High Wired update: Despite the boast ANU earns applause WHAT will he do after lunch?: "Researcher to solve world's biggest science problems," ANU media release Friday. But read on, the university is doing well in tough times. In contrast, peace in our time at Curtin is over. Earned applause for ANU: When Ian Young took over at ANU he was badly advised leading to the shambles of the on-off-maybe talk of budget cuts and a move on the music school, which was spectacularly mishandled. In the last year or so however the vice chancellor has not a put foot wrong. The latest example is the consultation process on budget cuts. In holding staff meetings and publishing submissions, Professor Young has brought the university community with him. The management response to submissions, on the ANU website, by Chris Grange, recently arrived from the University of Wollongong, is frank and respectful. Whatever savings Young adopts, it will be hard for anybody to argue staff were not heard. Over 1000 unique browsers logged on to the consultation webpage when it went live on Friday and the same number attended the consultation meetings. This might be why the local NTEU has not kicked up. There are three particularly interesting ideas in the process. One is the idea, or rather its absence, of a teaching-only career track. Demonstrating ANU's research-focus executives say it simply did not come up in submissions or consultations. Then there is how ANU will save serious money, the totality of most staff submissions do not add up to the tens of millions management says it needs to claw back. Voluntary redundancies are management's preference when it comes to staff cuts and in response to the nine staff submissions suggesting ANU abandon some disciplines Grange carefully replies, the university will work with the constituent colleges "to address under-performing academic area." And then there is the big one, the size of the pay rise in the enterprise agreement now being negotiated. Grange will not say what the university's bottom line offer is but admits that the size of the rise will determine whether ANU's deficit is either $20 million or $40 million. HW suspects there is one blue to come when the university starts cutting heads and operating areas and perhaps another one over pay, but Professor Young will go into the fight with credibility as a leader not merely a manager. Conflict at Curtin: The National Tertiary Education Union has lodged a dispute with Curtin University management over plans to run staff restructures in four pilot areas. According to the union, the university wants to spill jobs "and make redundant a significant number of academic staff." The NTEU argues this is in breach of the Enterprise Bargain adopted in December. The EB established teaching only positions which the union wants to provide permanent job for the large number of casual academics employed by the vast majority of Australian universities. At the time the Curtin agreement was seen as a potential template for the sector. No way AMA: The proposed $2000 cap on self-education expenses is exercising the AMA, in common with just about every organisation interested in professional development. The difference is the Australian Medical Association is used to getting its own way, solely, you understand, to protect patients. The union, sorry association, has a campaign website, including a convenient email link for doctors to send their MP a message. Doctors also have until July 12 to respond to a discussion paper on the cap, which is due to apply from July next year. Good luck with that, for now. Labor is committed to the cap and the Opposition says it will accept all the government's higher education savings. And if you don't believe the major parties mean it you weren't (heaven forfend) watching the Reps on Thursday afternoon, when a motion to rescind the higher education funding cuts by Adam Bandt (Greens, Melbourne) went down 35 to 5 with 109 members missing during the division. The message is manifest - the government will take the heat and the Opposition hopes to inherit the savings after the election. So for the next few months neither side will move, but who knows what will happen in the 2014 budget lobbying season. Exabyte imminent: At the University of Adelaide, Professor Matt Roughan estimates by 2016 Australian internet traffic will have increased five-fold to hit one exabyte (that's a billion gigs) a month. This is in line with a trend he first identified in 2004, that internet traffic doubles every 475 days. An exabyte eh? That's a lot of Despicable Me downloads. And no, I'm not being facetious, in the US last year Netflix accounted for 25 per cent of internet data transfers. Larkins' latest: Now research impact is all the go citation metrics are as fashionable as they are complicated and they are fiendishly difficult indeed, at least for the likes of HW. But not for chemist Professor Frank Larkins who studied the 2010 Excellence for Research in Australia initiative and then examined the way universities adjusted ("gamed" is such an unseemly word) their strategies for the 2012 round. His latest analysis looks at the way his own community, chemists, performed in 2012. This is important research, both for insights into academic strategy but also for what it shows about the way universities connect with industry - which is not much. Among a mass of detail HW noticed two intriguing points. First, chemists, or at least research managers in chemistry, lifted their game in the second round so that more universities qualified as above world standard in research. However, Professor Larkins makes it clear that "the behavioural changes" in the chemistry community "appear to be less extreme" than for ICT. Second, while chemists were researching, or at least recording where they published more, commercial engagement remained negligible. Commercialisation income was 0.8 per cent of total research funding in 2010 and 1 per cent in 2012. "Chemistry has an important role in supporting innovation, so it is surprising that the commercialisation figure is so low," he writes. In this case "surprising" is surely a synonym for appalling. Firepersons not encouraged: Way back in April HW reported the rather rushed creation of the new Bushfires and Natural Hazards CRC, which was the existing fire research centre with other disasters added, presumably to make it look like it was a policy plan instead of an urgent attempt to save the old operation which had reached its statutory time limit. Veteran fire chief Natalie Brown as acting chair and Richard Thornton as interim CEO were given the job of getting the new show up to speed by July 1. It seems they are cutting it fine, with the chair's job advertised in the Fin on Friday. What's interesting is that among all the boilerplate the ad suggests the new chair should have experience in areas with "a strong community focus," "ideally in sectors beyond emergency management." Um, isn't "emergency management" exactly the sort of experience a natural disasters research body needs in a chair? More salt on the scholarship: Last week HW reported Deakin University's intriguing experiment in crowd-sourcing community funding for small research projects (a $10,000 or so ceiling). On Friday, with just hours to go, five of the eight projects were oversubscribed; including research on medicine, diet and keeping toddlers happy, which all looked like sure things from the start. However, HW cannot fathom what was wrong with the research topic that tanked. Dr Julie Mondon is promised just $286 of the $12,000 she needs for students to study the impact of increasing coastal salinity on seafood. Perhaps the problem is her scholarly understatement. In the social media world, we are all salespeople now. Your taxes at work: The public policy biz is booming with taxpayer-funded centres for research into the ways government spend money popping up all over, but mainly at G8 universities. The ANU was awarded a tax research centre in the budget and on Friday, the feds forked out $12 million over four years for the University of Melbourne to create the Centre for Workplace Leadership. HW wonders what it is going to do that is different to the work of the National Strategic Institute for Stating the Obvious Excellently (yes, HW made that up). The new centre's brief is that, "There is increasing evidence - from both academic research and business surveys - that shows that workplaces with more effective leaders and management capability are more productive, profitable and innovative." John Brumby will chair the show and University of Melbourne management professor Peter Gahan will be boss, "pending permanent filling." From HW's "your point is?" file: Monash University tweets, "Did you know the Monash University Baseball Club is nearly as old as the uni itself?" Trained up, not: If you think that the skills tradespeople learn are up to date you are not alone, according to a survey of plumbing, hairdressing and printing business by Berwyn Clayton and colleagues for the estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research. They found that as "a matter of faith" employers assume trainers are well prepared and that registered training organisations, employ appropriate people with current skills. Not necessarily. According to the authors, "Training organisations have struggled to find effective ways to support and resource the development opportunities required to maintain staff currency." And yes, this is as bad as it sounds. There is growing concern about the capacity of training organisations to deliver the skills required by the economy.