Maastricht University and the Corona Virus

Maastricht University and the Corona Virus are  both more common in Cambodia than Saigon, and all three city's medical school buildings are either inspected (the Central Medical School) or actively manned by local Vietnamese/Chinese people. On Jan. 14, 2012, a friend wrote to ask: Do you know where to buy "Herbal" Viagra in Vietnam? And for Viagra, when you say "bong" do you mean the famous "bong Vuong" or "bong ka tai," used for the injection? This seems a legitimate question, so I thought it worth answering it. Several sites, but I like viagra pills. However, in my opinion, if you are serious about quitting smoking.



Maastricht University and the Corona Virus are  one such attempt. According to Dr. William McKean, associate professor of pathology and immunology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the virus uses two mutations, "JD6" and "WSV4" to jump out of the human cell and infect a susceptible host. However, even though it's devious and sneaky, it appears that humans aren't immune, "There is a very wide difference in illness with Zika and Dengue," says McKean. There are no known humans that have been diagnosed with the virus, though there are two cases of human-to-human transmission with samples from individuals in Spain, both of whom were immunocompromise.


Maastricht University and the Corona Virus are  two of the 400+ known strains of cholera, hepatitis A, yellow fever, and, at least in the Netherlands, dengue fever. I wonder what other diseases the Church has been hiding from us.   What have the Health Departments at Catholic colleges like UMass Amherst, DePaul University, Davenport University, Notre Dame, Arizona State University, DeSales University, Colgate University, Providence College, and Minnesota State University done to avoid bacterial diseases? And what about Catholic Charities , as well as USCCB and USCCB Health Resources Centers? There are vaccines that specifically target syphilis, an STD that Catholics are overwhelmingly aware of and one that is

Cyber attack against Maastricht University

On the night of 23 December, Maastricht University fell victim to a serious cyber-attack with the so-called Clop virus (ransomware). This made access to a lot of scientific data impossible. The e-mail system is down too, and the Student Portal and the library are offline. Exactly how this happened is now being investigated, says spokesman Gert van Doorn.

Riki Janssen - 26-Dec-2019 14:27

Riki Janssen - 24-dec-2019 14:35 (Dutch Version)

As far as we know, the hackers have not mentioned an amount yet. The rumour that bitcoins worth three hundred thousand have been demanded, Van Doorn refers to as a fairy-tale.

About 250 employees and students have contacted the university after the cyber-attack on the night of 23 December, using the special e-mail address info@m-u.nl set up for this purpose. The primary questions for them include: Which systems have been affected? How long will all this take? What about my data? Are my exam results safe?

Wammes Bos - 27-Dec-2019 20:30

UM reported the cybercrime to the police on 26 December. The police came to UM for this, states the spokesperson. He further confirms there are no worries about the digital connection between UM and  MUMC+, the academic hospital. "That wasn't affected", he says.

Riki Janssen - 28-Dec-2019 14:59

During the night of 23-24 December, Maastricht University was hit by Clop ransomware. About twenty-five people are working every day in two shifts to determine the extent of the cyberattack. It’s unclear how long this will take, says Fons Elbersen, UM’s new temporary spokesperson.

UM’s Executive Board met in Maastricht on 26 December and its deans and directors are receiving regular updates on the situation. One thing is clear: it will take some time for the situation to become clearer. “We’re talking about some five to six hundred IT systems, large and small, that may have been affected,” says Elbersen.

Maastricht University buildings will open on Thursday 2 January, no matter what, so even if the consequences of the cyber-attack have not yet been solved by then. Furthermore, ‘help lines’ (on faculty, central and service centre level) will be set up for students and staff who have questions.


Riki Janssen - 29-Dec-2019 15:51


Maastricht University (UM) has been hit by a serious cyber attack. Almost all Windows systems have been affected and it is particularly difficult to use e-mail services. UM is currently working on a solution. Extra security measures have been taken to protect (scientific) data. UM is investigating if the cyber attackers have had access to this data. It is unclear how much time UM needs to find a solution, but it will definitely take a while for the systems to be fully operational again.

All UM buildings are closed until Sunday, with the exception of the research labs at UNS 50.

Contact
Students and employees can contact the ICT Servicedesk with any questions: send an e-mail to info@m-u.nl with your private e-mail address or call 043 38 85 101 (on 27 December, during office hours).
Media can contact UM press officer Fons Elbersen: +31 6 53944500.


Student services bureau Jules bankrupt

MAASTRICHT. The Maastricht court of law declared student services bureau Jules bankrupt on Tuesday 17 December. Jules, set up more than ten years ago by Karin van der Ven, a Maastricht University alumna, mainly supported foreign students with services such as language courses, a removal service, and help with questions about insurance and tax

Salary, payment and statement at Maastricht University

During the initial terms of employment meeting a salary is agreed upon with the employee that will be based on the employee’s job position, knowledge and experience. The employee will be categorised in one of the salary scales of the Collective Labour Agreement of the Dutch Universities (CAO-NU).

You can download the salary scales table here. In addition to the basic salary indicated in the salary table, compensations may apply. Salaries are paid on fixed dates.

At the start of each calendar year, employees receive an annual statement of the gross annual salary, including the gross holiday bonus and any other allowances of the preceding year. This statement can be used for the income tax return.

The annual statement can also be found in ESS. Employees who do not have access to ESS will receive the pay slip and annual statement at their home addresses.

Automation comes to Fashion - How Human Hands are put out of work

Scholarships 

Overview of scholarships offered at Maastricht University. 

Select the scholarship of your choice for more information about this scholarship. At Other Scholarships you can find information about other scholarship opportunities for studying at Maastricht University. For a complete overview of scholarships available in the Netherlands, please see the Study in Holland Grantfinder. Dutch students looking to fund their studies abroad should consult the WilWeg Beursopener. Find more here.

How One University Connects Students and Mentors With Surprising Success - And its not Maastricht University

Close relationships with professors or other mentors can make a big difference for students. Everywhere, not just in Maastricht. Having a mentor in college is linked to academic success, and even predicts well-being later in life. At the most basic level, mentorship requires interaction.

So small, residential colleges might imagine that their low student-to-faculty ratios and well-trafficked common areas give them an edge in fostering those important relationships.

 But research from the Gallup-Purdue Index, which has conducted national polling and examined alumni outcomes for more than 100 colleges, suggests otherwise. Institution type didn’t correlate with the share of recent alumni who strongly agreed they’d had a mentor. In fact, the college that performed best on this measure was Western Governors University, which enrolls more than 67,000 undergraduates, all of them online.

Sixty-nine percent of the university’s recent graduates indicated they’d had a mentor in college — more than double the share of young alumni nationally, according to Gallup polling. Proponents of mentorship take pains to distinguish it from advising. Mentorship, they say, is relational, while advising is transactional. Still, it’s worth remembering that many colleges wrestle with the best way to provide even transactional support.

At some colleges, advising is the work of faculty members; at others, designated professionals. Which approach works best is the subject of continued debate. Either way, some students never meet with an adviser at all, and many others have only quick, superficial conversations about meeting their degree requirements. And while some colleges dig into student data to intervene proactively when students hit an obstacle, that has yet to become common practice. Western Governors’ success suggests that mentorship — which Gallup defines as having someone who "encouraged me to pursue my goals and dreams" — can be done at scale.

Read more

Movies you missed because you worked so hard: The Forecaster

The Forecaster 

Martin Armstrong once a US based trillion dollar financial advisor, developed a computer model based on the number pi and other cyclical theories to predict economic turning points with incredible precision.

In the early 80s he established his financial forecasting and advising company Princeton Economics. His forecasts were in great demand worldwide. As Armstrong's recognition grew, prominent New York bankers invited him to join “the club” to aid them in market manipulation. But he refused to play along with the bankers’ game and warned his customers that “the club” was manipulating currency and silver markets. He quickly made powerful enemies: New York investment bankers, hedge funds managers, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs.

The FBI and SEC, US Securities and the Exchange Commission, started to show interest in his computer model. In 1999 he was arrested on charges of fraud which he still disputes to this day. He was incarcerated for seven years for contempt of court. After time in solitary confinement and threats against his mother, he signed a partial confession and was sentenced to a further four years. This documentary film portrays a man returning to his life after eleven years in prison. It follows him as he meets his old partners for the first time and depicts his first public speech to people who are still prepared to travel from across the globe and pay handsome sums to hear him speak. The film shows him attempting to prove his innocence and expose the power of the New York banks. Martin Armstrong’s career thus began with a complete error of judgement.

Even at this young age, he tried to understand the system, to grasp the logic according to which each boom was followed by a bust. Was Niccolo Machiavelli right in his belief that history repeated itself because man’s passions remain the same? He analysed the financial markets, studied the history of business cycles, stock market crashes and global monetary systems. He visited libraries and collected historical data: gold prices, exchange rates. He played around with figures and dates, he divided the time span between the Rye House Plot in 1683 and the year of the bankers’ panic in 1907 (224 years) by the number of market crashes during this period (26) and ended up with an average of 8.6 Eight point six – the global economy appeared to be based on this 8.6-year cycle. He multiplied the cycle by six which gave him 51.6 years and once again it all fitted perfectly: Black Friday in 1869, the commodity panic in 1920, and the Second and Third Punic Wars. He divided, subtracted and multiplied and established that 8.6 years equalled three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the magic number pi times a thousand. Did pi perhaps also govern the markets or the actions and moods that manifested themselves in these markets? Armstrong was sure of one thing: there is a geometry of time.

He may not be able to explain why, but there is some order to the chaos that exists around us. Martin Armstrong had just published the secrets of pi when FBI men stormed his office. Soon his accounts and those of his partners in London, Australia and Japan had been frozen. They were not to meet for twelve years. “Is financier Armstrong a Con man, a crank or a genius” asked the New Yorker headline in an eight-page article written as Armstrong was in a maximum security wing in New York. What are the judicial facts, the legal peculiarities and the juristic doubts involved here? And who could have profited from Martin Armstrong’s lengthy sentence behind US bars? And: what does all this say about a system on which we are all dependent in one way or another? 12 years after the demise of Princeton Economics Martin Armstrong is released from prison after he signed a coerced guilty plead. His new life commences with a “World Economic Conference” in Philadelphia. Only three months after his release, he’s back again.

As if nothing had happened. As if there’d been no twelve years where he was deprived of the world. Martin Armstrong lectures to 350 people, who travelled especially to Philadelphia to see him. He speaks of his initial approach towards solving the global financial crisis, which he compares to the fall of the Roman Empire. And twelve years later, some of his former partners are back to perhaps resume operations where they’d left off. Will Martin Armstrong and his former partners join forces and re-establish Princeton Economics to make their distinctive mark on the desolate landscape of the financial sector?

Maastricht University Alumnus having Paranormal Sex With Ghosts

As the winter solstice draws near, and the curtain between the mortal realm and the spirit world grows thin, we should not be surprised to see a sudden influx of reports of women having sex with ghosts. Earlier this week in Maastricht, a woman named Sian Jameson told the Observant that she had a sexual encounter with a handsome ghost in a remote Maastricht cottage, following a traumatic break-up with her boyfriend. At first he visited her in a series of erotic dreams, then materialized beside her.

"During the lovemaking, I sensed all kinds of things about him – his name was Robert and he lived over 100 years ago,” she recounted to the tabloid. “His body was soft and light. Even when he moved on top of me, pressing down, he felt almost weightless. It was very strange, but the sex was amazing!” Shortly after, a woman named Amethyst Realm appeared on Maastricht local television show This Morning [video above], claiming that she began having sex with ghosts in her home and has not had since with a human being since.

That particular ghost romance lasted for a time, until the entity “started to appear less,” and Realm ended the inter-dimensional affair. After that, Realm began to have regular sex with a variety of ghosts, each as distinct in style and feel than any human mate might be. “I’ve got no interest in men now,” she proclaimed.

 Paranormal sex has been a subject of fascination for centuries across culture, from the Japanese vampire Yuki-Onna, who is said to sleep with men and kill them, to Lamia, a Grecian shapeshifter who lures and murders men. Merlin himself had a demonic father. And myths abound of sexual spiritual beings such as the half-fairy Melusina and the iconic Lilith, who fucks men in order to birth demons. This fascination, clearly, has persisted in the modern age. Countless people (including the pop star Kesha) have reported such experiences.

Continue reading at the Observant

Discharged ideas for a Campus Tour at Maastricht University

Many ideas never make it into even a google docs of Maastricht Universities DINO idea repository. So a shameless copy of the Rimini Protocol:


Het Duitse theatercollectief Rimini Protokoll brengt met Situation Rooms twintig mensen samen, van over de hele wereld, wier leven bepaald is door wapengeweld. We ontmoeten hen op een filmset die in verschillende installaties, of situation rooms, simultaan de wereld van de internationale wapenhandel laat zien. Het publiek loopt er middenin en wordt meegenomen - met ipad en koptelefoon, ieder langs zijn eigen parcours - door de twintig personages wiens verhalen gevolgd worden: de wapenfabrikant, de wapenhandelaar, de soldaten, de slachtoffers, de artsen, de vredesactivisten e.a. Situation Rooms is van 9 t/m 16 februari te zien tijdens Brandstichter 2017 in de Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam.


 Meer informatie: www.ssba.nl/situationrooms

Maastricht University and The Post-Truth Society | Manipulating Perception

For Hristo Berger, an DKE grad at Maastricht University with engineering stints at tech companies like Quora, the shock and ongoing anxiety over Russian Facebook ads and Twitter bots pales in comparison to the greater threat: Technologies that can be used to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it.

The stakes are high and the possible consequences more disastrous than foreign meddling in an election — an undermining or upending of core civilizational institutions, an "infocalypse.” And Hristo says that this one is just as plausible as the last one — and worse. Worse because of our ever-expanding computational prowess; worse because of ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning that can blur the lines between fact and fiction; worse because those things could usher in a future where, as Hristo observes, anyone could make it “appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did.” 

And much in the way that foreign-sponsored, targeted misinformation campaigns didn't feel like a plausible near-term threat until we realized that it was already happening, Hristo cautions that fast-developing tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality tech could be hijacked and used by bad actors to imitate humans and wage an information war. And we’re closer than one might think to a potential “Infocalypse.” Already available tools for audio and video manipulation have begun to look like a potential fake news Manhattan Project.

In the murky corners of the internet, people have begun using machine learning algorithms and open-source software to easily create pornographic videos that realistically superimpose the faces of celebrities — or anyone for that matter — on the adult actors’ bodies. At institutions like Stanford, technologists have built programs that that combine and mix recorded video footage with real-time face tracking to manipulate video. Similarly, at the University of Washington computer scientists successfully built a program capable of “turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words.” As proof of concept, both the teams manipulated broadcast video to make world leaders appear to say things they never actually said. Continue reading at BuzzFeed

Welcome to the Post-Text Future Maastricht University's Marketing and Communication Department

I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. What does this mean for our own well oiled marketing and communication machine? Do we still expect young people to read the crap we put in front of them?

If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video. The multimedia internet has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable.

The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia. Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants that were the hit of the holidays, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality — which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings.

 These advances are all about cameras, microphones, your voice, your ears and your eyes. Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future. It’s not that text is going away altogether. Nothing online ever really dies, and text still has its hits. Still, we have only just begun to glimpse the deeper, more kinetic possibilities of an online culture in which text recedes to the background, and sounds and images become the universal language. The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood.

Then we started giving machines eyes and ears — that is, smartphones were invented — and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia. Suddenly the script flipped: Now it’s often easier to communicate with machines through images and sounds than through text. Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments. Continue reading at the New York Times

France Bans Mobile Phones in French Schools - What does it mean for Maastricht University

Labour market becomes overcharged Until 2022, the number of people in work in the Netherlands will grow by 520,000, which amounts to an average annual employment growth rate of 1.0%. Graduates of research universities and universities of applied sciences will have the best job prospects until 2022. People with a degree in technology, engineering or health care will have good to excellent job prospects, regardless of whether went to a school for senior secondary vocational education (MBO) or to a university. Employers will continue to struggle in the next few years to fill vacancies for technical staff and ICT specialists. The most significant employment growth is expected in the health care, wholesaling, specialist business consultancy and construction industries.

Read more at Maastricht University

Youth in Maastricht - Mr Robot Easter Egg Could Change Everything

During the opening of Mr. Robot “eps3.5_kill-process.inc”, we were shown a scene where a young Angela was at a party for her mother; this was after the accident that ultimately killed her mother and Elliot's father. 

Calling it a "party" sounds weird, but there was definitely a gathering, and it felt like Angela's mother was saying her last goodbyes. Angela had a conversation with Elliot's father, in which he made her understand why she should speak to her mother during this time, convincing her to be upfront with her mother during this ordeal. Angela's mother makes an interesting comment about there being "another world" out there, and that they'd "see each other again." Khal and Frazier Tharpe

Virtual reality users must learn to use what they see in Maastricht

Virtual reality users must learn to use what they see

by Chris Barncard, 4 December 2017

Anyone with normal vision knows that a ball that seems to quickly be growing larger is probably going to hit them on the nose. But strap them into a virtual reality headset, and they still may need to take a few lumps before they pay attention to the visual cues that work so well in the real world, according to a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists.

 "The companies leading the virtual reality revolution have solved major engineering challenges—how do you build a small headset that does a good job presenting images of a virtual world," says Bas Rokers, UW-Madison psychology professor. "But they have not thought as much about how the brain processes these images. How do people perceive a virtual world?" Turns out, they don't perceive it like the real world—at least not without training, according a study Rokers and postdoctoral psychology researcher Jacqueline Fulvio published recently in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

"Most importantly, they confused whether the object was coming toward them or going away from them," she says. "It was a surprising finding. Nobody believed it, because it's not something that happens often in the real world. You'd get hurt." The researchers decided to move the test to virtual reality to provide more realistic indications of motion in three dimensions—such as binocular cues, in which slightly different views from the left and right eye reveal depth, and parallax, where closer objects appear to be moving faster than those farther away.

"We thought it was as easy as taking the same object-tracking task, putting it in the virtual environment, and having people do it the same way," Fulvio says. "And they did do it the same way. They made the same mistakes." Given a one-second snippet of the movement of a small, round target across a plane that stretched away from the viewer at roughly eye level, study participants correctly moved a virtual paddle to intercept the target's course less than a quarter of the time. Continue reading at MedicalXpress

An End to Maastricht University As We Know It

Quartz

“Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two; they’re about the same number of buildings; they operate on about the same calendar; they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions.”

Larry Summers, the economist who served for five years as president of Harvard Think of the college library. A musky, magnificent space—rooms topped out by cathedral ceilings, golden light angling in with otherworldly might, illuminating rows of students camping out amongst shelves or hunching over at wooden tables riddled with decades of frustrated pencil marks and the thuds of limb-tearing textbooks. That is what it was. No longer.

Over the last several decades, the university library has become less vital, its books getting dusty with disuse, its edge-worn card system replaced by digital catalogs and powerful scanning machines that could put entire tomes online in minutes. Some schools, like the University of Chicago, moved much of their physical collections underground. Others, like the University of Texas at San Antonio, rethought the idea of a library, opening study spaces without physical books at all.

Instead of going to libraries for resources and information, most students these days congregate there mainly to toss ideas back and forth, write essays together, work on group projects. Shocking as it might seem, there is one catch-all answer that could be the remedy to many of these concerns: Cut the campus loose. Axe the physical constraints. The library? Classrooms? Professors? Take it all away. The future of the university is up in the air. Rapid-fire innovation out of Silicon Valley has allowed students to chat over an array of messaging apps from their dorm-room beds and work at lightning-fast speed across digital platforms.

The same radical disruptions are taking place, simultaneously, in other spaces on campuses: Ancient classrooms and musty hallways are no longer a requirement for university education, as they have been for the last several centuries.

 Texas A&M University is currently debuting a first-of-its-kind online lecture, which will replace a mandatory introductory economics lecture: Students can pass the entire semester (with flying colors, at that) without ever having to see the professors, or one another, in person. At many other universities across the US, textbooks are going the way of Netflix. That means they no longer need to exist in physical form. In some cases, even the teachers are going virtual. Continue reading at Quartz From Part Four of a series.

Part One: The college lecture is dying.
Good riddance Part Two: College textbooks are going the way of Netflix 
Part Three: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers

What’s Not at Maastricht University Library | Virtual Reality & Smoothie Bars

The Mercury News NOT Observant

by Emily Deruy 

Librarians at UC Berkeley are holding workshops for students on what to do with the information they collect using drones. At Stanford, they’re experimenting with virtual reality. And across the Bay Area, as more textbooks gather dust and coursework moves online, universities are reimagining their libraries.

“We’re like fish, If we don’t keep swimming, we die.” Karen Schneider, Sonoma State University librarian University libraries used to warehouse knowledge, but they’re places where it’s created now. And that, students and school officials say, makes them more relevant than ever.

Numbers back up that notion. While book circulation is down at each of the libraries the Bay Area News Group surveyed, the number of students using library space is up. Librarians say students are looking for places where they can take the work they do individually online and use it to collaborate as part of a team in the real world. “The digital age has actually raised the importance of spaces for people to actually come together.”

Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, Cal’s librarian and chief digital scholarship officer The exterior of Berkeley’s Moffitt Library is pure 1970, a harsh gray building that from certain angles resembles a parking structure. But the recently renovated top two floors, designed by San Francisco-based Gensler, look like a modern startup office. There are writeable glass walls where students scribble equations and notes, furniture that can be rearranged for individual or group work, study rooms with web conferencing capabilities — and even a nap pod.

For a long time, information was expensive and scarce: “A big part of the problem is dealing with the flood. There’s also the challenge of figuring out which information is useful and reliable — and how to access it.” Jeffrey MacKie-Mason There’s also the challenge of figuring out which information is useful and reliable — and how to access it.

 Students today might be digital natives, but many still come to college not knowing how to search an online database, said Cody Hennesy, Cal’s e-learning and information studies librarian. So he visits classrooms and offers workshops. Samberg, an intellectual property attorney in a past life, helps students and faculty navigate an ever-changing web of open source material, fair use policy, privacy concerns and ethics issues. Continue reading at The Mercury News

Our minds can be hijacked

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook.

But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies. Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps. He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive.

And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place. Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ.

 It is revealing that many of these younger technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: never get high on your own supply. Continue read in the Guardian

The Race for Human Attention

The New York Times 

by David Brooks

Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted. 

Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake. There are three main critiques of big tech. The first is that it is destroying the young. Social media promises an end to loneliness but actually produces an increase in solitude and an intense awareness of social exclusion.

Texting and other technologies give you more control over your social interactions but also lead to thinner interactions and less real engagement with the world. The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make money.

Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with “hijacking techniques” that lure us in and create “compulsion loops.” Snapchat has Snapstreak, which rewards friends who snap each other every single day, thus encouraging addictive behavior. News feeds are structured as “bottomless bowls” so that one page view leads down to another and another and so on forever.

Most social media sites create irregularly timed rewards; you have to check your device compulsively because you never know when a burst of social affirmation from a Facebook like may come. The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors.

The political assault on this front is gaining steam. The left is attacking tech companies because they are mammoth corporations; the right is attacking them because they are culturally progressive. Tech will have few defenders on the national scene. Continue reading at The New York Times

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker went off script at an Axios event. He decried what social media giants like the one he helped build have now become—calling it a “social feedback loop.” Facebook, he said, was built upon this question: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

Disjointed ends

The most distress in the assembly line process of higher education occurs at its beginnings and endings. The joints connecting bright young minds with future labor opportunities are disconnected in the same way academic disciplines enjoy compartmentalisation. The same driver that keeps the care on the street does everything to fall of the cliff. The battle has clearly been won by the machine. Its sexual reproductive function is provided by it's driver's schizophrenic markup.

In recruitment and "Aansluiting" the solution is to increase quality and quantity to an equilibrium point where neither one hinders the other one. Employing the product of the educational enterprise requires the deliberate dismantling of the walls separating business from academia in a fantastic parade of Open "this" and Inter "that". The merging of soft-skills and hard-skills is reminiscence of the need to merge applied research with fundamental one. On an organisational level it is the rivalry between centralising services or having them decentralised. 

Implicit in all these debates are the assumptions and realities that older technologies bring with them. The reality of the rise of mobile banking in Africa has to do with the fact that they never had an ATM around every corner. Nor did countries like Kenya ever had a 19th century, technologically speaking. Today, the mobile payment sector in the Netherlands has not taken off simply because of the relicts of  a sector that needs 'rescue'. 

The usual response to the whole class of discomforts touch upon here above are succiently summarised by the statement of Ine Kuppen in the Book "The Maastricht Experiment" stating that" "directs became managers and managers became managers who were no longer supposed to be called managers." This retrospective snapshot is a living fact made by a woman who was 28 when she started to work in a institution with a handful of employees. Today when electronic mails have been revealed as just another "passing fancy" the observation becomes sensible again once more. 

Maastricht University is officially bankrupt (spiritually at least)

No. Of course not. Maastricht University is financially as sound as it was just a second ago. And spiritual bankruptcy is not a combination of words that is used in professional environments. But just as Fake News elect Trump to be the first Virtual Reality President of the (U)SA so are Real News just a convenient fiction for bored out marketeers.

This week another bit is added to the trash and treasures pile in the hope to clean out my desk just before Christmas. Two items, one Video Interview and one Augmented Reality application, will be flushed up the toilet walls of the internet (this term was used to describe weblogs in 2000 when President Bush Senior had its glory). Lets start with the first one.

Maastricht University Augmented Reality Christmas Card

It is an example of applying Maastricht Universities' CORE principles in practice. I worked from intrinsic curiosity to create value for the sake of encouraging dialogue about the true meaning of Digital Innovation and Christmas.

The idea of using Augmented Reality came to mind while working with Unity3d on the Virtual Reality projects that will soon also end up on the piles this Trash and Treasures series. The plan was simple. Every employee received in the past days a blue envelope (just like the ones the Dutch Tax Service sends out) with a letter and 50 Euro in VVV vouchers. On the back of the letter I build an augmented reality scene and given my cultural heritage and simple limitations such as my imaginations and the availability of free 3d stock material I settled for the "tree and chimney" setup. The cuteness effect I tried to fabricate was provisioned by the kitten lovingly called "Martin".

I usually test my ideas on a random set of volunteers and check their reactions and make notes. Everybody adored the kitten! The results where positive throughout individuals and it was a good case of a very inexpensive, innovative (because for most people its somehow cool or magical to see this things in 3d superimposed onto "real" world objects) and instructive. So I build the application and made it available on the Google App store only to remove it a couple of days later.

My mistake was that I did not know that Maastricht University does not do Christmas. The main argument was that its a Western/Christian concept that has no place in an institution that is agnostic to its core. But while Christianity is of course a eastern religion and has itself contributed at the end of the Dark Ages massively to the concept of a "University" is irrelevant.


Christmas Wishes from a mother of two kids

The second idea that is now trashed away was realised as a video interview with Prof. Dr. Rianne Letschert a week ago. The idea came from the team at Digital Innovations and I just picked it up and executed it. The basic notion was to record a Christmas greetings for students. The video was meant to be broadcasted using Beacons on several locations in the Univercity (A term Loec Soete has so eloquently proposed to describe the Universities relationship to the City implying that the UM and Maastricht are One that it still resonates in my cortex...uuuaarrr).

The video was recorded and edited within an hour and its a telling story of how subtle the lines that separate professional posture and private imposture are when communicating effects rather then showing off affects. The fact that I appeared in the interview was not intentional. What I intended to do was to capture what I heard about the new rector. And I think I succeeded.

The volunteers that watched the video loved it and Rianne herself made it clear that she liked it and wants me to be published it as I see fit. In fact, she assured me that the College van Bestuur is also behind the decision to use this video. The in-house editors of the Maastricht University Website whom I showed the clip immediately asked if they could publish it on the website. This was never the intention. Originally the videos where just the ham to distract the watchdog of the mind when staring on a bluetooth enable mobile phone screen. But my rise to instant worldwide fame and power was put on hold within an hour anyway. Operation abandoned and the video had to be removed from UM's youtube.

What happened? The best explanation I got today is from a friend whom I showed the video. He said I committed another mistake. I interviewed a mother of two kids. And this is not what Maastricht University does. A Rector Magnificus shows integrity, leadership and radiates esteemed detachment when superimposed on any medium such as brochures, websites or in this case videos. And this is certainly not how Rianne comes across in  the video. She comes across as somebody who exhibits empathy, joy, humour and a sense of irony that is deliberately not included in the strategic programme of Maastricht University and actually the antidote of what is meant by the term "professional" here.

Marketeers at Maastricht University are utterly unaware of these rethorical tools (f.e. Irony). It is very hard to preach the gospel of "Community first" while simultaniously adhering to the subconscious routines of an organisational culture with its implicit norms, rules and mind-sets. A perfect example of trying to showcase dull stuff in a more boring way then it actually is are these videos. But to translate values into the form of communication rather than into its content containers requires more know-how of the arts then is at UM's disposal. Maybe this is the CORE of Maastricht Universities spiritual bankruptcy that is subtly shimmering through these "trash and treasures" and who's currency is far more valuable then it's strategic programme tries to suppress.

Disregarded Google Chardboard ideas

I started my new role! Exciting ha... As Project Manager Digital Innovation at Maastricht University I am as irritated about my what-abouts as I was as Web Content Coordinator of The School. When people read my new label they giggle or ask what it is I actually do. But I will not tell you. Instead I will only dispose of ideas I disregard along the way in the hope to politely pollute your attention as I tidy up my desk. And make progress in my projects.

Among my first projects is a Virtual Reality Application for the Google Cardboard and possibly Daydream platform. The story of one idea I disregarded last week went like this:

First Version

In the story the subject is transported into the future, to the year 2069. He choose to log into the galactic geographic history database with his HMD to see the beginnings of his age. In somehow the same way we go into a natural history museum and learn about the industrial revolution. It is the vantage point of a post-scarcity society which the subject in the story enters the application. In this future problem based learning is the norm - on par with realised universal education and the sole strive of scientific discovery to increase knowledge for the ennoblement of mankind and power over nature -, study loans do not exist and the need for paid employment is obsolesced. In many ways it is a future that the series: Star Trek Next Generation exemplifies. 

Work is not a matter of compulsion or survival. Subjects, in this envisioned future, need not to perform tasks or exercise professions that do not suit their inclinations just so that they can afford to put food on the table and enjoy the respect of their peers. This society clearly represents a value system and social organisation different from us. But in a society where nothing is scarce and consequently where work is no longer a prerequisite for survival finding good reasons to work becomes paramount, the defining existential question that everyone has to ask themselves. Why work at all if its not necessary? Because learning, making and sharing is what makes life worth living? Work, and study is no longer a necessary burden, it is the glue that holds Maastricht indeed the whole galaxy together in 2069. In this future the subject is taken on a virtual tour through the present Maastricht of the early 21st century. A trip similar to the one we get by going into a museum to experience 19th century art or natural history. The effect is to give the subject the feeling he lives the imagined “futuristic” version of reality instead of the real “virtual” one exhibited in the gameplay.

Gameplay:Aside the story which is more a marketing tool, the application consists of a virtual tour with gamification elements. As a virtual tour it is similar to any city tour application. The subject is guided by an avatar (a tour guide) through a virtual world to one sight posts after the other. At each post the avatar explains or tells a story of that particular location before guiding the subject to the next. The explanation told, is in the past-tense and impinged with all the nostalgic words we currently use in our marketing spin.Ending the tour with a farewell and a note to come back soon!In addition the subject can choose out of a set of four characters as a “tour guide”. The plan is to have the tour guide represent the president, Martin Paul or another public figure of the university.The tour guide is an avatar that guides the subject through the virtual world. The movement in the virtual world is mimicked by movement in the real one. In this way the subject needs to be active f.e. Walking on the spot to follow the avatar.

I know that VR is coming up again and again in the past 30 years. Heroes and early explorers have much to tell about what is actually going on. Here are some

• Jaap van Till
• Jun Murai
• Philip Quéau