Academic Language

Every now and then academics revive the discussion on the readability, dissemination and usefulness of research. Most researchers write for a small group of peers. Most of the peers are already aware of what is being done before they actually read the research article. Add to this the depressing thought that only about eight people (this is a commonly cited figure, probably an urban myth) ever read an academic work (research article or phd thesis) and that is counting the reviewers and editor.

All this makes the practice of academic writing seem rather pointless.

PhD Comics by Jorge Cham

Part of the reason for this is that academics tend to become linguistically narcissistic (Oops, sorry – see what I mean). Instead of writing clearly and plainly they fill their pages with complex jargon from within their research field. They then have the arrogance to be annoyed when others have a difficulty reading their texts.

So, now that I have reached this insight (again!) I shall strive to be more clear in my writing (again!)

Instead of sleeping

You know that you should be asleep when you start reading spam mails. Most of my spam gets filtered out so it was actually a long time ago that I got a Nigerian 419 in my inbox. It was rather amusing. It begins with the rather polite apology for possibly insulting my morals…

Please accept my sincere apologizes if my email does not meet your business or personal ethics. I will first introduce myself as Mr. Amos Tower, an Auditor with Bank of Scotland, here in london,England.

It then goes on to explain that a bank account containing 15 million pounds has been untouched for three years and that the owner of the account had died five years ago in a airplane crash. The inability to do math here is an easy mistake. That the account has been used despite the holder being been dead… probably some late credit card slips…

The letter ends with the totally re-assuring words

This transaction is totally free of risk and troubles as the fund is legitimate and does not originate from drug, money laundry, terrorism or any other illegal act.

A risk free transaction 😉 All they want from me is to “stand in as the next of kin” and withdraw the money. They don’t even want anything in return 🙂 Its probably that they just don’t want that kind of money lying around?

I really should go to sleep instead of reading spam after midnight.

Social Idiocy

Historian Barbara Tuchman has written several fascinating books (many of which have been top sellers). One of her most interesting books is March of Folly (1984). In which she studies human stupidity in history.

Tuchman sets specific standards to what is to be defined as stupidity (or folly as she prefers to call it). To be understood as folly, acts have to be clearly contrary to the self-interest of the organization or group pursuing them; conducted over a period of time, not just in a single burst of irrational behavior; conducted by a number of individuals, not just one deranged maniac; and, importantly, there have to be people alive at the time who pointed out correctly why the act in question was folly (no 20/20 hindsight allowed).

Itâ??s easy to understand why this book is fascinating. We are often fed with success stories but I believe that we have more to learn from failures. Success can always be attributed to a number of vague and contradictory reasons but never really pinned down â?? success can be a result of dumb luck. Failure on the other hand can be studied.

But Tuchman has a specific type of folly in mind. My thought for today is more concerned with the stupid move the idiot idea. Not quite a total nutcase but more the act of sheer dumbness that is done unintentionally. OK so we have the Darwin Awards for those who manage to remove themselves from the gene pool and phenomenon like Jackass for pubescent humor â?? but who studies the fuck up?

What I am thinking about is the social Darwin awards. People who manage to remove themselves from a social group (friends, job, hobby) through an act of sheer dumbness.

If man is a social animal then how is it that we can be socially so inept? Sorry about this strange rant. If you are still reading this you must be wondering about my weekendâ?¦ It was very nice thanks!

On writers block

Writing can be a heavy experience but not as difficult as surviving writers block. Writers block is a nasty experience which poisons any creativity left inside the would-be author. In my case it leads to extreme procrastination where cleaning the oven suddenly becomes a vital challenge which must be met before returning to the keyboard.

Scott Berkun has written a list of things which may help the stuck writer to move beyond writers block. It is well worth reading and saving in a safe place for the day when nothing seems to work and the stress begins to choke you.

Here are some of his points (but you should go to the article itself)

  1. Start with a word
  2. Write about how it feels not to be able to write
  3. Have a conversation
  4. Read something you hate
  5. Warm up
  6. Make lists
  7. Switch to something harder
  8. Run like hell
  9. Whiskey
  10. Rummage your scrap pile

I really like his suggestions – except for whiskey, if I was to drink when I was blocked I would just lose another day and return to the keyboard the next day with a higher level of anxiety. Not a good idea for me. Also I would like to add one more to the list: blog. The feeling of producing text is, for me, addictive. When I blog I am more likely to be able to write in other areas. But beware blogging can also be a powerful form of procrastination…

Torture and the Future

Torture and the Future: Perspectives from the humanities ( Critical Issues in America, January 2007 – June 2007) is a companion website to an exhibition at the UC Santa Barbara. The exhibition is filled with interesting events which unfortunately all take place over there. I would have loved to listen to some of the lectures and it is unfortunate that they are not available online. However the site also contains a very good links section filled with online recommended reading and other material of interest. This alone is well worth the visit.

Change of State

Do you read First Monday? Well to be honest I don’t usually have the time to read through every issue but I get the email alert for every new issue – its out on the first Monday of every month – and I tend to browse through the titles and find something interesting to read each month.

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peerâ??reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 795 papers in 132 issues; these papers were written by 951 different authors. In addition, eight special issues have appeared.

This month has a focus on Wikipedia which is naturally interesting but what really caught my eye was a chapter from Sandra Braman’s book Change of State: Information, Policy and Power.

Thanks to MIT Press and Sandra Braman, First Monday is pleased to present an excerpt from Sandraâ??s latest book Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power. This book examines the implications of the change of the governments from welfare states to informational states. Sandra describes how information policy in areas as diverse as intellectual property, border protection, privacy, and research funding affect issues such as identity, the nature of technological systems, and organizational structures.

The table of contents for Change of State follows with a link to chapter 9, â??Information, Policy, and Power in the Informational State.â??

The book is naturally amerocentric but promises some interesting ideas. It looks like another book to add to the reading list – check it out.

Been Offline

Since I spent the weekend moving I have been unable to go online. Actually my online behavior of late can at best be called erratic. All due to the weekends activities. The tough part about this is not so much getting organised afterwards (which is terrible) but to attempt to catch up on all the reading. My inbox, rss reader and real life reading have piled up in an incredible way. This all makes me feel like Chaplin in the film “Modern Times“.

The lack of time to read is a common complaint. This is also connected to the increase in channels of information pouring in. Some of the choices are easy, while others are tough to lose for nostalgic reasons. Less or no television, skip the daily newspaper, more focused book reading, attempting to focus on one task at a time (rather than multitasking) and generally staying on top of all information flows by not allowing them to pile up.

Was it always like this? Obviously the couple of hundred feeds in my rss is new. How should one cope with the information one wants to maintain without becoming a simplified one-track person? In Republic.com Cass Sunstein writes about the daily me. This is the idea that users will tailor their information needs and ignore all “unnecessary” information. The result can be the creation of groups of outsiders who are unable to relate to their local groups.

Technology Ethics Report

UNESCO has recently published a report entitled “Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies” – The work was carried out by Mary Rundle and Chris Conley (Net Dialogue) at UNESCO’s request. Here is the text from the press release

In presenting results of this examination, the report first tells an introductory story of how the technologies covered relate to one another. Next, infoethics goals are presented. Then, for each technological trend surveyed, the report contains a short chapter drafted in lay terms to provide an overview of the relevant technology and to highlight ramifications and concerns. The report then summarizes this infoethics analysis and revisits the story of the emerging technologies. Finally, the report offers recommendations on ways to advance infoethics goals in anticipation of these oncoming technologies.

The ethical, legal and societal implications of ICTs are one of the three main priorities of UNESCOâ??s Information for All Programme and UNESCO was recently designated as the Facilitator for the implementation of Action Line C10 â??Ethical Dimensions of the Information Societyâ?? of the Geneva Action Plan adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society.

The full report is available here. At a first glance the 89 page report seems interesting and relevant. I am looking forward to  reading it.

(via Question Technology)

Lectures vs Student Presentations

My “eCommerce & eGovernment” course is drawing to a close and the time comes for a moment of reflection on the way in which the course was handled. This time in order to engage the students in the subjects I decided to let them take more space in the course. Instead of having my (I know it’s politically incorrect to speak of my students) students sitting passively through my lecturing I wanted to activate them.

In order to do this they had three larger pieces of work to present and a written examination at the end. The first presentation required them to pick a government agency and assess the website from different perspectives such as clarity, openness, human computer interaction, technology used and services offered. The second project focused on the digital divide and the students had now to pick another government agency website and evaluate if from different digital divide perspectives such as age, computer literacy, language skills, physical handicaps and more.  The third presentation required that the students presented a chapter each from the book. The point here was that the students both understand and communicate the content and add external thoughts (both their own and those of others).

Letting the students become more active requires a different approach from me. I need to support them and to critique what they do. At the same time it is difficult (and unfair) to critique people when they are maybe presenting material to a group for maybe the first time.

The results were predictable. Some students seemed to enjoy presenting, they had good presentations and a relaxed attitude towards the situation. While others were very uncomfortable with whole process and the task of standing up to speak in front of others.

While sitting and listening to all these presentations I was forced to think about the point of this system. While I really believe that the students profit from a more detailed reading of the material which a presentation requires I was unsure as to what the learning effects have been. This naturally leads to the whole question of what the point is of any teaching situation. In particular what is the point of the lecture.

Most of us are hard pressed to remember anything specific that a lecturer has said. We remember an astonishingly small amount of what we hear. At the same time memories tend to revolve around the performance rather than the content. A good lecture contains a lot of showmanship. But then what is the point of requiring this from the students? Does the course really deal with showmanship?

Of course not. None of the credits are awarded on the ability to perform live. I still believe that this system actually does promote a better level of student participation and understanding among the students but it is difficult to think of this when some particularly nervous students are attempting to survive their time at the head of the class. The learning part entailed in preparing the lecture is effective and important. But there must be a better way of relieving the anxiety of the students who dislike standing center stage?

Activists and Technology

This term has the main load of my teaching which means that I spend lots of time close to the students discussing and attempting to capture their attention for subjects ranging from eCommerce to Computer Ethics. It is very difficult to conduct larger research work in between teaching so most of the extra time is spent attempting to plan future work. This entails discussions of future work: meeting other researchers, planning projects, writing research applications and doing basic reading to cover the groundwork. This is useful in the sense that it lays the foundations for future work but it is also very frustrating since it is not real research work (some of you may disagree â?? but then thatâ??s the point of blogging).

One of my larger planned projects is developing well. No real results as yet (funding, publisher contacts etc) but it is still promising in that the basic reading reveals a good field ripe for additional research which may reveal very interesting results. The people around are enthusiastic, open and friendly.

The basic project idea is to gather empirical data on the use of technology in political resistance. To do this I intend to spend time interviewing activists to understand the way in which they use technology. The hope of this project is to understand both their mundane usage and the more â??exoticâ?? technology use. The point of this work is to first collect data on actual use and then hopefully penetrate the reasons for their use or lack of use of technology.

In particular I want to find out if the recent changes in attitudes towards activists has encouraged them to use more secretive technologies such as encryption and covert messaging. Ideally the project would like to understand what it is they believe to be threats to their activities and how they set about countering such threats. Alternatively the work will look at the reasons for their non-use of different technologies.

In order to do this I need to get into contact with diverse groups of political activists. In order to limit the study I will also be focusing on groups which primarily deal in non-violent methods within the participatory democracy ideal.

To me this is very exciting and I hope to begin data collection this summer and continue with this until February. In parallel with this will be data analysis and writing. The chance to do more detailed empirical work and connect it to my analytical background is an exciting prospect.

As I write this the train (yes another trip â?? but short this time) is speeding through a foggy landscape and two deer were walking slowly through a field itâ??s a mystical uplifting experience looking at nature â?? even if it is through the window of a speeding train.