AARON SLOMAN MESSAGES

MESSAGES FOR MISGUIDED POLITICIANS AND MANAGERS
(And Others)
(One of Aaron's proto-blogs)

13 Oct 2007:
Why academics should fight back against copy-editors and publishers.
October 2007:
Stop sending me your messages in duplicate, i.e. in plain text (good) and html (bad)
November 2006:
Why Computing Education has Failed and How to Fix it
August 2006:
Why large monolithic government IT projects (like the UK NHS IT project) are doomed to fail, and a proposal for an alternative way to aim for such objectives.
18 Apr 2006:
A brief explanation of why I now attach greater importance to putting research papers (including discussion notes, presentations, etc.) on the web than getting them into journals and conference proceedings can be found here.
1 Mar 2006: It has just occurred to me that this page ought to have a link to my rant against sending messages in both text and html (which is one of the reasons why people fall victim to phishing).
1 Mar 2006: Two kinds of dangerous obesity -- one not yet fully appreciated
2 Feb 2006: Social groups can agree among themselves which topics are taboo in their own discussions, but as soon as they start trying to tell me what I can and cannot say, and what pictures I can and cannot produce and publish, and what things I cannot laugh at, simply because they feel offended by them, then they are turning into oppressive tyrants trying to imprison the minds of other people, and they should be resisted at all costs, as some European newspapers are rightly doing. People who are offended, should look the other way. They can criticise me, laugh at me, jeer at me, insult me, predict eternal damnation for me, as much as they like. That's their business and I have no right to stop them, as long as they don't obstruct me going about my legal activities.
Mind-binding is even worse than foot-binding
If a government tries to stop me saying what I think (e.g. that all religions are foolish superstitions), in order to get the votes of these tyrants of the mind, who bind the minds of their children as some backward civilisations used to bind the feet of their children to stop them growing naturally, that government should be opposed too. (Give "foot binding" to a search engine.)
16 Jan 2006: A company I once helped (a little) to come into being is celebrating its 20th birthday, and invited party guests to recall some history and predict some bit of the future. My prediction was
2030: An even smaller proportion of people will know anything about programing or designing anything, or thinking deeply and critically. Everything, including ideas, will be designed, packaged, and sold by multi-national corporations, ready for use, and unchangeable. This will follow the previous de-skilling that occurred with mechanical then electrical machines. Most humans are already and will continue on the route to being the Eloi of H.G.Wells' Time Machine. Instead of eating them the Morlocks will use them as economic pawns, held in check partly by religious indoctrination and dreams of becoming celebrities. Can [the company] counter this by allowing, and even encouraging, people to design their own tools, interfaces, functionality, etc.?
7 Jan 2006: microsoft, linux and security
7 Jan 2006: Political correctness and religion as superstition
10 Dec 2005: Some thoughts on how to fund research using a lottery mechanism to reduce administrative waste, increase fairnes, and encourage deeper, more adventurous, more varied research.
8 Dec 2005:
There was a powerful video clip of Harold Pinter reading his Nobel Prize speech on BBC news last night. For those who missed it the full video and full text is accessible here (thanks to Ian Wright for drawing my attention to it). It includes a gift to George W Bush - a short speech written for him to use free of charge (search for 'God').
8 Dec 2005:
It's not only managers and politicians who get things wrong. I have some notes on why 'Intelligent Design theory' should be taught alongside evolutionary theory in schools -- helping students to understand what science really is and is not, which even some scientists get wrong.
12 October 2005:
Notes on academic freedom, including the freedom to be disloyal. Sometimes the greatest loyalty requires what seems to be disoloyalty. On the other hand, loyalty is a form of bias, which is often reprensible.
Some thoughts on league tables (and BBC's 'The Trap')
When universities start chasing one another by rebranding it's only the marketing companies that win: academic staff, students and tax-payers lose. For more on this see what happened here.
There's good and bad elitism: anti-elitism usually fails to distinguish them, as discussed here.
A country that tries to stop me saying what I believe merely because it deeply offends people who believe something different, is moving towards thought-control.
Someone who rigidly opposed contraception and who compared abortion with the holocaust can hardly be called a champion of freedom for the oppressed, even if he was a pope and worshipped by millions of people who did not see through his cloak of apparent goodness. There is more to life than being given enough to eat: ask all the oppressed women around the world, and people dying of aids. And there is certainly a lot to life that should matter more than meeting the approval of your local priest or pope.
Universities that ignore the provision of support for Linux in their student and staff services are probably turning away some of the most adventurous and intelligent thinkers of the future, in addition to wasting money. Some of the reasons are explained here.
(Things have moved on a lot since that document was written in 2003. See, for example, the storm created by the Asus EEE.)
Management based on the principle of maximising caution can strangle universities. Some people in administrative/management/legal roles in universities (and other organisations, including companies) don't have the right balance between concern for legalities and concern for the national and international obligations and functions of their organisation -- so that acting on their advice is shooting oneself in the foot.
Universities that claim to encourage debate and adventurous thinking, then act so as to stifle it, shoot themselves in the foot. (As in this example.)
Making tenure, promotion, and other rewards for academics, depend on frequent publication and grant-getting, produces a generation of narrow-minded (but highly expert) academics who have had far too little time to look beyond their noses.
Providing excellence is more important than providing choice.
See also:
Lynne Jones on 'Choice' and her comments on The Education White paper (2005)
'Choice is ruining education' in The Sunday Times Online (March 2006)
Cooperation between public service organisations can produce far better results than competition --- but it requires outstanding senior managers.
Use of 'objective' performance measures causes effort to be diverted to improving measures rather than improving performance.
Requiring every educational module to have rigidly defined 'aims and objectives' denies students the opportunity to learn by exploring -- education is replaced by training.
Rewarding effort rather than achievement gives high grades to the incompetent but earnest.

18 Mar 2004: COMMENT ON UNIVERSITY ACTION REGARDING WEB-SITES

Aaron Sloman
Last updated: 13 Oct 2007