Fortnightly Mailing

A leaving speech

I stopped being chair of governors of The Sheffield College at the end of March 2021, after a 45 year connection. Here's the short speech I gave to an online staff meeting.

==

The invitation to speak caught me by surprise. It really is an honour. Today is my first day since 2008 without a Sheffield College role. To explain: 

In 1976 I did teaching practice here. In 1979 I got a permanent job here. In 2002 the College dismissed me as redundant. In 2008 the College appointed me a governor, on my second attempt. Until yesterday I was chair of governors. 

I’m going to talk about how I feel about the College, and then to offer three reflections.

What is a 45 year association with one institution like?

I’ll start with three snapshots: 

It is 1979

After teacher-training I’d worked for two years as a part-timer, cadging cars from friends to get between Chesterfield, Cleethorpes, Manchester, Scunthorpe, and Sheffield.  I’m being interviewed for my dream job as a Lecturer Grade 1 in Trade Union Studies at Granville College. As a part-timer I had often worn a so-called Chinese rickshaw driver’s jacket. And Doc Martens. Once I’d henna dyed my hair. Anxiously waiting after my interview I was called back by the panel: “We’d like to offer you the job: but only if you agree to smarten yourself up, put on a collar and tie, and wear a decent pair of shoes.”  Of course I swallowed my pride and said yes.  

Still 1979, it is my first team meeting

I’m wearing my new smart clothes. We are planning the coming term. Unknown to me, something is on the way up the inside of my trouser-leg. I shift my position. My knee sears with pain. I yell. I  reflexively start to hit my knee to kill whatever thing has done this to me. Next I tear off my trousers, to make sure that the thing - formerly an Autumn wasp - is dead. Rather anxious laughter ensues. I feel sheepish. My new colleagues look worried. Who exactly have they been landed with?

The 1980s now 

It’s the lunch break. A three-course student made and served meal in the subsidised staff restaurant. Over a  three-term cycle you could experience most of the culinary curriculum - including lambs’ brains au gratin. Afterwards there’d be coffee in the staff lounge, sort of “at the feet” of the Principal, the aptly-named Arthur Colledge, who was also the Regional Secretary of the lecturer’s union NATFHE. (Think about that for a minute….) Arthur, smoking his pipe, or knocking out the dottle, would converse intimidatingly with whoever was sitting nearby. The trick was to avoid catching his eye, to nod occasionally, but never to get drawn in, else you’d risk being made to feel a fool. 

As an aside, don’t do any of it Angela - not the pipe, not the dottle, not the intimidation.

Through these three snapshots I wanted to focus on what FE felt like at the time of my start in it.

But of course there’s a continuous “jostle” of other memories, of widely varying significance. Here are a few of them: 

• the annual staff/student summer cricket match on Granville College’s sports ground out towards Fox House - land and pavilion bought by a speculator and even now slowly going to ruin; 
• outright and unchallenged homophobia; 
• the City Council’s correct 1980s plan to set up a fully tertiary system, fatally weakened from the start by the Secretary of State’s decision to retain school sixth forms in the south west of the City; 
• guerrilla action by women staff taking down sexist calendars from male staff rooms; 
• the huge changes in Sheffield caused by deindustrialisation; 
• the giant, muddled institution that resulted in 1992 from the merger of Sheffield’s six FE colleges to form a Sheffield College nearly twice our current size, with over 100 locations; 
• leading a bitter and protracted industrial dispute about our lecturers’ contracts; 
• the creeping damage done by austerity over the last decade; 
• a full-to-bursting City Hall Ballroom for the union-run (but everyone attended) annual staff Christmas social; 
• the pain, anxiety and eventual liberation of being “restructured out” aged 50; 
• the long period when “things were just not quite right in the College”, when pride in what the  College does had somehow ebbed away; 
• my last three years here as chair during which we’ve all been engaged in turning the college around.

And I’ve ignored completely: 

• the tough collective experience we are going through with Covid;
  
• the long term harm the pandemic has done and will do to the fabric of the City; 
• and the completely admirable way in which you have responded to the pandemic.

Before I finish, I have three reflections:

Firstly, what makes FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973: 

“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”. 

She continued

“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.” 

It was, above all, the heterogeneity, the incredible range in its workforce, that Tipton pinpoints, which made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does.

Secondly, what can make a college great? 

Above all it is its climate or culture. The vibe has to be right. The way that all roles are vulnerably interdependent on each other must be always in the background. Nobel prize winner and arms control expert Thomas Schelling put it this way

“Most of what we call civilisation depends on reciprocal vulnerability.” 

I believe that what is true for nations is true for organisations and is true for individuals. As chair I have tried to put this value into practice; I think governors have tried to do likewise; and I know that Angela shares this approach too. 

Finally, why is change for the better sometimes so hard? 

Because we don’t get or give enough time for things to run their course. If you make bread it takes the time it takes. If you lay concrete, you know it takes time to cure. If you grow veg you know that plants take the time they take to fruit. There are things you can do to improve the yield; sometimes you have to act fast - when frost threatens, say; but nature has to take its course. So, to get The Sheffield College back from its 2017 brink onto its current upward trajectory has taken you, has taken us, has taken our students, the time it has taken. Should you be impatient for improvement? Of course. But you must be patient too. 

To conclude: I wish The Sheffield College and you its staff, the very best for the future. From the side-lines, I know that I will see the College dealing with whatever challenges come its way; that I will see the College continue to go from strength to strength; that I will see the College, guided by a new strategy adopted yesterday by governors, being the anchor institution that the City of Sheffield needs and deserves.  

Thank you.

==

A saucer of beans

Runner beans straight from the pod earlier today.

The human brain while texting, tweeting, phoning, driving

As a cyclist I've developed a sixth sense about which vehicles will, when they get close, be driven by a phone user; along with a riskily combative approach to such drivers if I can engage with them....

The Economist's Andreas Kluth is rightly a bit obsessed with the same issue, and writes about it here.

Excerpt (which could equally well apply to people texting/tweeting etc whilst allegedly concentrating on the things around them):

The human brain cannot process communication (oral or written) with a person who is not physically present without drastically reallocating attention and thus compromising driving safety. This is a biological fact. All those who claim that they can call/text and drive are the modern equivalents of the people you might (if you’re older) recall bragging that “I can hold my liquor” before that started sounding ridiculous.

Note. The are links to references in the second comment to this post below.

Swooping descents? Not on this occasion.

At the end of March I spent a few days cross-country skiing at the North-Eastern end of Jotunheim in Norway. It was cold, sunny and windy.

Even high up there was lousy thin snow, with plenty of exposed rock, and abundant ice. But stunning views.

On 30 March we'd have needed ice-axes and crampons to reach the 2258m summit of Nautgardstinden (final picture below, with way barred by ice).

Holmenkollbakken in Oslo - April 2011

Last week I had the luck to be taken to the newly re-built Holmenkollbakken ski jump in Oslo, where I met a man who had last done the jump in 1940, aged 19. He said "you feel very lonely when the hooter has sounded, and you are at the top of the jump, and there are thousands of silent spectators down below." You will see what he means below, particularly in the fifth and final picture.

Wikipedia entry for Holmenkollbakken.

Language development in a child - the birth of a word

Below is a Fortnightly Mailing post from four years ago. Now you can watch MIT researcher Deb Roy summarising what he and his team have discovered about language aqcuisition from their analysis of the vast amount of data recorded in the "human speechome project".

[December 2006] The 9 eerie images below are time-lapse pictures taken in the course of theHuman Speechome Project, "an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development for a single child". The project, run by the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Deb Roy (with his and Rupal Patel's child the subject of the study) is taking place in a single family home that has been wired with microphones and video cameras, with the intention of capturing "virtually everything the child sees and hears ..., 24 hours per day, for several years of continuous observation.  This excerpt from the paper referenced below explains the rationale:

"In general, many hypotheses regarding the fine-grained interactions between what a child observes and what the child learns to say cannot be investigated due to a lack of data. How are a child’s first words related to the order and frequency of words that the child heard? How does the specific context (who was present, where was the language used, what was the child doing at the time, etc.) affect acquisition dynamics? What specific sequence of grammatical constructions did a child hear that led her to revise her internal model of verb inflection? These questions are impossible to answer without far denser data recordings than those currently available."

During the planned 3 years of the project over 300 GB of data will be generated per day. For a detailed overview of the project, see The Human Speechome Project [775 kB PDF].

Wikileaks

On 27 April 1961 John F Kennedy gave a speech to the American Newspaper Publisher's Association about press freedom and the poison that is state secrecy. A passage in the speech about the then "cold war enemy" stands out. Those who condemn Wikileaks would do well note it.

"It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumour is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."

[Post prompted by Swaraaj Chauhan - lots of interesting links - which made me find and read the full transcript of the speech on the JFK Library web site. For why this is not a simple issue, see this terrific 5/12/2010 piece by David Weinberger.]

Updated 5/12/2010.

Anticipating the Web - information available "in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance"

Source

During a discussion about Open Access journal publishing Brian Whalley posed this "christmas quiz" question:

Who wrote the following and when?

"The kind of organization we wish to aim at is one where all relevant information should be available to each research worker and in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance. Further, that not only should the information be available, but that it should be to a large extent put at the disposal of the research worker without his having to take any special steps to get hold of it."

Google and Sheila Webber's interesting¹ 2003 Journal of Information Science article Information Science in 2003: A Critique led me to discover that this anticipation of the Web was by the UK-based Irish physicist JD Bernal, pictured above. In 1939.

¹ Webber's categorisation of disciplines, building on Becher, as "Hard pure", " Soft pure", "Hard applied" and " Soft applied" caught my eye.

A quick and dirty review of a Dell netbook running Ubuntu Linux

Over the last few weeks I've had on/off access to a Dell Latitude 2110 which I was offered to trial by a company working for Dell, in exchange for writing a brief review. I do not normally get distracted by this kind of thing, but when I idly asked if Dell could supply the review machine with Linux on it, and Dell said yes,  curiosity got the better of me.

Here is a rough and ready assessment of the device.

Features

1. Weight - 1.35 kg.
2. Construction - extremely solid with a non-slip easily gripped rubberized surface.
3. Keyboard - quiet action, with full-sized key, 250 x 100 mm, with trackpad.
4. Indicator lights - prominent and unambigious, for all the normal functions.
5. Security - Kensington lock point on either side of the device enabling a carrying strap to be fitted.
6. Resilient screen covering that looked like it would be difficult to puncture, but with a shiny enough surface to work badly in conditions of high ambient light.
7. Ports:
   • - on the sides not the rear - VGA, audio, three USB ports, network socket, power input;
   • - on the front - SD card reader.
8. Battery - removable 2.42 AmpH, with the option of a larger one, which would alter the keyboard and screen orientation, probably for the worse in both cases, by raising the rear of the machine, and possibly fowling the screen when opened to the maximum.
9. Power supply - rather bulky and weighing 380 g.
10. 144 GB hard disk; 1 GB? of RAM.
11. Video camera and microphone centrally positioned on the upper edge of the screen, and speakers positioned on either side of the screen.

Performance

1. Time to boot from cold - 45 seconds; time to load Firefox - 7 seconds.
2. Silent operation, but with slightly disconcerting barely discernable vibration from the hard disk.

The device in use

1. Strongly built, pleasingly designed, simple, and obvious, and perfectly satisfactory as a netbook, with the only stand-out flaws being the shiny screen and weighty power supply, with the latter only an issue for travellers.
2. Ubuntu and the supplied applications that I looked at worked OK but on the device supplied Firefox was not set up to play YouTube videos; I did not have the patience and possibly do not have the wherewithal to sort this problem out.
3. Several hours of operation using the standard battery.

Would I buy one?

For years I've spoiled myself with a series of top-of-the-range as light as you can get high specification laptops, usually with a docking station, full sized keyboard and large separate screen, doubling as a desktop machine, running Windows, and the Windows applications I am accustomed to and fluent in.  (The photo below is of the first of these, circa 1994. I think it cost about £1200, which is about £200o in today's money.) A netbook like the Latitude is not a substitute for my current set up (and nor is designed to be). But as a back-up or second machine, it would work well. As a device for student or pupil use I would consider it seriously, with the apparent build quality, good layout, nice grippy surface, and sensible positioning of ports all being points in its favour.

Value for money? This is not something I can easily judge given the big differences between bulk and single device prices.

Windows vs Ubuntu Linux? I would need to be confident that I would not be tripped up by the video problem I encountered, but my guess is that after a steepish and possibly enjoyable learning curve, I would become confident in problem solving, just as I have had to become with Windows. In a managed environment my guess is that you'd have a standard disk image organised via which everything could be made to work consistently.

1994 Dell 320 SLi - 1.6 kg, rubberised, running DOS and Ability Plus, with a mono LCD screen that worked worked well in direct sunlight. The then state of the art, and manufactured in Ireland.....

CSR - converting cheap public debt into expensive private debt?

I've been thinking about the debt transfer that cuts in public spending will produce.

Those whose income is reduced by the cuts - for example public sector workers made redundant, unemployed people whose benefits are cut, businesses who supply the public sector, or higher rate tax payers whose child benefit is removed - will surely increase their own indebtedness, at least in the short term.

If they do this by borrowing at high rates of interest (through credit cards, loan companies, loan sharks, increasing their mortages, say) then the CSR transfers debt burden from (cheap) Government borrowing to (more expensive) personal borrowing.

Obviously (?) there isn't a one-to-one match between the reduction in Government debt and the consequent increase in private debt: I guess the latter might be larger than the former.

But given the disparity between the interest rates on the two kinds of debt what will be the net effect of the CSR on the total servicing costs of public and private debt?

In praise of praise (and Local Authorities) on the day of the Comprehensive Spending Review

A

Sent: 20 October 2010 14:08
To: StreetForce
From: Seb Schmoller
Subject: A plaudit

Please thank whoever has caused the pavements of Albert Road to be blown clear of leaves. To my knowledge this is the first time that this action has ever been taken. Previously a small council sweeping machine struggled to do only the road but not the pavements. This year a guy with a blower walked up the street, with a large hired in lorry collecting the leaves. Good stuff.

B

Sent: 20 October 2010 14:56
To: Seb Schmoller
From: John Charlton
Director of Street Force, Sheffield City Council
Subject: A plaudit

Thank you very much for your recent email regarding leaf clearance, it was much appreciated and good of you to write. I will arrange for the people involved to receive a copy of your email so they can read it for themselves. People are very quick to complain when things go wrong and I wish there were more like you who write giving praise when it is due. Once again, thank you very much for taking the trouble to write, it is much appreciated. Kind regards.