update on my on-campus concerns: I had an email from one of the other Students' Union officers today which made me a lot happier. As well as offering moral support and gratitude, which are always welcome but not that meaningful on their own, he announced that he had contacted some members of staff, one of whom is coming to our organisational meeting on Monday to help out, and that I will not have to be either the chair or the only Union speaker on Thursday. This is all a relief for me personally, and gives the campaign as a whole more credibility.

posted @ 6:30 PM -

An upgraded Blogger has just been released: Blogger Pro� - Power Push-Button Publishing. I am so spoilt with free stuff for my computer that I am highly reluctant to pay for any online service, but this might just have to change. On the one hand I think I'm about to shell out for my web hosting account, because I am already using the last free service I could find that supports the extensions I need (PHP) and doesn't add advertising to my pages, but they will stop the free service in a month. On the other, Blogger will continue to have a free service, but they've got me hooked and I think the paying service will be worth the small cost.

For me personally the most important things will be when I go off travelling in September. More sophisticated templates and titles for posts will save time, as will a guarantee of reliability on the servers. I don't intend to tour the web cafes of Europe and Asia, but I will want to write about what I see, so the quicker and easier it is to do that the better. I'll also be able to put the time & date stamps into local timezones and languages, which will be nice.

posted @ 8:22 AM -

I'm still a sucker for Rumi. I can't even read what I've pasted in above, but I've put it there because I find it visually pleasing, and I know it translates to something I enjoyed reading, and somehow feels appropriate at the moment.

I'm somewhat preoccupied at the moment, with big issues on campus. I won't keep on posting long rambles about that here, because it's pretty involved, and must be quite dull for people not closely involved, but I've spent the last few days trying to sort things out. On Thursday there will be a Students' Union public meeting at which the Vice Chancellor will try to justify the changes afoot on campus, and various others will explain why we are not happy. I am supposed to be chairing this meeting, but I need to change that.

At the moment, it must look far too much like all of this is a personal vendetta run by me, because I've also had to write an informational piece for the student paper. No-one else who has enough information (currently very few people) had the time apparently (hmm..... I'm a part time Union officer, I'm sure one of the full timers should have done it....), but this is not helpful. If it looks like my personal crusade on the one hand I look bitter and aggressive, and on the other the whole campaign loses credibility. Hopefully someone else will chair the meeting, and other people will also speak, because this is something that a lot of people are concerned about it.

Meanwhile a few things have the potential to make this all highly embarrassing for me personally, and even make it impossible to proceed. The Vice Chancellor has replied to my open letter, and amongst a few points which I don't agree with and will continue to argue, he was eager to state that I was wrong to complain about students not knowing what is happening to this University, because previous Union officials knew and (by implication) if they didn't tell the rest of us it's not his problem. The trouble is he's kind of right - my predecessors failed to tell either the student body as a whole, or the incoming Union Exec. I'm going to meet up with the only one of my predecessors who I can track down easily (most of the people in the know are no longer at the Uni; nothing sinister in that, it's just that the senior Union jobs that make one privy to such information generally go to people who have already finished their degrees), in order to find out how much she knew and why information wasn't passed on. At the very least this is going to make things more difficult.

My greatest fear though is that no-one will turn up to the meeting. Enough people are worried or angry enough about what is going on that we ought to be able to rely on a big turnout, in which the biggest problem would be stopping the VC from being heckled (I really do want him to say his piece), but I'm not convinced. Student apathy is so deep that however many people say they care and say they'll turn up, the spectre of a no-show still haunts me. If we don't get a big public display of support, for a start we will have to drop the whole issue, as we can hardly complain about students not being informed if students demonstrate a lack of concern, and it will really explode in my face. If we have a large turnout it should make it clear that I am acting responsibly on behalf of the students I'm supposed to represent, but the converse is also true - a poor turnout will make it look like I'm just pursuing this for my own reasons.

posted @ 7:39 AM -

More joy of Need To Know: I would not expect paris-charming-hotels.co.uk to be where to look for postmodernist poetry.

posted @ 12:55 PM -

Anyone fancy a job? This week's Need To Know has pointed out a very tempting advert for a Senior Bullshitter vacancy.

posted @ 12:50 PM -

sign of the times, or typing error? John Lewis lists a Palm m505 in the Kitchenware section of its website

posted @ 12:45 PM -

It's nice to see that the Glastonbury Festival is going ahead after all. When it didn't get a license last year I thought that was just the end of a great tradition, but it's back.

I don't know if I'll be going, because it sounds like they have really had to get serious about fence-jumpers, and that would take quite a lot away from the festival. Without them, for a start it would be half the size, and part of the appeal of Glastonbury is definitely the fact that it is absurdly huge and undisciplined, while other festivals are increasingly demure unsociable affairs. Unfortunately this is also part of the festival's problem - at the 2000 one it was pretty clear that the level of crowding was on the verge of being dangerous, and something had to be done to keep the event safe, so I'm not sure I can argue with what's happened.

It's really a victim of its own success, but I'm far happier to see a modified Glastonbury happening, even if a less good one, than no festival at all. Anyone got �100 and a lift to spare?

posted @ 5:12 AM -

Yes, it's true, a scientific study has proved the ineffectiveness of counting sheep. Oh and while they're at it they quote a study about how hard it is to not think about polar bears.

Of course there was a serious point to all this - it was a test of a new technique to beat insomnia. The bad news for insomniacs is that the new technique wasn't very impressive either.

posted @ 3:33 PM -

A lorry has shed its load of wombles, causing chaos on the M1. This isn't some sort of joke - it's the travel news off the radio.

posted @ 4:51 AM -

Brighton Council accused of Falling flat on their arts by Julie Burchill. Sadly I find myself agreeing with her....

posted @ 8:47 PM -

Nasreddin Hodja on current world politics (writing 7 centuries ago, but wisdom is always wise):

At midnight Hodja heard a lot of commotion outside his window. He wrapped his blanket around himself and went outside to see what was happening. He saw two men fighting and tried to break it up. Without answering, one of them ripped the blanket off him, and both of them quickly ran away. So poor Hodja walked back into his house naked and returned to his bed.
"What was the fighting all about?" asked his wife.
"It was over our blanket. Now that they have got it, they have stopped fighting."

posted @ 8:13 PM -

Gerry Adams is apparently a treehugger

posted @ 6:56 PM -

"If they'd operated like a normal brothel and made sure they got the money before the sex, they would have been all right'

Europe's First Brothel for Women Goes Bust

posted @ 9:16 AM -

well.... it's been sent now, so I can't go back. I still have my doubts about whether this was the right thing to do, but here is the open letter I've sent to the vice chancellor:

Dear Vice Chancellor,

I am sure that you will not appreciate me going public with this before discussing it with you in private, but please understand that I have spent a month deliberating about the best way to proceed with this. The main part of this letter was written immediately after the Senate meeting that inspired it, intended for publication. I then decided to wait a while and consider sending it privately to you, but after some time realised that this is far more important than a private disagreement between two individuals who each have a personal stake in the University. It is an issue of the future of an institution that has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and will continue to be far more important as a whole than either you or I are as individuals, whatever we do to it. Therefore I think it is crucial that whatever debate we may have is entirely public, making us accountable to the people we are supposed to be serving. Please also be aware that any personal reply to me will also be copied to the Badger and the USSU Exec for this reason.





On Friday the 14th of December I had the privilege of attending the first Senate meeting of my term as an elected student representative. I found the occasion most illuminating, but I am afraid to say this was for very negative reasons. I do not wish to devote many words to the details of decisions I disagreed with, as I am sure you will agree that Senate itself was the place for that, but I was disappointed by the whole spirit in which the occasion was conducted and by the method.

I went to Senate in good faith, expecting that this large group consisting mainly of staff and with a handful of student representatives would be consulted, and allowed to make decisions. Instead I felt that we were expected to rubber stamp a number of radical changes to the organisation of the University, in spite of the fact that it was perfectly clear that there was a lack of information, that some key stakeholders were not happy with the plans, and that others (the students) had simply not been consulted. Repeatedly those people who would say things with which you disagreed were cut short and dismissed, and the Senate was instructed about how you would like us to vote. When this was not adequate to control events, and a vote was tied, you used your casting vote to decide this; not in itself an issue, but this was a _second_ vote granted to you. By contrast the Students' Union Executive rotate the chair, so that no person can consistently control meetings in this manner, and the chair may only cast a vote if everybody else present can not decide.

I feel it would be only fair to back up my general complaint with specific details, so I will return to how I feel you are riding rough-shod over any possibility of dissent about the grand plans for schools' reorganisation. Repeatedly points were made that could only really be answered in the light of the ongoing CPES review, and repeatedly BIOLS asserted that they would need more information (giving examples of specific reports that would help them), and you paid lip-service to the idea of not having an organisation in constant flux, but actually producing long term structures that could last untinkered-with for some time. Yet after all this when it came to decision making you pushed very hard for going ahead with what is envisaged right now, in spite of the flaws, in spite of the fact that your documents suggest that a different model (the 4 school system) serves the academic needs of the University better, and in spite of the fact that it is envisaged that Chemistry will probably need to move soon after the reorganisation, and Informatics will probably want to demerge from Physical Sciences in the near future. This is short-termism at its very worst - going with a plan that is acknowledged to be faulty, just because you are suspicious of attempts to improve it.

To give another specific example that I feel may be closer to the hearts of the Arts students, who are unaffected by what was being discussed as the mangling (or was that "restructuring") of their part of the University is already done and dusted (unbeknownst to most of them), I tried to raise the issue of student consultation. I pointed out that most students don't even know the changes that are afoot in their university, let alone feel that they have had the slightest hint of an input, yet they are the service users. My point was dismissed, first with a glib rebuttal of the wilder rumours that are going around campus (yes I already knew that Brighton and Sussex Universities were not planning a merger, but to seize on that was to deliberately miss my point), then (when I insisted) you stated that these discussions are not secret and are in the Bulletin; hardly a concerted effort to inform students, most of whom don't read the Bulletin, and many of whom don't know that any reorganisation is afoot. Finally I was able to squeeze a muttered admission from you that student consultation had been inadequate, but you made no suggestion as to how this was going to change in future (what sort of company radically reorganises its product range without asking CUSTOMERS what they think?), and moved discussion on as quickly as possible. I was left wondering what the point of my presence at this meeting was.

I left (after almost 5 hours with no break - an unacceptably long meeting that implies we ought to be holding them more than once per term) feeling that I had participated in a sham designed to perpetuate the illusion that decisions are taken based on consultation across campus, when in fact they are taken behind closed doors before the consultation takes place. There were several mentions of the idea of "ownership" of targets, aspirations, reviews &c. I think the point was rightly made that when individuals feel they own targets and reviews they are well motivated to achieve the former and make the latter work. In this case, a clear signal was sent out that Senate, even the Deans of the existing Schools, let alone such lowly beings as faculty members and students, do not own the process of change that will tear apart existing structures and replace with what looks awfully like the standard package of ACME University, UK, losing all that is distinctive and appealing about Sussex in the process.

I have often wondered why staff morale (and we all know this problem spreads across all schools, all levels and many non-teaching staff) is so low at University that has so much to be proud of and offers such a pleasant working environment. I feel that in Senate I began to understand part of the answer.


Eldan Goldenberg
USSU Postgraduate Officer

posted @ 7:38 AM -

More on Cyprus, this time from a Turkish source: the Turkish Daily News reports that Clerides and Denktas are holding their talks on the basis of "the pre-1960 status of the two peoples of the island". Pre-1960 means before the Cyprus Republic collapsed, before the military coup in Greece and before the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus. It also means that they are serious and that they might actually get somewhere.

The continuing setbacks and frustrations in the peace processes in the Middle East and Northern Ireland make me wary of expecting too much, but this certainly looks promising. Relationships between Greece and Turkey have been slowly improving over the last few years (more from the Turkish Daily News - they are finally negotiating over territorial waters, an issue that has been the cause of a lot of their tension), so maybe if Cyprus can establish itself as a united, independent republic again both of the interested powers could actually bring themselves to leave it alone now.

posted @ 5:51 AM -

You can now (from next summer to be precise) take a GCSE in Citizenship Studies. I stumbled across this while reading about the comedy of errors that one of the exam boards has been committing recently with GCSEs and A levels, and I must admit I'm pretty shocked.

Unlike a lot of people, I have no doubt that schools should be teaching this sort of material. Classes explicitly in "citizenship" are of dubious value, but the ideas they encompass should absolutely be incorporated in every other subject a school teaches. The trouble is that schools teach kids to take exams, and nothing else, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you can now take an exam in being a good citizen - suddenly there's something that will encourage schools to teach it. What a sorry state of affairs.

posted @ 5:09 AM -

How's this for a laugh: the University might be about to employ me to install Quake on their servers.

There's actually a good reason - we offer an MSc in Multimedia Applications & Visual Environments, and something like Quake provides a richly detailed visual environment with graphics, movement, characters, simulated physics and so on. Students on a one year course are not going to be expected to create something that extensive in solo projects, but providing them with an interface to an existing simulator lets them do the interesting bit with the groundwork laid for them.

Still, I can't help thinking that this will also mean we can all play network Quake after hours....

posted @ 5:27 PM -

please argue with me. It's lonely out here.

Seriously, I wish more people would talk back to me on this site, especially after I've written something as opinionated as yesterday's rant. It gives me a better idea of who's reading, and arguing helps me clarify my own thoughts about many things.....

posted @ 4:59 AM -

The previous 7 posts are actually one long rant, but I had to break it down to make Blogger accept it. Sorry if this is confusing.

posted @ 6:24 PM -

Why oh why oh WHY do cretinous, breadcrumb-licking wannabe scientists feel the need to make ludicrously over-optimistic predictions about where their field will be in a few years' time? There is absolutely NO REASON to believe that robots will be taking GCSEs in 2010, as the latest in a distinguished line of AI nutters has predicted. I should know. This is the grand project of which my attempts at research are one small part.

There are an awful lot of people providing a hungry press with such predictions. They range from the simply ill-informed (actually the minority, they mostly repeat other peoples' predictions rather than making fresh ones) through the self-serving, such as the 'futurologist' in the article above, who is clearly trying to raise publicity for his company, to the completely insane.

posted @ 6:24 PM -

There's three reasons why I get so wound up about all this. The first is noble, the second a bit more selfish, and the third entirely self-centred:

1. It involves the spread of blatantly false beliefs. This is a BAD THING inherently


2. It risks fuelling a backlash against the sort of work I want to do. If people realised that our progress is quite modest they would be less scared than they are when they listen to Prof. Warwick's claims that robots will soon take over the world, and more willing to be interested in our work rather than wanting it stopped


3. There is a slow cycle of AI funding. Every time the field has grown people have started getting carried away with their optimism, and making short-term dramatic predictions. 10 years later the predictions haven't come true, a backlash begins, and it gets bloody difficult to get funding for such research. Warwick started making his daft predictions in 1995 (before that he had 15 years of sensible research behind him), and I will be finishing a PhD and looking for research funding in 2006

This is particularly on my mind right now as last week's issue of the Sussex student paper (sorry - not online - I used to publish it online 4 years ago but when a few of us got too busy no-one stepped into the breach - makes us rather embarassingly backwards really) claims that "[the Soulcatcher 2025] microchip's future-tech design will mean that, when implanted in the skull just behind the eye, it will be able to record a person's every thought and experience". This is such complete, unadulterated bullshit (quoting someone from the same lab as the BBC story linked above) that they may as well suggest we look at each other's pineal glands to see each others' souls, but nonetheless the journalists (applying the same tried and tested standards as all student journalists) swallowed it hook line and sinker, and now more people will get paranoid about something that isn't even possible.

posted @ 6:23 PM -

Anyway, I feel I ought to provide a quick guide to spotting these obvious false predictions, but first a quick dissection of why the particular claims I've been prattling about are clearly wrong. Let's start with the "Robot passing GCSEs" one first. What abilities do we need to be able to sit exams?:

posted @ 6:23 PM -

Reading

Optical Character Recognition is good enough to read postcodes on letters, some of the time, but still requires human backup even for that very constrained task. Actually making sense of unconstrained text is still extremely difficult for computers, even when it is typed or printed.

Understanding what we read.

A quick glance at Microsoft Word's state-of-the-art grammar checker or auto-summarise feature shows just how useless these are, and the reason is that they do not understand the text they are processing in any meaningful way.

Reasoning about it

The AI world has had some notable successes in this field, but they have been highly specialised machines, like Deep Blue, the great chess player. The problem is that the chess playing machine wouldn't even be able to process information about GCSE History, and the very impressive factory fault detectors, aircraft auto-pilots, credit scoring programs (and so on) are all equally specialised. No one is anywhere near being able to produce a generalised knowledge processing system, except using the very ancient technology of sperm and ova.

Write the answers

Actually producing output is not a problem, even if we insist it must be hand-written - there have been impressive hand-writing machines for centuries (look at the "18^th Century Automata" slides in these lecture notes from a course I took last term). The problem is being able to construct the prose to write. Again, there are some nice automatic prose generators, like this press release generator, but they too are highly specialised. We are nowhere near being able to computer-generate essays that even read well, let alone like a human student's work, without explicitly programming in so much specific information that it is really a human-written essay.

posted @ 6:23 PM -

Of course there is one reason why this prediction could be right - GCSEs become easier and more focussed on parotting of facts every year. Maybe by 2010 it will be possible to pass a GCSE just by spotting a few key words in the question and spouting some related data memorised from textbooks. Oh yes. It was in 1994 when I took mine, and today's computers can do that....

posted @ 6:23 PM -

Back to the mind-reading chip implant story. Here are a few questions that would have to be answered before I will believe that this is possible at all, let alone within my lifetime:

• How will we read thoughts, given that we don't understand how the brain works in any detailed manner?


• Why should we believe that all thoughts are transmitted through one place, like in a computer? The brain isn't like computers, and things aren't at all centralised


• If there is such a place, why should it be outside the brain?

posted @ 6:23 PM -

How to spot charlatans in the AI community

or charlatans who wish they were in the AI community

The more of these you can tick off, the less you should believe what is being claimed:

The person making the claim is:

• Called Kevin Warwick


• An associate of Kevin Warwick


• Willingly to publicly admit to being an associate of Kevin Warwick


• Based at Reading University (because to not have executed Kevin Warwick by now is proof of their insansity)


• Referred to as a "futurologist"


• Employed by BT


• Trying to scare you and/or whip up a moral panic in society

The person making the claim does:

• Spend more time conducting interviews than research


• Claim that detractors are just jealous


• Publish more often in lay magazines and newspapers than the peer-reviewed scientific press


• Publish in lay magazines before the scientific press


• Publish things in newspapers that other people have already published in the scientific press


• Want you to fund their work (unless of course you are a research council or their parents....

The claim itself:

• Features things that no-one in their right mind would want to develop


• Involves specific dates by which such things will allegedly happen, especially if they are within a decade

posted @ 6:21 PM -

I am about to post something in several parts, in reverse order because newest entries go to the top on this page. If you stumble across this in the archive it might be very confusing - jump up 7 posts and read them as one long one to make it make sense.

Sorry about this, but Blogger seems to crash whenever I try to publish the whole lot as one post.

posted @ 6:21 PM -

It's funny how whenever I have a sudden drop in workload I start to notice things I should have paid attention to months ago. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition has been at the Natural History Museum since October. It will wind up in March, and it's about time I paid a visit. I have a few trips to London planned over the next 6 weeks or so, so I'm sure I'll manage to find time....

posted @ 2:36 PM -

Guantanamo Bay - Base Housing

posted @ 2:16 PM -