Evolving Higher Education

Without variation, there can be no evolution. Darwin may not have actually said that, but he might have.

Consider the seven Universities in the Republic of Ireland. There are all notionally “independent”, and all fiercely protective of that status. And yet they don’t act independently. I like to use the analogy of the chain-gang to describe the way in which they all shuffle together in the same direction, converging on the imagined promised land of “best practise”. Sometimes one of them will make a minor adjustment, which the others will rather reluctantly follow after a short delay. For example Trinity recently decided that all lecturers are in future are to be called Professors. This is by no means a radical move, as they are merely converging on the American norm. However expect the other Irish Universities to follow suit within a year or two.

It didn’t have to be that way. One just might have expected all of the Universities to act individually, to have all assumed radically different approaches to the challenges of higher education, to have leveraged their independence to the maximum. But they haven’t. Ask anyone what is the main distinguishing feature of each of our Universities in terms of how they approach the challenges of higher education, and nothing immediately springs to mind (of more substance than an advertising jingle). With talk of increased collaboration and even mergers, we can expect that trend to continue and to accelerate.

But what if the position we are converging on in ever smaller steps is not optimal, in fact far from optimal? I would suggest that a group of intelligent people with little exposure to our current educational systems, locked away in a room for a month or two, might, just might, come up with a radically improved model for Irish higher education. They might then be funded to establish an experimental third level institution. To avoid the trap of instant convergence to imagined norms, it might be best not to call it a University, but something else, say for example a “National Institute for Higher Education” (!)

Of course in the early 80s when NIHE (Dublin and Limerick) were first established we did just that – and our radical approach was a wake-up call to the Irish third level sector. Maybe we need to do that again.

Fees & Entitlement

Overheard on the radio this morning, a protesting student “We gotta have free fees so we can get a degree and we can get out of Ireland, get a job, and have a life”.

Hmm. Do I really want to make personal sacrifices (pay higher taxes, take pay cuts..) to help that guy “have a life”? Honest answer – No.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country”, as President Kennedy once said a long time ago in another galaxy far far away..

The problem of fees is a tricky one. I honestly believe that Universities could take a “no frills” approach to cheaper education, and that perhaps this is the way of the future. See for example
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/oct/17/coventry-university-college-half-price-degree
Maybe Michael O’Leary can step up to the challenge? University education costs a lot because the modern university provides so much more than just an education. Perhaps we just can’t afford that anymore.

However I want to teach the best students, not just dumb rich ones (and the occasional bright rich one). So fees must not become a bar to participation in higher education for our cleverest young people, otherwise we all lose out.

Perhaps it would help if we had a Minister of Education who was not so compromised by foolish promises made before the last election. It would be good to have some-one in place with a clear vision and no baggage, who could simply do what was best for the country without having to come up with some elaborate fudge to cover his own political blushes.

Feckless Rankers

Oh dear, the Irish Universities are slipping down the University Rankings again, our own included. On the face of it the most recent Times Higher Education (THE) rankings tell a sorry story.

A University's position in the rankings is, I would suggest, directly proportional to the size of its budget. Rich Universities do well, poor ones do badly. When Ireland had lots of money our Universities rose up the rankings, when the money ran out we slipped back down. So does the money follow the ranking, or does the ranking follow the money? I suggest the latter. In other words money buys you up the rankings, its as simple as that.

I remember replying to an academic blog, written when we were at the peak of our ranking achievement, that the real test of our performance would be our ability to maintain that level when the money ran out. Well as the money ran out our corresponding drop in the rankings was almost instantaneous.

So what benefit is it to a poor country to pour money into Universities? Have the rankings not just become a rather pointless end in itself, a kind of higher-educational rich-list?

Here is a sobering fact. Most software companies are finding it extremely difficult to find good numerate software engineering graduates. The highly ranked Universities of the West are simply not capable of producing them in sufficient numbers. Big multi-nationals and small start-ups alike are heading over to Bulgaria and Romania to find and recruit people with the talents that they need. I was talking to the CEO of a UK-based start-up recently who was just back from Sofia Bulgaria, where he had employed 5 people and set up an office. Microsoft's research centre in Dublin recruits heavily from the same part of the world.

Now the Universities of Eastern Europe are hardly known for troubling the University rankings. Not one in the top 300 in the recent THE ranking....

BYOB

In London in the seventies it was common to see BYOB emblazoned on restaurant windows...

Took me a while to figure out what it meant, as restaurants were then well outside of my budget. It means Bring Your Own Bottle, the idea being that you purchased your own cheap bottle of wine in a supermarket and bought it to the restaurant, which opened it for you (and charged a small “corkage” fee for doing so). Nice to see that the idea is now coming back again into vogue here in Dublin.

In lots of businesses and universities a new mnemonic is also on the rise – BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. The idea being that the employee/student can bring their own preferred computing device to work or college and expect to have it supported by the business/university networks and applications.

There was a time when the business/university IT department would have been horrified by the idea. Indeed IT departments would often mandate a particular make of “supported” hardware, and insist on the use of an out-of-date, but “supported”, operating system. Often a deal would be done with a particular manufacturer to supply the approved equipment at a nice price.

But why shouldn’t the employee/student make their own choice as regards their own individual preference for a particular device? After all they feel comfortable with it, it suits them, why change? Rather than the individual conforming to the restrictions imposed by the IT department, surely the IT department should move to support the individual?

Now there are good and valid reasons for IT departments to be concerned, primarily about security. However gradually they are adapting to the idea, in part because users are voting with their feet. In our labs, filled with identikit PCs fixed to the desks, it is common to see a student stubbornly insisting on using their own personal laptop wedged between the PCs. Project work is often developed and demonstrated on a personal device rather than the standard PC provided.

However with freedom comes responsibility. So the most important advice is, yes, by all means BYOD, but also BYOB (Bring Your Own Brain!)

The Cost of Education

Actually it can be quite cheap.

A couple of years ago I took a summer sabbatical in Malawi, in Africa. A very poor country, where everything has to be done on the cheap. I recall watching a class of maybe 100 toddlers, sitting on the ground in the shade of a Baobab tree, listening to a teacher standing on a box. I guess that’s the same way it was done hundreds of years ago. As the sun moved, children on the edge of the group quietly moved around the other side to stay in the shade. One thing that was there in abundance was an eagerness to learn.

I then visited a secondary school where they did have buildings, but only a few broken down desks. Again mostly the students sat on the floor. The blackboard was so worn only a small corner of it was still usable. I recall a conversation with an Australian accountant who was responsible for checking the expenditure of €150,000 Euro worth of Irish Government aid. I remember him reeling off the list of what that money bought – three new fully fitted school buildings, eight teacher’s houses, 20 outdoor toilets, 100s of desks – the list went on and on. We are not used to that kind of value-for-money here at home, but in terms of life-changing potential that money went a very long way. Here in Ireland €150,000 wouldn’t even make a decent banker’s bonus.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that here in the first world we actually don’t do teaching much differently. Teaching a subject like mathematics still comes down to a teacher standing in front of, and talking to, a classroom full of students. We have all sorts of technical aids, but in fact they are rarely used. I still use chalk and a blackboard, as do most of my colleagues. At the end of the course I set an exam, I collect hand-written scripts, and I mark them with a red pen. Could I do the same under a Baobab tree, or in a class where the students sat on the floor and the blackboard was only partially usable? Well yes I probably could just about manage.

So why don’t we use advanced technology more in our teaching? And if we don’t, why is education so expensive here?

One problem with technology is that you can’t always trust it to work. Chalk and a blackboard always works. Connecting a laptop to an overhead projector never seems to be straightforward. Why is that? Once I recall going to give a lecture in DCU, and looking up to where the projector was, only to see a hole in the roof where the projector should have been. It had been stolen the night before. Sometimes technology actually takes us on a major step backwards. PowerPoint. I rest my case.

So all we have done is to take the ancient teacher-in-front-of-a-class model and surround it with layers of bureaucracy and some ill-fitting technology which arguably doesn’t add much value to the process. Perhaps if we were to strip it back to the basics and then carefully build it back up again we might end up with a much better value-for-money education system. And the way things are going, maybe that’s exactly what we will have to do.

The Tech-Sounding Math-Free Degree!

Surely the solution to all our problems! Maths is completely broken at 2^nd level, we are not in a position to fix it, so go with the flow and extract all math content from our 3^rd and 4^th level courses!

This would result in more students eager to do such a course (its easy!), no problems with retention (no-one fails!), and lots of graduates who will get jobs with companies starved of technical know-how. And while we are at it if its an ICT course take out the programming and software development skills as well, as they are hard to teach and hard to learn.

All of our quality monitors would be quite happy with this, in fact such a course would pass completely under the quality radar. The statistics on completion rates etc. would look great, and no-one would complain. Certainly not the graduates who would think they were the bees knees and expect to quickly get to well-paid top management positions where their lack of technical skills would not be an issue.

(Occasionally I do get such a graduate coming to me with top honours in such a degree and enquiring about doing a Ph.D. It is difficult to explain to them that they have been sold a pup in terms of their 3rd level education, and that there is no way in the world that they would be able for a computing Ph.D.)

And of course the problem wouldn't be solved, just pushed up the food chain. It’s the aghast employer who learns to their horror that the honours science graduate can’t do long division.

Meanwhile big multi-nationals, while going along with the myth of our world class education system, grumble amongst themselves, quietly import people from abroad to do the hard technical stuff, and plan their departure from our shores.

To avoid such dumbing down (for that is what it is) we urgently need to fix math at 2^nd level. Here is where “Project Maths” comes in, which seems to have gone from being a blatant political fig-leaf (politicians must of course be seen to be “doing something”), to being the fount of all our hopes. Frankly the jury is out on Project Math. I have heard good and bad reports. Let us hope it lives up to its billing, as there is a lot riding on it.

Meanwhile in DCU we will continue to insist that graduates emerging from our computing degree courses will have strong technical skills. This is why employers consistently indicate a preference for our graduates. If this means taking the occasional hit from an ill-informed media about poor retention rates, then so be it.

The Media & Mathematics

How often do you hear a media professional say something like “Sure I was brutal at Mathematics at school – hated it with a vengeance - hahaha..”,

the subtext being – look it clearly didn’t do me any harm as here I am on RTE getting a fat fee for jabbering on about nothing in particular and displaying how witty I am. I suppose its only natural that people from a humanities background dominate in the media – after all they need to do something. And these put-downs of the sciences must be taken on the chin – any attempt at retaliation along the lines of “sure you are only a useless bunch of needy navel-gazing wasters” brings on an instant whinge about the humanities not being sufficiently valued. And these people surely need to feel valued.

The other day I heard an hilarious exchange on RTE radio when it was suggested that some-one might actually have been good at maths, and might indeed even have liked the subject. The poor man was indignant as he hastily protested that no, he was brutal at maths, absolutely hated it. He was clearly horrified that he might be considered as being outside of the national consensus. And that consensus is about fear and loathing of math. The damage done by this sort of idle chatter is inestimable. You certainly would not get away with boasting of illiteracy (hahaha, can’t read or write, aren’t I the gas man?), and yet boasting about innumeracy is completely acceptable. And this shows up in numerous ways – billions and millions routinely mixed up and a complete inability to absorb the significance of statistics (and indeed as many politicians would be aware, it is trivially easy to fool the Irish public by misuse of statistics). In fact it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that national innumeracy might have played a part in the mess that is our current financial/economic situation.

And yet as is now generally accepted, producing graduates with world class maths skills is vital to our national well-being. Bluntly put, multi-nationals are not attracted to set up in Ireland because of the theatre scene. Instead we produce commentators whose job is to commentate on other commentators. It’s a national characteristic – we much admire clever commentary on the activities of others, rather than actually attempt something ourselves. This is of course recognised by specifically Irish terms such as “begrudgery”, or “hurlers on the ditch”. Unfortunately it encourages a strongly anti-innovation culture.

It is often claimed that Ireland has a great tradition in Mathematics. However a close examination of the role of honour reveals that most of Ireland’s famous mathematicians were of a distinctly Anglo flavour, and although they may have worked here (as part of the then UK), they could not be considered as representative of a long native tradition.

Which isn’t to say that such a tradition cannot be started right now…

Don't Dun an Doras

Today I got an email from an academic publisher…

They were telling me the good news that I could submit a paper for publication in their journal, and that the cost to DCU (if my paper were accepted) had been reduced to 18 Euro per page. If anyone wanted to read my paper they would have to either subscribe to the journal at the cost of 240 Euro per year (for 4 issues), or pay a hefty price to download the paper from the publishers web site.

I shook my head in amazement. Are there still people out there that do that? In the field of Computing we have long moved over to Open Access publishing. For example all of my academic papers are available for download for free from the Web, and none of them cost me a penny to put them there.

In fact its you, the Irish and European taxpayer, that is paying for most of this research in the first place, so surely its only right that you should have free access to view its outputs.

Here in DCU, and in particular in the School of Computing, we have pushed this ideal to the limit. All of our Ph.D. theses are published on our own open-access repository called DORAS – see http://doras.dcu.ie/. Many of us choose to place all of our published output (conference papers, book chapters, journal publications) there as well.

My colleague Prof. Alan Smeaton informs me that

"DORAS has been in operation for almost 3 years and there are now 578 research publications from the School of Computing available online http://doras.dcu.ie/view/groups/groups2a.html, more than any other School, Faculty or research centre in the University. These have had 34,490 individual downloads of the full PDF of the publications, with the most-downloaded paper being:

Coogan, Thomas and Awad, George M. and Han, Junwei and Sutherland, Alistair (2006) Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking. In: ISVC 2006 - 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing, 6-8 November 2006, Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. http://doras.dcu.ie/259/

which has had 1,081 individual downloads."

In a new initiative we have decided to make available presentations by all of our Ph.D. students, where in a recorded video of an academic talk they describe their research and their progress to date. These recordings are normally made after the students have completed about 2 years of their research program, and they then appear on this website in a blog posting. So now as well as browsing the printed word, you can also hear our research being presented directly “from the horses mouth”.

Open Access is the future of the dissemination of academic research.

(Of course there are occasions when we might have to keep quiet for a while about what we have discovered – there may after all be valuable Intellectual Property that we would need to take action to protect first.)

Very Reduced Instruction Set

Just how small can a computer instruction set get? 32 instructions? 16?

Well in fact you can get away with just one instruction, subleq, or Subtract if Less Than or Equal To

subleq a,b,c

where the contents of address a are subtracted from the contents of address b, and if the result is not positive jump to address c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

Interesting but not much use you might think. Well consider a computer doing encryption with a secret key. If each different instruction consumes a slightly different amount of power, then by accurately measuring tiny variations in power consumption you might get an idea of which instructions are being executed, and hence you might be able to determine the key. This is a very real problem and such methods are known as side-channel attacks. But if there only is one instruction such attacks are useless.

http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2010/presentations/04-Invited_Talk_1/CHES2010-Naccache.pdf

In this talk by David Naccache (who we had over here in DCU giving a talk a few years ago), as you can read here (page 59) some-one has actually built it, and even produced a C compiler for it!

Mathematics? What's that?

We are always getting surveyed about one thing or another, but sometimes you wait in vain for some-one to carry out a particular survey. What I am waiting for is for some-one to ask 1000 Irish people, equipped only with pen, paper, a comfortable table and chair, and 10 minutes of time (no calculator allowed), to divide 1104 by 23 and get the right answer. I bet less than 20% could do it.

Actually I take a fairly apocalyptic view of the state of maths in Ireland today. As a nation I reckon there are maybe only a few thousand people left who really understand math. It is gradually being leached out of our national consciousness. Come back in 100 years time, and left to our own devices, knowledge of maths would be entirely gone. Like ancient Harp making, it will disappear, except for a few old text books that no-one will understand. Already we have people teaching maths who don’t understand the subject, to classes who are not surprisingly completely bewildered by it.

In Western countries like America, where the education system is much more variable in quality, but where the average is really rather poor, they are not much better off. But America being America can always suck in know-how from other countries. So America is full of eager and math-literate Indians and Chinese, who will within a generation, (America being America) become as American as Barack Obama. Can we pull off the same trick and simply import math know-how? I don’t think we can, we are not America, and international maths skills will probably not be attracted in sufficient numbers to our shores. So we need to fix our own maths education system, urgently.

However this is a project that will take a generation to complete, and sadly we haven’t even made a serious start on it yet. After a decade of talking about it we are finally getting bonus points for honours maths - starting next year. Glaciers actually move many miles in 10 years so to describe the speed of change here as glacial would be an insult to glaciers.

Then again most other Western countries have the same problem, so if we can get serious about this, and launch a national effort involving all stake-holders, we could still steal a lead over the competition.

Googling for Code

You need a piece of code to implement a very standard algorithm. You could write it yourself, but instead you Google for it. No need to re-invent the wheel you say to yourself. Then frustration sets in..
My particular need was for a function in C++ to calculate the determinant of a square NxN integer matrix. Ideally I want something non-recursive and which does not need to allocate any memory.

Doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. However the solutions I find are all recursive, some very poorly written, some hundreds of lines long. Many are specific to the trivial 2x2 or 3x3 case. Most allocate a lot of memory from the heap. Now I hate recursion – does my head in - but I had assumed that a recursive algorithm was optional and that a non-recursive alternative always existed. Some websites held out the promise of a solution, but only if I signed up to join some group or other which would probably expose me to requests for payments, annoying ads and a deluge of emails. No thanks.

Anyway my search resulted in failure, so I resorted to writing my own – something which really should not be happening at this stage in the game. It does use recursion, and it allocates a very small amount of memory, but its less than 20 lines long.

int determinant(int n,int *matrix[])
{
     int i,j,k,sign=1,det=0;
     int **minor;
     if (n==1) return matrix[0][0];
     minor=new int* [n-1];
     for (i=0;i<n;i++)
     {
         for (j=k=0;j<n-1;j++)
         {
             if (j==i) k++; // skip i-th row
             minor[j]=&matrix[k++][1];
         }
         det+=sign*matrix[i][0]*determinant(n-1,minor);
         sign=-sign;
     }
     delete [] minor;
     return det;
}

Securing the Cloud

The potential benefits of cloud computing are amazing. Imagine for example your medical records being in the cloud, accessible immediately from anywhere in an emergency...

But wait a minute. What if the cloud is not secure? Already there have been a couple of instances where a cloud was hacked, or where there was a sustained loss of service. The cloud represents a single point of failure, and thus must not be allowed to fail. And what about privacy - you don't want anyone and everyone poking around in your medical records. The solution here is encryption, but a particularly sophisticated type of encryption. For example you might want your medical records to be completely available to you and your surgeon, and partially available to your GP and nurse, and somewhat available to your medical insurer. What's wanted in fact is known as "Attribute-Based Cryptography", where your access to the data depends on who you are and what attributes you have.

Well cometh the hour cometh the solution. As often happens in research, in a completely seperate development from cloud computing, mathematicians have recently come up with the perfect solution to the problem of attribute-based cryptography, based on the mathematics of "pairing-based cryptography". Previous efforts floundered on the problem of "collusion attacks". Say one needs attribute A and attribute B to access certain data. I have attribute A only, you have attribute B only, each of us individually does not have sufficient attributes to access the data, but if the two of us get together... The new methods prevents this. This is a very hot research area.

If you want to read more, see

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/565

and

http://ece.wpi.edu/~mingli/papers/Li_SecureComm10.pdf

But academics having solved a problem do not linger long on it. There are other problems of interest. Unfortunately commercial exploitation of such ideas is often delayed, as knowledge of these new techniques is not widespread.
Here is another problem of particular interest to an Irish audience - Electronic Voting. We in Ireland dabbled with it before but the proposed method then was totally insecure. Ideally we would like to encrypt each vote and yet still be able to count it. However normally you can't do maths (like counting) on encrypted data. The solution is "homomorphic cryptography". Google for it. We don't quite have a perfect solution for it yet, but we are getting there... Another fascinating and hyperactive research area.

What do you expect from us?

There was a time when an academic was just expected to be a good researcher and a competent teacher.

Now however an academic is expected to be an active researcher, an excellent teacher, an entrepreneur, an innovator, an accountant, an administrator, an inventor, a fund-raiser, a media performer, a businessperson.... In short there is a lot being expected from the poor overloaded academic. However I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. And I actually don't know of anyone who ticks all of those boxes (although I know of a couple who tick most of them).

In truth many of us became academics precisely so as not to become business people. Growing up in our rather snobby academic household I clearly recall the term "businessman" being used as a form of put-down. Our own self image as academics was (is?) as financially disinterested and personally unambitious, but with a noble curiosity about science, and/or literature and/or the arts.

However the expected attribute that worries me most is that of "innovator". The reason being that nowadays innovation is being entrusted solely to academia, and frankly in the past most innovation has come from outside of the universities. Think of a famous inventor and phrases like "college drop-out" and "no formal education" come rather uncomfortably to mind. The problem is that by implying that innovation is somehow the reserve of the universities, others may feel that their own ideas are not worthy of consideration. That would be a shame.

The Problem with Students is..

Now you won't ever hear a politician criticize the electorate, and neither are you often likely to hear academics criticize students, but..

If I were to list some of the comments of colleagues, some students are

• Poorly motivated
• Poorly educated
• Completely distracted by Facebook/Youtube
• Often absent from lectures/tutorials
• generally disengaged
• limited in attention span
• Filled with a sense of entitlement
• too busy doing a part-time job

Now what all this boils down to in my view is that some students are simply not interested in their studies. The reasons I would put down to poor career advice, leaving-cert burn-out, and the madness of the points system, whereby a student goes for the course that suits their points rather than the course which suits them.

Its bad enough with the backdoor re-introduction of fees that many well-motivated students will not be able in future to afford third level education, but its crazy to let the system become clogged with the clearly disinterested. The long term impact on graduate quality is frightening.

It almost makes me blush to say it, but a good teaching-learning outcome requires teachers passionate about their subject and students equally passionately interested in that subject. I was reminded recently of what that feels like when I taught a semester in the University of Mzuzu in Malawi (second poorest country in the world). Students so eager to learn they were almost ripping the knowledge out of my head!

Frankly third level education here often lacks that passion, and the even the most passionate teacher will wilt after years of exposure to clearly disinterested students.

I think in future we should consider making entry to third level dependent on the student demonstrating some considerable interest in their chosen subject.

Of course many of our students already fully fit the bill in this regard, and in our case we are fortunate that so many have a passion for computing as reflected in the energy and creativeness exhibited by the student computer society - see http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/

While its clearly a noble objective to have 70% plus of second level students move onto third level, noble aspirations have a way of running aground on the rocks of reality. I personally believe in mass participation in third level education, but only when people are ready for it. Many of the students I have met who are most passionate about third level education are those involved in "second chance" education as mature students, when they have finally figure out what they want to do.

Something doesn't compute

Premise: Here in Ireland the economy is in terrible shape. In the UK the economy is in bad shape. Here at third level we have introduced a ban on recruitment and promotion, and increased the student registration fee to €2000. In the UK they are implementing across the board cuts (Queen's University Belfast - QUB - is threatened with losing 25% of its staff - see
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/queens-university-lsquocould-lose-25-of-its-staff-in-cutsrsquo-15132108.html), and student fees have been raised up to £9000.

So what is going on? How come we can afford to get off so easily while the third level sector in the UK is getting absolutely hammered? Well of course to listen to the howls of protest from the third level sector here you wouldn't think we had it easy at all. And indeed the Employment Control Framework is a blunt instrument which means that all third level departments are downsizing in a haphazard and completely unplanned way. And that includes computing departments (so where exactly is the Smart Economy supposed to come from?).

It must be said that Irish Academics are still relatively well paid, particularly at the higher levels. Full professors top out at an impressive €146,00 per annum. I remember explaining this to a UK professor who was encouraging me to apply for a job over there. I recall his stunned silence. I remember getting a lift with a very distinguished and cheerful German professor and his wife, and it turned out my salary was nearly twice his. (However comparisons aren't always easy - he was happy because he was retiring, and under their system he was entitled to his full professorial salary until the day he died. Some perk!). However this differential has been corrected to an extent, as Irish Academic salaries have recently suffered a drop of about 25% by way of pension levies and the infamous Universal Social Charge.

I think Size Matters. The UK government can afford to make radical cuts as its further away from the affected nerve endings. So its easy for a UK government to force drastic cuts on QUB as the furious reaction will be local and can be ignored. You couldn't imagine a local administration making the same decision and surviving. Here in the republic you close a local hospital and you piss off a large and vociferous proportion of the electorate.

I suspect that we will be forced eventually to take much deeper cuts, much closer to the level of pain currently being experienced in the UK.

Where are our Brightest and Best?

In a shed with their arm half way up a cows arse.

Every wondered why it is so hard to find some-one in a leadership position in this country, who could unequivocally be described as "brilliant"? Why do we have such mediocre politicians and even more mediocre civil servants in positions of influence? Look around the public service, and the best you can hope for is competence, and very often we don't even get that.

Well in part it can be put down to the points system. The brightest people are attracted to the courses with the highest points, and so for example the brightest and best often become veterinarians (see above). Its a well understood phenomenom. People like to get "value" for their points, and if they have 550 points they don't want to be in a class where the entry fee is just 300 points.

Computing, despite the strong demand for good computing graduates (employers are beating my door down looking for them...) has traditionally had a low points threshold, and thus very rarely attracts the 500-points-plus student.

What to do. Well in Ireland we often develop elaborate plans, but we rarely implement them. So best to stick with something simple. There is a registration fee of €2000 coming in next year. Why not raise it to €4000 for prospective vets and reduce it to €500 for computing and engineering courses? Note that attempting to influence the "points market" is already an accepted tactic - higher maths already gets "bonus points" to encourage students to take it.

Top down or Bottom up?

Scott's law (well one of them). Some-one operating within a hierarchy believes in top-down control from their own position downwards, and bottom up control from their own position upwards.

Ironic to observe those within the Irish third level system, who themselves operate a vigorous top-down control upon those of us on the bottom rung, now complaining vociferously about the "soviet style" top-down control being exerted on the universities by the HEA and the government.

Priviliged or Talented?

It seems in this country we often mistake privilege for talent. I was just listening to two brothers on the radio who were clearly priviliged but not nearly so obviously talented - although they and their interviewer were assuming that they were. It actually must be a particular burden on the children of the talented - there is an expectation that talent is inherited, when often it is not.

In the universities of course we are solely interested in talent, irrespective of where it comes from. However with the rise in registration charges we can expect our incoming undergraduates to be more priviliged than talented. Which is a great pity. Privilege which is short on talent often comes across as full of a sense of entitlement, with no real capacity for hard work.

Making the transition to 3rd level.

To succeed in 2nd level, students must master the process of memorisation and regurgitation. Which does I guess result in a type of education and certainly prepares them adequately for the Leaving Certificate exams. Of course a subject like mathematics does not fit easily with the memorisation/regurgitation approach, but even it can be represented and examined by a kind of memorised pattern matching. Questions come in an expected format and a memorised sequence of steps gets you to the right answer (you hope).

In 3rd level the tradition is quite different. Its no longer memorisation/regurgitation, its challenge/response. Many new undergraduates find it very hard to adapt to this new way of doing things. It can be quite amusing to issue a challenge to a 1st year class and observe their bemused reaction. They want to know exactly what type of response they are expected to give. They would like model responses given to them to memorise and choose from. The want to know "is this on the exam?". If all else fails they expect to be able to Google for an answer. The idea of creatively coming up with their own response doesn't seem to occur, and they have no idea of how to go about it as nothing they have done since kindergarden has prepared them for it.

So what can we do about it at third level? Very little I would suggest. The move from 2nd to 3rd level comes at the same time when a young person moves from being a child to being an adult. As we all recall that involves all kind of challenges. Ultimately its the responsibility of the individual to successfully chart that transition. As it says in Corinthians 13:11

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. "