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What would you miss most if you left academia to become chief executive of a newly market-orientated but venerable British institution? David Rhind, head of the Ordnance Survey and previously professor of geography at Birkbeck College, London, stood up eagerly after yet another vaguely hostile question at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and said: "This is good, I'm going to talk a lot. As an academic I used to talk a lot but I haven't had this chance for ages."