Lack of Investment in Science in the UK

I have been following the various discussions taking place within the Royal Astronomical Society and elsewhere about the lack of investment in Science in the UK.

I believe that one of the causes of this problem is the concept in the UK of having 50% of School Leavers going to university. This concept should be scrapped. It would be better to have only about 5% of the population going to university and scrapping many of the subjects that degrees are given. This would enable grants to be given to cover student costs. I would have preferred scrapping tuition fees but because of stupid EUSSR rules we would have to give free tuition to the whole of the Europe.

I am old fashioned in believing that degrees should be of some use. Before I retired I found that many were taking degrees just to help them get a job and Personnel Departments were using the need to have degrees as a simple filtering scheme when looking for staff even though the jobs themselves did not really require one.

I was lucky. I was at school in the 1950s and early 1960s. The teachers were good - though most of them did not have degrees and completed a two year Teacher's Training College course. We had good books and a good school library. When it came to leaving school very few of the people I knew went to university, but most went on to good careers. Some started as clerks, others became apprentices and some like myself joined the Armed Forces. The ethos then was that if you were starting a career where you would in the future earn a good salary, then you did not expect to earn much to start with. The only lads who started on a good wage were those who became labourers, but of course their wages would not increase much as the years went by.

We need to invest in the future by investing in research and by supporting post grads and research fellows and this can be done by reducing the numbers going to university, bringing back polys.

I am sure that I will come back to this theme later.

When does the new decade start?

On a forum I belong to, some one wrote that today was the start of a new decade. I wrote back and said that this was not true and that the new decade does not start until Jan 1st 2011. This started a bit of a discussion and other people wrote that as 2000 was the start of the century 2010 was the new decade. This really got me going.

I searched through both my own library and in the internet on the subject.

My searches show that 1001 was considered the start of the second millenium and that 1101, 1201, 1301, 1401, 1501, 1601, 1701, 1801, 1901 were considered to be the first year of their respective centuries + 1, that is to say that 1901 is the first year of the 20th Century.

On this basis a decade starts on a year whose last digit is 1 and ends in a year that ends in 0!

People whose attitude is that the past is bad and never studied history decided through their lack of knowledge to promote 2000 as the the start of the 21st Century even though historians and scientists tried to advise them.

Of course these same people did not read T.E.Lawrence (they prob. do not know who he was!) on how to deal with arabs nor the many journals of soldiers of the Raj who fought on the North West Frontier and because of this, our poor soldiers have been put into the current mess.

I also blame the so called Y2K bug as it was professionally known but the popular press changed to the Millennium Bug