Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future

Additional booklet insert distributed at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The event looks forward. Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.EPSRC (Pathways to Impact award). Unilever plc (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics

Lindsay Crawford's 'Impossible Demand'? The Southern Irish Dimension of the Independent Orange Project

The Magheramorne Manifesto of the Independent Orange Order has been hailed as a bold attempt from an unlikely quarter to positively address the sectarian divisions and regional polarisation of early 20th century Ireland. But the Order's leading light, Lindsay Crawford, has also been indicted for formulating an 'empty radicalism' which demanded changes in the field of education that it was impossible for the Catholic community to accept. This working paper reassesses Crawford's ideological project in the light of hitherto underused sources of evidence. It highlights convergence between Crawford's thinking and that of 'Irish Ireland' activists in movements such as the Gaelic League and Sinn Fein. It argues that heterodox educational views were prevalent to a significant extent among the Irish Irelanders to whom Crawford looked for a positive response to his national regeneration project. The case is also made that, in the absence of unanimous acceptance of their desirability among lay Catholics, the support of Protestants - and particularly that of Crawford's fellow Irish Anglicans - provided existing school management arrangements with a vital source of sustenance.

Open Chemistry

An invited article on Open Chemistry discussing the importance of Open Access and Open Data and stressing the emerging role of the blogospher

The Blue Obelisk Community

Poster presented at the VSMF symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The Internet has brought together a group of chemists who are driven by wanting to do things better, but are frustrated with the Closed systems that chemists currently have to work with. they share a belief in the concepts of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. And they express this in software, data, algorithms, specifications, tutorials, demonstrations, articles and anything that helps get the message across. [http://www.blueobelisk.org/

Educational Developmentalists Divided? Patrick Cannon, Patrick Hillery and the Economics of Education in the Early 1960s

The catalytic effect of the OECD-linked study that produced Investment in Education is a much celebrated episode of Ireland’s modernisation. A remarkably broad cross-departmental consensus supported the initiative. Bureaucratic caution and ministerial self-preservation were set aside to allow a “warts and all” portrait of Irish education to be painted by the study team. Special efforts were made to focus public attention on the findings of a damning report that legitimated a quickening pace of government action to increase access to an expanded, rationalised and reoriented education system. But, as well as developmentalist triumph over conservatism in the education field, there was also significant division between state and civil society developmentalists. This is examined through an analysis of the relationship between the Federation of Lay Catholic Secondary Schools and the Department of Education.

Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future

Booklet handout distributed at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The event looks forward. Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.EPSRC (Pathways to Impact Award). Unilever plc (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics

How biased are maximum entropy models?

Maximum entropy models have become popular statistical models in neuroscience and other areas in biology, and can be useful tools for obtaining estimates of mutual information in biological systems. However, maximum entropy models fit to small data sets can be subject to sampling bias; i.e. the true entropy of the data can be severely underestimated. Here we study the sampling properties of estimates of the entropy obtained from maximum entropy models. We show that if the data is generated by a distribution that lies in the model class, the bias is equal to the number of parameters divided by twice the number of observations. However, in practice, the true distribution is usually outside the model class, and we show here that this misspecification can lead to much larger bias. We provide a perturbative approximation of the maximally expected bias when the true model is out of model class, and we illustrate our results using numerical simulations of an Ising model; i.e. the second-order maximum entropy distribution on binary data.

These confabulations are guaranteed to improve your marriage! Toward a teleological theory of confabulation

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference between clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational