Retroid Raving

The next most obscure major sculpture / outdoors artwork at UCT is the Darth Vader statue, hidden in the corner of a bleak and otherwise featureless courtyard on the north side of the Julius Malema Hall - sorry; forgot it hadn't been officially renamed yet; Jammie Hall!

Of course, there is another myth concerning this monument: that it is in fact a depiction of the "spirit of Table Mountain", called by its apparently more ethnically-sound name,  named "To Hoerikwaggo".

 This is of course a mere fancy: anyone seeing the tarnished, brooding hulk will immediately know that this just HAS to be the Sith Lord Darth Vader; as with our previous offering, its placement - apparently a deliberate attempt to hide it in an obscure and dreary location - is a clever use of context to emphasise the air of banishment and neglect.  Even more cunning is the use of loose bricks and builder's sand on the base of the figure to hammer home the casual abuse of a once-mighty potentate; how He has been forgotten in our popular culture, and used as a table.

And yet, and yet....  Still he stands, darkly brooding; still he looms over one who ventures close, so that a shiver runs up one's spine, and one looks around, involuntarily.

 For we remember: always two Sith there are....

UCT has a long tradition of parking statuary and other amorphous lumps of scrap around its various campuses, with very little explanation of what they are, or why they are there.

 They also have a habit of putting these things in some of the most obscure locations possible, where they are very well hidden from casual view, and it is generally highly difficult to see them properly.  It's almost as if a committee tasked with where to put large and concretey or metal objects donated by well-meaning but artistically challenged donors, has had a series of competitions on where to hide the latest monstrosity - and they have done a good job.

The View From the North has decided to expose these artworks to public scrutiny along with some invented narrative, given that there is generally nothing written on or anywhere near said objects to enlighten one as to what it signifies, who it commemorates or dignifies, or why UCT got lumbered with it.

Our first candidate is "The Blind Watchmaker".  This offering is cunningly placed below street level in front of the main entrance to the John Day Zoology Building: it is posed against a backdrop of a big windows fronting a dark foyer, which means it is seldom properly visible.  Its position in the small courtyard also means it is effectively impossible to see it properly from any direction except from directly in front and above.

It commemorates the book of the same name by the legendary Richard Dawkins, and symbolises the tortuous and essentially random evolutionary development of all organisms on this planet, by juxtaposing apparently unrelated modules to make an ungainly, aesthetically unpleasing whole.  Just as evolution does.  Situating it in what is essentially a hole, isolated from the stream of campus life is a masterstroke, as it adds a layer of complexity depicting isolated evolutionary niches to the imagery that would have been impossible otherwise.

Unkind folk have been heard to say it is just an anchor from a tramp steamer which has had some junk welded onto it, but their opinion is worth what you paid for it.

Talk about serendipitous Web trawling...there I was checking out a now-defunct RSS feed from a deli.cio.us feed from my web-teaching-by-remote colleague Alan J Cann at U Leicester, when I saw a link to a story with the taster "The impact of OA is significantly greater in the developing world than it is in first world countries"...which links to a story published in Science entitled "Open access and global participation" by James A Evans and Jacob Reimer, which basically says:

  ...and the original will show you South Africa very firmly over there on the left, with the considerable impact of OA publishing crew, namely Chile, Bulgaria and Mexico.

Which is all the more reason, added to what I already pointed out, to support Open Access publishing from our institution.

Isn't it??

In the absence of any regularity from Transplant_Ed, who seems to be neglecting his Friday duty, and because it is a HORRIBLE day outside, I give you - A View Of the North.  Taken not three days ago, as the sun rose golden.

Coming soon: an irreverent and unauthorised Guide to UCT Statuary and Monuments.  Every Friday.  Watch this space...!  Meet "Darth Vader".  Fear "The Blind Watchmaker".  Disapprove of "All in the Family".  Wonder at the point of "PG Windows".

You know, one would think - given the idealism at UCT, and the strong support for Open Access models of pretty much everything - that we as an institution would be members of one of the biggest worldwide initiatives for open access scholarly publication.

I refer, of course, to the BMC or BioMed Central family of journals: as an Editor of one of these, I get regular communications such as this, below.

BioMed Central Institutional Members Update

The following institutions have taken out full BioMed Central membership, allowing their researchers to publish in any of BioMed Central's journals without directly paying any article processing charge: [my emphasis]

Instituto Aragones de Ciencias de la Salud, Zaragoza, Spain
Agenzia di Sanita Pubblica, Rome, Italy
Biology Centre ASCR, Institute of Plant Molecular Biology, Branišovská, Czech Republic

Researchers from the following institutions are now entitled to a discounted article processing as these organisations have taken out BioMed Central's Supporter Membership:

Roma Tre Universita, Rome, Italy
Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, United States
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, United States
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Spain
Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, United States

A full list of all BioMed Central Member Institutes is available from the BioMed Central website.

 Going to this web site reveals...that not ONE South African institution is a member, and nor are we as UCT apparently a "supporter member" either.

It's not as if the charges are that onerous, either: supporter membership would cost us something like R90 000.00 per year, for a 15% rebate on publication charges, and full membership would cost as much as the page charges are per year, with a loyalty discount.  From the web site:

Prepay Membership enables an organization to cover the whole cost of publishing for their investigators when publishing in our open access journals. No additional fees will be paid by individual authors. This is an advance payment system whereby customers pay upfront for accepted articles authored by their investigators to be processed and published. Upon publication, the full Article-Processing-Charge (APC) for the journal in question, minus a loyalty discount, will be deducted from the account.

Now UCT staff and students are increasingly publishing in these journals, some of which are now quite prestigious, and many of which are rapidly increasing in impact factors: in fact, 39 articles were published last year that had Author Affiliation = University of Cape Town, including 4 from my group.

If one considers that it costs ~R10 000 to publish a decent article in a BMC journal, that is ~R400 000 worth of publications.  This may sound a lot - but if each of these brings in ~R90 000 in subsidy from DoE, UCT would be paying out only 1/9th of direct income, without even considering the loyalty discount.

Really, really, UCT, we need to consider such expenditure as being very well worth it: publication in electronic open access journals is very much a growing phenomenon, and would showcase our works better than any other medium.  The trouble is, given the paucity of hard science and other research funding in SA, R10K / pop represents a substantial portion of most people's research budgets - so it is simply not going to happen.

A Research-Led Afropolitan University (ReLeAfroUni?) would make it happen...wouldn't it??

How interesting it was - given the View From the North's deep interest in the doings and screwings dontings of the NRF (aka the Not Real Funding Agency) - to see a circular from Prof Danie Visser this am, to "The Research Community at UCT".

This addresses, inter alia, the "...major policy-shift ...by announcing that henceforth rating and funding would once again be linked..."; the fact that "...the Treasury allocation was much lower than anticipated, which meant that many rated researchers were left in the lurch"; the funding disjunction between lurching into their new direction and fulfilling old obligations - and the problems with the online system. 

But we digress: while we commend Prof Visser on telling Dr. Albert S. van Jaarsveld (Acting President) UCT's frustrations with the Not Real Funding Agency, the problem is in fact SA-global.  That is, the agency is sick, underfunded, and under-competent.  Indeed, in the newest issue of the venerable South African Journal of Science - it's apron strings to the NRF now throughly severed - the new Editor, Michael Cherry, and two correspondents lay into the NRF in fine style.  And I can't link to it, because - despite being a member of the ASSAf and receiving free print copies, I cannot get the online version...!!

But the fundamental thing that is said is this:

"New researchers, rated for the first time, and more established ones-whose cycles are beginning, but who do not fall into the rating categories above-are left high and dry, unless they are successful in being allocated funds from the Blues Skies programme, which has only R7 million to disburse this year.

...Is it surprising that government appears to be denying the NRF additional funding, as it has shown that it is incapable of administering the funds it already has in a judicious manner?  The problem is that South Africa's research enterprise will be diminished, not just in terms of graduate students not trained, but as researchers who are denied funding opportunities - particularly young researchers, who are worst affected by the NRF's ill-conceived strategy - join the exodus to greener pastures abroad.

The NRF board, now chaired by Belinda Bozzoli of the University of the Witwatersand, should waste no more time appointing a new president, as the organisation appears to have been in limbo since the departure of its former president Khotso Mokhele in 2006. The incumbent needs to appoint a management team mative enough to look beyond the tired practices of the past in seeking a new modus operandi for funding research in South Africa."

Amen, brother Mike, amen....

While I am professionally interested in the Influenza A H1N1 virus recently come out of Mexico, I also collect cartoons on this and other virological subjects.

And as an AA Milne and WtP fan, I just HAD to share this with you....