`Technology’, pace the scuttering gobsheens of hipsterismo eroico, snug and smug in their rolled-up jeans and heavy-rimmed spectacles, is not the collective noun for the latest beeping, whistling gewgaw from some fruit-monikered design house. It is all of the objects that let us be human. Rejecting technology means eating worms and in-season plants dug from the ground with your bare hands, your naked hairy body kept warm only by a layer of filth. R. R. Wilson famously said of Fermilab that it had “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.” Technology does not make our society worth defending; it makes our society.
Continue reading “How do you mooc a project?”
Convention for Higher Education: some thoughts
There are some short reports from the Convention for Higher Education, with links to videos of talks, here, here, here, and here. These are some thoughts on the convention itself.
The format of talks from experts, combined with input from university staff and students, worked well. A search on youtube will show the range and depth of the topics discussed, with coverage of issues from the political and economic context, to detailed description of the implementation of management practices in UK universities, and accounts of how this implementation has been resisted. The talks are to be published, and will be worth having and studying.
On the other hand, the convention had a limited range of subject areas represented, mostly from some areas of the humanities, with only four people that I met from science (physics, one), engineering (me, one), and mathematics (two), and none at all from business or management, or from areas such as law or medicine (though this might simply reflect the people I met). This had an effect on the language and style of presentation, which was rooted in the discourse used in the social sciences, and which lays itself open to mockery as `political correctness gone mad’, or whatever phrase the Daily Mail uses this week.
It also affected the type of discussion: `academic freedom’ has a very different meaning to a physical scientist or engineer than it does to a philosopher; the pressures on academics in STEM subjects are quite different to those on staff in the arts and humanities, though not necessarily more intense.
None of this is to criticize the people who attended, or those who did not, but it does mean there is a big gap in the campaign. According to HESA statistics, 18% of university academics are in arts, humanities and education, 63% are in STEM, broadly speaking, and 19% are in `Administrative, business and social studies’, which would include some disciplines represented at the convention but also many which were not. It is clear, however, that about two thirds of academic staff had no representation.
If there is to be a meaningful Charter for Higher Education, it has to be written with the involvement of scientists, and with an eye to their working conditions and ways of seeing the world. A good starting point might be to question the idea of `academic freedom‘ and think about a working, meaningful, definition of the term to which academics in any discipline could subscribe.
Getting it wrong
Today’s Sunday Independent reports on a Boeing 757 flying from London to Boston which had to land at Dublin, due to “technical issues with the Boeing 757-200 plane’s nose-wheel steering”. You might ask why an aircraft with duff nose-wheel steering might not simply continue to Boston to be fixed there.
Somebody with a clue gives us some more information:
When the left hyd sys is u/s consequences are:
– 1 autopilot (out of 3) inop;
– No autoland;
– No Autobrakes;
– Some spoilers on each wings inop;
– Rudder ratio inop;
– Left thrust reverser inop;
– Electric slats and flaps extention required (takes longer time and less flaps must be used for landing, Flaps 20 iso Flaps 30);
– Alternate gear extension required (then it is not possible to raise the gear knowing it makes a lot of drag);
– Alternate brakes inop (reserve and narmal brakes are still working);
– Yaw dampres inop;
– Nose wheel steering inop (towing required after landing).
Of all the things that weren’t working, the Sunday Independent noticed the minor one.
Under pressure
A recent issue of the London Review of Books had this:
The unit of measurement of this pressure is the atmosphere, named after the weight of the air bearing down on us at sea level. We don’t normally think of the air as having weight, but it does. Hold your hand out flat, and imagine an invisible column of air above each of your fingernails stretching up from where you are to the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. That column weighs 1.03 kg per square centimetre—in other words, about one kilogramme’s weight of air bears down on each fingernail. That amount of pressure is one atmosphere.
What is wrong with this is that it misses the point of pressure. The misconception is not unusual. A GCSE physics site says that atmospheric pressure is “about the same force as having over a dozen cars piled on top of you!”
So why are these statements wrong? The error is in the idea that pressure “bears down”. As engineers learn in their first course on fluid mechanics, pressure acts equally in all directions. When John Lanchester says that one kilogramme’s weight of air bears down on a fingernail, he would have been just as right, or wrong, if he had said that one kilogramme’s weight of air bears up on a fingertip. The force on the end of your finger, or anything else, is about one kilogramme of air pushing down, balanced by one kilogramme pushing up: in sum, almost nothing.
But, you object, things get squashed by atmospheric pressure, or by pressure in the deep ocean. The reason is not the pressure, but the pressure difference. When pressure inside a submarine, or an aeroplane, or a soft drinks can, is not the same as the pressure outside, the force is out of balance and the structure has to carry a load to maintain its shape. If you inflate a balloon, you can see how the material stretches as the internal pressure is increased until it is greater than the pressure on the outside. The rubber of the balloon stretches so that the total force due to the difference in pressure, and the tension in the rubber, is zero. Likewise, though you cannot see it, the shell of a drinks can expands slightly to balance the difference in pressure between inside and outside. An aeroplane fuselage behaves the same way; a submarine hull likewise, though with the high pressure on the outside, rather than the inside.