I cant beleive it's been a year since I last posted anything. This has been an indicator of a lack of time. As I now work at Aston University my commute to Birmingham takes 1hour 45 mins, so much of my day is taken up with travelling. Then when I get home I have to taxi my kids around so that they can have a social life. Hopefully all this will change soon when I move house and cut down the commute. There seems to be so many things to do and not enough time to fit them in.
Academia has proven to be an unstable place. Often it feels very unreal. There is a great murmuring about the importance of impact in the real world, but when it comes down to it, academics are not really interested in making it happen. Impact is a duty, one of those things that you ought to do rather than want to do. Publishing an important paper is something you can keep with you and use as collateral to take to another job. Impact is something that the institution benefits from, so the incentives are not really there. There is talk about changing the way performance reviews are carried out so that real impact can aid in promotion. Actually there is a more deep seated problem of cultural prejudice in academia. It's not just that impact is less interesting than research, it's that there is a scientific elitism.
Frances Saunders, the previous president of the Institute of Physics laid it out last year at the Photon14 conference in London. She explained how her career, which has been similar to my own, has been in the area of applied science. It has been to use the science to actually do something rather than postulate about what it could do before moving on to the next research topic. She described how This approach is looked down upon by the majority of the scientific community. Have you looked at the impact factors of journals that might take applied sciece, in fact have you looked at the number of journals that actually publish applied physical science. Science is touted as the driving force behind our economy, yet transition science that takes concepts and makes them practical, implementable and real is like the embarassing relative that no one wants to talk about. There is definitely an elitist attitude that blue sky, cutting edge science is the only science that matters.
Until we align the culture of scientific progress with real world impact, and recognise and reward it accordingly, there will always be this tension and true impact will creep rather than leap forward. I have now seen for myself how academics are like ferrets in a sack, squabbling and trying to get to the top. In my local environment at least there is very little interest in team work and the system does nothing to bolster the problem, it is everyone for themself and it is tax payers money that being treated as it is is academics by right. This is a big ship to steer and I cant see things changing much. The only way is for people like me to become established and try and change the culture form the inside.
