Beyond the Drawbridge

Following on from the Black Knight’s misgivings on awards, TheCardinal hears murmurings from his contacts on the review panel of a prestigious Teaching Award. Guess how many applicants there are?

er…

one.

Not that that could ever happen in RESEARCH, of course. …. surely the rumour about how a certain Professor not-too-far from here managed to get awarded a ‘medal’ by the National Biochemical Society couldn’t be true? Could it? naaarrr…

The stupidity (and hubris) of Admin continues, I am reminded.  And we’re not immune from it in the cage:  the director of Academic Administration of the science faculties wants us to dob in all our mates (and spenda shedload of time on it):

The Faculty of Science is developing a database of Faculty International Collaborations to inform its future international strategies.

Academic staff across the Faculty are regularly collaborating with colleagues from around the world on a wide variety of research projects, but the information is not systematically captured by the Faculty and hence opportunities are missed to support, develop and enhance these collaborations.

It would be greatly appreciated if you could provide me with brief details of your three most significant international collaborations between 2005 and 2008 (and into the future if you have plans):

Who your collaborators are and which institutions they are from;

What was the project? 

If any funding was received to  support the project then where from and how much;  

What the outcomes were (eg the number of publications but not details on which journals).

A collation of this data across the Faculty will not only provide the basis for future international strategies but also inform the budgeting process.

Thank you in anticipation of a great response.

What’s telling is (apart from the inability to use a plural such as ‘data’ correctly and the concept of ‘inform’ing non-sentient entities) the line about ‘outcomes’.  These people just have no bloody clue, and they pay our salary.  

But maybe we are finally getting fed up with all this.  An email from the manager of the Science Awareness Section of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (let’s not even think about how well they all sit together) begins

You may be aware that the nomination period for the 2008 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science closes on 9 May.

To date, the number of nominations received has been disappointing, and is clearly not reflective of the number of potentially suitable nominees currently active in research.

It continues

We had hoped, in fact, to see an increase in the number of nominations for the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year and Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year, as a result of an amendment to the eligibility criteria for these Prizes.

The prize consists of a shiny medallion, a lapel pin, and a fifty grand ‘grant’, which apparently you’re free to spend on anything you want, but it would take a brave young post-doc to take that literally and buy, say, a sports car.

The thing is, Philip, we just don’t give a rat’s arse.

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.

TheCardinal has been lying awake at night worrying about a vexed issue. He was beginning to feel that there was no hope… that people of great diplomacy and insight would never step forward to circumnavigate the torturous labyrinth of political intrigue and history underlying this great problem…. but GOOD NEWS reached us today from UberControl….

We are pleased to advise you that University Venues and the University of Sydney Union’s Venues Collection are merging to form The University of Sydney Venue Collection.This new venture will provide a single streamlined venue booking service and professional catering and events management services

At last we can sleep soundly….

I have to complain about the way people use the lab stocks: When you use aliquots and there are not many Eppis left, please MAKE UP MORE!!!
Currently, there are 3 Eppendorfs of Amp left in the stock…

This is not the first time I open a rack to find it nearly empty and I am fed up with making up the stocks for other people.

Since there are a lot of people expressing stuff at the moment, you should make up more stocks when there are 10 Eppis left, also of the IPTG or whatever else you use.

Please be more considerate about others!

Guessing the nationality just isn’t fun any more.

Dear reader,

What do you think to the idea of allowing you to write posts here?  It should be easy enough to turn on.

Let me know.

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.

One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.

The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.

We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.

Yay! We cheer.

And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says

To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?

It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back

Yes

or even

Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us

(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)

It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?

Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.

One of my spies (and not the usual one.  This is good!) forwarded an email from someone who was obviously rather pleased to be asked to review a manuscript:

Respected Sir,

Thank you very much for selecting me as a referee for your esteemed journal. Your journal is one of my favorite journal that is why i am too much interested to be a part of it (as author and referee).

I am sorry for my late reply because of engagements in students tour to different research stations of XXXX and because of the severe electric load-shedding these days.

I have the hard copy of the article (#####), I will check the paper during the study tour from Friday to Tuesday, and the comments will be communicated to your good office as soon as possible.

With best regards:

Dr $NAME

Mangled mother tongues aside, this is precisely the kind of attitude the Black Knight would like to encourage amongst his minions.  Set to it, troops.

Did someone try to leave a comment? I notice my spam guard has trashed one, but I didn’t get to see if it was real or not.  Note that you have to register in order to comment; I’ve turned this feature on to prevent leaks to the outer intachoobs.

xxx

BK