The last time I attempted to travel to Belfast to give a seminar, in 2019, it didn’t go very well. This time it went better, in the sense that I’ve actually arrived in Belfast. The Enterprise service between Dublin and Belfast has doubled in frequency since 2019 and the price is still modest, just €17.50 each way, including a seat reservation, which is the full fare standard price. Unfortunately the train that arrived in Dublin to take us to Belfast was much smaller than the regular one – only four carriages, presumably owing to a fault on one of the usual trains, so it was crammed – and there were no seat reservations on it. I did find a seat but many people didn’t and had to stand. The train started to empty at Dundalk and by Newry most people could sit down. Other than that, it was fine.
The trip from Dublin Connolly to Belfast Grand Central took about 2 hours and 10 minutes, by the way, which. You would be hard pressed to make a two-hour journey by train in England for the equivalent price.
I’ve successfully visited Belfast a few times over the past few years, actually, but not for work reasons.
It’s quite chilly in Belfast tonight, a good few degrees colder than Dublin, but my hotel room is warm, and being on my own I think I’ll just stay in and finish the book I’m reading. I’ll get up early, hopefully to publish a few OJAp papers, have a cooked breakfast and then venture forth to find Queen’s University Belfast, which I failed to visit in 2019:
I bookmarked a story in the Times Higher a couple of weeks ago, with the intention of doing a post about it, and then promptly forgot. Such is the effect of old age. Anyway the story is about the the fact that Lancaster University is undertaking a disciplinary investigation into one of its staff, Mike Ryder, who wrote a blog post of his own with the title Why are universities so bad at marketing? I’ve linked to it in order to boost its readership. He’s also done a video with the same title:
The point of me repeating this here is twofold.
The first is to point out that investigating an academic for daring to express an opinion is disgraceful, contrary to the principles of academic freedom, and symptomatic of the authoritarian attitude that pervades the modern university system.
The second point concerns my own institution, Maynooth University in Ireland. I know I have, in the past been critical of many aspects of this University’s governance, but in this respect I give credit where it is due. Maynooth does not indulge in pointless marketing. In fact, as far as I can tell, it does not indulge in any marketing whatsoever. I’m sure I speak for a majority of the staff when I say that we are all proud to work in an institution that does not sully its hands with such vulgar activities.
Today being the last Monday of October, it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland – Lá Saoire i Mí Dheireadh Fómhair (literally, the Holiday at the End of the Month of October) so I had the morning off; I have a telecon this afternoon. This week is Study Week too so there are no lectures or tutorials until next Monday, when we resume for the seven remaing weeks of the Semester.
I’ll be travelling tomorrow to give a seminar at Queen’s University Belfast. My talk will have the title Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics and the Open Journal of Astrophysics, an updated version of a talk I’ve given in a number of places. over the past few years. I was looking at NASA/ADS just now to get the latest statistics and discovered that articles in the Open Journal of Astrophysics have now received over 10,000 citations at an average of 14.9 per paper. The average has been consistent since the first few years of publishing, which is interesting for the reason that our publishing rate is rising steadily so that most of our publications are very recent.
Anyway, I’m quite looking forward to the trip. The worst of the awful weather of the past few days seems to have passed and I hope I can make it to and from Belfast by train without the intervention of floods or fallen trees.
Another name for the present Bank Holiday is Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna (Halloween Holiday), although Halloween itself does not occur until Saturday. I’ll be travelling again at the weekend, but this time purely for pleasure.
At this time of year many of the buildings of the historic South Campus are ablaze with Red Virginia Creeper:
My former colleague at Nottingham University, Philip Moriarty, alerted me to a piece in the latest Private Eye (No. 1686) about the parlous state of affairs there. The teaser on the left shows a bit more than Philip did in his post, but if you want to read the rest you should buy a copy of the Eye. Next to the story about Nottingham University, you will find one about Edinburgh University, which you will want to read if you work there…
The video that appeared in a previous post about Nottingham University has been taken down. I’m not really surprised, because it shows the University Management in a very poor light and we can’t have that, can we?
I have heard stories about how bad the situation is at Nottingham University. Apparently some members of staff are being told that they have to reapply for the jobs they currently hold and will have to do the same every year for the next three years. This is a disgraceful way to treat academic staff, but remember that this crisis was entirely caused by University Management, not the academic or other staff who are bearing the brunt of the cuts.
There may be massive job cuts among ordinary staff at the University of Nottingham, but there’s still money for three new Pro-Vice-Chancellor positions there. The purpose of these positions is “explained” in the following blurb that consists of the sort of vacuous nonsense such advertisements:
Our proposed transition from five faculties to three colleges will strengthen collaboration, support academic excellence and position Nottingham for long-term success. We are recruiting a Pro-Vice-Chancellor for each of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Health, and College of Science and Engineering. Each will bring together complementary disciplines, creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary education and research, knowledge exchange and external partnerships. Joining at this formative stage, you will shape your college’s strategy, identity and culture, building on established strengths while opening new possibilities for its staff and students.
As a member of the University Executive Board, you will contribute to institutional strategy and decision-making, working collaboratively with your fellow College Pro-Vice-Chancellors to advance the success of the whole university while taking executive responsibility for your college’s performance and development. You will lead excellence in education and student experience, research and knowledge exchange, supported by a coherent and sustainable academic portfolio and effective stewardship of resources. You will shape student growth, recruitment priorities and the long-term academic direction of the college. You will foster a culture of accountability and be responsible for delivering measurable improvements in academic and financial performance against institutional priorities and key performance indicators. Working closely with academic and professional services colleagues across our global campuses, you will lead change, strengthen financial sustainability and build partnerships that enhance Nottingham’s reputation and impact locally, nationally and internationally.
We are looking for accomplished senior leaders who combine strategic vision with a record of delivering change and improving performance. You will bring the communication and interpersonal skills to build trust, navigate difficult conversations and inspire colleagues through change, alongside a demonstrable commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. Above all, you will be committed to creating an environment in which colleagues and students can succeed, and to advancing the university’s ambitions through partnership, innovation and shared purpose. If you share our values of inclusivity, ambition, openness, fairness and respect, we invite you to help shape the future of Nottingham
I laughed out loud when I read “foster a culture of accountability”. I suppose that phrase does represent an admission that they don’t have one at the moment.
I wonder why they need a Senior Management team at all. The Eye story confirms the fact that all Nottingham University’s “strategic” decisions are made – at great expense – by management consultants.
Of course they are looking to a recruitment agency to fill these posts, so they’ll be fishing in the same pool that supplied such quality material for their previous management team – the one that bankrupted the University. Based on the above blurb, it looks like the three new College PVCs will replace five existing Faculty PVCs. Why could that not have been done through an internal process, which would have spared the considerable expense of resorting to a recruitment agency?
This sums up everything that it wrong with modern university “governance” – a jamboree for self-serving careerist types and austerity for everyone else. It has to stop.
Last night I travelled into Dublin for another concert by National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, this time under the direction of guest conductor Julio García Vico in a programme of music heavy with French and Spanish influences.
The undoubted star of the show was classical guitarist Thibaut Garcia, who is French but has Spanish ancestry, who played theConcierto de Aranjuezby Joaquin Rodrigo. I’ve loved this piece for ages, and have several recordings of it, but although it’s been a familiar part of the concert repertoire ever since it was composed in 1939, I’ve never heard it played live. Last night’s performance was stunningly beautiful, one of those occasions on which it was a privilege just to be there. I loved the way he played the first movement Allegrocon Spirito with poise and precision but without a hint of punctiliousness. The famous second movement Adagio gives the soloist much more latitude for interpretation, and Garcia’s version was very different from others I’ve heard. The music here evokes a sense of nostalgia, which comes with both joy and melancholy. I think in too many performances melancholy has the upper hand, but last night we really felt the joy. The final movement, Allegro gentile, contains a playful series of call-and-answer sequences set against varied rhythmic backgrounds. I adored this performance.
I noticed while he was playing that Thibaut Garcia has hyperextensible thumbs (as do I) and, as I went to the bar for my interval drink, I found myself wondering whether having bendy thumbs was an advantage for playing classical guitar. You could have knocked me down with a feather when, as I was returning to my seat after the wine break, that the man himself was sitting in the seat right behind mine preparing to listen to the second half of the concert. I couldn’t resist telling him how much I enjoyed the performance and mentioned his thumbs. It must be very irksome for an artist when strange people intrude awkwardly like that, but he was absolutely charming. After a brief comparison of thumbs, I sat down and left him alone. I was too starstruck to ask him whether distal hyperextensibility is a plus when it comes to playing the guitar. Perhaps someone can offer an opinion through the comments?
Anyway, it would be remiss not to mention the rest of the programme, which contained a great of interest. The first piece, for example, Laniakea by Camille Pépin is inspired by our Local Supercluster of galaxies which astronomers have named Laniakea, an Hawaiian word meaning “immeasurable heaven”.
The programme after the interval contained energetic and colourful performances of music from the opera La Vida Breve by Manuel de Falla, the Capriccio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and, for the finale, the famous Bolero by Maurice Ravel. All these were played very well, but the first half was so wonderful that it was always going to be impossible for the second half to match it.
It’s time for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 249 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 697.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.
The first paper this week was published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “The Metallicity Distribution of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Segue 1” by Daisy Bissonette (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Australia and Canada. The article explains that new data on the metallicity of ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Segue 1 reveal a continuous, short-duration episode of star formation and chemical enrichment, confirming its classification as a galaxy.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Metallicity Distribution of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Segue 1" by Daisy Bissonette (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Australia and Canada.
The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, “Ultraviolet diversity of Little Red Dots as a probe for direct-collapse black hole ages” by Elia Cenci & Melanie Habouzit (U. Geneva, Switzerland) and Dale D. Kocevski (Colby College, USA). This article uses simulations to explore UV emissions from galaxies hosting direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs), finding that these emissions evolve rapidly, reflecting changes in stellar mass and metal enrichment.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Ultraviolet diversity of Little Red Dots as a probe for direct-collapse black hole ages" by Elia Cenci & Melanie Habouzit (U. Geneva, Switzerland) and Dale D. Kocevski (Colby College, USA)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: improved mitigation of spatially varying observational systematics with masking for the MagLim++ lens sample" by M. Rodríguez-Monroy (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) and 65 others from around the world.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Spectroscopic Binary Detection as Agent-Callable Tools: Detecting 40,000+ Main-Sequence Binary Candidates from SDSS DR19 APOGEE Spectra" by Serat Mahmud Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA).
That concludes this week’s update. I had anticipate that we’ll pass the 250 mark this week, but business has been slower than of late so we’ll have to wait until next week for that. It is noticeable that the arXiv submission process is slower now than it used to be, presumably because of the huge influx of AI slop that the moderators have to deal with.
Maynooth University Library Cat seems to have survived Storm Austen intact. In fact, all we experienced here in Maynooth was a moderate amount of overnight rain and a bit of a breeze.
He seems to spending a bit more time these days at the entrance to South Campus on Kilcock Road, where he is pictured here doing his ablutions. His more usual spot is off in the distance, on the left of the picture, past the Library. The Kilcock Rd entrance was picketed during last week’s industrial action, so perhaps he thinks we’re still on strike?
There’s a very important paper on arXiv by P.K.G. Williams (of the Harvard-Smithsoninan Center for Astrophysics) with title AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons and abstract:
The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons”: an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.” There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable — some can be said to rank among humanity’s greatest achievements — the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600–1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via “slop spam”). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.
arXiv:2610.27251
The phrase “Enclosure of the Scientific Commons” is wonderfully apt. I wish I’d thought of it. The rest of the article is very good too and I urge you to read it.
P.S. I remember this little poem from school history lessons when we learnt about the enclosure of the common land in18th century England
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission is mapping the distribution of galaxies on large scales with the intention of finding out about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Making such maps involves surveying large areas of the sky for a very long time and doing that makes it inevitable that something unexpected will crop up. That happened last month, between 16th and 24th September 2026, when the Euclid telescope accidentally discovered a comet.
Here is an image showing what Euclid was looking at when the comet intruded:
Here is is a comparison of frames showing the motion of the comet, which is easily identifiable by the large arrow pointing at it together with the word “comet”.
Picture Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, M. Pöntinen et al. 2026
The serendipitous comet is named C/2026 S1 (Euclid) – and, before you ask, no it’s not an alien spacecraft.
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