Friday

Another sunny day! At work I made the mistake of leaving my office door open so was interrupted by a stream of students asking where to find other rooms. The signage around the place is quite clear but it's far easier to ask someone who is clearly sitting at her desk doing nothing very important... In fact, I was marking another MSc dissertation and fielding a great number of emails. I think a lot of students must use Blackberrys and, now the system is working again, traffic has increased. I also followed up alerts to two very useful - but very long - journal articles, one in a law journal on the board's risk management function and a big review article on comparative and international corporate governance. I shall need to have another reading day next week.

Most of today was taken up with conversations with colleagues, before and after a lunchtime meeting about the REF (Research Excellence Framework). The PVC  RKT (Pro Vice Chancellor, Research and Knowledge Transfer) gave a very good talk about the process and its implications, as far as is currently known, although I glazed over at the slide which contained equations. But he is a mathematician and he did explain the algorithm quite clearly. He was followed by a young woman from RBDO (Research and Business Development Office) who explained the rules about impact. These seem more complicated than I had understood hitherto. My two colleagues whose work will quite obviously have an impact on policy making by professional bodies will have difficulty meeting the requirements because of the need to demonstrate evidence of impact as well as link back to published research. Public engagement is not the same thing as impact, apparently. Researchers will have to start soliciting written feedback from the people they engage with. Goodness knows how the panels will make sense of all this.