From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6799 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Timothy Porter Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: IMPACT Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:00:24 +0200 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Timothy Porter NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1311087029 26559 80.91.229.12 (19 Jul 2011 14:50:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:50:29 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Categories To: JeanBenabou Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Tue Jul 19 16:50:22 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpy.mta.ca ([138.73.1.128]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1QjBcq-0000PX-26 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:50:20 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:34720) by smtpy.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.76) (envelope-from ) id 1QjBb9-0003bk-3I; Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:48:35 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QjBb8-0006M9-Cl for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:48:34 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6799 Archived-At: 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 [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]