“Taxpayers have spent billions of pounds in interest costs through the private finance initiative to enable tens of billions of pounds to be taken off the government balance sheet – money that should have been spent on the schools and hospitals. When in opposition, the present government acknowledged the issues and committed itself to clarity and openness in presentation. But it seems the exigencies of office have proved too demanding. Why lose weight when you can reset the scales?”
—
John Kay on ‘fiddling’ (aka lying) by HMG

“(Robert) Hughes was not afraid of occupying the radical centre, a space which has become somewhat under populated of late, and fighting all comers. He became one of the world’s great art critics without even bothering to complete his own university education, and had no respect for academics who baffled their students (and themselves) with the jargon of ‘theory’. He was hardly alone in noticing the appalling prose that slopped like effluent out of the post-modern university, but he described it better than most. ‘With certain outstanding exceptions like Edward Saïd, Simon Schama or Robert Darnton, relatively few people who are actually writing first-rate history, biography or cultural criticism in America have professional tenure, though many writers are attached to universities as decorative hermits or trophies in those therapeutic diversions known as Creative Writing courses.’ And then with typical erudition and style he tells us that in a denunciation of art schools in 1914 the Dadaist Arthur Craven had said ‘I am astonished that some crook has not had the idea of opening a writing school.’”

This of course just doesn’t apply to art, but to too much of the academy. Most of us just can’t agree on the extent.
Nick Cohen

 

“Kevin O’Rourke refers to the “cocooned elites in Brussels”, which gets to the heart of the matter. The dignity of office can be a terrible thing for intellectual clarity: you can spend years standing behind a lectern or sitting around a conference table drinking bottled water, delivering the same sententious remarks again and again, and never have anyone point out how utterly wrong you have been at every stage of the game. Those of us on the outside need to do whatever we can to break through that cocoon — and ridicule is surely one useful technique.”

This is not confined to Brussels. I seemed to remember some comment about the dangers of academics suffering ‘Kissengeritis’ — they end up a hopeless amalgam of academic and politician. The antithesis of science is not art, but politics. Just look at all these ‘professors’ peddling NHS nonsense and defending the indefensible.

Paul Krugman: Of cockroaches and commissioners

“On this note, he quotes mathematician and family friend Jacques Hadamard, apparently complaining about a student who asked for a thesis topic, “Can you imagine that? If he has no topic of his own, he should not even think of a Ph.D.!””

Which brings to mind David Hubel’s practice of trying to persuade students not to do a PhD — he only wanted the ones who ‘really’  wanted it, rather than those who were just judged able.

From a book review of Fractalist in Science

Derek Bok states that some of those who were found guilty of criminal acts in the recent waves of corporate malfeasance in the US, scored very well on their ethics modules at Harvard. It is easy (and facile) to imagine that somehow doing a ‘course’ on a particular topic will produce a change in behaviour that is permanent and withstands countervailing forces (culture eats strategy,and culture eats morality etc, I hear you say). Those in universities should of course know better — producing changes in behaviour in response to an environmental stimulus is a paraphrase of one definition of learning. But the message doesn’t get through, largely because the academy has increasingly chosen to turn its professional tools away from examination of its own purpose. It is deemed rude to ask for evidence when everybody knows the sun goes round the earth.

Nor, if we are to believe Timothy Wilson, should we go in with the ‘null’ hypothesis that courses wishing to eradicate ‘isms’ may only be beneficial. The evidence points in a different direction: they make some people’s behaviour worse. I sometimes wonder if anybody is really too worried about whether these interventions work — they just want to tick boxes to comply with yet more rituals of verification (to use Michael Power’s phrase from the Audit Society).

Anyway these ramblings were by way of introduction for what is for me one of the clearest expositions of morality and the human condition. I have no idea why I cannot keep it out of my mind but maybe putting it down in writing might help. It comes from a short article by Jacob Bronowski, in a posthumous collection of his essays, ‘A sense of the future’. The article is “A moral for an age of plenty”  and it includes an account of the death of the physicist Louis Slotin.

Louis Slotin was a physicist in his mid thirties, working at Los Alamos in 1946. Bronowski described him so: ‘Slotin was good with his hands; he liked using his head; he was bright and a little daring — in short, he was like any other man anywhere who is happy in his work’. Just so.

Slotin was moving bits of plutonium closer together, but for obvious reasons, not too close. And as experts are tempted to do, he was using a screwdriver. His hand slipped. The monitors went through the roof. He immediately pulled the pieces of plutonium apart, and asked everybody to mark their precise positions at the time of the accident. The former meant he would die (9 days later, as it turned out); the latter allowed him to prognosticate on what would happen to the others (they survived).

Bronowski writes:

There are two things that make up morality. One is the sense that other people matter: the send of common loyalty….The other is a clear judgement of what is at stake: a cold knowledge, without a trace of deception, of precisely what will happen to oneself and to others if one plays the hero or the coward. This is the highest morality: to combine human love with an unflinching, a scientific judgement.

I actually think we are more lacking in the second than the former. Worse still,  we are less tolerant of evidence than we once were: we prefer to wallow smugly in our self-congratulatory goodness. We have been here before. Medicine only became useful when physicians learned this lesson.

[ And yes, people remarked that Slotin hadn’t followed protocol…]

With these ideas in mind, we’re excited to announce the launch of HarvardXPLUS: new higher-touch versions of select popular online courses. With limited enrollment and smaller cohorts, HarvardXPLUS will allow you to engage even more with your fellow learners, and with Harvard faculty and teaching fellows.

The program also includes a new HarvardXPLUS credential that will clearly represent your commitment and hard work in completing these courses, as well as a deeper level of engagement and mastery of defined learning objectives.

At some stage these courses are going to surpass residential quality courses in many universities. The convergence will continue, although hopefully not of language (higher-touch anyone?)

‘This makes clear that one consequence (and one suspects one purpose) of TEF is to facilitate the division into institutional sheep and goats, followed by starvation of the goats.’

Dorothy Bishop

I didn’t know.

Two Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, saw opportunity. Working from a trailer on campus, they began compiling websites into a list, organized by topic. They eventually named it Yahoo, an acronym for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

NYT

I now have a new term for ‘learning outcomes’. Yahoo. Although ‘hideous’ competes with hierarchical

“The entire system of learning at Oxford, so far as I can recall, consisted of the combination of mnemonics, composition and argumentation. Reading lists were prodigious: often 20 or 30 items − both entire volumes and journal articles – so redundancy was a given: hours needed to be spent in the library to extract the pith from acres of paper. I took two courses (as modules were then called) every term, and the coursework requirement was an essay of 3,000 words per week for each of them; the sheer amount I had to write gave me the core facility needed for an entire adult working life as a professional writer.

The argumentation was, of course, astonishingly thorough when compared with the meagre “contact hours” most contemporary students are mandated: a full hour vis-à-vis, usually one-to-one, reading out your essay and then picking it apart.”

I learned a new acronym, too: BDDM (bi-directional digitial media). Ugly, but not silly

Will Self in the THE.

A nice story in Nature about two giants: Jerome Bruner and the Turing award winner,  Alan Kay.

Jerry made seminal contributions to an astonishing number of fields — each a stop on the road to finding out what makes us human. Beginning in the 1960s, computer simulations became the model of the human mind in cognitive psychology, with researchers trying to simulate how humans solve problems, form concepts, comprehend language and learn. But reducing humans to computers was antithetical to Jerry’s humanistic perspective.

Given this, it was surprising that computer scientist Alan Kay, the designer of what became the Macintosh graphical user interface, turned up more than 30 years ago on Bruner’s Manhattan doorstep with a gift of a Macintosh computer. Jerry’s ideas of representing information through actions, icons and symbols, central to his theory of cognitive development, had inspired Kay to get users (even children) to act (through a computer mouse) on icons, enabling the use of an abstract set of symbols (computer program). This was the foundation for what became the Macintosh interface.

One other line in the obiuaryt by Patricia Marks Greenfield stood out:

In 1972, Bruner sailed his boat across the Atlantic to take up the first Watts Professorship of Psychology at the University of Oxford, UK. 

I guess the removal expenses were as stingy then as now.