Retired

As you may have noticed, there hasn’t been a lot of science getting done here recently. 

The basic reason for this is that we’ve decided to retire and close down Blue Skies Research Ltd. We set it up about 10 years ago, when we returned from Japan, and have had a lot of fun continuing our research in a private setting but over the last few years have been gradually winding down the research activity and increasing the other-than-research activity and want to focus on the latter from now on.

There’s a paper in the works with paper charges still to pay so the company isn’t completely shut down yet. We aren’t looking for new projects but if something exciting comes up, we might change our minds.

To be honest, we haven’t been particularly inspired by new ideas for a while and simply don’t have any burning climate science questions that we need to answer. After all, we have worked out what Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is (actually we worked it out in 2006, but everyone else took 15 years to catch up). There are lots of other scientists quite capable of taking the field wherever they choose to, and we look forward to seeing where they go!

Make our Planet Great Again

Our kind host has pointed us towards the German call for applications for 4-year fellowships under the joint France-Germany “Make our Planet Great Again” program. This was originally Macron's brainchild, which attracted a certain amount of media attention possibly disproportionate to its scientific importance. Now the Germans have jumped on board with an essentially parallel (albeit smaller) scheme which offers awards of up to €1.5m over 4 years to attract overseas scientists to set up groups in Germany, again focussing on climate and sustainable energy sciences. It may not be a huge initiative but it will surely be very attractive to a lot of people, including perhaps those in the UK who are uncertain what Brexit will bring. If we were remotely interested in going abroad and setting up a new research group we'd probably be applying. But we aren't.

What did the EU ever do for us?

Ok, I said I wasn't going to do the referendum, but there's nothing else to talk about and I think this is worth mentioning.

Way back in the mists of time when I was starting out in the workplace, it was commonplace for new employees, especially junior researchers and academics, to be employed on the basis of short contracts. Open ended positions still existed however, and different institutes had different attitudes towards moving contract staff to open-ended positions. My first employer did it by creating an entirely new open-ended position, which was widely advertised. This was of course pretty stressful for the internal candidate having to fight for “their” job, although in practice it was just a huge waste of time for the external candidates who were never really in with a shout for a job which was designed for someone else. Not to mention being pretty awkward for staff like me having to talk to and show around these candidates without letting on that the job was really meant for the guy in the adjacent office who happened to be away that day. My next employer had more of an internal review process, similar to but far less formal than the US university tenure review system. My internal review was the day after I'd just got my job offer from Japan, which made it more fun than it might otherwise have been :-)

Incidentally, “permanent” is not a great term to use for these positions. No jobs are permanent in the UK, it is not uncommon to make people (or to be precise, their positions) redundant, as the chemistry department at Exeter Uni learnt to their cost. But making positions redundant costs money and takes time: much easier, management thought, to just allow contracts to end efficiently and painlessly (for them). This was also in line with the long term trend for research councils to be more "responsive", ie quicker to follow new fashions and not be tied down with things like staff or institutes or facilities to support, or long-term strategies to think about and follow through on. But I digress.

Some people were stuck indefinitely on a succession of short contracts, with no guarantee of renewal. I think one of the Reading people who visited us in Japan had been on 1-year contracts for something like a decade. Of course, a succession of short contracts, even if there's some sort of likelihood of renewal, are no basis for buying a house, raising a family, or even building a career.

Along came the interfering bureaucratic EU, who observed that this was not really a fair or sustainable state of affairs. And at a stroke, in the admirably brief and readable Council Directive 1999/70/EC, they put an end to it. Short contracts are still allowed for a finite duration, or where they can be objectively justified. But the directive underlines that the normal form of employment contract is one of indefinite duration. In practice, the research institutes and universities have pretty much abandoned short contracts, employees may get one on initial employment or for a particular project, but this no longer carries on indefinitely.

Incidentally, Japan is still struggling with this issue two decades later, in its own inimitable manner. Around the time we left, a law was coming in to limit contract employment to 5 years of continuous work, following which it would be regarded as open-ended. Prior to this new law, there was some sort of established precedent that after 9 years in the same job, you could claim open-ended status, but JAMSTEC had been careful to set up enough loopholes in our employment that there's no way jules and I were going to trust the legal system to actually enforce this in our favour. JAMSTEC's initial response to this new law was to state that all future contract employment would be on the basis of 5 years work and then a 6 month “break” (ie unemployment) followed by another 5 years work etc. I'm pleased to say that when my manager explained this to me, I laughed in his face and told him that he, and the institute directors, were all idiots if they thought that was going to work. Eventually they came up with a saner tenure review plan but excluded us from it, as I have probably mentioned here before.

So, the tl;dr version is that at a stroke, the EU abolished an unsustainable, abusive and unfair system of short-term employment, and this move has also had the benefit of making management think a little more carefully about the long-term sustainability of their institutes. The widespread RCUK fellowships (5 years of research which converts to an open-ended lecturer position) were one obvious response to the change in the law. Younger scientists probably don't even realise this, as the short contract era will have ended before they started work. But it has certainly made a big difference to scientific careers in the UK, and no UK govt had shown any inclination to do anything about it.

"If I was better at mathematics I would have liked to have been an engineer."

Spotted by chance, and the article is mostly irrelevant but I did like the refreshingly honest quote from a fund manager who has woefully underperformed the FTSE over the past 5 years, no doubt drawing a massive salary in the process.

There are those in the skeptic community who argue (based on who knows what, salary perhaps?) that scientists are basically the dregs left behind once the financial parasite industry has skimmed off the cream of the crop of the university leavers. This wasn't my experience, as in fact the top few in the year mostly queued up for the handful of DPhil grants available, but it's a good shtick to beat climate scientists with.

NOC NOC Who's there? Not as many as you thought....

Sad but generally unsurprising news from the UK, where it seems that the latest installment of austerity means another round of scientists losing their jobs, including up to 15 (out of 45) at the small lab where we used to work.

Mind you, I wonder what on earth NOC was doing with a 35-strong (or more?) "Directorate of Science and Technology" in the first place! Sounds like someone might have been building themselves a little empire there...which brings back memories of our time there.

Over here, the approach is one of salary cuts all round, which from our point of view seems preferable, though it may not be so good for those on a tight budget. Although we are not officially civil servants, I think this is going to apply to us, on top of JAMSTEC's recent disgraceful behaviour. But this additional cut is not actually JAMSTEC's doing and given events of the past year, it would be difficult to complain too bitterly. It's not like they are cutting our pay down to UK levels :-)

Well duh

I'm not really sure how this qualifies as being newsworthy:

Science graduates 'should move abroad'

Science graduates should look for work abroad because funding cuts mean finding work in Britain is too hard, two of the country’s leading scientists have claimed.

Doesn't really take a rocket scientist - or even an astrophysicist and sheep-cloner - to work that out.

We have occasionally considered options for returning to the UK - not least because the funding situation here is a bit precarious right now (but only because of a poorly-timed tsunami and nuclear meltdown just when the grant needs renewed, not as a matter of long-term policy). But the combination of a massive pay cut plus the need to actually work for a living has so far dissuaded us :-) Last summer reminded us of what we had got away from, though we enjoyed the visit itself immensely (not just because of the punting).

Anyway, it has long been my opinion that all scientists should spend time overseas if at all possible, as a matter of policy. Even Japan has plenty of opportunities at the moment in many areas.

The scientists are revolting!

Well I don't have any particular stake in the future of UK science, either as tax-payer or receiver of funds (ok we are getting some support during our stay in the UK, which I am grateful for) so I'm not going to pass judgement on this protest other than to point out that actions have consequences and our extended stay in Japan is due in no small part to the continual funding struggles that our lab(s) encountered while we were working in the UK. But although the country is probably better off without us, lots of good people may be leaving too!

It is interesting to note that according to the BBC, "Demonstrators were asked to wear science items such as a laboratory coat or telescope". Passing over the issue of how one wears a telescope, I wonder how sensible it is to persist in such self-stereotyping? I can't recall the last time I saw someone wearing a lab coat at work. Even scientists are people too.

Yes we Kan (spend more money that we don't have)

Well the IMF is full of praise for the Tory slash-n-burn, which is a sure sign that they are working hard to make the rich richer and poor poorer, but over in Japan, it seems that there is still plenty of spending to be done. Kan has just beaten off a leadership challenge from the hated Ozawa, so probably feels duty-bound to make a statement in the only way that Japanese PMs know how.

It doesn't make much sense to me, as the talk in Japan has also been of budget cuts, but the first sign of starting to understand Japan is to recognise that you don't understand it at all, so I may be closing in on enlightenment. Anyway, if any British scientists find themselves looking for work in a few weeks or months, there would be worse places to look than Japan...

(Amusing to see ol' Krebsy featuring in that article about brain drain - he visited us in POL while he was Chief Exec of NERC, and it was jules' question about the dire state of UK science, or more precisely the reaction of some senior management to her daring to raise her voice in public to say what we junior ranks were all thinking in private, that ultimately precipitated our move to Japan. I must remember to thank him on Wednesday! More of the same from Krebs here, including a radio interview.)

Bad PR

I mentioned some time ago that I was optimistically applying for a permanent residence visa. I got the rejection today, a few days inside their 6 month guideline, which consisted of the single sentence "あなたのこれまでの在留実績からみて，永住を許可するに足りる相当の理由が認められません。" or "Your achievements to date are not reasonable grounds to grant permanent residence".

Perhaps it's a useful reminder that after nearly 9 trouble-free years here the bureaucracy still views me as just a visitor to be tolerated for the time being, rather than the sort of person that they might like to settle here in the long term. And perhaps not entirely surprising, since my employer views me in much the same way. But based on the list of successful and unsuccessful applicants, it seems to me they have been unduly harsh (eg see Case #27 on that list, also #38).

There is talk of some reformation of the immigration process, but I am not holding my breath. The revolving-door approach towards foreigners (by all means come here for a few years, but make sure you don't stay too long) pervades not just immigration, but employment contracts too, so it will take more than changes to the immigration system to change things significantly.

Geniuses, Fanatics and Comedians only!

Turns out Japan isn't as open for foreigners as even I had thought. I took part in a careers fair last month. There I heard the international outreach chap from a supposedly internationally-minded university proudly proclaim that 4% of its staff are foreigners, 50% of whom are language teachers (so have no job security), and the other 50% are "permanent", where those who can't pass the standard written exam (in Japanese) are still called permanent but are actually on short-term contracts. Wow... (BTW "short term" in Japan means your contract may be terminated at the end of each year for no reason).

The fair had presentations from 5 people who had been sort of successful in Japan. Two had survived in Japanese companies and were clearly exceptional individuals, having reached full proficiency in Japanese in a single year as well as excelling at their jobs. What about mere mortals? The three researchers were slightly less remarkable individuals. One guy had risen to the heady heights of a boss at RIKEN, a place like JAMSTEC, running a group that was at least 50% foreign. Well done him. Another was a recently employed Assistant Professor who had landed his job after a postdoc in Japan, after some superhumanly persistent networking. The other one was ... me! Here's my talk. Preparing for this event I thought I'd worked out how we have survived in Japan: there are two of us which enables survival in a pincer movement kind of a way. But while giving the talk I discovered the real reason we are still here. As I spoke, the Europeans laughed politely in a kind of "Ah, British humour - must adjust brain to understand - 'ha ha ha'" way, while the Japanese in the front row were doubled-up guffawing into their face-masks and, despite all the odd things I'd said, greeted me afterwards with happy smiles and teasing comments.

General Douglas MacArthur may have called the Japanese a nation of 12 year olds, but I suspect he never managed to make any of them laugh.

Successful writer/call girl/blogger outed...as a scientist

Oh, the shame, the shame.

All the luvvies in the meejah were swooning over the elegant prose, the urbane and erudite discussions of Iris Murdoch with punters.

Her purple prose had them speculating variously that the author was the novelist Sarah Champion, journalist Toby Young or writer Rowan Pelling. Others had suggested Lisa Hilton, Andrew Orlowski or Michael Faber.

But it turns out that this outwardly-normal girl-about-town had a secret double life. Behind the façade of a sophisticated cultivated lady of the night, she was living a double life - as a bench-monkey.

I cringe at the embarrassing phone calls that are surely taking place following this revelation: "Hi Mum, you know you thought I was living as a high-class escort in London? Well, actually, I was moonlighting as a PhD student. Now I'm working as an obscure research scientist."

The dangers of blogging.

An amusing exchange on scienceblogs has been used here as an example of the dangers of blogging about a job search. In summary, a few months ago commenter Are sent an email enquiry relating to her concerns about the scheduling of a informal "tailgate party" during a faculty visit, and some interesting debate ensued with IMO some valid points on both sides of the "grow up and learn to cope with normal social environments" vs "sounds like it might be a hostile climate, especially for women" argument. It seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I was surprised to see just recently a rather hostile comment from someone identifying themselves as the search chair, having a go at the applicant. Sciencewoman had lifted their comment out of the previous thread and featured it as new post, so I went back and checked...and found this gem from Are immediately preceding it! Suddenly the chair doesn't sound so bad, and just in case there was any room for doubt, Are sticks her foot in it over and over again with a sequence of hostile and bizarre comments down the ensuing comments thread (exhibit 1, 2).

So does this mean that people should not talk about their experiences during job searches? Actually the message seems rather more general to me. It is not an example of the risks of blogging a job search so much as the risk of blogging under the cover of anonymity - or rather, the presumption of anonymity. It provides a prime illustration of one of the main reasons why I don't blog anonymously - I would much rather write in the knowledge that anyone might read this, and choose my words appropriately for a public discussion, than sound off under the presumption of anonymity and then suffer the embarrassment of being uncovered. I do accept that some people may have good reasons for blogging anonymously, but am somewhat concerned that it appears to be predominantly female bloggers who feel the need for this cover (perhaps my perception on this is skewed, so if anyone has some hard numbers they would be welcome). But anonymous or not, it is always necessary to consider how people might react when they read what I write, and in fact if I blogged anonymously I would probably have to conceal more (to protect my identity) than I do knowing that I'm out in the open. Even though the typical institute atmosphere is perhaps slightly more "corporate" than a university setting, we are still officially encouraged to present our work to the public and I would not be comfortable working somewhere I was not expected to offer my opinions in public. In principle, many big scientific meetings are open to the public - at least on payment of a fee, and sometimes journalists also attend.

Getting back to the topic of job searches, it seems to me that the main reason for keeping quiet would not be related to offending the potential new employers, but rather so as to not alert the current one, especially if the blogger in a vulnerable position. (Of course if the current position was a term-limited post-doc with no chance of extension that would not apply.) The only time that have I told a boss I was planning on leaving (and why) before actually having a new job lined up, his response was to ask for jules' CV in order to see if he could find a suitable position for her...

Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the UK...

Not that I had any particular plans, but the longer I stay away, the less I remember of the bad bits. However, every time the memories fade, some more news reminds me.

Latest is the planned closure of Jodrell Bank. OK, it's not actually the whole institute, "just" the e-Merlin project hosted there. But by all accounts that's pretty much the same thing. I suspect the distinction is moot for jules' brother who works on the project.

The sad thing is, I can't even pretend to be surprised by this - it's just par for the course.

Can you speak Japanese?

Funny how these things come in a bunch.

I've already posted about these vague proposals JT about revamping the visa requirements for Japan, including language skills testing.

Now a similar sort of idea has popped up again, but there's still no sign that anyone has actually thought it through. Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion, let me say at the outset that of course it is not unreasonable to impose some sort of language requirement on permanent residents and citizenship applications. These people are (in principle) here to stay as members of Japanese society. There already are de facto requirements, if not exactly de jure, in the form of paperwork and a face to face interview (no interpreter allowed!). Exceptions are only made for mass murderers on the Interpol wanted list (eg), and I don't want to stay here that badly.

It's not really clear what is being considered - there is no such thing as a "long term visa" anyway, with most categories limited to 3y. And obviously it would be a complete non-starter to hope that foreign professionals or wannabe English language teachers would take Japanese lessons just on the off chance that they might get offered a short contract here at some point in the future.

So I am still waiting with interest to see what concrete proposals, if any, actually see the light of day.

AGU: the science

OK, enough joking around. I was actually there for work, having received a generous invitation to present at the session on "Climate Sensitivity From Modeling, Current Observations, and Paleoclimate Data."

We've often thought about going to the AGU Fall Meeting, since while we are in Japan it's actually more convenient than the EGU, but never previously got round to it. The organisation is rather different to the EGU, and took a bit of getting used to. For some reason, the poster sessions are not clearly linked to their corresponding oral sessions (the code numbers indicate the section and the time, but eg there is no obvious link between U43A and U51B, despite them being posters and oral session on the same topic). They don't even arrange things in alphabetical order in the book. There is also no Climate section and very little Nonlinear Geophysics (the two most interesting sections in the EGU), but a whole lot of Paleoclimate.

Here are some highlights from my notes. Errors and omissions all mine, of course.

After a couple of paleoclimate talks first thing on Monday morning I ducked into a rather bizarre session entitled "Navigating a Career in the Geosciences: Strategies for Success." It started off with some important successful guy telling us how the rewards would come if we just put in enough hard work and perseverance and were prepared to take our chances. He told us his own life story of how there were not enough jobs in his PhD speciality, so he changed topics. Then he found funding hard to come by in his next field...so he changed again, becoming Director of NCAR. Why didn't we all think of that? The next presentation was a similar pep-talk from another senior professor about how great life was if only one persevered, but the last talk actually did have some useful content based on real research about what distinguishes the more successful from the less. But I'm hardly going to give away the secrets to you lot :-) One of the most important factors seemed to be the Y chromosome, which reliably distinguishes the "outstanding" from the merely "hard working" (Trix and Psenka, 2003). Later on that day, a session on extremes had Tom Knutson sounding rather sceptical about whether or not hurricanes were likely to increase much (and he thought it would take some time to see a signal in the data).

Tuesday morning started with a session on aerosols, not really my thing but I'd spotted both Schwartz and Chylek were presenting, so I turned up to listen. Steve Schwartz presented his sensitivity analysis, but admitted it had received a lot of criticism and he would not "bet the ranch" on it, which probably defused some potential criticisms (in the questions after someone did say that they thought his detrending was a dodgy step). Later on in the week I spoke to him in person, he said he'd just got our comment and hadn't yet planned his reply. Petr Chylek presented a somewhat similar paper from in the same special issue of JGR (guest editor: P Chylek) which I'll probably blog about in more detail later. I got the impression of a bit of a clique separate from mainstream climate science here. Someone in the audience actually asked where they might get the opposing point of view. It wasn't 100% clear what they meant by "opposing", but one good answer might be chapters 9 and 10 of the IPCC AR4 WG1, or indeed the whole book. There was also a session concerning use of the multimodel ensemble (ie the AR4 runs), which I am getting interested in. In fact there were a few sessions with this sort of flavour that during the week.

After 2 consecutive 10h days and fairly late nights, Wednesday morning had nothing much of interest so we had a lie-in (and tested the crappy hotel gym). The afternoon had some stuff on ocean tracers, including some adjustments to the ocean heat content data, and also estimates of ocean mixing based on various other tracers (tritium from bombs, helium from the mantle). This is something I've tried to point out to some climate sensitivity estimation people who claim that we can't say much about the ocean mixing rate (and thus heat uptake, which affects climate sensitivity estimates) because the temperature data are so uncertain. Even if the direct measurements of temperature are uncertain, we have other evidence about the mixing rate, which they studiously choose to ignore!

Thursday morning had some fun stuff on carbon sequestration, including various air capture schemes. I'm not really convinced that these make sense, but I've nothing against their consideration. Rather than harvesting and burying biomass, it might be simpler to just use it for energy in place of the fossil fuels. In the afternoon we had the exciting session on "Tipping points", which started off with a well-attended talk by Jim Hansen. He didn't actually talk about tipping points in much detail but argued for a rapid halt to coal use (unless sequestration-enabled).

Friday morning was our big thrill of the week, with presentations in the session on climate sensitivity. I was due to talk 2nd up, immediately after Jim Hansen, which (as is generally the case in these situations) I presumed would mean a mass exodus throughout my talk. I consoled myself with the thought that at least most would hear the start of it. Anyway, we arrived bright and early, checked that our presentations were set up and bagged good seats. At about 8:02 the convenor stood up, and said that she was very very sorry, but unfortunately Jim Hansen's presentation wasn't ready yet, so we would have to start with the 2nd presentation! Well at least that saved me another 15 minutes of nerves, and since Hansen's presentation was "in the pipeline" people didn't have time to run out for a coffee so I had a packed house. When initially invited, I'd really planned to steal jules' paleo work and talk about that, but then she also got a talking slot in the same session so I had to leave that in her hands and revamped the "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity" stuff instead. I had some fun reading a bit of Steven Goodman's Nature letter ("This technique would be a wonderful contribution to science were it not based on a patently fallacious argument, almost as old as probability itself") against a back-drop of quotes from the recent climate science literature all claiming that uniform priors represent a state of pure ignorance (this of course being the patently fallacious argument Goodman was ridiculing). Lest anyone think I was picking on anyone in particular, I quoted from 3 papers from largely different groups, plus an extract from the Nobel-winning consensus of 2500 climate scientists otherwise known as the IPCC AR4. However I had noticed that Myles Allen was supposed to be talking straight after me, and I was disappointed that he did not attend and defend his beliefs. I guess if I keep on turning up to the major conferences we can't continue to miss each other indefinitely. The rest of the session had a mix of old and new stuff, nothing too revolutionary. We wound down with a session on geoengineering which was fun.

Nameable names that I met for the first time (mostly very briefly) included, in no particular order: Steve Schwartz, Ray Pierrehumbert, Michael Tobis, Michael Mann and of course there were numerous others I've met before. The weather was great and SF is easily the nicest city I've visited in the USA (not that I'm very well travelled over there) so we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. On scientific grounds, I think I prefer the EGU, but maybe that is partly a matter of familiarity.

Debito packs it in

I was saddened to see that Arudou Debito, scourge of racist onsen-owners everywhere, has basically given up on his employer (a university in Hokkaido) and is looking for a new job.

The basic reason for leaving? Being denied a sabbatical, strung along with a line of bullshit as to the reasons why, and eventually getting to the bottom line: he's not worth anything to the old farts running the place. He's just an English teacher, after all.

I know Debito rubs some people up the wrong way but I have plenty of admiration for the effort he has put in to standing up for his, and others', rights. Moreover, he is the archetypal well-integrated immigrant, fluent in Japanese, with a Japanese (now ex-)wife, children, house, and indeed Japanese citizenship (born a US citizen, David Aldwinckle). If he is still hitting this sort of brick wall at his stage (and it's not as if a year of sabbatical is an unreasonable expectation for an academic after 14 years of service), then really I don't need to waste any more time wondering whether I have a long-term future here. I hope he finds something suitable for his talents (and I second the sentiment in his comments that something more explicitly activist-oriented may be more suitable than more teaching with activism as a side-line).

Incidentally, I was at a book launch party for the IPCC AR4 last week, organised by the Tokyo office of CUP. We were treated to the spectacle of a succession of Japanese researchers basically telling us all about what a wonderful contribution Japan had made to this project. Needless to say, there was no mention of yours truly, cited (along with jules) in 3 chapters and Contributing Author for one, all while employed full-time in a Japanese research institute. I realise that's hardly a big deal and I wouldn't have noticed were it not for the inordinate fuss they made over someone who managed to get his name mentioned on a figure or something. But it did bring it home to me just how much easier it was for us, as complete outsiders to the process, to affect (albeit in a minor way) the outcome of the massive international bureaucratic behemoth that is the IPCC, than it is to have any influence in the institute where we are nominally "Senior Researchers".

Jules was also invited to attend this event (by a senior manager at FRCGC who helped organise it) "as a researcher of Hadley". Yes, after 6 years here, we are still just visiting researchers to some. She didn't have the heart to tell him that she'd only ever been to the Hadley Centre about twice.

More doom and gloom

Interesting to see Nature jumping on the no job prospects for PhDs and postdocs bandwagon (via Pharyngula). (Disclaimer - I haven't yet read the Nature article - no access at home - but I'm assuming that it draws the same obvious conclusion from the statistics.) Not so long ago their "jobs editor" Paul Smaglik was having a go at some anonymous blogging post-doc for daring to suggest that anything was less than perfect in their work life. But it is of course blindingly obvious that if every tenured staff member mentors on average even a single PhD student at a time, them the overwhelming majority of these PhDs will not subsequently go on to get tenured positions in academia.

Of course one can legitimately argue that it is fine for the vast majority of PhDs to not get academic jobs (and for a large majority of postdocs to never land a tenured position) - so long as they are aware of the situation and walk into it with eyes open, that's OK. But that hardly justifies the sort of situation where people complain about (and are reported uncritically on) the "shortage" of qualified staff simply because they "only" get 30 applicants per post rather than 75!

More whinging from the CBI

At first glance, I thought this was a sign that the CBI was actually considering putting their money where their mouths are (albeit in a feeble manner), by offering minuscule bursaries to science students. But no, it's cheaper to lobby the Govt for it than to actually dip their hands into their own pockets.

As for "struggling to fill their posts", "struggling to fill their pockets on the backs of underpaid and exploited workers" would be more like it. "Only" 30 applicants per job? My heart bleeds. If their research and development is only viable on the premise of a never-ending supply of lab fodder desperately scrabbling for the scraps on offer then maybe we wouldn't miss them so much. Just how many people do they actually want the Govt to train (at vast expense) for each job on offer?

There's a simple solution in the free market that the CBI claim to believe in: PAY MORE MONEY, MORONS! I don't really mean purely "more money", rather a more general "better conditions" - but of course advocates of Stern think that everything can be reduced to cash :-). Sorry to shout, but it really gets my goat to hear these fat cats, who are sitting pretty at the top of the capitalist pyramid, desperately struggling to stick their snouts in the socialist trough of Govt subsidies with the intention of propping up their businesses with a never-ending supply of compliant and desperate wage slaves.

I rather liked this comment (found via the Adam Smith Institute blog, who I see has linked to my previous post):

You’re a well compensated, shiny-suited male executive spending a week at a conference in Amsterdam. In the evenings you experience a “shortage” of women willing to sleep with you. How do you solve this problem? Do you perhaps write to your MP demanding that the EU offer grants to nubile Ukranian girls to migrate to brothels in western Europe?

Note that the author is an ex-scientist following the abrupt closure of his lab, so may just possibly be even more bitter and twisted than me (note to self: must try harder).

Math class really is tough!

Obviously Barbie was just anticipating the latest research :-)

However, NewScientist is still well behind the times, bleating recently that:

The most urgent problem for UK science is the shortage of enthusiastic new recruits. The proportion of teenagers choosing to study physics at ages 16 and 18 is in free fall. The situation in engineering and maths is little better and in chemistry things are starting to decline too. Just about everyone bar the government accepts that the root cause is a shortage of schoolteachers qualified in these subjects to inspire pupils. There will be no solution until this is officially accepted...

The "shortage of new recruits" is, I assert, merely the free market speaking: achieving a useful level of skill in scientific subjects is hard, and those who are capable of it can get much greater rewards (certainly in financial terms) elsewhere. Note that even with the current supposedly "hard" science A-Levels, some universities have switched to 4 years rather than 3 for their degree courses, at least for people who are considering research.

I find it disturbing that people can seriously propose that all we need is smooth-talking teachers to con pupils into a low-paid and insecure job with stringent intellectual demands, severe competition for jobs and high failure rate, when they would be substantially better off elsewhere. As I've mentioned before, an average estate agent in the UK earns 50% more than a scientist, and if you want to consider careers with perhaps more comparable intellectual demands, an average GP earns about 3 times as much, and has a secure job for life too. I'm not saying that these people aren't worth their salaries, but for anyone who is considering becoming a scientist, and who thinks that they might want to buy a house (say) at some point in their adult lives, bear in mind that this is the sort of financial competition you'll be up against.

Of course I should acknowledge that there are good things about being a scientist, especially for the eccentrics and independently-monied :-) But for normal people, it's a rather poor choice, and I'd rather see people talking openly about the real problems than papering over the cracks. Yet more innocent post-doc fodder is most certainly not what we need.

"Women, and more severely challenged persons"

Spotted in an advert in NewScientist:

"Women are therefore especially encouraged to apply. The Max Planck Society also wishes to employ more severely challenged persons..."

At least they didn't say "... even more severely challenged persons (if such a thing exists)..." :-)