Chris Lintott’s Universe

The report by the Science Select committee on funding for STFC is to be released at midnight tonight, BST…more as soon as I’ve had a chance to read it.

Update : Here’s the press release. While the Times focus on the threat to Keith Mason, the head of the STFC, to my mind the Guardian are closer to the mark in concentrating on the reaction to the cuts themselves.

To recap slightly; as part of their reaction to the budget cuts, the government set up the Wakeham review of physics funding. While I think many of us saw this as our saviour, it’s not due to report until later in the year. The most important line in the release, therefore, is the call for no decision on where cuts should be taken to be made until after the Wakeham review reports. That’ll need some extra cash, I imagine, but it offers to my mind the best hope for a way out of this.

More when I’ve finished reading the report itself.

…is the excellent title of this post by someone with the delightful name of Clay Shirky. The nub and, indeed, the crux of it is as follows

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV … And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This is true. And important. And you should read the article, but not before you’ve finished catching up with the progress of our observing run over at the Galaxy Zoo blog.

Hat tip : Pamela.