One of my office mates led us in a discussion about Greggs.  They were named ‘Company of the Year’ at the North East Business Awards, do you know?  I have always found their food plain and effective and, observing my children’s responses, there are no offending additives present.  My office mate is leaving – his postdoc contract is coming to an end – and he has suggested that we have a bite at Greggs.  He wants us to try Ham and Pease Pudding Stotties.

His memories of the stotties are rolled into a bundle with days out with his grandfather, feeding the ducks and then eating ham and pease pudding stotties.  His face goes all glowing when he remembers it.

I am rather put off, repulsed really, because: I have never eaten pease pudding, it looks neither green nor grey but something in-between, and there is that skipping rhyme –

pease pudding hot

pease pudding cold

pease pudding in the pot nine days old.

Anything that stands in the pot for nine days in a warm climate, like South Africa, goes fizzing and sour and that rhyme has always made me taste the sourness.  In my mind the pease pudding brand is fatally wounded.

What does opportunity look like?  Do you fetch it off a shelf or simply pet it when it lands on your shoulder?  Feed it, tame it and milk it.

When asked about limitations on women getting started in business, someone wise said – it’s all in their heads – The inside out approach to being successful means that limitations are on the inside; you must feel the part before being the part? Is that fake it till you make it?

None of the data in the Royal Society’s 2010 report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity” is separated by gender.  Phew.  They have digested data about UK university learners who then become researchers and where these people end up working.  The graph on page 14 gives percentages that are relative to students starting.  I am interested in percentages relative to the number of early career researchers, or postdocs.  Of postdocs: 8% stay on as full-time university staff (1% will become professors), 36% work in non-university science, 56% go on to work outside of science.

I don’t (yet) have data for Newcastle and specifically for the Faculty of Medical Sciences.  I am on the trail of it.  But once I have it, what is the purpose of it?  Is it simply to get people to sit up and take notice?

There is that.  In the principles of my nudge universe where full disclosure is needed, where people must be allowed to make a proper choice with all the information in from of them, the above numbers are stark.

Researchers – and I include postdocs – do not simply fool themselves though.  They are people who have that scientific curiosity and the delight that comes from talking to smart friends about curious problems and maybe coming up with a view of the world that nobody else has before then.  Finding the fresh snow.

All the most fun-driven entrepreneurs are motivated by that same thing.  To change the world (and maybe make money doing so), to create something novel, to fill a need.  To listen to someone who runs a start-up one can be absolutely certain that it is not the money per se that drives them, the money is a marker and brilliant; and fun is the driver. But there is often an altruistic streak, and a search after passion, a need to set my own pace, generate my own life feeling that is similar to the drivers for researchers.

I loved cycling home past stationary cars.  In the flood, in the light rain that followed the storm, the smash whizz bang super cell thunderstorm that hit the city on Thursday.  But it seems that truly the work that I was doing, when the power had to switched off due to flooding in the west of the building, is lost. Sigh. Ah well.

The road the runs by the RVI was closed because of flooding near the roundabout in front of the Claremont buildings.  As I reached there – water streaming from my left, off the hill, a male policeman calmly lifted a woman in a perfectly undignified fireman’s lift – his hands around her legs and her buttocks by his ear – over his shoulder.  He carried her with heavy stomps through the rushing stream and set her down on the far side where they shook hands.  Then they went their separate ways.  So English.

If I trained postdocs to give talks using the Lessig method, like a TED talk.  I would be doing myself a favour and I would be doing them a favour.  I am not sure whether this is precisely what would benefit them, but it sure as heck would benefit me.  I have met 3 postdocs who would be fabulous.  I think I will start trawling for speakers in the pool of postdocs.

Researchers are required to be as nimble as their field of study is, but the university where they work is different.  A university, this university, is a large organisation with massive drag, slow to change and certainly slow to recognise organisational change.  There are bureaucratic processes that sometimes help and sometimes hinder and procedurally they may be equal but would be called best practise, or red tape, depending on which side of bed I put my slippers on.  And whether I wanted to be carried over the stream.

Within the organisation we have small businesses with projects – the primary investigators and their research questions.  They write a business plan, aka apply for grants, and if they are successful they are up and running.  Then they hire staff (teams of post docs) to do the work.  Each one has a budget and overheads.

The PI model is not a do-it-myself model.  At best it is a VC or investor model of small business which outsources HR, building maintenance, cleaning, desks, pens, computers; sticks and carrots. It could also be seen as being paternal and patronising and taking care of all the details so that they don’t bother the PI.