It looks like there is going to be a surge of universities wanting to charge close to the new maximum of £9,000 a year in tuition fees - with potentially devastating effects on government budgets. Do ministers have a Plan B to rein in spending? In his speech two weeks ago, David Willetts, the universities and science minister, failed to tackle the problem. Now he's making another big speech to vice chancellors. William Cullerne Bown examines Willetts' text and offers this line-by line analysis.
So. The big boys of Formula 1 are thinking of going green? For an industry driven by being on the edge and by its nature always looking beyond the next curve, perhaps the more relevant question is why they haven’t done it already?
Europe is just a few, short steps away from a system in which scientists, companies and lone inventors will be eligible to apply for a single patent that is applicable in all subscribing countries. After nearly half a century, 25 member states have joined an “enhanced cooperation” agreement on the patent’s official languages. This is expected to be adopted by the Council of Ministers on 10 March, paving the way for legislation in the European Parliament as early as May.
Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington should be forgiven for going over the top in attacking scepticism about climate change or genetically modified organisms, says Andy Stirling.
What to do with data? Most academics have been trying to avoid the questions but they keep coming. Special issues in Nature and now Science highlight the excitement of new research paradigms in data mining, correlation and visualisation.
The bad news is that there are now very few who don’t worry about information overload and how to manage it all, from academic journals to micro-blogging, lab books to personal photo collections.
I confess I come to this speech with a heap of anxious attitude. Conversations in the past 24 hours with university folk have convinced me that most universities will charge high tuition fees. Russell Group-type places seem set to go straight to £9,000 a year and even the post-1992 crowd seem set on fees in the £7,000 - £8,500 range. The average level of fees therefore is likely to come out at well over £8,000 a year.
The president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will focus on diversity in the sciences in an address to the association's annual conference later today.
Speaking ahead of the event in Washington DC on 17 February, Alice Huang said that although overt discrimination for women in science was “pretty well gone”, attitudes remain which set the bar higher for women than men. Huang, a virologist at the California Institute of Technology, called the subconscious discrimination “human”, but something which activity was needed to counteract.
The defence minister of Germany has been accused of plagiarism. Several newspapers say he copied parts of his PhD thesis from their archives. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says the introduction to Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s thesis on constitutional reform in the United States and Europe is an almost word-for-word match with a story the paper published in 1997. An investigation by the Sueddeutsche, which broke the news on Wednesday, has since uncovered several other allegations of plagiarism, some concerning newspaper stories, others scientific texts and books.
I think we should talk about science policy more. By 'we' I don’t just mean people who read blogs like this. I mean everyone.
So I was interested to see the Science Museum’s Dana Centre were hosting an event last week entitled Whose Science? The blurb promised questions like ‘Who should decide which direction research takes us and what takes priority?’ and ‘Do scientists and politicians know best, or should the public help decide?’. Tom Wakford trailed his talk with a post on Research Blogs.
Philosophy, history and classics are more than the icing on academia’s cake, says Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. Elizabeth Gibney finds out why she believes we ignore them at our peril.
