I have spent a couple of weeks cycling around the Netherlands with family this summer and there follows things which I noticed and thought interesting. In the main I was very impressed with the Netherlands, they have great infrastructure and friendly people who are very willing to help lost or confused visitors.

Living closer to the edge

The Dutch know that they live dangerously, on the edge of what is possible with much of the land below sea level. I got the impression that this left them with a closer affinity with their land than we have with ours; they know they need to care for it or they will lose it. Partly this was seen in the way that climate change is so much on their radar.
They know what is coming and are taking steps to try and stop it and to deal with it when it comes. Unfortunately their prospects do not look good. This year as last year my summer holiday took me somewhere which might not be there for my children or grandchildren to see, the Netherlands will be a very different place in 2100 than it was this summer.
You also find that this attitude runs further back; it is not a recent change brought about by a new threat but a strengthening of resolve which has been required throughout the history of the Netherlands.

Six lines of trees on one road

It is seen in the trees. The Netherlands has an artificial landscape but it is full of trees, tiny cycle paths are lined with trees, roads small and large are lined with trees, some roads have as many as six lines of trees running down them separating the houses from the road from the footpath from the garden and back through the footpath and road to the houses again. This is wonderful. You only really notice how integral trees are to the street-scape when you see this done properly.
In Delft for example (a beautiful city), there were blocks of flats such as you might see in sink estates in the UK, yet they were on roads lined with trees and many balconies were filled with flowers by residents who clearly enjoyed living there. Similarly the university (TU Delft) is beautiful, yet clearly built in the 20th century, using styles that elsewhere have produced horrendous eyesores, yet here perhaps with better architects they are beautiful, surrounded by trees.

It was also found in the attitude of the people, towards cycling, renewable energy, recycling and so on. They are on-board with a project to build a better future in a way that they UK clearly is not for they know that if they do not achieve a better future then they will find they have none. We might find ourselves in a similar situation but doom for us seems less certain and so more easily ignored.

Cycling

Cycling in the Netherlands is wonderful. Our infrastructure is nothing in comparison with what they have. Everywhere there were dedicated cycle paths, even minor roads in the middle of nowhere would have cycle lanes marked down both sides and much of the time there would be a segregated cycle lane.
There were also many cycle paths where there are no roads. The Dutch canal system with its dykes gives them an advantage here in that they need access roads along the tops of dykes but cannot have vehicles like cars running along them or the dykes would be damaged. Bicycles however are fine, this makes cycling a much more versatile form of transport as there are many more routes by bike than by car.
Similarly in cities many streets are one way, being too narrow for two way traffic with cycle lanes, but almost every ‘no entry’ or ‘one way’ sign has the Dutch ‘except cycles’ sign underneath. These dedicated cycle lanes are better than ours in that they deal with junctions properly having clear lights for the cycles with two sets, one high up and one low down so that they can still be read by the cyclist who is right next to the post.
They also give cycles priority over traffic joining from minor roads or turning off roundabouts so that the normal difficulty of having to negotiate every junction carefully is alleviated because it becomes mostly the car driver’s problem and they already have to deal with it to avoid other cars.
This combines to develop an attitude in the Dutch people that their cycle is much more useful than their car (if they have one). Talking to one Dutch lady, she said that she could live without her car but not without her bicycle.
The only slightly irritating habit was the way that they like their streets lined with bricks rather than tarmac more than I do which results in a little vibration.

They also define a ‘cycle’ rather more loosely than we do, motorcycles are also ‘cycles’ small four wheeled vehicles which can carry two people seated next to each other and which look like a tiny car with a motorcycle engine are ‘cycles’. Wheelchair bikes either driven by the wheelchair user with their hands or by someone else on a more conventional looking bike frame attached to the back are cycles, as are huge range on innovations with varying numbers of wheels, luggage space and passengers. Some of these designs have already been imported to Cambridge, but the Netherlands still has greater variety.

Having invented the bicycle we picked the side for the chain based on cycling on the left hand side of the road – such that when standing on the pavement the chain is on the other side of the bike.
Unfortunately in the Netherlands they cycle on the wrong side of the road and so they all have chain guards.

In the Netherlands the people do not wear helmets except when on racing bikes and wearing lycra, this distinguished us somewhat from the locals as we were on town bikes and wearing normal clothes and yet had helmets.

A rather good BBC article on cycling in the Netherlands has been published recently.

Open Street Map

I used Open Street Map (OSM) (specifically the OSMAnd app which has paid and free versions) and it was great, with offline route finding and location searching, which were invaluable. Being able to answer questions like ‘where is the nearest post box’ or ‘where can I get food’ and ‘how do I get there’ without having any internet is incredibly useful. I am definitely going to switch to using OSM rather than Google Maps in future and to actively contributing things which are missing from the OSM data. This also has the benefit that Google will not know what I am planning quite all the time.

Tourist destinations

We followed “Cycling in The Netherlands – The very best routes in a cyclist’s paradise” by Eric van der Horst (ISBN: 978-1900623193) which was excellent.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city with lots of beautiful streets like the tree-lined Churchill Laan mentioned earlier and lots of canals. There are also many parks such as the Vondelpark where we cooked dinner two nights. The Rijksmuseum is full of great painting and well worth a visit, I did not find the Van Gough Museum as impressive but still worthwhile.
Utrecht had some interesting buildings and streets. The castle of De Haar (or at least its gardens) were beautiful and the Farm Hazenveld camp site was lovely. Gouda had a large market and lots of cheese with many nice buildings.

The view from the church tower in Delft

Delft as previously mentioned is particularly beautiful – my favourite city in the Netherlands – the view from the church tower is particularly good and the [De Grutto camp site](http://www.degrutto.eu/) particularly excellent (particularly for the ecologically minded being solar powered and situated in an orchard in a nature reserve).
‘t Kraaijenest in De Lier was a particularly excellent B&B though we stayed there through the ‘Friends of the bike’ organisation where members open their homes to cyclists. The organisation is to be recommended we enjoyed both the stays we had with these ‘friends of the bike’.
The Hauge is good, though not as good a place to cycle as Amsterdam (still better than Cambridge or London). The Peace Place visitor centre is well worth a visit (and free) and we enjoyed wandering around the town centre.
Haarlem is beautiful and the guided tour of the Ten Boom museum particularly excellent. There was also an arts quarter with some very interesting shops such as one full of Lego and 3D printers.
IJmuiden’s Havenmuseum was unexpectedly impressive with a huge variety of sea related displays and lots of knowledgeable volunteers explaining about the exhibits. Particularity highlights included a working radar station (clearly not being interfered with by the wind turbines) and an ancient computer doing telegraph Morse to text conversion.

Disturbing things

Cycling down a street/canal and suddenly the horror of brothels down the side. Cycling down the canal to Utrecht suddenly there were brothel boats down the side with insufficiently clothed women in the window. It was disgusting, more so the cars slowly crawling along the road purpose built beside it with turning loops at each end. There is only so fast it is possible to cycle when you need to overtake other cyclists and there are oncoming cyclists but that is how fast I went, it is not fast enough. This was a disturbing experience, it was about midday…
Similarly in Amsterdam despite carefully staying well clear of the Red Light District walking back from dinner it was in places necessary to keep eyes very carefully on the canal.
While the experience of having tea in cafés in the Netherlands was much better than in the UK – nearly always offered a choice of tea and given a biscuit with it and a little plate on top of the cup of boiling water to keep it hot and to provide a place for the tea bag to go – there were several times when we looked at ‘coffee shops’ suspiciously and walked on as it looked like they might be selling more than ‘coffee’. Accidentally walking into a drug dealer’s establishment is not normally something I need to be concerned with ensuring and I prefer it that way.

Conclusion

The Netherlands is a great country to visit and everyone we spoke to had enough English that we could get by. Taking your bike on a ferry and cycling around it is definitely a good way to go.

So that might seem a little insulting but it is a statement of fact rather than of opinion. A few days I thought that AV was simply better than FPTP and so “yes” was obviously the right answer. Further discussion and consideration of the issue moved me to the position that since there were no valid arguments at all in favour of FPTP over AV based on methodology (it is simply better in all respects) anyone voting no was either being stupid (believing the deliberate lies being spread by the no campaign) or immoral (voting no in the belief that by supporting an inferior more unfair voting system they were helping to rig elections in favour of their preferred party). Further consideration has led me to believe that even the immoral argument is invalid and so no one who has carefully thought out the issues can vote no.

Before I can explain why you will first need to have any questions you have about methodology addressed. Is AV actually always better than FPTP? Well yes and Tim Gowers (Cambridge maths professor) has written a rather good blog post about AV vs FPTP which has been getting a lot of mileage among the Cambridge students. Having read that and perhaps thought a little about it you will hopefully come to the conclusion that the only reasons you have left for voting no are the ones that I would call immoral – you want to rig the vote in favour of your party because it is easier to rig the vote so that they win with a minority than to actually persuade people that their policies are better than those of the other parties.

Actually those arguments are just stupid as well, at least in the long term – current MPs can perhaps vote no on the understanding that they are only being immoral and not stupid but for the voter that expects to be around (or care about) elections in 20 or more years time then the short term thinking which results in a no vote being a valid option for immoral reasons is no longer valid.

At this point some people might be thinking “Your a lefty I don’t believe anything you say”[0] to which I will make some Peterhouse specific comments: Nicholas Wilson, Nick Dixon-Clegg, Matthew Wells are Conservatives through and through, and are voting YES to AV because it is fair. Owen Woods is a Socialist and is voting YES to AV because it is better. I as a green/orange lefty kind of person who respects people on the right enough that there are even a couple of people in the Conservative party I would vote for am voting YES to AV because it is fairer and better and there is no other sensible option on the table. This campaign is not a party political one it is a campaign between those who are right and those who are afraid of change even for the better.

Consider the two cases where someone might be intending to vote no based on immoral reasons: they are either a Labour or a Conservative voter and think that AV might harm the chances of their party getting into power so often. Well if you are a Labour voter then as Tim Gowers so eloquently puts it “A LABOUR SUPPORTER VOTING FOR FPTP IS A TURKEY VOTING FOR CHRISTMAS”. However what of the Conservative voter?

Well first I will assume that whichever party you support you think that they are the best party, they have the best policies the best principles and are generally better than all the other choices. (If not why on earth are your supporting them.) Then since they are the best then surely eventually they should win under a fair voting system as it will be clear that their policies and principles are better when discussed rationally, over time historically it will become clear (or be possible to make clear) that if the policies of your favoured party had been adopted on a whole range of issues at a whole range of different points in time then the outcome would have been unequivocally better. What I am saying here is that under a fair system democracy should eventually produce the right result if you are correct in your assertion that your favoured party is the best one. It might take a long time, it won’t be easy and things are dynamic so who the best party is in your eyes might change as its current leadership retire and are replaced – but if you believe in democracy then hopefully you believe that given enough time and effort on the side of the best party then they win. (Perhaps I am assuming more faith in democracy than you have, hopefully you have enough that the rest of the argument follows anyway)

Currently the Conservatives might do better under FPTP than under AV in a (fairly small) number of constituencies because though the majority of people in that constituency don’t want them to win they are split between Labour and Lib Dems as to who they prefer first over the Conservatives though the majority would sill prefer Labour over the Conservatives and Lib Dems over the Conservatives. This is the general problem of split voting and is one of the places that FPTP fails really hard because it does not collect enough information from voters to be able to pick the candidate with the most support since FPTP is designed for and works perfectly fine in situations where there are only 2 candidates and fails utterly when there are more than 2 (and there are always more than 2 candidates in constituency elections – even in the speaker’s seat).
However when picking a voting system we are picking something for the long term, we have had FPTP for over 100 years and Australia has had AV for over 100 years. It is not something that we change all that often and so any time the question does have a chance to be decided it needs to be treated seriously with application of long term thinking.
Currently there is not much of a split on the right while there is a fairly large spit on the left, but who can say for sure that in 20, 50 or 100 years from now the situation might be the other way around. For example UKIP might gain support from Conservative party voters, the Lib Dems might move further right (they are currently in coalition with the Conservatives after all) and so pull voters away from the Conservative party resulting in a split vote on the right while Labour mops up everyone left of centre. Then we could have a situation where Labour gained power and were immovable from it for decades despite having only minority support while parties on the right fought over who was the true party of the right. A Conservative voter might hope that Conservative voters are too sensible to let that happen and perhaps they are right but no one can guarantee that.

So we get to make a choice on the voting system now, and we probably won’t get a chance like this again for a long time. While in the short term it might favour particular parties a little to remain with FPTP, AV is clearly better and no one can know the future well enough to be sure that voting no now won’t result in the party they hate jumping up and down laughing on them for decades with a minority of the vote.

Vote AV unless you are stupid, but then even stupid people should be able to understand simple logical arguments ;-)

[0]: Words to that effect were said to me yesterday fortunately there were some Conservatives around to do the persuading.

P.S. though perhaps you might have found this insulting I don’t make any apologies for that, however it doesn’t mean I don’t still like you as a person, I just think you are provably wrong or a little immoral.

On Wednesday the Computer Science IB students demonstrated the projects that they have been working on for the last term. This is my thoughts on them.

Some of the projects were really quite interesting, some of them even actually useful in real life, some of them didn’t work, were boring and simply gimmicks.

Alpha: “African SMS Radio” was a project to create a pretty GUI to a “byzantine and buggy” backend. It could allow a radio operator to run polls and examine stats of texts sent to a particular number. However it didn’t look particularly interesting and though there might be use cases for such a system I think only as a component of a larger more enterprise system and only after the “buggy” backend they had to use had been fixed up/rewritten.

Bravo: “Crowd control” was a project to simulate evacuations of buildings. It is a nice use of the Open Room Map project to provide the building data. It looked like it was still a little buggy – in particular it was allowing really quite nasty crushes to occur and the resulting edge effects as people were thrown violently across the room as the system tried to deal with multiple people being in the same place at the same time was a little amusing. With a little more work it could become quite useful as an extension in the Open Room Map ecosystem which could help it gain momentum and take off. I think that the Open Room Map project is really quite cool and useful – it is the way that data on the current structure and contents of buildings can be crowd sourced and kept up to date but then it is a project of my supervisor. ;-)

Charlie: “Digit[Ov]al automated cricket commentary” this was a project to use little location transmitters on necklaces and usb receivers plugged into laptops to determine the location of cricketers while they were playing and then automatically construct commentary on that. It won the prize for best technical project but it didn’t actually work. They hadn’t solved the problem of people being between the transmitter and the receiver reducing transmission strength by 1/3 or the fact that placing a hand over it reduced it by 1/3 or the fact that the transmitters were not omnidirectional and so orientation was a major issue. They were also limited to only four receivers due to only having four suitable laptops. They used a square arrangement to try and detect location. It is possible that a double triangle arrangement with three corners at ground level and then the other triangle higher up (using the ‘stadium’ to gain height) and offset so that the upper vertices lined up with the mid point of the lower edges would have given them a better signal. Calibrating and constructing algorithms to deal with the noise and poor data would probably have been quite difficult and required some significant work – which IB students haven’t really been taught enough for yet.

Delta: “Hand Wave, Hand Wave” was a project to use two sensors with gyroscopes and accelerometers to do gesture recognition and control. It didn’t really work in the demo and since it had reimplemented everything it didn’t manage to do anything particularly interesting. I think using such sensors for gesture control is probably a dead end as kinect and the like makes just using a camera so much easier and more interesting.

Echo: “iZoopraxiscope – Interactive Handheld Projector” this project was about using a phone with a build in pico projector as an interface. This was obviously using very prototype technology – using the projector would drain the phones battery very quickly, in some cases even when the phone was plugged in and fitting it in the (slightly clunky) phone clearly was at the expense of providing the normal processing power that is expected in an Android phone resulting in it being somewhat sluggish. Since the sensors were rather noisy and techniques for coping with that were not as advanced as they might have been (they just used an exponential moving average and manually tweaked the parameter) they had some difficulties with sluggishness in the controls of some of the games. However I think they produced several nice arcade style games (I didn’t play any of them) and so did demonstrate a wide range of uses. With better knowledge of how to deal with sensors (not really covered in any of the courses offered at the CL) and better technology this could be really neat. However getting a battery powered projector to compete with normal lighting is going to be quite a challenge.
The thing I really like about small projectors is that it could help make it easier to interact in lectures. Sometimes when asking a question or making a comment in lectures it might be useful to draw a diagram which the lecturer (and the rest of the audience) can see and currently doing so is really quite hard. (I should take to carrying around a laser pointer for use in these circumstances).

Foxtrot: “Lounge Star” this was a android app for making air passenger’s lives a little easier by telling them information such as which gate to use etc. without them having to go anywhere and integrating with various airlines systems. As someone who has ‘given up flying’ (not in an absolute sense but in a ‘while any other option (including not going) still remains’ sense) this was not vastly interesting but it could really work as a product if the airlines like it. So: “Oh it is another nice little Android app” (but then associated short attention span kicks in and “bored now”).

Golf: The Energy Forecast this was a project I really liked (it pushed the right buttons) it is a project to predict the energy production of all the wind farms in the country based on the predicted wind speed. It integrated various sources of wind speeds, power production profiles for different types of wind farm and the locations and types of many different wind farms (they thought all but I found some they were missing) and they had a very pretty GUI using google maps etc to show things geographically and were using a very pretty graph drawing javascript library. So I did the “oh you should use the SRCF to host that” thing (they were using a public IP on one of their own computers) and I am sort of thinking “I would really like to have your code” (Oh wait I know where that is kept, snarfle, snarfle ;-) It is something I would really like to make into a part of the ReadYourMeter ecosystem (I may try and persuade Andy he wants to get something done with it).
I love wind turbines all my (small) investments are in them, we have one in our back garden etc. this could be really useful. [end fanboyism]

Hotel: “Top Tips” this was a project to see whether the comments traders put on their trading tips actually told you anything about how good the trade was. The answer was no, not really, nothing to see here. Which is a little disappointing and not a particularly interesting project “lets do some data analysis!” etc.

India: “True Mobile Coverage” this was a project to crowd source the collection of real mobile signal strength data. It actually serves a useful purpose and could be really helpful. They needed to work on their display a little as it wasn’t very good at distinguishing between areas they didn’t know much about and areas with weak signal and unfortunately as with all projects it started working in a very last minute manner so they didn’t have that much data to show. Nice crowd sourcing data collection android app of the kind that loads of people in the CL love. Of course there will be large quantities they could do to improve it using the kind of research which has been done in the CL but it is a good start.

Juliet: “Twitter Dashboard” this was so obviously going to win from the beginning – a twitter project (yey bandwagon) which looks pretty. They did do a very good job, it looked pretty, it ate 200% of the SRCF’s CPU continuously during the demo (but was niced to 19 so didn’t affect other services) – there are probably efficiency savings to be made here but that isn’t a priority for a Group Project which is mainly about producing something that looks pretty and as if it works all other considerations are secondary. My thoughts were mainly “Oh another project to make it easier for Redgate to do more of their perpetual advertising. meh.” (they have lovely people working for them but I couldn’t write good enough Java for them)

Kilo: “Walk out of the Underground” this was a project to guide you from the moment you stepped out of the underground to your destination using an arrow on the screen of your phone. It was rather hard to demo inside the Intel Lab where there is both poor signal and insufficient scale to see whether it actually works. It might be useful, it might work, it is yet another app for the app store and could probably drum up a few thousand users as a free app.

Lima: “Who is my Customer?” this was a very enterprise project to do some rather basic Information Retrieval to find the same customer in multiple data sets. The use case being $company has a failsome information system and their data is poor quality and not well linked together. Unfortunately the project gave the impression of being something which one person could hack together in a weekend. I may be being overly harsh but I found it a little boring.

So in summary: I liked “The Energy Forcast” most because it pushed the right buttons, “True mobile coverage” is interesting and useful. Charlie could be interesting if it could be made to work but I think that the ‘cricket’ aspect is a little silly – if you want commentary use a human. iZoopraxiscope (what a silly name) points out some cool tech that will perhaps be useful in the future but really is not ready yet (they might need/be using some of the cool holgrams tech that Tim Wilkinson is working on (he gave a CUCaTS talk “Do We Really Need Pixels?” recently).

Idea for next year: have a competition after the end of the presentations to write up the project in a scientific paper style and then publish the ones that actually reach a sufficiently good standard in a IB Group Project ‘journal’ as this would provide some scientific skills to go with all the Software Engineering skills that the Group project is currently supposed to teach. (No this is so not going to happen in reality)

Recently there has been again a lot of media attention on Simon Hughes’ comments that universities should increase the proportion of their intake from state schools to reflect the proportion of pupils in the secondary school education system going to state and private schools.
While I accept it is really important for universities to make a particular effort to ensure pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who would thrive at university do go to university and go to the university which will stretch them the most. I also hold that each and every person who universities fail in this regard is being really badly let down. I think that it is correct that universities should be considering the quality of the teaching that pupils received when considering admissions as if someone managed to do the same amount with less then they have achieved more even if their grades are identical.

I am however going to say something which is possibly controversial – we are never under any sane system going to end up with representative proportions of people across all sectors of society and all types of school going to university and in particular to the best universities. We shouldn’t even try for that as it fundamentally isn’t going to work. What we should be aiming for is what the proportions would be if universities were doing their job perfectly – which would probably be significantly more representative than is currently the case. However it would not be and should not be completely representative.

Why? [Begin controversy] There are genetic factors which impact on the ability of students to thrive at university. If someone’s parents went to University then probabilistically they are more likely to have those factors. HOWEVER this does not mean that people whose parents didn’t go to university didn’t have those factors as not everyone wants to or should go to university even if they could. Additionally as humans we are not limited by our genes we may have natural tendencies towards certain things but with enough effort most of these things can be overcome. My argument is not that people whose parents didn’t go to university shouldn’t go – simply that you are not going to get a representative split there is going to be some natural bias and if we are making our assessments correctly we shouldn’t be upset about this. Of course universities should, can and are making an additional effort to reach those whose parents didn’t go to university as they are less likely to know that they can and should.[End controversy]

Additionally it is not the place of universities to make up for all the failings of all the previous educational establishments that students have previously been to – they make a great effort to do so and have great successes but if the Government really wants to make progress on making university education more representative of the population as a whole it really needs to look very hard at other areas first.

The differences in achievement between people from disadvantaged backgrounds and people from privileged backgrounds (like for example me) appears really quite early on in a child’s education and so the additional effort needs to be being put in there – in primary and secondary schools. Additionally people from privileged backgrounds are likely to be able to put time into learning the right kind of parenting methods and into implementing them that would increase the probability of their children going to university. This is not to say that other kinds of parenting are worse university is not that important in the grander scheme of things and there are far more important things for parents to focus on imparting to their children.

However parenting is hard (yes I find the idea slightly scary) and if there are things which can be taught which do help then they should be taught to those who want to learn them – people only get one childhood and it is important to get it right.

So in summary yes we should be doing better than we are but there are limits to how well we can do (and these limits are very hard to calculate and as limits can only be tended towards). It is unhelpful to say “lets just do reverse discrimination and hope this causes the private school system to collapse in a heap” that doesn’t solve the problem of differences in the quality of education provided by different schools it just gives middle class people even more angst about choosing schools for their little darlings. It causes sillyness like children going to state schools to increase their chances of getting into a good university but actually being taught by private tutors “off the record” which just make inequality harder to measure without actually solving this.

Again please bear with the fact that this won’t actually communicate what I want it to and is eminently capable of being misunderstood. Sorry. However I hope you can see through that to what I really mean.

(Yes as a Guardian reading lefty who went to two different private schools for my secondary education there is some ‘guilt’ that I have been given a better start in life than most people and so all I have had to do is make the effort to tuck in to the plate placed in front of me rather than having to go and fill the plate first. I do try and make an effort to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds through various different mechanisms – but that doesn’t stop my private sixth form school from asking me back to help their pupils but then they gave me a scholarship so I owe them something as well.)

The Peterhouse JCR is currently holding a vote on the current occupation of the University Combination Room by students of the University.

In the process of deciding how to vote on that issue I should consider the demands that the occupiers are making and so that follows.

1. That the University completely oppose the increase in fees, fight against it and fight against all cuts to education, and use its influence to oppose the spending review’s threat to education, welfare, health, and other public services.

I think that the issue here is that it is not sufficient to simply oppose increases in fees it is necessary to coherently explain an alternative solution. Now the University does have influence but it is not an overt one – it is a behind the scenes one and so while I expect that the University is working behind the scenes to do what is best for the University and for Universities in general it probably won’t tell us when and how because diplomacy of that sort doesn’t work like that. With the latter points on welfare, health and other public services – the University is not a political entity. Its purpose is education and research not political change. Members of the University should indeed be encouraged to campaign for things which they believe in and to make their voices heard in government but that does not mean that the University itself can express one particular view and support it.

2. That the University use its influence to fight for free education for all.

There are principles here which I agree with but I think this statement too general in that it includes things I would disagree with. For example if students have parents who clearly can and will pay for their children’s university education then they probably should as this means more money available for those who can’t. (I am in the category of people who’s parents could and indeed do pay). Also if this ‘education’ doesn’t involve actually spending >40 hours a week working on said education (during term) then it is rather pointless and should probably not be paid for in full by the government as it it probably counts as an extended holiday. [1]

3. That the University acknowledge and take steps to combat the systemic inequality of access to this elitist institution and the danger of its intensification posed by the scrapping of EMA, a rise in tuition fees and removal of programs such as Aim Higher.

Here I worry as to the definition of elitist being used. Certainly Cambridge only accepts students with the best academic ability and so discriminates on the basis of academic merit and that is what it should do. However I fear that the definition being used here relates to discrimination on the basis of background. Cambridge does not do that. Cambridge is not elitist under that definition. It once was but it is no longer – we have moved on and so I don’t think that Cambridge could now acknowledge that it is an ‘elitist institution’ because that would be a lie. Yes Cambridge is greatly concerned to ensure that no financial hardship prevents or hinders students from studying at Cambridge but anyone at Cambridge knows that it is exemplary in doing so and provides bursaries and financial support better than that available anywhere else. I am confident that the University will maintain these bursaries and other financial support at whatever level is necessary. Hence I think this point is rather pointless in that it asks the University to admit a line and to do what it is already doing.

4. That the University declare it will never privatise.

This is a rather odd point. Yes I can see that there would be large issues which would need to be addressed before the University could privatise (in particular relating to access and funding) but it would be foolish to for the University to state that at no point in the life of the University will it privatise. In the hundreds of years of history which may yet lie in the future of this University circumstances may change such that privatising is the right thing to do. For a large proportion of its past the University was private and outside (at least to an extent) of the influence of government there are many things that the University has gained through being funded by the government but we can’t be sure that all future governments will not try and do something which would be detrimental to the University to the extent that the University was forced to privatise to avoid it.

5. That the University commit to ensure the autonomy of education from corporate interests.

What this means is not well defined. Yes education should not be commercialised – it is of intrinsic value to society quite apart from its standard economic impacts. However not all influence from all companies is necessarily bad just as not all influence from governments is necessarily good. Both can be both good and bad at different times and on different areas and it would be naive to exclude companies from all influence for all time. Yes they should never be allowed to run the University or its courses but they may at times be able to provide things of value and so can’t be ignored completely.

6. That the University recognise UCU (University & College Union). We urge post-graduates, academics and all university staff to unionise.

This seems rather irrelevant to the issue at hand. Yes unions have value and can serve a useful purpose however since the University is (or at least should be) run by the academics in a perfect world there would be no need for them to unionise as they are their own managers. My main concern with this point is that it is offtopic and to an extent partisan – unfortunately not all students like unions and hence making one of the points involve unions is not going to increase support. As far as I know the UCU has been fairly sensible and if I were at some point to be eligible for membership I would probably join. However some unions have done eminently stupid things at various points including the recent past which has unfortunately tarred all unions.

7. That the University ensure that no students who take part in any form of peaceful protest will face disciplinary action.

Here I agree save for that stipulation that I define peaceful to also include not causing damage to property as well as people. Should people commit criminal offences[0] while protesting then they will of course remain liable for the consequences of their actions.

8. That the University urge Gonville and Caius College to open their library, and allow Caius Students full access. (mission accomplished)

Of course I agree with this – I think the Caius rather silly to have closed it in the first place yes the conservative offices were rather badly damaged but Cambridge students are not in that kind a of a rage with Caius or the Caius library and suitable access controls could have been placed on it to prevent anything bad from occurring.

So in conclusion while agree with some of the demands raised and with the right of students to peaceful protest and consider that it is a good thing that they are doing this protest (and would indeed stand in front of tanks that they retain this right) I disagree with a sufficient number of their demands sufficiently strongly that I can’t support this protest. If they were occupying the local Conservative or Lib Dem headquarters then I would come visit, bring cake and ask what their proposals are for an alternative mechanism for funding University properly. (Clearly what we are being given is suboptimal but it is not sufficient to criticise it is also necessary to present an alternative).

[0]: Here I would also specify further that the laws under which these offences are committed are also good laws we have had quite a few rather bad ones in recent years. In the eyes of the law this is of course irrelevant but to my eyes it matters a lot.
[1]: If it doesn’t take three years of working really really hard then it is not a degree and should not be treated as such – instead it should be compressed into a shorter period of time such that that time is spent working really really hard and then it should be called a Diploma and offered by polytechnics – but I digress.