MishMash

Newcastle University Compromises on Excellence

High hopes for our new Vice Chancellor take something of a battering with this latest news:

Key themes of the discussions centred around how the pursuit of excellence should be balanced with relevance to student vocations, business and society in general.

Er ... pardon?

Looking forward to the next announcement:

After careful consideration, Newcastle University has decided that it can best provide relevance to student vocations, business and society in general by striving for unequalled mediocrity in all of its activities.

Craig Murray on University management

It looks as if Craig Murray is going to be a fly in Dundee University's management's ointment in his new role as Rector. He expresses surprise at how far the University is from the self-governing body it once was:

Interestingly every academic and graduate representative on Court voted against the cuts, but they were rammed through by an array of co-opted members, who appeared without exception to be either businessmen or from the government's educational administration establishment.

Here at Newcastle University we await with interest the arrival of our next Vice Chancellor, Professor Chris Brink. As an academic, will he show more interest in people and less in buildings?

Consortia don't reduce bureaucracy

From a CORDIS report on the (EU research) FP6 mid-term review:

While welcoming the new instruments as tools which really do encourage integration and collaboration, Professor Bullinger questioned whether such large consortia really fulfil the aims of increasing flexibility and reducing bureaucracy. He added that with so many partners involved in each project, the amount of EU funding received by each partner is often low.

Good to hear this said at that sort of level. Every cycle EU research funding seems to go for bigger and bigger projects. Everyone gets together to bid (and bidding costs an insane amount of work) but to what extent is the work done by these huge projects integrated, and to what extent merely collected? Some work just can't be done without big funding, and some of that requires large scale collaboration, but in the end money begets beaurocracy. I'm convinced that vastly more — and more interesting — research would be done if money was handed out in smaller packages to a wider range of people.

In the very next paragraph it says,

… he proposed that more is allocated to project management …

which seems rather at odds with the above quoted view.

Amoral Adsense

Over at Bill de hÓra's weblog there's a post about a thesis on distributing RESTian web services. In itself worth linking to for future reference, but what caught my eye was the ads Google has placed at the top.

Custom Dissertations! it says. Custom Unpublished Dissertations in the UK - Quality Guaranteed.

UK University Assignments!

An impressive demonstration of Google's adsense ad placement algorithm, to be sure …

Bibliographic records in RDF

I've had a couple of conversations recently with Bruce D'Arcus, in particular about the tendency for people working on bibliographic software of one sort or another to get stuck on the BibTeX data model. We are agreed that that data model is basically broken; it was never perfect and it has become less so as time has passed.

As an aside before I continue, I once had cause to try to modify a BibTeX style (chicago, which seemed at the time to have a rather nasty formatting bug). It turns out that BibTeX styles are written in a postfix stack language. If I hadn't learned to use an HP reverse Polish calculator as a kid I would have been completely bamboozled by it. I got somewhere with my modifications, but then I came across a script which would ask a series of questions and build a BibTeX style accordingly, so I was released from having to learn a truly obscure language properly.

Bruce's weblog is probably a good place to watch for news on ongoing efforts to develop new ways of encoding bibliographic data. Most of these are developing XML schemas for the purpose, while there is at least one RDF based effort. Unfortunately many of these are doing no more than expressing the old BibTeX data model in XML or RDF.

Bruce himself is a MODS evangelist. I haven't had time to get my head round MODS, and the fact that I feel I need to spend time doing so worries me slightly. From what I can gather, MODS is largely a simplification of the MARC 21 (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) bibliographic format, and is developed by the US Libraries of Congress. I say largely a simplification because, for example,

Funny Money

The European Parliament has unanimously adopted a report by German MEP Rolf Linkohr calling for the budget of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to be raised to 30 billion euro for the four year period. [CORDIS: News service]

Crikey. Question is, will the average project size go up by 70%, or will there be more projects?

Citation and influence: science versus the blogosphere

Jon Udell observes that communication in science is still predominantly off-line or private (access restricted journals, and email).

Beyond the computer-science-related disciplines, though, it's unclear to me how much scientific content is becoming freely available online, and therefore able to benefit from the powerful knowledge-transmission and reputation-building forces at work in the blogosphere.

One of the problems here is that academics who are not working in computer science (and no doubt some who are) are not aware of the tools, and haven't thought about what better tools could do. And I am finding, as I periodically try to do something about this, that there are very good reasons for this situation. There is still way too much expertise needed to get things set up and working smoothly enough that you can go to a busy academic and present them with a compelling proposition for investing time in learning the tools.

In the case of weblogs, and some recent introductions to the concepts and technology notwithstanding, there's still a huge barrier to entry in just explaining enough of the concepts for anyone other than a relentless self-publicist to see the value of learning.

Open Publishing in Science

Via Dan Gillmor, an interview with Harold Varmus in New Scientist.

In answer to the question, "But why bother?"

Well, it doesn't live up to the opportunities that are created by the internet. The system as it exists has produced many good journals, but journals are expensive and increasingly people are reading and searching online. There's an opportunity here to eliminate boundaries between the individual and the information, and between pieces of information.

Well worth reading.

A Networked World: Why Are Socialist Economies More Competitive?

Earl Mardle on the button again. This made me laugh out loud, then wonder whether I shouldn't be crying:

Maybe it has to do with scale, our organs collaborate among themselves, if the liver was in constant competition with the feet for resources and both spent half their time trying to sell their services to the stomach, we'd feel sick most of the time and never be able to compete with other species for resources. So while individuals can compete within a society, for whole societies to "be competitive", maybe they need to release their constituent parts' energies through higher order collaboration. [Earle Mardle, A Networked World: Why Are Socialist Economies More Competitive?]

Earl continues with these observations which fit in, to an extent, with my earlier post on innovation.

Maybe because the Scandinai\bvians u derstand that if the community, via the state, takes over the supply and maintenance of education, health services, transport, social and civil support, people have much more time available for creative thinking and doing. Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters makes the case that a great deal of human creativity comes not, as the adage puts it of necessity, but of luxury and that in those societies where even a single failure can be disastrous, we become cautious, fearful and very conservative. [Earle Mardle, A Networked World: Why Are Socialist Economies More Competitive?]

Innovation needs space, not beaurocracy. Sounds as if I could do to read The Future Eaters, which I would never have guess from the description, as generically interesting as it might appear.

Of course, this could easily sound like me, as an academic, saying, "Give me plenty of money, and make no demands of me, and you will thank yourselves for it one day." I'm sure it's true, but it's not going to get me very far :)

EvoComp cluster, academic wiki, weblogs, RSS use

EvoComp:

Evocomp is an EPSRC research cluster addressing complex systems via novel mathematical and computational models informed by biological metaphors, with the aim of designing and controlling complex systems.

There are folks here at Bristol who are involved in a Novel Computation cluster as well.

A few things strike me right away about the EvoComp web site.

1. It's a wiki.
2. It has a Plone influenced skin.
3. It is syndicating the complexity digest, which draws my attention to the fact that said digest is available as an RSS feed.
4. It provides RSS feeds of the wiki, weblogs, and more (links at the bottom of each page.

At last, evidence of academic networks light weight collaboration tools such as wikis and weblogs. There's also a link to a sourceforge web site, suggesting that the project is planning to produce open source software. One to watch.