Ian Sudbery

"Precarity is the one constant of academic science. Themes of instability thread themselves through everything we do."

A brief blog post from me about the @ukri.org funding pause and who the real victims will be.

occamstypewriter.org/mindthegap/2...

#AcademicSky

I remember saying to someone once "Oh, I'm not a Waitrose sort of a person". The person I was talking to turned to me and said "Ian, you are the most Waitrose person I've ever met". (We shopped at Aldi, stopping at waitrose next door for the things Aldi didn't sell).

Scratch that. Your class is what your parents relationship would have been to the means of production had you been born in 1850.

Your class is determined by what your relationship would have been to the means of production had you been born in 1850.

Scientific Humility

"Some essential circumstance may have escaped me: I may have neglected some other, not thinking it necessary; my consequences may have been too general, my experiments too few in number."

Much like the weavers at the start of the industrial revolution. The Luddites were correct - the machines made poorer quality cloth. But it was more profitable to sell mid-quality cloth to a million people than excellent quality to 100. The 999900 people who could now afford cloth also benefit.

A cabbie will still get you there quicker than someone with GPS. A London cabbie knows which shortcuts work, how the traffic is likely to evolve over time, and where rules can be bent.

But they are more expensive. Get to your destination 5 mins quicker, but pay 2x as much.

In STEM we teach maybe 20 hours a week, and the idea that students might 🙀prepare🙀 for teaching is unthinkable.

That is to say, I think you are entirely correct.

Please show your support to colleagues at Aberdeen facing job losses.

We will fight this ✊

i can’t speak for anyone else but the reason i write software is that i enjoy the /exercise/ of bringing a computer to life to accomplish something. i enjoy having a goal and figuring out the kind of program it takes to achieve it

good morning, it is day 3 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all depts & stop the closure of our Southend Campus and our Foundation Year programme. The campus cat Pebbles is in solidarity 💕

Philippa Perry, pictured with hearts, flowers and cherubs in the background, on Valentine’s Day and reasons to shun it

Valentine's cards used to be anonymous and optional. Now they’re a public audit of devotion, writes @pperry.bsky.social

www.thenerve.news/p/philippa-p...

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

AI agent goes nuts on open source maintainer after having its pull request denied. This is a pretty insane story. Open source development as we've been used to for the last few decades is likely over. 1/
theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Screenshot of a patient form on the website of an NHS hospital. Most Brits read that date of birth as the 10th of July. However, the form is using the American format of MM/DD/YYYY. So the database will record this date as the 7th of October, which in this case is wrong. An error like this can cause multiple problems beginning with failure to identify the patient. Imagine trying to identify yourself to an NHS facility when it can't match your personal information with what it has on file because the system has your date completely wrong. Note that the person, Stephen Cobb, was not born on either of those dates.

But here's one tip I can offer, a possible sign of US infiltration of NHS IT:

Online forms using US date format — mm/dd/yyyy — vs the UK — dd/mm/yyyy

This is either US coding or lazy coding or both, and it can cause cascading errors. E.g. is this person's DoB 10th of July or 7th of October? 4/4 🧵

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

The way UK govt funds science is in the midst of a major transition, with creation of a much more direct link between government priorities & UKRI research funding.

My attempt to set in context the biggest upheaval in UK science funding policy since the 1980s:
softmachines.org?p=3252

"The United Kingdom’s researchers are an under-used asset “that we need to sweat” to boost economic growth"

UKRI is "under-exploited"

The UKRI CEO in his own words.

But nothing on why the cut too submitted but not yet awarded applications

Open letter from Ian Chapman to research and innovation community UKRI Chief Executive outlines changes to UKRI investment approach, addressing concerns about research funding and the financial position of STFC.

I am sorry. We all knew the three buckets were coming. We are all prepared for a shift in priority. But this message does nothing for all the UK scientists dependent on project grant funding. It doesn’t actually give any information

www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Leaks everywhere and finally we get an official statement, one that somehow manages to say a lot while; No timelines. No clarity. No acknowledgement of impact on ECRs whose careers depend UKRI funding.

“Later this year” isn’t a plan. And the sector deserves better than reassurance without detail.

I'm still quite worried about the long term impact of these pauses, even if there will be funds afterwards. No funds allocated to research-led projects in 2026 means lost jobs, lost knowledge. You can't just pause and expect to restart from the same place.

At least we are not STFC funded physicists, who are having their already awarded grants cut.

Spot on.

Even if the changes are for the good (I doubt, but await the data) - implementing them like this is curtains for the careers of a bunch of postdoctoral scientists, and probably a final dissuasion for a bunch more.

And they talk and TALK about how much they want to support junior careers..

At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.

Spend months during last summer writing a MRC grant, hoping that we will have finding to continue employing postdocs in the lab. This week l am already expecting to receive a disheartening message from UKRI.

🤷‍♀️ I guess the money is going to be "refocused" away from responsive mode funding to other funding types.

Total funding isn't changing apparently. We do know that at STFC there is a problem with budgets running out, but no one has suggested this is the case at MRC or BBSRC I don't think.

Rumours of 'more news in spring', which likely means no rounds until summer and no money being released until 2027 at the earliest. Given the virtual cancellation of the current round, where applicants and reviewers have already poured thousands of hours of work and effort, that's a 12 month gap.

We need to be shouting about the effects of this on junior researchers from the roofs, writing to our MPs. We are risking a "missing generation" of researchers.