Travels, 2

Today is the day it really starts. The long flight will be an ordeal, but at least my cold is a little better than it was.

We had allowed ourselves two quiet days in London to prepare. Inevitably, the outside world intervenes.

An email from Leandro Vendramin about bad things happening in Argentina with respect to research funding. I won’t go into great detail: these involve breaking the link between research and development, starving institutes and universities of research funds, and paying research fellows just enough to put them above the poverty line. The letter doesn’t suggest action that readers can take, but Leandro might be able to supply some detail.

Then exam marking. Nik Ruskuc and I taught Set Theory and Mathematical Logic last (fraught) semester. Now the exam software is suggesting that the exam marks should be scaled. This has been a problem throughout my career. Those in charge want and expect exam marks to follow a nice bell curve, so that the “desired” pass rate can be achieved by simple scaling. But mathematics marks always have a strong tendency to be bimodal; those who get it do well, while others do poorly. In this case, there was a group of good and highly engaged students whose marks cannot be scaled up, and others who never submitted any written work who did less well.

And the final one was on-line check-in. Of course, there are predatory companies who have tricks to get above the official sites in a Google search. So when I googled on-line check-in, I ended up on one of these, sufficiently bland that I didn’t realise at first that it wasn’t the official airline site. I entered my details, and they asked me to pay one pound before proceeding. I was awake enough to realise something was wrong, so I killed that and tried again, and this time got to the correct place. A little later I got a mysterious email saying that my registration was not complete, “click here” to continue. So I guessed it was phishing, and reported it. The response of the IT service desk was that no, it was not phishing, this is a legitimate company, though it has nothing to do with the airline. Is there a name for this, if “phishing” is not appropriate?

Anyway, we should be on our way in an hour.