Discussion: They often do

but then again, at other times...

Maybe they will do a deal with DUP to have a more comfortable majority, and DUP will convince the Tories that science is a good thing... despite denying climate change themselves.

Not the best of days...

SNP all in favour of science, your worry has to be in the climate-change deniers of the Tory right (and the DUP misogynistic dinosaurs).......

I think I know how people felt when Bush made a second term now.

Jon, my worry is that the SNP can't do anything to prevent cuts to science on a UK wide basis. I know they want to prioritise funding in Scotland but where's that money coming from? Far too many of my friends in England and Scotland are still losing their jobs.

Neil, I had never heard anything about the DUP until today. What a wonderful bunch of human beings!

So you missed out on the Paisley heydays. What a deprived childhood you had.

Though Paisley snr did end up like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Paisley#/media/Fi... -- which he deserves some recognition for.

Actually, given you are "worried for my country's position as a united country", you might have more in common than you think.

More because if Scotland leaves, the north of England is done for.

until the advent of The Northern Party, which would seek seccession to an independant Scotland.

Xuehong just told me I should go into politics, maybe that should be my thing!

If not, you could always move to California.

Or back to Scotland ;-)

Back to Scotland...
where the nice anti-austerity SNP just cut funding to University of Edinburgh by 14%. That'll teach us for doing really well in research assessment.

FFS... I am still struggling with large bouts of despair about everything to do with this.

Don't despair about things you can't control. Scotland is a country with 6M (mostly) sensible people and the UK is a country with 70M (mostly) sensible people. We'll muddle through. If you and everyone else just concentrates on being the best you can, everyone wins.

The SNP went only from 45.4% in 2011 to 50% in 2015. Next year they'll have to fight on their record, so there little danger of us becoming a one-party state (even though some of us believe they've done OK).

I can't really be the best I can when I'm sitting here having spent three years inventing a new technique that we now can't afford to test an any experimental system. 3 grants waiting at the top of their respective piles waiting to find out if NIH will have any money to fund them, and one grant just rejected because reviewer 3 completely failed to understand the purpose. Boss has another 5 or 6 waiting in various piles but we're not hopeful.

I'm so fed up. Just sitting around waiting to see who else manages to figure out my technique before me now, while prepping samples for one of these enormous consortium stamp collecting exercises that is swallowing up all the money at the moment.

Since you worked your ass off at times, is this not a good point to tell your boss you fancy a break?

Does the reallocation of money not make it easier for the likes of Becks to do "internationally excellent" research in Scotland (perhaps in Glasgow rather than E'burgh), instead of giving all the money to the "world leading"?

Incidentally, doesn't excellent mean excellent, and if one is excellent internationally, doesn't that imply world-leading, or to be world-leading mean you have to have people following in your footsteps?

Unfortunately my publication record doesn't show me to be excellent. I was relying on using my awesome technique for that to happen. So it is doubly frustrating. I would be extremely happy with Glasgow, if Glasgow would have me.

I am taking all of August off.

@ndobbs The phrase is "emerging excellence". Nothing means what it says in UK education. If I rate a student as "satisfactory" I have to fill in an additional form to explain what I'm doing to remedy the situation.

@becks I just looked it up, and despite three years of technique development your record is still way better than our, ahem, emerging excellent colleagues in the west. You don't have to be outpublishing everyone at Yale.
Also: think about writing up the technique. Your boss may not like it because you rate to get 100s of citations down the line rather than the short-term splash, but if you can't get funding then cut your losses.

I'm not getting interviews in the red brick places I've applied so far (not a great sample size, that's true), and the people getting Chancellor's Fellowships mostly have a Science or Nature paper, plus a Nature Neuroscience/Cell/Neuron to add to that.

I have been trying to write up my technique for a significant time now. Unfortunately my analyst is too busy working on these enormous consortium projects and can't get round to finishing off the data. My PI is very happy with that route and has been encouraging me to do that for a whole now.