Beyond the Drawbridge

Those of you who have been paying attention will remember that I’ve been invited to London at the end of August. Between you, me and the wireless router, this is a bit of a jolly.

There’s the rather intriguing Blogging Conference organized by Nature, and the possibility of a Web 2.0 conference in Southampton the day after. Mr JM wouldn’t pay for me to go to them (and I don’t really blame him) but I did have the gall to approach the Dean of Science and ask for money.

Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed (after a ‘vigorous’ management meeting) — on condition that the School stumped up an equal forty ponies of your Ostraylian Dorrars. And even more to my surprise, the HoD agreed in a matter of minutes.

I have to prostitute myself for the Faculty and the Department, but it means I get a few days in London, perhaps give a seminar at my old gaff, and get to see my family — especially my dad, on his 64th birthday. Chuffed, we is. My tickets are booked.

All that remains is for me to figure out how to make the Dean and Arthur, King of the MMBians, feel like they’ve got their money’s worth.

To all researchers, postgraduate students and research assistants,
Would you like to help motivate today’s science students to build a bigger
and brighter generation of Australian researchers?

No I would not. There’s too much competition for jobs already.

The Student Research Scheme is a national program that offers selected
senior secondary science students, the opportunity to complete a brief
research project under the supervision of practising researchers in
laboratories, offices and field study areas.
Unlike work experience, students are presented with a problem or an idea,
and undertake a minimum of 20 hours of real research to develop their own
sets of results and findings in order to complete the project. The project
can be a small part of ongoing research, or a project specially designed for
the scheme.

Hang on… actually, you know, this would be the perfect chance to poison their little minds against a career in science for ever.

Mwah hah hah hah.

This post is primarily for the benefit of those who are are not enCagéd.

After the mindless Dilbertism described in my previous post, I had a little email chat with Mr JM, making exactly the point that we’d rather spend the money on something useful. He mistakenly thought I’d emailed the entire Cage, but after that agreed with me that collective tongue-biting was probably in order.

However, my young apprentice had few such calms, and sent the following masterpiece to everyone:

I took a poll of the students in our room. Half of us prefer the red books to the blue as there is more room on each page to write on. Those who prefer the blue based this on paper quality, room for the date, and especially the gridlines. We all agreed that it was not worth branding the lab books as your work should be enough to make you proud, the appearance of the lab book shouldn’t really matter.

I am so, so proud of her.