The new space agency will be based in Adelaide, but definitely not in the electorate of Mayo. According to the prime minister, Adelaide is the obvious place because, “South Australia is a key hub for innovation and the technology industry, making it the ideal home for the new agency.” CMM awaits an announcement that Adelaide is to host an ARC centre for the study of red bikes and ponies.

Some 76 per cent of academics with full-time/ fractional FT appointments have PhDs, according to the 2018 staff statistics from the Department of Education and Training, up from 63 per cent in 2008.

Universities with over 80 per cent PhDs on their academic FT-FFT staff include, ANU (90 per cent), UoQ (87 per cent), Uni Wollongong (85 per cent), and Monash U and UNSW (84 per cent).

(A learned reader suggests that the headline per cent age understates reality in that it includes staff for whom there is no information on qualifications.

“Got someone in your life who’s hard to buy for? Donate a Data Science lesson plan in their name for Christmas!”, Australian Data Science Education Institute  fundraiser, yesterday. Because nothing says Christmas like statistics.

Research data analyst Altmetrics has crunched 25 million mentions of 2.8 million “research outputs” for this year to identify the top 100 articles, “which have truly captured the public imagination.”

The top five sources of articles by institutional affiliation of all authors are the US (72), UK (29), Australia (17), Germany (12) and China (11).

The local heroes are led by Will Steffen and colleagues from the ANU and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research for “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” “without major interventions to curb emissions, global warming will soon be stuck in a frightening feedback loop” (4th). The world number nine was Terry Hughes (James Cook U) and colleagues, “Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages.”

There is an emphasis on environmental science and medicine in the other Australians participating articles, although one exception is a multi-author study that concluded humans were out of Africa earlier than thought, which was 63rd.

Maths evangelist Chris Tisdell has a new book, Partial Differential Equations, which is free to download here. Just the thing if the cricket goes quiet on Boxing Day. Professor Tisdell is director of the Scientia Education Academy at UNSW. His YouTube maths channel has 65 000 subscribers.

Back in July the University of Newcastle told staff that it seemed to have stuffed-up some of their super but details were scant because no-one knew who was effected and for how much. The university promised consultants Deloitte would find out (CMM July 27). Which they did, analysing eight million payroll transactions between 2009 and October this year to discover 6316 present and former staff effected. In-line with the University of Wollongong, that had the same problem, (CMM, April 6 2017) Uni Newcastle will write off over-payments and will pay principal and interest to people short-changed on super. Vice Chancellor Alex Zelinsky says $13.37m is budgeted to make-good.

Simon Bronitt will become dean of law at the University of Sydney in July. He will join from the University of Queensland, where he is deputy dean of law.

John Dornbusch has a new five-year term as chancellor of the University of Southern Queensland, through to 2024. He became chancellor in 2014.

Nathan Doyle is UniSports coach of the year. He coaches the University of the Sunshine Coast Spartan’s para swim squad.