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.

And so the leaves grow back on the ivy - sorry, Virginia creeper - that adorns our venerable buildings, and a young person's thoughts turn to...well, pretty much anything other than studying, given the well-established tradition of frantic displacement activity that afflicts students when the prospect of having to S.T.U.D.Y. all that stuff that flew over your head during the year.

Surely you know the old UCT sayings?  That

• when the ivy is green, it's time to party
• when the ivy falls off, it's time to work
• when the ivy comes back, it's time to study
• in the case of failure to follow steps 2 and/or 3, just keep partying; it's too late for you.... 
• oh, and the Cecil below Jammie steps will stand up when a virgin walks past (he hasn't yet, although he nearly did, once...)
  

Some things never change: like the average age of students, study habits, smoking grass behind Jammie (can't do that anymore; they built a library over the bushes), going to the beach rather than studying, drinking cheap wine likewise...ah, me.  Thirty-four years on, and I remember it like yesterday.

Well some of it, anyway.  The bits that haven't been corrupted by age, info overload, and - dare I say it - too much cheap red wine.  When I was a student, obviously.  And not quite like yesterday - possibly last week.

And I still wonder, why do we do it like this? Why do we have these tests of short-term retention aka exams; why do we burden lecturers with marking many versions of the same thing, in handwriting that varies from the childishly clear through to the completely frantically illegible?  This is the computer age, people; I remember doing multiple choice / guess back in 1975 that was marked by computers - so why isn't everything done that way now?  Why is it still about recycling the lecturer's utterances / notes - something about which I heard a colleague once remark, "Regurgitatus est"??

Because it's the easiest thing, I suppose.  Because changing systems would entail a complete restructuring of our pedagogy (someone once called me a pedagogue, before I knew what it meant, and I nearly hit them) (hey, I've only just learnt what a metaphor is in SoJS-style discourse!).  Because...it's what students want??  And they do, they do....!

Bless them.  Because you're not allowed to kill them.

Subscribing as I do to The Scientist - seriously good journal, even if one Robert P Grant seems to write half of it - I found this audio snippet the other day, which was of more than passing interest.

You see, I seem to have got myself invoved in a scheme aimed at revolutionising UCT researcher access to the WWWorld, of which a very important part is going to be Open Access publication, and Open Resources, Educational and otherwise- and this is right up that street.

Access the podcast here.

Pretty much all of the article follows:

In this five minute clip, Cameron wonders how to stop talking about open science, and how to actually do something that will showcase its benefits. His idea is to leverage funders’ requirements, by not simply capturing ‘outputs’ from the science they fund, but thinking about how to measure how they are used—be they papers, data, materiel or patents. The ultimate aim is to demonstrate benefits of reuse, and thereby encourage scientists to make their research output open. 

Amen, brother Cameron!  We could do a lot at UCT to further this aim - like having an easy-to-use repository for theses and reports that otherwise moulder away on shelves; like displaying all Open Access papers published from UCT - and there are a lot, every year - and putting all (or nearly all) of our teaching material up on the Web. 

Like I do, he says, modestly.

Because it really does help improve the visibility and the reputation of this University.  The next couple of years look like they may just be fun...B-)

Ed Rybicki

...go little birds, some big birds - and an increasing number of academics.  Like our former DVC, The Martin himself - from Times Higher Education:

"...Twitter has its advocates in higher education. One is Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, who has no doubts about the positive effects of social media on universities. "The availability of broadly online means of communication is completely transforming the way that we work in any aspect of education," he says.

Hall, who was the first head of a UK institution on Twitter, says his foray into the world of social media began with blogging as a way to solve an internal communication issue. He now blogs every Monday, taking up topics that he feels will interest his staff and students. His efforts have brought him a new audience, and not just online.

"I'll be walking across campus to get a sandwich, and people, from first-year students to staff, will stop me to talk about issues I've brought up in the blog. It introduces a very interesting culture of informality: people don't hesitate to call me by my first name because that's how I blog," he says."

Do we know any DVCs / VCs / Deans who tweet - or even blog?  Any at all, other than The Martin?  The reluctance of UCT to embrace social networking on campus is evidenced by the page that pops up when you access Facebook from on campus - yes, purely for educational purposes; I'm accessing The Guru Cann's Microbiology posts, really! - which says:

*You are about to visit a social networking site* If you are visiting this site during the day for recreational reasons, please rather do so after hours so that the bandwidth can be used instead for academic purposes. *Social networking at UCT* UCT recognises the role that social networking can play in society and on campus. However, we need to balance our academic requirements for Internet bandwidth against those for recreational surfing. The University currently spends approximately /R8 million a year buying bandwidth/. Yet students, researchers, academic and administrative staff still struggle to use the Internet for work purposes....

 So no acceptance there that social networking May Be Used For Good, then.

Ah, well.  Things may change - bandwidth may expand exponentially; folk may buy in to intelligent use of the media....

And airborne porcines may come sooner.  But you never know.

This just in from The Preventer Of Internet Services ICTS:

Dear UCT Staff and Students,
 
Remember to install the latest GroupWise client (GroupWise 8.0.2) as soon as possible as it contains the latest bug fixes and patches.
 
It can be installed from the following sources:
The ZENworks Application folder on the Desktop (Recommended for Windows network users)
The Downloads page on the ICTS website (Recommended for Apple Mac and Linux users)
A script on the Y: drive (Windows network users only)
Installation disks available from the ICTS Front Office (Windows users only)
How do I install GroupWise client version 8.0.2?
 

Ummmm...how to phrase this...?

Dear ICTS:

This message presupposes that we WANT to install the latest GroupWise client - which we may not want to do?

In fact, in my case, I have finally ALMOST extricated myself from its dead clutches, by being in the throes of UNarchiving all the stuff I stored when I actually, honestly believed that I should be doing my thing for UCT and using the stupid system - after having successfully avoided doing so for a good few months.  And having unarchived it, moved it into Outlook 2007, along with all of the stuff on the server, which is where ALL my email dating back YEARS, is stored - in sensible folders, archived by date.  Which I couldn't move over to GroupWise, because it is a clunky, stupid, unintuitive, user-unfriendly piece of sh1t.

Which I don't intend to install.

So thank you, but no thank you.

Sincerely,

The Retroid Kollectiv

And I note that I can have a local Inbox, a GroupWise Inbox, AND a Gmail inbox, all open in the same Outlook client - if I want to.

Which I don't, generally, as using my Firefox browser to open Gmail is MUCH easier.

Ah, well...hopefully, from rumours floating about, this is the last twitch of a dying system.  Roll on the cloud!!

Note added in proof, >1 hr later:
Of course, GroupSTUPID!! has the last word - unarchiving simply doesn't work...!!!!  Not in a human timeframe, anyway.

PPS: OK, it did EVENTUALLY work - after hours!  Then sucking the whole lot over to Outlook took FAAAAAAAR les time.  Tells you something!

I was in the PD Hahn LT1 yesterday, attending a CUES (Committee for University Education in Science) Critical Conversation on "The BSc(Hons) "Bottleneck": Is It Choking Research?".

At which, it became apparent - that in the Science Faculty, anyway - that:

• there is no real bottleneck due to Hons
• that we UCT folk have some weird notions about getting kids to do Hons
• we in the Sci Fac have some strange policies with regard to foreign students
• that Science Depts are VERY different to one another in
  • how they fund Hons student projects
  • how much demand there is for their courses

Apparently, the Sci Fac Depts have a throughput rate of 96% for Hons registered in any one year: moreover several Depts say they can take everyone who applies, so there is no real bottleneck in the Faculty, though there may be for certain Depts.

A mildly perplexing notion was that we were failing our students and the University in not keeping a higher proportion of students in those disciplines where there are actually paying jobs available after a BSc - like Computer Science, for example.

That this is not a problem seems obvious: in fact, we are doing our jobs, in training people to a point where they can finds gainful employment without further training!

Being as I was in fact foreign at one time - from some 3000 km north, since you ask - I take it as mildly insulting that the Science Faculty should have a goal of >81% South African students at Honours level.  It is surely to UCT's credit that we attract as many foreign students as we do; the fact that a great proportion of them stay and a significant proportion of the South Africans leave, is part of the phenomenon of academic and professional mobility in the modern world.  I mean, damn, I'm still here - as are certain senior chemists, a senior zoologist of my acqaintance, and doubtless many others.  Hearing that UCT wants to do as the Government asks is also a bit of a jolt: we did everything we could for years not to do as they asked; why should we change now, if we still disagree?

The differences among Depts in their need for extra funding for Hons student projects, and in the relative demand for Hons courses in different disciolines, was also striking.  The point was made that lab science disciplines required a lot more money per student per Hons degree than computer- or literature research-based courses - and what was not made sufficiently explicit was that this was presently mainly supplied by individual academics from their research grants, and that this was a limiting factor for expansion of Hons classes in those Depts.  It is already a hard fact of life that in certain Depts, certain academics cannot offer as many Hons projects asthey might like, simply because they cannot afford to fund them.

The level of demand for certain courses was also much higher than for others: these represent potential growth points, staff and space permitting, given that these courses have high enough entrance requirements that almost everyone registering is guaranteed to pass.  Expanding the intake so as to widen the mark distribution so that the low end of the bell curve falls at the pass mark instead of significantly higher, would mean that most people doing the course would still pass, and that a choke point would have been widened.

Of course, this sort of policy would mean significant investment in those Depts in terms of staff and for projects, given that it would be an onerous imposition to require a lot more Hons teaching from the same number of folk - and that lab-based Hons projects can only be done if funding is sufficient.

All in all, then, I came away from the meeting with the feeling that we really, really do need to take a good hard look at 

• which of the Hons courses that are offered are used to any great extent in the job market, and which simply act as feeders for higher degrees
  
• which of the courses could be significantly expanded without seriously raising the failure rate
• how to fund Hons training without milking researchers as we do at present in lab-based Hons courses

Ctrl-Alt-Del time, folks...before a hard reset becomes necessary.

Ed Rybicki
MCB

And then the good Prof Jansen who moved up on and out – far out – to the Free State, plogged* in The Times on the policy, and I couldn’t resist.

I am sad to have missed the debate at UCT recently on admissions criteria, although for the sake of my blood pressure, it is perhaps as well that I did.  You can see at least one other UCT blog on the subject here; the subject also got a lot of press – and rightfully so.

The good Prof JJ says the following:

“The central question in the UCT debacle is whether we can correct apartheid's wrongs by invoking the very racial categories that offended and divided us in the past.

I cannot think of anything more bizarre, for the manner in which UCT approaches the question of redress is the best way of keeping apartheid-thinking alive and well in the consciousness of most South Africans.“

Viva!  Cde Jansen, viva!  He goes on:

“As critics of UCT's policy correctly assert, using race to determine admission is meaningless in the suburban economy of that institution, where the top academic schools have enrolled more and more black students of all stripes over the past two decades. This means black children at schools like Bishops, Westerford or SACS are less likely to be first-generation university students than was the case 10 or more years ago.

These children are not disadvantaged, at least not educationally or materially; in fact, more and more of these black students appear in the top 10% of their class and assume leadership positions throughout their schools. To advantage such students in entrance to economics or medicine at UCT is laughable.“

Oh, why didn’t we appoint this man??  Wait – he actually chose to go to the Free State.  Ah, well….

I have a personal anecdote to relate here, to illustrate the silliness that can result from a silly policy.  My son has an acquaintance who incurred his wrath recently because they wondered out loud whether or not it was more advantageous to their case to be [insert ethnicity here] or [insert alternative ethnicity here] when it came to getting into UCT, given that they could choose either.  What offended him most was that this was a child of professional parents, living in the leafy southern suburbs, who came in near top of their class in an elite Cape Town school – who would beat him hands down when it came to getting into one of UCT’s OU^TM’s more sought-after degree offerings, purely because they were not “white”, and not because of any other merit.  Not that he is going for commerce or medicine, as it happens, despite pleading and tears, but there you are.

“Sour grapes” you say, but wait, there’s more.  Prof JJ again:

“The problem is class, not race. There is a much greater disparity (in terms of resources, confidence and university preparation) between black students from Khayelitsha and Manenberg, in the Cape, than there is between a white or black student from Wynberg Boys or Girls High School.

Where you studied matters; where you live matters; whether you parents have a job, or whether there are computers and books in your home, matters. The degree of pigmentation of the student is, to be honest, irrelevant.

Of course what intellectuals like Neville Alexander realise is that retaining those ridiculous four racial categories is a prescriptive act; it not only selects students for studies at one of South Africa's most prestigious universities, it also instils in the minds of young people ways of thinking about themselves and others.

Race categories order the world for students in the same way it did for their parents before the 1990s. This is the great danger facing social transformation in South Africa.”

Ja, boet – the nail, firmly on the head.

My son knows he is “white”, and that a claque of his friends are not, partly because of having to fill in forms that ask him what he is, and having to self-classify to apply to study at this University.  A University, I might point out, that consistently espoused the ideals of non-racialism through decades of apartheid policies designed to thwart them and it – and that now applies simple racialism in its admission policies.

Why is this acceptable now, when it was not when we were teaching here in the 1980s?  I remember us actually benefitting from government stupidity in the bad old 1980s, in that Fort Hare and UWC “catchment area” kids could come to UCT if they wanted to do a course not offered there – so that certain of our science courses in particular were very well integrated even then.

How is it now, then, that such a simple-minded and discriminatory policy receives such support from otherwise intelligent-seeming people, when it is such a departure from values that were regarded as laudatory for so long?

Jansen is correct in saying that the disadvantage that should be redressed in the prospective intake to UCT is very largely one of class, and not of race.  How radical an idea is that, Mr Price and supporters?  That an acceptable proxy for disadvantage should be actual disadvantage?  It is raising a straw man to say that this is difficult to assess, as well: three questions should do it.

Where does your family live?

Where did you go to school?

What is your supportive parent(s)’s income?

If the answer to (1) is Khayelitsha or even Hanover Park, and to (2) is the local high school – I submit that there is evidence of disadvantage, given the demographics of these areas.  If the answers are Constantia and SACS, on the other hand, then the answer to (3) becomes important, because if the parent is a domestic worker resident on a property there, then disadvantage may still apply – but a judge’s child might not be so lucky.

But how difficult would that be?  Not very – and a whole lot less offensive than continuing to classify oneself in terms of “race” a whole generation after the quiet revolution.

Ed Rybicki

* = paper blog

Anyone else ever wondered why some obscure Web-hosting company from another country should be advertising on the slip road off the M3 into UCT from the south?

I know I have...from long before there were such companies, and I used to come from the south.

But thanks to XKCD, all is revealed.

Find a gem like the Web-based Endnote referencing system via the UCT Libraries site, that is: it is cross-package (ie: supports Macs, about which, more later), integrates with Word up to 2010 version, and your browser of choice (Firefox seems the best option), and (best of all) is free to use for UCT staff, even if you are logging in via EZProxy!!

How many folk know about this?  Was it just me, labouring on in the dark and paying for my own software, or is everyone ignorant of this?

Now the way I found this was, I was trying to find out which bibliographic packages support Macs, me having having gone and got one and all (Mac Mini, since you ask B-) - and the answer was, precious few, and definitely not my 20-year package of choice, Research Information System's Reference Manager.   I do not even mention UCT's publicised offering of RefWorks, which it puts in the shade - which is probably where it deserves to be: I tried to demo that as an alternative to individualised PC-based software last year, and just gave up because it was so clunky.

So I looked at the comparison of offerings, trying to figure out how I would manage to keep my PC-based software and databases, and transplant to Mac, without spending a lot of money - and was struck by the mention of EndNote, which was the only one I knew anything about which supported Macs.  And happens to be in the same stable as Reference Manager.  And while I was mulling, I saw that there was a version which supported "Win, Mac & Linux", and thought, how could that be?

Turns out this was EndNote Web.  With this, your bibliographies and reference collections are accessed via Web - which we can even DO in real time these days, thanks to bandwidth increase (cue: applause for ICTS and partners), and has Word plugins like "Cite While You Write" (CWYW) that made RefMan so useful...and, it dawned on me, would be ideal for a PC-Mac transition, as I could use the same references via the Web on two different computers running different OSs...

<RAVE>WHY DID THE STUPID SYSTEM LOG ME OUT WHILE I WAS TYPING AND MAKE ME LOSE HALF OF WHAT I WROTE??  HEY?  HEY??? </RAVE>

... but what made it for me was the words in tiny print at the top of the screen, which I saw by accident:

EndNote Web is a Web-based bibliographic tool that integrates with the ISI Web of Knowledge...

 Really??  Could life really be that simple??  Because, you see, the ISI Web of Knowledge or WoK, is available via UCT Libraries, and off-campus via EZProxy - and is a VERY powerful reference trawler, and incidentally also very useful for the kinds of detailed bibliometric analyses one needs to do for akademic advancement, as well as the guilty private pleasure of calculating one's own h-factor*.

Well, yes and no, as it turns out.  Yes, one is able to access "My EndNote Web" via WoK access; yes, one can do seriously complicated searches and amass databases and reference lists...and no, not that simple, because using these things requires one to (a) have a login at the site (I had one; not sure why...?), (b) download some quite chunky software to make access via Firefox (or IExp) easier, for both PC and Mac, (c) ditto for interfacing with Word on both platforms for CWYW.

Still, I have managed to set up all these things, and to do searches from within EndNote Web, and import reference lists from out of my PC-based Reference Manager 11 onto the Web, and do WoScience searches (better than internal search machine) that include abstracts and citations, for export to EW in the background.  You can also do a multitude of things with the references on site, including having them in separate folders, publishing bibliographies....

All in all, a truly wonderful find - despite the fact it was not so much hidden under a bushel, as down a well in terms of accessibility!

*= like autoGoogling±, only more specialised

±= Googling yourself, idiot!

As I sit here at home with a cat happily flexing claws into my leg, and the new puppy munching on the office chair - hey, it's sabbatical, I am actually working! - checking out photos and accounts of the untimely Fall of the Two Towers (well, not working right now obviously...B-), my mind is inescapably drawn to thoughts of Architecture.

You get the progression, surely?  Towers - buildings - architecture...with the fall of the towers being a metaphor for the demise of the aesthetic, the beautiful, the inspiring...careful, now, careful; that's South of Jammie Steps talk; that way lies Postmodernity, and madness....

OK; back on track: the Cape Crime Gazette Times this am has a wishlist of buildings people in CT would like to see demolished - and the UCT link is strong, strong.  Top of the list appears to be the unfortunate Disa Towers; high on the list also are - in no particular order - the Werdmuller Centre in Claremont and Leo Marquard and Tugwell Residences.  The link that runs strong between them is that they were designed by the same person, who was a UCT professor, and that they both may have had some aesthetic value once, on paper, but as concrete structures are two of the most unfriendly places to use or to live in that I and many others have ever seen or experienced.  In fact, we used to speculate, when elements of the Retroid Kollectiv lived in LM, and their love interest(s) in Tugwell, that in fact the original design had been for an innovative toilet roll holder, and that someone had gotten carried away and expanded it unnecessarily.

To ten storeys, twice.  I mean, one building could be held to be a simple mistake, but two??  With the Werdmuller Centre, that's actually enemy action - which, together with the barren wilderness of undressed concrete that is the UCT Sports Centre, and the collections of buildings that constitute the whole main campuses of the Universities of East Anglia and Zambia, could be held to be crimes against humanity.  But then, those who can, do, and those who can't...design UCT buildings, apparently.

So the Kollectiv is going to hold a competition, along the lines of the Unguide to Campus Statuary, for folk to nominate their most hated UCT building, with reasons why it constitutes an offence to reason or to humanity in general.  The winning entry will be published in View from the North, and the winner will get...will get...well, may feel vindicated and have a warm fuzzy glow for a while.

But they'll still probably have to look at the offensive structure until it falls down from lack of maintenance.

I was fortunate to be at the launch of the UCT Research Report the other evening - yes, fortunate, stop sniggering out there! - both because there was free food and passable drink, and because someone I didn't even know was a UCT alumnus gave the keynote address.  Which was truly wonderful.

Seriously: a UCT business occasion with a wonderfully good speaker AND talk.  I digress here: the last two such launches have been a pleasure; this may (or may not) have something to do with a new DVC Research...?

But anyway: Lee Berger, it was, presently from Wits, who spoke on his and his son's discovery of not only a new hominid fossil, but of a whole new hominid fossil site in a well-explored area near Johannesburg.  Oh, the story was wonderful; his account of how he was possibly the last person on the planet to discover Google Earth, and then used it to map possible cave sites, was legend; the build up to finding the fossils would have made camp-fire story tellers envious - and then the 3-Dimaging of not only a skull, but a whole fossil site, simply took one's breath away.

And what did it for me, was that this was simple Discovery.  Not a hypothesis in sight - he went out and discovered the sh1t out of something.

Man*, I like that.

Ed Rybicki

* = person if you like...

A recent issue of Nature - 17 June 2010 - has an editorial on "assessing assessment", wherein the Editor has a number of thought-provoking things to say.

Such as the opening sentence:

"The use of metrics to measure and assess scientific performance is a subject of deep concern, especially among younger scientists." 

He could say that again - although we older folk also have our concerns.  And further:

"Many researchers say that, in principle, they welcome the use of quantitative performance metrics because of the potential for clarity and objectivity. Yet they also worry that the hiring, promotion and tenure committees that control their fate will ignore crucial but hard-to-quantify aspects of scientific performance such as mentorship and collaboration building, and instead focus exclusively on a handful of easy-to-measure numbers related mostly to their publication and citation rates."

Ye-e-es...well, it's hard to quantify community interactions, for example, and certain things to do with teaching, given the stellar ratings students seem give to people who spoon-feed them rather than those who challenge them - itself the partial subject of a recent article - although a retroidal colleague did once try, in our very own local Nature SA J Sci.  He came up with a very interesting graphical approach (GG Lindsey, South African Journal of Science 101, May/June 2005, pp. 211-212) which is worth reproducing here.

Simple and clear...one wonders how many Distinguished Teacher awards could be reconsidered in the light of this?  However, this is not the point; therefore, let us return to the distinguished Editor for more illumination:

"Most institutions seem to take a gratifyingly nuanced approach to hiring and tenure decisions, relying less on numbers and more on wide-ranging, qualitative assessments of a candidate's performance made by experts in the relevant field.

Yet such enlightened nuancing cannot be taken for granted. Numbers can be surprisingly seductive, and evaluation committees need to guard against letting a superficial precision undermine their time-consuming assessment of a scientist's full body of work."

 Yes, the Kollectiv has heard terms such as "impact factor" and "h factor" being bandied about in connection with evaluating people, and it is now surprisingly easy to get such information, thanks to our very excellent Library and its electronic database access <note librarians: kudos on offer>.  But the good Editor has this to say further:

 "Academic administrators, conversely, need to understand what the various metrics can and cannot tell them. Many measures — including the classic 'impact factor' that attempts to describe a journal's influence — were not designed to assess individual scientists. Yet people still sometimes try to apply them in that way." 

And further:

 "...transparency is essential: no matter how earnestly evaluation committees say that they are assessing the full body of a scientist's work, not being open about the criteria breeds the impression that a fixed number of publications is a strict requirement, that teaching is undervalued and that service to the community is worthless. Such impressions do more than breed discontent — they alter the way that scientists behave. To promote good science, those doors must be opened wide." 

Amen, brother Editor, amen.  And to all that wish further enlightenment, there are two articles in the same issue - Do metrics matter? and A profusion of measures - which discuss the issue in serious detail.And include the fact that Google Scholar may in fact be the best - if clunkiest - means of accurately assessing just how many people cite one's work, beating out ISI's Web of Science and even Scopus.  

Come on, Google yourself: you know you want to...B-)

The Kollectiv hears that, yet again, the thorny question of recognition of bringers-of-income into OU^TM is being debated...with the loved-by-Cheryl-and-Daya-and-Tim-and-Kit solution of not giving anybody anything because it just encourages salami-slice publication in lousy journals, again coming to the fore.

Confused?  Link out to here, here, here and especially here for enlightenment - but do hurry back.... 

The last post in particular highlights from personal experience just how active researchers fill OU^TM's coffers:

 And STILL people are saying that, because of the hoary old chestnut that a bad publication brings in as much subsidy from the government as a good one, people will publish bitty stuff in lousy-but-ISI-recognised journals.

This is a straw man of very little worth, and in any case, is easily set on fire. 

 Consider: Academic A publishes 10 articles in 2009, in journals with an average impact factor of 1.  This would bring in - if all authors were from UCT - 10 x R120 000 = R1.2 million.  Academic B publishes 5 articles in the same period, in journals with an average impact factor of 2, for an income to OU^TM of R0.6 million.  Right, so sleaze is rewarded for A, and excellence is punished for B, in terms of relative income - but it is so easy to fix!

Simply tie recognition of publications to relative worth, in terms of publishing quality.

How outrageously simple a solution is that??  In this altogether more worthy straw man, impact factor considerations alone would determine that multiplying A's net worth by 1, and B's by 2, would give the same figure - from which relative rates of recompense could be determined.

However, and as much as some of us might wish it to be the case, all disciplines are not equal in terms of IFs of journals, and this does need to be taken into account: for instance, while we would all aspire to publish in Nature or Science, with their astronomical IFs, we are mostly constrained to publish in discipline-limited journals - and the top-scoring journals in each field may vary very widely in IF scores.

And the ISI Web of Science site very kindly lists discipline-specific rankings of journals in terms of their IF scores...making it quite a trivial exercise to determine - say, for theoretical physics, or biochemistry - which are the top-ranking discipline-specific journals, and to rank individual publications accordingly.  In fact, the Science Faculty for one currently asks that IFs be listed for all articles claimed in the yearly assessments - so it is in fact very easy to extract the necessary info to determine relative impacts of publications, especially if Departments (as guardians of disciplines) keep a league table of IFs.

With the corollary being that the information is used to calculate a fair return on output to individual researchers...!

Another straw man that is raised, however, is the one that publications are rewarded already - by promotion and advancement.  While this is partially - and only partially - true, it ignores the elephant in the lab: the soft money-funded folk whose contributions to the fiscus are nowhere acknowledged, and who could supplement their own (sometimes precarious) existence with publication subsidy.

Another beast in the room is the question of postgraduate student subsidy: this is a concrete and easily attributable source of very real money for our institution, yet is also not ever recognised at the level of the individual.  And it should be!  Consider: UCT does not contribute directly to the teaching of any higher-than-Hons postgraduate; rather, it takes fees from them, sometimes takes money from the researchers supervising them for their space and overhead, if grants allow it, and allows them space and electricity and library access.  Meaning postgrads are supported in terms of working expenses by researchers, and very often in terms of living expenses as well.  Yet the government gives us R130 000 per completed MSc and R270 000 per completed PhD...which pretty much equals what I pay them as bursaries!!

Plenty of room for improvement in the standard OU^TM model, folks.