Apathy Sketchpad

My PhD research makes use of CT scanning, so I’ve had to do a lot of research into that for the literature review. Here is some of the knowledge I’ve gained:

The mathematical framework that makes CT possible was all outlined in 1917 by Johann Radon. Then in the 50s, the mathematical framework was outlined again, differently, by Allan McLeod Cormack, who invented the CT scanner without having read Radon’s work. Then, in 1973, the CT scanner was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield, who hadn’t read Radon or Cormack’s work. For this, Cormack and Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize.

I’ll be honest, this somewhat undermines the importance of the literature review in my mind.

Only… I wonder what amazing stuff we’d have invented by now if we’d started inventing information technologies instead of pissing about with steam engines all that time. There should have been Discworld-style semaphore towers up and down the country in Tudor times at least. Why should a message take days to get across the country just because that’s how long paper takes? We could have had a CT scanner in the 30s, for a start. By now I’m totally convinced we’d have flying cars and moonbases.

And even given that, scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system. It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes.

If you want jetpacks, don’t invent the jetpack, reform scientific information handling. Because that way it’ll come with teleports and moving hologram projectors and sexy androids and other implausible future stuff.

It’s Student Election Time!

Actually, it’s not. Hasn’t been for a bit now, but the uninspired propaganda chalked onto the floor still haven’t completely washed away. The thing that gets me about student election campaigns is the pointlessness of it all: nobody has any real policies because none of the positions offer any real power, so voting decisions come down to personal relationships and advert quality, but since none of the candidates differ significantly, all the adverts are identical and none of them say anything. They just say ‘vote Jennie #1 for editor’ or something, with no reason offered for you to do so. Participating in this absurd farce is supposed to look good on one’s CV. I have no idea why.

I did not vote in the student elections.

I’ve uploaded an album of photos to Facebook, which consists mainly of stupid signs I have seen about my various travels. You may have a look at it if you like, even if you don’t have a Facebook account. (You’ll need an account to view and post tags and comments, though of course you can still comment here.)

One or two have been on the blog before, but they haven’t been on Facebook so I included them anyway.

I had what may be the worst lecture ever last week. I mean, it was easier to sit through than many I had as an undergraduate, but at least they did, if you could bring yourself to listen and having listened remember any of it, contain some information. This one… well, it did have information in it, and some bits were relevant. Other bits were even true.

I say some bits were relevant. Of course, it was all relevant. Granted the lecture was to dental PhD students and the lecture covered relativity, SI units (wrongly), string theory, gravity, religion and how mercury thermometers work (without mentioning that you shouldn’t use them), but all those things connect to dentistry, which is of course the Master Science from which all other sciences flow:

(I love that lecturers put slides on the intranet now. It makes it far easier to mock them.) In fact, he said, all sciences connect to dentistry, “except perhaps oceanography”. So now you know. As such, here’s a slide which clearly impacts directly upon dentistry:

I’m not convinced it makes any sense to unify one thing (such as alpha-decay) with itself, but there you go. I also like that he’s put “planets” and “apples”. Because really, Newton did “unify” the theories behind the motion of planets and that of apples, but the way it’s presented here — and there was not a spoken word of context for this — makes it look like there was a Theory Of Apples.

The lecture was actually delayed because the lecturer had forgotten it was on and turned up forty minutes late.

He stated that there are five SI units (there are seven) and that the second* is defined by astronomy (it isn’t).

In this slide, he explained that while science was good at finding secondary causes, religion was the path to true understanding:

I can’t say I was pleased with this slide (not least because he’s used a famous quote from a vocal atheist to make his point).

I didn’t like this slide either, but that’s just for composition reasons:

I don’t mean to just sit here and reproduce all his slides. I want to stop somewhere about where I think “fair use” ends. So here’s just a couple more of the most laughable:

I know it looks like I’ve resized the second one badly, but I promise you that’s what the original looked like.

Honestly, this lecture sounded like he’d been told to give a lecture but not what it ought to be about, so he tried to cram the entirety of mankind’s scientific achievement into forty-five minutes in no particular order. He failed. He bounced between sciences (but not oceanography) like a crazy lecture pinball, offering a few facts (and/or lies) about each but no real understanding of any.

I mean honestly, how am I (or anyone else) supposed to learn anything from this drivvel? This took two hours out of my day that I could have spent writing reports which would have saved me time I could have used to write programmes which would have saved me time I could have used to fix all the comupters in the building which would have saved me enough time to actually do some research. But no, it’s a requirement for my PhD that I sit through this nonsense.

Here’s a research question for you:

Why?

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Note: this entry has been edited slightly after various comments pointed out an error. In the spirit of honesty I have left the comments in so you can see what error I made. I’m not certain why I’ve done that.

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*That is, the unit of time called “the second”, not the second SI unit.

Here’s a delightfully heart-warming story. Well, a story, anyway.

It’s the story of a comedy show called Allah Made Me Funny. It’s a Muslim comedy show which will be on at Dundee University in a couple of weeks, which Dundee describe as “comedy from an Islamic perspective that is not just for Muslims, but for everyone, [which] we are showing it as part of our Islam awareness week at the university… to show the comic side of Islam and show that it is not just a serious religion,” with “nothing in it… that is offensive to the religion”. (You can watch some on the website. In fact, it’ll start chatting at you the moment the page loads. Probably I should have mentioned that sooner, and indeed probably now I should go back and edit it in, but I won’t.)

The show will not be on at Glasgow Caledonian University, because some Muslim students there complained. I don’t know if they found the title offensive (it looks offensive but patently isn’t if you give it a moment’s thought) or if they just kind of assumed it would be offensive, or maybe they’d seen the show and Dundee’s spokesman was just lying, but it would seem that Muslims can now be offended by “comedy from an Islamic perspective”.

And yes, I am a little annoyed that the university caved in to the complainants, but more than that I’m shocked at how fucking stupid these people are. They’ve complained, implicitly on religious grounds, about something designed specifically to soften the perception that their religion is an over-sensitive, mental one that complains about everything. Unfortunately the article didn’t name the morons in question, so I can’t award Religious Crackpot Of The Month to them by name, but if they’re reading this then they know who they are. Or more probably they don’t because they’re so utterly and enormously brainless.

From the Manchester University postgraduate accomodation guide:

You should also note that if you require accommodation from September the closing date for applications for accommodation is the 31st August.

How am I supposed to get anything done with restrictions like that placed upon me?

Apparently, Oxford University is to introduce a contract between itself and students.

I remember some years ago when I was in sixth form our school tried introducing one of these. It essentially said that we had to try hard, and we were informed that we had to sign it or we could be expelled. Enough students simply refused to sign it that the whole thing was abandoned — nobody got expelled because of course that would put the school in breach of contract, as we’d already started the course and only now were being given this contract. Oxford have, rather more cleverly, applied this contract to future students only.

The aim is to stop students signing up to a degree course, flunking it, and suing the university for not teaching them properly. This is a fairly reasonable goal but they’ve gone about it the wrong way. Personally, I’ve never been to Oxford University, so I don’t know what the teaching is like there, but I do know that an alternative way to avoid being sued for breach of contract is to stick to the contract.

The fact of the matter is that the universities do not pay the students. The students pay the universities, and when you pay for something you have a right to get something of a reasonable standard in return. If I want to spend thousands of pounds on a degree course I have no intention of completing then that is my preoragtive. The day a university pays me is the day I will feel obliged to live up to their expectations (although as the government would be sibsidising your degree, you have an entirely seperate obligation to them to at least try to pass the course). (I feel I should probably also mention here that I personally was, in fact, paid by the university. I was on a scholarship scheme, however this didn’t even cover half of my tuition fees, and in fact was dependant on my attaining certaing grades anyway. It was not so much a case of “we’re paying you, so you’d better do well” as it was “if you do well, we’ll reward you”.)

Apparently, all this was sparked by a university paying out £30,000 to a student who complained about teaching standards there.

The student who sued them wasn’t complaining that the teaching was bad, he was very specifically complaining that the lecture theatres were overcrowded and that there were errors in the assignments given to him. That sort of thing is very easy to prove, or, if the lecture theatres aren’t overcrowded and the assignments don’t contain errors, disprove. I realise Oxford is a widely respected university with an excellent reputation, but there’s no guarantees. You can’t try out a university. You can’t go to more than one, at least, not without spending thousands of pounds at each. Most people have nothing but second-hand and often out-of-date accounts of universities to help them make their decision, and most of the second-hand accounts are from people who only went to one university, have nothing to compare it with, and generally had a good time because that is what univerisity is all about (as much as they told us otherwise). If you are supported by a grant for the first half of your course you have the option of given up on it and going somewhere else. With grants there was some motivation for universities not to be crap. As it is any student who feels their university is failing them has the following options:

Legal action — a great option, except that it is expensive, time consuming, hard work and potentially disasterous if you lose. Students, as a rule, couldn’t afford to do that.

Change course — and abandon the thousands of pounds and years of your life you’ve invested in the course. Most students can’t really afford to do that either.

Complain to the university — which is great news for next year’s students, but won’t change a thing as far as you are concerned. It fails to solve the problem at hand, and hardly seems worth the bother.

Lump it — most students in this situation choose this option. (We know this because the one whi didn’t must have had at least enough coursemates to overcrowd a lecture theatre.) It essentially means that they’re doing their own work, as well as work the university ought to be doing — say, proofreading the assignments. Then the University sees that people are managing to get good marks and assumes its teaching is up to scratch. But it’s the only way to come out of the situation with a degree and any money at all.

There’s basically no recourse for students when universities fail them, and since there’s no way to try out a university before committing to a three year course, there’s really no reason for universities to bother maintaining standards as long as they can maintain their reputation, and this is the problem with Oxford’s proposed contract. In its current state it makes students’ responsibilities very clear, but not the university’s. It essentially states “I, the student, acknowledge that it is my responsibility to try my best to earn a good degree, and if the university feels like helping me out then I should be grateful”. That won’t do. Worse still, if the university makes you sign a contract that clearly spells out that the university is free to choose how much teaching you are entitled to then they have a very easy get-out clause if you do complain about the standards or availability of teaching. That is an incredibly dangerous precedent. I only hope that prospective students do what current students are famous for, and refuse to accept any such thing.

I was assurred years ago that physics was a good employable degree. Don’t worry, I was told, you don’t have to get a job related to your degree. It shows you can put the work in and get a result. It shows commitment. It shows that you can learn something and pick up skills. Blah blah blah.

Today I discover this is a lie.

If I want to apply for the job of website designer, what do I need? Why, that would be a website design degree. If I want to write software I’m expected to have a degree in that, and if I want to design kitchens I need a kitchen design degree. I don’t know why I would want to design kitchens; I have no intrest at all in them, but it’s a good example of a job demanding a degree that nobody in the world will have.

This is, of course, the problem with these degrees. I know a man with a degree in greenkeeping. That opens up approximately four only incrementally different jobs to him, but it closes them off somewhat from everyone with a proper degree, because why would you hire someone with a degree in chemistry when there’s someone with a degree in precisely the job you have advertised?

What am I supposed to do? Be a physicist? Alright, so I’m clearly qualified for it, but it would mean working with physicists, and four years of being at university with them was quite enough for me. It’s rather disspiriting applying for a job you know you don’t meet the stated requirements for, but it’s the only way to get any job at all, especially when it was the computer science A-level that put me off the idea in the first place. That was mostly outdated, idealised nonsense that had nothing to do with any computer I’ve ever seen. You learnt it, and then were examined on it, and then tried very hard to forget it before you accidentally mentioned it to someone who actually knows about computers and looked like an idiot.

Taking the web design as an example: clearly I can design websites. I have two. Some people don’t have that many ears! But how am I supposed to convince someone of this in an interview? I’m terrified that the degree courses will teach you words I don’t know for things I do:
“So, do you mind if we ask you a few questions to assess your knowledge of HTML?”
“Go ahead.”
“What is the Carnegie Principle in the context of Front And Back Extrusion?”
“Come again?”
Then I go home and Google it and it turns out to mean “make sure you use the American spelling of ‘centre’ in align tags” or something else equally obvious and I’ve just told the interviewer I didn’t know it.

So now I’m stuck with a degree nobody wants, skills nobody will ever know about, and no job. Great.

You never know how much you really need something until it’s taken away, when you would give anything to have it back. This is the idea behind striking; if enough employees of the same industry just stop working for long enough society is disrupted enough that their demands are met. It doesn’t always work, but it can be very effective.

Today is Day One of the two day strike by the AUT, and tomorrow is the one-day strike by the NUS. The AUT is the union the lecturers belong to, and is campaigning for equal pay. The NUS is the student union and is a little miffed about fees. Unfortunately, neither strike will have any effect on anybody at all. I will use myself as an example here, simply because it will require minimal research on my part. As a member of the NUS, I am pressurised to skip university tomorrow. There are several small problems with this plan:

1. All students (in theory) have Wednesday afternoons off anyway.
2. I have the whole day off thanks to cunning module selection.
3. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
4. If the AUT is on strike there won’t be any lectures to skip.
5. Students have no power.

Students do not provide a useful service to society until they graduate and get real jobs, at which point nobody will notice that they all took a day off a few years ago. Therefore, striking will not effect anyone. In our department, the students who strike will still have to do the work, they’ll just do it later. That won’t inconvenience anybody except the students.

Similar problems affect the AUT’s proposed strike:

1. There are (in theory) no lectures on Wednesday afternoons anyway.
2. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
3. If the NUS is on strike there won’t be any students to lecture in any case.
4. You will only inconvenience students, and students have no power.

In my specific case I have only three lectures on a Tuesday. Two of them are given by the highest paid lecturer in the department, so the chances they would be cancelled in favour of an equal pay campaign were never very high. The last one is Physics in Review, which is a waste of time anyway and only generally has three students turn up. And they were glad it was cancelled.

Today was our eighth ‘physics in review’ session this semester. Each session lasts an hour, and they are organised into pairs. We get the questions in one week, and work though a few. Then we have a week to look over the rest and go through the difficult ones in the second session. It doesn’t work that way. No, not at all.

What actually happened was that we would pointedly ignore the question sheet all week and sit in silence for an hour while the tutor went through the remaining questions. Unfortunately, the tutor is so incredibly dull that we almost can’t bring ourselves to listen to a word he says. It isn’t our fault, of course. The university decided to schedule this for 4 to 5 in the afternoon, so by the time we get there we’ve been in lab for six hours and those of us why can be bothered to turn up are too tired, bored, and drained to participate.

It wasn’t always like this. We had more energy at the start of the semester, but, according to the Heisenburg Principle, that was never going to last. (And people say I don’t pay attention in Quantum.) In fact we once paid so much attention that two of us answered a question in two very simple and very different ways, both of which were much simpler and quicker than the one the tutor was doing on the whiteboards. I made the mistake of trying to explain this to him, and discovered a lot more about psychology that physics by doing so. Instead of seeing the very obvious way my method arrived at the answer, he tried to find out how my method was related to his. It wasn’t. He was integrating things, differentiating things, and other quite superfluous mathematical verbs, while I’d used geometry and simple algebra to solve the same exact problem and arrive at the same exact answer.

This is why nobody spoke in today’s session. He went through four questions. The first one I’d solved in five minutes on half a page, whereas his method took two pages and half an hour to complete. I already knew what would happen if I tried to explain my method, so I didn’t. To be honest, I can’t understand for a second how he managed to miss my method, or why anyone would ever want to do it the more complicated way. The second question he went through nobody had even looked at, and ditto for the third. The last question was in fact rather easy. Unfortunately the wording of it was so strange it wasn’t until he explained the answer that we understood the question.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that we still don’t have time to look through the questions. We have other things to do, like labwork, an essay, magnetohydrodynamics homework, and getting a gold medal on Nobody Rides For Free. We can’t waste time on things that aren’t assessed. Even if he tried to report us he couldn’t — he has no idea which one of us is which. We frequently skip sessions and he doesn’t seem to notice.

I missed the fifth session, in which a question sheet was given out. Also in that session, the review papers were given out so we could give anonymous feedback on the module. I didn’t realise this until I arrived at the next session. I remembered earlier in the course he told us in previous years people had asked on these forms for the question sheet to be handed out a week early. In his experience, he said, people didn’t look at the sheets so the exercise was pointless. That seemed quite plausible to me. It was obvious to me that this whole pointless exercise was going to be repeated this year, but he went through the motions anyway because as I have mentioned he is blind to the obvious unless it can be explained using calculus somehow.

Needless to say, everyone who showed up asked for the questions in advance again. In the next session he did what he always does; he picked a question, asked if anyone had looked at it, and then picked someone at random to glare at until they admitted they hadn’t. This time he also asked why we wanted the questions in advance if we weren’t going to look at them. He picked me. This was not a good idea, because if he had enough memory to recognise us, he’d have known the following facts:

Having missed the last session I hadn’t got a review sheet and therefore couldn’t possibly have asked for the questions in advance.
Having missed the last session, I hadn’t got the question sheet in order to have looked at it.
Of course there was no way he could have known that given the review sheet I would have written on it “I just want you to know that if you start giving the questions out earlier, I will compensate by starting to ignore them earlier”, but I think the other two points are sufficient. He gave out the next sheet early. He’s stopped doing that again.