Sunday, June 19, 2011
Unconscionable waste at the Irish universities
“I don't teach for visceral reasons – I just dislike it. ....talking to a
group of people who don't want to be there is disgusting”
David Deutsch. The “New Yorker” May 2 2011 p 35
“What we have seen instead over the past 40 years in addition to the raising of a reserve army of contingent labour, ia a kind of administrative elephantiasis...From 1976 to 2001, the number of nonfaculty professionals ballooned over 240 %, growing more than 3 times as fast as faculty”
William Derwsiewicz “The Nation” May 23, 2011, P 30
This current government has made no moves to bring the universities back into normal jurisdiction, and the “wild west” scene whereby their management can do whatever it wants has been described earlier;
http://universitywatchdog.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-greens-and-opportunistic-hypocrisy/
While this removal from their being answerable to anybody may seem clever to the new Minister for Education, there will be hell to pay, as this post will make clear. For a start, it means that management at Irish state universities can bully, bribe and intimidate both staff and students; a drastic revision of the social contract
Yet such revision has been one of the leitmotiven of the Irish state, in the wake of the domestication of the IRA with its alternative narrative of the Irish state. Paradoxically, the failure of this version of the "official" Irish state (a failure more spectacular than all IRA versions from Sean Lemass as "Minister of Defense" in the 1920s onward to P O'Neill RIP 2005) - a socioeconomic fiasco which is universally clear , will allow us put manners on its replacement
The ancien social contract was clear on a few fundamentals;
1.The Irish state existed for the benefit of the Irish people, who included the Cromwellian settlers as also the diaspora;
2.Irish culture, particularly Gaelic culture, had a privileged place in this status quo;
3.The ethos of the 1916 proclamation, with its insistence on the equitable sharing of the country's wealth was to be enshrined in the maw and sinew of the state;
4.The island of Ireland was home for those who call ourselves Irish;
5.Both the letter and spirit of the law were to be respected
Instead, in a process that has accelerated since the mid-1990's, the goal of the state has been to exemplify the new neoliberal dispensation; an ill-defined “multiculturalism” was to be the guiding cultural touchstone, even if that meant the schools went to pot ( as is now clear) with many kids not able to speak English, let alone Irish; those artists who sough to create within the bounds established by thousands of years of autochtonous creation were to be marginalized; a thoroughly corporatist state was to ignore and indeed deliberately violate the law when deemed expedient (I can attest this)
There are numerous nested Russian Doll “My Daddy is bigger than your daddy” mechanisms to call on when a stitch was dropped. The amorality of the Bar council and law society means that, beyond a slap on the wrist to an occasional solicitor/cowboy developer, there are no checks and balances for Ireland's poorly-trained lawyers. The political system is nowhere near as bad as the e-voting proposal intended for it to be, but – as the link above shows – there is no standard parliamentary answerability ,with a “Because we can” really the fundamental Dail answer
Those of us who attempt to get back to the foundational documents like the 1916 proclamation are shouted down by the nonsense that passes for meaningful media dialogue, and when successful urged to vote again and change our minds (Nice, Lisbon and without doubt the GFA had it not gone through)
Coupled with “Because we can” is, as PB Ahern used to put it so charmingly “We have de money”. As indeed they had. Moreover, they had powerful friends in the EU, and the Anglophone countries as they suppressed any native upsurge. Now their friends do not agree among themselves, except to point out that the Irish taxpayer must pay back money (s)he never borrowed to expiate the sins of a self-appointed elite. The current government do not seem to understand that it is no longer 1997; they are rather in the position of Austin Powers before he takes his crash course on the 1980's and develops a righteous fear of Mrs Thatcher
So they have not made any attempt to bring the universities under the rubric of law, and use grotesquerie like SFI to elevate hereditary politicians. This will never do. Likewise for the high salaries for very little work at universities that Morgan Kelly has rightly outed. The very values that the state universities can inculcate/foster are those that the Irish state has turned its back on in the new technocratic Disneyscape. The burgeoning of administrative staff is simply a waste of money – they have nothing to do with learning.
Derwsiewicz, in the article cited above states that individuals cannot create universities. Indeed; but, with the web, small teams can do so. In fact, they can do so in a way that ensures – pace, Deutsch – that students actually want to be doing what they're doing. The IRA's problem was that it wanted to overthrow by force a state that was violent to its core. It is much more interesting to create an Ireland that is not of this world, but rather incarnate, in symbols, on the web.
Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
19 u Meitheamh 2011
David Deutsch. The “New Yorker” May 2 2011 p 35
“What we have seen instead over the past 40 years in addition to the raising of a reserve army of contingent labour, ia a kind of administrative elephantiasis...From 1976 to 2001, the number of nonfaculty professionals ballooned over 240 %, growing more than 3 times as fast as faculty”
William Derwsiewicz “The Nation” May 23, 2011, P 30
This current government has made no moves to bring the universities back into normal jurisdiction, and the “wild west” scene whereby their management can do whatever it wants has been described earlier;
http://universitywatchdog.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-greens-and-opportunistic-hypocrisy/
While this removal from their being answerable to anybody may seem clever to the new Minister for Education, there will be hell to pay, as this post will make clear. For a start, it means that management at Irish state universities can bully, bribe and intimidate both staff and students; a drastic revision of the social contract
Yet such revision has been one of the leitmotiven of the Irish state, in the wake of the domestication of the IRA with its alternative narrative of the Irish state. Paradoxically, the failure of this version of the "official" Irish state (a failure more spectacular than all IRA versions from Sean Lemass as "Minister of Defense" in the 1920s onward to P O'Neill RIP 2005) - a socioeconomic fiasco which is universally clear , will allow us put manners on its replacement
The ancien social contract was clear on a few fundamentals;
1.The Irish state existed for the benefit of the Irish people, who included the Cromwellian settlers as also the diaspora;
2.Irish culture, particularly Gaelic culture, had a privileged place in this status quo;
3.The ethos of the 1916 proclamation, with its insistence on the equitable sharing of the country's wealth was to be enshrined in the maw and sinew of the state;
4.The island of Ireland was home for those who call ourselves Irish;
5.Both the letter and spirit of the law were to be respected
Instead, in a process that has accelerated since the mid-1990's, the goal of the state has been to exemplify the new neoliberal dispensation; an ill-defined “multiculturalism” was to be the guiding cultural touchstone, even if that meant the schools went to pot ( as is now clear) with many kids not able to speak English, let alone Irish; those artists who sough to create within the bounds established by thousands of years of autochtonous creation were to be marginalized; a thoroughly corporatist state was to ignore and indeed deliberately violate the law when deemed expedient (I can attest this)
There are numerous nested Russian Doll “My Daddy is bigger than your daddy” mechanisms to call on when a stitch was dropped. The amorality of the Bar council and law society means that, beyond a slap on the wrist to an occasional solicitor/cowboy developer, there are no checks and balances for Ireland's poorly-trained lawyers. The political system is nowhere near as bad as the e-voting proposal intended for it to be, but – as the link above shows – there is no standard parliamentary answerability ,with a “Because we can” really the fundamental Dail answer
Those of us who attempt to get back to the foundational documents like the 1916 proclamation are shouted down by the nonsense that passes for meaningful media dialogue, and when successful urged to vote again and change our minds (Nice, Lisbon and without doubt the GFA had it not gone through)
Coupled with “Because we can” is, as PB Ahern used to put it so charmingly “We have de money”. As indeed they had. Moreover, they had powerful friends in the EU, and the Anglophone countries as they suppressed any native upsurge. Now their friends do not agree among themselves, except to point out that the Irish taxpayer must pay back money (s)he never borrowed to expiate the sins of a self-appointed elite. The current government do not seem to understand that it is no longer 1997; they are rather in the position of Austin Powers before he takes his crash course on the 1980's and develops a righteous fear of Mrs Thatcher
So they have not made any attempt to bring the universities under the rubric of law, and use grotesquerie like SFI to elevate hereditary politicians. This will never do. Likewise for the high salaries for very little work at universities that Morgan Kelly has rightly outed. The very values that the state universities can inculcate/foster are those that the Irish state has turned its back on in the new technocratic Disneyscape. The burgeoning of administrative staff is simply a waste of money – they have nothing to do with learning.
Derwsiewicz, in the article cited above states that individuals cannot create universities. Indeed; but, with the web, small teams can do so. In fact, they can do so in a way that ensures – pace, Deutsch – that students actually want to be doing what they're doing. The IRA's problem was that it wanted to overthrow by force a state that was violent to its core. It is much more interesting to create an Ireland that is not of this world, but rather incarnate, in symbols, on the web.
Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
19 u Meitheamh 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
SFI: An unspeakable waste of taxpayers' money
SFI is Ireland's main science funding
body. Like others such in the world, it rests on the idea that the
economy benefits from large tranches of public funding for science.
Again like its peers, the examples of Google, Apple and so on are deemed
irrelevant by SFI; in each case, the breakthroughs came from a new
business idea applied to a publicly-available technology by college
dropouts (Facebook, with even less tech, is similar). Steve Jobs did not
just ransack Xerox Park; he simply insisted that the mouse should cost
$10 max. Larry Page did not just rip off Leo Katz's ranking algorithm,
IBM's clever etc; the lads at Google developed a business model based
on scanning the results of searches. In each case, there was no benefit
in being there first.
This particularly applies to a country as small as Ireland that can't afford anything like SFI (or PRTLI, etc). It is indeed possible to import "adjunct" faculty and up the ratings of Irish science, as assessed by publications. But wait : Doesn't this mean that the whole world now knows about the "innovation" that the unwitting taxpayer just paid for? Given that a paper achieves credibility by being much-referenced, doesn't his mean we're giving away our secrets to everybody?
No, actually; the taxpayer probably doesn't know, because the research is locked up in pay-per-view journals. (The late Robert Maxwell got his business start in one such, Pergamon press). Open science attempts to redress this, and there is a growing consensus it is correct in insisting that what is paid for by public money should be available to the public. However, our politicians are unwilling to miss out on the chance of seeming all futuristic/visionary for the cameras - and damn the torpedoes (or the cost)
As this is being written, Minister Bruton is being taken through his Potemkin tour of silicon Valley (for once, the usually weak pun “silly con” is indeed appropriate ). On the way, he will be assured of the Irish presence at Stanford, and the great things to be expected from the Irish innovation centre in San Jose. SFI is the second-biggest national scandal after Anglo, and Bruton might use this trip to start its demolition. I am going to restrict myself to two projects in areas in which I have some competence to show why he should do so.
The centre at Stanford first came to public attention with the news that the Deri mother house in Galway had taken to the air;
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/academics-rack-up-euro108000-taxpayer-bill-for-private-jets-2394074.html
So the money was refunded ….but by the taxpayer. I am to my knowledge the only Irish person to have had original courses accredited by Stanford in the past decade, so surely the Stanford Deri should have trumped anything I did with its share of 12 million diverted away from childcare, primary education, and palliative care for cancer sufferers, inter alia;
http://www.deri.us/team/
There is only one Stanford faculty member there, and he has not even given them the link to his normal site (Petrie is not faculty);
http://logic.stanford.edu/people/genesereth/genesereth.html
Note the complete absence of private funding in both Deris;
http://www.deri.ie/
But cui bono? Have a look at the “alumni” of Deri and play “spot the Irish person” (Hint; of the 10% or so, they’re disproportionally in administration);
http://www.deri.ie/about/team/alumni/
Why are we paying for the training of foreign researchers who have NO special skills? Deri – insofar as it does anything – deals with concerns that are so theoretical that NO companies will be formed.
Not so with the other project I am going to mention, software localization, which has no proper role whatsoever on a university campus;
http://www.cngl.ie/index.html
This is again exclusively funded courtesy of the taxpayer;
http://www.cngl.ie/research.html
Software localization is ideal for the R+D departments of corporations. However, they are unlikely to do any of this while they can charge the taxpayer through a mechanism like SFI. Then, when they sell the products, they can hit up the taxpayer again, now in his role as a consumer.
Ireland is increasingly fragmenting into two groups; those who think we can stand on our own two feet and produce worldclass work, and those who believe we should continue to borrow and in doing so sacrifice the autonomy that was so dearly purchased by accepting the restrictions on our autonomy the IMF/ECB (UK/USA...) will impose.
In short, we’re back to where we were 100 years ago. In the meantime, Ireland should focus on open source science.
Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
13 u Meitheamh 2011
PS Here is a very truncated list of some of the better open science sites, which give access to research without any cost to the taxpayer;
alt science
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ - good link to patent attacks
http://daviswiki.org/LUGOD Linux/Gnu fans
http://keionline.org/ “Knowlege ecology” Good, informative
http://www.righttoresearch.org/ for students and very good
http://thirdreviewer.com/ general comments
http://roar.eprints.org/ is reprints free
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ similar – Stevan Harnad, who pioneered “skywriting” is here!
http://foresight.org/ as it says on frontier tech with example http://opensourcesensing.org/
http://speakscience.org/ better still includes videos
http://okfn.org/ good = open knowledge, has tools
http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php loads of data incl astrophysics
http://www.mendeley.com/ soc netw for sci w tools
http://colabscience.com/ collaborations parallel scientific
http://corp.kaltura.com/ video
Biology and Biomedical applications
http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking Hardware and has real sites as links
http://blog.stodden.net/A pioneer speaks
http://www.mindthehealthgap.org/ great idea neglected diseases
http://openpcr.org/ Good PCR tools
http://www.synthesis.cc/ very good indeed - rob carlson
http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/igh/ seems “open source” pharma?
12 Eanair 2012
9th level Ireland - which has uncritically carried a huge amount of VP's comments, refusing to entertain rebuttals - has censored this comment I posted;
"Just heard an SFI pensioner at a conference in honour of Bill Miller, unannounced to the public and so a very exclusive audience, at UC Berkeley yesterday;
http://www.ucd.ie/physics/staff/academics/davidcoker/
The only reason I knew he was funded by the Irish taxpayer was that very briefly, during the setup, SFI appeared for a few seconds - ok, nanoseconds
He started then with a photo of himself at some cliff scenery. Moher? No, California. It was clear that the pitch was "Hire me - I really really will suck up to you"
At no point was an acknowledgement given to SFI, let alone the numerous Irish taxpayers who sacrifice food, housing and cancer treatment to allow a narcissist make himself pretty
BTW, the talk was absolute crap, a perfunctory run-through of material taught to undergrads at Cal. As he admitted, it was bringing coal to Newcastle
How long more will Irish people be deprived of basic essential services for this insult to our intelligence?"
I now ask Hedley and his gang to stop syndicating my posts ere, as I do NOT want to be associated with them
0
comments
This particularly applies to a country as small as Ireland that can't afford anything like SFI (or PRTLI, etc). It is indeed possible to import "adjunct" faculty and up the ratings of Irish science, as assessed by publications. But wait : Doesn't this mean that the whole world now knows about the "innovation" that the unwitting taxpayer just paid for? Given that a paper achieves credibility by being much-referenced, doesn't his mean we're giving away our secrets to everybody?
No, actually; the taxpayer probably doesn't know, because the research is locked up in pay-per-view journals. (The late Robert Maxwell got his business start in one such, Pergamon press). Open science attempts to redress this, and there is a growing consensus it is correct in insisting that what is paid for by public money should be available to the public. However, our politicians are unwilling to miss out on the chance of seeming all futuristic/visionary for the cameras - and damn the torpedoes (or the cost)
As this is being written, Minister Bruton is being taken through his Potemkin tour of silicon Valley (for once, the usually weak pun “silly con” is indeed appropriate ). On the way, he will be assured of the Irish presence at Stanford, and the great things to be expected from the Irish innovation centre in San Jose. SFI is the second-biggest national scandal after Anglo, and Bruton might use this trip to start its demolition. I am going to restrict myself to two projects in areas in which I have some competence to show why he should do so.
The centre at Stanford first came to public attention with the news that the Deri mother house in Galway had taken to the air;
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/academics-rack-up-euro108000-taxpayer-bill-for-private-jets-2394074.html
So the money was refunded ….but by the taxpayer. I am to my knowledge the only Irish person to have had original courses accredited by Stanford in the past decade, so surely the Stanford Deri should have trumped anything I did with its share of 12 million diverted away from childcare, primary education, and palliative care for cancer sufferers, inter alia;
http://www.deri.us/team/
There is only one Stanford faculty member there, and he has not even given them the link to his normal site (Petrie is not faculty);
http://logic.stanford.edu/people/genesereth/genesereth.html
Note the complete absence of private funding in both Deris;
http://www.deri.ie/
But cui bono? Have a look at the “alumni” of Deri and play “spot the Irish person” (Hint; of the 10% or so, they’re disproportionally in administration);
http://www.deri.ie/about/team/alumni/
Why are we paying for the training of foreign researchers who have NO special skills? Deri – insofar as it does anything – deals with concerns that are so theoretical that NO companies will be formed.
Not so with the other project I am going to mention, software localization, which has no proper role whatsoever on a university campus;
http://www.cngl.ie/index.html
This is again exclusively funded courtesy of the taxpayer;
http://www.cngl.ie/research.html
Software localization is ideal for the R+D departments of corporations. However, they are unlikely to do any of this while they can charge the taxpayer through a mechanism like SFI. Then, when they sell the products, they can hit up the taxpayer again, now in his role as a consumer.
Ireland is increasingly fragmenting into two groups; those who think we can stand on our own two feet and produce worldclass work, and those who believe we should continue to borrow and in doing so sacrifice the autonomy that was so dearly purchased by accepting the restrictions on our autonomy the IMF/ECB (UK/USA...) will impose.
In short, we’re back to where we were 100 years ago. In the meantime, Ireland should focus on open source science.
Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
13 u Meitheamh 2011
PS Here is a very truncated list of some of the better open science sites, which give access to research without any cost to the taxpayer;
alt science
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ - good link to patent attacks
http://daviswiki.org/LUGOD Linux/Gnu fans
http://keionline.org/ “Knowlege ecology” Good, informative
http://www.righttoresearch.org/ for students and very good
http://thirdreviewer.com/ general comments
http://roar.eprints.org/ is reprints free
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ similar – Stevan Harnad, who pioneered “skywriting” is here!
http://foresight.org/ as it says on frontier tech with example http://opensourcesensing.org/
http://speakscience.org/ better still includes videos
http://okfn.org/ good = open knowledge, has tools
http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php loads of data incl astrophysics
http://www.mendeley.com/ soc netw for sci w tools
http://colabscience.com/ collaborations parallel scientific
http://corp.kaltura.com/ video
Biology and Biomedical applications
http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking Hardware and has real sites as links
http://blog.stodden.net/A pioneer speaks
http://www.mindthehealthgap.org/ great idea neglected diseases
http://openpcr.org/ Good PCR tools
http://www.synthesis.cc/ very good indeed - rob carlson
http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/igh/ seems “open source” pharma?
12 Eanair 2012
9th level Ireland - which has uncritically carried a huge amount of VP's comments, refusing to entertain rebuttals - has censored this comment I posted;
"Just heard an SFI pensioner at a conference in honour of Bill Miller, unannounced to the public and so a very exclusive audience, at UC Berkeley yesterday;
http://www.ucd.ie/physics/staff/academics/davidcoker/
The only reason I knew he was funded by the Irish taxpayer was that very briefly, during the setup, SFI appeared for a few seconds - ok, nanoseconds
He started then with a photo of himself at some cliff scenery. Moher? No, California. It was clear that the pitch was "Hire me - I really really will suck up to you"
At no point was an acknowledgement given to SFI, let alone the numerous Irish taxpayers who sacrifice food, housing and cancer treatment to allow a narcissist make himself pretty
BTW, the talk was absolute crap, a perfunctory run-through of material taught to undergrads at Cal. As he admitted, it was bringing coal to Newcastle
How long more will Irish people be deprived of basic essential services for this insult to our intelligence?"
I now ask Hedley and his gang to stop syndicating my posts ere, as I do NOT want to be associated with them
