Holding an internal research workshop

We have just held the 4th Aberystwyth Bioinformatics Workshop. It's a one-day workshop, held with no budget, and intended to be a mostly internal informal research networking event.

We call for 5 min lightning talks, 20 minute longer talks, demos of software, and posters. We end up with a good mixture of both. We especially encourage new PhD students to present, and for all attendees to be friendly and supportive rather than combative in their questions. Registration is done by a very simple Google form (name, email, what kind of talk, title of talk/poster, any other comments). Registration closes one week before the workshop. Tea and coffee is acquired somehow, a room is booked, talks are arranged into a programme, and then away we go.

Aber Bioinformatics Workshop attendees July 28th 2016. Photo by Sandy Spence.

 Each time we've done this we have ended up with a full day of talks. People use it to let others know what they're working on, to practise a talk they're preparing for an external conference, to ask for advice on their work, to describe the state of the compute cluster facilities and to just introduce new people. Bioinformatics at Aberystwyth is mostly done within the biology departments of IBERS, but this meeting allows Computer Science and Maths people to join in, and make interdisciplinary links. Finally we go down to the pub, and continue the discussions there.

It's a very low cost minimal preparation way to bring together a group of otherwise independent researchers. Many bioinformaticians feel that they are either the only one in their group, or else, that they're not really a bioinformatician at all and somehow masquerading as one. I've learned a great deal from each workshop that we've had, and its just great to find that we do have a surprisingly strong local support network in such a specialist field.

Aber Bioinformatics Workshop

Last week we had the 2nd Aber Bioinformatics Workshop. It's an internal workshop for work-in-progress talks, posters and networking and the aim is for us all to keep up with what's going on in Aberystwyth in bioinformatics across departments and institutes. We had a wide range of talks on genomics and sequence analysis, metabolomics, optimising proteins, population and community modelling, data infrastructure and other topics. Here's the programme for the day.

Photo of all the attendees, taken by Sandy Spence

It was great to see that we now have so many people interested and working in bioinformatics, despite the difficulties in trying to understand all sides of the story (the biology, the computing, the statistics, etc). We talked about the range of modules and courses that were available to help people get up to speed with this, and how we should do more to let new PhD students know what is available. Also, now that we've had the workshop, hopefully we're more aware of the expertise and facilities available here in Aber, so we now know who to approach with questions and ideas.

At the end of the day we moved down to the pub, and continued to discuss more random topics: beetles, plant senescence, hens, temperature sensing wires for computer clusters, and concordance in Shakespeare texts. I'm sure this all helps in the long run.

Burglary at the railway refreshment rooms

The NLW have a fantastic collection of digitised historic newspaper articles available. They're going to release a new interface shortly with access to 15 million articles, and I was testing the search facility on the new interface today. I came across this gem of a story from the Aberystwyth Observer in 1907, which also happens to be available in their currently live beta collection.

BURGLARY AT THE RAILWAY REFRESHMENT ROOMS. The police are investigating two cases of robbery from the refreshment rooms at Borth and Dovey Junction. At these places thieves broke into the premises and got away with a quantity of wine and money. This is the second or third time that Dovey Junction has been visited during the last few years.

http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk/en/page/view/3050081/ART41 (may need to zoom out and zoom in again before moving the page to see the article, which is at the edge of the page)

The thought of wine and money being held at remote Dovey Junction station is delightful, as is the fact that the reporter can't remember if it's the second or third time this has happened. Perhaps the reporter knows something about where the wine went.

Storm damage in Aberystwyth in January 2014 and in January 1890

An unusually high tide in Aberystwyth in January 2014 has severely damaged the promenade. We do get some spectacular weather here on the west coast of Wales.

Broken railings and paving on Aberystwyth promenade.

Forceful storms that broke up the promenade also occurred in other years, particularly in 1927 and 1938, and their aftermath was photographed and looks remarkably similar. In January 1890, the Cambrian News reported a storm at Aberystwyth which caused trouble to the train travelling between Aberystwyth and Machynlleth.

"The uptrain from Aberystwyth had to wait in the Junction for over half an hour until the tide had partially subsided. Then the line was cleared of pieces of timber and accumulations of grass and rushes and the train proceeded, though the water was half way up the wheels."

Would the Junction that was referred to here be Dyfi Junction station? The storm in 1890 also caused a hole in the sea wall, in a very similar location to the one that's been opened up this year:

"Unfortunately, the masonry forming the slipway near the Queen's Hotel gave way and subsequently a large hole was washed in the sea wall"

The Queen's Hotel is no longer a hotel, but still exists as a building. It has been used for many purposes since 1890, and has most recently been used as council offices and archives. It's currently up for sale, at a price of approximately £1 million.

The hole in the sea wall caused by this year's weather shows just how powerful the sea is against our buildings and defences.

And in 1890 a steamer in distress was spotted out in the bay, carrying a cargo of pig-iron but having lost its funnel in the storm. The lifeboat was launched, under the command of a Mr Tom Williams, and the crew were rescued and taken to the Belle Vue Hotel for "much-needed refreshments". Our lifeboat was also out rescuing in 2014 and, so far, everyone's safe and sound.

Waves wash over the promenade in front of Alexandra Hall and flood the ground floor.

More photos of what happened in 2014 are on Flickr.

Frederick Soddy

Last week I went to a Royal Society of Chemistry lecture about Frederick Soddy, who had been at Aberystwyth in 1894 and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for his discovery of isotopes. The speaker was Dr Alun Price. I was fascinated by this diagram that Soddy showed to the British Association meeting in Birmingham in 1913, depicting what he knew about the radioactive decay of 3 elements (actinium, uranium, thorium). At first - what an untidy looking diagram! But then it does show what he knew at the time in an organised way, and tells the story far better than a paragraph of words. He now has a uranium compound named after him: Soddyite.

Apart from his fantastic work in chemistry, he also wrote poetry and wrote books about economics. One of the quotes given in the talk was: "The man who said that it was not possible to fool all the public all of the time was fortunately quite ignorant of the methods of modern banking" (Frederick Soddy, 1924).