- Email: [email protected]
A fresh look at postgraduate training in the UK
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as providing technical personnel and participating in the design of the pilot plant. Petrolite Corporation will provide worldwide field service for all commercial BDS units as they go on stream. Koch Refining Co. will provide EBC with refinery operations support and product quality testing for development of a gasoline BDS process. Texaco Inc.'s Exploration and Production Technology Division will provide additional petroleum engineering and analytical sources for the development of a BDS process for desulfurizing mildly sour crude oil. Recently the process has been described in Oil & Gas Journal (May 15, 1995, pp. 39-40) and Hydrocarbon Processing (February 1994). The company and process are described in EBC's 1994 Annual Report, which is available from the company. For more information, contact Energy Biosystems Corporation, 4200 Research Forest Drive, The Woodlands, TX 77381, USA; tel. (+1-713) 3646100; fax. (+ 1-713) 3646110.
A fresh look at Postgraduate Training in the UK For decades the completion of a PhD in the UK has been carried out by students working at the laboratory work-face for about three years, being trained under the supervision of an academic scientist. Following this the student writes a thesis which is examined viva voce before the degree is awarded. Additional coursework was a minimal requirement, often being a specific requirement of the supervisor. As a result of this streamlined process, PhD'e from UK universities were awarded to candidates at a tender age of 24/25, far earlier than many European countries. For some
applied catalysis A: General
time now this training procedure has been under review by the Government, the Royal Society of Chemistry and also individual universities. The RSC review has led to a recommendation for increased taught courses to be taken during the PhD. To some extent these events have resulted from the first Government White Paper on Science Policy that was published two years ago. The direct result of this is that a number of taught Master of Research (M.Res) courses are being started in the UK as a pilot scheme this year. These are one year courses which are designed to increase the ability of students to carry out a subsequent PhD. One of these courses, and I am reliably informed, the most popular in the eyes of the assessors that ranked the various applications, is an M.Res course in 'Interface and Surface Science' that will be run jointly by the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester. This course will include a detailed course on heterogeneous catalysis and related surface science and should prove to be most popular as a pre-requisite for a PhD in catalysis and surface science. Anyone who is interested should contact Professor Peter Weightman, IRC in Surface Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, tel. no.: 0151 708 3871 for further details. Training on the scientific method of hypothesis and subsequent testing is central to the advancement of not only science but also of society and our civilisation. There have been many attempts to explain the scientific method over the years. At the heart of everything is scientific inference and I will end with a quotation I have found on this which will no doubt be of interest to all M.Res course organisers and all PhD supervisors throughout the world. "You are given a large number of identical inscrut-
Volume 130 No. 2 - - 28 September 1995
N12
able boxes. You are to select one, the 'target box', by any means you wish which does not involve opening any boxes, and you then have to say something about what is in it. You may do this by any means you wish which does not involve opening the target box. This apparent miracle can easily be performed. You only have to select the target box at random, and then open a random sample of other boxes. The contents of the sample boxes enable you to make an estimate of the contents of the target box which will be better than a chance guess. To take an extreme case, if none of the sample boxes contains a rabbit and your sample is large, you can state with considerable confidence: 'The target box does not contain a rabbit'. In saying this, you make no assumption whatever about the principles which may have been used in filling the boxes. This process epitomises scientific induction at its simplest, which is the basis of all scientific inference. It depends only on the existence of a method of randomising - - that is, on the assumption that events can be found which are unrelated (or almost) to given events. It is usually thought that scientific inference depends upon nature being orderly. The above shows that a seemingly weaker condition will suffice: scientific inference depends upon our knowing ways in which nature is disorderly." From the Scientist Speculates, edited by I.J. Good, (Heinemann, 1962). I hope you are all now aware of what scientific inference is! GRAHAM J. HUTCHINGS
applied catalysis A: General
Exhibitors at 14th North American Meeting of The Catalysis Society
A record number of exhibitors attended the recent 14th North American Meeting of The Catalysis Society, held at Snowbird, Utah during June 11-16, 1995. Atotal of 32 exhibitors representing a variety of organizations participated as an exhibitor. In spite of the large number of exhibits, requiring the local organizers to scramble to fit them all in, they were well attended during the meeting. Among the exhibitors were many organizations featuring reactor systems designed primarily, or completely, for the study of catalytic reactions. Many of these exhibitors with reactor systems are already familiar to those in catalysis, and some have been exhibitors at earlier NAMs. One very recent entry into the vending of reactor systems, SE Reactors, Inc., was present. SE Reactors, Inc. appears to be an effort to commercialize an instrument that takes advantage of temperature scanning (TS) as a new approach to kinetic studies and catalysis. The temperature scanning reactor (-I-SR) is a research tool for kinetics and catalysis studies, capable of producing reaction rates while operating under non-isothermal, non-steady-state nonadiabatic conditions. It is claimed that application of the TSR method of operation will allow one to perform complete kinetic studies and broad-ranging catalyst evaluations in as little as one day, in contrast to taking months using the isothermal operation. In all reactor configurations - - plugflow, batch, back-mix or streamswept - - a TSR includes the following components: feed-metering devices, a reactor in a proVolume 130 No. 2 - - 28 September 1995
as providing technical personnel and participating in the design of the pilot plant. Petrolite Corporation will provide worldwide field service for all commercial BDS units as they go on stream. Koch Refining Co. will provide EBC with refinery operations support and product quality testing for development of a gasoline BDS process. Texaco Inc.'s Exploration and Production Technology Division will provide additional petroleum engineering and analytical sources for the development of a BDS process for desulfurizing mildly sour crude oil. Recently the process has been described in Oil & Gas Journal (May 15, 1995, pp. 39-40) and Hydrocarbon Processing (February 1994). The company and process are described in EBC's 1994 Annual Report, which is available from the company. For more information, contact Energy Biosystems Corporation, 4200 Research Forest Drive, The Woodlands, TX 77381, USA; tel. (+1-713) 3646100; fax. (+ 1-713) 3646110.
A fresh look at Postgraduate Training in the UK For decades the completion of a PhD in the UK has been carried out by students working at the laboratory work-face for about three years, being trained under the supervision of an academic scientist. Following this the student writes a thesis which is examined viva voce before the degree is awarded. Additional coursework was a minimal requirement, often being a specific requirement of the supervisor. As a result of this streamlined process, PhD'e from UK universities were awarded to candidates at a tender age of 24/25, far earlier than many European countries. For some
applied catalysis A: General
time now this training procedure has been under review by the Government, the Royal Society of Chemistry and also individual universities. The RSC review has led to a recommendation for increased taught courses to be taken during the PhD. To some extent these events have resulted from the first Government White Paper on Science Policy that was published two years ago. The direct result of this is that a number of taught Master of Research (M.Res) courses are being started in the UK as a pilot scheme this year. These are one year courses which are designed to increase the ability of students to carry out a subsequent PhD. One of these courses, and I am reliably informed, the most popular in the eyes of the assessors that ranked the various applications, is an M.Res course in 'Interface and Surface Science' that will be run jointly by the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester. This course will include a detailed course on heterogeneous catalysis and related surface science and should prove to be most popular as a pre-requisite for a PhD in catalysis and surface science. Anyone who is interested should contact Professor Peter Weightman, IRC in Surface Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, tel. no.: 0151 708 3871 for further details. Training on the scientific method of hypothesis and subsequent testing is central to the advancement of not only science but also of society and our civilisation. There have been many attempts to explain the scientific method over the years. At the heart of everything is scientific inference and I will end with a quotation I have found on this which will no doubt be of interest to all M.Res course organisers and all PhD supervisors throughout the world. "You are given a large number of identical inscrut-
Volume 130 No. 2 - - 28 September 1995
N12
able boxes. You are to select one, the 'target box', by any means you wish which does not involve opening any boxes, and you then have to say something about what is in it. You may do this by any means you wish which does not involve opening the target box. This apparent miracle can easily be performed. You only have to select the target box at random, and then open a random sample of other boxes. The contents of the sample boxes enable you to make an estimate of the contents of the target box which will be better than a chance guess. To take an extreme case, if none of the sample boxes contains a rabbit and your sample is large, you can state with considerable confidence: 'The target box does not contain a rabbit'. In saying this, you make no assumption whatever about the principles which may have been used in filling the boxes. This process epitomises scientific induction at its simplest, which is the basis of all scientific inference. It depends only on the existence of a method of randomising - - that is, on the assumption that events can be found which are unrelated (or almost) to given events. It is usually thought that scientific inference depends upon nature being orderly. The above shows that a seemingly weaker condition will suffice: scientific inference depends upon our knowing ways in which nature is disorderly." From the Scientist Speculates, edited by I.J. Good, (Heinemann, 1962). I hope you are all now aware of what scientific inference is! GRAHAM J. HUTCHINGS
applied catalysis A: General
Exhibitors at 14th North American Meeting of The Catalysis Society
A record number of exhibitors attended the recent 14th North American Meeting of The Catalysis Society, held at Snowbird, Utah during June 11-16, 1995. Atotal of 32 exhibitors representing a variety of organizations participated as an exhibitor. In spite of the large number of exhibits, requiring the local organizers to scramble to fit them all in, they were well attended during the meeting. Among the exhibitors were many organizations featuring reactor systems designed primarily, or completely, for the study of catalytic reactions. Many of these exhibitors with reactor systems are already familiar to those in catalysis, and some have been exhibitors at earlier NAMs. One very recent entry into the vending of reactor systems, SE Reactors, Inc., was present. SE Reactors, Inc. appears to be an effort to commercialize an instrument that takes advantage of temperature scanning (TS) as a new approach to kinetic studies and catalysis. The temperature scanning reactor (-I-SR) is a research tool for kinetics and catalysis studies, capable of producing reaction rates while operating under non-isothermal, non-steady-state nonadiabatic conditions. It is claimed that application of the TSR method of operation will allow one to perform complete kinetic studies and broad-ranging catalyst evaluations in as little as one day, in contrast to taking months using the isothermal operation. In all reactor configurations - - plugflow, batch, back-mix or streamswept - - a TSR includes the following components: feed-metering devices, a reactor in a proVolume 130 No. 2 - - 28 September 1995