Category: Academia and Science

  • One Right Way to do Things in Education

    I just found out from the local newspaper this morning that Bielefeld University had a “gala” celebration of its 50-year anniversary on Saturday evening, with a concert by the Bielefeld Philharmonic and a few speeches and refreshments in the local concert hall, the Oetkerhalle. Well, how nice. I worked there for 22 years. Obviously not…

  • The World Bank’s Chief Economist Says What the Problem Is

    I don’t often read what Paul Mason writes, but a recent essay at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-time-to-junk-the-flawed-economic-models-that-make-the-world-a-dangerous-place  points to an interesting draft paper by Paul Romer, The Trouble With Macroeconomics  https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf . Romer is an academic economist and sometime entrepreneur who is now Chief Economist of the World Bank. To me, there is an interesting part and an uninteresting part…

  • A Book on the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Accident

    In August 2011, we held the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop on Systems Engineering. The theme was the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. We have just published a book on it. An Analytical Table of Contents may be found at the end of this note. I had convened a mailing list in the days…

  • Saying the Wrong Thing

    The Guardian yesterday wrote an encomium to the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor Prof. Sir John Beddington (I hope they don’t mind that I quote in full): Politics may not be the enemy of scientific method, but they are hardly intimate friends. Science inches along by experiment, evidence and testing (and retesting); politics is often…

  • The State of Modus Ponens and of Rational Discussion

    A bit of intellectual biography, prompted by a couple of days’ free time leading me to a paper written 27 years ago by a pal, which I have just read. I say a little of what’s in the paper, to encourage others to read it. And then I comment on a couple of disappointing aspects…

  • Scientific Publishing: Letter to An Editor

    Here is a letter I just sent to the editor of a prestigious journal. I follow it with some links to the general debate about scientific publishing and publishers’ business models. Dear Editor, On 8/2/12 4:22 AM, SCP Editorial Office wrote: > Ms. Ref. No.: SCICO-D-12-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Title: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > Science of Computer Programming >…

  • Michael

    Michael. Everyone knew him as Michael. I was a freshman at Oxford in mathematics, interested in logic. I had been reading Chomsky in my first quarter because I had been told Chomsky had mathematised language. My tutor in algebra, Ian Macdonald (same jacket as in the picture!), an algebraic geometer, suggested I could look at…

  • The Definition of Risk – Yet Again

    In a message to the York Safety-Critical Systems Mailing List, Tracy White recounted a discussion with someone from the field of “Risk Management” who was taking a course he was giving on system safety. There is apparently a series of international standards, designated ISO 31000, on “Risk Management” (so says Wikipedia ). Tracy says The…

  • John McCarthy

    John McCarthy has died. The great John McCarthy. Brilliant and entertaining, fun to be around, accessible unlike many of his stature, who carried an aura about him which blessed you with the feeling, if you came within it, that you were doing the Thinking That Really Mattered. Even if you were just flapping around at…

  • Coda, Interdisciplinary Work, and Scientific Publishing

    It sounds like a mish-mash, doesn’t it? will probably read like a mish-mash, too. Because true interdisciplinary work always looks that way, I think. That is one of the main points I wish to get across. But first, let me get there. Concerning my last post, Leslie noted that the condition he labels “FAA requirement”…