It is a truism that you never understand anything unless you can understand it more than one way. I like this one:

When he and his colleagues spun ClearMotion out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008, their intention was to use bumps in the road to generate electricity. They had developed a device designed to be attached to the side of a standard shock absorber. As the suspension moved up and down, hydraulic fluid from the absorber would be forced through their device, turning a rotor that generated electricity. But, just as a generator and an electric motor are essentially the same, except that they run in opposite directions, so ClearMotion’s engineers realised that running their bump-powered generator backwards would turn it into an ideal form of suspension. And that seemed a much better line of business. They therefore designed a version in which the rotor is electrically powered and pumps hydraulic fluid rapidly into and out of the shock absorber. The effect is to level out a rough road by pushing the wheels down into dips and pulling them up over bumps.

Economist

Ebbinghaus link

Dr. Santos speculated that Yale students are interested in the class because, in high school, they had to deprioritize their happiness to gain admission to the school, adopting harmful life habits that have led to what she called “the mental health crises we’re seeing at places like Yale.” A 2013 report by the Yale College Council found that more than half of undergraduates sought mental health care from the university during their time there.

Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness – The New York Times

“The relationship of the individual student to their university is an unusual one. In Western higher education, for a long period, the student was generally viewed by the university authorities and its academic staff as some kind of apprentice to the academic discipline: there to learn, certainly, but not quite in the way a high-school student would learn; rather, to play a supporting role in the knowledge production process and thereby to absorb an understanding of the discipline concerned. Several important features of traditional university life followed from this conception. One was that students were considered to be members of the university, albeit junior members, with certain rights and responsibilities. The role was neither that of an employee nor that of someone attending merely to master a new skill, as they might be at a technical college in further rather than higher education. Another important feature was that teaching methods, as a school teacher would understand them, were considered less necessary for a university academic to grasp than a deep knowledge of the discipline and a research orientation towards it—with a desire to extend knowledge in that area. Students would, it was tacitly assumed, learn by exposure to this atmosphere of scholarship and research at least as much as by formal, structured teaching. It therefore also followed that students were expected to take a great deal of personal responsibility for their learning, with teaching contact hours (lectures, seminars, tutorials) comprising a small proportion of their time—though students in science and technology subjects usually needed to spend a good deal of time in the laboratory. (Medicine was always different, as students spent a large part of their time in hospitals and usually formed a distinctive community where professional norms typically took precedence over academic ones.)”

“Universities and Colleges: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)” by David Palfreyman, Paul Temple

On the: Office for students (OfS).

We learned last week that not only was DfE’s compliance with the Commissioner’s requests woeful, but the interference by special advisors in Number 10 led to the effective no-platforming of candidates with any ties to the National Union of Students. It can now safely be said that we’re in a post-irony world. The minister also broke the rules about public appointments when choosing to appoint Ruth Carlson to the student experience board position, despite her not having been interviewed for the role and for not consulting on the appointment.

And if you thought that the way in which the whole episode was handled was as if Jo Johnson was writing his own episode of The Thick of It, we haven’t even got to the fact that Toby Young’s appointment was made without even a cursory glance at his Twitter history. By contrast, the original student experience role candidates had extensive checking by the “No 10 Googlers”, to see whether they had ever expressed any negativity about the Prevent duty, or dared to whisper the word “union”. The OfS board appointments were a shambles of the omni variety.

WONKE: Monday Morning HE Briefing – 5th March, 2018 and see here (OfS board appointments and the death of irony).

So, Orwell lives, and business as usual. Some are indeed more equal than others.

From the Monday Note

What we need is MBA-like programs for journalism. (They will have to be less expensive than a year at Stanford Graduate School of Business, which can shoot up to $120,000. Last year, one of my classmates, a bright Indian woman, said to me, ‘I’m depressed for the whole week when I have to send my quarterly $40,000 check’; her Big Five consulting firm was too cheap and too short-sighted to pony up the cost, she had to resign and take a loan.

The following is an excerpt from a review in press with Acta. You can see the full article with DOI 10.2340/00015555-2916 here

 

From the solar constant to thong bikinis and all stops in between. 

A review of: “Sun Protection: A risk management approach.” Brian Diffey. IOP Publishing, Bristol, UK. ISBN 978-0-7503-1377-3 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-7503-1378-0 (print) ISBN 978-0-7503-1379-7 (mobi)

Leo Szilard was one of half a dozen or so physical scientists who, having attended the same Budapest gymnasium, revolutionised twentieth century physics. In 1934, whilst working in London, he realised that if one neutron hit an atom which then released two further neutrons, a chain reaction might ensue. Fearing of the consequences, he tried to keep the discovery secret by assigning the patent to the British Admiralty. In 1939, he authored the letter, that Einstein signed, warning the then US President of the coming impact of nuclear weapons.

After the war, in revulsion at the uses to which his physics had been applied, he swapped physics for biology. There was a drawback, however. Szilard liked to think in a hot bath, and he liked to think a lot. Once his interests had turned to biology he remarked that he could no longer enjoy a long uninterrupted bath — he was forever having to leave his bath, to check some factual detail (before returning to think some more). Biology seemed to lack the deep simplifying foundations of the Queen of Sciences.

Training gets a bad rap for a reason – it’s all a bit, well, dull and inflexible. At one point in my life I point blank refused to be in a room with round tables, a flipchart, coloured pens and a bowl of mints for inspiration.

Donald Clark Link. And please no breakout sessions.

Already UK Biobank has transformed our understanding of health and disease, improving diagnosis and care for those with cancer and rare diseases. But if every participant has their genome sequenced, the prospects for understanding and treating disease, including obesity and mental health disorders, will be extraordinary. We do not know what we will find, but we can be confident it will transform our understanding of what it is to be healthy and what it is to be sick.

Dr Jim Smith is a developmental biologist and the director of science at Wellcome, the science and health foundation.  Link

But all of that media can’t really replace the socializing, networking, and simply fun that happened as part of (or sometimes despite) the conference formula.

I don’t know how to fix conferences, but the first place I’d start on that whiteboard is by getting rid of all of the talks, then trying to find different ways to bring people together — and far more of them than before.

Marco Arment

I no longer go to many conferences, and that is a good thing. But fixing them is a problem, not least because many academic conferences are businesses that collect money that supports other activities. This is not always bad, but is often not good. ‘Getting rid of the talks’ is of course attractive. Leo Szilard once suggested that you should stand up, briefly report your conclusions, then sit down. Only if the audience were sceptical of your results would you have to speak for longer. As for size, there is no single right size. However the best conferences I have every attended were all small, with less than 40 people. But I wouldn’t t have got to these small ones, unless I had gone to the big ones.