Getting a bit cold for fieldwork now. This photos were taken this morning on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire. I’ve been fine tuning the route and instructions for the Cannock Chase Geotrail all weekend.
Nov 302008
And The Winner Is …
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Oct 262008
… not me.
Thursday saw me dash down south to the Times Higher Education Awards at the swanky Grosvenor House Hotel, in Park Lane, London.
I’ve been doing some work with my university’s widening participation unit which encourages students from backgrounds who traditionally don’t go into higher education, to consider it. Part of what we do is give potential students a taste of university. They come up for a few days, have academic taster sessions, do sports, have a disco in the union building, stay overnight in halls, etc. My small contribution is to do an hour on the Indonesian Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami. Our KeeleLink project was one of six nominees for a Times Higher Education Award in the “Widening Participation Initiative of the Year Award” category.
Unfortunately, we didn’t win the award but congratulations to Birkbeck who did. However, getting a nomination was a major achievement.
It was a cracking night out and a chance to see how the other half live (tickets and wine were not cheap – I’m just glad I wasn’t paying). Only downside was to have to get up the following morning at stupid o’clock to get the train back to give my Friday morning Java for geologists course.
Oct 202008
I’m coming out.
In following up a comment on Kim’s blog via e-mail I was asked “who are you?”.
This set me thinking about why I have been blogging anonymously, and do I still want to keep it that way.
When I started this blog, I used it as a stress release mechanism. Fuelled by a couple of fluid inclusions in amorphous silica (of the Chilean red variety) I would let fly at random targets. Global warming was one of them. It was fun playing devil’s advocate.
But blogging that way was not compatible with having an official lecturing position in a university, and while I still don’t have much of a career to damage, I wanted my rantings to remain anonymous.
Fifty odd blog posts and a few years on, things have changed. I have attained a place on the holy grail of the geoblogosphere, an entry on the allgeo google feed. I get 20-30 hits a day even if I don’t post anything. My posts have (I hope) become generally less rant like and more scientific and interesting. I want to discuss things that are related to my research and me. There is now probably more than enough information in my collected blog musings for somebody semi-proficient with a search engine to find out who I am anyway.
So does having a real world identity add gravitas and credibility to a blog? I have a huge admiration of the ‘real’ bloggers, Dave, Kim, Chris, Ron, Callan, Erik, Andrew et al. (my sincere apologies if you have been left out) and I feel it is time to join you.
That is not to say that I have any problems with those who want to stay anonymous. I suspect that those bloggers of a female persuasion might attract more unwanted attention than a male would and different people blog for different reasons. My reasons and blogging have changed and so I’m coming out.
So who am I? I’m Ian Stimpson, and I’ve been lecturing in geophysics and structural geology at Keele University, Staffordshire (about halfway between Manchester and Birmingham) in the UK for over twenty years.
There, I’ve done it, I’ve come out. I suspect in some respects I’ll have to be more careful about what I post in future, the rants will be more mild but in other respects in more posts I hope I can be a bit more free in what I what do say. However, all the opinions in my posts, past, present and future will continue to be all mine and not those of my employer.
In case you are wondering, I’ve removed the (three) global warming rants, not that I don’t stand by what I said at the time, but I (and the evidence) have moved on (although I still have reservations about the process of global warming politics) and I feel that they no longer have a place on this blog. They are probably in some search engine cache anyway if you really want to find them.
By the way, I’ve adopted a new anonymous identity elsewhere in case I feel like a really good rant!
