2705, 2016

The humanities in a tech-rich world

By Richard Black|May 27, 2016|Research|0 comments

I’ve been running a small experiment in recent weeks amongst friends and colleagues, simply by asking them what they think of a controversial article in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Dwoskin.  The article talks of how poets and playwrights are increasingly working in Silicon Valley’s tech firms to help make machine bots more ‘human’.  The idea is to give personal assistants like Microsoft’s ‘Cortana’ and Apple’s ‘Siri’ back stories and teach

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0405, 2016

The Nurse review of UK research councils: where next?

By Richard Black|May 4, 2016|Research|1 comments

In December last year, the UK government published the long-awaited Nurse review entitled “Ensuring a Successful UK Research Endeavour”.  The review, written by eminent scientist Sir Paul Nurse, was tasked with looking at the UK’s Research Councils, which have the responsibility of funding ‘demand-led’ research in Britain across seven broad discipline areas.  It had high level input from government and from the scientific community.  So what does it say, and

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