2009 final photo

This was taken last week in the small town of Ennigerloh in Westphalia, Germany.

Compatibility with future generations

A little while ago I was asked by a group of students from a neighbouring school for advice on the following: they were putting together the contents for a time capsule that they were intending to bury in their school grounds, to be disinterred in 2100. They wanted to include in it a lot of [...]

‘Red flags’ in higher education finances

The US tax authorities, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), recently conducted a survey of higher education institutions in order to ascertain how well their finances are being managed. The conclusion was, on the whole, positive, and the IRS found that the institutions were prudent and responsible with the resources at their disposal. But the report [...]

All the news that’s fit to print

One of the key questions for modern journalism is about where to draw the line between news which the public have a legitimate right and expectation to know and items that are really just an intrusion into a person’s privacy. And before we go down that road, there is a corresponding question that needs to [...]

Two year degrees?

In a recent post here I drew attention to the annual ‘grant letter’ which the UK’s Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson, had sent to the English founding council. But apart from the issue of university funding that the letter addressed, there was also one other matter raised by Peter Mandelson [...]

The continuing story of e-books

According to the latest information released by online book retailer Amazon, this Christmas, for the first time, e-books out-sold hard copy (i.e. paper) books. The company’s e-book reader, the Kindle, is now more likely to contain a customer’s book collection than a bookcase or a set of shelves on the wall. This raises a number [...]

Weird illegalities

I always find myself sitting down during the evening of Christmas Day and reading one of the books I will have received (I always receive some, and would miss it if I didn’t). One rather amusing book I was given this year describes ‘the maddest laws from around the world’. It’s in German, but in [...]

Christmas greetings

May I wish all readers of this blog a happy, relaxed, social and satisfying Christmas. For many people 2009 will be remembered as a less than perfect year, but perhaps we will be able to say that it ended well. And so I hope that this holiday season will be everything you wanted it to [...]

2009 Photo of the week #2

This one shows the DCU entrance avenue from Ballymun Road on a slightly misty late autumn day this year.

UK universities facing cuts

It was always clear that the recent experience of Irish universities of significant cuts in the light of the economic downturn was also going to be a feature of British higher education funding. Yesterday the UK’s Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson (whose remit covers higher education), wrote the annual ‘grant [...]