Materials engineer, scientist, teacher and student. TATA Steel Chair at Swansea University. Director @SustainSteel

Wales, United Kingdom
Joined July 2017
When 'right' and 'honourable' really mean something.
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Tried to get Sheffield from South Wales, after 3 or 4 swerves and changes I turned around at a bleak Severn Tunnel Junction after my last hope north got cancelled. Glad I gave up when I did as Temple Meads was my next hope. Trying again tomorrow. Glutton for punishment🤔
Wow. There are no trains running south from Bristol. Not their fault - there's flooding. But instead of replacement buses, @GWRHelp has given us taxi chits. Just one problem: hardly any taxi drivers want to do the distance. There's a queue of 1000 people and no movement.
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This is critically important. It was highlighted to me in a recent discussion on potential future HDRI (near zero primary iron) trade. It's also harder in general to build in these regions.... but we must.
Costs of capital for renewables are much higher in low income countries, and this correlates well with much lower deployment. We need strong domestic policies and scaled up and more effective international support to overcome this. More here from @IEA : iea.blob.core.windows.net/as…
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👇!!!
The Telegraph has gone absolutely heat pump tonto. When you replace editorial judgement with algorithmic outrage-farming, you end up making a total fool of yourself. For the record, heat pumps work, and the UK has several world-leading manufacturers. telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09…
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🌱 Curious about building a sustainable future? 🔎Explore the #CircularEconomy with our latest blog post: 'Introduction to Circular Economy: Building a Sustainable Future'. 🌐netzeroskills.wales/2023/10/… #SBCityDeals #NetZeroSkills
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If ever there was a reminder that clean energy infrastructure was a prerequisite for green growth and investment, this is it. More broadly I wonder what will temper FIDs first, the number of sites with suitable clean energy, or the availability of ore of sufficient quality.
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As @BenChu_ eloquently points out in his thread, not sure hindsight is the most appropriate term. It was a once in a multi-generation opportunity for investment. Debt rocketed in any case.
🚨 Austerity update 🚨 "With hindsight we probably should have taken advantage [of low interest rates] and borrowed more when times were more stable...and invested more." Former HMT permanent secretary (05-16) Nicholas Macpherson on Radio 4 Analysis ... bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001r7…
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C Pleydell-Pearce retweeted
🚀 Elevate Your Skills with SWITCH-On Skills! 📚 "Introduction to Electric Arc Furnace Operations" 🔗 Dive deep into EAF process, raw materials, & steel production! 🌐 Learn at your own pace. 👉 Enrol Now: now-switch.wales/netzeroskil…
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Catch up with @AlastairMarsh  and Michał P. Drewniok's journey with the Transforming Foundation Industries Network+ and learn about the impact of their research on waste mapping of foundation industries. youtube.com/watch?v=7zEYIAGn… @UniversityLeeds #circulareconomy #waste
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When England are playing and you walk past a Welsh 🏉 club hearing them all excitedly shout combinations of YEESSS and COME ON!! 😬😬😬
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My only comment on Bham to Man HS2 is this.... Keep an eye on the land. Who had it before (many forced to sell)? How much did it cost the taxpayer? Who'll end up owning it after? How much will they pay for it? theguardian.com/uk-news/2023…
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Super impactful and interesting work 👇
Catch up with Matthew Hobbs journey with the Transforming Foundation Industries Network+ and learn about the impact of his research on Emissivity Characterisation of Metals from Near Infrared to Long Wave Infrared @sheffielduni Watch now - youtu.be/8suWuMDAkqw #metals
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Just had a 💡 moment. Been wondering where I've heard this 'keep repeating irrelevant and/or basic stuff over and over mixed with buzz words' thing in political interviews before. It's exactly the sentence structure you get in exam scripts of students who clearly haven't revised.
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🙏🏿Lord please grant me the confidence to deny a brilliant woman prof / researcher tenure track, demote her, push her out of my school, to be the adversity that she had to overcome in life... and when she overcomes me and wins the Nobel prize, to roll in like I did something. Amen
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, Penn’s historic mRNA vaccine research team, win 2023 @NobelPrize in Medicine bit.ly/48BswPR #nobelprize
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
In an interview posted on the official Nobel Prize feed Karikó describes being "kicked out" and "forced to retire" by @Penn. twitter.com/NobelPrize/sta…
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C Pleydell-Pearce retweeted
If the smoke isn’t hitting the East Coast, Canadian wildfires are “out of sight out of mind” for many. But our wildfire season continues to accelerate. The area burned over the past week alone = that of nearly an entire typical fire season across Canada. axios.com/2023/09/29/canadas…
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The competitive 🔥 has gone out of the RWC. Not to be re-ignited until 7th Oct for 🇮🇪 v 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿. Or do I have it wrong?
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C Pleydell-Pearce retweeted
With many 🧩 dropping recently, a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating System. E.g. today it orchestrates: - Input & Output across modalities (text, audio, vision) - Code interpreter, ability to write & run programs - Browser / internet access - Embeddings database for files and internal memory storage & retrieval A lot of computing concepts carry over. Currently we have single-threaded execution running at ~10Hz (tok/s) and enjoy looking at the assembly-level execution traces stream by. Concepts from computer security carry over, with attacks, defenses and emerging vulnerabilities. I also like the nearest neighbor analogy of "Operating System" because the industry is starting to shape up similar: Windows, OS X, and Linux <-> GPT, PaLM, Claude, and Llama/Mistral(?:)). An OS comes with default apps but has an app store. Most apps can be adapted to multiple platforms. TLDR looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.
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A graph worth spending some time looking at. @DanNeidle @MartinSLewis any plans for either of you to publish a tool to generate more personalised plots based on circumstance (stdnt loan, # of kids etc, earners in household etc)?
Replying to @DanNeidle
The practical effect is clearer if we plot gross vs net income:
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