United front aims to end casual labour
A century ago, dockers who wanted work had to assemble at the dock gates in the early morning and take their chance of a day's work. Lucky ones might get a few weeks or months. Today, would-be...
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Wellcome backing for basics
Alison Goddard reports on a private-sector investment of Pounds 400 million in British basic research THE WORLD's largest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, made a U-turn this week to...
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Vice-chancellors sell out infantry
It would be churlish not to celebrate extra money for education. But it would be naive to take the headline figures at face value. The presentation is irritatingly slick. There is double counting and...
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Raw material, tainted cash
In the knowledge-based, weightless economy developing around the world, research is the raw material for growth. Demand for ideas is huge and so is the response. The numbers of people employed in...
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Thirteen ways to treat an external examiner
1 Always send incomplete drafts of exam papers to be approved. The draft should be full of grammatical errors, missing parts of questions, inconsistent numbering and ambiguities. Illegible hand-...
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One that got away from the fish laboratory ...
I have turned my back on earning a living in the lab after almost seven years as a scientific researcher. The decision was not easy and has left me feeling like a lapsed scientist, just as I lapsed...
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And one that stayed
Andy Pitsillides is in his first lecturing post, teaching anatomy. He has contemplated leaving science but stayed - partly because he was offered the lectureship after his second postdoctoral...
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RAE forces us to fudge
Having read two pieces on "abuse" in the research assessment exercise (THES, July 3 and July 10), I feel moved to respond. I should start by pleading guilty to being one of those "managers" in...
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Hot shots
(Photograph) - Rolls-Royce backs 16 university technology centres in Britain, where teams are developing competitive aero-engines and industrial power systems, see page .
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First Impressions
This week's First Impressions, the competition in which you have to identify a book from its opening sentence, is taken from a colourful tale of Washington intrigue written by an unidentified source...
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How genetics can be good for health
A puree genius at his work Healthier chips: potato plants can be genetically modified to make firmer potatoes. When these are fried, they absorb less fat. This results in a crisper, lower-fat chip...
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Time and notion
He may have a Nobel prize, countless honorary doctorates and a viscountcy from the king of Belgium, but Ilya Prigogine's belief that time really does exist has alienated the physics community. Andrew...
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Regrets, he's had a few ...
Huw Richards talks to one ex-student union leader who is about to become president of his old university, Neil Kinnock Neil Kinnock was famously the first of a 1,000 generations of Kinnocks to go to...
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Who killed fair reporting?
Eighteen months ago six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was brutally murdered. The killer has never been found, so the media provided some suspects - her parents. The subsequent trial by TV so infuriated...
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How I fell out with Fat Puff and Bonbon
Alan Tormaid Campbell was a brilliant lecturer, a respected academic and a fine writer. So why, an industrial tribunal will hear, was he still a junior lecturer at Edinburgh University after 20 years...