The Rise and Fall of Civil Engineering – courtesy Google’s amazing ngram viewer

I read an astonishing article this afternoon titled ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books‘, published early last year in the journal Science. Based on Google’s effort to digitise all books in all languages, researchers have carried out computational analysis on a corpus of over 5 million books – approximately 4% of all books ever published – to give access to vast amounts of data on word use.

The availability of this data allows researchers to observe cultural trends and then subject them to quantitative investigation – the study of ‘culturomics‘. The paper illustrates fascinating changes in language size and use, and shows how the data is used to draw more socio-cultural conclusions.

Best of all, Google has a nifty tool for presenting the data called the ngram viewer, which has allowed me to do a little culturomics of my own for the field of engineering.

Time Travel at the Beach

I am sitting at the Kit Kat Cafe, perched on the dune at the back of Camber Sands, a vast stretch of sandy beach in East Sussex. The beach is full of people enjoying the warm Autumn sun. In the distance there are kite surfers, and along the shoreline riders are galloping their horses in the shallow water.

Good laughs at Science Showoff

I went down to Science Showoff last night at the Wilmington arms, ‘an open mic night for all communicators of science’. The spectrum of material covered was rather large: from shining infra red light through the skulls of babies, to the biochemistry of baking; from the sad world of lonely neutrinos to the history of the space shuttle programme as told through a mash up of archive footage.

Notes on ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ by Tom Hodgkinson

This post is for the Front Row gang (you know who you are). Since we were talking about the concept of Fun for Free at the last Front Row session, here is a rough-and-ready summary of the essay where I first heard of the concept, ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ by Tom Hodgkinson. The essay appears in a book called ‘Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth’, edited by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith.

Resisting Ikea – preparing for Monday’s sustainability conference

I spent most of last weekend preparing for a sustainability conference that we ran on Monday (post about that event appearing shortly). I know from experience that the last few days of organising any event like this always involve a mad dash to the shops, and this time was no different.

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