This year's media technology bachelor student theses

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Our third-year students presented their bachelors theses this week. We strongly encourage our students to write these in pairs. I have been the advisor ("demon producer"?) of five students (three theses), and I have also been the examiner of 11 theses (where I read, provide feedback, judge and grade them).

The theses that I have "demon produced" during the spring (all written in Swedish) were called:

- "Carbon dioxide currency with individual carbon dioxide rations" [Koldioxidvaluta - med individuella koldioxidransoner].

This thesis is based on my suggested thesis topic "carbon dioxide currency" (in Swedish).

- "Starcraft: A spectator sport for a wider audience?" [Starcraft: En åskådarsport för bred publik?]

Can the popular computer game Starcraft 2 could become a "spectator sport" in Sweden?

- "The economy around professional e-sport players, with a focus on Counter-Strike"

Where does the money come from to support professional computer gamers? Who sponsors these professionals and why? What are the (economic) conditions of professional gamers?

The thesis that I examined were called:

- "The public diary - A study of why people expose their private lives in blogs"

- "Customer contact in social media"

- "A user study of Twitter as a backchannel"

- "Friendship on Facebook"

- "Message credibility on Facebook-pages and in newspaper advertising"

- "Course evaluation system for students based on user generated content"

- "Gamification: Game mechanics as a motivational factor among students"

- "Newspapers and the general public: Everyone is a potential source of information"

- "The importance of tactility for tomorrow's newspaper"

- "Web-based collaboration tools and their use by students at the Royal Institute of Technology"

- "Live concerts, digitally through time and space"

Quite a few (more than half!) were related to social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, user-generated content).

The students should provide English-language titles but since they haven't handed in the final version, some haven't yet and I might thus retroactively alter some title above.

I will eventually link the list above to the final texts. We publish all student theses on the web nowadays but I don't know if that will happen before the summer (June) or after.

Almost all theses are written in Swedish. The quality of the the work (and everything that goes into it - the planning, the research question, the methods chosen, the investigation itself, the analysis and the flow of the actual text in the report itself) of course varies widely...

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What do our ex-students work with?

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For the longest of time, I have floated the idea of an "individual course" to map where all our graduated media technology students work and what they do. I started plugging the idea more than half a year ago and I know for sure that I have reached all our (current) students (around 250 or so). Despite this, no-one has expressed any interest in doing this - until now. In short time no less than three students have gotten in touch with me and expressed interest in doing this task.

My original idea came from seeing the wonderful information about work/employer as well as information about personal networks that is accessible in LinkedIn. I never initiate, but almost always accept LinkedIn invitations from students of mine. I thus have an extensive network of contacts and I can also see their contacts and LinkedIn networks. I'm sure it is possible to find most of our alumni through these (LinkedIn) networks and then sift through the information about current (and perhaps previous) employers and what they work with. Are they consultants, entrepreneurs or web programmers? Do they work with video conferencing systems, in the game industry or with audio books?

I have this far refrained from elaborating on the exact character of the mapping task that a student should do, as I think it is more appropriate to do this elaboration together with the student in question who take it upon him- or herself to do this task. The thought was to craft this task according to my and the student's own interests (and where my interests represent the interests of the whole department). We know way to little about what our students do, but would sure all like to know more about it. An individual course comes in different flavors so it would be possible to do this task for credits representing 4, 5 or 6 weeks of full-time studies (160 - 240 hours of "course work").

As it turned out, two persons got in touch last week and we had a meeting together just in the beginning of this week. It now seems the plan is for them to expand the size and the scope of the task and shape this into a bachelor's thesis project that they will do together. It is as of this moment unclear if they can do their thesis (with me as their advisor) now/during the autumn, or if they have to wait and do it next spring together with all the other third-year students. I myself am divided about this issue. On the one hand it would be a drag to wait until next May to have the results of this study. On the other hand it is much easier and more convenient for them and for me if they do it within the structure of the bachelor's thesis "course" - and that course is only given during the spring term. Our (mine and their) preferences might anyway be moot as it is not clear that they will at all be allowed to do their bachelor's thesis outside of the course (more work for everyone involved, less structural support for them).

Anyway, it is all very exciting that some students have finally risen to the challenge. From their perspective, they are equally or more interested than the faculty in finding out what our alumni are doing nowadays. Just as we (teachers) would like to know more about this, so would the students themselves (both these individuals and the larger student body) like to know where they will work in the future! So beyond a personal interest, we all feel that this project would in part be a "civic duty" that many others would be interested in and benefit from.

As it so happens, right after my meeting with the students, yet another student has gotten in touch with me to ask about doing this as an individual course. I might involve her too, she might be able to do some work that would be of use to the other two students (especially if they will not commence their bachelor's theses until next spring). I will involve her in our soon-to-be four-way talks and we'll see how it turns out...

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The reflective engineer

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I gave a lunch talk in a student-led "project" called The reflective engineer this past week. It is one of the projects that the student organization Sustainable Engineering Everywhere - a KTH student organization (SEEK) organizes and there was a surprisingly large audience, perhaps 60 or 70 students or so. I don't know if it was my talk or the free lunch that got students there...

I built on the talk I have half a year earlier at the House of Science and connected peak oil to the future of the Internet. I unfortunately only had 45 minutes and that left only a few minutes at the end of the talk for questions. We had time for two and both were good.

I stayed and answered some questions and in fact had an hour-long conversation with an Iranian guest student who had been an oil trader earlier.

I realized afterwards (a few days later) that my talk probably was the first occasion for many students to hear about peak oil. Talks such as these give me an excellent platform to talk about issues that are important for me. So it is a pity to only have a few minutes for questions. What I realized is that I should have offered to sit down in the café outside the lecture hall for half an hour and talk or answer questions from those students who felt the need to probe thee questions that were raised further. That would also have been very valuable for me; I could have gotten some feedback and a better feeling for how my talk was understood and processed by the students. This did alas not happen this time around but I have decided to do so from now on every time the opportunity presents itself!

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On my nerdiness

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This is an introspective text.

I don't think I read enough academic literature when I was a ph.d. student. Sure, I read quite some now and then, but the problem, as I identified it later, was that I read quite some now and then, but at other times I didn't read very much at all. So, on average, I'm not sure that that much got read. After having finished my ph.d. I worked in industry for a while, and when I went back to academia, I felt that I needed some new reading habits and I devised a scheme that rested on three principles:

- Read an average of 50 pages of academic literature every day (seven days per week).

- Pick out a package of 10 next-to-read books according to allocated quotas (1 out of 10 books is a ph.d. thesis, 3 out of 10 books is fiction etc.)

- Keep track of how many books I read, and buy three new books for every four books I read (I had a stock of about 100 unread non-fiction books at the time).

I more or less followed these three rules for a period of several years, although I fiddled a little with them now and them. In terms of "academic literature", books, academic papers, student assignments or master's thesis drafts all counted towards the 50 pages. Fiction counted as half. I kept track of how much I read and I actually did read 350 pages of text each week (by reading on the subway and then also for an additional hour or so in the evening).

In the end it proved to be a little too much. I abandoned the system, but later devised a new system that is a little bit less stressful:

- Read 25 pages of non-fiction/scientific books each weekday (for a minimum of 125 pages per week).

- Read 15 pages of fiction each day (for a minimum of 105 pages per week).

- Every second book should be work-related (media, Internet, online communities, social media etc.) and every second book is related to my non-work interests (energy, peak oil, sustainability, climate change etc.).

With this system, around two non-fiction books get read every month and so I have select the new books I buy very carefully. If I only read a dozen books in each category each year, I just can't run out and buy whatever happens to catch my attention right this moment. I also do spend a fair amount of time thinking about which books to buy next and which books to read next (I have books for the next couple of months already lined up, although a book that should be read urgently can jump the queue).

Books in the fiction category has tended to swell in length during the last couple of decades, but if I find a page-turner and finish it in a few days, I don't put reading aside for a month, but rather start to read a new book directly. While it is possible for me to be "behind" in reading fiction, it isn't possible to be "ahead" of the quota as it is "reset" every day.

These rules probably sound reasonably insane to most people, but they do get the job done and they do get the books read. I am sure these rules and my adherence to them says something fundamental about me, but I can't myself figure out exactly what. I think they do have something to do with my need for control, and there are probably some mildly disturbing parallels to monomania, obsessive-compulive distorder, Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders. Or not. I don't know enough and I'm not so sure I'm that interested in knowing. It's not like I'm going to run out and buy a book about it anyway :-)

I have similarly elaborate systems in place for how to choose, mix and spend time consuming other sources of media such at podcasts and moving images (television, movies etc.). I'll give you just one more example.

I really like the TED talk videos. But despite my liking them, I just didn't watch them that often. I then checked out how many TED talks were published during the last couple of months (I subscribe to them through Itunes) and came to the conclusion that I was lagging and just getting more and more behind all the time. So I set up a new system with rules for watching TED talks:

- I will watch 10 minutes of TED talks per day and keep track of whether I'm ahead or behind (e.g. the status as of today might be "110424 +4", e.g. I'm right on target, or rather, I'm even four minutes ahead of where I "ought to be" today).

- I check out all the TED talks of, let's say, the first quarter of this year and then choose half of them based on which titles I think sound most interesting.

I'm actually a couple of years behind the running production of TED talks, but I have come to the conclusion that I will eventually catch up if I keep to my rule of watching an average of 10 minutes of TED talks per day. With this system, TED talks get watched. More specifically, they get watched at a pace of 300 minutes per month. Without the system, my TED talk consumption would be much more random (and most probably much lower).

That's the scope and the state of my nerdiness (see also this previous blog post that touches on the same issues and that complements this text).

Anyway, how weird, or how reasonable are these systems of mine?

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How the media (unfortunately) works

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This week I have unfortunately gotten an(other) insight into the shallowness of how media works. I am both the advisor of (a handful) of students and the examiner of (20 or so) students in a course where they write their bachelor's theses over the course of the spring term. I was taken aback earlier this week by a KTH press release that was based on an unfinished bachelor's thesis that as of now is being written by students at our department and in this course.

It seems the two students in question were quite hot on marketing their own personal selves, jumped the gun and went public with the results of their survey of (no less than 891) Swedish iPad users. Unfortunately, their thesis is not yet finished and will not be presented for another month. I (and everyone else involved in the course) thus have no insight whatsoever into the quality of the results - although the quantity might in fact be pretty impressive. But - and it is a big "but" - that quantity is of little worth if the quality is lacking in terms of exactly how the survey was conducted, what the results are, how these results are being interpreted and what conclusions are reached based on the results and the analysis. It is entirely possible that a substantial part of this has not even been written yet. I happen to know the students in question and they are very focused and goal-oriented, so I'm sure they haven't done a bad job - but the problem is that I (and everyone else) don't really know how good a job they have done - since their job isn't finished and noone has had the chance to have a look at it yet. And that is a problem.

The students themselves seem to think that since they have received almost 900 answers to their survey, their survey are three times "better" than an earlier survey that received less than a third as many answers. But the raw number of respondents of course has little impact on the quality of the results if the survey itself is flawed in any way. In this particular case (and as far as I understand), they have reached out to iPad- and Apple-lovers' Internet discussion spaces with requests for answering their survey. The people who hang around these fora are most certainly not representative of Swedish iPad-users, and it is to be expected that the persons who furthermore actually answer such a survey are the most enthusiastic of the enthusiasts.

It is therefore highly doubtful that (for example) Swedish iPad users in general spend more than 16 hours per week using their iPad, that almost 40% have the music-related application GarageBand on their iPads and that almost half of them own a Macbook Pro computer etc. Some people have furthermore misunderstood the fact that 95% of the respondents were men and now think that 95% of Swedish iPad owners/users are men...! So the question is to what extent a survey like this (and the ways in which the results have been disseminated) reveals new information about iPad users and iPad uses, and to what extent it spreads misinformation and infobabble about the same issues. It for sure says something about how quite a few people (891 persons) use their iPads, but it is still unclear what it says about (Swedish) iPad users in general. We are all eagerly awaiting the finished thesis, where these and other answers will hopefully be revealed...

To summarize, the survey is "only" part of a bachelor's thesis (e.g. a relatively limited investigation), it has not been reviewed by anyone yet - perhaps including the students' advisor (!). It is furthermore not yet finished, but is still being presented as representing "important" research results from KTH and originating from our department. Other teachers that I have talked to at our department don't really feel comfortable about this situation and think this course of events is unfortunate. I hope this won't affect the judgement of the students' finished thesis and affect their grades negatively when that time comes around some weeks from now (I'm not the one who will examine the thesis in this specific case)...

That might be as it is, but what really troubles me deeply is that the person responsible for press contacts at KTH made the judgement call of choosing to "make news" out of this as-of-yet unfinished bachelor's thesis. It seems like a remarkable misjudgement that could easily have been handled by just postponing the press release a month, until the thesis was finished and it had been reviewed. What instead happened was that a press release was written which soon found its way to the front page of KTH's website. It was then picked up by major Swedish morning newspapers and trade press and blown out of proportion by being uncritically (of course - who would expect something else nowadays) reported by so-called journalists. Anyone with some sense would have picked up on the fact that it is after all "only" a bachelor's thesis (limited work/effort) and not even finished or reviewed at that. This makes it difficult to understand of frame the reported results beyond parroting the press release and it is a dismal witness to the poor state of our media and to the triumph of surface over depth and speed over correctness in today's media landscape and in today's society.

The absurd part though is that after expressing my misgivings to the KTH press officer, it seems he took offense and came back with a request for me to "clarify" my actions. My actions in question consisted of sending an internal mail to my colleagues expressing my doubts (same as here, see above), requesting more information and questioning the use of university funds for hyping unfinished student "research" over actually using that same money to spend more time meeting and advising our students when they write their theses - and then forwarding this mail to him as a curtesy. The press officer also received an official rebuke (complaint) from the head of our research group, which was a much more diplomatic and toned down version of what I had previously written in my mail.

Now, the press officer obviously felt no need to clarify his own culpability in this process of "manufacturing" news of questionable (or at least uninspectionable) quality and "selling" an unfinished student research project as bona fide "KTH research", and he furthermore obviously did not even understand that his actions in this specific case might be questionable or objectionable, or at least counterproductive for KTH and its "brand". The world we live in can sometimes be truly absurd. His complaint was basically that we (me and the head of our research group) were making his job more difficult by "spreading rumors" about the fact that the emperor might not have any clothes...

The technical expressions for what has happened is:

- The students were fleecing the bear before it was shot.

- The press officer was making a hen out of a feather.

- The so-called journalists were uncritically parroting a press release.

- I expressed critique over the course of events and the actions of the press officer in this specific case.

The press officer felt that I questioned the quality of his work (in general) and he tried to bully me and squeeze an excuse (a "clarification") out of me. He did not and has not addressed the more important underlying question of whether his actions were perhaps a wee bit objectionable, misguided, or premature. I rebutted his request for an "clarification" (excuse) and squarely put the blame for this (in my opinion) "mess" where I believe it properly belongs - at his footsteps. I have not heard from him since although I have received some (mild) critique for being too frank about expressing my opinions.

Comment (April 2012): Here's a great blog post about the same (or a related) topic.

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Climate change online

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I have a (pretty ambitions) private blog/hobby that pertains to issues about sustainability, resource challenges, peak oil etc. and in that role, I participated in the third annual Environmental Blog Forum (Miljöbloggforum 2011) this past weekend (I've also participated in the previous two).

I would not write about it here if it were not for the fact that we this year, for the first time, were visited by a researcher who was studying us. More specifically, Jutta Haider is a senior lecturer ("lektor") in Library and Information Studies at the University of Lund in southern Sweden and her project Climate change online "investigates people's appropriation of social media to tell about their everyday life efforts to lead climate friendly lives".

True to the topic of her research, she has a project blog where it is possible to follow her project. The blog (and presumably the project) started during the autumn, and she switched from Swedish to English on the blog at the beginning of 2011.

I only had time to talk to her a little at the event itself, but it seems we have overlapping interests and I hope we will bump into each other some other time. Or, I might get in touch with her at some point in time if it seems to be justified.

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Unleashing our cognitive surplus for a better future

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There has been a very informal call for "visionary" proposals that involve researchers belonging to different research groups at my (huge) department of Computer Science and Communication. I presume this is in order to get us to cooperate and work together better outside of our small cells/research groups. So I got together with my friend Cristian Bogdan who is an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction group and wrote the following (one page long) application:

TITLE: Unleashing our cognitive surplus for a better future

TIMEPLAN: starting date: Aug 1 2011 - July 31 2012

RESEARCH PLAN:

Are open source Mozilla contributors really not more than non-paid employees? How will the tension between free-flowing grassroots idealism vs. harnessed and managed production play out in the 21st century and in a world where cognitive surplus (Shriky 2010) could herald the arrival of unparalleled creativity and generosity in a connected age. Is the future of open source software becoming a cog in the corporate machinery, or a fundamental threat and a radical alternative to business-as-usual in the world of computers, programming and participatory interaction design and development (see for example yr.no)? Does the future of the internet belong to distributed society-oriented generative technologies (Zittrain 2009) that improvise and build on each other (Wikipedia), or to the centralized business- oriented “tethered” applications of today (XBLA, Apple!s App Store) and the “walled gardens” of yesteryear (AOL, Genie)?

concrete and measurable research goals: What are we going to do?

We will publish a book based on this research project! This project will accomplish the first step: we will collect material though surveys, focus groups, interviews and case studies of both “free-flowing” as well as “managed” open source projects. We will also use and develop relevant frameworks and theories to analyze our empirical material.

impact: Why is this research important?

How should one of the most important strategic resources of our time be used – the cognitive surplus of literate educated members of western and other societies? In what kinds projects should it be used and for the benefit of whom? How could our collective cognitive surplus lead to better applications and better use of the Internet by the people, for the people, and for creating better societies?

motivation and justification for the involved personnel: Why are we the right people to do it? Daniel and Cristi have both been interested in, and studied on- and offline communities for 15 years. Both our Ph.d. theses concern these issues, but we haven!t taken an interest in this specific angle before. Cristi has practical experiences of open source software, accounts of which where also published. Daniel has given a Ph.d. course on virtual communities as well as cultures of programming/hacker culture at KTH.

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Mobile application design & development

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Two students of mine recently presented their respective masters' theses. They had worked together & in parallel and their theses complement each other neatly.

Both theses were excellent, but as the topics are slightly peripheral compared to my main research interests (nowadays), they will not be listed under the "finished-theses" tab in my companion blog (a blog with suggestions for thesis topics). I instead post this text as well as links to the theses themselves (pdf documents). Do note that these theses are both written in Swedish.

Johan Alexandersson's thesis is called "Mobilapplikationsutveckling till smartphones - hur utvecklingsprocessen kan förbättras" ["Mobile application development for smartphones - how the development process can be improved"]

Andreas Blackne's thesis is called "Mobilapplikationsdesign: En utvärdering av designprocessen för mobilapplikationer till smartphones" ["Mobile application design: An evaluation of the mobile application design process for smartphones"].

As master's theses go, I think both of these are impeccably done. It was a pleasure to be their advisor and the process went like a breeze. Most readers might want to stop reading here, but I anyway append their abstracts below in the case someone has a special interest in this area.

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Abstract to "Mobile application development for smartphones - how the development process can be improved":

The development of mobile applications for the new generation of mobile phones, also known as smartphones, has become a worldwide phenomenon, not least in Sweden. Many companies have realized that this market is growing for each day and has therefore chosen to broaden their activities in this area. There are also many companies whose sole activity is to develop mobile applications. The problem is that this still is an unexplored area for many companies. For this reason, they still haven't formed any well-functioning work processes to use during the development. Instead, they use complex processes that, in fact, are suitable for development of software. The difference between traditional software development and mobile application development is that the mobile application development projects are completed in a shorter amount of time, and that there are a fewer amount of people involved. This is something that the companies have forgotten to take into account when they designed their own development processes. The goal of this study has therefore been to develop a new approach that is better suited for this type of projects. The new approach will also describe which steps that should be included in a mobile application development process, and the order in which steps should be performed to achieve the best results. This study is based upon interviews with people from ten Swedish companies. All the interviewees have different responsibilities, but are in one way or another involved in the development of mobile applications in their company. All the companies have basically told the same thing, both regarding their current situation, and how they would like their future situation to look like. For this reason, it has been easy to determine which parts of the development processes that can be developed and improved. It has also been easy to determine which parts of the process that is directly unnecessary for mobile application projects. The mobile platforms covered in this work are, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone 7.

Abstract to "Mobile application design: An evaluation of the mobile application design process for smartphones":

New ways of interaction produce unprecedented problems in use. Therefore, especially for ground-breaking technologies such as the smartphone, it is important to design usable user interfaces allowing users to interact with the device in an easy, efficient and satisfying fashion. Additionally, the production of mobile applications is still a fairly undeveloped field, leaving great room for improvement in order to produce better designed mobile applications. The aim of this study is to, through conducting qualitative interviews with people operative within mobile application production, evaluate how the design process for mobile applications can be improved and/or made more efficient. The results of this study show that the design process is—amongst other things—determined by the nature of the company and how design centered they are. Moreover, the results show that there, for most companies, exists a lack of thinking in terms of design, resulting in shorter design processes, which, according to the study, primarily stems from limitations in time, money and knowledge. The conclusions of this study demonstrate that the design should be performed by people with adequate skills in interaction design to ensure a high level of usability and a good user experience. The design process should also be given enough space in the agile methodologies characterizing modern software development..

Astroturf robot wars

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This week I specified and published a thesis topic concerning "Astroturf robot wars" together with a colleague of mine (Hannes). Astroturf in this context refers to "fake grassroots movements" that are paid for by someone with an interest in affecting or controlling the public discussion. The background to my interest in the area is:

1) my own experiences of hanging out on forums that are invaded, infested and overrun by vocal pro-fossil fuel anti-global-warming denialists (etc.) who seemingly show up the very second someone has posted something, and who never give up. I have several times tried to understand who these people are and how come they stay around and continue to post messages no matter how unwelcome they are and no matter how many times their arguments are refuted. Don't these useful idiots have other things to do rather than to post the same things for the XXth time? Are they in fact paid by someone to wreak havoc on the forums?

2) I think the latter view might not be that unfeasible after having read a number of texts on that topic by British journalist and author George Monbiot:

--- On astroturf robot wars and software for impersonating an army of "ordinary citizens" on the web (Feb 2011).

--- On astroturf campaigns trying to control who and what is being heard in the cyber-commons (Dec 2010).

----How the tea party movement was jump-started by fossil fuel lobbying seed money (Oct 2010).

--- On systematic disinformation that is spread by corporations with political agendas and money to spare - but hiding behind innocent-sounding organizations that do their dirty work (Dec 2009).

From reading these and other texts, I now realize that it might be the case that these persons are not private citizens at all, but rather paid-off employees working for (for example) a PR or computer security firm. Since it would be too expensive to pay a highly educated (but amoral) person for posting a handful of blog comments every day, they need better tools and these have now turned up in the form of for example "persona management software".

It is on the basis of these developments that I and Hannes specified the "Astroturf robot wars" thesis topic which can be found here. That text contains a better introduction to the topic at hand as well as actual suggestions for what could be done by a student and references to materials to read up on.

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Can a student fail at a Swedish university?

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This text veers away from my ordinary texts that are usually based on personal experiences of something that happened during the past week. This text instead goes into the territory of educational politics of the Swedish university system. It was triggered by a conversation with our dinner guests yesterday (high school teacher Anna and Ph.D. Mårten).

I have, as a university teacher, met some students who are clearly out of their league at a university. I basically think everyone should have the chance to try to be a student, but some (for example people who don't like to read books) are not up to the task unless we drastically lower the bar.

Let's say I meet a third-year student who is in the process of writing his bachelor's thesis (I would meet him in the role of being his advisor) or who has almost finished his thesis (I would meet him in the role of examiner of the finished thesis). When I am examining someone's work, a student who produces a crappy thesis will hear about it from me. Although it is the student has to bear the full brunt of the crappiness of his thesis, sometimes I really feel sorry for him as I think that some of the critique should have been given by the thesis advisor at an earlier point in time, or better yet, the advisor should have given advice so that the situation (almost-finished but crappy thesis) could have been avoided in the first place.

The student in question most often fully understands the critique and furthermore realizes the extent and the scope of the mistakes he has made. He might understands much about what went wrong during his thesis work and what he should have done (earlier) in order to avoid it. At this late point in time, there is unfortunately not much to do about it but to bite the bullet and accept that the thesis will get a relatively low grade.

At other times however, the student might not accept the critique, or does not even understand it, and the problems with his thesis might be of a magnitude and a kind that any advisor would be hard pressed to "fix" no matter how much time she would have spent advising that student (barring writing the whole thesis herself). The thesis might at times represent nothing but a long line of bad judgement calls on behalf of the student. Furthermore, sometimes students have such a bad command of language that it is difficult to understand the text, and even more difficult to judge the quality of the thoughts that are in the text - somewhere. A number of questions then present themselves of which the premier one is: how can this student have made it this far in the higher education system? The next question is: what do I do now?

The question of what to do is difficult and politically sensitive, but I for sure know what I myself would have wanted to do at a number of occasions - and that is to fail the student. Do note that I didn't write that I would fail the thesis, but rather the student. Some students just don't have what it takes to be at a university and they really shouldn't. Not that they necessarily never will be able to get a university degree, but right here and right now their presence at the university is a drain on scarce resources, and no-one is happier for it except maybe (but not necessarily) the student himself.

When I reflect upon this issue, I have myself been the advisor of at least three or four such students. I a better-functioning world, someone would at some point - before they reached the third year of their studies - have told them that perhaps this whole thing (higher education) is not for them. But to say such a thing even - or especially - if formulated as "friendly advice" requires an authority figure (a teacher or so) who actually wields his authority. It furthermore requires a structure (rules, colleagues, bosses, sympathetic administrators) that fully backs that teacher up.

The alternative is an impersonal system where no one person has to take it upon himself to personally deliver the bad news, i.e. a system where a student at some point actually runs out of chances. At a Swedish university, it doesn't really matter how slow or unsuited a student is, because he will never be kicked out, and he will always receive yet one more chance (for example to write an exam). The student in question might quite quickly run into financial trouble (as you actually have to perform to be able to get new student loans), but a frugal or financially independent student can remain a student forever without actually accomplishing anything in particular. He might even wear his "opposition" down and "fix" one course after another by sheer force of will and determination and by expending enough time and energy - even if he has no talent and little knowledge of the subject at hand.

Here I'd like to invoke Neil Postman who writes that every new technology has winners and losers, and that every new technology brings pros and cons. Hopefully there are more winners than losers, and hopefully there are more pros than cons. The point here is that always giving every student one more chance, and never being able to fail a student might brings a warm, fuzzy feeling to many, but although less apparent, there are also substantial cons (disadvantages, costs) to such a practice.

Some of those costs are born by the university in terms of time and decreased job satisfaction on behalf of teachers and administrator. How much time should you spend writing an answer to the 76th e-mail from the same student and concerning the same issue? Other costs are born by fellow students as the quality of their education and the value of their degree decreases when "anyone" can get it. Some costs are born by companies who are suckered by the fine diploma and hires an ignoramus. Which again bring costs the university in terms of decreased public support and decreased confidence in the actual value of a degree ("what are spending our money on?"). Some costs are born by society in the form of more numerous, but less qualified engineers, teachers, economists (etc.) doing a shoddy job instead of fewer doing a better job.

The problem is difficult to solve and an analysis of underlying reasons is sensitive (spinelessness, conflict-avoidance? misjudged "care" for students' tender egos? ideological blindfolds? lack of (perceived) legitimate authority?). I think it is quite clear though that there are no incentives whatsoever today for any one person to make and to stand by these difficult decisions. Furthermore, it might be the case that (especially young) people in our society are not used to setbacks of any kind and would feel offended and wronged by someone pointing out (however gently and however much it was justified) that "they might just want to think it over and ask themselves if they are spending their time and efforts in the best possible way - taking into account that they have failed so miserably during (let's say) their first year at the university".

How big is the chance that we will talk about and solve this problem? How big is the chance that we will try to solve or just ameliorate them? Not very big, I would say. So in the meantime I will personally have to struggle with those (fortunately) few students who are failing and flailing and who lack the insight to realize that they are out of their league.

According to the 80-20 rule, 80% of my time as an advisor can be spent taking care of business originating from 20% of the students. It's really not that bad, but it is clear that the weakest 20% of the students will always need extra time and support - no matter how much they are already receiving. The problem is that the least able students "steal" time from the more able students who will always excel no matter how little attention or time they get from their teachers. As a teacher I would personally want to spend less time with less able students and more time with the sharpest and most ambitious students - helping them reach even higher. Less able students represent a drain on my time, on my energy and on my enthusiasm, and they will always need more support in order to make it through the educational system.

PS (March 2014). We are very polite nowadays. It's of course unacceptable to tell someone he/she is "stupid". It is also not considered acceptable to tell someone that an opinon of his/hers is "stupid". History professor Dick Harrison writes about students feeling aggrieved by facts they don't like when he teaches (the article is written in Swedish).

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