sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLVI

The latest batch, before the Christmas batch arrives.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIX

The latest batch:

book review: What are Universities For?

Stefan Collini.
What are Universities For?
Penguin. 2012

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This book may be over a decade old, and some of the essays included even older, but it is more relevant today than ever. The first half is a thoughtful discussion of the history and purpose of universities in general. This is followed by a series of reprinted essays, dissecting various governmental initiatives in higher education.

The historical overview of the role, size and funding of universities from their inception is fascinating. My personal experience is confined to being a student in the late 70s and early 80s, and an academic during the 2000s. Collini points out most people tend to think that universities had always been the way they experienced them as a student, and only changed since then. But of course, they have always been changing. I am myself guilty of this view! My seven year tenure as a student was during the time of no fees and full grant (and fewer students and universities overall): so no student debt, and only vacation-time jobs. I would almost certainly not have gone to university under the current scheme, as getting into any debt, let alone that much, would have been too terrifying. I feel very lucky, but not guilty: I have certainly since paid enough in taxes from good jobs to cover the costs! I do think that current students should be similarly lucky, particularly as the number of good jobs has not kept pace with the increase in student numbers. (Even jobs that in the past would have required A-levels now seem to require not just a Bachelors, but even a Masters degree: surely they are not that much more complex? I often wonder if this degree-inflation is deliberately used to force people to go to university and get into debt, so making them more willing to take rubbish jobs, or if it is merely an unanticipated side-effect benefical to corporations and governments.)

Collini has a wide ranging and thoughtful discussion of what universities should be for. What should students be taught? How should they be educated? And why? He comes from the Humanities, which some argue are not “useful” subjects, because they do not contribute directly to the economic health of the country. I’m a scientist, and he thinks the arguments for these subjects are easier there. They may be easier, but I think that makes them more damaging, as it tends to encourage a focus on the economic, rather than educational or intellectual, benefits: graduate employability, rather than better, more thoughtful, well-rounded citizens. (If it’s just about job-specific skills, why not raise the status of apprenticeships instead?) Caving to that economic focus can unintentionally strengthen the argument against the humanities.

In particular, Collini’s point is that at university, the student should “study”, rather than be taught, or learn, a subject. This perspective puts the onus on the student to do the work, in depth, and not be a mere passive recipient of whatever the lecturer deems important, merely regurgitating it for assessment. The current insistence on increased “contact hours” (rather than private study) and ever-increasingly detailed assessment encourages this attitude of regurgitation, which helps parrots, but not growth. We are now encouraged to treat students as “customers”, where they pay a fee for the product of a degree certificate. Many students will focus on the certificate outcome, not the process they need to go through to get it. Rather than certificate seller, I prefer the metaphor of “personal trainer”: the lecturers are providing opportunities, resources, and direction, but the student has to do the (sometimes painful) work to achieve the desired goal. No-one goes to a gym to get a certificate (maybe some do? I’ve never been to a gym!), but rather to achieve fitness, understanding that this will require effort on their part.

After this excellent review of the state of universities, and their goals, Collini fills the rest of the book with reprints of earlier articles, which eviscerate various government schemes to measure the “quality” of universities’ performance. These essays are also excellent, and pull no punches. Collini argues that we should not measure (rigid metrics designed by unqualified beancounters), but rather judge (thoughtful analysis by qualified peers), performance.

There is a lot more excellent, thoughtful (and very well-written) material here. I have just pulled out a few points that resonate most strongly with me. Read this, and have good arguments to support universities beyond mere economic gain.

view from a hotel window

We're at Levitation, the 2024 Eastercon, being held this year at the Telford International Centre (TIC). It's a new venue for Eastercon, and is nice and spacious (great for social distancing) and well laid out.  There are also nice gaps between items, so no need to teleport around the TIC.  So far, we've been to:

• a panel on SF and the Industrial Revolution -- a theme of the convention, given that Ironbridge is just down the road
• a talk by Kari on the history of the Welsh border -- also close by, and surprisingly ill-defined
• a talk about bones and forensics -- not all found bones are human: "the last time this bone was above ground, it was surrounded by cow"
• a panel on narrative point of view and tense -- which has moved from traditional 3rd person past tense to more 1st person present tense, especially in Young Adult fiction
• an enraging talk by Clute on the British Library's destruction of 100 years of dust jackets
• a panel on libraries, in the real world and in SF -- "getting my adult card which allowed 4 books a fortnight meant you were supposed to read 4 a fortnight!"
• a panel on Dr Who and the Industrial Revolution, including the 1985 story of The Mark of the Rani
• a panel on Educational Safeguarding in SF/F -- fictional schools seem very dangerous!
• a talk by Emma King on her unsuccessful applications to be an ESA astronaut, and the other successes that led from that 
• a panel on (fictional) Invertebrates in Space -- including interesting discussions of real invertebrates (on Earth), too

We're looking forward to more great stuff tomorrow and Monday.

We're staying at the hotel next door to the TIC, with the customary view over the car park:

at least we can keep an eye on our car...

We drove up to Telford yesterday, in our new electric car.  I still have a little range anxiety, so when we stopped for lunch, I did give it some juice, despite the prediction we'd have enough left when we arrived.  Note to self: when travelling on a Bank Holiday, charging points tend to be well-occupied.  The hotel has four of its own fast (22kW) charging points for guest use, that are not quite as eye-wateringly expensive (70p/kWh) as service station chargers (~79p/kWh), so I will fill up tonight, ready for the trip home.  A bit different from the 9p/kWh I can get at home on the overnight rate, though.

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Later: for more notes on the convention, see my website

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXXXIII

 The latest batch:

book review: Adam's Task

Vicki Hearne.
Adam’s Task: calling animals by name.
Akadine Press. 1986

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This is a book about taking domesticated animals seriously: training them, respecting them, and treating them as creatures with their own complex, non-human internal lives. It provides a deeply fascinating account of how domesticated animals relate to humans, and of our responsibilities to them. It is mostly about mostly dogs and horses, told through a series of in-depth stories of particular animals Hearne has trained, plus a chapter on how different cats are.

It is also a book about building a philosophy of communication with domesticated animals. No behaviourism or anthropomorphism or sentimentality, but instead a deep understanding of their existence and differences.

This is a difficult book to summarise, but it is an engrossing read. I was completely hooked, and devoured it in just two sittings. It is an inspiring view into minds simultaneously alien, and yet co-evolved with our own, so that we can communicate meaningfully, if we take the time to learn how.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

not a shop

There is a good discussion of what education is for, and how different disciplines use different tools, in the post How to speak truthfully about what it means to be human: a user’s handbook.  All of it is interesting, but there is one paragraph that speaks forcefully about why students are not “customers”, itself a quote from another piece (my emphasis):

We go to school, not to get what we already know that we want, but because we want to receive an education. Here, we would expect teachers not just to give students what they know they want or say they want or are able to identify as what they want, but to move them beyond what they already know that they want. We want teachers to open up new vistas, new opportunities, and help children and young people to interrogate whether what they say they want or desire is actually what they should desire. To turn the student into a customer, and just  work on the assumption that education should do what the customer wants is therefore a distortion of what education is about, a distortion that significantly undermines the ability of teachers to be teachers and of schools, colleges and universities to be educational institutions rather than shops.

Hear, hear.

 

the “customer” is not always right

One way that university lecturers, and departments, are ranked and evaluated, is by student satisfaction surveys.  Such a customer-based model does not inevitably lead to better eduction, however, as students are not necessarily the best judges of what they have learned:

College students think they learn less with an effective teaching method
They don’t even realize they’ve learned more.

While students learned more with active instruction..., every measure of satisfaction was lower.

Personally, I prefer a “fitness instructor”-based model, where the students pay the instructor for improvement opportunites and advice (and these should indeed be as well prepared and appropriate as possible), but they have to put in the time, effort, and sweat.  No pain, no gain.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCV

The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCIV

The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCI

The latest batch, pre Christmas rush:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time LXXXIX

The latest batch, including the eight we bought on holiday in Hay-on-Wye:

book review: Better by Mistake

Alina Tugend.
Better by Mistake: the unexpected benefits of being wrong.
Riverhead Books. 2011

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We often hear that we should learn from our mistakes (or, preferably, from the mistakes of others). Here Tugend digs down into this aphorism, and shows how we are actually given mixed messages: if mistakes are such a wonderful learning opportunity, why are we actually ashamed of them, punished for them, and why do we try so hard to avoid them to the extend of over-constraining our ambitions?

Tugend recounts some work showing that mistakes while learning can be valuable, for some people at least, and should be allowed, even encouraged, to enable the deeper learning that results.

[p93] Gully and his colleagues found that not everyone learned better by making mistakes, but those with certain types of personality traits—who are good at processing information, open to learning, and not overly conscientious—were more effectively trained by being encouraged to make mistakes rather than avoid them. In other research, Gully and colleagues found that telling people to perform well during training resulted in higher immediate performance; but it also resulted in shallower processing of information, more superficial learning, and less confidence. In contrast, those people who were told to learn—and nor worry about mistakes—during training did more poorly initially but ended up with deeper processing of information, more complex learning, and more confidence about performance. Those in the latter group also showed higher performance when faced with a really challenging version of the task they were trained to perform.

Of course, mistakes while learning are somewhat different from mistakes that happen during operational use. But we are actually learning all the time, and so these other mistakes should also be exploited as learning opportunities, both to educate the one who errs, and to make the overall system more robust to inevitable mistakes.

[p112] “when an adverse event occurs, the important issue is not who blundered, but how and why the defenses failed,” […] In life-or-death situations, it is important to set up a system in which, to whatever degree possible, one person’s error cannot sink the ship. […] focussing on active errors lets the latent errors remain in the system, and “their accumulation actually makes the system more prone to future failure.”

The key point here is that a systems approach to error does not look just at the “active error”, the immediate surface error that seems the cause of the problem, but also digs down to find the “latent errors”, the systemic issues that allowed the active error both to occur and to have such poor consequences. Just fixing active errors results in a patchwork of arbitrary rules and regulations that can make the system more complex and fragile.

How to use errors during learning requires a supportive culture. Tugend gives an example of the culture in Japanese schooling.

[p191] Making a mistake, therefore, isn’t a reflection of your lack of ability or intelligence, but simply that you haven’t learned something yet. “You have to show you’re trying hard—they have this expression for ‘facing the desk,’ ” […]

So there are two aspects. First, the learner has to be trying: their mistake is a good-faith error, not the result of carelessness, or even deliberate sabotage; the learner genuinely thought that their mistake was the right thing to do. Second, the mistake can then be recognised as a signal that the learner needs to learn something, maybe a new fact (surface error), or a revised mental model of the problem space (latent error). Occasionally, it is the teacher who has to change: the learner’s mental model might be more advanced than the teacher had realised, and their “mistake” is due to tackling an over-simplistic problem in their more sophisticated manner. A systems approach to diagnosing the latent error should be able to distinguish these cases.

Of course, not all mistakes occur when we are trying our hardest: we might be tired, or distracted, or careless, or selfish. A systems approach can help diagnose these problems as well: we don’t need to learn new procedures, rather a new attitude. Although Tugend doesn’t explore this aspect (other than in the chapter on apologising), this links to the rationale behind punishment of errors: the assumption that the error is in some sense “deliberate”, and the way to learn the required new attitude is through some sort of pain. But a culture change is needed, to distinguish good-faith learning opportunity errors, from sloppy poor attitude unnecessary mistakes – and to treat them differently.

There is more in the book, including how the air transport industry learns from mistakes and its use of checklists, how men and women react differently to their mistakes, and apologising for mistakes. There is a lot of food for thought here. I would have liked more guidance on the productive exploitation of mistakes, but maybe that is for another book.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

insight into the OU

An ex Open University friend of mine comments on recent changes there.

Closure at the Open University?

How could any national treasure go quite as wrong as The Open University has done in recent years?

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

then four come along at once

One of the tasks of an academic is examining research students.  This involves reading a thesis, then discussing it with the student in a viva.  In the UK the viva is held behind closed doors, and usually involves only two examiners, one internal (same university as the student) and one external.  The scheme is different on the continent: the defence is public, following a lecture, and there may be multiple “opponents”, or even an entire panel, of examiners.

If every research student needs (a minimum of) two examiners, that implies for every student I supervise, I should examine at least two others (one as internal, one as external, to keep the numbers balanced).  In fact, since many universities like to have “senior” external examiners, I should probably do a few more than that.

Each year, I usually take on one or two new students.  So, each year, I should probably examine about three to five students.  So far this year I have examined only two: both external continental defences, one in Trondheim in April, one in Lyon in July.

That implies I should have two or three more to do this year (if it is an average year).  And sure enough, in November a pile of theses started raining down in a seemingly never-ending stream on my desk.

So the total number is about right, but all at once is a bit of a nightmare.  Two internal students, two external students, all to be examined before the end of January.  I know what I’m going to be reading over Christmas.

phenomenon-based learning

Finland ahead of the education game yet again.

Finland Will Become the First Country in the World to Get Rid of All School Subjects
[assume there’s an interesting snippet quoted from the article here – there isn’t, because the article is “protected”, by someone who doesn’t understand how the Web works] 

[via Danny Yee’s blog]

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

Worldcon 75: Saturday

Day 4 of the Worldcon, and the queuing is getting more efficient.

First I went to a panel on Why Are Finnish Schools So Good?  Finnish schools do have a good reputation internationally, and a couple of teachers tried to explain why.  But it seems that maybe they don’t really know why.  They suggested it could have something to do with the autonomy of the teachers, trusted to roam freely in their teaching within certain guidelines. There is also a low authority gap between teachers and students, with mutual respect rather than scary teachers.  But this does mean it is hard to push lazy pupils.  All teachers are well-qualified, with Masters degrees.  However, not all is well.  Refugee children do worse on average, maybe because they aren’t expected to excel.  And boys do worse than girls, because they don’t read.  The culture doesn’t allow them to be enthusiastic about reading, and it isn’t cool to get good grades.  They recover later in the system, but the lack of reading reduces their vocabulary; reading from the web doesn’t seem to build as much vocabulary.

Next to a panel on Gender and “Realistic History”.  Some people who are happy with elves and magic in their medieaval fantasies object to female or gay characters as “unhistorical”. But such people were much more prominent than later histories would lead us to believe. Some erasure happens deliberately.  There’s a book about Inca beliefs, written in Spanish after their conquest, which has a section on a cult who worship a particular deity; the Spanish original talks of “hermaphrodite native people”, which was deliberately erased by the English translator who said only “native people”.  All written history says more about the time when it was written, than the time it writes about: we can’t look at the middle ages without all the subsequent times being “melted” into them.  History is narrative, and stories leave things out.  Narrative focuses on protagonists, heroes, villains; people not important to that narrative get left out, and minorities are not seen as critical to events. Most women in historical Paris had part time jobs – we know this from tax records – and they included barbers, night guards, locksmiths, goldsmiths…  Don’t tell others that their narrative is wrong; instead say, here’s my narrative, it’s better.

The panel on Maintaining Your Scientist Character’s Credibility discussed ways not to drop readers out of their immersive experience by having a scientist character do something utterly ridiculous.  Don’t put in unnecessary detail that can trip you up.  Some writers are tempted to prove they have done the research. even if it doesn’t add to the story; the characters need to be perceived as the experts, not the writers!  Don’t include a number you don’t need: someone will do the calculations to see if you are being consistent!  The science can be right, but the environment wrong: laboratory practices; hospital dramas are unwatchable because of the lack of hygienic procedures and ethical concerns.  Risk management is consistently handled poorly.  The further in the future the story is set, the more you can get away with: things can have changed.  The problems arise with things the writer doesn’t realise are important.  Get experts to be your beta readers: they’ll love pointing out the mistakes. [Personal experience: never be a beta reader for a family member writing their first book.]  Very credible phrases to have your scientists say: “I don’t know” and “I was wrong”.

The next panel I attended discussed Science Fiction Gone Wrong: science and predictions that SF got badly wrong.  Stapledon’s Last and First Men purports to predict the next 2 billion years of human evolution, from the early 1930s on.  There are vast changes, 18 successive species, it’s a staggering visionary work.  But wherever we can check on a prediction, Stapledon gets it wrong.  He failed to see Hitler, and has Germany as a pillar of enlightenment while France conquers most of Europe.  Most evolutionary changes are natural biological mutations, but the 2nd men eventually discover gene editing, 40 million years from now.  The 7th men discover space travel.  When the book was re-released in the 1950s, the publisher deleted first 6 chapters, because they were all wrong.  Later editions have restored them, but they are still all wrong.  Yet it’s one of the greatest SF novels; it’s not a work of prediction, but of poetry.  On the other hand, the Handmaid’s Tale seemed totally implausible in the 1980s: how could a mature democracy evolve that way?  Today, it seems more prophetic.  Political situations can change seemingly overnight, think of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Atwood says that world is far too complex for speculative fiction to make accurate predictions; its role is to conjure a possible scenario.  Sometimes errors can be useful.  MIT students proved Ringworld is unstable, so Niven made his next book about fixing the engines that kept it stable!  Try to understand as much about how the Earth works as possible – ecology, geography, climatology, everything – and then use that understanding in your world building.

unlikely to be seen in a real lab

After a break for lunch, I went to the panel on Portrayal of the Scientist and Science in SF. The bad: every single variant of the Frankenstein archetype of the lone mad scientist building something that gets out of control.  BBC’s Horizon, for a period, got it into its head that the way to tell a story was to have a hero, and make the story is about him, which does not reflect reality.  A couple of good examples of scientists as part of teams: Sagan’s Contact, and Arrival.  It is easier to make the hero be an engineer than a scientist; there’s more action in building things than working things out.  In Armageddon, for some reason it’s easier to teach Bruce Willis to be an astronaut than to teach an astronaut to use a drill; it’s part of the anti-intellectualism, the suspicion of intelligence.  Real science, of course, is 99% tedium; when scientists write up their own work, even they leave most of it out.  Mathematicians do this too: Gauss would only publish when he had polished to perfection; the reader couldn’t work out how he got there. He would say, when a fine building is finished, the scaffolding should not be visible.  Jacobi said Gauss is like the fox who erases his tracks in the sand with his tail.  Science in SF is not about the process of doing science, but about the changed worldview when the new body of knowledge becomes current, about the world where this new science exists.  Frighteningly, the only view most people have of science is from books and movies.

After three panels on science and scientists, I next went to a panel on Folklore and Myth in the Fantastic.  This had some overlap with Wednesday’s Invented Mythologies; see there for definitions.   Myths are deeply embedded in their cultures: how do we create a myth that feels embedded in that way?  Accounts can be emic or etic: etic is the outsider’s experience and account of another culture – emic is an insider account of one’s own culture; it’s more emotional, closer to the heart.  We should  look for this emic, not the etic, view.  Folklore was often designed to answer questions alien to our culture yet very important to the culture in which they originated;  it was devoted to the violation of mores, which differ across cultures; it can be incomprehensible to us, being set in a social mileui we don’t share, so we can’t tell when it’s funny, or why the ending is satisfying.  The original tales were often gnarly, violent, and socially destructive; the prettified Victorian versions we know were adapted to fit a view of what’s a satisfying story or ending.  What groups your group has been in contact with will work its way into the stories, and stories will be rework to re-understand the world when things change.  As myths and legends develop, they may co-opt earlier myths, which may have been designed for different people in different circumstances.  Imagine the folklore of a people that says “we have always lived on water” being told in a future when there is no more water.  All these reworkings are layered on each other, with multiple versions of each story, which gives a richness to the mythology.

Back to SF with a panel on the Morality of Generation Ships.  You set off sub-lightspeed for a far distant world, forcing your children and theirs to grow up on a generation ship.  Is this moral?  The first question: why are you doing this? Are you facing certain death if you stay, or “just” emigrating?   Is it the first attempt, or is it commonplace?  Do you know the conditions at the destination, or is this a shot in the dark?  The context frames the moral questions.  To get an idea of timescales: if the Neanderthals has launched a space probe 10,000 years ago, going at the speed of Voyager 2 [57,890 km/h], it would only be half way to the nearest star. [Actually, it would be much less than half way: only be half a light year away!]  If they have been living on the ship for so long, why would they want to stop and move to a completely unknown environment?  If the ship could go at near-relativistic speeds, the passengers wouldn’t experience a long duration; but it’s hard to get to these speeds, and then you have to slow down again.   How big would the population need to be to maintain technology? Literacy reduces the number of people needed to maintain working knowledge; take along eggs and sperm for genetic diversity.  The technology for building and maintaining such ships would be a spin-off from self-sustaining space colonies; if we have these, why build the ships?  Is it moral to raise children in space colonies or on the moon, where the low gravity means they can never come to Earth?  Is it moral to emigrate and raise children in a foreign land, or in a different societal structure like a commune?  [Is it moral to have children at all?]

My final panel of the day was The Singularity: Transhuman Intelligence in Fiction and Futurism.  There are two paths to the Singularity.  The first is building super-intelligent self-improving AIs.  The second comes from Fyodorov’s Russian Orthodox Christian heresy of transhumanism: striving for immortality and, as a corollary, colonising space and bringing people back from the dead.  Most modern transhumanists are atheist rationalists, but they have latched on to a Christian pattern!  The idea of the singularity is that we cannot predict what the world will be like after: the transformation will be too great.  Hence it is difficult to write about a post-Singularity world.  But the Singularity has already happened – twice!  The first was 75,000 years ago, with the invention of transmissible culture.  The second was 250 years ago, with invention of limited liability companies; these are very slow alien intelligences, but they are getting faster as they replace their biological components [us!] with computers.  Augmenting human intelligence is limited by the size of brain that can pass through the birth canal; the answer is kangaroos: gene engineer us to be marsupials!  AIs are being used to identify email spam; spam bots are being engineered to fool these; there’s a fully automated Turing test arms race in progress: the first AI to pass Turing test will be a spambot.

The final event was the Masquerade.  There were excellent great entries, classified into the Novice and Open classes; there were no specifically Journeyman or Master entries.  I suspect the more experienced go to the dedicated costuming events nowadays.  During the judging, we had a great concert by Sassafrass, including their complex songs about Norse mythology, some Renaissance music to change the tone, and an emotional Somebody Will.  They had to keep on going until the judges returned.  The judges gave out a variety of awards for many of the entrants.  When Halley cam to Jackson in 1910 (Halley’s Comet) won Best in Show: a stunning first entry by Olivia Flockhart, who refused to enter the children’s class in favour of the novice class.

Masquerade Entry No. 1: Olivia Flockhart with Ian Flockhart; Entry Name: "When Halley came to Jackson in 1910" #Worldcon75 pic.twitter.com/efExzvXyzs

— Worldcon 75 (@worldcon75) August 12, 2017

So, only one day left!

book review: The Slow Professor

Maggie Berg, Barbara K. Seeber.
The Slow Professor: challenging the culture of speed in the academy.
University of Toronto Press. 2016

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There is an external view of academics as ivory tower effete dilettantes who spend all their time swanning around, thinking big thoughts, or just kicking back during the long vacations. There’s no real work involved, is there?

Then there is the reality: ever increasing bureaucracy, more scrabbling for more students, more worrying about “student feedback”, more scrabbling for ever reducing (per capita) research funding, more pressure to publish. I spent nearly two decades in industry, and have spent over a decade in academia: I can say with conviction that academia is much harder work and longer hours.

Bosses will say, but that’s because academia is vocational: you work so hard because you enjoy it. Well, we enjoy some of it, maybe even most of it, which is more than many people can say. But also if we don’t work so hard, we fall behind harder working peers, we don’t get promoted, we don’t get the research funding, we get in a death spiral. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. And when we claim we are stressed because we have too much work to do, we are sent on time management courses (which we have no time for), rather than having workload reduced.

This thought-provoking little book (a mere 90 pages of text, to be digestible by the hurried academic, yet sufficiently dense with references to be academically rigorous), analyses the problem, and advocates slowing down, and savouring, the academic life. This is by explicit analogy with Slow Food and as a part of the Slow Movement in general. There are chapters on teaching, and research, and, crucial for academic learning, on collegiality. The call is for individual researchers to regain a sense of agency in the face of overpowering bureaucracy.

The authors write from the perspective of social scientists, but the findings and comments are equally applicable to other disciplines. The book documents much evidence of the problems, and suggests some approaches to mitigate these:

[p59] What does “time for the self” mean in the context of scholarship? For me, it means a shift from the dominant view of time as linear and quantifiable to time as a process of becoming. That is, rather than thinking of time as an accumulation of “lines on the CV” …, I am trying to think of time as an unfolding of who I am as a thinking being. Broadly speaking, I am trying to shift the focus from the product (the book, the article, the presentation) to the process of developing my understanding. This is not to say that books and articles and presentations don’t get written (although there may be fewer of them), but my experience of writing them changes in the sense that shifting my focus in this way eases some of the time pressure. I can keep at the back of my mind Readings’s question, which applies to our students as much as it does to us: “How long does it take to become educated?” … We tend to think of time as spent and gone. However, thinking of time as “constitutive, a becoming of what has not been before” … connects us to the scholarship that we do and goes against the corporate model.

How well this will go down with that “overpowering bureaucracy” remains to be seen. The issue with bureaucrats is they focus on those outputs, on those products, (presumably) because those are easy to measure, to count, to quantify. Students are to be assessed against learning outcomes: have they learned X, Y, Z? Yet students should grow and learn and change, through a process of becoming educated to think, and gaining meta-skills that can be adapted in a changing world. Research is to be assessed by publication and impact: how many journal papers and books? Yet researchers should grow and learn and change, through a process of reflection, and thinking, and experimenting. With much of academia, both teaching and research, most of the value lies in this process of becoming, hard to measure, even invisible in some cases. How much work are you really doing when reading a book, or staring at a screen, or just staring into space, thinking? Where’s the output, the result, the evidence of your work?

Learning and discovering and critiquing and thinking, like the rest of life, is a verb, not a noun.

I must read more about this Slow Movement. If I can find the time.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

do this now

A nice arXiv paper “Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing”, full of very sound advice, although I'd probably call it “The Theoretical Minimum Practices in Scientific Computing”.

Our intended audience is researchers who are working alone or with a handful of collaborators on projects lasting a few days to a few months, and who are ready to move beyond emailing themselves a spreadsheet named results-updated-3-revised.xlsx at the end of the workday. A practice is included in our list if large numbers of researchers use it, and large numbers of people are still using it months after first trying it out. We include the second criterion because there is no point recommending something that people won’t actually adopt.

[via Danny Yee’s blog]

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why why why

Feynman gives a marvelous “answer” to “why do magnets repel?”

[via Sabine Hossenfelder's blog]

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page