Cosmo-torun April 2004

cosmo-torun@cosmo.torun.pl

1 participants
2 discussions

constructive ideas on cosmo/relativistic political problems?
by Boud Roukema 09 Apr '04

09 Apr '04

Dear Martin, Alvaro, Reva, All three of you have made a great effort - and risked being labelled as "troublemakers not interested in science" - by publishing your experiences in present-day astronomy, especially cosmology/relativistic astronomy. You may already know me, or if not, a quick search on astro-ph for "Roukema" will tell you more about my cosmo stuff. Just like you, i also would prefer just to do pure science and not have to worry about all this meta-stuff of how we organise and communicate, and now that i have a faculty position here at the Toruń Centre for Astronomy (TCfA), Nicolas Copernicus University, Poland (observationally we're working on the OCRA project which will hopefully soon be able to do a Sunyaev-Zeldovich survey), i no longer have a Damocles sword hanging over me regarding having to find my next job. :) (But trying to get the younger students up to speed is taking quite a bit of time...) IMHO people like us, who are willing to speak out openly and honestly in the interests of our common sense of scientific ethics, should find ways of coordinating our thoughts and maybe generating suggestions for making things better. At the moment i'm spamming (sorry) our general cosmo-torun mailing list because i don't think this sort of discussion should be secret, but i think that further discussion should go off to a discussion forum which will not bother people on the main list. IMHO, a wiki is one of the best ways of communicating on this sort of stuff - it's more structured than a mailing list - anyone can reorganise the pages and make them clearer - but it's much less formal than posting articles on arxiv.org. Anyway, i've put links to all three of your articles here: http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Cosmo/AstroPolitics and it would be great if you could add your comments on the page, reorganise it, (or even rename it if you don't think "AstroPolitics" is the best name for the page), or put in a link to an electronic place where you think these sorts of questions can best be discussed. Hoping to hear from you (maybe on the twiki?), and keep doing good science :) boud

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(1) censorship only for extreme cases; (2) censorship itself uncensorable
by Boud Roukema 08 Apr '04

08 Apr '04

Hi Andrzej Kus, Grzegorz, Bartek, everyone, The purpose of a university is the collection and analysis of empirical information, its analysis and integration into theory, the development of theory, and the learning/teaching process between researchers and students. (1) IMHO, censorship is something that should not be taken lightly, and IMHO the minimum that is reasonable in the internet era is that (2) the ***process of censorship*** itself is public. This is why i would be most comfortable in discussing this on cosmo-torun rather than by private, secret emails. ***Please send any responses to cosmo-torun at astro.uni.torun.pl *** i have violated netiquette in forwarding this private email to the list, but i think this is acceptable since censorship is only something that should done, IMHO, in very extreme circumstances. Censorship was (AFAIK, i didn't live in Poland at the time) very common during the PRL period, and IMHO a university should be one of the places where academic freedom is most vigorously defended. If information on a web page is uninteresting or irrelevant, that is a very poor reason for censoring it. However, a polite request to someone who has published uninteresting or irrelevant information is surely sufficient if someone feels that the information needs to be hidden. Let us respect each other as intelligent adults! On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Grzegorz Hrynek wrote: > Jako administrator serwisu internetowego Katedry Radioastronomii i z > upowaznienia Kierownika Radioastronomii prof. A. Kusa informuje, ze > odwolanie z glownej witryny serwisu KRa do strony internetowej o adresie > > http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/~blew/ > > zostalo zablokowane. > > Strona o powyzszym adresie zostala stworzona przez Bartosza Lwa. > > Powodem zablokowania strony jest umieszczenie informacji i zasobow > prywatnych nie majacych zadnego zwiazku z dzialalnoscia wykonywana w KRa. KRA is part of UMK. UMK is a university. Knowledge can only very artificially be split between subjects. How can one study astronomy without knowing physics? How can one study physics without understanding mathematics? How can one use efficient learning methods without being aware of the research being done in psychology and pedagogy at the university? We have a research/teaching department in Pedagogy which investigates the efficiency of using the internet for teaching, for creativity in learning - http://www.ped.uni.torun.pl/kognityw/ Would there be a problem in publishing useful pedagogical information on KRA web pages? In any case, there is talk of extending UMK by uniting with an institute in Bydgoszcz - it would be rather inconsistent to claim that we want a bigger university when at the same time we try to discourage "cross-talk" and interdisciplinary discussion. As for the expression "informacji i zasobow prywatnych", those pages (which Bartek has chosen voluntarily to hide) concerned anecdotal documentation of ethnological information. Since he chose to publish them, they are no longer private information - the term "private information" refers to things like someone's private address, telephone number, bank account number, etc. In the case of publication of that sort of private information, a request to censor the information would be much more reasonable. We have a department of Ethnology: http://www.his.uni.torun.pl/wydzial/program/etnologia/progetno.shtml The fact that Bartek is a doctoral student in KRA rather than ethnology is, IMHO, not a good reason to ask him to hide the pages. A more valid point would be that the pages are only anecdotal rather than systematic. They do not claim (AFAIR) to constitute a systematic study of any given social group, and so are probably not terribly useful for quality ethnological research. However, whether this justifies requesting Bartek to hide the pages is not obvious to me. A more constructive suggestion would have been to propose to Bartek that he contact the Ethnology department (URL above) and find out if his documentation can be useful to them. The argument of wasted resources is a different argument: the amount of disk space and bandwidth used for the (now hidden) pages would IMHO be negligible compared to what we do which is directly cosmo related. On the contrary, sharing resources with resource-poor departments like Ethnology makes sense - we're here to work together, not compete with one another. (OK, OK, i know that among us we have divergent points of view on the validity of competition in an E=mc^2 society living on a planet with a climate system going into a non-linear warming phase.) > Zobowiazuje Bartosza Lwa do jak najszybszego usuniecia informacji prywatnych > z komputera adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl Well, they are not private information, IMHO, but in any case, Bartek seems to have chosen to hide them. > Informuje ponadto, ze do prezentacji wlasnych prywatnych materialow i > przekonan sluza serwisy platne swiadczace tego typu uslugi. There is no need to use commercial web servers, i don't think we should be encouraging people to commercialise information. We are a university, not a hypermarket. There are zero-cost servers like: http://geocities.yahoo.com/ http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/learn2/HowItWorks4_Free.html and probably on http://www.wp.pl, http://www.onet.pl etc it is possible to host quite a few images at no cost (apart from having to accept advertising). > Ponadto zwracam sie z prosba do administratora komputera > adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl - Bouda Roukema - o nadzor nad ta sprawa i jak > najszybsze wyjasnienie zaistnialego problem z uzytkownikiem Bartoszem Lwem. Well, i don't understand the urgency - in any case Bartek is a good cosmologist and an intelligent adult and as i understand it, he decided that fighting censorship in this case is probably not worth it. That's his decision. The important thing is that rumours do not start going around of students' web pages being arbitrarily censored. Hopefully in this case it is clear that a polite request has been made, and that any such requests can be publicly discussed and we can trust each other to make reasonable decisions based on constructive discussion - even if having highly diverging viewpoints. Please remember that creativity is an important part of the learning process. Creativity is not just poetry: it is something that can be measured (to some extent, e.g. see the recent PhD thesis (March 2004) by D. Siemieniecka-Gogolin consisting of empirical measurements of "creative attitudes" and "creative abilities" among Polish school teachers regarding the use of computers and the internet in teaching, in the Pedagogy Department of the University of Nicolas Copernicus (URL above, no direct link to thesis, sorry)). If a bunch of web pages showing a few photographs of personal travels stimulates the creativity of a doctoral student doing excellent work in trying to make a step forward in the problem of dark matter, i really do not understand the problem. The bubble chamber for detecting high energy particles is said to have been inspired by physicists driking beer and looking at the bubbles. Killing off creativity is appropriate for an army, not for a university. Creativity is certainly *not sufficient* for good science, but most scientists would agree that it is *necessary* for good science. KRA is part of a university, just as that same university exists as part of euro-asian-african-american-australasian civilisation, which exists on the planet Earth over a time interval of a few kyears and into an unknown, possibly very short time interval in the future (relative to our local space-time position), which formed about 4.6 Myears ago around the Sun which formed in a molecular cloud according to a process of star formation which is still poorly understood, in a galaxy which formed inside of a dark matter halo which virialised from a primordial density perturbation in a perturbed Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker Universe. Let's not forget the context. We are a university, not an army. pozdr boud

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Cosmo-torun April 2004