Main Edition | 9 November 2012 | Issue no. 98 _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Robb bags "wasteful" research spending Coalition finance shadow Andrew Robb says he is appalled at the amount of time established researchers have to spend simply applying for grants and has undertaken that a future Coalition government will cut red tape around research funding. Robb also says there has been "considerable waste of grant resources" under Labor, with many projects supported by the Australian Research Council looking to be of limited value. One $210,000 project from last year's grant round criticised by Robb was … [Read more...]
Inside the secret world of the data crunchers
09/11/2012 by
Time Swampland | 7 November 2012 From the very beginning, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given … [Read more...]
Victorian Super Trade Mission
09/11/2012 by
Karine Ataya, Director, Education Services, Victorian Government Business Office Dubai, will be leading a major Victorian Government education and training trade mission as part of the 2013 Super Trade Mission to the Middle East (Feb.23-28 2013). This will be a vocational education and training trade mission visiting Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Istanbul and will include: Regional market overviews from in-market specialists Briefings from key governmental officials Events with education agents at each destination Business to business meetings Put Victoria on Your Table networking events, and Participation in an A2 Education Fair in Istanbul following the mission program … [Read more...]
A dud hormone gets to the heart of its value
09/11/2012 by
The Age | 8 November 2012 No longer will it be dismissed as "the dud hormone". As of today a synthetic version of relaxin — a hormone first described in 1929 — is the key ingredient in a new class of medicine for acute heart failure that has been shown to improve symptoms and reduce deaths among sufferers. Now retired, Professor Tregear, 71, began his relaxin research in Melbourne in 1975. And while he knew the hormone was important, it took decades to prove it. "There was always people asking 'why are we still working on relaxin, it doesn't do anything'," he said. With patience and perseverance, Professor Tregear and his Howard Florey Institute colleagues set about … [Read more...]
Measuring the economic impact of research
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The Australian | 7 November 2012 Measuring the economic impact and other flow-on effects will be part of a future national research audit, says Australian Research Council CEO Aidan Byrne. A month before the release of the second research quality audit (Excellence in Research for Australia), Byrne says that while the initiative is rigorous in measuring academic excellence, "it's not the only thing that we are able to measure, or indeed, ought to measure for universities". Universities aren't uni-dimensional institutions, they perform a variety of roles and functions and academic quality is high up on the list of things they should be doing, but it's not the only thing they … [Read more...]
Robb bags “wasteful” research spending
09/11/2012 by
The Australian | 9 November 2012 Coalition finance shadow Andrew Robb will be at the centre of decision making in an Abbott government so what he says carries weight. And he’s been saying a bit about research funding recently. Following lobbying by Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, Robb has said he is appalled at the amount of time established researchers have to spend simply applying for grants. Schmidt says researchers with international reputations have to spend between 30 and 50% of their time each year either applying for grants, in the same way junior colleagues have to, or in peer-reviewing grant applications. Robb says it’s …insulting and such a waste having someone of the … [Read more...]
