Making a mission impossible
The British Council has a mission that can be stated simply but is difficult to deliver: to make the UK more important in the world of culture and knowledge than it has any right to be given its size...
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Quality controls
Anyone with experience of managing an intellectual service organisation operating in a market knows you can have ISOs and BS5750s by the bucketful, but without the right people, systems can simply...
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Quality controls
I note that ministers are considering proposals to give the QAA the power to withdraw universities' degree-awarding powers ("Unis fail to ensure degree quality", THES, August ). Speaking quite...
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Quality controls
The University of Bradford has not been found wanting in the recent QAA report ("Unis fail to ensure degree quality", THES, August ). On the contrary, our recent continuation audit states that...
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Cheats are 'shaped'
B. F. Skinner has shown that people and animals can be "shaped" into just about any behaviour pattern by rewards or "reinforcements". The "law of effect" is that people and animals will unconsciously...
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Below the belt
Slang is often vivid but readers should be aware of cultural and regional variations that can alter the picture. "Kegs" are a little more brief in Scotland than King's College might accept ("Better...
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Daddy scientist doesn't know best
While it is amusing to be called authoritarian by Steve Jones (even if being compared to a Nazi is entirely ludicrous), the issue of genetically modified crops is too important for his views to go...
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Daddy scientist doesn't know best
That there were aspects of National Socialist policy that could be described as "green" is undoubtedly true but to use this as a means of linking today's GM protesters with the Nazis is at least as...
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Shelf sufficiency
David Baker rightly observes that the long-awaited electronic publishing revolution offers little in the way of an immediate solution to the acute problem of university underprovision of books and...
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Shelf sufficiency
The terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency photocopying licence go a long way to improving student access to published works in university libraries. Since April 1998, the short loan collection in...
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UCAS accused over dropouts
University admissions chiefs should do more to safeguard the hundreds of millions of pounds of public money wasted on university dropouts, a backbench committee of MPs said this week. But...
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New structure and more pay tempt students back to nursing
The number of students taking up places on nursing degree courses has leapt 20 per cent this year, according to the latest UCAS figures. It follows the introduction of a new career and grading...
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Wellcome to look overseas after failed bid
Michael Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, this week warned that the charity's recent failure to win planning permission for a Pounds 100 million expansion of its genome campus near Cambridge...
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Unemployed spend week at Queen's University, Belfast
(Photograph) - Thirty unemployed young people who want to make a future in the music world have spent a week at Queen's University, Belfast, learning how to strike the right chord. The Soundlive...
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Professor calls for end to the name game
What's in a name? All too often little more than puerile humour and unpronounceable in-jokes, according to a Canadian professor of geology, who has issued a plea for taxonomic sanity. William...