Tag: science

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War on the humanities, again

The THE reports that leading historian Professor Peter Mandler has delivered a paper on the “crisis in the humanities”, concluding that there isn’t one. In particular, he says:

It is hard to take too seriously talk of a crisis in Britain when even by the narrowest definition of the humanities the absolute number of humanities students has increased fivefold since 1967, and by the broader definition almost 10-fold.

In the US, over a period of much slower expansion, their numbers have still doubled…Talk of a crisis triggered by a decline in a percentage point or two does seem like an over-reaction that is likely to contribute to rather than ameliorate the alleged problem.

As well as looking at student numbers, we can look at the UK data for academic staff numbers, as a proxy for resource allocation.

hesa-1

The figure shows the percentage of academic staff in STE (Science, Technology, and Engineering), Humanities (shown dashed), and Medicine from 1994 to 2008, using the freely available HESA data sets. The break in the curves corresponds to a change in the reporting of data. The details of how staff numbers were assigned to the three categories are given in a separate PDF.

The first part of the plot shows a drop in the percentage of STE staff, which might correspond to the closure of Chemistry departments over that time (the data for these years are not broken down to subject level), while Medicine rises, and Humanities are fairly steady.

After the change in reporting methodology in 2003, Medicine has about the same proportion of staff as before the change, while Humanities increases markedly and STE reduces. Clearly, this is an artifact of the breakdown of data and does not indicate real changes in the proportion of academic staff in STE or Humanities. The trends from 2003 onwards are validly indicated, however, and show STE and Humanities holding more or less steady.

In summary, the data from 1994 onwards show a sharp drop in STE, a rise in Medicine, and a small drop in Humanities.

Crisis in the humanities? What crisis?

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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.

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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.

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The creative process blog tour

In Darran Anderson’s words, this seems to be a Ponzi scheme of some sort, but Kirsty McCluskey has passed me the black spot, so here are my answers to the questions.

What am I working on?

Right now, I am working on an article for the Honest Ulsterman  on the politics of Irish memory of the First World War, overlapping with some ideas from an article to appear there on why Italian Fascists have a thing about Bobby Sands; a major overhaul of a set of notes for a course on Turbulence and Noise; a paper on fast methods of computing noise over large areas.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In acoustics (science of) as a genre, my work fits into a certain niche between numerical analysis (using computers to get answers to hard problems) and applied mathematics (pencil and paper). When I write for students, I try to produce coherent narratives rather than a simple set of notes, and introduce the cultural and social context of the technology, through examples (Nazis in space), and encourage wider reading (Tom Wolfe, Jed Mercurio, Yeats and MacNeice in notes on aircraft control).

In my non-scientific writing, I have brought science and technology to fora where they might not otherwise appear, and a particular technical background to historical and political issues.

 Why do I write what I do?

Science: because I’ll be fired if I don’t. Also, it’s only science, or scholarship, when it is published so that other people can read it, contest it, and use it.

Non science: I think I have something different to say about some familiar issues, and something common to say about unfamiliar ones.

How does my writing process work?

In both cases, I write randomly, throwing down fragments, ranging in size from bullet points, as aides memoire, to full paragraphs. When I have something like a first draft, I print it out, delete the electronic original, and write it again. If needs be, rinse and repeat. The first pass lets me generate the material, and identify gaps in the argument, without being constrained by a need to produce good prose. The subsequent passes let me form a coherent argument, without worrying about the content.

 

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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.

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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.

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Convention for Higher Education: I

Having just come back from the Convention for Higher Education at Brighton, I am putting up summaries of discussions. These are broken up by session, to avoid having a very long account, and to make it easier to comment. Panel speakers are named, because they had already agreed to have their names used, but not contributors from the audience. Apparently, videos of the talks will be online in the near future.

In the first session, I estimated about sixty people were present. The speakers in the first session were Caroline Lucas MP, Luke Martell from University of Sussex, and Peter Scott columnist and one-time Vice-Chancellor at Kingston.

Caroline Lucas spoke mainly about the political context of the public university and especially the effects of fees on applications and access, and how the idea of studying for love of learning rather, and the words `public good’, have largely disappeared from discussions of higher education. She also mentioned the UCU proposal for an education tax on large corporations, which would allow the abolition of fees.

Luke Martell talked about resistance to privatization at Sussex and the balance between trade unions and students in the campaign. He described an initially negative response from the trade unions to the campaign, with academics complicit in marketization, and considered the limitations of information or propaganda activity as opposed to occupation and other forms of action. He was especially critical of the one day strike.

Peter Scott gave his view that we must take back the claim to be radical, which is currently made by the government. He said that supporters of the selective, academic (in the bad sense) system have not come to terms with mass higher education, and that while higher education needed reform, to deal with inequities that were in the system, it did not need this reform. Noting that the question is what is the trajectory of the reforms, he pointed out that Browne introduced a paradigm shift in the sector (this was developed further by John Holmwood on the second day). In answer to the question `what is to be done’, he said we need clarity about values, and that we should celebrate the mass system of higher education, end league tables, and weigh all forms of impact including social critique.

In the discussion at the end of the session, the issue of role of trade unions in universities was raised, and the problem of the depoliticization of unions and the lack of concern amongst academics about outsourcing. There was a comment about a general lack of radicalism amongst staff, even those organized into trade union branches. A participant from Brighton said that the Sussex occupation had shaken his faith in trade unions, and that he was supporting the `pop-up union’. Luke Martell shared this disillusion with trade unions but pointed out that they do have important resources and mobilizing capacity. It was noted from the floor that while class had been raised as an issue of access and widening participation, the white maleness of the panel (Caroline Lucas had had to leave early) did not inspire confidence in its ability to deal with the diversity of university students and staff. The von Prondzynski review of governance in Scottish universities was mentioned in the context of the role of academics in governance. A colleague visiting from the US mentioned the role of debt in higher education and how it destroys any idea of education. Finally, it was stated that unions are best placed to resist the changes in the sector, but cannot do so in a narrow way, and the question of how to politicize `support staff’ was raised.

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Mooconomics 101 exam

MOOCONOMICS

Venue: anywhere with wifi that lets you use Google

Date: whenever you feel like it

Instructions to candidates:  You may not use any external information, unless you can get away with it, nor should you use your free hand to shoo the cat, pick cornflakes from your navel, or scratch unhygienically. Answer any questions which appeal to you. Pictures of kittens will only be considered as a tiebreaker …

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