The View From the North Kollectiv notes with interest this missive from Union Central today:

"Dear AU Members,
 
We have just been informed that UCT Finance is predicting a R46 million surplus for 2010.
 
This comes against the background of the 2009/2010 negotiations, where it was clearly stated that UCT could not afford to meet the pay policy.
 
It is important to note that more than one third of that surplus (R16m) arises from staff churn, i.e. unfilled positions or delay in filling positions – which is directly related to our workload.
 
We believe it is untenable for the University management to claim that it cannot afford its pay policy whilst simultaneously extracting a R16 million surplus from staff alone.
 
We continue to negotiate with management and will keep you informed."

 No!!  Really??  OU^TM negotiates in bad faith??  Never!!  The Korporate Arm of the University would never do that - would it??

Sadly, it appears as though they would - unless the folk doing the negotiating were kept in the dark by the folk handling the money.

Which, knowing this institution, is very possible: just the other day, our Retroid Komponent was amused to hear from a SoJS* colleague, that the Fees Office and the Admissions Office down in the BotB** apparently do not speak to one another.  Which means that parents of aspirant students have to inform the Admissions Office once they have paid the Fees Office....

But maybe they need to pay Max more: he is, by a newspaper account at least (Funday Crimes), the worst paid VC of universities worth noticing in SA.

But we are not concerned with the aspirant comprador bourgeoisie, comrades: la loota continua!  OU^TM continues to exploit us!  Rise up, and strike!!  March!! 

Ummmmmmmmm....exams are finished, things are winding down...maybe in late January??

* = South of Jammie Steps

** = Belly of the Beast - aka Bremner.  Do try to keep up?

I have mentioned previously that my new brief at Our University - and it IS ours, even if wicked people want to "brand"* it - as of next year will be to help establish a Research Portal at UCT.

Which begs the question - what IS a Research Portal??

Turns out it is a little like a politician's policies - anything you like, if you pay for it....

But seriously, it will be to do with having a window onto tools - and the tools themselves - that will help the researcher at UCT, whoever they are and whatever they do.  And for most people, that will be reliable email, free Microsoft Office, and easy access to forms and to the Libraries.

Which effortlessly brings me to the topic presently occupying me, which is  - how to find specific information from as long ago as 1918, on the discovery of viruses.  From home, nogal.

A fairly difficult test of the systems, possibly, but not unreasonable - and directly relevant to my sabbatical project of producing a book, so damaging a couple of avians with one rock.

We start with googling (completely fair use of a word now in common currency) "influenza 1918 etiology", and lo, The Big G spits forth many, many hits.  Winnowing them down a bit gives us a page with mention of an account by a British doctor of a couple of Frenchmen who proved that the etiological agent of the Spanish Flu was a "filterable virus" - interesting fact in itself, given bacterial viruses had only just been discovered, and viruses themselves had been described only 20 years earlier (stay with me; it gets more general), so pretty fundamental.

And this is where the fun starts.  Let's say, for the sake of argument, I have forgotten how to get hold of electronic journals - so I head for the UCT home page.  There I click on the "Research & Libraries" tab, and then "Libraries".  I get a screen describing the libraries, not the library site at all - with only an obscure link in text or another off on the right-hand side linking to the actual place.Thus:

University of Cape Town / Research & libraries / Libraries via kwout

Which is pretty obscure...!  OK, then clicking there gets you here:

University of Cape Town Libraries via kwout

Where way down the bottom on the right-hand side is what we need: EZProxy is our gateway to UCT Library resources from off-campus.  Click there, and this is all you get: a wimpy little screen with Libraries as one of the options.

Database Menu // Off-campus access to selected e-resources via kwout

 

 I note the statement at the bottom: why does the URL NOT match the certificate, BTW??  But no matter.  So you go back to UCT Libraries...and there you are bid Welcome / Wamkelekile / Welkom, and you can finally start on looking for an eJournal or using databases. 

Which has its own frustrations, one of which is that the ISI Web of Science - accessible only via a 3-click drill-down fromthe home page, and then only as one item in a loooooong alphabetical list - has on its its menu bar, in smallprint, the following - about which I have blogged before:

So, to summarise: two of the most useful tools available to a practicing researcher - ISI Web of Science, and the associated web-based FREE referencing / bibliographic tool - available only if you know EXACTLY where you are going and what you want, and then only via a long, tortuous road.

And I was still no closer to finding my Frenchmen...and lo, 'twas the Big G that did it for me, via a very excellent French site that gives free access to all the Comptes Rendus going back to the mid-1800s.**

NOT the way the Research Portal will work, hopefully!

Ed Rybicki
MCB

* = when I hear the word "brand", I reach for my mshini....

** = Charles Lebailly, Charles Nicolle and MR Dujarric de la Riviere, since you ask.

The Rev Frank Chikane - yes, he of the organophosphorus-laced undergarments - has in recent days been acting as apologist in the Cape Town Murder Gazette Times for He who has been termed The Native Intelligence.  Yes, he whose best friends while in power were Jack, Johnny and Jim; who trawled the internet late at night, and believed what he found there.

And then put it into policy - or worse, did NOT enact policy as a result.  As a result of which, 300 000 people may have died.

According to the Rev Frank, the Univ of Sussex pseudo-intellectual of whom we speak - so ably outed as such by a former Editor of the Mail and Grauniad - was merely indulging his deity-given right of skepticism concerning what nasty pharmaceutical companies were pushing onto us.

That is, poisons in the guise of antiretrovirals - and worse, poisons which were to be given in ways not sanctioned in that source of all evil, The West.

Really, Frank?

You forget, my good Rev, that said Native Intelligence wrote an open letter to world leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, in which he said a number of things that pointed up his complete inability to comprehend how science works - and his complete and blind refusal to acknowledge facts given to him by people inside his own country.

I reproduce for you, therefore, something several of us wrote at the time - which may jog your memory.

Correspondence

Nature 405, 273 (18 May 2000) | doi:10.1038/35012786

AIDS dissidents aren't victims — but the people their ideas kill will be

Edward Rybicki¹, Anna-Lise Williamson² & Lynn Morris^3,4

1. Department of Microbiology, University of Cape Town, PB Rondebosch 7701, South Africa
2. Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Cape Town, PO Observatory 7925, South Africa
3. National Institute for Virology, Private Bag X4, Sandringham, Johannesburg 2131, South Africa
4. The authors are members of a consortium sponsored by the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative, seeking to formulate vaccines to the HIV-1 subtype C viruses prevalent in the area.

Sir

As South African scientists working in the field of HIV/AIDS vaccine research, we are extremely concerned about the letter president Thabo Mbeki recently sent other heads of state (Nature 404, 911; 2000). As an individual Mr Mbeki is entitled to his point of view, but as our head of state we feel he risks binding our country to an untenable position.

Mr Mbeki's comments that distress us most are these:

1: "It is suggested ... that there are some scientists who are 'dangerous and discredited' with whom nobody ... should communicate or interact ... We are now being asked to do precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did, because, it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the majority, against which dissent is prohibited."

This is unfair. The views of the 'AIDS dissidents', publicly aired when the debate was current, are largely ignored now because most experts do not believe they have any currency in the light of today's knowledge. Yet the 33-member committee Mr Mbeki has convened to advise his government contains as many 'AIDS dissidents' from other countries as South African scientists. Less than half of the total are HIV/AIDS experts (see Nature 405, 105; 2000).

2: "The scientists we are supposed to put into scientific quarantine include Nobel prizewinners, members of academies of science and emeritus professors of various disciplines of medicine!"

This is a misleading statement: distinguished though these people may be, if they have not worked in areas concerning HIV/AIDS they may not be well-enough informed to have credibility in this debate.

3: "People who otherwise would fight very hard to defend the critically important rights of freedom of thought and speech occupy, with regard to the HIV/AIDS issue, the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism which argues that the only freedom we have is to agree with what they decree to be established scientific truths."

This is incorrect. 'AIDS dissidents' promote the idea that unholy alliances of pharmaceutical companies and funding bodies are bent on silencing them. The fact is that, if one's scientific views are very obviously not being backed up by other people's findings, one's scientific credibility is lessened. Internationally, science is a democratic institution: as such we would hope that Mr Mbeki would sympathize with it. This case has clear historical parallels with the championing of Trofim Lysenko's flawed science by the authorities in the former Soviet Union, and with the 'scientific' justifications of apartheid by the old South Africa. Neither is a good example to follow!

4: "It may be that these comments are extravagant. If they are, it is because in the very recent past, we had to fix our own eyes on the very face of tyranny."

This is irrelevant to the country's AIDS-related crisis. The previous government was guilty of inaction in the face of a threatened epidemic; the present government has not done enough in the past five years to stave off the disaster that now threatens us.

We would like Mr Mbeki and others to consider how the mass of South Africans would react if he were to give a sympathetic ear to unrepentant proponents of apartheid. His willingness to be influenced by people with no credibility causes as much anguish to those of us working to combat HIV/AIDS.

The simple facts, as shown by a huge volume of scientific and medical research, are that HIV causes AIDS; that in Africa (as in other developing regions) the disease is mainly spread heterosexually; and that AIDS kills poor people in disproportionate numbers. We most emphatically do not need to revisit the debate on the causation of AIDS. What we do urgently need is to educate, train and medicate, to save lives.

As long as Mr Mbeki is being advised by people with no credibility, we as South African scientists feel dangerously marginalized in the search for solutions to HIV/AIDS.

So, Rev Frank: who do you think comes off looking better over the last ten years?  Your principal, or the people who so vehemently opposed him - including the ones he made vicious ad hominem attacks on, in public forums?  I would apologise less for your man, Rev - or you may have to join The Intelligence in a cauldron of his making when the reckoning comes.