[SystemSafety] C for OSs

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2019-09-17 11:09 , Martyn Thomas wrote:
> On 16/09/2019 21:47, Olwen Morgan wrote:
> 
>> (In my busier years, it was nothing for my annual personal expenditure
>> on professional books to exceed £1000. It's a lot cheaper than going
>> on courses.)
> 
> Many years ago when I was running Praxis, I encouraged managers to use
> their training budgets to buy technical books for their staff on
> request, for exactly the reasons that Olwen gives. It mystifies me why
> so few other companies appear to see the sense in this

I don't know whether there is a demise in consulting the written word (and symbol). It sure seems to
to some. Leslie Lamport said earlier this year that he'd been forced to make videos, since "no one
reads any more". There is a point to that. Were people watching David Pannick's gripping advocacy
before the Supreme Court this morning? I broke for (late, in Germany) lunch with the feeling I had
learnt more UK constitutional law in two and a half hours passive looking and listening than I ever
would have by picking up books. There is an compelling immediacy, and the arguments stick (it helps,
of course, that he knows how to do this). Reading in a way that you can use what you have read is an
acquired skill, like playing a musical instrument, even if you like the material or the music.

I think it is a skill that could be explicitly taught and practiced in engineering. Then those
libraries would be as valuable to most engineers as I and Olwen and Martyn think they are to us.
Such a course is not foreign to tertiary education. Many (most?) universities offering philosophy
degrees have a course in reading and reasoning (what we used to call "comprehension" when it was
taught in school). Extracting key moral arguments from opinion pieces written for newspapers and
magazines. And key political reasoning from transcipts of speeches. That sort of thing. But not in
engineering.

But speaking of not reading any more, my articles get 80-90 "reads" a week on ResearchGate.

When I started working in Menlo Park & Palo Alto, I used to spend 2-3 hours each week in the company
library. Scanning the latest deliveries of journals (there were fewer). Skimming through books. And
going to the Stanford bookstore once a month to browse the shelves.

Three decades later, my university does not subscribe to any of the journals I consider relevant in
system safety. It barely finds the resources to subscribe to what we used to think of as the
definitive journals in computer science. It is not their fault, or my faculty's fault (although I
used to think it was) or my fault (it's never my fault). There are just so many journals and they
cost high-three-figure or four-figure sums of money. Or you can get them bundled for five figures.
And they all go away soon after you decide you don't have the five-figures for this year because
your tastes/trend-subjects have shifted.

Stocking up and letting people browse just does not work practically, and probably cannot work, the
way it used to work for me.

You can't "browse" the Internet the same way I used to do with paper three decades ago. On the other
hand, I don't see any technical reason why you can't. Publishing companies are happy to send you
emails with their latest, on topics you select. And you can visit the WWW sites of your favorite
journals and read abstracts. But what you can't do is look inside for a few moments, or half an
hour. There is no technical obstacle to such a process, as far as I can see. And it would help
people like me.

And if students could browse sections of a key text, and then decide whether they want a permanent
copy of *that section* (not the whole text), there might be money in it for publishers. And not only
students.....

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/private/systemsafety/attachments/20190917/56873553/attachment.sig>