Back page gossip from the 1 December issue of Research Europe
Painfully honest At the Open Evaluation 2016 conference in Vienna in November, Erik Arnold of research evaluators Technopolis was surprisingly candid about the shaky basis of efforts to measure programme impact. “We say: ‘Well I know my programme affected part of this, but I don’t know how much, so what I’ll do is I’ll get an estimate, then I’ll cut it in half, and I’ll divide it by the page number, and say that’s a conservative estimate.’ That’s what we’ve been doing, for God’s sake,” he said. Maybe the Commission will think twice before coughing up next time?
Short-term memory Meanwhile at the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System’s annual conference in Brussels, the EU commissioner for security Julian King chastised some of the conference speakers for the long-term thinking in their trend predictions. “I’m thinking more about the next two to three years,” he said, adding—after a long pause—“because we can’t afford to wait to act on security”. And here we were thinking the British commissioner might have a better reason for not planning too far ahead.
Declassified During his contributions on security issues King also let slip that in 2015 the European Parliament suffered a cyberattack, in which hackers broke into the Parliament’s network and tried to access information stored in the networks of all the EU institutions. We certainly don’t remember that being common knowledge in Brussels at the time. And we hope King didn’t jinx the Commission, which suffered a distributed denial of service attack of its own just a few days later.
Fairy-tale opportunity Here at Research Europe, we’re quite used to research fields being described—usually by people working in them—as ‘Cinderella subjects’, meaning that they supposedly don’t receive enough attention or support. So imagine our surprise when we opened an email from the University of Bedfordshire titled ‘Academics invited to submit papers for Cinderella conference’ and discovered it was in fact soliciting submissions relating to the age-old fable itself. We wonder what metaphor Cinderella researchers use to avoid confusion when telling their own tales of woe?
One more time The European Academies Science Advisory Council, a Brussels-based body, has just published its assessment of the EU’s plan for the ‘circular economy’. The plan relies too heavily on the prospects of substitution as a solution to materials scarcity, doesn’t use accurate scientific indicators and hasn’t appreciated the amount of variation between components that need recycling, Easac said. Maybe this is one proposal the Commission should just start over with…
This article also appeared in Research Europe