Status-Q

You know that something has become a true part of British life when it gets mentioned on The Archers. The Archers, for anyone outside the UK, is a BBC Radio soap opera, set in rural England, that has been running for 55 years and has aired about 15,000 episodes. It started when Britain was still subject to rationing after the war, and part of its purpose then was to embed hints in the story to farmers about how they could raise agricultural productivity.

Anyway, yesterday, the subject of webcams came up and they mentioned the Trojan Room Coffee Pot which Paul, Dan & I set up in the early nineties when we were still subject to coffee rationing. The full programme is on the BBC web site but I’m not sure how long it will stay there, so I hope they won’t mind me posting this two-minute MP3 clip.

I’ll make no claims about whether or not this particular plot-line will increase British productivity…

A couple of weeks ago, a burglar broke into the flat belonging to my friend Duncan Grisby.
Sadly, burglaries are all too common in the Cambridge area, and the police are unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it. I have never, ever, heard of a burglar being caught, and certainly never heard of them being sentenced as a result.

Until now. This one hadn’t reckoned on Duncan and his software.

More information from the BBC and from Duncan’s own website.

It’s been a while since Oxford, Cambridge and some other key UK universities have been adequately funded to provide the quality of education for which they are famous. The tuition fees charged to UK students are set by the government and are very low by international standards, which is a good thing, but the top-up provided by the state doesn’t come close to covering the costs, even though the overall costs per student of Oxford and Cambridge are tiny when compared, for example, to Harvard, Stanford and Yale.

The Labour government has a dilemma: it can’t be seen to be subsidising heavily what are still thought by many to be toffs’ universities (despite the positive discrimination in favour of state schools in recent years). But neither do they want Oxbridge to ‘go private’ and become even more exclusive, though I think this must be inevitable in the long term.

This Times article talks about plans at Oxford to reduce the number of UK students in favour of more international ones, who can be charged higher prices.

The concept of paying for excellence is so far off anybody’s political map these days that it’s not worth discussing…

[Original Link] The prefect Christmas present for all those Silicon Fen millionaires?

[Original Link] Three things that get my goat:

• The government’s constant striving to push as many kids as possible into higher education, (which is nothing whatsoever to do with keeping unemployment figures down),
• the inflation of A-level grades (because everybody’s suddenly got so much cleverer over the last ten years)
• The ridiculously low salaries of UK academics

All of which are components behind this report that Cambridge University is thinking of building three more colleges.