In a "shock announcement", our Deputy Director of Logo Development, Roger Placement, has confirmed that Poppleton will abandon its current logo.

At a hastily convened press conference in the atrium of the new Impact Building, Mr Placement said that extensive and costly market research had revealed a low level of public appreciation for our current "Pulling Together" logo.

Some respondents (62 per cent) felt that this formulation did not so much articulate a vision of cooperation as the desperate activities of sailors aboard a sinking ship. Others (22 per cent) felt that the phrase had "unfortunate intimations of self-abuse".

Mr Placement said this decision meant that the search was now on for a brand-new logo - or indeed a new brand logo - that, in accord with Hefce's ongoing three-year, ?249,924 research project, would seek to promote our university's distinctive distinctiveness.

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He intended to "kick-start" this process with a series of seminars devoted to a comparative analysis of logos currently favoured by other leading universities.

Next week's seminar will compare and contrast four critical examples: Distinguish Yourself (King's College London); Distinctly Ambitious (Heriot-Watt University); We're Breaking New Ground as Well as International Boundaries (Anglia Ruskin University); and Dirt Cheap and Dead Close (Poppleton College of Further Education).

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Old habits die hard

Our head of social psych-ology, Professor D.K. Mundayne, has welcomed research by Nottingham Trent and Stockholm universities that shows that those who play a lot of computer games carry the practice over into real life, with some "gamers" reaching for "a search button when looking for someone in a crowd, or seeing energy boxes above people's heads".

Professor Mundayne said that this research "very much complemented" his own work on traditional university dons. When such people were released into a modern university and given an intellectual problem to resolve, they often reached up one of their hands towards an imaginary bookshelf or turned and sought the opinion of an imaginary colleague.

Mundayne claimed that this behaviour was an "unfortunate and negative throwback" to the time when real books and real intellectual colleagues had actually been standard components of university life.

UUK - not guilty!

Our vice-chancellor has said that he can understand if not wholly sympathise with the official judicial decision to charge a number of Italian seismologists with manslaughter for totally failing to predict a deadly earthquake.

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However, he rejected the idea that this might prompt a similar charge of institutional slaughter against all those members of Universities UK who totally failed to predict the destruction of British higher education occasioned by the new government funding proposals.

Speaking to The Poppletonian, our vice-chancellor said that this would hardly be an appropriate analogy in that the powers of the UUK to see anything nasty coming their way were necessarily constrained by the traditional requirement for its members to keep their heads buried in a bucket of sand.

Thought for the Week

(contributed by Jennifer Doubleday, Head of Personal Development)

"The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."

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lolsoc@dircon.co.uk.