• Academic freedom is in crisis ; free speech is not

    In August 2020, the UK think tank The Policy Exchange produced a report on Academic Freedom in the UK (https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk-2), alleging a chilling effect for staff and students expressing conservative opinions, particularly pro-Brexit or ‘gender critical’ ideas. This is an issue that was examined by a 2018 parliamentary committee on Human Rights which found a lack of evidence for serious infringements of free speech (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201719/jtselect/jtrights/1279/127904.htm). In a university context, freedom of speech is protected under the Human Rights Act 1998 as long as the speech is lawful and does not contravene other university regulations on issues like harassment, bullying or inclusion. Some of these controversies have been firmly rebutted by Chris Parr (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/free-speech-crisis-uk-universities-chris-parr) and others who describe how the incidents have been over-hyped.

    Despite this, the government seems keen to appoint a free speech champion for universities (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/tories-war-on-the-woke-ministers-statues-protests) which continues a campaign started by #Sam_Gyimah (https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/sams-on-campus-but-is-the-campus-onto-sam) when he was minister for universities in 2018, and has been interpreted by some commentators as a ‘war on woke’. In the current climate of threats to university autonomy, many vice chancellors wonder whether this might be followed by heavy fines or reduced funding for those institutions deemed to fall on the wrong side of the culture wars.

    While public concern has been directed to an imagined crisis of free speech, there are more significant questions to answer on the separate but related issue of academic freedom. Most university statutes echo legislation and guarantee academics ‘freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial and unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.’ [Section 202 of the Education Reform Act 1988]. In reality, these freedoms are surrendered to the greater claims of academic capitalism, government policy, legislation, managers’ responses to the pandemic and more dirigiste approaches to academics’ work.

    Nevertheless, this government is ploughing ahead with policies designed to protect the freedom of speech that is already protected, while doing little to hold university managers to account for their very demonstrable violations of academic freedom. The government is suspicious of courses which declare a sympathy with social justice or which manifest a ‘progressive’ approach. This hostility also extends to critical race theory and black studies. Indeed, the New York Times has identified a right wing ‘Campaign to Cancel Wokeness’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html) on both sides of the Atlantic, citing a speech by the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, in which she said, “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt…Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

    This has now set a tone for ideological oversight which some university leaders seem keen to embrace. Universities will always wish to review their offerings to ensure they reflect academic currency and student choice. However, operating under the cover of emergency pandemic planning, some are now seeking to dismantle what they see as politically troublesome subject areas.

    Let’s start with the most egregious and transparent attack on academic freedom. The University of Leicester Business School, known primarily for its disdain of management orthodoxy, has announced it will no longer support research in critical management studies (https://www.uculeicester.org.uk/redundancy-briefing) and political economy, and the university has put all researchers who identify with this field, or who at some time might have published in CMS, at risk of redundancy. Among the numerous responses circulating on Twitter, nearly all point to the fact that the critical orientation made Leicester Business School distinctive and attractive to scholars wishing to study and teach there. Among those threatened with redundancy is the distinguished former dean, Professor Gibson Burrell. The sheer volume of protest at this anomaly must be an embarrassment to Leicester management. We should remember that academic freedom means that, as a scholar of proven expertise, you have the freedom to teach and research according to your own judgement. When those in a field critical of structures of power have their academic freedom removed, this is, unarguably, a breach of that expectation. Such a violation should be of concern to the new freedom of speech champion and to the regulator, the Office for Students.

    If the devastation in the School of Business were not enough humiliation for Leicester, in the department of English, there are plans to cancel scholarship and teaching in Medieval and Early Modern literature. The thoughtless stripping out of key areas that give context and coherence within a subject is not unique to Leicester – similar moves have taken place in English at University of Portsmouth. At Leicester, management have offered the justification that this realignment will allow them to put resources towards the study of gender and sexuality. After all, the Vice Chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah, offered the keynote speech at the Advance HE conference in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion on 19th March (https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/programmes-events/conferences/EDIConf20#Keynotes) and has signalled that he supports decolonising the curriculum. This might have had more credibility if he was not equally committed to extinguishing critical scholarship in the Business School. The two positions are incompatible and reveal an opportunistic attempt to reduce costs and remove signs of critical scholarship which might attract government disapproval.

    At the University of Birmingham, the response to the difficulties of maintaining teaching during the pandemic has been to issue a ruling that three academic staff must be able to teach each module. The explanation for this apparent reversal of the ‘lean’ principle of staffing efficiency, is to make modules more resilient in the face of challenges like the pandemic – or perhaps strike action. There is a consequence for academic freedom though – only the most familiar, established courses can be taught. Courses that might have been offered, which arise from the current research of the academic staff, will have to be cancelled if the material is not already familiar to other colleagues in the department. It is a way of designing innovation and advancement out of courses at the University of Birmingham.

    Still at Birmingham, UCU is contesting a proposal for a new ‘career framework’ (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/strike-warning-over-birminghams-or-out-probation-plan) by management characterised as ‘up or out’. It will require newly appointed lecturers to achieve promotion to senior lecturer within five years or face the sort of performance management procedures that could lead to termination of their appointment. The junior academics who enter on these conditions are unlikely to gamble their careers on academic risk-taking or pursue a challenge to an established paradigm. We can only speculate how this apprenticeship in organisational obedience might restrain the pursuit of discovery, let alone achieve the management’s stated aim to “develop and maintain an academic culture of intellectual stimulation and high achievement”.

    Meanwhile at the University of Liverpool, Vice Chancellor Janet Beer is attempting to apply research metrics and measures of research income over a five-year period to select academics for redundancy in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Staff have been threatened with sacking and replacement by those felt to hold more promise. It will be an unwise scholar who chooses a niche field of research which will not elicit prime citations. Astoundingly, university mangers claim that their criteria are not in breach of their status as a signatory to the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2021/03/08/project-shape-update). That is correct insofar as selection for redundancy by grant income is clearly such dishonorable practice as to have been placed beyond contemplation by the international board of DORA.

    It seems we are reaching a pivotal moment for academic freedom for higher education systems across the world. In #Arkansas and some other states in the #USA, there are efforts to prohibit the teaching of social justice (https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public).

    In #France, the education minister has blamed American critical race theory (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/france-about-become-less-free/617195) for undermining France’s self-professed race-blindness and for causing the rise of “islamo-gauchisme”, a term which has been cynically deployed to blunt any critique of structural racism.

    In Greece, universities are now bound by law to ensure policing and surveillance of university campuses (https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/section-list/1012-exiting-democracy-entering-authoritarianism) by ‘squads for the protection of universities’ in order to suppress dissent with the Orwellian announcement that the creation of these squads and the extensive surveillance of public Universities are “a means of closing the door to violence and opening the way to freedom” and an assertion that “it is not the police who enter universities, but democracy”.

    Conclusion

    It occurs to me that those public figures who feel deprived of a platform to express controversial views may well be outnumbered by the scholars whose universities allow their work to be suppressed by targeted intellectual purges, academic totalitarianism and metric surveillance. It is telling that assaults on academic freedom in the UK have not attracted comment or action from the organisations which might be well placed to defend this defining and essential principle of universities. I hereby call on Universities UK, the Office for Students and the freedom of speech champion to insist on an independent audit of academic freedom and autonomy for each higher education institution.

    We now know where intervention into the rights of academics to teach and research autonomously may lead. We also know that many of the candidates targeted for redundancy are UCU trade union officials; this has happened at University of East London and the University of Hull. Make no mistake, this is a PATCO moment (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-000-striking-air-traffic-controllers-aug-5-1981-241252) for higher education in the UK as management teams try to break union support and solidarity in order to exact greater control in the future.

    Universities are the canary down the mine in an era of right-wing authoritarianism. We must ensure that they can maintain their unique responsibility to protect against the rise of populism and the dismantling of democracy. We must be assertive in protecting the rights of academics whose lawful and reasoned opinions are increasingly subject to some very sinister threats. Academic freedom needs to be fought for, just like the right to protest and the right to roam. That leaves a heavy responsibility for academics if the abolition of autonomy and academic freedom is not to be complete.

    http://cdbu.org.uk/academic-freedom-is-in-crisis-free-speech-is-not
    #liberté_académique #liberté_d'expression #UK #Angleterre #université #facs #justice_sociale #black_studies #races #race #approches_critiques #études_critiques #privilège_blanc #économie_politique #Leicester_Business_School #pandémie #crise_sanitaire #Birmingham #Liverpool #Janet_Beer #concurrence #Grèce #Etats-Unis #métrique #attaques #éducation_supérieure #populisme #démocratie #autonomie #canari_dans_la_mine

    ping @isskein @cede

    • The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness. How the right is trying to censor critical race theory.

      It’s something of a truism, particularly on the right, that conservatives have claimed the mantle of free speech from an intolerant left that is afraid to engage with uncomfortable ideas. Every embarrassing example of woke overreach — each ill-considered school board decision or high-profile campus meltdown — fuels this perception.

      Yet when it comes to outright government censorship, it is the right that’s on the offense. Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege and microaggressions, is often blamed for fomenting what critics call cancel culture. And so, around America and even overseas, people who don’t like cancel culture are on an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory in public forums.

      In September, Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’” which it described as “un-American propaganda.”

      A month later, the conservative government in Britain declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal. “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” said the Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

      Some in France took up the fight as well. “French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society,” Norimitsu Onishi reported in The New York Times. (This is quite a reversal from the days when American conservatives warned darkly about subversive French theory.)

      Once Joe Biden became president, he undid Trump’s critical race theory ban, but lawmakers in several states have proposed their own prohibitions. An Arkansas legislator introduced a pair of bills, one banning the teaching of The Times’s 1619 Project curriculum, and the other nixing classes, events and activities that encourage “division between, resentment of, or social justice for” specific groups of people. “What is not appropriate is being able to theorize, use, specifically, critical race theory,” the bills’ sponsor told The Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

      Republicans in West Virginia and Oklahoma have introduced bills banning schools and, in West Virginia’s case, state contractors from promoting “divisive concepts,” including claims that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.” A New Hampshire Republican also proposed a “divisive concepts” ban, saying in a hearing, “This bill addresses something called critical race theory.”

      Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering legal scholar who teaches at both U.C.L.A. and Columbia, has watched with alarm the attempts to suppress an entire intellectual movement. It was Crenshaw who came up with the name “critical race theory” when organizing a workshop in 1989. (She also coined the term “intersectionality.”) “The commitment to free speech seems to dissipate when the people who are being gagged are folks who are demanding racial justice,” she told me.

      Many of the intellectual currents that would become critical race theory emerged in the 1970s out of disappointment with the incomplete work of the civil rights movement, and cohered among radical law professors in the 1980s.
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      The movement was ahead of its time; one of its central insights, that racism is structural rather than just a matter of interpersonal bigotry, is now conventional wisdom, at least on the left. It had concrete practical applications, leading, for example, to legal arguments that housing laws or employment criteria could be racist in practice even if they weren’t racist in intent.

      Parts of the critical race theory tradition are in tension with liberalism, particularly when it comes to issues like free speech. Richard Delgado, a key figure in the movement, has argued that people should be able to sue those who utter racist slurs. Others have played a large role in crafting campus speech codes.

      There’s plenty here for people committed to broad free speech protections to dispute. I’m persuaded by the essay Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in the 1990s challenging the movement’s stance on the first amendment. “To remove the very formation of our identities from the messy realm of contestation and debate is an elemental, not incidental, truncation of the ideal of public discourse,” he wrote.

      Disagreeing with certain ideas, however, is very different from anathematizing the collective work of a host of paradigm-shifting thinkers. Gates’s article was effective because he took the scholarly work he engaged with seriously. “The critical race theorists must be credited with helping to reinvigorate the debate about freedom of expression; even if not ultimately persuaded to join them, the civil libertarian will be much further along for having listened to their arguments and examples,” he wrote.

      But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory. It wants to eradicate them from public institutions.

      “Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank once known for pushing an updated form of creationism in public schools, wrote in January.

      Rufo’s been leading the conservative charge against critical race theory. Last year, during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, he called on Trump to issue an executive order abolishing “critical race theory trainings from the federal government.” The next day, he told me, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called him and asked for his help putting an order together.

      Last month, Rufo announced a “new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America’s institutions.” A number of House and Senate offices, he told me, are working on their own anti-critical race theory bills, though none are likely to go anywhere as long as Biden is president.

      As Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups, justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

      This inversion, casting anti-racist activists as the real racists, is familiar to Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in critical race theory. “There’s a rhetoric of reaction which seeks to claim that it’s defending these higher values, which, perversely, often are the very values it’s traducing,” he said. “Whether that’s ‘In the name of free speech we’re going to persecute, we’re going to launch investigations into particular forms of speech’ or — and I think this is equally perverse — ‘In the name of fighting racism, we’re going to launch investigations into those scholars who are most serious about studying the complex forms that racism takes.’”

      Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. “You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,” he said.

      This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play.

      When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending “the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.” If it was really about free speech, they should be.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html

      #droite #gauche #censure #cancel_culture #micro-agressions #Trump #Donald_Trump #Kemi_Badenoch #division #critical_race_theory #racisme #sexisme #Kimberlé_Crenshaw #Crenshaw #racisme_structurel #libéralisme #Richard_Delgado #Christopher_Rufo #Ian_Haney_López

    • No ‘Social Justice’ in the Classroom: Statehouses Renew Scrutiny of Speech at Public Colleges

      Blocking professors from teaching social-justice issues. Asking universities how they talk about privilege. Analyzing students’ freedom of expression through regular reports. Meet the new campus-speech issues emerging in Republican-led statehouses across the country, indicating potential new frontiers for politicians to shape campus affairs.

      (paywall)
      https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public

  • Petit crash course sur le #Taylorisme

    Le but même du taylorisme était de remplacer le savoir implicite des ouvriers avec des méthodes de production de masse, développées, planifiées, surveillées et contrôlées par les managers. Le Taylorisme va s’imposer en promouvant l’efficacité par la standardisation et la mesure, d’abord dans l’industrie avant de coloniser avec le siècle, tous les autres secteurs productifs. Le Taylorisme a été développé par les ingénieurs, mais aussi par les comptables. L’expertise nécessitait des méthodes quantitatives. Les décisions basées sur des chiffres étaient vues comme scientifiques, comme objectives et précises. La performance de toute organisation pouvait alors être optimisée en utilisant les mêmes outils et techniques de management. Ceux qui calculaient les coûts et les marges de profits s’alliaient avec ceux qui retiraient l’expérience des travailleurs pour les fondre dans des machines qui décomposaient les tâches pour mieux mesurer chacune et pour les rendre non spécialisée, permettant de remplacer n’importe quel travailleur par un autre. Le calcul s’est immiscé partout. Le biais matérialiste également : il était partout plus facile de mesurer les apports et rendements tangibles que les facteurs humains intangibles – comme la stratégie, la cohésion, la morale…

    trouvé au détour d’un article / revue de livre de l’historien américain Jerry Z #Muller « La tyrannie des #métriques »

    http://www.internetactu.net/2018/09/17/de-la-tyrannie-des-metriques

  • Au-delà du #capitalisme_cognitif : subsomption, imprinting et exploitation de la subjectivité
    http://revueperiode.net/au-dela-du-capitalisme-cognitif-subsomption-imprinting-et-exploitation

    Face à la multiplication des emplois précaires, il est devenu presque banal de diagnostiquer la crise de l’institution salariale et des formes de revendications qui y sont attachées. De même, on a souvent souligné le fait que l’accumulation capitaliste dépendait dorénavant de la mobilisation des capacités à réfléchir, à imaginer et à communiquer qui font le cœur même de la subjectivité. Pourtant, ces deux caractéristiques du capitalisme contemporain sont rarement étudiées dans leur interdépendance. Pour pallier à cette insuffisance, expliquent ici Federico Chicchi, Emanuele Leonardi et Stefano Lucarelli dans un dialogue serré avec le post-opéraïsme, il faut poser à nouveaux frais la question centrale de l’exploitation. S’appuyant à la fois sur l’analyse marxienne de la subsomption du travail au capital et sur (...)

    #Uncategorized #welfare

    • La voilà donc la double injonction de l’impératif catégorique du capitalisme contemporain :
      1) sois ce que tu veux, agit en pleine autonomie, à condition que
      2) la résultante de ton action soit traduisible dans l’axiomatique du capital et dans ses métriques conventionnelles en mutation permanente.

      Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’une inclusion différentielle fondée sur le paradoxe apparent d’un contrôle social qui s’exprime à travers la production de liberté, d’un dispositif de gouvernement qui organise la production sociale en incitant à l’autonomie subjective....

      Nous pourrions en d’autres termes affirmer qu’entre la logique de l’exploitation par subsomption et la logique de l’exploitation impressive, il n’y a pas de frontières, mais tout au plus des littoraux ; les littoraux sont en effet perpétuellement redessinés par le mouvement incessant des vagues : toute métaphore mise à l’écart, part des pratiques sociales et institutionnelles qui s’agitent au sein du capitalisme en fonction des exigences de son axiomatique.

      Il s’agit par là de comprendre la multiplicité des formes sous lesquelles nos vies peuvent être soumises à la valorisation du travail mort, de manière à « retourner le couteau de la lutte des classes dans la plaie de la réalité capitaliste. »

      Pour en finir avec ce capitalisme maudit, la lutte des classes reste t-elle la solution ou s’autodétruira t-il de lui même ?

    • J’ai l’impression que la notion d’imprinting est introduite pour résoudre un faux problème qui découle de deux biais dans l’interprétation du rapport social capitaliste.

      1) l’individualisme méthodologique qui voit dans le rapport salarial, le rapport entre un salarié et son employeur. Or, le rapport salarial dans la subsomption est défini au niveau de la totalité : c’est le rapport entre une masse de travail-marchandise et le capital total. C’est seulement à ce niveau que la catégorie prend sens, notamment lorsque est introduit le passage de la subsomption formelle à la subsomption réelle.

      2) la réduction du rapport salarial à sa dimension juridico-contractuelle « classique », où le rapport de subordination est explicitement mis au centre. Mais vendre sa force de travail-marchandise en échange du moyen indifférencié d’acquérir (la totalité de) sa subsistance sous forme de marchandises aussi, cela ne se limite pas à la forme du contrat salarial « régnante » sous le fordisme. Cette nécessité (se vendre pour acheter sa subsistance) est tout aussi valable pour l’artisan, le créatif précaire, etc.

      Au niveau de la totalité, le moment de crise actuel s’éclaire assez facilement comme produit du mouvement même de la dynamique du rapport social capitaliste (suppression tendancielle de ce qui demeure la base incontournable de la reproduction du capital : le travail). Du coup, l’émergence des subjectivités du capitalisme le plus récent n’est plus un mystère. Encore faut-il ne pas vouloir sauver un pôle (le travail) contre l’autre (le capital)

  • Comment les médias sociaux peuvent-ils être utilisés pour comprendre les événements - Nesta
    http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/121009100944

    Après avoir montré qu’on pouvait utiliser des données en provenance d’événements pour comprendre l’évolution du paysage technologique britannique, le Nesta, l’organisme de promotion de l’innovation britannique, publie une autre étude qui pourrait être son pendant et qui est en tout cas tout aussi intéressante. L’association britannique s’est en effet intéressé à comprendre l’impact des événements sur les #réseaux_sociaux. Les réseaux sociaux permettent en effet de mieux mesurer l’impact des événements : savoir qui ils touchent et qui ils mettent en relation qui ne l’étaient pas avant. Les équipes du Nesta ont utilisé Twitter pour créer un gamme de métriques permettant aux organisateurs d’événements de mieux mesurer leur impact en observant comment les gens entrent en relation sur Twitter via l’événement, en tentant (...)

    #softplace #métrique #évènement

  • Can Chartbeat save journalism by changing the metric? - Columbia Journalism Review, 11/03/2015
    http://www.cjr.org/innovations/tony_haile_chartbeat.php

    In the six years since its creation, #Chartbeat has become the arbiter of audience in the digital age. Roughly 80 percent of the top 100 publishers, as measured by traffic, use Chartbeat to track their online readership—places like Al Jazeera, The New York Times, Forbes, Gawker and Gannett. Yet the company’s mission has expanded exponentially beyond tracking Web traffic. Instead of simply monitoring journalism, Chartbeat wants to save it.

    #data #chiffres #métriques #algorithmie #audience #médias

    • #attention

      Chartbeat have been pushing the media establishment to adopt attention, or the amount of time spent on a landing page, as the universal measurement of Web traffic.

      This switch, Haile believes, will increase the value of the kind of content people are actually reading—the kind of content that has taken a beating in recent years. “We’re in crisis because we chose the wrong metrics,” says Haile. “And that has kind of screwed everything.”

  • An educator challenges the #Gates_Foundation - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/08/an-educator-challenges-the-gates-foundation

    Their approach has been to pursue standardization and the metrics of test scores in order to put market forces in the driver’s seat in education. This has had very bad effects on students, who are not at all standard, and on teachers, as well. I challenge them with the understanding I gained in my 24 years working in Oakland, where I came to understand the sort of collaborative environment we need to foster growth among teachers.

    #éducation (à propos des #métriques qui constituent aussi le critère essentiel de la fondation Gates dans le domaine de la #santé )

  • Paul Farmer · Diary: Ebola
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/paul-farmer/diary

    Anyone whose metrics or proof are judged wanting is likely to receive a cool reception, even though the #Ebola crisis should serve as an object lesson and rebuke to those who tolerate anaemic state funding of, or even cutbacks in, public health and healthcare delivery. Without staff, stuff, space and systems, nothing can be done.

    If such things were thin on the ground in Monrovia and Freetown, they were all but absent in rural regions. (...)

    Ebola is more a symptom of a weak healthcare system than anything else. But until this diagnosis is agreed on, there’s plenty of room for other, more exotic explanations.

    #métriques #ebola #santé

  • A propos des classements de #villes - DeZeen
    http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/97797128996

    Pour le professeur d’architecture de l’université de l’Illinois à Chicago, Sam Jacob, la démultiplication des classements de villes en fonction de paramètres précis joue un rôle très particulier, explique-t-il dans une tribune pour le magazine DeZeen. Ils présentent la ville à travers une lentille comptable, une lentille d’entreprise, pour mesurer sa compatibilité avec le corporatisme mondial. Censés être innocents ou objectifs, ces classements mesurent des attributs censés qualifier de “bonnes” villes, reposant sur la qualité des transports en commun, la connectivité, la présence d’espace verts, d’écoles, la faible pollution, la faible criminalité… Mais toutes les villes peuvent-elles se mesurer sur ces critères ? Quelle vision du monde ces critères impliquent-ils ? Le langage utilisé par ces mesures - (...)

    #citelabo #métriques #dashboard #classement

  • Le Capital naturel, un nouvel eldorado pour le business ?

    Le concept de « capital naturel » a été récemment promu par de nombreuses conférences et publications dans les arènes nationales et internationales. Pour protéger l’environnement ou permettre le maintien d’un business as usual dévastateur ? Retour sur le récent premier Forum Mondial sur le capital naturel organisé à Edimbourg fin novembre 2013.

    http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/maxime-combes/110214/le-capital-naturel-un-nouvel-eldorado-pour-le-business

    #capital_naturel #business #Edimbourg #Ecosse #Rio+20 #services_écosystémiques #compensation #investissement #révolution #Royal_Bank_of_Scotland #Rio_Tinto #Coca_Cola #KPMG #IUCN #scientifique #biodiversité #carbone #zones_humides #mangroves #Havas #Defra #chaines_d'approvisionnement #métrique #entreprises #PUMA #Webcor #TruePrice #internaliser #externalités #communs
    @rezo

  • Le monde désordonné des Big Data -JunkCharts
    http://junkcharts.typepad.com/numbersruleyourworld/2013/10/the-messy-world-of-big-data.html

    Kaiser Fung, l’auteur de « NumberSense », revient sur la difficulté à mesurer l’audience d’un site web... Cette difficulté explique que les grands pourvoyeurs de #métriques donnent des #chiffres différents dans les mesures médias qu’ils proposent par exemple. Car rien n’est plus difficile finalement à mesurer qu’un visiteur unique... Il faut donc comprendre que toute mesure est subjective. Et que l’important est toujours de comprendre comment les choses sont mesurées.

    Les journaux Web sont un monde (...)

    #Bigdata

  • RFC 6534 : Loss Episode Metrics for IPPM

    Le RFC 2680 définissait une #métrique (une grandeur mesurable et spécifiée rigoureusement) pour le taux de pertes de paquets entre deux points du réseau. Mais un certain nombre de logiciels ne sont pas sensibles uniquement à la moyenne du taux de pertes mais aussi à sa répartition. Sur un flot de cent paquets, ce n’est pas la même chose d’en perdre trois, répartis au hasard, et d’en perdre trois de suite, par exemple pour certains protocoles multimédia qui encodent les différences entre paquets. Ce nouveau #RFC définit donc des métriques pour caractériser les épisodes, ces pertes consécutives de paquets.

    http://www.bortzmeyer.org/6534.html

    #métrologie #taux_de_pertes