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Longest Physics Lecture in History?
gfrege writes "Perhaps you remember some long physics lectures from your days at school. But as part of a general strike of students at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin concerning cuts in funding for the city's universities, some physicists are in the middle of what could be the longest physics lecture in history. It started at noon on Monday, and is planned to run to noon on Thursday. Check out the topics, and if you're in Berlin, come on down. The Babelfish translations of the lecture titles make for some fun reading, too, if you can't make it there yourself."
Also, since a student strike does not hurt as much as a worker strike, the students have to revert to more spectacular means. The one described in this article is one of them. Another media effective action was the demonstration at IKEA last week where many students occupied the beds there and "applied" for educational asylum in Sweden.
You could say it is a kind of demonstration, but a very specific one.
BTW: I am not a student, but work as assistant at a German university, so I am familiar with the current situation and the student protests.
Sebastian
1.) Here in Germany, higher education comes mostly for free, including attending University. This is paid for by state taxes, mostly.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states (Laender), of which Berlin is one, due to prolonged blissful ignorance of reality (tax revenue down) in crazy public spending. Berlin is one of the worst candidates with huge debt, kind of like CA in the US, even suing federal gvt. to bail them out and unfortunately winning.
3.) Berlin has three full universities plus N colleges and such, sucking up money.
4.) what's an avg. politician to do? Slash university funding big style, amongst other things, potentially closing one of them down for good
5.) what's a university student to do? go on strike (IMO not very creative either, but I digress....) and generally raise awareness that higher education is worth its money.
6.) what's a prof to do? help students out (after all they're in the same boat), by e.g. holding a 3 day continuous physics lecture in the middle of Berlin, for everybody to attend.
That's why they're doing it. If you or I agree with it, is another question...
There is also something wrong with the idea that if someone comes out the right vagiana then they everything for free, while others have to struggle for the same oppertunity. Isn't education something everyone has a right to? It is the only thing I can think of which by itself can take a person and improve their quality of life, their job, the amount of money they make, and their happiness.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yes, it's about "modernization" of universities here in germany, especially Berlin, which means to drastically cut expenses, close faculties, adopt a tuition fee model (studying is free until now in germany). And also funds for profs are dropped. So it's in there interest, too.
You might get some more information on indymedia germany (http://de.indymedia.org), but until now the whole movement is not too much related to social movements in general, more about academics getting a bad future like everyone else does.
That's not true.
In Western Australia, for example, university student's can not be forced to join a union. They actually have freedom of association and aren't forced to pay large amounts of money to an organisation they do not support.
They also have *better* student services, but simple economics would tell you that would be the case.
It's mentioned on page 130 of Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid..
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which droll tales of absent-minded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherance, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience that out-of-order popping from from the stack onto which the professor's verbs had been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender."
What the fuck are you talking about?
...).
Not everybody can get a higher education - you have to earn it first by, you guessed it, getting good grades. This is called the "Hochschulreife". Without it, you are not eligible to even apply to a University. There's ALSO this thing called "Numerus Clausus", which basically says "only people with these grades or better get even LOOKED at" for degrees with a limited capacity. And furthermore, if you don't spend effort to study, you'll get kicked out - if you don't manage to pass the exams in the given time-limit (if there is one) or flunk twice, you'll lose your right to ever take another exam in that discipline again. Forever. For every University in Germany. This means, that if I manage to flunk twice in Mathematics, I'm not allowed to study anything where Mathematics is a part of the degree (Engineering, Computer Science,
There's also no studying forever: you get one and a half times the specified time of study for that particular degree (in BW at least). After that you'll have to pay tuition fees. But this is different from state to state.
Who told you that bullshit anyway? Take it from someone who actually studies in Germany...
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.