HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Not exactly an educational comment, I know...

Which idiots proposed affiliation to the NUS in the first place?

Good to see that Munkey used his light sabre to fight off the darkside.

Good, good! I hope everyone is having a nice time gloating :) I shall be over that end of town this evening so look out for the Cheshire Cat :)

My cynicism over getting the 15% was proved wrong - not every day you get me admitting I was wrong :)P

Well done to all the No Guys and Gals. I wonder how NUS are feeling now.

Hurrah!

On another note, that is a VERY cool picture. Munkey looks quite at home as a Jedi. But who decided that "Munkey" should be spelt with a "u" not an "o". Was it deliberate, or did one person just get it wrong, and then everyone else follow, assuming that it was deliberate?

Respect to the 73.2% of students who implicitly voted for apathy - this is the kind of adherence to tradition that makes me proud to be an ARCS (and continuing student).

so thats what engineering students do all day, they dress up munkey and take his picture. Deeply troubling

erm... actually the picture came from the New Election campaign at Shefield Halam "Univeristy" Students Union. (I was randomly browsing links on the NUS web site...)

Hurrah! Imperial students see sense!

I have been gloating at the pro-NUS QM Union officers all day :)

Amazing! How did we manage that? I reckon the monkey rigged the ballot boxes.

Are you saying that is't a picture of Munkey? If not, it must be his twin brother, as he looks identical! The chances of you happening across a picture of an identical monkey must be pretty slim. If it IS Munkey, why would there be a picture of him on their website? Has Munkey been moonlighting?

Munkey is an creature of many talents. There are some nice shots of munkey in action at http://union.ic.ac.uk/no2nus...

Show me the monkey!

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist that chestnut.

The NUS site also seems to have a good job resource.

Where can I buy/get one of those monkeys?

Subscribe to ITV Digital and you get one free...

You can then get it delivered to college because there's no-one to accept delivery at your flat.

Then you can donate it to your CCU as a mascot...

But we've already got one.

The womble is getting impatient about his long-sought-after meeti9ng with Munkey.

PRESS STATEMENT

While Munkey is very interested in promoting inter-CCU and inter-FSA cooperation he finds that his diary can not immediately accomodate a meeting with the womble. Munkey also believes that it would be inappropriate to meet with a representative of a single body at Imperial College without giving similar opportunities to the fluffy mascots of other parts of the Union. In due course it will hopefully be possible to pursue the prospect of a mascot meeting once matters deemed by C&GCU 'more important' have been carefully dealt with. Munkey appreciates your understanding in this delicate matter.

Munkey is one week old and already has grey hair.

The Munkey will be representing me in my upcoming disciplinary procedure vs the University of London under a policy thatdoes not exist.

A more serious question - why did the referendum cost "more than twice what is usually spent on sabbatical elections" when there were only two candidates instead of 8 or more, and the voting was still only open for two days at SK and only one day at most other places? Where did the extra money go?

Much larger campaign budgets and, unlike the sabb candidates, they actually spent the money.

Incidentally, what is the rationale behind the Union funding election candidates' campaigns?

1) funding appears to have been justified in the turnout, even if noone bothered to come to the debates, which is a shame (I think mustafa's idea to resurect debating soc may be dead...)

2) You fund the campaigns, so that they can spend ONLY that money, thus not giving anyone an advantage if they had, say, an external body that might have an interest in helping their campaign.....

3)The money was spent on the campaigns in the referendum. The incoming sabbaticals spent a total of £8.28 out of a possible £200, which is an absolute disgrace. I'd have made that point at council but i forgot, as people kept asking me how they change elections policy - being as I seem to have gone from being interested in the union to uber-hack in about 6 months.....

So how much does it actually cost to pay people to man the ballot boxes? I thought that was the main expense in the elections.

As for funding the candidates' campaigns, giving them a fixed amount of money does not stop them spending some of their own money as well. You have to require that they provide proof of the cost of all their expenses, and check that they didn't do anything else that they havn't put on the list. You have to do this either way. Who actually pays for the campaign doesn't really affect it. The only real reason to fund them is that having to pay might put off some candidates from standing. But by my recconing the figures above give about £20 to each candidate. I would have thought that even a hard up student could raise £20 with a whip-round among his friends if he were serious about standing.

The cost of ballot box hiring, transportation and manning is indeed the most expensive element of most elections (even offering the national minimum wage of £4.10 an hour).

In the case of the NUS referendum, there was a large budget set aside for the two campaigns and also for publicising the referendum in an impartial manner.

Despite the innovation of the NUS Referendum Committee, this contributed heavily to the overall cost of having the referendum.

The exact cost is not yet known but be assured that every effort was made to reduce the costs involved whilst ensuring representation across all campuses and, in particular, that the turnout required was achieved.

In the case of sabbatical elections, I support the allocation of budgets in order not to discourage people who do not have the money to pursue a campaign alone.

The job of the returning officer and the elections committee is to ensure that spending on any campaign is limited to this allocation.

Thank you for you interest in the NUS referendum, surely?

;-)

Given that ICU and the CCU's / FSA's use ballot boxes for at least 4 days every year and time for transporting/counting, wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to buy them rather than hiring them every year? Perhaps the cost could be spread out by buying one each year until we had enough? Storage shouldn't be much of a problem as they would be able to stack quite well. We could even higher them out to other people maybe.

And we would have keys for the locks, my it'd be like a real election.

Exactly!

Which is presumably why the clever people in the Union have put some money aside for the purchase sometime in the near future.

Now all we have to do is schedule the elections so they don't overlap.

Ho hum Stuart of Life Sciences ;o)

That would require both intelligence and coordination.

And this is Imperial College Union we're talking about...

If you think ICU is bad, you need to get around London and see how a Union can be really run badly...

/smug

Has Andy just discovered HTML tags? :P

Andy knows nice HTML...

http://freespace.virgin.net/a.heeps/cf/oldindex.htm

That's FrontPage - surely doesn't count... ;)

Ned

/microsoft

Nuff said :-)

Dreamweaver is much better (then that's not difficult when it comes to Microsoft :D

I wonder if anybody else is as sad as I am checking out the old articles now that I am gone and turning my unquestionable skills to making me richer.

Which is why I find myself in upstate New York about to present to Warren Buffet with my bank and generally shaking like a leaf. Even Andy Heeps (bless him) didn't induce this kind of fear.

Still, there's no other feeling like it. I want that on my tombstone if I don't make it.

Laters.