The good news is that German health minister Daniel Bahr is about to change that.

I closed my eyes, hoped for the best and thoroughly rinsed it. Then, like people in this 2005 Boing-Biong-piece recommend, I placed it over a radiator for three days, turned it round from time to time and today I plugged it back in.

Result? It works as good as new!

(click to enlarge)

Across the street from where I live the Team Building of Erste Group is currently coming into existence and I do hope their architects are more professional than their proof readers.

In August 2012 I made a first attempt and failed miserably. Today I tried Owncloud 5 (still on all-inkl.com) and the folks have put a lot of work into owncloud since last summer: most things just work!

• Syncing contacts with thunderbird
• Syncing Calendars with lightning
• Sharing files (needs tweak)

I think I'll do a proper writeup soon, for now I just post links to the tutorials I used:

• Meinnoteblog
• Points of Interest
• SoGo
• Owncloud on Webdav and this support page (very slow at the moment)
• Jamie Flarity: Make Webdav persist in Nautilus

F I R S T   (F A I L E D)   A T T E M P T

[update 15 Mar 2013] I am giving it a second go (see above) and keep the record on my failed attempt here for reference: show failed attempt

Ich muß [...] bekennen [...] / daß die übermäßige Zeitungs-Begierde / eine dermaßen schädliche Kranckheit sey / welche durch ihren Mißbrauch dem gemeinen Wesen viel Schaden bringet. [...] Es ist nichts gewöhnlicheres / als daß die Bauren in der Schencke ein Collegium curiosum über die ordentlichen Post-Zeitungen halten / und durch den capabelesten aus ihrem Mittel selbige buchstabiren lassen / wenn man sie aber hernach [...] fragen solte / was sie daraus verstanden / so würde es in nichts anders bestehen / als daß es weit rathsamer vor sie gewesen wäre / sie hätten [...] mit dem Holtz-Axt an einem guten Eich Baume auf den Hieb gefochten / als daß sie die edele Zeit mit solchen Dingen verderben.

Not sure what is behind Bing's translation here. Ding in space-time? Different time zone? Cultural differences?

From my Piwik report – I wish I could have helped.

It's very easy and very fantastic: User defined Tags.

So where I am not sure where I come from, this at least answers the question of where I grew up: I grew up where people decorate their homes with wheels and fake wells, I grew up where toilets in educational facilities are closed due to soiling and destruction, I grew up where many shops are empty and those still operating are run down. In a word: I grew up in Hyperborea.

If you choose to have a look at my Hyperborea-Set, I suggest you listen to a song from Live's Throwing Copper while doing so.

Lately many Facebook users are whining about how unfair and sneaky it is that now they have to pay if they want all their followers to see their content. Today Der Spiegel is whining about Apple increasing the price of the Spiegel-App in their app-store from EUR 3,99 to EUR 4,49 without even asking. Der Spiegel says it is like having a stall at a farmer's market and returning to it one morning to notice, somebody has changed all your price tags and now wants the extra money. I say it is certainly not: first, the equivalent would be a market operator increasing the stall fee – which is neither unheard of nor too revolting. Second, a farmer's market usually operates in public space. Public space belongs to everyone, so we can all have a say in how it is being utilised. The name for this is democracy.

Facebook and Apple on the other hand are, as I am sure everybody is aware, private companies. This unfortunately means that – within the boundaries of something called law – they can do pretty much whatever they want. It is called capitalism. If you don't like it, stop doing business with the company. That, we call market.

A guy named Andrew Lewis summed it up pretty definitively a while ago:

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

That shouldn't be too hard to understand.

I'm bad!

Been chopping trees. I done something new for this fight:
I'd a wrestle with a alligator – That's right.

I have wrestled with a alligator, I done tussle with a whale
I done handcuff lightning, throw thunder in jail

That's bad.

Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.
I'm so mean, I make medicine sick.

Bad. Fast. Fast. Fast.

Last night I cut the light off in my bedroom.
Hit the switch, was in the bed before the room was dark.

Muhammad Ali (1974). Waldorf Astoria New York, promoting »The Rumble in the Jungle« against George Foreman.

The entire fight from 30 Oct 1974 in Kinshasa (Zaire) is on youtube (round 1 starting at 21m 10s).

When I select /media/MEDIA and click »unmount«, I get the following error message

device maper: remove ioctl failed: Device or resource busy Command failed«

But at the same time, the alphanumeric string changes into /media/MEDIA and stays so when I click »OK« in the error message.

Here are screenshots (click to enlarge):

1. Europe = Danger
   Europe is a very dangerous place for young girls. At least one blond girl a day is kidnapped in broad daylight and sold into sex slavery at every major airport.
2. France = Indecent
   The French are obsessed with sex, and they are very good at it, too.
3. French police = incompetent, luxurious, lax and corrupt
   They can't get to the trafickers, they don't want to get to them, they forgot to feel the different weights of loaded and unloaded guns. All they care about is where the amount of money comes from, »that is the difference in between x (what I earn) and y (what I spend).« Instead of heaving a proper barbecue with red meat and red wine (from red paper cups), they serve two kinds of meat and drink from glasses on an ordinary week day.
4. Virginity = A woman's most valuable asset
   If you are a promiscuous young woman who thinks of having sex with the first French Peter she meets, you will certainly die. If you are a virgin (»certified unspoilt«) and willing to stay one , you will live until popa comes to get you.
5. Enemy's Wife = Handy tool
   If you want to get to a man, shoot his woman. She won't mind if it's only a flesh wound and you apologize via her husband later.
6. Woman = Stupid
   Wifes or daughters, they just don't understand what it means to be a soldier and serve king government and country.
7. Compassion = for the weak
   If you are Daddy's daughter, I'll get you out of there. If you have Daddy's daughter's jacket, I'll get you out of there until you can talk. If you are someone else's daughter, it's not Daddy's problem if you get shot along the way.
8. Torture = Efficient
   Contrary to what the pacifist softies try to make you believe, torture is the fastest and most reliable way to get the information you want out of a tough baddie.
9. Violence = Apt solution
   If you only get the chance to exercise that »set of very specific skills acquired over a long career« (aka mindless violence), everything is going to be ok: your ex is going to like you again, her new husband will respect you and your daughter finally loves you. You even get close enough to the beautiful cash-cow to have her help you turn your daughter into one, too.
10. Danger = Squeeze eyes
    If you're the good guy and don't want to get shot by someone who is firing at you from really, really close range: squeeze your eyes as hard of possible and you'll be safe.

This flying of the flag marks the starting point of a new life for a fresh few thousand people who pass through the old gates to become students. To facilitate the transition into their new and exciting lives, the university organises a fair with two types of stalls: the student societies introducing themselves, the postgraduate center providing information on academic afterlife and the religious groups trying to interest people in their activities belong to the first type. They compete, and – judging by the length of the queues – lose to the second type.

It is the owner of a Type II stall who is responsible for the flying of the yellow flag: Raiffeisen Bank. Apart from the flag, they set up an enormous pavilion called »Yellow Café« everybody must pass who wishes to enter the main building.

Indoors the bank fest continues: Raiffeisen's competitors Voksbank, Bank Austria and Erste Bank are also looking for fresh customers. This year, Bank Austria hands out free Nescafé with the slogan »Probieren geht über Studieren«. The slogan literally means »trying excels studying« in the sense of »an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory« or »the proof of the pudding lies in the eating«.Luckily, one can wash down the somewhat dry academic pudding with a very cheap energy drink Spar kindly provides free of charge today.

»s like strong, s like save money«

Six semesters from now, most of these students will have a first degree in Applied Tourism Management or European Corporate Law or maybe in Comparative Literature or Analytical Philosophy under their belts, and purportedly a bright future before them.

Vienna University will hand them their Bachelor degree in an envelope that might remind them of the flying of the flag on their very first day because Raiffeisen somehow managed to brand that envelope, too. And, in case somebody was proud and generous enough, they might have booked them the grand graduation ceremony: For EUR 70,– a real dean gives advice for the future and in addition to the yellow envelope one receives two identical brown paper tubes: one contains a luxurious version of the degree certificate, the other a can of Red Bull.

The little envelopes and flags and the free coffees and energy drinks do not mean much in or for themselves, but if one sees them as symbols and metaphors, they signify underlying changes in academia that bring with them very real, very deep, and very problematic implications.

The Energy Drink

The graduate edition Red Bull might come in handy, as the student's bright future probably begins by joining the ranks of the unemployed for a while. At the moment it is most likely to happen in Greece and Spain, but by no means uncommon in Britain, Germany or Austria, even for the top 10% of a year. Several months of writing applications, job interviews and general self marketing will instil just the right amount of humility to put up with a life of increasing working hours for decreasing pay that is waiting.

»You've fucked us« – Student Protests,
Westminster 2010 by bobaliciouslondon
(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The student might now realise that there never was such thing as a free coffee. The seemingly witty bank with the trying-excels-studying joke knew exactly that today's student customer is tomorrow's debtor – and indeed, the bank now owns the ex-student with hide and hair. In ever increasing numbers, students all over Europe need a student loan, both to support themselves and as a means to afford the steadily rising tuition fees. After students finish their degree, they are usually cheap, well educated and highly productive workhorses because they are deeply in debt – and someone who is in debt is not in a very strong position to negotiate employment terms. This has been the normal scenario in Britain for many years, but it got much worse there recently and other governments have been flirting with the idea one way or another all over Europe.

The Proof of the Pudding

Universities are chronically overcrowded and underfunded. As a rule, they need more money than they can get from the state. One way of funding – every little helps! – is to squeeze as much out of their students as they possibly can. But students are poor and can only provide what they get out of the banks through their student loans. The perversity of the ecosystem becomes apparent when the student loan banks pay little to no, or even less tax, but get bailed out with billions of taxpayer's money by the same state that lacked millions to properly fund research.

Student money alone is hardly enough. A decent rank among tough international competition is expensive and can only be secured through third party funding. The third parties are often private corporations or the foundations private companies set up. It clearly is much easier to sell a million dollar project to a sponsor if the benefits are immediately apparent, so third party funding necessarily increases the inclination towards application-oriented research.

Basic (or blue skies) research becomes less and less attractive and the humanities are more and more sneered upon as »non exact« (but then again, exactly how exact are the exact sciences?). They have the air of an old caprice one only keeps around for nostalgic reasons and in many discussions they are already branded as superfluous – which is rather convenient, given that History, Philosophy, Sociology and the likes are the domains that have the analysis of cultural dynamics of the educational system, neo-liberalism and corruption at the core of their interest.

Niklas Luhmann describes the communication of social subsystems as fundamentally rooted in a basic distinction or currency that governs each of them. Academia deals in true/untrue and when breaking down scientific reasoning to its core, one necessarily ends up at this fundamental distinction behind it. The economical subsystem on the other hand uses profitable/unprofitable as its basic binary code. When economic considerations outweigh functional ones, the proof of the scientific pudding finally is in the eating, and the sooner it can be devoured, the better. Ultimately, scholars aren't accountable to truth any more, but to profit. They have left the academic domain and entered that of commerce. From there, the step into corruption might be a big one for man, but can be a minuscule one for academia.

The Flying of the Flag

A year ago, following massive spending cuts in Austrian education, an independent research institute with a focus on cultural studies had barely escaped closure by entering a partnership with a University for Art and Design. The new partner's director gave a speech at the yearly opening, congratulating everyone on the win-win-win-situation. He said: »Everything is going to get better because private sponsors will come aboard«. It didn't seem very convincing and it is hard to believe even he was buying into his own speech as he added: »however, we cannot make any promises beyond 2015, but we may and we must have a vision!«

Private sponsors do wheel in money, but that certainly do not make everything better. There is no such thing as a free lunch and so they want newer, better puddings faster all the time. A vital part of academia is to provide space for scholars to develop the creativity and analytical skills necessary for tomorrow's research. Given everything we know about creativity, this space is threatened by the tight deadlines of today's fast-paced bachelor curricula, and to some extent also by the strong application focus of many Master and PhD programmes

But there is another very serious problem: if someone is paying for the pudding, there is a strong chance they also want a say in the taste. Consequently the many examples of private corporations exerting influence on academia come from a wide spectrum.

»All your base are belong to us« by
Rutger Middendorp (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

At the low end of the scale, the (de facto monopolist) Google funds an entire internet institute – and is busy assuring they won't interfere with the research at all. One step up, a university is bought – or »rescued« – by and named after the Jacobs foundation that stems from the Swiss chocolate and coffee company of the same name.

A further step on, we have Danone and Coca Cola sponsoring a congress on nutrition. The research at the congress is – of course – completely independent and unaffected by the »partnership«. However, the companies reserve the right to give talks at said conference. Talks that are announced alongside the scientific talks in the conference programme without any special designation.

At the top end of the scale sits a »cooperation and sponsorship agreement« between Deutsche Bank and the Berlin based Technical and Humboldt Universities. The cooperation started in 2006, and it took five years for the secret contract to finally leak. The agreement not only granted the largest European bank special advertising rights at the universities, but a say in teaching content and regular teaching assignments for employees, sidestepping academic qualification procedure. But most importantly, they had a veto in the publication of research. Any and every (potentially tax-funded) paper needed the clearance of a bank.

Finally, almost off the chart, there is Pharma. Drug companies are the biggest funders of university research – and they want a return:

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 370 randomised drug trials, an essential phase in finding out if medicines work. It discovered that if a study is sponsored by a drug company, it tells you the drug is safe to use 51 per cent of the time. But if the scientists are publicly funded, they say the drug is safe only 16 per cent of the time.

Johann Hari (17 Nov 2009): Peter Mandelson's assault on science. The Independent.

Apart from the significant correlation of funding source and outcome of a study, there is another striking problem: many of the studies with undesirable outcomes simply don't get published. In 2008 The Guardian reported that an analysis of unseen trials and other data concluded Prozac – an antidepressant used by 40 million people – performed no better than placebo, and in September 2012 The Guardian reported a similar story on Reboxetine:

In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published.

Ben Goldacre (21 Sep 2012): The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal. The Guardian.

Corruption in Academia

When one thinks of corruption, one might think that it is hardly a problem in academia. Rarely exam questions might leak following a bribe and occasionally a degree may be awarded in return for an envelope – these things surely happen, but to a degree that does not affect the institution in itself. Yet, there is a different type of corruption, which Lawrence Lessig calls institutional corruption. Institutional corruption is not about breaking laws or violating rules and norms:

It is institutional corruption in the way that I mean it, if it weakens the effectiveness of an institution and especially if it weakens the public trust that an institution enjoys.

Lawrence Lessig (30 Oct 2009): Institutional Corruption. Blip.tv, 0 min 29 sec.

In this sense, western societies slowly let short-term profits corrupt an institution that fulfills an important role in our culture and, more importantly, is the institution western culture choose to entrust with the task of finding solutions to future problems. The health of that institution will be crucial if the economical and environmental challenges of the future are to be met successfully.

The academic ecosystem can hardly function effectively if companies that are responsible for the biggest chunk of anthropogenic pollution and the worst damage to the global economy in history run it – the flying of a yellow flag marks the point where the sell-out of scientific principles and a centuries-old tradition of academic independence begins, the subordination of academia to profit is where it ends.