… reports that University Diaries is blocked in China.
UD checked it out.
… [The ban on] WordPress in China could have been lifted had [the company] agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about [WordPress] users.
… Unlike other [internet] giants, WordPress took a more ethical stand[,] refusing to comply with the Chinese diktats[,] and WP blogs therefore still remain blocked in China. The situation is likely to stay the same forever unless China relaxes their censorship laws which again sounds like a remote possibility.
However:
… RSS feeds [allow you to] read any blog using a web based feed … even if the main WordPress site is blocked.
In case of WordPress blogs, you can append the string “.nyud.net” to the blog URL and it should open just fine. For instance, if the main blog is located at labnol.wordpress.com, you can access a mirror image of this site from labnol.wordpress.com.nyud.net.
Note that at the top of this page there’s a Subscribe to UD’s Feeds feature. That should work.
In yet another sign of what Marcia Angell describes as “the widespread corruption of the medical profession by industry money,” a Columbia University study reveals that
Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year…
Researchers followed the disclosure activities of a group of MDs and PhDs who were paid a million dollars or more by orthopedic device companies in 2007. Most of these people failed to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in the journals that published their articles.
And, as Angell points out, the journals get money from the companies too, in the form of advertisements, so they’re not about to actually enforce their disclosure policy…
Everybody’s getting paid, see. Professors at medical schools are getting paid. Journals are getting paid.
Some in this group might be getting paid twice, as it were. Ghostwriters, possibly hired by the same companies paying their consultancy fees, could be writing their articles for them…
Quelle postmodern! Simulacral research (ghost-written, guest-written), simulacral disclosure, simulacral journals…
Mr UD was reading through
the 1958 edition of Godel’s
Proof — a book he inherited
from his father — when
this letter fell out of it.
(Click on the pages for
readable images.)
****************
It was from a P. McCleary, in the school of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was written to Karol’s father, Jerzy Soltan, an architect who taught at Harvard.
The letter wasn’t dated, but its paper was very weathered. Its subject – beauty – is close to UD‘s heart. She’s teaching a course about it this semester at George Washington University.
McCleary sent a book along with the letter, A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy. We easily found this book, with McCleary’s underlinings in it, in our library at home (despite UD‘s math phobia, she has read it). We’re not sure how the letter ended up in Godel’s Proof.
UD quickly discovered that P. McCleary is Peter McCleary, a professor of architecture at Penn, and she wrote to him asking if she could post his letter.
He said sure, and gave me some background on it. He thinks it must have been written “on a bus in the Andes” in the early seventies. He and Jerzy “would discuss his mentor, Le Corbusier, and my mentor (from 1965), Le Ricolais – and often our mentors’ guiding principles. It was probably in that context” that the letter was written.
McCleary’s letter, and Hardy, bring to mind the famous lines from Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats:
poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Pure, creative, non-utilitarian mathematics, what Hardy calls beautiful mathematics, is like poetry: A discovered pattern, a hidden truth revealed, a new, unexpected, elegant, vivid and vivifying thing. When the pure mathematician discovers something new, the earth says something it didn’t say before: it is given, as Auden says, a mouth.
Architecture (McCleary cites Palladio and Alberti) is that peculiar art that sometimes combines Hardy’s abstract aesthetics with the grounded, practical, embodied world.
UD‘s grateful to McCleary for taking out his pen on the bus in the Andes. She’s grateful for a number of reasons, but this is perhaps the strongest: He returned her to this remarkable bit of prose from Hardy. Hardy wrote A Mathematician’s Apology toward the end of his life, and in this passage he reflects on his existence:
I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’ It is to them I owe an unusually late maturity: I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford. Since then I have suffered from that steady deterioration which is the common fate of elderly men and particularly of elderly mathematicians. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.
It is plain now that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. It is very difficult to be dispassionate, but I count it a ‘success’. I have had more reward and not less than was due to a man of my particular grade of ability…
My choice was right, then, if what I wanted was a reasonably comfortable and happy life. But solicitors and stockbrokers and bookmakers often lead comfortable and happy lives, and it is very difficult to see how the world is the richer for their existence. Is there any sense in which I can claim that my life has been less futile than theirs? It seems to me again that there is only one possible answer: yes, perhaps, but, if so, for one reason only.
I have never done anything ‘useful.’ No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.
The case for my life, then, or for that of anyone else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.
***************************
I’ve put McCleary’s letter back inside the pages of Hardy’s Apology, where it belongs.
***************************
UPDATE: Maurice, a reader, emails UD:
“Little did Hardy suspect that his branch of mathematics (Number Theory) would become the basis for security on the Internet.”
UD loves ironies like this.
Maurice links her to this page.
[T]oday’s Internet commerce makes heavy use of encryption techniques that depend upon results in number theory, a branch of mathematics that until relatively recently was thought of as strictly “pure mathematics,” with no real-world applications. In his book A Mathematician’s Apology, the famous British number theorist G. H. Hardy declared “The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless’.” Yet it is mathematics developed by those very mathematicians, along with Hardy himself, that keeps today’s Internet transactions secure.
We started here, at the very bottom — diploma mills — and argued that these represent really the only form of efficiency pricing in higher education, since the desired endpoint of the transaction is completely obvious to both parties: an official-looking piece of paper testifying to a particular advanced degree, plus the provision of extremely minimal institutional support in the off-chance it will be needed (I have in mind things like plausible-sounding accreditation, and people at the other end of the line who know what to say if phone calls about the degree are placed). Since no collegiate experience of any kind is intended — since, indeed, money is changing hands precisely so that the purchaser can avoid even a whiff of collegiate experience — we do not have to worry about defining and then evaluating the university education for which we are charging the student.
Let’s kick it up a notch now, to very expensive online for-profit universities, objects of a good deal of tut-tutting lately. Here the desired endpoint is equally obvious: certification of a vocational skill for which people will employ you pretty much as soon as you get the degree.
Among the many scandalous features of the online for-profits is that although they do almost exactly what many community colleges do (provide certification for employers that the person holding their degree is able to do a particular job), they do it at a far, far higher price. Not only that, but community colleges have plenty of face to face courses, which are far superior to online.
Online is supposed to be all about cost savings, but the for-profits pretty much use only online and still soak you.
Plus they have insanely high dropout and loan repayment failure rates. And the whole gainful-employment-within-a-reasonable-period-of-time thing doesn’t look too good either.
I mean, think about it. For-profits desperately, sordidly, pounce on any enrollee with a pulse; once they’re got ’em, they’re gonna give everyone A’s to keep ’em. So employers have no idea, based on transcripts, whether people from for-profit schools can do a particular job.
At costs comparable to private liberal arts colleges, for-profit schools are – as you know if you’ve watched the news lately – a national disgrace.
… yesterday took extremely dangerous amounts of cyanide out of a lab there.
She brought them to her house and used some of the cyanide to kill herself.
She had just lost her job. She wrote various farewell entries on Facebook, including this moving one: “Today… my heart shattered, and I left my soul behind somewhere.”
Beyond the sadness of this story lies a good deal of worry from security agencies about how easy it was for Emily Staupe to lift so much deadly material from the lab.
———————————-
More reaction.
This concluding paragraph of a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, authors of a much-discussed new book about American universities, gets at something ol’ UD has pondered many a year.
There’s a significant disconnect, at universities ranging from the most rapaciously crass for-profit to the most hopelessly threadbare non-profit, between what people willingly pay for the education and the degree on offer and what, in many cases, the education and the degree are worth. Let me elaborate.
We’ll start here: By UD‘s reckoning, only diploma mills represent true higher ed efficiency pricing. Why?
Consider diploma mill costs first from the student’s perspective.
On the one hand, she’ll earn her diploma in seconds.
On the other, as countless ruined political and professional lives have made known to her, it’s a risky degree, subject at any moment to exposure.
Yet generations of diploma mill graduates have faked their way through white-collar lives without exposure… Statistically, she’s likely to get away with upping her public school or military salary by purchasing, with the press of a key, a pretend master’s …
What’s she willing to pay?
Well if the thing cost nothing, or cost $21.49 like a Popeil Pocket Fisherman, it would make her nervous. It would seem really obviously cheesy and bogus. In some part of her mind she’s working on believing in the authenticity of the degree in case she’s ever, you know, asked about it… It should cost a plausible amount so she can say, if cornered, I thought it was a legit university! I paid a huge sum!
Hm… hm…
Something in the low thousands? Hell, she might even be able to get her agency to spring for the tuition, or part of it… After all, the only reason she knows about the particular diploma mill she’s considering is that Sid two cubicles over got his promotion by getting the agency to pay for his diploma mill degree. One afternoon, over coffee, he told her about it…
Yes, the low thousands. Real universities charge in the thousands, don’t they? But it’d have to be really low thousands. She’s not made of money.
How about pricing from the perspective of the diploma mill?
Its only costs involve printing, posting, and – if it’s one of the diploma mill Ivies – the hiring of a guy with a cell phone to make up shit if potential employers call for references.
Plenty of people all over the world want its services. Its business is a raging success. It could probably charge two hundred dollars per degree and do nicely.
But it wants to make a huge profit. Who wouldn’t? And it’s peculiarly well-situated to do so. Low to vanishing overhead, a globeful of grasping morons.
And the beauty of it is that the diploma mill has to charge rather a lot in order to make the education look legit.
Plus keep in mind that huge numbers of its customers are rich people from Saudi Arabia and places like that… And tons of American employers subsidize employee education and don’t check out the universities employees say they’re attending…
So the diploma mill goes for a nice even number: One thousand dollars. Or if that sounds too arbitrary, as if the mill hasn’t done the complex math to match the complex intellectual apparatus it represents, make it, uh, $1,210. Something like that.
And indeed something like that — something that makes good sense to customer and provider — is what most diploma mills charge.
Whew. All this math has exhausted UD. She’ll write more later.
… opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Tom Eblen writes an advertisement for the next president of the University of Kentucky:
… Many Kentuckians are suspicious of new ideas and averse to change. They avoid risk for fear of failure or criticism. Ignorance and powerful vested interests often combine to keep the status quo.
Your biggest distraction in this job will likely be UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters. These programs are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. They bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.
… [A]t UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.
… [Y]ou will face a sports scandal or several. You will constantly be at odds with rabid fans who think the university exists to support a sports franchise…
The provost of Texas Tech
suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.
More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…
Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.
**************************
Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?
Some students and professors say Mississippi State shouldn’t cancel Thursday classes for a football game.
In the article’s comment thread, a fan complains:
I guess with all the academics on our campus there’s no surprise we’d get a nerd (or professor) or two to complain.
Background on University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, the lyingest good ol’ boy this side of anywhere.
… Not long after Pearl was hired, there came a day in 2008 when his wife reportedly got the day’s mail and there were two property-tax statements, not one. Yes, the coach owned another house in Knoxville where another woman lived. Whoops.
Of course, a divorce suit followed and a 25-year marriage was dashed because Bruce Pearl, aside from being a great motivational speaker and now a crowd favorite, was also a liar…
In Knoxville yesterday [the UT chancellor] said that once again Bruce would buy his way out of his latest lie…
University of Tennessee v. University of Kentucky: A race to below the bottom.
You’re about to be beatified.
I’ve always liked what you have to say about the nature of a real university education.
… [A university should create] a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes… [The student] profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal.” A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit. This then I would assign as the special fruit of the education furnished at a University, as contrasted with other places of teaching or modes of teaching. This is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students.
In the same chapter, you describe, similarly, the university’s cultivation of “a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind.”
The university student, having been introduced to the breadth and variety, the lights and shades, of human knowledge and experience, attains some distance from the particular set of beliefs and preferences she happens to have inherited from growing up in a certain family and in a certain social setting. Freedom here is freedom from unreflective prejudices and emotions that undermine your ability to be fair, to see things clearly. The student gains all of this from exposure to professors and others at the university who embody, in their teaching and their conversation and their daily behavior, a truth-seeking ethos.
I like “candid” as well. From Newman to Orwell to Hitchens, a primary mark of an educated person is the consistent statement of unvarnished truths.
… [E]ducation is a higher word [than instruction]; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour… Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.
Ultimately, what you enter into at a real liberal arts college is the drama of mind and spirit constantly being transformed by dispassionate engagement in thought.
This blog was born just as asynchronous (to use the pretentious word its advocates like) courses became the rage in American universities. University Diaries has chronicled the immense and ongoing public relations effort to make these cheesy offerings seem legit. Click on the category Poor White Trash for details.
Or just start with this detail, something that won’t surprise anyone who has thought even a little about the technology that has come to define America’s for-profit universities, and which even schools like Berkeley are considering.
…The researchers did everything from making students sign an e-mail course contract to placing personal phone calls to make sure they were on top of their class material, according to the study, which will be published in the International Journal of Management in Education in October. Students exposed to the strategies dropped out as frequently as those who were not, the authors said.
“We called them at home, sent them emails, quizzed them on the syllabus and made other efforts to try to engage them,” said Elke Leeds, an associate professor of information systems at Coles and one of six study authors, in a press release issued by the school…
And gee, nothing worked. Wonder why.
Wanna wait for the next round of studies on that one? Or wanna read the next paragraph?
Babe, you can’t even verify the identity of the person taking an online course. You can’t verify the identity of the professor giving the course. We’re in the twilight zone. Where are we? Who are we? Who took the midterm? Who gave the midterm?
Drift, drift, drift… I’m melting… Life is but a dream…
Okay so call the student! Put in a call! Place an actual personal phone call! Hellohello? Actual person? Here is another actual person. Come back! Why are you fading? Why are you dropping out….?….. Helloooo?… O tell me all about why you faded. I want to know all about why you faded…
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Do not stand at your phone and forever weep.
I am not there; I make no peep.
I am a thousand courses that blow.
I am the students who nothing know.
I’m the dumbass emoticon on your screen.
An eager mind unheard and unseen.
The nightmare end of a bookkeeper’s dream.
The evil spawn of a cost-cutting scheme.
We are the students who might have shone.
Think of everything we’ve missed!
We are not there. We don’t exist.
************************************
Ooh la la!
Here’s another one. Business students at NYU love to hear him lecture on bankruptcy, but he may also know a lot about fraud.
