Category: Science

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Where is Professor Ludd when you need him?

It may be time to keep certain people away from computers, lest they corrupt the youth. The starry-eyed carny barkers for iTat have decided that no university is complete without a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course. A number of British universities have joined Futurelearn, a consortium led by the Open University which will “offer a best-in-class educational experience that will delight students”. The main reason for offering MOOCs seems to be that they are popular, especially in America. The main feature of a MOOC is lectures, mostly by star professors, recorded and made available online as part of a course taken by `students’ who are not present at the university and who have no contact with the person who is `delivering’ the course.

The argument put forward in favour of MOOCs is that they allow millions of people who would not otherwise have the chance to `access’ higher education. By integrating tests of knowledge and understanding into the course, it is possible to assess students and give them something of the university experience, for free.

Clearly cost is an issue here. As Moshe Vardi, editor in chief of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (so not an obvious opponent of the use of IT in education) puts it:

It is clear, therefore, that the enormous buzz about MOOCs is not due to the technology’s intrinsic educational value, but due to the seductive possibilities of lower costs. The oft-repeated phrase is “technology disruption.” This is the context for the dismissal (and later reinstatement) last summer of Theresa A. Sullivan, University of Virginia’s president, because she was not moving fast enough with online education. The bigger picture is of education as a large sector of the U.S. economy (over $1T) that has so far not been impacted much by information technology. From the point of view of Silicon Valley, “higher education is a particularly fat target right now.” MOOCs may be the battering ram of this attack.

Higher education is one of the few public goods yet to have been taken under private control and run for profit. MOOCs offer a cheap way of selling something which can be passed off as a university education, without the inconvenience of dealing with students or, probably, academics. Individual profit and loss accounts for teaching staff are already here. Once a university realizes that it only needs its star teachers to give one show, perhaps for a cut of the advertizing revenue, why should it bother hiring permanent staff?

The aim, in the pursuit of lower costs (i.e. profit), is to remove the essential elements of a university education and replace them with an inferior substitute for one of them, the ersatz lecture.

Continue reading “Where is Professor Ludd when you need him?”

Posted on

Mayan Mystic Mathematics, no thanks

Ed Vulliamy has some reasonable things to say about the Mayan `prophecy’ of the end of the world  but he gets it wrong here:

The Maya were no fools. Likely inventors of the figure zero, their mastery of astronomy – bequeathed to history through various codices and stoneworks – was breathtaking not only for its time, but for all time. Their systems for measuring time were more sophisticated than ours, with pivotal numbers of 13, 18 and 20, based upon lunar, Venusian, astronomical and mathematical measurements, and expressed in glyphs.

Vulliamy seems to confuse obscurity and sophistication. Our Arabic-numeral, place-system, method for arithmetic is much more sophisticated than one based on different `pivotal numbers’, because it makes things simpler for the person using it. By having one, and only one, set of rules, all calculations are the same, no matter what size of problem you deal with, a point which will be appreciated by those who had to learn the pounds, shillings, pence system of currency, or by those in benighted countries which continue to use imperial measures. Try doing mental arithmetic switching from base 13 to 18 to 20, without mechanical aids.

Vulliamy then talks of `lunar, Venusian, astronomical and mathematical measurements’, without saying what a `mathematical’ measurement is, and how it might differ from the other three he mentions.

Finally, he is impressed by the Mayans’ use of glyphs: `glyph’ is a fancy word for `character’ or `letter’.

We seem to have here a journalist falling for the idea that any ideas which survive long enough are `ancient wisdom’ and therefore better than our own. Actually, mathematics, and arithmetic, are areas where we can be fairly sure that the modern state of knowledge is definitely better than what people had X centuries ago.

Posted on

How peer review really works

Peer review is the process which scientific journals use to help editors decide on what to publish and what to reject. It is not perfect and not always a pleasant experience but on the whole it works and researchers freely, and unpaid, give their time to make it work.

The exact experience of peer review for a researcher submitting to a journal depends on the field they work in, but is much the same for most reputable publishers. First, you have to write a paper: you might already have a journal in mind when you start, or you might decide where to send it after you write the paper. You might be boycotting Elsevier or you might not. Either way, you pick a journal.

The choice of journal depends on how good you think the work is and who you want to read the paper. Most people want their work to appear in a good journal, if only as reassurance that the paper is of a certain standard. There is also the pressure to publish in `high quality’ journals which bring prestige to your CV and your department. If your work is good, you also want it to be read by the right people. This might mean other researchers who will appreciate the elegance of your method, or it might mean end-users who will make practical use of your work.

So you format the paper according to the requirements of the journal and submit it through their online system, by uploading a PDF. You might also be asked to nominate an editor to handle the paper, and maybe some potential reviewers. If the editor does not reject the paper immediately, as not within the scope of the journal say, she sends it to the reviewers for advice on whether to publish.

If you are one of the reviewers, you receive an email with some information about the paper, asking if you will take the job on. Usually, you do: other people are doing the same for your papers, so you should do likewise. Your first job is to read the paper. The editor wants to know if the paper should be rejected or accepted. Your second job is to say yes or no, giving reasons and conditions, with a commentary on the paper.

If the author has written a decent paper, the usual response is `Publish with changes’, meaning that the work is good enough to appear in the journal, and is of the right type, but it needs some changes, either to clarify some points, or to give some more evidence for the claims made. Often, this is the first time the paper has been read by another expert, so comments like this are useful and welcome.

The editor gets the reviews, after a month or two, and passes the comments on to the author, possibly with a few words of their own, along with a decision. If the decision is `Accept’ with no changes required (very unusual), the manuscript is sent to the publisher and a few months later, it appears online, and in a printed volume a bit later. If some changes are required, the author sets to work and rewrites the paper: this might take a day or it might take a year, depending on what is required. If it looks unfeasible, they might simply withdraw the paper and send it somewhere else. Likewise, if the paper is rejected, for reasons other than being rubbish, you reformat for another journal and send it to somebody else.

When the paper appears online, it is a `publication’ and you add it to your CV. If you are part of the Research Excellence Framework, you might submit the paper to be included in your department’s submission. Then you start all over again.

Posted on

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.