Writing about:Petition to: Immediately ban NHS funding of homoeopathy and redirect the resources to proven medicine.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Immediately ban NHS funding of homoeopathy and redirect the resources to proven medicine.

Go on, sign up

Writing about: BBC NEWS | Education | Stop harking back to the past

An excellent article by Mike Baker, which very eloquently articulates some ideas which I’ve held for a long time.

So, questions about how today’s examination results compare with the past are, frankly, of little relevance.

If, as I suspect, commentators are more interested in judging the system as a whole then they need a different measure than public examinations.

Because any such measure would have to be fixed and unchanging and we simply cannot afford to have examinations that stand still as they would be a block on curriculum reform.

So I finally graduated from the PhD this week, some 4.5 years after finishing my MChem. It’s somewhat odd to have a pseudo-medieval ceremony in a university founded in the 60’s, but there you go. At least it wasn’t in Latin or Welsh…

It’s rather strange to visit Warwick again. I’ve been gradually becoming more distant from the place for the last year, but now it feels final. I’ve been working in Guildford since the summer, it really feels like a long time ago that I finished working at Warwick.

Graduating from the MChem feels like a lifetime ago. In some ways that was more of an event than this graduation. Firstly, it was new and exciting, and I was graduating with my class who I’d studied with for four years. This time, it was just the three of us, of who I only knew one of the others. Secondly, at the end of the MChem I was about to start something new, whereas this time I’m already well-established in a job. I think it was worth turning up for, just to draw this line under things and move along.

Writing about: Sussex VC reprimanded in Commons report

A senior chemist with close links to Sussex told THES: “Remarkably the biologists, medics and biochemists have agreed to forgo the investment in new academic posts that they had been promised to allow the funds to be transferred to rebuild chemistry.”

The chemists don’t want to merge, the biologists want to save chemistry, the RSC is spitting vitriol and now a commons select comittee is giving the VC a good kicking too.

Don’t misunderstand the situation: the future for many chemistry departments is not good, but Sussex should not be one of them.