From the MEI Archives #20- Chingola 1972

This time next week I will be visting Nchanga, Zambia's largest copper mine. It will be my first visit to the Copperbelt since Barbara, Amanda and I left in August 1973.

The photo below was taken 40 years ago of the Nchanga Metallurgists rugby team, a motley crew who played 'friendly' matches against other mine department teams.

I hope some of you might be able to fill in a few gaps, but the faces that I remember are:

Bach row: ?, Mike Blowers, Phil Cudby, Giles Day, Jock McGregor, me, ?, Stuart Mellor, Doug Edmunds
Front row: John Farthing, Crawford Masson, Sandy Lambert, ?, ?, ?

It would also be great to hear from anyone in the picture.

Phil Cudby I am still in touch with. He is retired and lives in the UK. Giles Day has his own business in Cyprus. Jock McGregor sadly passed away in the USA several years ago. Stuart Mellor I last saw in 1982 on the Harmony Gold Mine in South Africa. Doug Edmunds is in UK, and founded the World's Strongest Man competition. Sandy Lambert frequently attends MEI Conferences and is an adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town.

After 40 years, I expect to see major changes to Chingola next week and will be sharing memories and photos if internet access allows.

Is this scientific suicide?

I have ranted many times about the insane need for academics to publish at all costs, which has led to a profusion of cases of plagiarism and multiple- submissions, and the almost total reliance on impact factor in choosing where to publish their material.

So it was interesting to read a blog posting by David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, which was also printed in this morning’s Times. I have copied it verbatim below and invite your comments:

There are moments when the way a university runs its affairs is so boneheaded that it deserves scorn far beyond the world of academia. Queen Mary University of London is selecting which staff to sack from its science departments in a way that I can describe only as insane.
The firings, it seems, are nothing to do with hard financial times, but are a ham-fisted attempt to raise Queen Mary’s ranking in the league tables. A university’s position is directly related to its government research funding. So Queen Mary’s managers hope to do well in the 2014 “Research Excellence Framework” by firing staff who don’t publish a paper every ten minutes.

To survive as a professor there you need to have published 11 papers during 2008 to 2011, of which at least two are “high quality”. For lecturers, the target for keeping your job is five papers, of which one is “high quality”. You must also have had at least one PhD student complete their thesis.

What Queen Mary defines as “high quality” is publication in “high-impact journals” (periodicals that get lots of citations). Journals such as Nature and Science get most of their citations from very few articles, so it is utterly brainless to base decisions about the quality of research from such a skewed distribution of citations. But talk of skewed distribution is, no doubt, a bit too technical for innumerate HR people to understand. Which is precisely why they should have nothing to do with assessing scientists.
I have been lucky to know well three Nobel prizewinners. None would have passed the criteria laid down for a professor by QMUL. They would have been fired and so would Peter Higgs.

More offensive still is that you can buy immunity if you have had 26 papers published in 2008-11, with six being “high quality”. The encouragement to publish reams is daft. If you are publishing a paper every few weeks, you certainly are not writing them, and possibly not even reading them. Most likely you are appending your name to somebody else’s work with little or no checking of the data, let alone contributing real research.

It is also deeply unethical for Queen Mary to require all staff to have a PhD student with the aim of raising the university’s ranking rather than of benefitting the student.

Like so much managerialism, the rules are an active encouragement to dishonesty. The dimwitted assessment methods of Queen Mary will guarantee the creation of a generation of second-rate spiv scientists. Who in their right mind would want to work there, now that the way it treats its scientists is public knowledge?

Precious Metals '12 programme published

Sandwiched between Process Mineralogy ’12 and Nickel Processing ’12, Precious Metals ’12, MEI’s 4th international conference on the processing of precious metals ores and concentrates, has attracted corporate sponsorship from major players in the gold and PGM fields, and a high profile technical programme, which has just been published.

The two keynote lectures will be presented by Dr. Rob Dunne, of Newmont Mining Corporation, USA, and Keith Liddell of Platmin Ltd, South Africa.

Registration for Precious Metals ’12 is now open, and if you would like to submit a paper, please send us your short abstract as soon as possible.

A successful Sampling School in Brisbane

Dr. Norman Lotter. of Xstrata Process Support, Canada, has sent me this photograph, taken during his recent successful sampling course in Brisbane, organised by the JKMRC for their research students, and others.

Pictured standing (left to right) are Vannie Resabal (PhD student), Dr. Cathy Evans (Senior Research Fellow), Gerson Sandoval (PhD student), Dr. Norman Lotter, Devan Govender (FLSmidth, USA), Jocelyn Quinteros (Research Assistant), Cristian Carrasco (MPhil student), Bianca Foggiatto (PhD student), Francois Vos (Research Fellow), Tim Napier-Munn (Professorial Research Fellow), Chris Akop (PhD student).

Kneeling are Ezhilan Selvapandian (OneSteel Whyalla, Australia) and Dee Bradshaw (Professorial Research Fellow).

Norman Lotter is a CIM Distinguished Lecturer and he will be presenting a paper at November's Process Mineralogy '12 in Cape Town.

Process Mineralogy '12 provisional programme published

As ores become ever more complex and refractory, the importance of mineralogy on their processing increases in importance, and this is reflected in the reputation that MEI’s Process Mineralogy conferences are achieving.

Process Mineralogy ’12, the 2nd in the series, has attracted high profile corporate sponsorship, and the high calibre programme has just been published.

Process mineralogy applied to base metals, precious metals, industrial minerals and coal processing is supplemented by a keynote lecture on ore characterization, process mineralogy and lab automation by Dr. Wolfgang Baum, of FLSmidth, USA.

Strongly featured in the programme are papers on geometallurgy, and mineralogical measurements, such as EDS/SEM techniques, XRD and image analysis, as well as the continued development of X-Ray computed tomography as an effective tool in process mineralogy, the subject of the second keynote lecture by Prof. Jan Miller, of the University of Utah, USA.

Registration for Process Mineralogy ’12 is now open, and the conference is followed by two more MEI events, Precious Metals ’12 and Nickel Processing ’12, so the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town is the place to be in November.

Minerals Engineers group now exceeds 3000 members

I am pleased to report that MEI's Minerals Engineers group on LinkedIn continues to grow, and today membership passed 3000 members.

I have been very selective regarding membership, so that the group has become a dynamic forum for networking, and the next best thing to face-face contact.

The group is essentially the discussion forum for MEI, and supplements MEI Online and the MEI Blog. There are no News or Jobs sections in the group. Relevant news or jobs should be sent to amanda@min-eng.com, and these will be published free of charge in MEI Online. Conference announcements can be posted in Promotions, and/or submitted to Amanda for MEI Online.  Vendors may list their company products and services in the Business Directory section of MEI Online.

If you are already a member, please encourage your colleagues and contacts to join. If not, then please join without delay!!