Gathering of quality chiefs
The first steps towards forming a single quality body, ordered last month by Education and Employment secretary Gillian Shephard, were taken this week as the major players met in London. The Quality...
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Governor cuts row
University of Liverpool plans to halve the size of its governing body are ill- judged and may have repercussions on other institutions, according to university teachers. Liverpool's plans, endorsed...
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CVCP hits at research cash shift
A Government decision to allow "all competent suppliers" to bid for research council funds now spent in universities has been criticised by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals as...
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A Slice Of Success
(Photograph) - Gillian Shephard this week launched the Further Education Development Agency which replaces the discarded the Further Education Unit and the Staff College. She called FEDA's three year...
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Man who turned the lights on
Complexity theory guru or great British eccentric? Lucy Hodges meets Stuart Kauffman who simulates the origins of life on a computer As a Marshall scholar at Oxford in the early 1960s, Stuart...
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Fable for High Table
Political philosopher Steven Lukes has chosen an obscure literary form to defend human rights. He tells Simon Targett why. It is 200 years since the French aristocrat Condorcet wrote the...
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The Earth as lab
Scientists are increasingly confident that they can pinpoint the culprits of global warming, says Stephen Schneider Awareness that pollution can degrade our environment is hardly new. That was...
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Anything but simple
Peter Coveney says there is a growing breed of scientists using computers to formulate the universal features of"complexity" defined as the behaviour of large collections of single units with the...
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Complexity and art
Complexity influences the arts in many ways. In contemporary literature, there are numerous examples. There was the cartoon caricature of a "chaos mathematician" who warned of the dangers of meddling...
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Complexity and the brain
Of all the sources of inspiration that computer scientists have drawn on, none can compare with the brain. It has long been a goal of those working in computer science to endow a machine with...
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Artificial life
More than 60 years ago, the young Irish crystallographer John Bernal anticipated the possibility of machines with a life-like ability to reproduce. "To make life itself will be only a preliminary...
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Running up that hill
Can Clinton win? Huw Richards looks into the American political scientists' crystal ball It's my job you're after" says the banner toted by the grim-looking chap on the cover of the programme for...
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Budget against student wastage
Over the next few days university registries will be waiting anxiously to see how many of their old and new students fail to enrol. But this wastage is far from unavoidable, even with the advent of...
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Don's diary
FRIDAY. Arrive Compton Durville, Somerset, in good time for supper with the convent Sisters. Most meals used to be silent, now only breakfast is. Even that is a strangely moving experience but...
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Easy end to an empire
As Britain entered the post-colonial age some four decades ago, Dean Acheson, principal architect of postwar United States foreign policy, made his notorious comment that while Britain had lost an...