The paradox of planning

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How much time should be spent planning an event in relation to the time spent actually doing it? How much time should be spent planning a study or a software project in relation to the time spend actually doing that study or project? How much time should be spent evaluating a course in relation to the time spent actually teaching it?

When it comes to doing studies, most "junior researchers" (university students writing their theses) often spend way too little time planning something before they jump in both feet first. That is a pity, because by beforehand thinking over all the steps of a study and the process of performing one, you can "debug", find and solve problems before you even start - rather than halfway in. The same goes for writing a large, complex computer program - time spent planning is undervalued, and especially so by junior programmers.

But after you have written that computer program, how much time should be spent documenting it? A traditional problem in software engineering is that very little time is spent on documentation and the short answer would thus be "more". At the same time, there is a law of diminishing returns at play both in the case of documenting computer code or planning a study. Spending twice as much time does not necessarily lead to twice as good results, and spending ten or a hundred times as much definitely won't. At some point, it's time to say "enough".

Moving to the university setting, how much time should be spent planning and giving a course, and how much time should be spent administering and documenting that very same course? At some point, any endeavor will face a diminishing marginal utility of pouring more resources into it. My previous blog post concerned the diminishing marginal utility of trying to control and improve the quality of higher education by top-down approaches (such as through performing "Education Assessment Exercises"). If I give a course this year and I will give the same course next year, how much need is there really to document the course in excruciating detail? I can understand the need to do so if I were to hand of the course to someone else, but if I don't plan to do so, is it not enough that I do the work of thinking through the course, rather than writing lots of stuff up just for the sake of it?

My point is that those times that I have written up a course evaluation, nothing has come from it. Sure, someone may have spent a few minutes looking at it, but that is of no special use for me. So why should I be forced to write things up just for the sake of it?

On the other hand, I would be passionately willing to discuss the course in question with someone who has a sympathetic ear and who might offer suggestions for improvements, but this service has never been offered to me because someone else's time is a cost, but my time is free (in the eyes of my superiors). This is another example of a top-down approach (of ordering me to provide information that no-one ever reads, or at least never acts upon) and a bottom-up approach (of supporting me as a teacher with those things I perceive as problems in my day-to-day activities). It also unveils power relationships between me as a lowly and exchangeable provider of educational services, a cog in the machinery in an industrial model of education - and those who run the organization or the whole system of higher education in Sweden. In this model, students are the raw materials and teachers stand at a conveyor belt "treating" them in different ways until we in the end turn out "quality-assured" cookie-cutter engineers.

We never have enough money to provide hands-on support for teachers to help improve their courses, but we always have money to make sure that someone writes an email to remind me to fill out the course evaluation document and to perform an EAE assessment. Who reads the course evaluation document? How will the EAE assessment be used? Who knows? I for sure don't know! How come? Who knows?

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Program integrating course

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We have this course in our program where all students (250+) meet once every quarter of the year in order to reflect upon and discuss the courses of the previous period. It is for the most part a really good course, but it runs over three years and managing the administrative backend of the course is indeed a hairy affair. Unfortunately it is my task to it as I have been responsible for the course this year.

I can be very details-oriented, so I manage, but it is quite boring and it takes a lot of time. To track down the students who did not perform and to force them to an extra task (which some of them object to) is not the most fun of things to do either. Sometimes I have to invoke detective skills to try to make sense of things that happened half a year ago or more. But someone has to do it.

I've now spent several days just summing up the results of four seminars during the past academic year, with hundreds of students, divided into 36 groups, led by 9 teachers, all of whom report to me. The quality of the documentation I get from the teachers vary and so errors do creep in and I then have to juggle students that are upset or angry. Sometimes the anger is justified (errors to happen) but oftentimes it is not.

Fortunately I'm (almost) finished now. Phew!

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Top-down vs. bottom-up

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Over the weekend, I've thought a little bit more about exactly why the exercise I wrote about in the previous blog post (Education Assessment Exercise) matters to me. It is obviously not the two hours I spent (wasted?) on the exercise itself that matters, but rather something else that bothers me. What?

I believe it really is the folly of someone, somewhere thinking such an exercise will magically (?) improve the state of our education that bothers me. I might live under the misconception that there is goodwill involved and that this exercise is an honest (but misguided) attempt to improve what we do. A more devious alternative interpretation is that it is all about power and control, and that quality of has little to do with it. Still, I will here operate under the first assumption and spell out why I think it is misguided.

I'd like to draw a parallel to the gentlemant-"scientist" who, at the height of the British empire, sits in his comfortable leather chair somewhere in the greatest city of them all, London, and reads accounts from all around the world (i.e. the British empire) about "savages" and their affairs. Based on these reports - themselves of varying quality - he performs some magic sleight of hand. Through an act of armchair science (i.e. not getting his hand dirty by working with actual empirical material, but rather using others' interpretations of others' interpretations as his "research material" to be analyzed) he puts it all together into one grand unified theory about cultures and races. He "reasonably" draws the conclusion that savages at best can be compared to children and that "we" (white British imperialists) obviously are doing them all a great favor by ruling their countries and "taking care" of them. Later and based on his "unified theory of savagery and governance", the Empire finds support for a variety of policies that one hundred years later look, well, "strange".

Such one-size-fits-all theories take little care about unique idiosyncrasies of specific cultures and geographies into account and suffer from a whole lot of other intractable problems too. The lack of high-quality information, and the folly of drawing sweeping conclusions without any (own) first-hand observations has since been heavily discredited in scientific contexts. Scientist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov does a great job of portraying such dismal scientific processes on a grand scale in the aging, dying galactic empire in his Foundation trilogy. In an old, tired empire stretching over innumerable worlds, it is considered crude to collect actual empirical material, and refined to add yet another layer to what there already is. Armchair science in a culture no longer interested in the present or the future is in fact a defining characteristic of this vast empire in decline.

I find that the some of the same mechanisms of trying to understand and rule at a distance ("top-down") are at play in a large bureaucratic organization such as KTH. I would suggest that one example of this "syndrome" is that there is vast overconfidence in the possibility of improving the content and the quality of whole university programs and individual courses through top-down measures, and a corresponding lack of confidence in the alternative; in the possibility of reaching for the same kinds of improvements through bottom-up measures.

To raise quality through bottom-up measures necessitates a high degree of trust in the faculty and in the teachers who are the nuts and bolts of the teaching effort. I would go as far as to say that there is little such trust in place today. I also freely admit that such trust can obviously sometimes be misplaced. However, if there is a perceived need to (in infinite detail) (attempt to) control every teacher and every course through copious and detailed instructions regarding this-and-that, this all really just signals that the average teacher is not to be trusted by the very organization she works for. But seriously, what can realistically be done at all if a university does not trust its core personnel - the people who actually teach?

It should be obvious that the most important task of all other personnel at a university should be to support those who actually teach; those who meet students in classroom situations and who try to impart some knowledge and at times hopefully even some wisdom. To me - an small cog in the machinery - it oftentimes feels like it's the other way around - other groups of employees (administrators, bosses) make demands on my and other teachers' time not the least because (from their point of view) our time is always free of charge. If I on the other hand would like to make demands on some other people's time within this organization (where have all the secretaries gone nowadays?), the gut reaction is instead to deem it expensive and therefore unrealistic.

I personally think that one of the best and least expensive ways to improve individual courses (and consequently whole educational programs) would be to set up high standards and requirements as well as high-quality support for the individual teacher. I most often feel that neither is in place, and I would personally not appreciate high demands without also having a high degree of support (as in "every man for himself", or "sink or swim"). As a university teacher, I am of course free to develop and improve my courses as much as I would like to - or not. There is unfortunately little official support for, and few consequences of not doing so.

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The folly of our Education Assessment Exercises (EAE)

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I took part in an Education Assessment Exercise (EAE) a week ago. I can't say that it was "traumatic" or anything like that, but it did point out several things I find strange (e.g. stupid) about the individually easy, but in total overbearing administrative duties of a university teacher.

The EAE exercise itself took less than two hours - no big deal - but it still felt like a relatively futile attempt to "capture" important things about the courses I and other teachers teach at our program. I had a large sheet (A3-sized) with 11 high-level goals for our education. These goals were an amalgam of a variety of different (worthy) goals, but the results were cumbersome to say the least. Here are three examples of these 11 goals. Our students should:

- "demonstrate broad knowledge and understanding in scientifically based proven experience in the chosen area of technology (the main area), including expertise in math and science, significantly advanced knowledge in some parts of the area, and deepened insights into current research and development. Students should also demonstrate deepened methodological knowledge in their chosen technical area."

- "demonstrate an ability to holistically, critically, independently and creatively identify, formulate and manage complex problems and demonstrate the skills required to participate in research and development, or to perform independent work in other advanced contexts and thus contribute to the development of new knowledge."

- "demonstrate an understanding of capabilities and limitations in science and technology, its role in society and our responsibility concerning their use, including social and economic aspects as well as environmental and work safety aspects."

Do you get it? These goals are very "fluffy" and imprecise, or alternatively all-encompassing. Furthermore they overlap (to figure out how much they overlap is in itself an advanced task). A third of the text/terms were marked in bold, signifying that they were extra important and there were a lot of "extra important" terms in these texts... There were a not insignificant amount of spelling errors in these texts - implying that they had not been prepared with a lot of care (much like this text, with the difference being that I don't force my colleagues to read it :-).
For each of the courses that I teach, I then had to specify if any of these goals were covered by 1) the (stated) goals for the course in question, and if so 2) what "learning activities" they corresponded to in the course, and if so 3) how these goals and activities played a part in the examination (and grading) of that course. Phew!

To fill out this form to me felt like a cross between a jig-saw puzzle and a big waste of time. My tiny act of rebellion was to ask/comment out loud that it didn't feel like this exercise and the relatively carefully crafted snippets of text that I produced really captured what was important about the courses in question. The answer I got was not very enlightening and had something to do with the fact that "we all had to do it anyway".

Now, I can understand that the one person who is responsible for our education in Media Technology (Björn) might have some use of these artifacts (the filled-in sheets), but I'm sure he could have gained much better information by performing short "interviews" me and other teachers. I'm also very not convinced that the effort or performing this exercise (including Björn's effort to try to interpret and act on the information that teachers provide) will stands in parity with the potentially positive results of the exercise.

My constructive suggestion would have been for Björn to himself have done the intellectually taxing/deadening work of trying to make sense out of these wonderfully-sounding but overlapping, slightly overbearing and potentially vacuous goals, and then used his interpretation as a starting point for conversations with the teachers. Instead, all teachers individually and redundantly had to do the work of trying to understand what all these (fluffy, overlapping) goals meant (and implied), what was wanted of us by this exercise (and by the person(s) who will interpret our scribblings), and then do our best of fudging up answers that sounded maximally impressive and convincing. If different teachers interpret the goals in different ways, we will provide information and answers that in subtle ways will answer not the same, but different questions. The impression I wanted to convey when I filled out the EAE sheets was that my courses turn every student into a Leonardo da Vinci (or at least tries to...).

I want to make clear that I have only the highest of respect for Björn and what he does. Perhaps he would say that he doesn't have the time to perform individual interviews with teachers about their courses. His answer is valid, but implies that this task might then not be so important after all. That's fine, but if it's not worth doing well, then it might not be worth doing it at all. Also, although Björn is the person who is best suited for this task, it does not necessarily have to be him personally who does it. The task could be outsourced to someone else (although I would personally decline).

This exercise was as much a test of my personal ability to interpret and act on complex texts and to make (a perhaps sometimes rather bleak) reality sound like heaven on earth, as it was to convey some sort of "objective" or useful information to someone higher up in the chain of command. I do agree that this exercise can emphasize that the goals of a course are not (any longer) in line with the activities in the course, but finding this out could be done in many other ways of which basically all are much simpler and easier than performing this exercise...

What I especially object to in this case is the fact that the quality of the information I provide is so low that I have little confidence that it is of use to anyone who will look at it, and that the results of any actions or recommendations that comes out of this exercise will be so out of touch of the realities of teaching that they might hinder as much as they might help. It is basically a lottery. One unfortunate possible outcome could be that teachers will be ordered to provide more informations about the courses they give in order to... well, something. For example to keep other people (newly hired exclusively for this purpose?) somewhere in the organization "in the loop"? Would this help to improve the quality of the education? Of course not.

This blog post just scratches on the surface of uncovering the errors in thinking that this exercise is just a symptom of. I hope to write a follow-up post about the folly of using precious resources (including my time) to try to improve education in this "top-down" manner.
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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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