The insanity of RAE

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Those happy souls who live in the real world will not know that last Thursday saw the culmination of nonsense on stilts in the British university world — the release of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results. In a nutshell, RAE is the extension of ‘targets’ and bean-counting to the world of ideas, and it’s a crazy system. In one major academic department I know, the most creative and original member of the department was excluded from the RAE by his colleagues because his pathbreaking work “didn’t fit the narrative” — i.e. the story being carefully crafted to impress the bean counters.

The mainstream media know nothing of this, however, so it’s really nice to see my Observer collleague, Simon Caulkin, turning his withering fire on it. He examines the consequences for universities of having to play the ‘targets’ game.

The first and most obvious of these is colossal bureaucracy. Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to scrutinise submissions from 50,000 individuals in 2,500 submissions, high as it already is, is dwarfed by the indirect ones – in particular, the huge and ongoing management overheads in the universities themselves. As with any target exercise, the RAE has developed into a costly arms race between the participants, who quickly figure out how to work the rules to their advantage, and regulators trying to plug the loopholes by adjusting and elaborating them.

The result is an RAE rulebook of staggering complexity on one side and, on the other, the generation of an army of university managers, consultants and PR spinners whose de facto purpose is not to teach, nor make intellectual discoveries, but to manage RAE scores. As in previous assessments, a lively transfer market in prolific researchers developed before the submission cut-off date at the end of 2007, while, under the urging of their managers, many university departments have been drafting and redrafting their submissions for the past three years.

Wapping comes to Wall Street

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This morning’s Observer column.

You might think this is all a storm in an online teacup, but in fact it's a revealing case study of how our media ecosystem has changed. What happened is that reporters on a major newspaper got something wrong. Nothing unusual about that – and the concept of "network neutrality" is a slippery one if you're not a geek or a communications regulator. But within minutes of the article's publication, it was being picked up and critically dissected by bloggers all over the world. And much of the dissection was done soberly and intelligently, with commentators painstakingly explaining why Google's move into content-caching did not automatically signal a shift in the company's attitude to network neutrality. Lessig was able instantly to rebut the views attributed to him in the article.

Watching the discussion unfold online was like eavesdropping on a civilised and enlightening conversation. Browsing through it I thought: this is what the internet is like at its best – a powerful extension of what Jürgen Habermas once called "the public sphere".

And the Journal’s response? A snide little “roundup” on its website about critical responses to the article which – it observed – “has certainly gotten a rise out of the blogosphere”. Instead of an apology for a seriously flawed piece of journalism, it produced only a celebration of the outrage its errors had generated. Verily, the Sun has come to Wall Street.

Because my Observer column is limited to about 800 words, there’s a lot more I’d like to have said about this episode. It would have been nice, for example, to have been able to point to some of the more illuminating commentaries on the WSJ story. For example:

  • Google’s response
  • Scott Rosenberg’s comments
  • Larry Lessig’s scathing remarks on how he was misrepresented
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan’s observations
  • Timoth Lee’s comments in Freedom to Tinker
  • John Timmer’s ArsTechnica post
  • Tim Wu’s observations

    I could go on, but you will get the point. This was about as far as you can get from the LiveJournal-OMG-my-cat-has-just-been-sick media stereotyping of blogging. It was an illustration of something that has always been true — that the world is full of clever, thoughtful, well-informed people. What has changed is that we now have a medium in which they can talk to one another — and to newspaper reporters, of only the latter are prepared to participate in the conversation.

    I’m searching for metaphors to capture what has happened. One image that comes to mind is that of a vast auditorium or sports arena which is packed to the rafters. In the centre is a stage with a very powerful public address system capable of generating tremendous amplification. Only a few people are allowed onto the stage to speak. When they do, everyone in the stadium can hear them. But they can’t hear the audience; or if they can it’s only as an undifferentiated roar. The performers cannot hear any individual voice.

    That’s how it was when newspapers and broadcasters were in their prime. As someone who was first invited onto the stage in 1987 (and has been performing on it continuously ever since), I always felt that it was a privileged position, which carried with it commensurate responsibilities. No doubt many other journalists and columnists felt like that too. But as a group we took our privileged position for granted, and most of us didn’t notice that our technological advantage — the amplification provided by the mass-media publication machine — was eroding. Nor did many journalists notice that network technology — the ‘generative Internet’ in Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase — was busily providing members of the audience with their own global publishing machine. So suddenly we find ourselves in an arena where our amplifiers are losing power, and individual members of the audience can not only talk to one another, they can shout back at us.

    But actually, most of the time they don’t want to shout. They want to talk. They think we’re wrong about something that they know about. Or they feel we haven’t done a subject justice, or maybe have missed a trick or even the point. The challenge for mainstream journalism now is whether its practitioners want to participate in the conversation that’s now possible. My complaint about the WSJ’s reaction to the blogosphere’s reaction is that it evinced a refusal to participate. The errors made by its reporters were serious but for the most part understandable; journalism is the rushed first draft of history and we all make mistakes. The tragedy was that the Journal saw the blogosphere’s criticism as a problem, when it fact it was an opportunity.

    • Village to close after contributing nothing to local Tesco

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    A 1000 year old Oxfordshire village is to close after it was deemed not to be economically viable to the local Tesco superstore. Villagers received the news at a tense public consultation meeting last night when Councillor Shapley revealed that not a single person from the historic village of Stony Bridgeford shops or works in the Tesco store a few hundred metres away. ‘It’s no good being sentimental about these things. In this modern competitive environment, villages either have to pay their way as far as the supermarkets are concerned or face closure.’

    There had been some hope of keeping the village open, and just closing down some of the older and more annoying residents as a compromise but this was rejected as impracticable. David Gordon representing the village commented ‘We are devastated by this ruling from the local council. We have been good neighbours to Tesco and never gave them any bother despite having lorries thundering through the village at all hours making deliveries. Our village has stood since the Doomsday Book, Tesco has been here six years

    From NewsBiscuit — Britain’s answer to The Onion.

    Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

    The benefits of synchronisation

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    SERIOUS, U.S. BIDDERS ONLY PLEASE!

    This is a like-new 3G, 16GB, Black Apple iPhone, and boy does it come with a million dollar story!

    I purchased this phone a few months ago. Last week, it was stolen from me. Having become quite addicted to this marvelous piece of technology, I went right out and bought another one with some money I had in savings.

    The next day, as I’m scrolling through to make a phone call, I notice some new contacts in my brand new phone. Apparently, the thief had added contacts to my stolen phone, and Apple’s MobileMe service synced those contacts with the internet, and then with my NEW iPhone! I called the contacts, got the thief’s information, and called the police. By the end of the night, I was the proud owner of TWO iPhones.

    Needless to say, this phone is in PERFECT condition. I’m selling this one on ebay in the hopes of offsetting the expense of my new iPhone, as well as the $150 speeding ticket I got rushing down to the Apple Store that night to purchase the new phone! :)

    From an eBay auction listing.

    Call it a micki

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    Doc Searls has been thinking about what’s missing in wiki technology.

    Wikis are flat. All topics are at the same level. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but lousy for, say, projects. Joint efforts such as ProjectVRM are not flat. They have topics and subtopics. These change and move around, and this is where an outliner like MORE is so handy. With a few keystrokes you can move topics up and down levels, back and forth between higher-level headings… You can hoist any single topic up and work on that as if it were a top level. You can clone a topic or a piece of text and edit it in two places at once. I could go on, but trust me: it freaking rocked. There was no faster way to think or type. Hell, I’m typing this in one of its decendents: an OPML editor, also written by Dave Winer.

    Anyway, just wanted to say, here in the midst of an unrelated local conversation, that wiki that works like MORE remains on the top of my software wish list for the world. Trust me: it would make the world a much more sensible place. And make both individual and group work a helluva lot easier.

    Source.

    Dave Winer is interested. I’d put money on the proposition that something useful will come from this.

    MORE was the most useful piece of software I’ve ever used. It ran on all the early Macs I owned. For years after OS X came out I retained the Mac Classic emulator for just one purpose — so that I could run MORE. I stopped only after Q discovered OmniOutliner, which is pretty good — and still the best tool for thinking on my machine. But it only works on my stuff: a wiki tool which would bring that kind of functionality to collaborative documents would be a killer web app.