Adrian Liston

Ever wonder how your career (and life!) could have turned out differently if you had picked that PhD project in London instead, or gone into #patientadvocacy rather than a #postdoc? What different lives could you have lived? Now you can find out! amazon.co.uk/Professor-Pipe…

@_joestacey_ Yes. I don't typically go back and read the original reviews.

@LabListon As an editor do you think you would find it helpful, even when you can already see all the positives in the review above?

Most review responses seem to start with 'thank you to the reviewer for saying [summary of nice things said]' Do ACs/reviewers actually like that? Or is it just a waste of everyone's time?

"This book was spookily accurate, like having your fortune told by a psychic octopus" - Dr Pseud O. Nym

Is this tweet meant to be for or against humanities education?

@Scott_Wortley This is literally not happening. Cambridge just had a vote and overwhelmingly voted to keep compulsory retirement in order to save early careers. One or two disgruntled people doesn't change that binding vote.

Good to see oxbridge concentrating on this while redundancies stalk every other institution and precarity for young colleagues is the norm. Top work lads

@t_m_wilson @ShalnevaE You think these changes are driven by academics? In the particular case above, Cambridge academics just overwhelmingly voted to keep compulsory retirement with the explicit justification of the beneficial effect it has on younger people's careers. A handful of are protesting.

@ShalnevaE Its a good job if you can get it, and once most of them do, they don't want to put down the bone. Of course thousands of younger people's careers are impacted by this attitude, but they don't care.

ALL universities should have a mandatory retirement age of 70 (and even that is highly generous). Academics are paid to advance human thought -- and it is really hard to do so when you are 30 years past your cognitive prime. No breach of law here, either. Plenty of professions have compulsory retirement age, from high court judges to air traffic controllers.

@philipmurraylaw I'd much prefer a post: "Cambridge academics voted to keep compulsory retirement, here is why I think they are wrong". People are generally open to new arguments, but you first have to acknowledge that they just voted against the old ones.

'Oxford and Cambridge' aren't launching any such thing.

@LensScientific Conflating "I couldn't do it" with "it can't be done" is certainly something...

A colleague at Caltech once challenged Feynman to explain why spin-½ particles obey Fermi–Dirac statistics in terms a freshman could understand. Feynman happily accepted and promised to prepare a beginner-friendly lecture. A few days later, he returned with an unexpected conclusion: “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to a freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” He took this as a lesson in teaching: if an idea can’t be explained simply, our understanding of it may not be as complete as we think. The story became a reminder among students and faculty that even the greatest physicists should measure their knowledge by their ability to communicate it clearly. It also captured Feynman’s dislike of “cargo cult” teaching and his determination to cut through academic pretense.

@DigitalDionysu1 Cambridge professors just voted on mass in one of the largest vote turnouts ever to keep compulsory retirement on themselves, explicitly to help the next generation get jobs. This is a vocal minority creating a petition against this clear majority vote

Everyone is so fucking selfish

@john_ritzema "Elderly academics" at Cambridge just voted to keep compulsory retirement, explicitly to create career opportunities for the next generation. So a little credit is due :)

@benjcartlidge The majority of Cambridge academics just voted to affirm compulsory retirement

The wild privilege of being an Oxbridge academic means it is entirely justified to have a retirement age. I argued that point when I was an Oxford academic as well.

@EdwardEGibbon Yes, agreed, this is a necessary pre-condition, and is less palatable than compulsory retirement.

If Oxbridge don’t have retirement ages, then they will need to have performance management. They’re two sides of the same coin. The final triumph of managerialism is the price of people not having to retire.

@MiiroV1 @EdwardEGibbon Colleges and Universities are distinct for employment.

@EdwardEGibbon Is the retirement age even true? I knew of supervisors at my college who were apparently too senile to teach but did so anyway, and encountered numerous fellows who, with respect, did look to be older than 69. Perhaps it’s different at collegiate vs university level?

@nmrqip @JosephPConlon Permissible justifications include workforce planning, such as creating opportunities for younger workers. That was the main justification for the Cambridge policy, recently re-agreed up by a large majority of professors.

@JosephPConlon While you might be right in principle there is little real doubt that such policies are unlawful in the UK today.

Compulsory retirement is, for so many reasons, one of the most sane policies universities can (and should) have.

@sbaroncohen Cambridge just had a vote which overwhelmingly decided to keep compulsory retirement, based on the justification provided. A vote which had higher turnout than any other issue since I've been here. Obviously not unanimous, but this campaign needs to be framed as a minority view

Delighted to see Oxford and Cambridge launching this campaign called Academics Against Ageism to end the illegal practice of compulsory retirement based on age. No other university in England does this and it breaches the Equality Act as it’s not justified academicsagainstageism.co.uk

@FiendishFu @sbaroncohen Weird take, considering the oldest cohort of professors are male skewed, while new hires are largely sex-balanced.

@sbaroncohen It's also arguably a sexist policy. I know female academics who took career breaks to have families, and then just as they were back and about to get board chairs, academy fellowships etc., 10-20 years after their male colleagues, they were kicked out for being too old.

"You carefully craft application after application for tenure-track positions. It is a huge amount of work. When the rejection comes back from the final application you are shattered." Not every career shift is our choice. But the story doesn't end there - new pathways beckon!

@3DiMMUNE Or they could act as niche-filling cells within the tumour/tissue

The key question is not exhaustion itself, but whether it impairs the activation of new waves of naïve T cells, and if so, how. 2/2

in my view, the focus on the T-cell exhaustion program itself is misplaced. As long as there is a continuous supply of naïve T cells that recognize the same antigenic pool, why should exhaustion of earlier T-cell waves matter? 1/2 #science #immunology pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

I know I sound like a broken record, but I'm so tired of this bullshit. The cell is nothing like this. The dimensions are all wrong -- a typical protein molecule is 3-5 nm, so ~5000 times smaller linearly than a typical 20 um eukaryotic cell, and one part in 100 billionth the volume. There's far too much empty space, the cytosol is packed with molecules. The collective wavelike motion is pure fantasy -- stochasticity dominates at the molecular level. I suspect scientists put together these animations to show to the layman how much we know, but to me it just points out how much we DON'T know, and doesn't even begin to convey the true complexity.