Grombles

Somehow, about 45 years ago, I was accepted into University College London (UCL) to study Mechanical Engineering. My A Levels were Maths, Physics and Chemistry, because I was less worse at these subjects than I would have been had I chosen others. Put them into a subject mincer, sprinkle on single-minded paternal advice (my dad was a great engineer), and out popped Mech Eng as my passport to a career. It wasn't long before I realised that I was never going to be a career engineer, but I persevered and scraped into my final year where I encountered two novel features of the UCL course. Firstly that I could choose to add subjects that had little to do with engineering - so I studied stuff like Law, Psychology and the History of Technology. And secondly I had to do a dissertation on a project proposed by one of my professors. The project I chose was titled "Steam injection into an internal combustion (IC) engine to suppress the onset of pre-detonation with unleaded fuel". ...

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Malala's surprise when she began school in the UK. She was shot by deluded madmen because she insisted on going to school in Pakistan where it's recognised by children and parents alike not only as a privilege, but also as an enjoyable experience that kids universally want to do. They don't here and that amazed her. I suspect the way kids in Pakistan and the UK are taught differ relatively little bar the technology we might use in British classrooms these days (and the flavour of religious dogma of course). A cynic might suggest that Pakistani kids prefer school because it's less onerous than doing chores at home or slaving in factories. They also spend the day with all their friends and they get fed (I presume). So it might be an exaggeration to suggest that Pakistani kids understand the value of school whereas British kids on the whole don't, but there's an important issue here surrounding the way we sell, or don...

In the summer of 1986, I met a guy in a pub. At the time I was between jobs having left mainstream marketing at BMW and trying to make a go of Marketing 4 Motorsport (most of my start-up businesses subsequently contained a numeral... 2nd Byte, 10ACT, Calls2Account, R9 etc). The bloke I met, Tom, was a freelance systems engineer (a sort of software expert) who had formed a company called Tome Associates Ltd with another systems expert, Carl Mattocks (now living in New Jersey). Together with an academic duo - Alina Vickery and her husband Professor Brian Vickery, from the University of London, who were much published in the field of Information Science... or librarianship - they formed a company called Tome Associates. The Vickerys had developed some pioneering software with a small team of computer experts at UCL that used an expert system to formulate and then modify boolean search strategies (sets of words combined with AND, OR and NOT that you could use to search textual databases) f...

According to the OECD , the UK's share of all 'international mobile higher education students' decreased from 10.8% to 9.9% between 2000 and 2009. In other words we are gradually becoming less competitive, losing out especially to the likes of Australia (5.1% in 2000 to 7.0% in 2009), Canada (4.6% to 5.2%), and New Zealand (0.4% to 1.9%). Isn't it about time UK plc started marketing itself professionally to wealthy Chinese and Indian parents rather than leaving it up to individual cash-strapped institutions whose messages will be both weak and inconsistent? It is becoming increasingly difficult to find sectors where the UK still excels internationally. Admittedly we're pretty good at some things (engineering, financial services, medical research, even agriculture - we have some of the most fertile land on the planet), but we're no longer world leaders in very much - except what is becoming known as the Knowledge Sector (Higher Education and discrete areas o...