Jacob Christensen

Now Euro-fever has hit The Times of London. I’ve prepared a thing about this but I’m working on an article about Danish political history which has to be ready next Thursday

… must not procrastinate … must not procrastinate … must not procrastinate …

Via Efficient Academic two articles in The Scientist about the issue of scientific work and language. Quotes for the lazy:

E. James Lieberman: English-Only Science in a Multilingual World: Costs, Benefits, and Options.

Besides translating texts, [scientists] must learn enough English to understand and deliver oral presentations, and to converse with colleagues of diverse backgrounds and accents. The time and effort detracts substantially from scientific work. Presenters feel humiliated by language mistakes, and struggle to understand what they hear and read in English. Ulrich Ammon points out that the work of those less fluent is more likely to be ignored, hence colleagues and employers value scientists who are fluent in English. Some Finns worry that their own language may fail to develop new scientific words and concepts, thus barring lay people from science discourse and causing social inequality based on English proficiency.

and

Richard Gallagher: Speaking Your Mind.

Is monolingualism also having an impact on efficiency? Most certainly — consider public understanding of science. Journalists in non-English-speaking countries have the formidable twin barriers of language and complexity of the science to overcome in order to present the latest concepts to their audience, and inevitably, mistakes are made. Non-Anglophone scientists have a more difficult time assessing research, and therefore advising policy makers, who themselves are handicapped in accessing the literature. Teaching, even at the most basic school level, is complicated by the use of English terms in place of the native language. With scientific issues playing an increasingly central role in social discourse, the dominance of English is holding back the free exchange of ideas across most of the world, which may have consequences for all of us. Moreover, the Anglophone world has obvious economic benefits, although these remain to be quantified.

I am of cause aware of the irony that this blog is written in English (which in all likelihood gives it a smaller audience than if it had been written in Danish), but it is worth noting that politicians and university managers in Scandinavia generally pay no attention to the costs of and issues raised by the new monolingualism. Writing and teaching in Inglisj makes you international. As an out-and-out cynic, I have little hope for the recommendations of the Danish Sprogudvalget to make an impact on research and higher education.

Oops: Forgot the link to Efficient Academic. Hereby entered.

Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, New Zealand was the talk of the town as the Labour (!) government introduced a number of de-regulations, privatisations and other types of what are known as “new public management” reforms to those in the trade. And so just about everybody who was somebody in politics visited the place to marvel at the wonders.

That economic reforms were overdue in a country which very much had adapted its farm and industry production to the increasingly irrelevant UK market was and is obvious. That the New Zealanders might have gone – if not too far, then too fast can also be argued.

The 1998 and 2006 black-outs suggested that just privatising public utilities was not a magic wand that in one stroke would solve problems with under-investment, even though privatisation wasn’t the cause of the black-outs. De-regulating electricity markets have proven to cause headaches in other countries as the promised gains haven’t shown up in consumer bills.

Via Tagesscchau, we now learn that the New Zealand government will re-nationalise the railways. The NZ press release is here. Some quotes:

“The selling off our public rail system in the early 1990s and the running down of the asset afterward has been a painful lesson for New Zealand,” Dr Cullen said.

“During the negotiations with Toll it transpired that buying the rail operating business including the ferries was the best way to increase investment in the industry and enable it to be more responsive to the needs of New Zealand customers.

“Running a commercially viable business that was able to contribute to the economic and environmental development of New Zealand was proving extremely difficult without government support.

“The government will now avoid paying subsidies to third parties and we also avoid the on-going disputes over the implementation of the National Rail Access Agreement that had the potential to destroy value in the business and erode the morale of the people who work in it.

There are reasons why NZ lessons can’t be transferred directly to Europe – whose state-run railways do not add up to a credible competitor to transnational road transport of goods – but as the fiascos of the UK rail privatisation from the mid-1990s onward are making themselves noted, I think we see the same pattern: Just privatising will not attract investments.

I suspect some spammer criminal has stolen my work e-mail-address. I checked my webmail an hour ago and had received 360 error and spam messages within 12 hours – the really bad thing about Umeå University’s webmail is that you have to weed out the spam manually.

These days, I receive something like 100 spam messages on my .umu.se-address per day. I’ll be glad to see that one go.