This entry was posted on March 25, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Daily Telegraph, Ian Douglas, Physics, STFC.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Congratulations on making the list, Peter, but out here, where we rely on jungle drums for much of the news (and STFC funding), that paragraph about a full-scale financial disaster is a little disturbing. Any chance of another hint of what it’s all about?
Basically, it goes like this. STFC was supposed to make savings from its budget by looking for redundancies at RAL and other places in order to balance the books after phase 1 of the financial disaster. It has failed to do so, preferring to wait for natual wastage to do the job, but this hasn’t materialised.
Meanwhile the pound has collapsed, which means the contributions it has to make to CERN and ESO have risen substantially. These are a substantial fraction of the STFC budget.
Science is therefore caught between the rock of the rising subscription costs and the hard place of management failure.
It’s been said before, but this time I think it’s right.
Thanks for that, Peter! I’ll sleep rather uneasily tonight. I appreciate the update though and let’s hope things turn out a little better than you think.
They might be boring, but ours are the only crosswords that give away military secrets.
Just as I thought. The Daily Telegraph was in league with the Abwehr.
Dammit, just heard about your Dublin talk now! What a pity, I could easily have made it. Was it advertised in The Irish Times? I didn’t see it.