Re: IMPACT

[Timothy Porter <t.porter@bangor.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

The message  got extremely garbled by having some =20 added.  (I presume
these were translated from one text format to another and were end of
line symbols!)

The term REF is a research evaluation.  I quote from our HEFCE website.
(HEFCE= Higher education funding council for England. It also
coordinates these sorts of exercises for Wales, Scotland and Northern
Ireland.)

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing
the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.

I will try to send the message again, hoping that the =20s, which I will
delete, do not reappear!!!!!!

Tim

Thanks to Jean for pointing out the =20s!


Here is the original:

______________

Dear All,

Let me put this in a context for non-UK readers of this list.  Various
bodies in the UK are asking for `impact' as part of their assessment of
research.  This is in particular true of the REF exercise. (Perhaps
someone else can comment on this as well as I am `out of this', having
been a victim of a previous round of such `exercises'.) We all know that
mathematics is central to modern technological developments, but pure
mathematics finds itself in the position of having  little direct IMPACT
as measured in the way that the nebulous THEY (i.e. the bean counters)
have defined it. We thus have that a sociologist can say that their
research resulted in  (whatever), a physicist can point to a new
technical development, whilst a pure mathematician is left saying
`doh!'. This may have, unless watched, very serious implications for
category theory as between us and the areas with IMPACT there seems to
be a wide gulf, at least to the outsider. (When money is short, people
fight over what little there is with enthusiasm!)

This may have also an impact on the recrutement of new researchers, so
someone working in PDEs is likely to be viewed as potentially having
more impact than someone working in category theory. (If you think that
as you are not in the UK then you need not worry, and that your research
organisations are not going to behave so stupidly,..... )

There is a wiki (at lmsrefresponse dot wordpress dot com <- and I hope
this is ok with the list rules about links replace dot by . of course)
which some of you may want to look at. The London Math Soc does not seem
that sure as to how to best treat the situation.

(I would request, that if someone on the list wants to discuss IMPACT,
that they look at the lms pages first. If they go to the LMS main page
then to `policy' and look for impact they should find it and various
related documents. Please restrict attention to category theory, as that
is very vulnerable as quite a few other mathematicians have a negative
attitude to it.)

Tim




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