The local university has implemented a new course/faculty evaluation plan. A significant number of faculty members hate it because it requires far more time and demands all too often quantification of the qualitative and the unquantifiable, and it also requires using the same parameters for describing learning outcomes for all the various disciplines. The result is that either professors must oversimplify or only evaluate those aspects of their courses that can be described and measured by the accepted parameters. The reason for the adoption of the new evaluation system was to provide “hard data” for use by university administrators to prove to accrediting bodies and to the state legislature that the university is successful in educating students, in short, to make the administrators’ jobs easier and to present “data” that the legislators can understand at a glance. Or in other words, the lower-paid faculty must spend even more time on administrivia in order to better enable higher-paid administrators to justify their jobs. Put another way, to shift work to others while essentially requiring a process that will present oversimplified and often misleading results.

Furthermore, professors can be downgraded for having “too many learning objectives,” even if the nature of the course requires a number of disparate learning objectives. Of course, the easy way is simply to come up with generic learning objectives, but that results in poor data… and good data doesn’t fit the “mold” in all too many cases.

Add to that student evaluations, in which 18-22 year olds attempt to evaluate what they “need” from professors who have spent at least a decade learning and applying their expertise. Such evaluations often require even more time and effort on the part of the professors to rebut the often erroneous judgments of inexperienced students. More to the point, study after study has shown that the most consistent result of student evaluations is not improvement in education, but grade inflation, and that means that not only do ever more intrusive student evaluations put more burden on faculty and fail to improve education, but they do so in an effort by administrators primarily to make universities more “student friendly” and marketable.

This sort of work-shifting permeates society today.

Take another cost-shifting measure – the decision by major U.S. airlines, except Southwest, to charge fees for checked luggage. While this has increased revenue for those airlines, it’s also increased costs for TSA, which has to hire more employees to screen the vastly increased number of carry-on bags, as well as increasing security screening delays at U.S. airports. This cost-shifting creates costs for the taxpayers who fund TSA and delays for passengers.

Then, too, as I’ve mentioned before, the proliferation of email requests for status reports in organizations and businesses results in employees spending a greater and greater share of their workday answering such requests rather than doing actual work. It may make their supervisors’ tasks easier, but it’s a drag on productivity, which isn’t all that high these days anyway, and it’s resulted in longer workdays for employees.

Every time that I take an airline flight, buy an electronic book, stay in a hotel, purchase an appliance or piece of furniture, no matter how small, or even buy groceries, I’m asked or prompted to fill out a survey – and if there’s something wrong, I’m supposed to suggest how the seller or vendor could do their job better. Isn’t that their job? Yet we’ve been sold a bill of goods that the seller is just asking for our opinion because our opinion counts, when it’s both as marketing tool and a way to obtain data on a lower-cost basis.

Walmart and other retailers get in on the cost-shifting movement by setting up self-check-out lanes, resulting in fewer cashiers. More than once at stores, I’ve ended up doing self-check-out, even when a cashier could so it faster, because the lines at the cashiers were so long.

Yet another form of cost-shifting is practiced by governments, either state, local, of federal, when they offer “tax breaks” to businesses for various purposes. Those tax breaks may indeed create jobs and the like, but seldom do they cover the foregone tax revenues, which means that the “new jobs” are at least partly subsidized by the old taxpayers.

Yes, indeed, cost-shifting, another example of the capitalistic great American economy… and yet I see almost no one who’s willing to call it for what it is, an additional cost on taxpayers and consumers.

As most of my readers know, I’m not exactly fond of electronic piracy of my books, or of anyone’s books, and I’m certainly not the only author or editor who feels that way. While much of the publicly expressed concern over piracy has focused on fiction and music, there’s an even more problematical aspect of piracy – that of scientific journals and papers.

The battle over electronic piracy of scientific papers and journal articles has become a huge issue since the founding of Sci-Hub by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011. According to Science magazine, in the six months from October 2015 through the end of March 2016, 28 million documents were downloaded from Sci-Hub, with the greatest number of downloads going to China (4.4 million), India (2.6 million), and India (3.4 million).

The problem is simple. Legal access to the majority of scientific journals and papers costs money, and especially for scholars in the developing worlds, or scholars at educational institutions without the funds to obtain wide access, the cost of keeping up with developments in their fields becomes prohibitively expensive and enormously time consuming. Obtaining just the permissions for the papers a U.S. university linguistics researcher needed took over a year. An Indian scholar discovered that to legally obtain copies of papers to stay current in his field every year would cost five times his annual living expenses.

At present, as calculated by Science, Sci-Hub’s downloads represent only about five percent of the total number of science documents downloaded in the world every year… but those numbers are growing, fueled by the increasing need of scientists and other professions to follow current scientific developments and by the fact that a huge number of those professionals who need access for their professions have either limited legal access, no legal access except by paying out of their own pockets, or the time required to use other legal ways of obtaining access.

No matter what anyone says, useful information doesn’t come cheaply. I’m not a scientist, but as a science fiction writer I need to stay current. I did a quick checklist of the science periodicals that I take and read – and my annual “information” costs come close to $2,000, and I’m talking only about periodicals and science books that represent a small fraction of the documentation a full-time scientist or researcher needs to know.

That’s one side of the problem. The other side is one that very few consumers/users of fiction, music, or scientific documents seem able to grasp – the cost of assembling, editing, copywriting, and overall production of these documents is far, far, greater than the final cost of physical production. Another difficulty is that recent studies have shown that too many science papers haven’t been properly peer-reviewed and vetted and their results can’t be replicated. That also takes not only money, but a structure that’s not supported by piracy or by an information disseminator such as Sci-Hub.

Add to that the fact that most researchers and scientists aren’t paid much, if anything, for having their work published, and those who profit most from scientific publishing are companies like Elsevier, not either the researchers or the users/readers of those documents

According to Marcia McNutt, the editor-in-chief of Science, “Today, digital publishing is just as expensive as print for a state-of-the-art Web design that incorporates multimedia, is responsive to desktops, tablets, and smartphones, and maintains access to back content.”

All of which means we have a problem that’s going to get worse. If piracy of scientific documents follows the path of fiction, what happens to all the checks on falsified or sloppy research…or who is rightfully credited with what…or who gets paid for coming up with an innovation. These areas are already problems, and I don’t see the world of increasing intellectual piracy solving them.

Now…the world isn’t going to stop if fiction writers don’t get paid and all “creative” writing becomes essentially a hobby because not enough readers want to pay the real cost of production, or if classical music dwindles to nothing, or if art reproductions return all artists to a semi-starving situation. But the piracy and distribution of scientific documents is, to me, a different situation.

It could be that I’m totally wrong… but… if I’m not…?

We’ve been through the Emmys, Grammies, Oscars, and the Hugo finalists have just been announced, and now we’re entering university graduation season, with all the awards bestowed at each university’s ceremony or ceremonies.

Once, back in the dark ages when I was actually in school, pretty much the only award given to students was that of valedictorian. When my wife the professor began teaching at the local university, there were just two faculty awards – one for excellence as an educator and one for excellence as a scholar, creator, or researcher. This past graduation there were thirteen awards for faculty and something like eight major student awards, and likely more than a hundred lesser student awards (although that’s a guess on my part based on the awards given in one of the six university colleges) because I don’t intent to spend days tracking them all down.

Everywhere I look, it seems like there’s been award proliferation. In the realm of speculative fiction alone, there are not only the Hugos and the World Fantasy Awards, but a whole list of regional and national awards, not to mention the Nebula Awards, the Sideways Awards for alternative world SF, the Prometheus Award for Libertarian speculative fiction, the Carl Brandon awards for speculative fiction by or about people of color, the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, the James Tiptree Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and a host of others as well. What I’ve found interesting about all these awards isn’t so much who has won them as who has not.

I’ve also noticed the same “phenomenon” in regard to the faculty awards at my wife’s university. Most of them go to “politically astute” professors or those I’d classify as either one-time flashes or “flavour du jour,” rather than to professors who have created flourishing programs from nothing, received national recognition for achievement or scholarship, or those whose students, while students, have received multiple and continuing awards for their accomplishments. Oh, yes, I forgot “popular” professors, usually easy-grading, cheerleading types who always factor in the awards.

A similar sort of result occurs, from what I’ve seen, in the F&SF field and elsewhere. The bottom line is simple. No matter what anyone says, the vast majority of awards in any field tend to be popularity contests of some sort or reflect favoritism on the part of the judges, if not both. Even juried awards can be prejudiced in one way or another, and having served as a judge on a juried award, I’ve seen that happen as well.

Probably one of the most reliable indications of excellence is when something remains known, respected, and moderately popular well after the time of its creation. That’s certainly not an infallible guide, but it’s a start. As for “current” excellence – for books, anyway – sales figures are about as reliable as awards, and sales figures that endure for decades are definitely more reliable than one-year sales or a burst of awards in a single year. In the end, neither awards nor sales are necessarily an indication of excellence.

Awards are nice to have, but, alas, they never meant as much as most people thought, and with the flurry of awards proliferation, most of them mean even less now… but I certainly wouldn’t turn down a Nobel Prize, not that one is ever going to a U.S. F&SF writer.

Reviewers of all sorts – from those in Kirkus and The New York Times to those offering their opinions on their blogs or on Goodreads or Amazon – generally attempt to assess authors according to their standards. And that’s really what reviews are all about.

What tends to get overlooked, if not positively ignored, is that there ought to be reviews about readers as well. Because, just as authors differ, so do readers, and what pleases one reader can often infuriate another. And, just because I’m feeling contrary, I’ll offer some reviews of the types of readers I’ve observed over the last forty years or so, although you shouldn’t attribute too much meaning to the order in which I’m presenting these reader semi-stereotypes, even if they’re only my stereotypes.

I’ll begin with every author’s favorite type of reader – the enthusiasts. They like reading and books, and many especially like a particular genre or subgenre of fiction, and some are only wildly enthusiastic about a given author. Authors who have large numbers of enthusiasts are fortunate indeed, although often enthusiasts can be very reticent to admit their enthusiasms, which can leave some authors bewildered – as I was for years – because such authors sell books but can find very few people who admit to buying them.

Other types of readers are a more mixed bag, such as the literalist purists, for whom three typos in book provide discomfort, and more than that occasion physical pain, who also often have difficulty with authors who employ words in ways that require knowledge of more than the first dictionary definition, and who are outraged if the author portraying a low-tech culture uses a different weight for a stone’s worth of merchandise [despite the fact that there were different “stone-weights” for different commodities until the nineteenth century].

Following the literalist purists come the one-gender readers. They’re usually but not exclusively male and have virtually no interest in or possibly no ability to identify with a protagonist of the opposite gender, let alone protagonists with complex genders.

I’ve also noted in the past that there are readers who seem to believe that literary romance cannot be complete without copious and explicit sexual encounters. Call them the over-sexed romantics, as opposed to the prudish romantics for whom the merest direct implication of sexual encounters sends them for the literary equivalent of smelling salts.

For the stylistics, the words themselves offer the greatest satisfaction, so much so that often the plot or what passes for one is merely a bothersome necessity, some of whom prone to gush over or luxuriate in the work of Mervyn Peake or Gene Wolfe.

The secret violence lovers are those readers who find all manner of means to praise books of dubious quality so that they can deceive themselves into believing the books they enjoy are better than they are, rather than accepting the fact that they personally have a touch of the voyeuristic sadist in themselves and really like all that violence and rough, if not vicious, sex. Those who have a touch of the stylist get double pleasure out of Game of Thrones.

The gourmet bibliophiles comprise one of the smallest groups of readers, those who want excellence in every aspect of what they read, and who are actually intelligent enough to know what excellence is and well-read enough to discriminate between the merely popular, the flavor-de-jour books of the pseudo-literati, and the books of depth. Unfortunately, they’re usually disappointed, given how rare excellence is, and how often literary flash is taken for depth.

Then there are the fictional gourmets, for whom plot is a device to carry them from fictional meal to fictional meal, and I suspect a number of them read my novels, particularly the “Ghost” books.

In stark contrast to the gourmet bibliophile and the stylist is the minimalist – otherwise known as the slam-bam-thank-you-sir-or-ma’am type. They go straight to the story, like a famished wolf to bloody meat. This kind of reader demands only the bare-bones story, and forget about metaphor, allusion, or anything requiring diversion from the pursuit to the bloody, sexual, or explosive end, and if a book doesn’t have one of those, for them, it’s not worth reading.

Then we’ve also seen the recent rise of the genderists, for whom no book is satisfying except those that explore in depth beyond that of the Challenger Deep the role, identify, function, malfunction, dysfunction, optimal theoretical function, including all other ancillary functions, of all possible genders and permutations thereof, preferably in overstated understatement.

More and more in the realm of speculative fiction, we’re seeing the immersers, or the compleatists, those who not so much read a given series, but would prefer to live and spend their entire existence in just the world of that series. And yes, I’ve given them a series just like that in the Saga of Recluce.

Related to the gourmet bibliophiles are the cogitators, the thinkers who get great pleasure in books so deep that they can find additional twists and meanings on re-read after re-read and who find what the minimalists insist upon is akin to reading primers or simplistic graphic novels.

Now… I’ve probably missed type or two of reader, and most likely many readers have characteristics of several types, but since readers are always rating writers, I thought it was only fair for a writer to review readers, turn about being fair play, so to speak.

One of the ever-increasing problems created by technology – and especially the internet and cellphones – is a failure, particularly by the younger generations, to understand that waiting until the last moment can be a problem, sometimes even a disaster. I’m perfectly well aware that procrastination has been a fault in every “younger” generation since before the time of Plato, but from what I’m observing, that particular fault seems to be lasting longer among the young and spreading to a greater segment of the population.

Part of the reason for this, I’m personally convinced, is because of the “instant” nature of communications. Especially in the high-tech world, one can reach people immediately, and more and more businesses are expecting their employees to be available electronically all the time. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this has some considerable downsides, but one of those downsides I haven’t mentioned in any depth is that such communications expectations lead to other expectations, particularly that physical products and goods can be available equally swiftly.

In this regard, Amazon has also been fostering unrealistic expectations. It’s one thing to be able to pack and ship an existing product in less than twenty-four hours; it’s something entirely different to be able to create something unique in the same period, or to write a detailed analysis about something new, with which the analyst has had no experience, in the same period. In short, doing the work actually takes far more time than one-day shipping the product, or electronically zapping an analysis to whoever needs it.

My wife the professor sees this all the time. Students think that they can learn a piece of complex music overnight or at least in a few days. They think they can write papers overnight… and they indeed can, except that such papers seldom make sense because they simply throw things together because they haven’t spent time doing the background study necessary.

Then there’s the associated problem. All this technology that we use today has a far higher failure rate than the old-fashioned manual typewriter did…and when that’s combined with waiting until the last moment… is it really anyone else’s fault when your hard drive fails at four in the morning because you put everything off? Is it anyone else’s fault if the internet goes down for the two hours just before the deadline for acceptance of the paper, project, grant application, or whatever? Or that the color printer runs out of toner and the office supply store won’t be open until nine o’clock?

This just doesn’t happen to students. Boeing screwed up the production of its new 787 because the company decided to outsource manufacturing and relied on “just in time” delivery. It became such a disaster that Boeing had to build more facilities to manufacture certain key components. The “instant” aspects of technology aren’t infallible, and they’re only part of the process, and everything requires lead time and planning – something that all too many people from students even to engineers seem to be forgetting.