Category: Universities

Posted on

Paying for education

As seems likely, we in the UK are about to see the price of education hiked by another few grand a year. It turns out that the problem of what to pay for education was solved by William Blake a couple of centuries ago:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain

or, if you prefer, fame costs:

Posted on

Theodor Adorno and Michael Gove

So there I was, minding my own business, when I discovered that the Frankfurt School was responsible for giving gay men and women in Ireland the right to marry.

“Well now,” says I, “what else might they be responsible for, these gnomes of Frankfurt.” It turns out they have been the source of the “ideas” for education policy in the United Kingdom for decades. From Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Cultural education spread with bourgeouis property. It forced paranoia into the dark corners of society and the soul. But since the real emancipation of mankind did not take place with the enlightenment of the mind, education itself became diseased. The greater the distance between the educated consciousness and social reality, the more it was itself exposed to the process of reification. Culture became wholly a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it. Thought became restricted to the acquisition of isolated facts. Conceptual relationships were rejected as uncomfortable and useless effort. The aspect of development in thought, all that is genetic and intensive in it, is forgotten and leveled down to the immediately given, to the extensive. Today the order of life allows no time for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labour markets and to heighten the commodity value of the personality. And so that self-examination of the mind which works against paranoia is defeated. Finally, under the conditions of modern capitalism, half-education has become objective spirit. In the totalitarian phase of domination, it calls upon the provincial charlatans of politics, and with them the system of delusion as the ultima ratio: forcing it upon the majority of the ruled, who are already deadened by the culture industry. The contradictions of rule can be seen through by the healthy consciousness so easily today that it takes a diseased mind to keep them alive. Only those who suffer from a delusion of persecution accept the persecution to which domination must necessarily lead, inasmuch as they are allowed to persecute others.

Posted on

Things I have learned about Brazil in the last two weeks

I have now been in the middle of Sao Paulo state for just over a fortnight. Lessons learned:

  1. It is hot, like Africa hot, like you could fry Sally O’Brien on an egg if you had a stone hot.
  2. There are two big black cats around here that look as if their mammies were interfered with by jaguars.
  3. Brazilians eat a lot of meat. Round here Desperate Dan would be considered a perfumed ponce for having that effeminate pastry nonsense.
  4. Sliced, grilled cow hump is very tasty.
  5. Do not cross the woman with the machete who chops the ends off the unripe coconut so that you can drink the coconut water. She has a machete and she chops the ends off coconuts to make a crust.
  6. There is at least one person here who believes a chap can put coconut water in whisky and remain a gentleman. Such a man probably cheats at billiards.
  7. Everybody knows somebody who has been to Dublin, except for the people who have been there themselves.
  8. Brazilian academics will cheerfully go on strike for three months in pursuit of an above inflation pay claim.
  9. Brazilian academics have had their pensions slashed: they can no longer retire on full pay after thirty five years service.
  10. I might need to do a t-test on my sample size, but there is only one vegetarian in Sao Paulo state. Or all of Brazil, quite probably.
Posted on

Turbulence and Noise

I have produced some notes for a final year aerospace engineering unit on Turbulence and Noise (PDF). The introduction reads:

This is not a textbook and should not be read as one. It is a set of notes written for a final year unit at the University of Bath, with the aim of introducing aerospace engineering students to the extra concepts, mainly mathematical, which they will need in order to be able to read research papers in turbulence and noise. These papers are a mixture of classic work, such as Lighthill’s analysis of aerodynamically-generated noise, and more recent studies which apply state-of-the-art techniques to hard problems, and either extend our understanding of the physics, or give us completely new insights, in a way not previously possible.

The notes are written fairly informally, to give some intuitive sense of the concepts, as an aid to getting started on the real thing. Having read about correlation functions, for example, you will be in a position to read a paper which makes use of them, but that does not mean you will find it easy. You will find it possible, and the more papers you read, the deeper the understanding you will develop as you see how different people have made use of the same techniques. In practice, any writing of substance will require multiple readings, and will reveal more of itself under each reading.

Turbulence and acoustics are difficult, and you will not master them on this unit. You will have to work hard on ideas which will not be obvious, and were not obvious to the smart people who developed them. You will often feel stupid and confused, and you will wonder why you are doing this. You are doing this because it is worth it: you are taking on a difficult topic which some of the brightest people in history have found hard, but have nonetheless been able to contribute to.

Feeling stupid means you are working on something worth the trouble: if you want to feel clever, watch Sesame Street or read the Daily Mail.

Posted on

A pox on student satisfaction

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? (T. S. Elliott)

One of the methods used to rate universities, and departments, in the UK is the National Student Survey, based on a questionnaire seeking new graduates’ opinions of their degree courses. It claims to `build a broader picture of the quality of Higher Education‘ by measuring student satisfaction. In the interests of transparency, I should declare that my employer is very proud of having the highest NSS score in the land.

The logic here seems to be that if students are satisfied, the university has done its job properly. Students are invited to think like customers, because they are paying, and because customer satisfaction is the objective of the supplier. Apart from the unexamined assumption that `satisfaction’ is the same thing as good service, for this to work, students need to forget that charging for a service puts a limit on what is to be expected: you can’t get more than you pay for, if you pay in cash, and if you do not invest part of yourself, `satisfaction’ is all you will get from the transaction.
Continue reading “A pox on student satisfaction”

Posted on

How to write a high impact paper

Academics, in the UK at least, are being encouraged to write papers with `impact’. There is some discussion about what exactly `impact’ means, but these seem to be two papers which can reasonably claim to have had some:

  1. a paper in one of the world’s leading journals, cited 1730 times in fifteen years (according to Google Scholar), which described a previously unknown phenomenon, and led to a massive change in public behaviour.
  2. a paper cited 543 times in three years, which led to changes in government policy world-wide, with far-reaching societal effects.

Paper 1 is Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet work which found that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, vaccination rates fell as low as 80% in the UK, with predictable results.

Paper 2 is Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper claiming that government debt above 90% of GDP slows economic growth. The authors made an error in Excel (using it was their first mistake) which led to them leaving out data which contradicted their conclusion. Governments have used this paper to justify their cutting of public services, on which many people depend, with predictable results.

Posted on

What do they know of education, who only education know?

Scot L. Newstok has proposed the term `close learning’ to refer to university education as we presently understand it:

“Close learning” evokes the laborious, time-consuming, and costly but irreplaceable proximity between teacher and student. “Close learning” exposes the stark deficiencies of mass distance learning such as MOOCs, and its haste to reduce dynamism, responsiveness, presence.

Or, in summary, “to what are they being given access?”

The argument about access to higher education, the ground on which much of the mooc stooshie is being fought out, is based on ideas about social mobility, and meritocracy: in short, going to university will let you make more money and escape the harsh grinding poverty (intellectual and financial) of whatever benighted hole spawned you.
Continue reading “What do they know of education, who only education know?”

Posted on

How do you mooc a project?

`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?”