The academics vs the bureaucracy

Why the Stern Review of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) could mean the end of the university as we know it

Annual Europa Lecture-2002. NCRE Online Paper No. 02/02

[From the Introduction]. Let me begin, however, by commenting on the establishment of this research centre. I am aware that when it was opened by Phil Goff in May 2000, it was as the University of Canterbury’s Centre for Research on Europe, funded through the Vice-Chancellor’s new initiatives fund. Following the receipt of a most welcome and substantial EU grant at the beginning of this year, it was renamed the National Centre for Research on Europe, and I understand that it has gone from strength to strength. Thanks are due especially to Martin Holland as Director for what has been achieved in such a brief time. It is indeed timely to have a research centre focused on Europe. A large majority of New Zealanders trace their ancestry to European countries, especially Britain, and we like to think we know and understand them. But Europe is changing fast, and the mass migration from there to New Zealand occurred several generations ago. If we don’t take care to nurture the relationship, we will end up being out of touch with the new developments. While the logic of our geography leads us to focus a lot of attention on the Asia Pacific region and the Americas, our ties to and interests in Europe are just too important to let go. This evening I will talk about the expansion of the Union, about its importance to New Zealand, and about the wide ranging relationships we have with the European Unio

Empathy Institutionalized: Sociocultural Dialogue as a Strategic Peacebuilding Initiative

A common adage used in psychological exploration tells us that “If you want to know the end, look at the beginning.” While typically employed to emphasize the importance of upbringing and environment on personal outcomes, this phrase can be equally applicable in examining the ways in which society has developed over time to produce our polarized sociopolitical culture of today. This work explores from an integrative psychosocial perspective the potential that exists in working to define a new “end” by shaping a new “beginning,” through going directly to the institutions that comprise our own beginnings— schools. Through a combined research lens of peace studies and developmental psychology, this presentation will examine in detail the capacities of sociocultural dialogue as a strategic peacebuilding initiative, specifically in the context of institutionalized education. Through initiating relevant, age-appropriate conversational opportunities for our youngest minds to encounter and understand difference, this method would thus essentially strive to serve as an embedded, ongoing strategic peacebuilding initiative that assumes a preventative rather than reactionary approach to conflicts in perspective. In using an interdisciplinary approach to both inform frameworks and measure outcomes of implementing developmentally appropriate sociocultural dialogues in early educational settings, we gain a heightened understanding of the ways in which these types of dialogues can contribute to increased levels of empathy—ultimately working, from the beginning, to pre-emptively instill qualities capable of bridging the divides which we have clearly seen to emerge in the end

Can We Develop Our Daily Vocabularies By Following Native English Speakers On Twitter?

Twitter as a microblogging site is used by many people in the world for many functions. One of them, we can see people making conversation in their own language and “following” native English speakers (L1). The problem is: can follow L1 help us improve our English skill? The aim of this research is to know whether following L1 on Twitter can improve English daily vocabularies or not. We use qualitative research method to collect data. By dividing people into three groups: (1) people who are following mostly L1, (2) people who are following few L1 and (3) people who are not following L1 at all. We ask some questions related to English daily vocabularies which are some of the most often used in conversation. To conduct this research, we also use Tweepi.com to prove that the participants are truly following L1. In this end of research, we are going to know whether following L1 give Twitter users improvement in English daily vocabularies or not

Collapse of Distance: Epistemic Strategies of Science and Technoscience

Already the title of this paper shoulders too heavy a burden of proof. By contrasting science and technoscience it alludes to an epochal break or fundamental shift in the culture of research. "Science " refers to theoretical representations of nature as we know them primarily from the history of physics and primarily from a tradition that begins with Einstein and end

COVID-19 and the academe in South Africa: Not business as usual

The famous R.E.M. song laments ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it, I had some time alone, I feel fine…’. Many South Africans would agree that COVID-19 signals the end of the world (or business) as we know it, and through the lockdown we have certainly had some time alone. But contrary to the lyrics, all may not be fine, especially for South Africa’s scientific community. The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has impacted every economic and social sector1 across the globe, including higher education in South Africa. Every student and staff member at a higher education institution will have been affected in some way and to varying degrees; not one person will emerge from this unscathed. It is impossible to predict every short- and long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we will experience the aftershocks for a long time to come. Here we discuss some of these impacts, ranging from undergraduate level to large research projects, and we offer suggestions on how to mitigate some of the damage.Geograph

Is Cosmology Solved?

We have fossil evidence from the thermal background radiation that our universe expanded from a considerably hotter denser state. We have a well defined and testable description of the expansion, the relativistic Friedmann-Lemaitre model. Its observational successes are impressive but I think hardly enough for a convincing scientific case. The lists of observational constraints and free hypotheses within the model have similar lengths. The scorecard on the search for concordant measures of the mass density parameter and the cosmological constant shows that the high density Einstein-de Sitter model is challenged, but that we cannot choose between low density models with and without a cosmological constant. That is, the relativistic model is not strongly overconstrained, the usual test of a mature theory. Work in progress will greatly improve the situation and may at last yield a compelling test. If so, and the relativistic model survives, it will close one line of research in cosmology: we will know the outlines of what happened as our universe expanded and cooled from high density. It will not end research: some of us will occupy ourselves with the details of how galaxies and other large-scale structures came to be the way they are, others with the issue of what our universe was doing before it was expanding. The former is being driven by rapid observational advances. The latter is being driven mainly by theory, but there are hints of observational guidance.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. To be published in PASP as part of the proceedings of the Smithsonian debate, Is Cosmology Solved