Child Benefits

One inevitable consequence of living in another country is that you don't always stay on top of politics at home.  For example, yesterday I saw an article on the BBC about UK child benefits:

Some 200,000 people - of 1.2 million - have opted out of receiving child benefit, ahead of changes on Monday.  Treasury Minister David Gauke said that was "slightly above" what was expected.  Families with one parent earning more than £50,000 will lose part of the benefit. It will be fully withdrawn where one parent earns above £60,000.  But unless parents opt out of receiving it by the end of Sunday, higher earners will still get the benefit and will have to pay it back later.

The point of this news article is about how the changes to child benefits are working.  In particular, the system where benefits are by default paid but then must be repaid is not exactly efficient, and will probably be unpopular.  The fact that only one in six of the families affected by the new rules have acted suggests that the policy has not penetrated popular consciousness.

But as someone who hadn't seen the changes, I respond to them instead.

LED Higgs

Time to talk about another paper.

New Year, New Thoughts

I'm generally not one for New Year's Resolutions.  Still, this time around I do at least have an obvious one: update this blog more often.  It's not as if I'm lacking in ideas; I have several partially-written posts, some of them over a month old.  I also have several series I've started, that are currently orphaned.  (I do intend to get back to all of them.)

Part of the whole issue relates to work.  Last year was a bad year for me in terms of work, and when that's the case it's harder for me to feel motivated to work on the blog; this is, after all, a hobby.  That's why more regular updates are only my second resolution.  Related is the whole issue of reading; I talked about this early in December, and it was not until last weekend that I finally got on top of this again.  Right now, my to-read pile consists of three papers, all of which went up on the arXiv today.  To put that into perspective, a week ago I had thirty-four papers to read, some of which dated back to November.  Plus, there where an additional seventeen papers I felt it worth downloading from last week; you can guess what I've spent the holiday season doing.

In all, 2012 really wasn't a good year for me.  Sure, I started my new job, but I'm still not really comfortable with Melbourne; not in the way I was with Vancouver, at least.  My publication record was anaemic, I was rejected by a conference for the first time ever, and I still haven't properly explored my new home city.  What really hurts is I know the flaws that caused many of these problems, and more to the point I know I can deal with them better.  But on the flip side, that also means I can be hopeful that this new year will be better than the last.

Happy New Calendar Day to you all!

Multidimensional Bigotry

It turns out that everyone's favourite exploiter of xenophobia also has plans for homophobia:

The Conservatives' turmoil over David Cameron's plans for gay marriagehas been compounded after Ukip pledged to exploit their divisions and go after the votes of Tories who abandon the party over the issue.

Amid signs that Conservative associations are losing members in their droves over what is being dubbed the prime minister's "clause IV moment", the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, warned that gay marriage could "rip apart" the Conservative party. He plans to put the issue at the heart of Ukip's campaign for the 2014 European parliamentary elections.

Ukip stands for the UK Independence Party, an anti-European Union party whose biggest successes have come in EU elections.  While I'm sure the party members themselves would argue that they are not xenophobic, they clearly benefit from anti-immigrant sentiment, which in the UK also includes a certain level of anti-looks-like-a-Muslim totally-not-racism-honest.

Golden Spike and the Private Space Industry

As a follow-up to my post from a couple of days ago, I thought I'd comment on the announcement by the Golden Spike company to land on the moon by the end of the decade.  In a more general sense, there's the question of commercial space travel; I'd somehow missed the news that the SpaceX company successfully delivered cargo to the ISS earlier this year.

The Science of the Apollo Missions

On the subject of research papers, I recently came across a paper by Ian Crawford on the science of the Apollo missions.  It's a review written at a non-technical level; it's from the journal Astronomy and Geophysics, but the only link I've found is at the arXiv.  I encourage anyone curious about the scientific merits of the whole affair to read it.  One interesting quote compares what Prof. Crawford achieved on a field trip on Earth to the moon missions, concluding

I do not think that we were inefficient, and we were in fact well-pleased with what we accomplished (which will result  in several peer-reviewed publications), but clearly what we achieved in 42 man-days at one site in Iceland pales into insignificance to what the Apollo astronauts achieved in 25 man-days at six sites on the Moon under far more difficult operating conditions. Based on my own experience I find the field efficiency of the Apollo astronauts to  be simply staggering.

On Reading

Once upon a time, I used to read for fun.