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Long before chancellor Gordon Brown started to flirt with taxing car-parking spaces at work, Tim O'Shea, master of Birkbeck College in central London, solved the parking problem more radically. He told a conference in Nottingham last week: "I just tell anyone asking for a parking space that at the University of California there is free parking for anyone with a Nobel prize." Birkbeck is free of anyone in a position to park gratis on this basis.