Mark Carroll's Journal

Yesterday on the radio I heard Louise Richardson, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, defending her handsome salary, making the point that competition for vice-chancellors occurs in a global marketplace and she would be paid rather more in the US. This morning, somewhat in response, we had Jo Johnson MP, the Minister for Universities and Science, defending funding arrangements for universities. Now I receive an broadcast e-mail from the Vice-Chancellor here, the University of Dundee, expressing pleasure at our being shortlisted as University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards which I would guess helps to validate his salary.

I was lucky to be born early enough that my own university education in England was paid for rather more by grant than by student loans and what loan I did have had a low interest rate. Now England has moved to a system that is dominated by loans at a higher interest rate. Especially, as a student I had the sense that the taxpayer, not me, was paying for my education and that probably affected my attitude to it.

One concern I have is the idea of having to pay competitive market rates for university staff. ( It may be a mistake to consider money as the principal attractor to positions in English public universities. )

Another concern I have is the change in mindset that comes from students feeling that they are paying for their own education. ( Pleasing the student customers is not the same as requiring worthwhile academic success of them. )

Considering that I am fairly progressive in some respects, I am perhaps unusually conservative when it comes to the Palace of Westminster. People often observe that a government may enjoy a significant majority with but a minority of the popular vote but ( that may not be so bad. )

I do consider it a significant problem that many people may consider that their vote counts for less. ( Some elections may not seem worth voting in. )

I am against encouraging absentee voting. People who actually turn up to vote are more likely to have also bothered to find out something about the candidates and parties. When people vote in person the secrecy of their ballots is more greatly assured and the incidence of voter fraud very low. Encouraging in-person voting does require ( making it easy. )

I wonder about reform of the House of Lords. I like the idea of it retaining some power to counterbalance immoderate populism from the House of Commons. From that point of view, inasmuch as the House of Lords is unrepresentative then I like the idea of its members tending to be educated and conservative: they tend to detect and retard extreme legislation while still supporting progress like the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. I also like that they ( have much freedom to vote according to conscience. )

I am open to that the House of Lords may do its job at least as well through being selected very differently. For example, from aggregating the votes for members of the House of Commons we know how the nationwide popular vote stands and I wonder if it may be best to somehow select new members of the House of Lords so as to more proportionally balance the legislature in accordance with that vote.

Controversial though it is, I am in favor of Trident, the UK's submarine-based nuclear deterrent. Perhaps I am colored by my years of working for the US Department of Defense because I am in favor of military spending in general, though perhaps of a more Iranian-style self-sufficient form. I do not trust alliances to last and I expect climate change and other coming stresses to ( make it a bad idea to reduce military capability. )

I consider disarmament a fantasy: ( nobody will be giving up their nuclear weapons. )

This is one reason why I favor space exploration: it may be imprudent for our species to rely on advanced civilization being sustainable on Earth.

Trident is expensive and in general I am in favor of self-sufficiency not only for strategic reasons but to help retain money and expertise within the national economy. As with the American focus on dual-use technologies, ( perhaps benefits to related industries can make self-sufficiency affordable. )

Further, I fear that austerity in UK military spending may unconscionably underresource the armed forces given that so much is and may need to be asked of them.

I have little idea how well these supposed indirect benefits would appreciably assist the domestic economy. I would hope that they go quite some way because I am ( largely against selling weapons systems to other countries. )

In terms of dual-use technologies, while renewable energy is to be encouraged, certainly more than the present Conservative government has, my guess is that the UK needs nuclear power for decades yet. That is another reason to develop domestic capability in nuclear engineering. I thus object to the Hinkley Point C project in which foreign businesses play key roles in the domestic construction of a nuclear power plant of a rather old design.

I generally buy the modern variety of Keynesian economics that allows for stimulus spending when wages are stagnant and many prime-age workers are unemployed or underemployed. A poor economy causes real present suffering and inflicts long-term damage: better to incur the debt now and have tax revenues rise sooner for paying it off. Conversely, when the economy is doing well, the national debt must be aggressively paid down.

Generous welfare benefits fit well for stimulus spending: those who receive them tend to spend the money to help keep others in jobs. While the goverment can incur long-term debt cheaply, economic downturns are also an excellent time for infrastructure investment, anything that is of lasting benefit such as education, transportation and communications. In the service of keeping the economy moving, I am fine with a few percentage points of inflation, focusing specifically on the non-commodity items: if oil is more expensive but wages are not rising then I doubt we are about to turn into the Weimar Republic.

More speculatively, I am all for trying to keep things simple. For instance, I wonder if it would be practical to tax investment and employment income the same and, rather than means-testing benefits and fussing about percentage increases, simply give everybody a sufficient universal basic income as the Finns have been trying, especially if government also guarantees the provision of affordable basic food and shelter for those who ask. If neither the food nor shelter are generously lovely then I suspect that both the US and the UK are wealthy enough to meet citizens' basic needs, the real problems being challenges like mental health provision that require well-qualified staff. These thoughts feel to me like I am moving too far into foolish amateurism, like when I play an unusual chess opening and in the coming moves my opponent then illustrates that my opening is unusual because it is a bad idea.

Following on from my recent journal entry about increased divisions between Republicans and Democrats I continued investigating and stumbled upon discussion of Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism. One of many things I enjoyed about living in the US is well-stocked libraries but since returning to Britain I am back to being surprised if the local library does stock a book rather than if it does not. I certainly do not have the money to be buying them myself: the book I read on the airplane back from Ontario was a creased, yellowed paperback that I had picked up in a charity shop. (An annoying thing about book clubs is that they typically choose recent books available only as new hardbacks rather than used paperbacks.) I have four library systems within reach: our local one in Perth and Kinross, the Dundee city one with branches within an easy walk of work, then the Angus one to the north-east and the Kingdom of Fife's south of the Firth of Tay: none of them appear to offer Luce's book.

Now I hear of Jon Snow (not of Westeros, but available on YouTube nonetheless), in delivering yesterday's James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in Edinburgh, speaking of an increasingly fractured Britain and a terrible divide as one can easily be disconnected from the lives of others; he also spoke of fake news stories (i.e. lies) posing a vast threat to democracy. I do not think that here in Britain we yet have such a deep division among mainstream sources of news but it is nonetheless interesting to compare these local themes with my thoughts on American politics and there may be lessons to be learned.

In recent times nationalism seems to have been synonymous with an authoritarian xenophobia but I was looking at flags and wondering if there is also a good side. In wandering central Michigan I see the American flag flown from everywhere from baseball fields to highway-side truck scales. I had previously observed that in the US I more strongly feel a pervasive sense of where I am. One example might be that, rather than having A roads and B roads and whatnot, there are US routes and state routes (named for each state: Ohio, Michigan, whatever), with the location thus being part of the name. It occurred to me that the flags might also relate to that strong sense of locality, whether as cause or effect, and that they may foster a positive sense of community in which those flags remind people that in some sense these sites are all communal assets. The baseball field and whatnot certainly seemed to be in good repair.

From my distant view as an outsider it seems that nationalist, authoritarian forces appear to hold sway in Poland. There are enough emigrants from Poland in Britain and perhaps elsewhere that I wondered if Polish domestic politics somewhat disproportionately reflects the kind of Pole who does not tend to emigrate. I would guess that our British Poles may still vote but perhaps it is more inconvenient for them to do so from afar; indeed, perhaps some feel less morally inclined to if they have become distant from their country of origin. Especially in the case of British citizens it is rather more awkward to register as an overseas voter than as a domestic one. If a few percent of Poles live outside their native country then such a difference may well have some significant effect on Polish politics, though perhaps not enough to have much changed the outcome of their latest parliamentary election.

On the way into work this morning I again waited at a traffic signal that protects a pit in one lane of a two-lane road. There is usually no activity around this hole in the road and whatever work is being done there by Scottish Water appears to be taking them many days.

I wonder what it costs utility companies to block roads. I imagine that the city council charge them more, the longer the work takes, but how much? I am reminded of living in Massachusetts. There, the police union seems to have wangled some neat deal to get officers paid plenty for watching traffic around road construction. Whatever I think of that, I wonder if the ongoing expense is a sufficiently non-trivial fraction of the project cost to help hurry the work along.

Many American states have the notion of secondary traffic offenses: the police may not pull one over for committing them but if stopped for some primary reason, like speeding, then secondary charges may follow. It depends on the state but secondary offenses are acts such as using a cellphone or not wearing a seatbelt.

I find the concept bizarre. I don't know if the theory is that being pulled over constitutes some kind of seizure under the Fourth Amendment or if the legislature really did not want to pass, say, a seatbelt law so making it difficult to enforce was the only way to get enough votes at all, or what. I am curious to know what the thinking really is and the degree to which it makes sense. I am not aware of an analog in English or Scottish road traffic law.

In the School of Life Sciences where I work we produce systems like the Image Data Resource which is full of strange pretty pictures acquired from expensive microscopes and used to justify scientific conclusions. There is also some initial proof-of-principle code for reproducing analyses via the IDR Jupyter Hub. OMERO.figure is also rather neat: turn the raw image files acquired from the microscope into figures ready for Adobe Illustrator to put into your paper; information in the figures like timepoints, scalebars, etc. is derived from the metadata encoded by the microscope as it acquired the images.

Modern academic life is highly competitive and journals are far more keen to publish interesting new discoveries, however lucky, so there is great career pressure report the right kinds of findings. Further, many of them turn out to be difficult to impossible to reproduce. Even despite this, my impression is that the kind of research misconduct I have in mind is, at its core, well-intentioned: the results may be a little doctored, or an unusually significant subsample, or whatever, but the researcher does generally believe the hypothesis that they are trying to prove, they are just exaggerating the evidence for it.

I figure that our work stuff might be useful if it helps to encourage a culture of sharing all the raw data and the procedures by which it was analyzed. But, I wonder if this papers over a more fundamental problem: that the people generating the hypotheses are also those testing them. I am amused to be thinking of this as a conflict of interest.

I can see why it happens. The people who have the idea are probably the more enthusiastic about testing it. Maybe not many labs are used to working with those cell lines or protocols or whatever at all so it is not like any lab could just pick up the work. And, even if we had a system where the people who generate hypotheses are separate from those who test them, one can see that there is still scope for mutual back-scratching and the like. One can imagine the specifics of the experimental design would be something of a negotiation between the hypothesizer and the tester.

So, I am not saying that even this pipedream idea of having researchers' hypotheses tested by third parties is a good one even if it were workable. But, I do wonder if there is some related but realistic way in which scientific research could be restructured to make it more trustworthy.