Higher Education's dirty secret

Interesting op-ed in the NY Times by Mark C Taylor. In it, he mentions one bit about academia that they don't like to admit too much.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs.

Now, I suspect I won't find myself seeing eye to eye on a number of topics with academics from religion departments, and I'm not sure about some of his suggestions for dealing with the problem (he doesn't mention how to limit and control the centralised bureaucracies, who would undoubtedly argue they should remain permanent even if teaching and research staff were all on fixed term contracts). But the fact is that universities using postgrad students as cheap staff rather than employ technicians, postgrad and postdoc researchers is widespread. So much so, in fact, that a group that wishes to go against this trend will have questions asked about their funding applications. "An opportunity for training" is the mantra that academics have developed to justify having cheap students do the work rather than qualified staff, and they have so convinced themselves of that - even when it is not true - that they question anyone who doesn't act in the same way. So I find myself asking the awkward question - why is it only students who can benefit from new opportunities? Are we postdocs not expected to gain any further knowledge and experience now that we're being paid to do the job?

Science - the funding wars continue

An article from across the pond, this time, where they have many of the same problems as in the UK. Prof. Steve Quake from Stanford University writes in the NY Times about how funding by committee tends to squeeze out some of the more adventurous ideas. The comment on a rejected proposal of “typically bold, but wildly ambitious”, or variants thereof, is probably familiar to many scientists currently seeking funding.

One difference between the US and the UK is that there is a chance that the US - seeing the success of the NIH special awards that Quake refers to in his article - may be creating more opportunities for bold and wildly ambitious research. The UK, however, continues to give the impression of going the other way, with research funding increasingly linked to immediate gains for industry.

Call yourself a geologist?

You get some really daft people managing to get stories into the media. Fundamentalist Christians in the US are very good at this. Not to be left out, some twit claiming to be a geologist has managed to have their declaration that Mecca time should replace GMT because Mecca was in "perfect alignment to magnetic north" get reported by the BBC.

He's clearly not a geologist, as any *real* geologist knows that Magnetic North moves. Currently by about 41km a year. It moved 1100km over the 20th century. I'm not an expert on Saudi Arabian cities, but I'm pretty sure that Mecca doesn't move around the desert anywhere near as much (and it'd have to move rather faster than magnetic north, given that the fixed point on the circle, the north pole, is much closer to Magnetic North than it is to Mecca).

Also - and I haven't bothered to work out exactly, but there's probably a nice Great Circle mapper on Google somewhere - the great circle that passes through wherever Magnetic North currently is and the North Pole will also pass through a number of other places. At a rough guess from looking at the map, I'd be pretty confident that a Great Circle that passes through Mecca and the North Pole is going to go pretty close to both Moscow and the west coast of North America. So - why Mecca time and not Moscow time? Or even Hollywood time? At least we'd know when the latest TV shows will appear on the internet...

Or what if they mean a line where magnetic north and true north are the same? Well, this is a complex beast, due to local effects, but again, one such line passes through the US - from Lake Superior and across the western panhandle of Florida - and another through Europe - in 2000, this ran pretty much slap bang through Copenhagen (you know, the place with the cartoonists) and nowhere near Mecca.

Daft names - men's fault?

An article in the NY Times suggests that the number of extremely bizarre names may be reducing as women now have more of a say in the name of their offspring than they did in the past.

“I can’t tell you,” Mr. Sherrod said, “how often I’ve heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully, ‘Danger is my middle name.’ But their wives absolutely refused.”

There is a long history of men giving their children very, very silly names that reflect their father's viewpoints. Nicholas Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon appears to have coped relatively well with this, becoming an MP and a founder of the London fire brigade.

The article includes some really odd names. You can sort of understand the arty types who think that Heavenly Hirani, River, or Moonunit are good names, but Goblin Fester, Cheese Ceaser and Leper Priest? Seriously?

A commonly reported English tradition is the father who wants to name their child after the members of their favourite football team. Although when it comes to silly names and sports, probably the worst is the Canadian ice hockey team from Port Moody, who decided the "Port Moody Fog Duckers" was a good name.