Nick Gibbins

Some good news for HE

The Independent is reporting that the government is to put an extra £1.5Bn into academic salaries. Notable quotes: At Labour’s National Policy Forum on 1 December, [Tony Blair] said university lecturers were “probably the worst-paid workers in the public sector”. He said their pay had only increased by five per cent in the past 20 years whereas the figure for the rest of the economy was 45 per cent. The article goes on to note that this might mean pay rises of up to 18%, though doesn’t attribute this figure.

More on the Edinburgh fire

Someone at the Beeb has realised that, aside from the buildings, one irreplaceable resource lost in Saturday’s fire was the artificial intelligence library. Full story is on the BBC site. It seems likely that the University may at some point raise an appeal to help rebuild the library, as has already been suggested by some current members of the Divison of Informatics with whom I work. Finally, some more rather depressing photographs.

I read the news today, oh boy!

I missed this story earlier today through not listening to the radio, but last night a large fire destroyed a number of buildings on the Cowgate in central Edinburgh, including that part of the Department of Artificial Intelligence where I worked for my MSc from 1996-1997. I can’t explain just how I feel, save to say that I’m in a state of shock; in amongst the pictures published by the BBC is a photograph of what is left of my old office (fourth picture down, captioned “buildings on the city’s South Bridge were burnt out”). In that photograph, my old… Read More »I read the news today, oh boy!

Three times bitten, four times shy?

As the fabulous has also noted, the damned cat has pissed on the bed again (making this the second time for our own bed and the third time for beds in the house in general), which is of course exactly the sort of relaxing event that we need in the run-up to the wedding (three weeks today). I’ve been mentally composing notices to put in newsagents’ windows, but they all come out something like “Affectionate yet neurotic, plaintive and incontinent adult cat to go to good home with ample opportunities for defecating and urinating on soft furnishings, beds and other… Read More »Three times bitten, four times shy?

You can get the boy out of the PhD course…

Spent part of my lunch hour knocking together an order of ceremony for the upcoming nuptials of and myself. The temptation to begin the document with “Abstract” and finish with “Conclusion and Further Work” was almost overwhelming.

Dealing with fussy eaters

As some of you may or may not know, and I are getting married at the end of the year (one month to go – gulp!). We’re currently trying to finalise the catering, but although we tried our best to provide for all tastes and requirements in the menu choices (ie. catering for the wheat-intolerant vegan and the Atkins diet follower), we’ve still hit a few snags. It is unsurprising that the following pre-dinner party questionnaire (seen on Jenn Manley Lee’s website – read her comic) struck a chord with me…

2 + 2 = 5

More coverage of the top-up fees issue in today’s Grauniad, which analyses the DfES‘s claim of a lifetime salary premium of £400,000 enjoyed by graduates (or to put it a different way, a £10,000 salary premium for each year of your forty year working life) and finds it rather wanting. Of particular note is the comment (from an academic at Essex) that “graduates only maintain their premium if they work in a field where their skills are in short supply”. Still think that the graduate premium will be £400,000 when 50% of young people end up at University? In other… Read More »2 + 2 = 5

Let the dukes subsidise the dustmen

Good comment piece by Roy Hattersley in today’s Grauniad on ways of solving the funding crisis in UK higher education without recourse to the £6000+ tuition fees that various universities are threatening (Imperial College and Warwick, my first university, being the chief culprits). Hattersley, as sensible as ever (shame he’s not still on the front benches), advocates a graduate tax as a progressive source of funding that properly reflects the advantage that a degree confers on a graduate, unlike the fees-and-loans fiasco, and goes so far as to say that such a tax should be “levied on all graduates, not… Read More »Let the dukes subsidise the dustmen