Loose Ends

Just a brief post today, I think, in order to tie up a few loose ends from this week.

For reasons that I really don’t understand my blog suddenly became very popular on Thursday (31st March), attracting nearly 5000 hits in a day. That’s nearly four times my current daily average and a couple of thousand more than my previous busiest day. So this week I had my busiest day, last week was my busiest week, and last month was my busiest month. I guess it’s all downhill from here.

I couldn’t figure out what happened to cause all this interest, as not all the hits were on any specific article and no particular search terms were used to find this blog, at least not that I could figure out. I presume that it was my sarcastic take on Wonders of the Universe that was behind it. At any rate that was the post that generated the deluge of abusive comments that my spam filter caught.

Anyway, other items of relevant news are that two new members of Staff joined the School of Physics & Astronomy yesterday (April 1st; no, seriously…) and there are a couple more expected to join soon. It’s nice to have a few new faces around the place, and I’m sure they’ll all be bringing new ideas about research and teaching to the physics side of the School.

A week or so ago I passed on some pretty disappointing news about the funding climate here in Welsh universities. More details emerged this week about what this means for individual institutions; you can find the full list of allocations here (PDF). The figures don’t tally with those in the newspaper article I referred to in the previous post which was presumably inaccurate.

The picture isn’t as bad as I feared but, with a total cut of about 5% (in cash terms) across the sector it could hardly be described as good, especially when inflation is running about 5% on top of that. My employer, Cardiff University, has done slightly better than average, with a cut of only 3% in cash.

However – and it’s really delightful to be able to pass on some good news for once – the School of Physics & Astronomy has just been awarded a pretty large increase in its quota of undergraduate students. This is excellent, as I’ve previously reported that we have had a huge surge in applications this year. We’ll have to work hard to squeeze the extra bodies into laboratories, tutorials and even lecture theatres, but the income they will generate should help us carry out the strategic plans we have developed, perhaps bringing in even more new members of staff.

I’m still a bit grumpy, though, as our teaching terms has another two weeks to run, while some lucky bastards have finished already and are now on their Easter holidays…