Imagini uluitoare din laboratoarele unei mari institutii iesene. Experti din Europa au vazut cu ochii lor ce se intampla in oras
Performante greu de egalat la cel mai inalt nivel • Ceea ce a realizat o mana de oameni a ajuns si la urechile unor importante figuri din Comunitatea Europeana • Specialistii europeni din domeniul IT au luat cu asalt laboratoarele unei mari universitati iesene • Zeci de reprezentanti din statele membre ale Uniunii Europene au ajuns in aceste zile la Iasi, unde vor avea loc intalniri diplomatice de rang inalt • Universitatea Tehnica din Iasi a gazduit un prim eveniment de amploare • Astazi, la Palatul Culturii va avea loc o noua intalnire a oficialior UE • Masurile de securitate sunt incredibile
Lovitura de imagine pentru comunitatea ieseana. In aceste zile, in municipiu are loc o intalnire legata de sistemul de e-guvernare, derulata de Ministerul Comunicatiilor si Societatii Informationale, sub egida presedintiei Romaniei la Consiliul European. La Iasi sunt prezente zeci de persoane din statele membre ale Uniunii Europene (UE), acestia urmand a participa la conferinta de nivel înalt privind eGovernment si reuniune a eGovernment Action Plan Steering Board, eveniment derulat la Palatul Culturii din municipiu.
Ieri, oficialii UE au ajuns la Universitatea Tehnica „Gheorghe Asachi„, unde au vazut cu ochii lor cum se deruleaza proiectele pe partea de cercetare, dezvoltare si nu numai.
Reprezentantii UE au vizitat laboratoarele de IT, robotica, aeronautica, energetica si cel de seismica, dar au asistat si la o dezbatere despre povestile de succes de la Iasi, din domeniul tehnologiei, universitatea ieseana fiind foarte bine vazuta de la acest nivel.
„Ne-am bucurat foarte mult ca am fost cooptati ca parteneri in aceste zile. Tema principala o reprezinta digitalizarea si aplicarea domeniului atat in comune, dar si la nivelul guvernarii. Suntem singura universitate din Moldova cu cei mai multi absolventi care pregateste specialisti in IT si era normal sa fim cooptati. De aceea, reprezentantii Uniunii Europene vor avea ocazia sa cunoasca istoria Universitatii Tehnice, istorie pe care eu le-o voi prezenta, vor avea ocazia sa cunoasca ceea ce intreprindem ca masuri practice in vederea dezvoltarii antreprenoriatului in domeniul IT si in domenii conexe, de asemenea vor fi vizitate primele cinci laboratoare performante din universitate”, a mentionat prof.univ.dr.ing Dan Cascaval, rectorul Universitatii Tehnice Iasi.
Si oficialii Guvernului Romaniei s-au aratat multumiti de cum a decurs intalnirea. „Cred ca se intampla lucruri foarte interesante in ceea ce priveste e-guvernarea, atat la nivel national, dar si la nivel local. Sunt convinsa ca maine (astazi – n.r.) se vor vedea lucruri noi, pe care nu le stiau multi. Am descoperit si eu, de exemplu, ca in Iasi este una din companiile care face o solutie foarte stabila pentru zona guvernamentala, este o gestiune de medicina legala. Este una din cele mai stabile solutii si de aceea nici nu s-a auzit de ea, pentru ca nu se crapa. Sunt foarte multe lucruri care sunt pornite acum. De la proiectul pentru identitate electronica, carte de sanatate, dar si altele incepute. Sunt lucruri care se intampla si chiar daca nu se vad, ele se pot intampla la nivel local. Sunt lucruri pe care le facem spre zona de mobil si care pot veni in ajutorul cetateanului, el nemaiavand nevoie de competente de a folosi un laptop, care de altfel e si scump. Un telefon e mai usor de folosit de oricine si aceasta e si ideea, sa mutam pe local. Am foarte multa incredere in comunitatile locale, in primul rand pentru ca sunt mult mai stabile in timp”, a precizat Maria Manuela Catrina, secretar de stat in Ministerul Comunicatiilor si Societatii Informationale.
Noi proiecte pentru Iasi, in domeniu
Aceasta a aratat si ca Iasul se poate dezvolta mult mai amplu pe acest sector de activitate. „Prioritatea presedintiei Romaniei este sa fie cetateanul in prim-plan si conferinta se inscrie in acest deziderat. In primul rand, noi ne-am dorit sa aducem la Iasi oameni care se ocupa de guvernare electronica in tara lor. Sunt foarte multi CEO din tarile europene, tocmai pentru a vedea ce se intampla la Iasi. Sa nu fie doar in Bucuresti asa ceva. Acolo sunt alte evenimente, dar relevant este ca oamenii acestia au venit in Iasi, sunt extrem de placut surprinsi de ceea ce au gasit aici. Iasul este in aceste zile oglinda Romaniei digitale si cred ca Iasul, vazut de la Bucuresti, are cel mai mare potential in domeniu. La noi, in general, vin foarte multe companii care ne intreaba unde sa investeasca. Romania e cautata ca loc pentru IT si eu recomand Iasul cu inima deschisa. E mult mai mult loc, e zona de nou, e zona de crestere. Daca punem toti actorii la masa, zona de administratie, zona universitara, business, societatea civila, ecosistemul care se creaza va duce Iasul inainte”, a mai spus secretarul de stat.
Oaspetii, plimbati prin tot orasul
Astazi, la Palatul Culturii va avea loc intalnirea comisiei de eGovernment. Fiind vorba de reprezentantii statelor europene, au fost luate masuri de securitate de nivel inalt. Oaspetii sunt cazati la trei stabilimente din zona centrala a orasului. O parte din ei au ajuns inca de weekendul trecut cu cursele de linie de pe aeroportul iesean. Intre timp, acestia au avut timp sa viziteze Mitropolia, Teatrul National, Palatul Culturii si alte obiective din municipiu, plimbati de organizatorii de la Iasi. Aseara, au ajuns in zona Poitiers, unde au luat masa.
Statele membre ale Uniunii Europene au fiecare cate un reprezentant in aceasta structura de guvernare electronica ce pune in aplicare planul fiecarui stat cu strategie nationala pe aceasta tema. Pe langa reprezentantii statelor membre, aceasta comisie mai are in componenta alte patru persoane ce reprezinta alte entitati publice, dar si un observator. Daca cei 28 de membri cu drepturi depline sunt reprezentanti ai statelor membre UE, ceilalti sunt reprezentanti ai tarilor cu care UE are diverse acorduri. Este vorba de Elvetia, Norvegia, Islanda si Liechtenstein, in timp ce Comitetul regiunilor va avea statut de observator. In principal este vorba de delegati din statele UE care se ocupa cu comunicatiile, dar si alti oficiali guvernamentali care au legatura cu acest sector de activitate.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Romania se confrunta cu o reala problema, performanta resursei umane! In studioul BZI LIVE este programata o editie speciala pe aceasta tema
Marti, 18 februarie, incepand cu ora 15:00, in studioul BZI LIVE are loc o noua emisiune cu puternic impact in randul studentilor, dar si a celor care urmeaza sa isi aleaga o facultate. In direct, la BZI LIVE, vor fi prezenti trei profesori, din domenii cheie. Alaturi de noi vor fi prof. univ. dr. Costel Istrate, prodecan Facultatea de Economie si Administrare a Afacerilor, coordonator master Contabilitate, Experita Audit, pe zona de tutoriat; conf. univ. Ilie Farte, Facultatea de Filosofie si Stiinte Social Politice, director de departamen si tutore master Relatii Publice si Publicitate; conf. univ. dr. habil. Ovidiu Gavrilovici, Facultatea de Psihologie si Stiinte ale Educatiei, reprezentantii a celor mai atractive masterate din cadrul Universitatii ”Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iasi. Alaturi de acestia vom dezbate teme cu puternic impact social. Vom face o analiza la rece despre situatia resursei umane, slaba pregatire a acesteia, dar si despre tutorial si cum poate acesta ajuta la acomodarea studentilor cu mediul academic. Intr-o alta ordine de idei, invitatii din cadrul emisiuni BZI LIVE vor explica despre importanta parteneriatelor pe care Universitatea ”Alexandru Ioan Cuza” le are, despre relatia cu studentul, dar si despre insertia pe piata muncii. Despre aceste subiecte, dar si despre multe altele, va invitam, maine, ora 15:00 in direct, la BZI LIVE
Toti cei care doresc sa ii adreseze intrebari invitatilor o pot face la rubrica de comentarii sau in direct, accesand pagina de facebook.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
‘Usualising’ transgendered people can help break down stereotypes
Trans people deserve visibility that recognises them as unique individuals, not whether they fit society’s expectations of them, says Pippa Catterall
The first time that I presented as a trans woman at work our wonderfully friendly porter greeted me as usual, then looked at me quizzically and said, “Why do you look like a girl?”.
I explained that I had been conscious of being trans since I was about seven, but had only now plucked up the courage to publicly acknowledge who I really am. He burst out laughing, then stopped and said, “Oh, you’re serious”. I replied, “Why would I joke about something like that?”
It’s not a joke, but it’s not something to get hypersensitive about either. Anxiety about how you look and sound or how others react to you is understandable, and not just for trans people. But responding defensively when misgendered or dead-named does not, I think, help.
As my colleague Anick, a mentoring administrator in our university’s careers department, said recently when introducing his excellent autobiographical film about another historically occluded group, The Intersex Diaries, we have to “usualise” ourselves. I agree with him that “usualising”, rather than the conforming implications of “normalising”, is a good way to think about
Like many trans people, I hid who I was for far too long from an often hostile heteronormative culture. It is therefore important to me to establish a visibility that generally has been denied us. “Usualising” in this way has been remarkably easy for me so far. The porters all adjusted rapidly. My students were even kind enough to applaud when I came out to them. And the tedious process of changing my name on all the university databases – who knew it appeared so many times – was handled with alacrity.
There are other adjustments as well. On a societal level, while I like to think that I’ve always been conscious of the gendered nature of public spaces and discourse I am, for instance, even more aware now that de Certeau’s network of urban glances are much more male than female. Sociologically, it has been fascinating to notice how both male and female colleagues treat me differently.
In particular, that I am now included in conversations about distinctly female experiences and disadvantages is a form of sharing which is, to me, much more important than passing physically as a woman.
Meanwhile, although I am by no means sure that it passes as female, my voice has undoubtedly changed and for the first time in my career, students are asking me to speak up.
The focus on “usualising” has meant that my head of school and I decided against making some special announcement about my transitioning. Accordingly, many colleagues learned about my transition through word of mouth or when doing a double take along a corridor. On one hand, I had to keep coming out to people, not that someone who earns a living by explaining things should find that too much of a chore.
But on the other, it meant that the news of my transition was conveyed on a human scale, rather than officially. People were responding to the human being they already knew, albeit in a slightly different persona, rather than to a stereotype.
Not that I’ve met much stereotyping at my university, where trans people come in all varieties among both the students and staff. I’ve certainly encountered all kinds of stereotyping in other settings, some of which would be hilarious if it did not have such serious consequences on people’s lives.
Only through acknowledging that every trans person is different, and “usualising” it as part of humanity’s own rich diversity, can we work towards eliminating some of that dangerous stereotyping. No one should have to feel suicidal, as I did for much of my life, simply because they do not fit into some societally imposed norm.
When I explained this at the start of my paper at a recent conference on church history, someone in the audience shouted “praise God!”. It was an unexpected reaction to a coming-out narrative. However, if it helps to “usualise” us, I’m all for it.
Publicație : The Times
Report calls for moratorium on new Confucius Institutes in UK
Conservative Party Human Rights Commission calls for investigation into whether Communist-supported centres are being used to intimidate students or restrict freedom of expression
The UK government should launch an investigation into whether Confucius Institutes restrict academic freedom or are being used by China to monitor students and teachers in the UK, according to a report.
There should also be a suspension of further agreements between UK universities and Confucius Institutes until the investigation is completed, the report from the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission adds.
The institutes are promoted as centres for teaching Chinese language and culture. According to the report, however, they serve as an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda arm and to stifle its critics around the world.
The commission, which began its inquiry in April last year after the launch of a similar investigation by the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that it had found that “freedom of expression and academic freedom is limited, even suppressed, in Confucius Institutes”.
Controversy around the centres has prompted at least 27 universities worldwide to cut ties with Confucius Institutes, including Stockholm University, Copenhagen Business School, the University of Chicago and McMaster University.
Confucius programmes operate within UK universities including UCL, the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield, but they are funded and staffed by an agency of China’s Ministry of Education.
The report says that “without exception” every submission to the commission pointed to serious concerns about the presence of Confucius Institutes in universities in the UK and showed widespread evidence of a ban on the topics of Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Isabel Hilton, the editor of the China Dialogue website, told the commission that all mentions of a particular Chinese dissident were removed from her contribution to a book sponsored by a Confucius Institute. Rachelle Peterson, policy director of the US National Association of Scholars, said that the Chinese director of a Confucius Institute had told her that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she should “show [the student] a picture and point out the beautiful architecture”.
The report also says that legislation is required to ensure that foreign institutions are “not able to hold undue influence” on curricula in UK institutions and to guarantee more transparency about the agreements made.
Fiona Bruce MP, chair of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, said that although the group welcomes and encourages language teaching and cultural exchange, “we believe a review is necessary to assess whether Confucius Institutes represent a threat to academic freedom, freedom of expression, other basic rights and indeed national security.
“We also believe it is right to have an assessment to ensure that the curriculum taught in Confucius Institutes is balanced, independent, holistic and comprehensive, and measures to require transparency and accountability in any future agreements between British institutions and Confucius Institutes.”
The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission aims to advise and develop the party’s foreign policy.
Publicație : The Times
Canadian universities battle to preserve copyright exemptions
Publishers accuse institutions of piracy as revenues slump
The Canadian parliament is considering tougher copyright protections that would raise costs for universities, after hearing complaints that many institutions have expanded a modest fair-use exemption into widespread piracy.
Since parliament granted the fair-use waiver in 2012 – with the intent of allowing the reproduction of books and other materials by non-profit providers – publishers have reported an 80 per cent drop in royalty payments from the sector.
Nearly all Canadian universities have dropped out of a contractual payment system that they used in 2012 and instead have turned to rampant duplications and electronic copies of entire academic texts without making rights payments, a major publishing group has alleged.
Lost royalties are costing publishers about C$30 million (£17.6 million) a year, according to Access Copyright, a not-for-profit organisation that handles payment collections for rights owners.
“The copying that they used to pay for is now being done under the guidelines” created in 2012, said the president of Access Copyright, Roanie Levy.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers, which for years has led legal and political battles against Access Copyright and other publishing industry groups, flatly rejected the accusations and predicted that the parliament and the courts would continue to side with educators.
Access Copyright and its authors may be experiencing a decline in revenues, said CAUT’s executive director, David Robinson. But that decline pre-dates the 2012 revision of the Copyright Act and should not be a reason for parliament to reverse its position during the ongoing review of the act.
“The business model that they’ve structured themselves on is failing,” Mr Robinson said of Access Copyright. The universities of British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta all have started open textbook platforms, through which authors, usually with university affiliations, agree to post their material for free.
“The whole business footing is shifting underneath their feet,” Mr Robinson continued, “and I think they haven’t responded to it, and they’re just blaming the Copyright Act.”
Analysis presented by Access Copyright during a lawsuit against Toronto’s York University found that the amount of material being copied for free was equivalent to 360 pages per student per year, Ms Levy said.
The 2012 update to the Copyright Act required a five-year review, so the country’s parliament is well behind schedule. Ms Levy said that she expected a conclusion within weeks, while Mr Robinson said that he believed that the debate on the Copyright Act would drag on past the national election in October.
Ms Levy said that she based her confidence about receiving an eventual payday from Canadian universities on her group’s victory in the York University case. In it, a federal judge faulted York on grounds that included its decisions to stop paying royalties and to encourage the free copying by its employees of up to 10 per cent of any published work.
“It is evident that York created the guidelines and operated under them primarily to obtain for free that which they had previously paid for,” the ruling said.
An appeal hearing in the case is drawing near, and Mr Robinson expressed confidence that the Canadian Supreme Court would overturn the trial decision.
Both he and Ms Levy agreed that major publishers appear to be under stress and reducing their output of educational content.
Ms Levy described this as a “big loss” for Canadian education. But Mr Robinson disagreed, saying that the replacement of traditional corporate publishers with open-access models would make questions about the fair-use exemption increasingly irrelevant.
Publicație : The Times
Australian funding growth claims ‘shifty’
Institutions that win performance-related funding will fall behind anyway, university group claims
The additional money promised under Australia’s contentious performance-related funding scheme will not keep pace with inflation, let alone a demographic bump triggered by a turn-of-the-century “baby bonus”, universities have warned.
The proposed scheme, if implemented, would see teaching grants accumulate by about an extra A$70 million (£39 million) annually from next year. The money would be shared by universities that perform acceptably on measures such as retention, completion and student satisfaction.
But the Innovative Research Universities group said that the extra money would not match increases in either population or teaching costs. Conor King, executive director of the IRU, said that it was “shifty” to suggest that the scheme would fund universities to increase their admissions in line with population growth.
This is because the additional money is tied to the growth rate of the overall adult population, while the number of school-leavers is expected to expand at more than double that rate between 2022 and 2025.
The bloated pipeline of 17- to 18-year-olds – thought to be the result of a financial incentive scheme introduced in 2002 to encourage couples to have more babies – means that demand for university is likely to grow at more than twice the rate of funded university places.
Moreover, when the government capped the overall value of teaching grants at the end of 2017, it did not introduce any mechanism to index the cap. This means that the real value of funding for teaching is declining at the rate of inflation – about 2 per cent – which is considerably more than the population growth projections underpinning the performance funding.
“Universities are going to be standing still at best, assuming they get the full performance-based complement,” Mr King said.
The government should index the cap on teaching grants, he said, so that the base funding keeps pace with inflation, and then tie the performance-contingent funds to the growth rate of the 17- to 18-year-old population. Such a measure would cumulatively increase the cost of the scheme by perhaps A$95 million a year.
Responses to a discussion paper on the proposed scheme were due on 15 February. The government has undertaken to publish the submissions after that date.
La Trobe University vice-chancellor John Dewar said the scheme was the “wrong mechanism” for meeting the government’s objectives. “I don’t have a problem with a framework for measuring the sector’s performance; I just don’t think it should be tied to funding,” he told Times Higher Education.
“The paper talks about wanting to improve participation rates in regional and rural areas, which I thoroughly endorse. The problem is that the universities that most need the growth places are least likely to do well on these metrics.”
Professor Dewar said that the proposed metrics did not measure performance. “They measure outputs, a lot of which just reflect inputs in the form of students’ demographics. Performance on a lot of the metrics being proposed is highly correlated with socio-economic status and ATARs [university admission scores].
“A university that draws higher socio-economic students with higher entry scores is likely to do better on these measures than universities that draw from a different demographic. Unless you’re very careful, all you’ll end up doing is rewarding institutions that attract more middle-class students.”
Publicație : The Times
Doubts over Israel’s bid to double international student intake
Country’s £93 million initiative aims to make it a ‘beacon of academia’, but scholars question whether learners will want to go
Israel is aiming to double its number of international students by 2022, but experts have warned that the country’s negative image around the globe may hinder its efforts to reach this goal.
The Council for Higher Education said that it had approved a NIS435 million (£93 million) budget aimed at attracting 24,000 overseas learners in the country by 2022, compared with 11,000 international students in 2017, an increase of 118 percent.
The council said that it would provide NIS100 million for postdoctoral fellowships, and that it would spend another NIS100 million supporting universities to develop their infrastructure and programmes, including English-language courses. Funding will also go towards new scholarship programmes.
A spokesman for the organisation described the initiative as “the first time such a large effort has been made to open up Israeli higher education to international students”, arguing that it would help turn Israel into a “beacon of academia” and help it build diplomatic ties with foreign countries.
However, Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said that it was “unlikely” Israel would be able to attract a large number of international students “given the volatile security situation between Israel and its Palestinian and Arab neighbours, as well as the international boycott movement which has gained in strength and momentum worldwide”.
“I doubt whether Israel can overcome the widespread global negative perception as long as it maintains its colonial settlements of Palestinian lands and its unwillingness to allow millions of Palestinians self-determination,” he said.
Philip Altbach, founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, agreed that the instability of the region – despite the fact that Israel itself is fairly safe – and the boycotts of the country would affect its ability to reach its goals.
Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and the settlements in particular have received more and more negative press around the world, he said. This is likely to affect students from Europe and North America in particular, he added.
However, Professor Altbach said that the selling point for study in Israel was that the higher education system was well regarded and its universities were seen as high quality.
“Certainly if you dangle a carrot in front of people, especially from developing countries, for strong universities and a strong system, it can have some positive impact,” he said. “It’s a soft power move by the Israelis.”
In a statement, the Israeli council admitted that the perceived security situation could deter some students from studying in Israel, but claimed that “the main obstacle is largely because most courses in Israeli universities are only offered in Hebrew”. The funding would go towards removing these kinds of barriers, it said.
Publicație : The Times
European university heads take the fight to publishers
Vice-chancellors are leading contract negotiations, allowing universities to make more demands on open access and costs
University heads from across Europe have increasingly taken the lead negotiating new national contracts with publishers, allowing institutions to make tougher demands and in some countries break off contracts altogether, according to new research.
In Germany and Sweden, both currently without a contract with the publisher Elsevier, university leaders have taken charge in order to take a firmer stance on issues such as open access and rising journal costs for libraries.
University leaders are now involved in about six in 10 European negotiating consortia, once largely the preserve of librarians, according to preliminary data from the European University Association’s latest survey on big publishing deals across the continent.
In a quarter of these consortia, university heads are leading the negotiations.
Lidia Borrell-Damian, the EUA’s director for research and innovation, said that there were now “a substantial number of consortia that have university leaders involved”.
“The anecdotal evidence is that it does make a difference” to negotiations, she said, as university leaders “have a broader overview than the library”.
In Sweden, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, vice-chancellor of Stockholm University, took over the leadership of the country’s consortium in 2016, the first time it had been headed by the leader of a large research university. “This was indeed a conscious choice in order to strengthen the consortium,” she told Times Higher Education.
Negotiations with publishers “have become a primary concern for university leadership perhaps even more than for librarians…because they are part of the transition to open access and open science, which indeed is the responsibility for university leaders”, she said.
Even more important had been unanimous support for their negotiating stance from other Swedish rectors, she said – backing that had been “decisive” in allowing Sweden to break off its contract with Elsevier after the sides failed to reach a deal.
In Germany, too, national negotiations with the major publishers have been led for the first time by university heads.
Bernhard Mittermaier, a member of the country’s negotiating team and head of the library at the Jülich Research Centre, said that their involvement had made “the threat credible that we were prepared to walk away from the table because it showed that it was not only a library that was sitting there, but a whole institution – or 700 institutions.”
University leaders “can speak from firsthand experience” about publishing, said Dr Borrell-Damian. “They know what it means to publish an article, what it means to be open access, what it means to have to pay to access that research,” she said.
They were also better able to keep academics onside, even through breakdowns in access to journals. “It has to be an academic leader to create the glue” to keep researchers supportive, she said.
Even those countries where university leaders were not on the negotiating team were “in the process” of involving them, she said.
In the UK, Jisc Collections, the consortium that negotiates deals with publishers, is looking to bring more university heads into the fold. Director Liam Earney said that these plans “are well advanced and have been welcomed by our university library stakeholders”, and stressed that vice-chancellors had also been involved in previous deals.
Publicație : The Times
US science society launches research hotline for politicians
American Association for the Advancement of Science accompanied by global efforts to better inform policymaking
The world’s biggest scientific society is creating a helpline for policymakers as researchers worldwide take steps to address what they are seeing more clearly in the Trump era as glaring deficits of academic expertise in governmental decision-making.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s move to create the hotline for science-based questions has been accompanied by the National Science Foundation’s launch of a concerted campaign to provide more scientific assistance to US officials, saying that events of 2016 had made clear that it should take more seriously that key advisory aspect of its founding
And, at last weekend’s annual AAAS conference in Washington, global delegates began work on similar efforts on an international basis, focused primarily on a deficit of expertise available to legislative bodies.
That international effort is based on a realisation that while presidents and prime ministers often have access to good scientific advice, members of their legislatures rarely do.
Some 90 per cent of legislatures worldwide do not have any proactive system for telling lawmakers the “things they do need to know but didn’t think to ask”, said a leader of the legislative project, Chris Tyler of UCL.
“Democracies don’t work properly if politicians can’t get their facts straight,” said Dr Tyler, the director of public policy in UCL’s department of science, technology, engineering and public policy.
Changing that will take large amounts of time, Dr Tyler said. After the AAAS gathering, he anticipated spending several years getting scientists in perhaps a dozen countries studying the ways they can better help their lawmakers.
The AAAS’ own effort in the US is moving faster. One of its organisers, Kei Koizumi, a visiting scholar in science policy at AAAS, said that he anticipated a hotline-style service that members of Congress could call with questions needing an academic expert.
Initiated with roughly $4 million (£3 million) in private foundation support over the coming three years, the operation known as EPI Centre will also devote resources to finding better methods of identifying key issues and knowledge gaps facing Congress and creating ways to address them.
The AAAS, with more than 120,000 individual members in 91 countries, has long seen its role as “acting as a convener and matchmaker of sorts”, said Mr Koizumi, who was a White House science adviser in the Obama administration.
Dr Tyler, who previously headed the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, said he welcomed experimentation but was wary of the idea of a telephone-style help desk service for lawmakers.
Directly connecting a politician to an academic scientist may work problem-free for about 80 per cent of enquiries, Dr Tyler said. But with politically sensitive questions, he said, it is critical to have a cohort of scientific experts with the training to answer in a way that does not put the entire operation under a reputational cloud.
“It’s actually more difficult than it sounds to just simply answer the question, because the more political the question, the more risk there is in answering it,” Dr Tyler said.
The National Science Board, the NSF’s governing body, is also looking to join in, said the board’s chair, Diane Souvaine, a professor of computer science and senior adviser to the provost at Tufts University. The board is still developing what that role might look like, although it has been clear “since 2016” that the US government needs better scientific input, Professor Souvaine said.
Publicație : The Times
Royal Academy Schools receives £10m from Tetra Pak heir
Hans Rausing gives Britain’s oldest art school its biggest ever donation
Schools. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images
Britain’s oldest art school, a 250-year-old institution which offers postgraduate students a three-year art course free of charge, has received its biggest ever donation.
The Royal Academy of Arts said on Monday that the £10m gift from the Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing would go to restoring and renewing a historic central London campus which many people do not even realise exists.
The RA Schools was founded in 1769 and has taught artists from JMW Turner, John Constable and William Blake to more recent graduates Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Catherine Story and Eddie Peake.
It occupies subterranean space between the RA’s main buildings, Burlington House, on Piccadilly, and 6 Burlington Gardens, which faces Mayfair. It is unusual, probably unique, in that it offers three years of art studies which are free of charge. This year 767 people applied for the 17 places on offer.
Christopher Le Brun, president of the RA, said the school was one of the organisation’s founding purposes and the gift of money would ensure its continuation for the next 250 years.
He said the artists and architects who run the RA want the education side of its operations to be better known. “The general perception is that we are a set of exhibition galleries with the most wonderful exhibition programme you can imagine … the academy as an academy had somehow slipped out of sight.”
The RA has costed the necessary improvements – which cover everything from new plumbing and electrics to providing a better library – at £15m.
The gift comes from a charitable fund in the name of Julia and Hans Rausing, one of Britain’s richest men. He hit the headlines in 2012 when the body of his drugs-dependent first wife Eva was discovered under several feet of duvets, blankets, tarpaulin and TV screens in their vast Chelsea home.
Her body had lain there for about two months. The reclusive Rausing hid his wife, he said, because he could not face her being dead. He was given a suspended prison sentence for preventing the lawful burial of her body.
Rausing married Christie’s art expert Julia Delves Broughton in 2014. The couple’s charitable fund has given over 220 grants totalling more than £185m since it was founded.
Rebecca Salter, Keeper of the RA, said the Rausing gift would allow restoration and renewal of the campus: “This is unashamedly not an expansion of the RA Schools, we are small, we are free and we are going to stay that way.”
The RA has been run on the same principles for 250 years, with money raised by the annual Summer Exhibition going towards providing the school’s free art education.
Kira Freije, who graduated in 2016, said the RA course gives you an opportunity to fail as an artist, and time to recover: “I graduated feeling equipped with the right attitude and ambition to pursue whatever comes next.”
The plan is to begin work in 2021 and keep students at the school while it is carried out around them in phases.
Publicație : The Guardian
England lacks white working-class graduates. Quick fixes won’t change that
Half of universities have fewer than 5% of students from poorer white backgrounds. Just trying to boost numbers isn’t enough
At half of England’s universities, fewer than 5% of students are classified as being from disadvantaged white backgrounds, according to a new report from the National Education Opportunities Network (Neon). This fact is bluntly stated as being a problem in the introduction of the report rather than the conclusion, but it is worth looking beyond these headline figures. What do reports like this really tell us?
Who attends university, and which university they attend, is a question that captures commentators and policymakers, for reasons that are related to but not fundamentally about education. Universities are both pathways and gateways. They can help train you to get somewhere new, but they also work to make sure that only the right sort of people get into positions of power. These functions overlap, but aren’t the same.
You can see the tension when we talk about, for instance, the “less prestigious post-1992 universities”. Sheffield Hallam is noted for taking on the highest numbers of students from what are called “low-participation neighbourhoods” or LPNs, but what’s wrong with Sheffield Hallam? We are forever talking about the role of universities as providing “preparation for the world of work”, but there is little discussion of the divide between the kind of work the majority of students are preparing for and the kind of work the people who make policy want them to do. Doing a nursing degree at Teesside, which comes third on the list of universities with students from LPNs, is a pretty good route into the NHS. But if you want to head into a life of talking about or making decisions about the way we train, pay and employ nurses you’re better off going doing something like PPE at Oxford or modern history at Cambridge.
Denying loans to students with weaker A-levels will ‘penalise poor families’
Previous conversations have focused on getting more “white working-class” students into classics at Oxford rather than asking why someone doing architectural technology at Liverpool John Moores is never going to be the housing minister. Similarly, it may be worth asking what underpins the push to get more people from less privileged backgrounds into university, rather than asking why going to university is regarded as a panacea. After all, these “low-participation neighbourhoods” are also the “post-industrial communities” whose cultural identities are tied up with the loss of mining or manufacturing. Is a university education really an answer to this problem?
Nor does it help that we cannot separate the role that the university system has in perpetuating the class system from its role in enabling working-class people to move away from their backgrounds – an expectation that middle-class families do not reckon with in deciding whether their children should attend university.
If your children get a degree, they’re likely to move away – they don’t bring their new petrochemical engineering skills back to your hometown, because there aren’t the job opportunities. Even if higher education did work as a flawless pipeline for social mobility, there would be an emptying-out effect. And then what happens to the people who, for whatever reason, never got those degrees?
A solution that relies on a proportion of individuals being granted the capability of getting away and moving up will never be a real solution. It’s no surprise that negative attitudes and parental fears of “losing” their children figured highly among the barriers to attendance cited in the report.
What if you feel as if you’re choosing between building a life close to your family and building a career? Or what if you want to leave but feel as if doing so would be letting the side down?
Unpicking these attitudes is complex, especially when we throw ethnicity into the mix. The fact that specifically white working-class communities are underrepresented can lead commentators down some dubious paths. It’s only a short error of reasoning to “these Asians are hardworking and that’s why they get on, not like the lumpen whites”. Similarly, we see libertarian speculators from the Spiked or Spectator set arguing that the imbalance proves that there’s no such thing as racism except against white people. It is difficult, especially when everyone doing the analysis has gone to Balliol rather than Salford, to get to grips with the way the particular histories of place, especially places that have undergone recent economic upheaval, can create negative attitudes.
It is to be expected that migrant parents will have different expectations of their children than those in post-industrial communities that are “left behind”, regardless of ethnicity, simply because of local experiences and history. But at the same time we should not look to this as a full explanation, nor see the solution as being yet more “engagement” programmes to persuade people from these places that they just have to sort their attitudes out.
We need to reach children before they decide university isn’t for them
The focus on individual rather than systemic solutions permeates too much of our debate on this issue, in terms of framing both the problems and acceptable solutions. The social issues caused by the closure of factories and steel mills cannot be solved by simply getting more children of factory and steel workers into higher education, especially if the net result is to empty out these towns and leave them older, poorer and sicker than before.
This should not be taken as an idea that I am against education or “getting on in life”, nor that I have an issue with academic degrees such as literature or history as opposed to more vocational courses. Rather, I am saying that we need to be able to investigate the relationship of our higher education system to the rest of our society, including the complex myth-making that surrounds it, and that we should not expect easy answers.
Unfortunately, complex analysis rarely survives an encounter with a policy machine that likes to see things in terms of league tables and easy metrics. We want to set goals and targets such as “increase the number of students from LPNs being accepted into our top universities” because that’s measurable and technical. But for policy to make a difference, it is going to have to engage much more deeply than that.
Publicație : The Guardian
Passer d’études littéraires au développement informatique
Les formations rapides pour se reconvertir dans l’informatique n’accueillent pas que des « matheux ». A la clé : un foisonnement d’offres d’emploi.
A l’école Simplon, à Paris. Frederic BIETH/ Simplon
Comprendre ce qui se passe derrière l’homme comme derrière la machine. C’est le pont que construit spontanément Orélia Sokambi entre le code informatique et la psychologie. Depuis mai 2018, la jeune femme occupe un poste de « développeuse Web full stack PHP » (développeur « à tout faire » par le biais du langage de programmation PHP) chez Eventdrive. Elle y corrige les bugs, développe de nouveaux sites ou de nouvelles fonctionnalités. « Je suis contente de me rendre à mon travail tous les matins », confie cette informaticienne de 30 ans.
« Dans ma bulle »
Se reconvertir dans l’informatique en passant par une formation courte : telle est la décision qu’Orélia a prise il y a quelques mois. Elle est loin d’être la seule. Le label « grande école du numérique » a été accordé à plus de 700 formations depuis sa création, en 2015. Selon l’enquête réalisée en 2017 auprès de 300 cursus, ceux-ci durent en moyenne sept mois et accueillent 45 % de diplômés au-delà du bac et 56 % de gens âgés de plus de 26 ans. Plus de 12 000 personnes devraient être formées par ce biais en 2019. D’autres dispositifs existent, comme le programme du ministère du travail « 10 000 formations aux métiers du numérique » lancé en avril 2018. Malgré cette offre foisonnante de formations, Orélia Sokambi n’a pas tant de portes qui s’ouvrent : « Je ne pouvais pas prétendre à certaines formations ou certains financements car j’étais trop diplômée et je ne rentrais pas dans les cases. »
Son parcours avait jusqu’ici été assez fragmenté. Après une licence d’histoire, elle repart de zéro pour entreprendre des études de psychologie. Studieuse, elle enchaîne les années d’études et vise un master 2 en psychopathologie clinique, qu’elle sait très sélectif. « J’étais dans ma bulle : je me focalisais sur les partiels, la sélection en master, le mémoire, le titre de psychologue… » Elle sort diplômée en 2015. Et là, la douche froide : la jeune femme constate le peu d’offres d’emploi et la quasi-généralisation des temps partiels.
Elle finit par décrocher un CDD d’un an, deux jours par semaine, dans un établissement et service d’aide par le travail (ESAT). « Le travail avec les patients me passionnait mais ne contrebalançait pas la précarité de l’emploi et le manque de moyens mis à disposition pour l’exercer. C’était très anxiogène », dit-elle. A l’issue de son contrat, Orélia s’accorde une pause pour réfléchir : « Je ne voulais pas reprendre des études longues et je redoutais une nouvelle galère professionnelle. »
« Un petit côté geek »
Au gré de ses recherches et des discussions avec ses amis, l’idée de se tourner vers l’informatique fait son chemin. Un secteur porteur s’il en est : 80 000 postes seraient vacants d’ici à 2020, selon un rapport du Conseil d’orientation pour l’emploi de 2017. « J’ai toujours eu un petit côté geek, sourit la psychologue. J’aime les jeux vidéo ou améliorer les performances de mon ordinateur. Mais j’étais persuadée que l’informatique n’était pas faite pour moi car je n’ai jamais été très bonne en maths. J’ai eu un bac L ! »
Les littéraires ont-ils leur place dans l’informatique ? « Bien sûr », répond Neila Hamadache, délégué à la formation au Syntec numérique, un syndicat professionnel : « Les profils scientifiques possèdent un avantage non négligeable, mais avoir un autre parcours n’est pas rédhibitoire. Apprendre le code, c’est comme apprendre une langue. Il faut procéder par étapes. » Pour tester son idée, Orélia Sokambi a d’abord suivi le parcours « développeuse web junior » sur la plate-forme de cours en ligne OpenClassrooms. « J’étais au chômage, je passais mes journées sur l’ordinateur. Il m’a fallu fournir beaucoup d’efforts pour entrer dans la logique informatique », dit-elle.
Apprendre à apprendre
Au terme de diverses recherches et candidatures, Orélia Sokambi intègre finalement la formation gratuite « développeuse Web full stack PHP » de l’école Simplon et travaille « en mode acharnée ».Samia Ghozlane, directrice de la Grande Ecole du numérique, le confirme : « Les formations courtes demandent beaucoup d’investissement. Etre motivée est nécessaire pour suivre le rythme. »Dès qu’elle met son CV en ligne, Orélia Sokambi reçoit plusieurs offres d’emploi et peut même choisir son employeur : elle opte pour la start-up Eventdrive, qui lui propose un salaire de 30 000 euros brut annuels. « J’avais l’impression d’avoir gagné au loto », s’amuse l’informaticienne.
Après un bac L et des études de psychologie, Orélia Sokambi a appris le code informatique. Orélia Sokambi
Aujourd’hui, Orélia Sokambi se sent toujours en situation d’apprentissage. « J’aimerais pouvoir coder aussi bien et aussi vite que les développeurs seniors. Ce qu’ils font, c’est quasiment de l’art »,s’exclame-t-elle. Elle le sait, les langages informatiques se périment vite. « On ne peut pas se reposer sur ses lauriers. Il faut toujours se mettre à la page. » Et ce n’est pas pour lui déplaire.
Publicație : Le Monde