[SystemSafety] Partly Off Topic: What Happens in October

[Dick Selwood]

Peter says

/It's that tertiary education allows exceptional talent more easily to 
develop to the standard of which it is capable./

These prize winners were in tertiary education in the era when Britain 
provided free tuition alongside grants to live on.
Will the current attitude British attitude - that makes no connection 
between the well-being of society and an educated society  - produce 
future Nobel winners except (possibly) from the small group of 
financially privileged?



On 18/10/2016 07:28, Peter Bernard Ladkin wrote:
> Might it more appropriately be parsed as Partly-Off Topic than as Partly Off-Topic?
>
> So what always happens in October? The Nobel Prizes and the SSCS.
>
> First, Nobel.
>
> It's grand to see a bard honored.
> https://abnormaldistribution.org/index.php/2016/10/18/a-dylan-encomium/
>
> It's also grand for this Brit, cognisant of the hitherto advantages of British academics, to see
> five Brits in four of the five science prizes. While the people are deserving, I don't think it's
> that Brits are smarter. It's that tertiary education allows exceptional talent more easily to
> develop to the standard of which it is capable.
>
> But then, one notices. One Japanese, in Japan. Two Frenchmen, in France. One Dutchman, in the
> Netherlands. Five Brits - in the US (along with a Finn.) A half-century ago, we used to call it the
> brain drain. It hasn't stopped, and all indications are that it's about to get a lot worse.
>
> Some people come back, Fields Medal winner Andrew Wylie, for example. Not a lot.
>
> When I pointed this out, a colleague said "so what?" I think it's a big deal. I don't think either
> British science or European science is better off for many of its stars leaving. It's not symmetric
> travel, as it might be in a more balanced world.
>
> It's not even symmetric inside Europe. The Anglo-American penchant for continued productivity even
> amongst the top research personnel, as well as humane academic career development prospects, have
> made UK academic careers attractive to Europe's best young scientists (not just scientists). That
> has put pressure on other national academic systems, such as the one I work in, to improve (that's
> partly why I'm here - but I think I came thirty years too early......enough said).
>
> That appears about to end with a thud. As yet there aren't even any believable proposals for
> maintaining the status quo ante for those already in the UK. Sickening, and insulting. I guess it's
> what happens when you leave politics to politicians.  The rest of Europe is worse off, because the
> pressure is now off often dysfunctional and non-transparent national research systems to continue to
> clean up their collective acts in response to more attractive career conditions elsewhere.
>
> Second, SSCS.
>
> First, the non-news. Cybersecurity is a mess. We knew that, but we can divide it more finely.
>
> There is the sociopolitical mess. The IPT has just ruled that GCHQ's data collection for most of the
> last two decades was illegal
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/17/uk-security-agencies-unlawfully-collected-data-for-decade
> The solution? Make it now legal. That's all right then. I anticipate SSCS will continue to have
> almost nothing to say about all this. Where do we go for this debate? Chatham House? This shouldn't
> be left for politicians.
>
> Then there is the technical mess. The good news may be that GCHQ, and now NCSC, has plenty of very
> smart technical people, one of whom, head of NCSC, gave a scintillating half-keynote following
> Martyn's first half. A lively and resounding start to the conference of the very first order.
> Profuse thanks to both, and kudos to Carl for getting it to happen. This will be on IET.tv at some
> point. I do recommend people look at the video.
>
> A hint for those concerned with Cyber Essentials, a British government computer security program.
> Something I found out Wednesday - if you're one person or a couple of people running a standard OS
> with the delivered configuration of iptables, you don't leave a machine turned on when you're not
> using it, and you don't have NAS, then as long as you've changed the default PW on your router you
> probably qualify for Cyber Essentials. I didn't realise that. But don't quote me on these details -
> I am not a Cyber Essentials assessor.
>
> The elephant in the room with me is how to reconcile the update cycles for safety and security.
> Safety requires careful and thorough impact analysis before updating; security requires one react
> quickly to zero-day vulnerabilities. Anyone have any ideas about how to reconcile these? Nope. Not
> even when it's in the title of a talk. (Although Altran seems to have some technology that might
> help, which they didn't talk about here.)
>
> I did learn something, though. Besides DIS IEC 62859 trying to do safesec for nuclear power plants
> and the NWIP for safesec of machinery now before the IEC, I learned about ISA 84.00.09-2013
> https://www.isa.org/store/products/product-detail/?productId=118130  As usual it costs a lot of
> money, so I'm now trying to find a version it is within the scope of DKE to let me read.
>
> PBL
>
> Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
> MoreInCommon
> Je suis Charlie
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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