Professors in the UK are required to act as police agents

A 3-page document originating at the United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) was distributed to us today. It outlines certain new procedures requiring teaching staff to be policing foreign students with visas and report them to the officials if they fail to come to classes.

According to the document, teaching staff are required to
1. highlight students at risk of missing 10 expected contacts
2. chase highlighted students
3. report non-attendance to UKBA.
By "expected contacts" they mean class or tutorial attendance, submission of homework, etc. So if a student misses 4 classes, 4 tutorials and 2 homeworks, then I must report him or her to the police. This is absurd because:

1. It forces us, professors, to micromanage every class, every meeting and keep detailed records.
2. It requires students to attend lectures. Whereas this is something that, in general, a student has to do, it does not take into account students who can do perfectly well without attending lectures. Universities are full of boring lectures and lecturers. Why should a (presumably intelligent) university student be treated like a schoolchild? If I was required to attend all lectures when I was at the university, I'd probably quit: I couldn't stand irrational or boring teachers. I did better (much better) by studying in bed.
3. It creates a new load for everybody: for the computer people (who, according to the document, will have to create a computerized monitoring system), for teaching staff (who must act as police officers even though they are neither trained nor ever desired to do so), for administrators who will be chasing professors who are not chasing students, for secretaries, etc. (Actually, some administrators may be happy with this new measure because it creates work for them.)

The UK is, as well-known, a surveillance society. A few days ago, the Sunday Times published an article reporting that

Britain has 1% of the world’s population but about 20% of its CCTV cameras; it has one camera for every 14 people in the country.

In another Guardian article, it is reported that CCTV is the worst of all possible worlds.

For some reason I cannot quite understand, the UK wants to monitor everybody at all times. And now they try to make people (professors) who are out of the game, get into it.

I DO NOT WANT TO BE A POLICEMAN.

So, why don't the UK officials install a few more CCTVs in each classroom to monitor the students they want? As a matter of fact, why don't they electronically tag each incoming foreign student, immediately upon entering, so that they can monitor his/her presence in lectures, tutorials, home or the toilet?

PLEASE KEEP ME OUT OF THIS POLICING GAME.
THE STATE MUST HIRE TRAINED POLICE OFFICERS TO DO THIS, NOT SCIENTISTS AND ACADEMICS.

A Governor’s prayer for rain

I just received an email from Michael Schermer's e-skeptic about a method used in Atlanta, GA, to produce rain in a period of drought in 2007:

On Tuesday, November 13, 2007, Sonny Perdue, the Governor of Georgia, led a group of approximately 250 persons, including many state officials, in a prayer for rain on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta. Georgia had been suffering an extreme drought, and the level of Lake Lanier, an important water reservoir near Atlanta, had been decreasing dramatically over several months. Governor Perdue believed that a divine intervention was necessary and so he boldly asked God to bring rain. Fully expecting his prayer to be effective, Perdue said “Hopefully we will be better conservators of the blessings God’s given us as he gives us more [rain].”

There is no need to discuss further the idiocy of such an act. But (miracle of miracles!) ....

the next day there was light rain in Atlanta and much rain came to the area over the next couple of months. Many Georgians considered Perdue a hero and thought that his prayer had influenced God to increase rainfall to the drought stricken vicinity of Atlanta.

So, the e-skeptic people decided to conduct a

[statistical] investigation to determine whether the prayer was correlated with an increase in rain, and if so, how likely it was to have caused the increase.

And guess what they found:

However, no evidence was found for a causal relationship between the prayer and the increase in rain. The Governor did not produce the increase, despite the claims of many that he did! This is clear from comparing the outcome of his day of prayer to the outcomes of nonprayer days. Nonprayer days were likely to be followed by rainfall increases equal to or greater than what followed the Governor’s prayer day approximately 11% of the time for all nonprayer days, 17% of the time for nonprayer days in November, and 50% of the time for nonprayer days preceded by periods of low rainfall. Any belief that the Governor produced an increase in rain by his prayer on November 13, 2007 can be considered to be wishful thinking.

It is sad that there are so many idiots who are ready to believe that there is a causal relationshop between prayer and rainfall. It is also equally sad that we have to run scientific experiments to prove (to these idiots) the obvious. But guess what: no matter what proof you give (to these idiots), these people will remain unconvinced. Faith is more powerful (for them) than proof.

Watch the following video (about a minute after the start) to hear what the moron Governor says:



Here is a little problem... WHICH God did this moron (and the idiots who prayed along) pray to? Some prayed to Allah, some to Zeus, some to other gods. Do gods of different religions collaborate to answe the prayer, to produce the rain? Hm... probably not. This simple thought alone should be enough to spare e-skeptic from conducting a scientific experiment to prove the obvious.

It seems that many politicians act completely irrationally, by appealing to "gods", to "prayers" and to "faith". I commented on one of them earlier. And it would be OK as long as they did so for their own private reasons. Nevertheless, they do use "gods", "prayers" and "faith" in order to take decisions that affect peoples' lives. (Remember that Bush invaded Iraq because "god told him so"?) This IS the problem.

An Einstein quote

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.

Holodomor

In the Ukrainian language, holod=hunger, mor=plague

Holdomor refers to another Stalinist crime: the famine of 1932–1933 in the Ukraine during which millions of people were starved to death. I knew little about it, until the "a Nadder!'' blogger informed me that, like Katyn, Holodomor is yet another Soviet massacre.

What is more surpsising is that, unlike Katyn which is now almost universally acknowledged as a Soviet mass murder (excepting the deniers who live in their own world), Holodomor is, still, thought to be just another Stalinist operation, not a particular crime per se. One of the problem seems to be that, during the 30's, Walter Duranty, a pro-Stalin journalist living in the USSR, published in the New York Times denying the famine, contradicting other voices, like that of Gareth Jones, and thus establishing a lie, even in the west. I also read that western intellectuals, sympathetic to the Leninist/Stalinist "progressive'' regime, talked down the famine.

What is interesting to consider is this: How can it be that such huge crimes, murders of incredible magnitude, can be trivialized or denied? The blame is not (only) with the regime that caused the murders: they do their job. It is the others, the good boys, the deniers, who propagate the lies.

I will give a parallel in my domain: I constantly see the decline of the education system, the way that, nowadays, the university spoon-feeds students, collects their tuition and grants them a piece of paper. I wonder how it is possible to have system in which, say, maths/science students cannot do elementary high-school algebra; and I shout about it. Well, the politicians (who cause the situation) will definitely not speak about it. But what about academics? Among them, there are several deniers who will contradict me and it is they who are the most dangerous ones. The politicians are doing their job: they ensure that more students will go through the university pipeline, they will establish a good name for themselves and they will be re-elected; this is their goal. However, this goal would not have been possible had the deniers been absent.

Certainly, I do not claim that deniers of the university ridicule are at the same level as deniers of mass massacres, but, logically (and I'd dare say psychologically), there are parallels. So it seems to me.

Katyń

I saw, yesterday, the film Katyń by the famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Probably one of the most important films of the early 21st century, it tries to restore the historical truth about the mass murder of 22 thousand Polish people (military officers, engineers, intellectuals, merchants) in the Russian Katyn (Катынь) forest near the Polish border. Ordered by Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret Soviet Police NKVD, these people were captured, shortly after USSR invaded Poland, kept as prisoners for several months, and finally executed and buried in mass graves. The Nazis, who invaded Poland almost simultaneously as the Soviets, took advantage of the massacre for their own propaganda. At the end of the war, the Soviet-occupied Poland started an organized propaganda to convince everyone that it was the Nazis who had committed the massacre; anyone who dared deny this was imprisoned, marginalized or killed. The situation lasted until 1990 when Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility; and Boris Yeltsin made public the documents authorizing the massacre.

An excellent review of the film is written by Anne Applebaum who tells us that the film is in the classic Wajda style:

For half a century, beginning in the darkest era of communism and continuing through the years of Solidarity, martial law, and the post-Communist present, Wajda has been conducting precisely this kind of cinematic dialogue with Polish audiences. Although they have sometimes been celebrated abroad, his movies have always been made with his countrymen in mind, which gives them a special flavor.

We don't need too much of Polish history to watch the film, although some certainly helps. From Applebaum's review I also learned that Wajda's father was among the Katyn massacre victims and that there are several references in the film about Wajda's own life; for example, that he wanted to be an art student, and that his mother had, for years, no idea what had happened to her husband. Wajda was asked why he made the film now.

Most of those who actually remembered the events of 1939 were now dead, he explained—Wajda himself is eighty-one—so the film could no longer be made for them. Instead, he said, he wanted to tell the story again for young people—but not just any young people. Wajda said he wanted to reach "those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society, and not just an accidental crowd."

But both in the interviews he's given and in the film itself, Wajda seems to be saying something rather different about the need for a national cinema. By making Katyn, he wanted to create something that would get Poles to talk to one another, to reflect upon common experiences, to define common values, to admire similar virtues, to forge a civil society out of an anonymous crowd. Katyn is deliberately intended to inspire patriotism, in the most positive sense of the word. This too helps explain why Wajda made a film that asks not just "what happened?" or "what did the Soviet Union do to us?" but rather "how did we, as a society, react afterward?" as well as "and how do we remember it now?"

Wajda has achieved his goals as he has, indeed, created discussions, and

"Have you been to see Katyn yet?" was something one was asked with some frequency in Warsaw this past fall.

Most interestingly, he has managed to solicit some Russian reaction:

[O]n the day after the film's release, a government-owned Russian newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, declared that Soviet responsibility for Katyn was "not obvious." In a snide article, one of the newspaper's pundits threw doubt on a decade's worth of voluminous archival publications, and accused Wajda of "separating us further from the truth."

The film includes rare original photographs, excerpts from German newsreels presenting the Katyn massacre as a Soviet crime, and excerpts from Soviet newsreels presenting the massacre as a German crime.

Unfortunately, not everybody will be able to watch the film because it's not a main Hollywood production. I'm lucky to be in Edinburgh where the film scene is very good.

P.S. (Added 20 Feb. 2013). Here is a link on Andrzej Wajda's biography, as presented by culture.pl