By . Commercialising research can do ‘far more’ for humanity than Nobel Prizes, says Mayor of London. UK scientists should be more willing to embrace the idea that commercialising breakthroughs can do “far more” for humanity than winning Nobel Prizes, according to Boris Johnson. More...
By . Four-fifths of institutions fail to release details on how v-c salary was set. The University and College Union has called for universities to “lift the lid on murky world of remunerations committees” after four-fifths of institutions refused to release minutes of the meetings that set vice-chancellors’ pay. More...
By Daily Telegraph Reporter. Almost three quarters of graduates will have at least some of their loan written off under the new repayment regime, research finds. The vast majority of students will still be paying back university tuition fee loans when they are in their early fifties, and many will never repay their debt, according to new research.By Telegraph Staff. Senior academic pay amongst information redacted for confidentiality by universities. Universities are refusing to disclose secret details of wage rises for vice-chancellors, according to a report into the ''murky world'' of senior academic pay. The University and College Union (UCU) said that just 27 out of 139 institutions responded to a request to see minutes of meetings of remuneration committees, which set pay rates, while half of those that did reply redacted some information. The union, which has staged several strikes since October after claiming that university staff had suffered a 13 per cent cut in real-terms pay since 2009, said it was time to “lift the lid” on pay rises for senior staff. Read more...By Tim Ross. David Willetts, the Universities Minister, tells Labour's Liam Byrne that the government expects 60 per cent of students' loans will never be fully repaid, costing taxpayers billions of pounds. Almost two-thirds of students will never repay their taxpayer-funded tuition fee loans, according to new government figures. 
By Melonie Fullick. On March 16, Steve Paikin – the host of the TVOntario’s popular current affairs show “The Agenda” – shared a blog post titled “Where are all the female guests?”. In it, he expressed concern about the ongoing lack of gender parity among the show’s guests, which has led to male-dominated panel discussions. The main question Paikin poses is, “Why, oh why, do we have such a tough time getting female guests on our program?
By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life. What did you hope for in terms of employment as you completed your PhD?
I wanted to be an academic — but not only an academic. As early as my undergraduate days, I had my eyes on career paths that would involve participating in public debate and policy-making. I thought that academia might provide a good platform from which to do those things — and my graduate education was essential to developing my most valuable skills — but I learned about and prepared for other options along the way. More...
By Liz Koblyk. I’ve been taken with the Tinkering Studio, where people put together common items in unusual ways. The idea with tinkering is to use what’s at hand, in ways not originally intended, and to focus more on what you can produce rather than on whether you’re qualified to produce it. While light-up jewellery made out of binder rings might not be your scene, tinkering still offers a good way of thinking about career flexibility and exploration. More...
By David K. Foot. For the past 15 years, Canada’s postsecondary institutions have benefited from educating the children of the Boomers. The Echo, or Gen-Y, generation includes those born between 1980 and 1996. They are now aged 18 to 34. Those born in the peak year, 1991, are 23 years old, possibly finishing undergraduate studies or doing a graduate degree. More...
By Alan MacEachern. Warning: I’m going to talk about my own work in this column. I don’t usually like to do that, because it smacks of self-promotion. I prefer my self-promotion masked as self-deprecation. That’s the Maritime way.
In 2008, I had a meeting at the Environment Canada headquarters in Downsview, Ontario. Other visitors probably get to see where they make the weather, but because I’m a historian, they showed me the old stuff. We went to the basement and walked down aisle after aisle of weather observations: all of the original paper forms that volunteers and paid observers had filled out, multiple times a day, across thousands of stations across Canada, from 1840 onward. More...
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