2. What was going on from the very beginning at MLE was that government and some other, let’s say, nationalists, pushed to prefer people of certain nationality when hiring researchers. That’s not only illegal, it’s also against the spirit of a European lab. And in a truly European lab, you wouldn’t expect to see more than a small percentage of Irish researchers. But it was a fact that more than just a few Irish and British people worked there. So it’s not just been an important lab – quite a few researchers were locals. If we want Europe to grow together and to have pan-European institutions, we have to accept that these institutions will follow a European spirit, and not the one present locally. And it was Media Lab EUROPE, and not Media Lab Ireland. That’s something most of the Irish people I have talked to failed to acknowledge.

3. The cost-benefit ratio of Negropontes concept of blue-sky- and rarely well-evaluated research seems appallingly bad. That was one of the reasons why MLE failed.

The model, as I understand it was that corporate sponsors would provide the income. The sponsors in return would be allowed full access to the research that was produced.

I don’t think it’s fair to just slag off all the work that was done. There were problems with it, but if everybody knew the best way to do this stuff, well then we wouldn’t need research, would we?

Most academics seem to live in a kind of Never-never land and MLE seemed to be some kind of Happy Hunting Ground for them. In technology, the academics are almost always years behind the state of the art. The reason for this is typically that the research of the industry is always directed. For example during the piracy of the satellite tv channels in the 1990s when all those secure smartcards were being broken, the academic community was still publishing papers on secure systems and some of them seemed to think that the models and systems that were being broken were still secure. There was a famous Intellectual Property/Copyright court case in Dublin where they had to get some expert witnesses who had not seen the pirate source code/program for defeating one of those systems – where did they find them? Why they dug up some people with excellent academic qualifications. But even at that stage, the code that was at the centre of the case was about two years old – a life time in terms of technology.

As regards MLE being Media Lab Europe, well I guess that the well intentioned people in the Irish government of the time were the only Europeans stupid enough to pay for it. They saw it as the bait for bigger and more efficient operations that would employ thousands. And in a way it worked.

If MLE had been a good operation, which it was not, then it would have been necessary to hire the best people regardless of nationality.

There is a good phrase to describe Negroponte et al – “Cargo Cult Science”. It is not blue-sky research at all. The process of invention is a highly Darwinian one and what does not work, or does not succeed, gets dropped. When I read of all this happy-clappy “rethinking” rubbish, it is not hard to think that these people understood neither invention or technology. They were just being “creative”. It was as if MLE was trying to turn back the evolution of technology.

It was as if the nasty meme of Political Correctness had been applied to science and technology and the final test of whether something worked replaced with some imprecise value of how “creative” it appeared to others of that ilk. I still wonder if Swift had seen the future of the area near where he lived. The Grand Academy of Lagado is such a good satire of the MLE and it even had Negroponte too.

Regards…jmcc

Having a rant about academia adds very little to the discussion. Whatever else can be said about it, MLE was certainly not run like a typical academic institution.

It’s quite easy to knock, but it’s harder to come up with a better idea for how to get things done.

I’ve written (well, brain-dumped) more about it on my blog: http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2005/01/mle-is-dead-long-live-research-in.php