Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Critical Condition

On 25 October 2010, the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna was informed without prior warning that its funding by the Austrian Ministry of Science will be terminated with effect from 1 January 2011. It might not be too late to reverse this decision---and I really don't like the idea of something like this on that type of ridiculous time scale---so take a look at a letter circulating among mathematicians and maybe try to help mathematics in Austria.

Reducing the Eurocracy for Research Funding in Europe

Well, at least we can try. Here is a petition to sign whose goal is to do that. Assuming that you believe in reducing the amount of red tape to try to get research funding in Europe, please sign this petition.

Today's adventures in Eurocracy

Today was spent marking problem sets --- which is just as much "fun" as it was when I was TAing back in the day --- and trying to get the ball rolling to get my National Insurance Number (the UK equivalent to a Social Security number). It's supposed to be abbreviated NINO, but I keep abbreviating it as NIN (first by accident and now on purpose) even though I don't actually like Nine Inch Nails. I now feel like getting this abbreviation wrong is expected of me, so I'm just going to keep doing it.

Anyway, there was some confusion with this because the financial staff in the Mathematical Institute told me I will get instructions with my first pay check. (They are busy with a major time sink with massive quantities of forms involving how much government funding the Mathematical Institute will get, so they are scrambling and because there were so many new people in the department --- which is linked to the particular thing they're doing (for those of you from back home reading this) --- they decided that we should take care of that ourselves. And for many people there probably isn't an issue, but I don't think they truly appreciate just how clueless I am about how this stuff works. I basically feel quite lost when it comes to this sort of thing.

Anyway, I got a message from Somerville today indicating they hadn't gotten some information with me yet and some of the language seemed to me to imply that none of my employers (I am dually employed by Somerville College and Oxford University, as far as where my $ [pounds, actually] comes from) can pay me without an NIN. So then I have these seemingly contradictory pieces of information about the (hopefully!) comprehensible version of the instructions to get an NIN coming with my first paycheck and the comments that made me think that perhaps I cannot get paid without getting the NIN first. (That would be bad for multiple reasons---among them the fact that I would need to borrow more money from my colleagues. I already borrowed some cash so that I wouldn't have to pay annoying fees to transfer money from my U.S. accounts. I find it embarrassing to have to borrow nontrivial sums of money from people like that, and I would really like to repay my debt and actually have money in my U.K. back account so that I no longer have to do that.)

So the gist I got today (and I needed to spend a good amount of time looking at forms, sending e-mails, making phone calls, filling out forms, photocopying every page of my passport, and mailing forms) was that I can turn in the forms with my NIN blank; I will be given a temporary NIN by my employers so that I can get paid; and then now that the ball is rolling, once I have the NIN we can replace the temporary one with the permanent one. I still hope that all the accounting stuff works out correctly (the dual employment thing will confuse matters, and the fact that I still have some U.S. income will confuse matters even more... sigh...) and the plan of attack is basically to look closely at my paychecks when they arrive and take appropriate action as needed if the tax withholdings aren't working out correctly.

Tomorrow is a big teaching day. I will be giving three tutorials, one lecture, and a seminar. And if I have a spare moment, I'll try to find some time to breathe a bit as well.