[10283] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France, pt.2/3: Grandes Ecoles Symposium, May 27-30
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (PACS-L Moderator)
Mon Jun 17 20:40:00 1996
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 17:46:43 -0500 (CDT)
From: PACS-L Moderator <libpacs@UH.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>From: kessler@well.com
>Subject: FYI France: Grandes Ecoles Symposium, May 27-30 -- part 2 of 3
>
>FYI France: Grandes Ecoles Symposium, May 27-30 -- part 2 of 3
>
>3.0 Day 2 -- Was ist "Multimedia"?, and "Bioengineering"?
>
>Session 3: "Multimedia and Networks"
>
>The second day began, after introductions by co - chairs Litster of MIT
>and Erich Spitz of Thomson, with my own non - demo demo of the Website
>which UC Berkeley's Roy Tennant, and the E.N.S. de Telecommunications'
>Jean - Pierre Tubach and Bertrand Serre mounted for the Symposium.
>
>A "non - demo demo" is a backup which you plan in case the official
>version doesn't work. I learned a lesson watching two masters, John
>Gage and Steve Cisler, long ago: always plan on three levels of "demo"
>backup in hi tech -- something to fall back on in case the "demo"
>doesn't work, and something to fall back on again in case of trouble at
>level 2. In our case we had no live Internet connection this morning at
>Sophia; but I had made printouts of the demo, and Roy had this slide of
>the homepage, so the talk actually went very well -- much favorable
>comment about it, and some resulting email since. People were impressed
>at seeing their own institutions "online" on the WorldWideWeb.
>
>One other note from my own presentation: I gave the audience copies of
>Oracle's very recent "NC / Network Computer" -- I call it "Non -
>Computer" -- press release, suggesting that this late news development
>could "blow away" the personal computer market as currently
>constituted. My own session role is to be what the French call an
>"animateur" -- to animate -- often blended with "provocateur", which
>has much the same ring as the "agent provocateur" of spy novels. My
>"NC" suggestion succeeded both in animating and in provoking: the
>vested interests of the personal computer industry are as strong in
>Europe as they are in the US -- a bit stronger, perhaps. It turns out
>that Oracle's President for World - Wide Operations, Ray Lane, was on
>this same Sophia Antipolis stage saying the same thing only last week.
>And the rumors, anyway, are that he was traveling with someone from
>Netscape named Jim Clark. This thing is developing fast.
>
>Camille Wanat of UC Berkeley then showed a real - life example of how
>the technology could help in daily work. Most of the conference
>attendees are educators -- professors, school administrators -- and all
>are interested in applying digital techniques at their institutions.
>Wanat showed her own engineering library's example of bringing IEEE
>publications to users online. The possibilities for their own libraries
>and schools were mouth - watering for many in the audience. The Grandes
>Ecoles are financially well - endowed, and have good - sized serials
>budgets, while other schools in Europe are not and do not, but all have
>increasing problems in providing information access. Wanat emphasizes
>the importance of mounting a "critical mass" of material of interest to
>users. She says this was the central success factor in her current
>project, and provided its decided advantage over similar predecessors.
>
>J.M. Chaduc of the Ministry of Industry, Post, and Telecommunications
>gave the historical and institutional contexts of my own and Camille's
>presentations. He mentions the Nora - Minc report, the history of
>Minitel, the project to "wire" all of France, the US and French
>"Information Superhighways", the recent Bangemann report calling for
>telecom deregulation, and the dawning problem of developing services to
>provide over all the infrastructure. Hundreds of suggestions were
>received, he says, in response to the 1994 call for "content"
>proposals. He reminds us of the difference between the US set of
>concerns in hi - tech -- private investment, competition, open access,
>flexible regulation, and universal service -- and the priorities of
>Europe -- privacy, intellectual property, individual rights, cultural
>diversity, global cooperation, and social implications.
>
>Patrick Purcell of Imperial College London addressed the "distance
>learning" topic which is of such great interest to the educators in the
>audience. All of them are worried about making effective use of the
>techniques, without allowing technique to become merely a stopgap
>panacea for education's currently - omnipresent financial ills. The
>University of Maine's Martial Vivet called for "evaluation", a crucial
>aspect of any learning approach, which thus far is remarkably absent
>from most distance - learning experiments.
>
>Hal Varian, Dean of the new School of Information Management and
>Systems at UC Berkeley, outlined the plans for his program. "Library /
>information" schools are under no less a state of siege and change in
>Europe than they are in the US. France's "E.N.S. des Bibliothe`ques"
>added "Sciences de l'Information" to its name only a few years ago. All
>of the schools represented in the Symposium audience, like schools
>everywhere now, are wrestling with the various problems of teaching and
>using "this new information thing". The Berkeley approach, as Varian
>outlined it -- see http://www.sims.berkeley.edu for full details of
>what is a very complex picture -- received much corridor - comment.
>
>The summary of Session 3 was offered by a stellar panel, which included
>researchers, writers, professors, and economists. Le Monde's Michel
>Colonna d'Istria outlined his work toward an online edition for his
>publication (imagine "Le Monde" on a Website! -- http://www.lemonde.fr)
>and presented his conviction that online and print publication will
>work hand in hand in the future.
>
>This view was challenged by Serge Soudoplatoff. He just has accepted a
>position with "WANADOO" (http://www.wanadoo.fr) the French national
>Internet service of France Te'le'com. (Note: as of May 5 the Internet
>may be reached, from anywhere within the country, via dialup to a
>single number at a uniform rate -- 36.01.13.13 is the cheapest, and
>other numbers will be announced on October 10 -- all this is per the
>mandate of France's national president, at a meeting held last Fall).
>
>Soudoplatoff feels that print's former emphasis on "product" now has
>been shifted to "information", that "print will vanish". Colonna
>disagrees: he is a fan of the Internet, he says, but he offers the very
>reasonable reminder, and warning, that, "everything real cannot be put
>online". Colonna quipped, in English, that the challenge which he and
>other journalists nevertheless face is, "to turn our trademark into
>your [Netscape] bookmark".
>
>The outstanding star of this stellar group, I think -- I am a little
>biased, here -- was UC Berkeley's Stephen Cohen. He literally rattles
>off -- in a great challenge to the excellent simultaneous translation
>which was going on -- a number of "relevant considerations" which he
>suggests a "Multimedia and Networks" group might want to think about.
>These were fascinating. The economics are mysterious, he says:
>"marginal costs are declining", "there are network economies" -- "the
>more use there is, the more use there is". Pricing is in a quandary:
>the "free" Internet pricing model needs revision -- local network use
>predicated upon 6 - 7 minute sessions does not scale up to the
>WorldWideWeb which sees users logged in for 6 - 7 hours.
>
>Cohen warns against abstracting hi - tech applications elsewhere from
>the Silicon Valley model. California's Silicon Valley even has
>significant differences from Boston's "Route 128", he points out. He
>tackled the Colonna - Soudoplatoff discussion of print and reading:
>there is a place for variety, he says -- Danielle Steele novels perhaps
>always will appear in print, other things won't. The copyright and
>privacy concerns are serious, Cohen says, but he points out that laws
>themselves change to accommodate new realities: "it's just not good
>policy to have lots of people in violation of the law".
>
>Cohen is concerned about information inequality: universal service was
>a good idea for telephony, but what does it mean for the Web, he asks.
>Work patterns are changing: our urban / office building structure
>perhaps is giving way to a more rural / telecommuting idea. There could
>be some room here for answers to Dean Buxbaum's Symposium - opening
>question about Internet - based job opportunities. Cohen concluded --
>or just "stopped", as he put it -- with the point that sheer speed has
>become paramount in information technology: "first to market" now is
>more important than many things, including quality -- he suggested the
>"qwerty" typwriter keyboard as an example of an approach which was able
>to predominate by being not best but simply first - to - market.
>
>Cohen also had the opportunity to display his talents telegenically.
>French television interviewed him about the Symposium: "they only gave
>me 1 1/2 minutes", he said -- so the Symposium faced the realities of
>the "sound - byte culture" which it is discussing, directly.
>
>There was an interlude, then, for an impressive panel to present an
>impressive project. Within the local Sophia Antipolis area, "Te'le'com
>Valley" is being established as more than just a name. A 155Mbs ATM
>platform is being set up to provide service to the entire Co^te d'Azur
>area, with eventual extensions elsewhere around the Mediterranean. Jean
>Paul Michel, who directs IBM's nearby La Gaude laboratories, and is
>President of "Telecom Valley", described the project. Other speakers --
>one from Italy, another from Spain -- spoke of their own local efforts
>and of how these might be linked soon to that of the French.
>
>Outstanding among the presentations was that of Senator Pierre
>Lafitte. He is known in France as the "father" of Sophia Antipolis.
>Now he is providing the impetus and vision for the "Telecom Valley"
>project as well. Lafitte casts the project in very general terms: a
>triple convergence, he says, of, 1) digital technology, 2) information
>content, and 3) community and regional development -- a "globalization"
>of all three, Lafitte urges, "we must have the will to develop all of
>this." Lafitte is a senior French politician, a man of some standing in
>both his home territory in Provence and in Paris. But when he heard
>about the Symposium Website his reaction was immediate and very
>personal: "Let me have the Web address, I will try it from my office!"
>"Where is your office?", I asked him. "Why, in the Luxembourg Palace,
>of course!" How many senior US senators really are _this_ "online"?
>
>Session 4: "Bioengineering and Environmental Engineering"
>
>The session this afternoon has provided some of the best sparks. The
>program officially was devoted to three workshops, entitled
>"Biomedical", "Bioremediation", and "Agriculture": difficult areas, for
>anyone not fully - initiated. The whole assemblage was engineered ably
>and energetically by UC Berkeley's Kent Udell and the E.N. du Ge'nie
>Rural des Eaux et des Fore^ts' Claude Millier. (Someone, sometime, must
>tell me how the French think up the names for their schools?: "Ponts et
>Chause'es", "Ge'nie Rural des Eaux et des Fore^ts"!?)
>
>I am severely out of my depth in these subject areas, myself. I gather
>that all three contain some element of dynamic tension between those
>who would change things and those concerned that change disrupts
>various environments. Session 4 participants were to include Emmanuel
>Clair of Soletanche and Boris Rubinsky of UC Berkeley. But I confess
>that I had to spend much of the time in a nearby computer lab,
>exploring the Web with several people from the morning session. So I
>did not hear all of the Session 4 presentations myself. Hopefully some
>versions of these will get installed on the Symposium Website soon.
>
>I did get back just in time to watch some of the best controversies of
>the Symposium, though. UC Berkeley's Jennie Hunter - Cevera was
>standing, eyes and intellect flashing, defending US bioengineering
>against European environmental worries. A couple of European
>questioners were very concerned about work which has been done with
>California tomatoes, and the Hunter - Cevera defense was pungent and to
>the point. Of this more below.
>
>UC Davis' Lee Baldwin, somewhat more sedately but ultimately just as
>forcefully, made a very reasoned presentation of both facts and issues
>on similar work done on American cows. As with the tomato controversy,
>there was muttering from the audience: the use of hormones to increase
>milk production plays well to very different audiences on each side of
>the Atlantic. Of this more below, also. It did occur to me generally as
>an outsider, though, both how odd it is that such specialized and
>seemingly - remote areas can stir such deep passions, and how rare and
>wonderful that the passions might be aired and discussed this way,
>freely and openly in an international Symposium, rather than simply in
>newspaper disaster headlines.
>
>4.0 Day 3 -- Summing Up: "The most famous phrase in science is not
>'Eureka', but 'Gee, that's funny...'" (I. Asimov)
>
>The extraordinary panels assembled, on the third day, to try to wring
>conclusions from these wide - ranging discussions, enjoyed the
>exceptional abilities of an extraordinary moderator. Axel Krause has an
>established reputation as a journalist and editor at the International
>Herald - Tribune. His fine stage presence -- resounding deep voice,
>telegenic presence, and infinite yet firm patience with his charges --
>make him a superb conference chair. It was obvious that he has done
>this before: the Web says that he does it often. Krause frames the
>questions of the Symposium as, 1) "What training is needed for
>scientists and engineers in a global economy?", and, 2) "What should we
>be looking at and preparing for?"
>
>UC Berkeley's Chang - Lin Tien was the first to respond. He enumerates
>three hard financial realities of the last 3 - 5 years in education: a)
>budget restructurings, with reductions in state aid to education, b)
>the uncompleted shift from Cold War military / space to new civilian /
>commercial emphasis, and, c) the "information" / telecommunications
>explosion. Tien says that integration, rather than differentiation, is
>needed in education: integration of a) theory / analysis / design /
>experiment with b) knowledge and with c) communication skills. Change
>must be dealt with better by the campus, he thinks. Resistance to
>change in educational institutions, in curriculum as well as in other
>areas, is the greatest challenge: "At Berkeley now we all are
>experimenting," Tien says.
>
>Gilbert Frade, of the Ecole des Mines, distinguishes between, 1) the
>task of understanding what is happening now, and, 2) the task of
>reconciling technology with society. For the first, perhaps we need
>some adaptation of fuzzy logic, he thinks: inter - disciplinary studies
>and student exchanges must be encouraged -- in education today, he
>says, "disciplines separate more than nationalities do". For the second
>the emerging question, Frade believes with deliberate irony, is "what
>to do about human error, the human factor?". Engineers must become non
>- scientists as well, he thinks. There is a lack of critical thinking
>in the new media now: "politically correct" means simply "lack of
>imagination", Frade feels. Krause observed that one extension of this
>point might be the problem of defining who will set the goals going
>forward?: the old problem of "church and state", in modern guise.
>
>John Weiner, of the US NSF / National Science Foundation, described
>what his own, new, "Office of Multidisciplinary Activities" is going to
>try to accomplish. "A map to the traditional departments," is how he
>sees it developing, he says. NSF sees the need for new approaches,
>called for by Frade and Tien and others, and is trying to respond.
>"Education needs to be better - integrated with research," Weiner says,
>"the time to degree is getting longer and less flexible." Funding is
>going into non - academic research, while education is aimed at
>training. His office will support university programs, he promises.
>
>Dom Hugues Minguet is "Responsable du Centre Entreprises" of the
>monastery of Notre Dame de Ganagobie, in Ganagobie, France. Just _try_
>finding that on a map: Durance valley, high in the mountains -- the Web
>found it at http://www.imaginet.fr/apollonia/monasteries/mona04.html
>("Benedictine, Priory founded around 950, Daily mass chanted in
>Gregorian", and, "Hostel for retreats: 14 rooms", and, "Crafts: jams,
>honey, perfume essences"), or you might try
>http://www.hh.se/stud/d95ms/skivor/ALBUM5F58.html for their CDROM of
>Gregorian chant (St. Benedict decreed self - sufficiency). Both
>Ganagobie and Dom Hugues are aspects of experience as much outside of
>my own California upbringing (Jerry Brown, maybe?), as was any of the
>earlier bioengineering talk.
>
>The "take" of Dom Hugues and the monks of Ganagobie on all of this is
>simple: there is a need for "Ethical Management", he says -- Ganagobie
>teaches this now, through retreats at the monastery and workshops held
>inside large French corporations. There is a "need for community to
>deal with the current speed of change", he believes: is Howard
>Rheingold listening? The four - part program of the monks of Ganagobie
>emphasizes: 1) "a sense of self - direction -- science will close in
>upon itself without a notion of self - direction" ["sens"], 2) "an idea
>of complexity", 3) ethical humanistic ideas, and 4) some idea of
>individual spirit or conscience.
>
>How remarkable, I thought, in my California innocence, that Dom Hugues
>and the monks of Ganagobie even are invited to such a gathering, much
>less are taken seriously by decision - makers such as the others here
>assembled. There could be few more dramatic illustrations offered by
>this Symposium of the differences between what interests most Americans
>in these fields and what interests so many Europeans. [And others?
>Think of Moslem countries, Latin America... the US is the exception
>rather than the rule in this, I myself think.]
>
>Next: Controversies, and Conclusions?
>
>XXX
>
>FYIFrance (sm)(tm) e - newsletter ISSN 1071 - 5916
>
> *
> | FYIFrance (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic newsletter,
> | published since 1992 as a small - scale, personal,
> | experiment, in the creation of large - scale
> | "information overload", by Jack Kessler. Any material
> / \ written by me which appears in FYIFrance may be
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> // \\ long as, a) they give me credit and show my e - mail
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>(path: 3. Electronic Journals (Library-Oriented)/ 6. FYIFrance/ or
>http://www.univ-rennes1.fr/LISTES/biblio-fr@univ-rennes1.fr/ (BIBLIO-FR
>econference archive), or gopher.well.sf.ca.us , or via telnet to
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>Suggestions, reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison - pen letters
>all will be gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .
>
> Copyright 1992 by Jack Kessler, all rights reserved.
>
>XXX
>
>end
>
