Mark Collard

Every time students, staff, and faculty engage in this sort of self-indulgent, anti-intellectual nonsense, it makes it harder to convince politicians and the voters they represent to spend tax dollars on the higher education system. It needs to stop. The activists are not only making life worse for those currently involved in universities, they are putting at risk the educations of future students and the discoveries to be made by future scholars.

Oh dear.

@VeritasAntequam Thanks. It really is an amazing skill. It’s hard to believe they’re not actually wearing roller skates, they’re so fluid. 😀

@profmarkcollard Here's a great example I found: youtube.com/watch?v=U2Ly_l…

(1) "This swift step simulates the dancer floating or defying gravity, reflecting absolute control over the body." I was thinking roller skates rather than floating or defying gravity. Regardless, it's a pretty remarkable skill. (2) "Circassian folk dance is one of the most...rigorous cultural expressions of the North Caucasus region" "North Caucasus region" seems a bit limited in scope. One could probably widen it to Western Eurasia without fear of contradiction. Maybe even Eurasia.

Cambridge rises to morning melodies 🎶 Early this morning, over 100 people gathered to hear the Choir of @Christs_College sing from the rooftops for Ascension Day. Ascension Day is a long-standing Christian tradition celebrating the ascension of Christ into heaven, 40 days after Easter.

Whose blushes are they trying to spare by referring to this takeover as a 'merger'? archive.is/hjF37

Talk on Darwin & Wallace at The Linnean Society (sadly, in-person only) May 15th members.linnean.org/events/699dec4…

Swartkrans Paranthropus and Sterkfontein Australopithecus from southern Africa had different locomotor repertoires | PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

"Franklin expedition sailor's DNA links to BBC reporter." Unfortunately, the reporter is a bit confused about what the term 'ancestor' means. bbc.com/news/videos/cd…

@Prolapsarian FWIW, I think you should expand it and submit it as an article to the THE. Or even just submit it as a letter to the Guardian or Times.

@Prolapsarian Ah, okay. Thank you.

There really is no need for the catastrophic redundancies hitting our university sector. The UK is an educational powerhouse and its resources are being squandered.

Blimey.

The notion that STEM will survive has always been an illusion. The same arguments for eliminating humanities eventually apply to all disciplines. Some applied STEM survives momentarily because it sounds vocational, despite actually facing weaker job prospects.

90th Anniversary of the first discovery of an adult Australopithecus cranium, TM 1511, at Sterkfontein Caves, South Africa ditsong.org.za/en/90th-annive…

I suspect that's already a bit of a problem, given that the top scholars in a field will likely be inundated with requests to do reviews for free at the moment. Besides, I'm not sure that there's a straightforward relationship between review quality and standing in the field of interest. In my experience, postdocs and even grad students can and do provide excellent reviews, while senior researchers can sometimes be too busy to invest much time in a review. So, on balance, I'm not too worried about paying reviewers making the quality of reviews worse.

@profmarkcollard Is there not danger that lower quality scholars will dominate reviewing, for money? Don't we have 2 think out unintended consequences? The review system is broken though! No question. + the problems r deeper than bogeyman critical theory! Might be a Heterodox debate topic? 2/2

This is an interesting proposal for a credit system to improve peer-review. Seems unncessarily complicated to me and places the burden on researchers when it should be on publishers, especially for-profit publishers. It would be much simpler, and fairer, for the publishers of journals to just pay reviewers a fixed amount per review, with for-profit publishers paying more than not-for-profit ones. That way researchers will have a more tangible incentive to agree to do reviews and to complete them in a timely manner. Without a cash incentive, I can't see the situation improving. It's irritating to do reviews for companies like Elsevier for free when one knows they are making enormous profits. It's even more irritating when one reflects on the amount such companies charge for journal subscriptions, individual PDFs (multiple tens of USD is not uncommon), open-access publishing (last time I looked Nature charges something like 11,000 USD per paper), and even reprints (recently I was asked whether I wanted 'e-reprints' of one of my articles [i.e., a fancy PDF] for $150 USD!). It's hard to feel motivated to 'do one's bit' for science in the face of what seems like shameless profiteering. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

I'm not sure we differ that much. I think more high-school leavers should be encouraged to attend vocational/trade schools. I'm not sure what the right balance of academic vs vocational is, percentage-wise. But I am convinced that we are some way from it. What I disagree with is the idea that an unsupervised shakeout is a good approach to the current problems. A more strategic approach is needed, otherwise we risk losing important departments, and even whole disciplines, in the pursuit of short-term savings and the avoidance of conflict.

@profmarkcollard We probably have a very different perspective here! I think too many people go to uni, and that a shakeout will be a good thing. I say let the schools decide if they value faculty and scholarship or admins. The ones that choose wrongly will perish. Good.

Blimey. Fifty UK institutions of higher education at risk of insolvency and ‘market exit’ (nice euphemism) in the next two to three years.😬 bbc.com/news/articles/…

Here's a paywall free version of the article: #selection-939.0-939.197" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">archive.is/GLWLT#selectio…

I can't quite believe that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham thinks that increasing reliance on digital learning is part of the solution to the institution's woes. It's like she's still living in the pre-ChatGPT world. "But Norman stressed that the institution’s transformation plan, Future Nottingham, represented more than just cuts. She said it will also see the university move to more "digital ways of learning"."