Strumpet City is a novel of Dublin in the early twentieth century: between the royal visit of 1907 and the hero’s departure for Flanders in 1914, a servant girl marries her sweetheart; the slum of her employer collapses; three priests contend for hegemony over the allegiance of Dublin’s poor; an ageing rake finds a cause; a labourer falls in love with a prostitute; a raggedy-arsed chorus of beggars are Godoted into comment by the shambles they see about them.
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Derrida and Haynes manuals: why engineers should write properly
Famously, according to Derrida, `il n’y a pas de hors-texte‘, `there is nothing outside the text’. It’s time for engineers to get po-mo.
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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.
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The grave of Giorgio Bassani,
Giorgio Bassani’s grave, in the Jewish cemetery, Ferrara, supposedly just over the wall from the Garden of the Finzi-Contini
Christopher Logue on books
And, of course, we loved books. Books were the thing. Portable, durable, inexpensive—a marvel of technology, needing no intermediary save spectacles; that can be exceptionally beautiful, and may become valuable. Above all—free spirited, subversive, difficult to police.
Christopher Logue, Prince Charming.
Why I ride
[Written for another purpose and not used. May as well blog it.]
According to the relevant chronicles, a thousand years ago Irish monks used to have themselves set adrift in a boat with no sail or rudder, that God might choose where they would end up. You might think that only a devotion to some higher calling would induce anyone to throw themselves at the mercy of fortune’s good graces with no reliable means of setting a heading and such eejits are not to be found nowadays.
In 1932, one Robert Edison Fulton Jr., trying to impress an attractive woman in London, said that he intended to ride home to the United States on a motorcycle. The president of the Douglas motorcycle company was present, and offered him a bike for the trip. When Fulton later regained consciousness in Turkey, he examined the evidence and concluded that the bridge he had been crossing was unfinished. Examining his motorcycle, he found that “the only damage I could find was a slightly bent front fork which thereafter tended to turn the machine in circles to the right.”
A mathematician writes …
From the preface to Introduction to the Theory of Fourier Integrals, Titchmarsh:
A great variety of applications of Fourier integrals are to be found in the literature, often in the form of `operators’, and often in the works of authors who are evidently not specially interested in analysis. As exercises in the theory I have written out a few of these applications as it seemed to me that an analyst should. I have retained, as having a certain picturesqueness, some references to `heat’, `radiation’, and so forth; but the interest is purely analytical, and the reader need not know whether such things exist.
Keep an eye out for the red dot
Today’s Guardian asks if laser spying is really practical. As any student who has taken my acoustics course will know, it has probably been in use for at least twenty five years, as described in this Time magazine article from 1987.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Tante lobby
Nick Cohen would have it that the Pope has `signalled his fealty to the deep strain of reaction in European history’, because, in a statement on prejudice against gays, he made reference to `masonic lobbies’ (`lobby dei massoni). Cohen explains:
Few Anglo-Saxon readers understand that prejudice against freemasons is the founding conspiracy theory of the far right. It saw the machinations of a society that began among harmless Scottish craftsmen in the 15th century as responsible for liberalism, the enlightenment, the rights of man… everything it hated.
Quite apart from the use of the term `Anglo-Saxon’ (does that include the Celtic fringe, or non-white Britons), Cohen seems to have missed the point.
To anyone paying attention to post-war Italian history, the first thing which comes to mind when someone says `freemasons’ is not some harmless old buffers with their trouser legs rolled up, but the Propaganda Due lodge, which, as part of the strategy of tension, perverted the course of justice during the investigation into the Bologna railway station bombing, and was involved in the corruption of the Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican’s piggy bank.
It is not impossible that the Pope is a bit reactionary, but his use of the term `masonic lobbies’ is a feeble hook to hang the argument on.