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The Decalogue of Nick #3: I work in schools IT policy
For Scott Welch.
When I walked away from linguistics, I walked upstairs into department IT support for the Languages Department. It was an underpaid but cosy sinecure, where I got to write papers, work on the side as a research assistant, and practice bad Italian, French, and German on my peers.
That didn’t last, and it couldn’t of course. Just as IT was being centralised into faculty in 2006, and I would have to give up my cosy office, an old friend gave me a call. He was doing a PhD in physics while I was doing mine in linguistics, and we both worked in university tech support.
He had just taken a secondment with a consultancy, that was advising the Australian federal government on interoperability issues in the school sector and the university sector. They had a project going on persistent identifiers, which was kinda philosophical and might be right up my alley. Was I interested?
That started my current career; it’s been ten years now. I’ve been working for national infrastructure projects, of various flavours, in the school sector or the university research sector. I’ve been called a business analyst in all those projects, although that’s a title of convenience more than anything else, because I have done and do lots of different stuff.
- I have done the conventional BA tasks of gathering requirements and writing use cases and communicating between developers and management. I have even drawn the odd flowchart.
- However, I do on occasion cut code where needed, I know what developers get up to, and I can write it up. As a delighted colleague once said to me, when he discovered that I programmed: “Oh! So you’re not an idiot!”
- Staff befuddled at where I fit in the world have come up with Technical Business Analyst.
- A lot of my work has been in standards for data transfer online. That work is a lot of fun: it’s a bit of philosophy, and a bit of engineering, and a lot of ratiocinating. More often than not, in international collaboration.
- Increasingly, I’m moving into policy analysis, and I’m also becoming more aware of systems architectures, and planning strategic choices around them.
- Since 2013, the particular national infrastructure project I’ve been involved in has been the National Schools Interoperability Project, which works on improving access to information for stakeholders in the Australian school education sector (including schools and system vendors, as well as government agencies).
It’s kind of hard to describe what I do, because I do bit of everything. I hop from being a developer to a data analyst to a policy analyst to a business analyst, at a moment’s notice. But I like that.
I don’t post here much about my day job. The approaches we use are hardly unique to Australian education, but I haven’t gotten into the culture of talking about it much.
For a very long time, I didn’t identify myself with my new gig; the circumstances of me having to leave university were somewhat wrenching, I had a lot invested in my academic identity, and the new gig was not something I’ve trained for, or expected to end up in.
It took me some years, really, for me to take pride in what I do in my day job.
The real test of it would be for me to start pontificating about my day job on Quora, the way I do about linguistics—or the way I can, face to face, with Scott Welch, who turns out to be in the same line of work. But the gig is a little more politically sensitive than I’ve been accustomed to; and I haven’t sought out yet the network of people who would be interested (other than Scott).
But I do take pride in it now. It’s a job, true, and like any job it has its downsides. But as its best, I get paid to think. And that is to be cherished—particularly in a small country like Australia, which effectively has no R&D in the private sector. (That’s why you’re going to have to blast me out of government work.)
And the gig is flexible enough to allow me to pursue other things. Perhaps a little too flexible… 🙂
How hard would it be to write more poetry using only Quora questions?
Mergers and edits can, it’s true, impair
the incidental rhymes of Quora questions.
The metre of such verse would brook deflections
as well—though your example doesn’t care.
But I’d dispute the questions need be live.
They can be captured at the time of writing,
and any links can redirect. Inviting
their permanence is hope that cannot thrive.
You posit here a jeu d’esprit, a joke,
no verse with which the heavens to command.
Let it then be a mandala in sand:
the transitoriness its masterstroke.
Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?
The learned researcher Susan James (Vote #1: Susan James’ answer to Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?) is of course right in the evolutionary selection angle, and even more right in the cultural situatedness of attractiveness. The body-ideal of Botswana sure isn’t the ideal of the 2016 US, which wasn’t the ideal of 1956 US.
But there’s a bit of semantics being missed here. It’s not that the notion of attractiveness is preexisting, and people want to have sex with people bearing that characteristic. There is physical fitness or suitability for child-bearing, which has visual correlates; in fact Susan has pointed them out in previous answers (I think;, though Quora Search, so I can’t find them). So breasts or butts (or six packs) tend to correlate with attractiveness.
But attractiveness is also culturally determined; there are plenty of cultures in which big butts or physical fitness are not prized as attractive. In fact attractiveness is defined the other way around. Attractive people are defined as those people that humans (in that particular culture) want to have sex with.
(And that also helps you with LGBTI+, which a narrowly evolutionary approach doesn’t.)
How are you so knowledgeable?
Hoo boy. I’m being A2A’d this by Michaelis Maus, and he’s a trenchant one: I can’t give him a glib answer, and I can’t just protest that I’m an impostor.
OK.
- I read a lot as a kid, as others did, and picked up a lot of encyclopaedic knowledge that way. It helps to connect the dots when you know what the dots are. It was harder when I was a kid, because no Interwebs; I ended up reading through most of the World Book Encyclopedia, and I also read pretty generally through my high school, local, and university library.
- I read the newspaper religiously back in the day, which gave me good news and international awareness.
- I studied a specific subject at university level:
- I determined to gain a grounding of linguistics, a subject I actually loved, after University Engineering let me down.
- I determined to become a world authority in the subject matter my PhD was within.
- I lectured undergrads for a couple of semesters, which helps you systematise that knowledge.
- I became online-search aware, when online search replaced reading.
- I spent a couple of years reading Wikipedia the way I used to read through my local library.
And here’s the impostor bit. I answer a lot of questions that, by Quora’s standards (and by many users’ standards) I have no business answering. I have a superficial knowledge of the subject matter, that needs to be bolstered by Wikipedia; and the body of my answer is intelligent guesswork, based on extrapolation from situations or disciplines I am more familiar with, or from a willingness to think through foundational assumptions.
Most A2As I respond to from Mehrdad Dəmirçi fall into that category (and there a lot I don’t respond to, because even I have my limits). I know very little about Iran. Until this past year on Quora, I had not even clicked how many Azeris there are in Iran. So I have no business answering Why does Iran have a variety of ethnic groups? As a Greek, I know less than Wikipedia does about the Ottoman Empire; I was actually guessing at the meanings of the terms when I answered Why do you think Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism Failed?
I think the answers I wrote come across as knowledgable (you tell me), but they really are intelligent guesses.
For which I make no apology. Intelligence is the ability to make connections, not just the hoarding of facts. The specialist has the best sense of where the connections lie, but the generalist (or at least, the specialist in a slightly related field) is still equipped to draw conclusions.
And if I get stuff wrong, I expect people here to pipe up and tell me so.
Will Australia become a republic soon?
As Richard Farnsworth said, republicans are waiting for an unpopular and unfamiliar monarch to raise the question again. OTOH the celebrity appeal of Kate & Wills (which is driving the millennials’ affection for the monarchy) could still see it stick around.
Part of the problem is that republicanism doesn’t have the emotional vigour it did in the 1999 referendum, or as energetic a proponent as Keating. Yes, Turnbull is a republican, and came to political prominence through the referendum; but come on, Turnbull is hostage to his right wing on everything, this can’t be an exception.
There’s a complacency of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” around the republic, and affection for Wills & Kate. Australia may well not go there. Plus, the rebellion against elite republicanism in favour of some Stupid-Arse “As Seen On TV” popularly elected president did republicanism real lasting damage in Australia. The mob want a Trump (or a Scott Cam), and the elites want nothing that will impact the constitution as we know it.
What is the purpose of a university education? Is it primarily to learn or to acquire credentials for a future job?
Habib le toubib, how do you manage to keep breaking my heart so with your questions? (Ah, by sending A2A’s that I leave in the too hard basket for weeks.)
I admire and love the ideal of liberal arts education. I do. Really. It makes you a better person.
But we live in an age where universities are not the province of the children of the loaded, which is where the ideal of liberal arts education flourished. Unis are not there to train philosopher kings (or at least philosopher baronets).
Universities seek to be loss-leaders for research; they’ll take in whoever’ll pay, and they’ll give them a crap education while they’re doing it. The State needs credentialed citizens, because it needs a trained workforce.
(And oh, the disaster that AI is about to wreak on the white collar workforce. But hey, at least they’ll then have the free time for a liberal arts education. If they don’t starve first.)
It is also true that the web allows the democratisation of vocational learning (and we’re seeing that), and also the democratisation of Bildung, of the kind of education that’s good for you. MOOCs are a thing, and so are fora like this.
Universities were about learning. Societies has made universities about credentialisation. But for better or worse, that too is getting disrupted now, along with everything else.
If Satan had Quora, what questions would he ask?
- Michael Masiello: what are your views on theodicy? (“Fuck you” is not an adequate answer)
- Am I also Shaytan?
- Am I also Kali?
- Am I also Angra Mainyu?
- Am I also the Demiurge?
- If God is Good is He also God? If God is God is He also Good?
- Should pronouns referring to Satan be capitalised?
- Why do I get to have all the good tunes?
- Is The Devil Went Down To Georgia really a good tune?
- Seriously?
- If I’m meant to have all the good tunes, what explains the albums of Anton LaVey?
- How can I revive Manichaeanism?
- How can I distance my brand from Alisteir Crowley’s?
- Are the Rolling Stones still writing good songs?
- How about those South Park guys?
How would you define your personal culture? How does it differ from the general culture of your place of residence?
Unsurprising that this question of yours, Habib le toubib, is attracting a lot of attention from migrants and diasporans. And it would: migrants and diasporans have a personal culture that hybridises their upbringing and their environment, so it will be perceptibly different to that of their local mainstream.
It’s a big brushstrokes kind of personal structure difference. Of course there is cultural difference mediated through differences and fluidity in subgroups, particularly in more heterogeneous countries like the US. And I disagree with Peter Flom: culture is mediated through the collective, but it is still realised in the individual’s attitudes and praxis, and individuals can veer off and do strange things.
But there’s nothing that subtle about me.
I wrote a little about my diaspora experience recently at The Decalogue of Nick #1: I’m Greek-Australian by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. I’ll give some dot points here about how I’m a misfit against majority Australian culture, though I am much more of a misfit against majority Greek culture.
- This may well surprise some of my followers, but I am more uptight than I’d prefer to be about casual sex, particularly as depicted on Australian drama and soaps. I see young nubile things carousing and gallivanting on Winners and Losers or Neighbours or Offspring, and I don’t think, “mmm, young nubile things”, or even “is it ratings season again?” I think “who are these bogan rootrats doing on my telly?”
- In the case of Offspring, it’s “hipster rootrats”. But then, I find it impossible to like anything about the smugfest that is Offspring. Or, as one of the gay guys on Gogglebox sneered, “yet another show about a neurotic chick”. It’s turned into quite the genre here.
- I think there is more meaning to be had in the collective than in the individual, and it pains me that I don’t have a crowd to hang out with any more. That whole notion of the parea, the big freewheeling social group, is much more a Greek thing than “hanging out with your mates”.
- And why yes, parea is the only Catalan loanword in Greek.
- Distaste at pub culture. That’s not quite true, because my happiest nights after I left Melbourne Uni were when I kept in touch with the Melbourne Uni German crowd at a Uni pub. But I would nurse a Kilkenny’s for an hour, or make a point of getting either a cocktail or a Jameson, and nurse that for an hour. Certainly though, extreme discomfort at public drunkenness.
- Mercifully, The One True Meat Is Lamb is a virtue Anglo-Australians and Greek-Australians share. But Meat also means Oregano to me. In fact, we had Xmas Eve leftovers at a colleagues’ this year, and we marvelled at the exotic delights of crackling and cranberry sauce and roast ham. Xmas being a family thing, neither of us had ever really had English Xmas food. (Apart from Xmas cake, which my folks would get as a present from the factory, and bring home bewildered.)
- I find the traditional ideal of how an Australian man should be to be emotionally constipated. I’m not alone in this; that’s a cultural shift well underway.
- But God help me if the evolutionary endpoint is to be Patrick on Offspring. He’s scripted that way because it’s a female fantasy, people! Starring a neurotic chick! Who daydreams because she’s a loser, not because she’s quirky and cool and hip. What a fricking wet rag that guy was.
Yeah, hadeha Neurotic Chick. Just remember, I’m laughing at you not with you.
How do you feel when a foreigner knows much more about your country than you do?
Nikos Tsiforos was a Greek humorist, who wrote a series of humour pieces covering all of Greek Mythology. I’ve cited his collection here a couple of times. At the end of the 640 pp book, he wrote this.
Few of us Greeks know Greek Mythology well. (Before I started studying it to write it up, I was an almost complete dunce too.) They teach it to us so superficially and perfunctorily in school. But we should know it, even if not perfectly. Our mythology is ourselves, our yesterdays, our todays and our tomorrows.
I was in Olympia once. And I have the tendency of studying up on the historical sites I visit, so I’m not a complete ignoramus. So I was walking around the Altis, and flattered myself to be telling my companions that I knew all about it. And I saw a bunch of foreigners. There was an old man among them, and he was speaking to them about Olympia in German. Because I can speak German, I stopped to listen to him.
And then I realised that I was a complete idiot when it came to knowing about Olympia. The man knew Greek history and mythology to the last detail. And he knew the site stone by stone. And he was a foreigner: Swiss.
I did not say a word. I just listened, and then felt deep shame. And that’s why I wrote this mythology.
Let someone else write up Joyce’s depiction of how Stephen Dedalus resents Haines knowing more about Irish culture than he did in Ulysses. That was couched in colonialism, and in Joyce’s rejection of folklore as a source of identity.
Me? I’m been involved in Modern Greek linguistics, and I’ve known Germans who know bits of my language’s history far better than I. I’ve known Ukrainians more fluent than I. I’ve known Britons more thorough than I. How do I feel?
Grateful. They didn’t have to. It’s not my personal property. I’m glad they share in what I get joy from. I’m glad they chose to, where I was merely bequeathed it.
Is it a coincidence that the nations which industrialised first were Christian?
Some good answers here, but none giving the obvious reference: Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel. It was despite (mediaeval) Christianity: Byzantium stopped all science very early. The Islamic world was into Science before Christendom was, and the switches in both worlds were not about the religion, but about interpretations of the religion.
As for why Christianity went big time when it hit Europe: that’s all about the Roman Empire and its successor states, and the power vacuum to its North. And about the Persian Empire rejecting Christianity as a Roman thing.