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tcpipThis Saturday at 2 pm I'm giving a presentation entitled "The United Colours of Jürgen Habermas: A Life's Work" (link in comments), who recently died. Habermas was, from the 1960s onwards, he was Europes's most influential social theorist and philosopher whose works combined linguistics, communication, rationality, and pragmatism. I readily admit that I have been a follower of his work for around 35 years and have been impressed by his commitment to an emancipatory modernism. I have also agreed with his criticisms of positivism, hermeneutics, systems-functionalism, and post-structuralism (c.f., my recent talk on French philosophy). Anyway, for those who enjoy listening to me go on a passionate philosophical-political rant for an hour, or who have never had the opportunity, please do come along; I promise it will be at least entertaining and sincere.
In my other, more formal scholarly activities, I've smashed through the University of Chicago's course on science and climate modelling, completing the material in about half the expected time. Mind you, it does help if one is pretty familiar with the content, though one should recognise that some of it could be updated. I will also say that the user interface of the professor's models could be improved. With these caveats, however, the content is quite excellent and what one would hope for from someone who has been a professor of geophysical sciences for almost 35 years. I admit I am intrigued by the follow-up make-your-own modelling course.
On a somewhat related manner, I have also organised multiple researcher talks at work involving a variety of researchers who have used our supercomputer and have some publications as a result; one has the charming title of "CRITTERS: Climate, Resource, and Image Tracking in Tiny, Ecologically Representative Systems". The second, "Threshold-Calibrated Word Sense Disambiguation: Semantic Broadening Without Sense Redistribution in Schizophrenia", and the third "Skuas as sentinels of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5N1 on the Antarctic Peninsula in the 2024/2025 austral summer" (my own recent trip to Antarctica in the same area witnessed more than a few of these well-travelled birds). All quite different but equally important subjects that, in their own way, needed the processing power we could offer to model and verify theories and to seek matches with empirical data; this is how real science progresses.
In my other, more formal scholarly activities, I've smashed through the University of Chicago's course on science and climate modelling, completing the material in about half the expected time. Mind you, it does help if one is pretty familiar with the content, though one should recognise that some of it could be updated. I will also say that the user interface of the professor's models could be improved. With these caveats, however, the content is quite excellent and what one would hope for from someone who has been a professor of geophysical sciences for almost 35 years. I admit I am intrigued by the follow-up make-your-own modelling course.
On a somewhat related manner, I have also organised multiple researcher talks at work involving a variety of researchers who have used our supercomputer and have some publications as a result; one has the charming title of "CRITTERS: Climate, Resource, and Image Tracking in Tiny, Ecologically Representative Systems". The second, "Threshold-Calibrated Word Sense Disambiguation: Semantic Broadening Without Sense Redistribution in Schizophrenia", and the third "Skuas as sentinels of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5N1 on the Antarctic Peninsula in the 2024/2025 austral summer" (my own recent trip to Antarctica in the same area witnessed more than a few of these well-travelled birds). All quite different but equally important subjects that, in their own way, needed the processing power we could offer to model and verify theories and to seek matches with empirical data; this is how real science progresses.
