Especially when cameras are rolling...

So you've had a hard commute, and the traffic was foul, and your son guilt tripped you the whole way in to work, and the deadlines are crowding in...then you look up at the sky, and remember your little sister saying "I used to think that seeing clouds like that meant that Heaven was behind them".

 And it's almost all right again.

Now here's a thing a Kollectiv could get its teeth into: a new book entitled "The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters", by one Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University in the USA.  This is reviewed in a recent Times Higher Education post, which also reports an interview with Ginsberg.

"Faculty members feeling besieged by, well, take your pick – increased scrutiny of their productivity and the relevance of their research, broadsides against tenure, attacks on their expertise and ability to collectively bargain, or their shrinking role in the affairs of their institutions – will no doubt find succour in a new book to be released next month.

In his polemic... Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, takes stock of what ails higher education and finds a single, unifying cause: the growth of administration.

Ginsberg bemoans the expansion over the past 30 years of what he calls “administrative blight”, as personified by what he characterises as an army of “deanlets” and “deanlings”. By virtue of their sheer number and their managerial rather than academic orientation, Ginsberg argues, these administrators have served to marginalise the faculty in carrying out tasks related to personnel and curriculum that once sat squarely in their domain."

 Any of this sounding familiar?  Heard any rumours of academic union-bashing circulating down in your bit of UCT Pty SA Ltd recently?

One of us distinctly remembers a now-retired academic who shall not be named (but he used to sing operatic arias loudly in the corridors of a depressingly ugly Stalinist Modern building on this campus) standing up in a Science Faculty Board meeting some years ago, and noting (just for minuting purposes) that the number of PASS staff had just for the first time exceeded the number of academics.

 We wonder what the ratio is now?

 Creeping corporatisation, comrades: that is the enemy!  And the luta continua with a vengeance.

Back in the unreconstructed 70s and 80s, some of us slightly more noncomformist not-quite-dissidents thought it might be fun to show up how ridiculous The Regime's censorship laws were - so we talked about trying to get a couple of songs banned.

One was Chris de Burgh's "Just Another Poor Boy".  The other was the Strawb's "The Man Who Called Himself Jesus". Obvously subversive, both of them: really,how could The Big J be a poor kid, or a misunderstood modern prophet??

We didn't follow through with it - it might have worked, but we actually liked the songs! - but one of us was reminded the other day when they bought a Strawbs compilation for some ridiculously low price, and there was that song again. 

Very underrated band, the Strawbs: always instrumentally and melodically superb, even when the lyrics sometimes sucked - and when they were good, they were very, very good.  While they are mostly remembered now for their satirical "State of the Union"- which, we will remind you, is the unofficial song of our very own Academic Workers Union - they were much more than that.  Which is the subject of another rave, another time.

For we are here, we in the Kollectiv, to carry on a long tradition of modifying the lyrics of others - given that we have no talent whatever in writing actual new songs - honouring another Big J.

Take it away, comrades....

The Man Who Called Himself Julius*

He came into the shop and looked me straight between the eyes
And said "You know I'm Julius", and I must have looked surprised
Because he said "You bloody agent, you mulungu don't understand"
And his six bodyguards lifted up their guns.

He was the man who called himself Julius.

For a minute I was speechless, then I looked into his face
With sufficient fat deposits for the total human race
And I said "You must be joking" but he slowly shook his head
And said "That's what you all say, you might as well be dead".

He was the man who called himself Julius.

He asked me if I knew a business he could nationalise
I said "Well, try A**a bank, that would give them a surprise"
And I was trying to be serious but he didn't seem impressed
He said "You think I'm crazy, you're just like all the press".

He was the man who called himself Julius.

I was really quite embarrassed, he was looking so sincere
So I said "I close the shop soon, won't you come and have a
beer"
Then he asked me if I meant it and he smiled a funny smile
And he said he'd prefer a tender, but he hung around a while.

He was the man who called himself Julius.

On the way he stopped to pat little children's heads
And he taught them one line slogans to say as they went off to their beds
But mostly they were frightened and they looked at him wide eyed
And when he said his name was Julius, one girl even cried.

He was the man who called himself Julius.

In the pub I asked him if he'd tried to see Anglo
And he said although he'd asked about it, it really wouldn't go
Then he said he thought he'd better leave, he had some work to do
He said he'd come and nationalise me in about a week or two.

He was the man who called himself Julius.

Well after he had gone I thought of what he'd said
And all his funny actions they kept running through my head
And when I felt my mind was drowning in a sea of blood
It seemed his pint of Chivas had turned into toxic mud

He was the man who called himself Julius.
He was the man who called himself Julius.

* = link to the actual song

I notice Mr Price's Rondebosch branch (aka our VC) has the following to say, according to our UCT home page, concerning rushing into tertiary education:

"Vice-chancellor Dr Max Price dissuaded learners from jumping straight into the "hardest-to-get-into" careers, such as engineering and medicine, at university, advising them to choose generic degrees first in order to be "well-rounded and better educated" professionals.

Speaking from experience (he first studied medicine, and then a BA degree), Price described it as "illogic and irrational" to think that being good at maths makes students a natural fit to such careers. He placed responsibility for that misperception at the door of the country's higher education system, which he believes is doing a disservice to the youth and the economy.

Most 17-year-olds don't know for sure what they want in life, Price said, and should rather spend the first three years at university studying for general degrees, while using that time to explore further options."

 Ummmm...yes, well, that might be a little hard to do, here at UCT Co SA Pty Ltd, given our rather high fees.  And pretty hard to do anywhere, for the bulk of first-time entrants, given that dicking about for three years while you decide what you want to do, will not go down well with whomever is funding said dicking.

And isn't that the "liberal arts degree" so beloved of Those Who Tell Us We are Philistines?  I notice that the example is not very good; doing a medical degree THEN a touchy-feely humanities/arts degree is not quite the same as the converse, is it?  Might mean you have a lot more money to go do the second, for a start!

Kids, don't listen to Uncle Max: unless your parents / funders are as liberal as the degree you wish to take while you defer actually working for anything like a profession, and have enough money to support your self-indulgency, you are on a hiding to nothing. 

Which is what you may end up with.

The Vatican has just put us straight: no more shilly-shallying about; The Big G likes GM.

So:

The X1th Commandment

Thou shalt genetically modify
crop plants henceforth

- Pontifical Academy of Sciences
March 2011

And the year has started with a bang, we went to Korea, and the temperature got below -10, saw a lot of Buddhist temples and did some science and took a lot of photos and wrote bad haiku....

Bamboo leaves, growing
Green, in the snow.  Brown-leaved tree:
Juxtaposition

Deep breath - hold for five seconds.  Say "Frak it" or something similar.  Practice breathing kata.

So - hello, all, and we're back!  At work and at UCT; the 30th year on the job - and how do you feel, you ask?

Yes, fine, don't worry about it - and to business!

An element of the Kollectiv went walking on main campus today, from the Uttermost North, to the Uttermost South - fruit-themed laptop in bag (yes, we have gone to the Dark Side), memory stick in side pocket, intent on Higher Things.

And noticed - trees, that have somehow grown, all unnoticed.  Freshers and -ettes, thronging the pavements.  Many, many freshers and -ettes...yea, and their name was Legion, for they were many.  Many, many...young, clean-limbed (well, mostly), not wearing a hell of a lot - not a lot changes, does it??

How many can we take, you wonder?  Because we have gone from 5 900-odd in 1974 (trust us, some of us were there) to 25 000-odd now.  Without a commensurate increase in infrastructure, we will note: OK, they've paved the not-quite Paradise that was the back of Jammie, where were the bushes someone sat in once to smoke a certain herb while waiting to gatecrash a Dollar Brand concert (hey, I was 19! - says the offending one); there's the odd new building (very odd, in the case of the Leslies) - but not 4x the structures.

And not 4x the lecturing staff either, we'll be bound.

To cap it all, there's now the awful rumour that certain folk (aka Mr Price Rondebosch) are talking wildly of increasing numbers to 34 000 or so.

 How the FRAK are they going to do that??  There's no longer the possibility of taking over UWC and shipping all the touchy-feely Humanities students out there; they're now a successful and quite large Uni in their own right - so unless we build another campus, there's nowhere to PUT all the extra bodies!

Unless - and here the speculation becomes seriously dark - they plan to try to make the UCT lecturing staff teach outside of the 1-5 + Meridian + afternoon slot lecturing times...and double up on lectures....  Could they do that??

Well, yes - in a word.  The Beast that is Bremner can do just about anything - unless we say "no".

Our Cairo moment is almost upon us, comrades: we really, really need to say "no". 

Loudly.

The View From the North Kollectiv

I have a new version of what NRF stands for - that would be:

No?!  Re-rating??  F@£$%^!!!

For the following reasons: I share with you my open letter to the NRF rating section.

 Addenda:

Received in mailbox: Supportdesk@nrf.ac.za
From: ed.rybicki@gmail.com
Message:
Programme : 2011 Rating Application
Reference : EV2010100200001
Name : EDWARD
Surname : RYBICKI
Email : ed.rybicki@gmail.com
ID Number : 5503225194081

Description :I spent a long, long time trying to get my Best research outputs of last 8 yrs sorted out this afternoon - then tonight, I access the page to get NO entries at all and this message: Error Loading Browser, Please Call Your System Administrator Cannot Execute SQL Command: Argument data type text is invalid for argument 1 of left function. What the HELL is going on??

Calling Page : /Submission/Evaluation/

Dear User
You have been logged out of the NRF-Online system.
This happens when you have been not been actively browsing the site for a while.
Kindly login again.

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.

Given that I have a violent antipathy for the kinds of simperingly kitschy inspirational posters that are so ubiquitous, yet more than a passing fondness for the products disseminated by the wonderful despair.com, I had to give you this....

Hey, you gotta love ICTS: they define the definition of insanity (while doing good work), by doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result...I refer, of course, to the never-ending and fruitless endeavour that is fixing GroupSTUPID!!!  The latest offering:

Dear UCT staff and students,
 
We require a period of unscheduled maintenance time on the UCT GWIA, a part of the UCT email system that affects IMAP users and the external delivery of mail. 
 
Reason for the maintenance:
Troubleshooting an issue regarding the UCT email Disclaimer.
 
Date & Time:
Intermittent unavailability for the period: Tuesday 16 March, 17h00 - 19h00.
 
Affected services or groups:
Intermittent unavailability for IMAP users and interruptions to external mail delivery.
 
We will post a message to the ICTS website System and Service Announcements pane as soon as the maintenance is complete.
 
Regards,
ICTS Communications

So...outgoing mail will be affected...because of the UCT email disclaimer??  Really??  A simple solution, folks: DON'T USE GROUPSTUPID.  Ah, Gmail, thy virtues are plain to see....  And see here, for an earlier offering on how silly the disclaimer / datclaimer is.

I'm off to read my Gmail.  Which - thanks to ICTS and submarine cables - really works well.

Mail from ICTS on Friday 5th:

Dear UCT staff and students,

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the system of setting clocks one or two hours ahead of standard time so that sunrise and sunset occur at a later hour, thus artificially moving a period of daylight to the evening hours.  South Africa does not use this system and the DST setting is centrally de-activated on the GroupWise server at UCT.

This deactivation of DST did not flow down to all GroupWise users [! how surprising!  - Ret.] and as a result some people’s calendars will switch to DST at the end of March. If you are affected, a once-off configuration change is required.

Hands down.  Really: it is the most frustrating, clunky piece of sh1t I have ever had to deal with to get email - and I go back to the days of logging in via DOS to UCTVAX and UCTHPX!!

The latest insult is this - which I get after a banner which says my mailbox is corrupted, and needs to be rebuilt, and that this may take a few minutes:

It has been saying that for 30 minutes....

I have had enough.  I am already in the cloud (yes, looked at from both sides now, thank you B-), I have my Gmail account (retroid.raving@gmail.com, seeing as you asked - thanks, Vernon!), I have imported all my addresses and I autoforward my mail.  Frak Gwise.  FOREVER!!!!!