Archive for December, 2009

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Another kick in the teeth…

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on December 23, 2009 by telescoper

I shall  attempt to beat the weather tomorrow and fly up to the North-East for Christmas break. This blog will therefore be offline for a few days (if I succeed in getting airborne). I wish I had a bit of good news to post before the holiday, but I’m afraid there’s even more bad news. Yesterday, Lord Mandelson (yes,  another unelected member of the government) has written to the Chairman  of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) outlining their budget for 2010-11.

The letter confirms £180 million in efficiency savings from the 2009 Budget and an £83 million deduction following last year’s grant letter. On top of those there’s another cut of £135 million ““the higher than expected costs of student support during the economic downturn”. Of this cut, £84 million will be switched from capital baselines, leaving a £51 million cut in teaching grant.  The letter says these savings should be delivered “in ways that minimise impact on teaching and students”, but doesn’t say who should bear the maximum impact. It also says “greater efficiency, improved collaboration and bearing down on costs will need to be combined with a commitment to protect quality and access”. In other words, all we have to do is supply a high-quality service at bargain-basement prices. Easy.

The research element of the funding is held roughly constant (at the obvious expense of teaching): “we have agreed to switch £84 million from your capital baselines, so that the reductions to the teaching grant can be held to £51 million.” Although the research funding is maintained in level, Mandelson says “securing greater economic and social impact will be important over the next year”. Not thinking in the short term, then. Next year will do.

The letter also asks HEFCE to develop proposals on:

  • Creating a more diverse higher education landscape, by increasing the range of alternatives to the full-time three year degree;
  • Maximising the impact that higher education makes to the economy by supporting the programmes with highest economic and social value;
  • Supporting research concentration to underpin our world class ranking, while continuing to support excellence in research;
  • Developing a standard set of information about higher education, so that all students can exercise informed choice about courses and institutions.

What these points really mean is:

  • Realising that slashing student support and increasing fees is going to deter many students from doing a degree, Mandy wants us to make up for it by offering more part-time degrees so students can work full-time as well as studying. Bad news for laboratory-based subjects.
  • Impact again. I’ve explained what that means already
  • In the letter, Mandelson makes clear the “Government’s presumption in favour of more, rather than less, research concentration”. Apparently they don’t care about doing the best research possible, just doing it in a smaller number of places. Idiotic. More worryingly still, Mandelson asks HEFCE to suggest how to achieve this in the 2010-11 allocations. In other words he wants HEFCE to tweak the funding  allocations arising from the 2008 RAE even further to stamp out excellence that isn’t sufficiently “concentrated”.
  • One size clearly fits all in Mandy’s Discount House of Higher Education.

Finally, Mandelson leaves us with the following message of goodwill

Over the next year, moving towards a sustainable position on pensions within the sector will be a key challenge

In other words, “I’m after your pensions too….”

Merry Christmas, Lord Mandelson. It’s a good job you’ll be out on your ear after the next election. But then I assume you’ve got a nice fat pension stashed away already.

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The Miracle of Bach

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on December 22, 2009 by telescoper

The discussion after yesterday’s post prompted me to put this online. It’s a stunning performance that I heard a while ago but have been saving up for a special occasion. It’s the aria Erbarme dich, Mein Gott (“Have mercy, my God”) from the St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s a bit invidious to pick bits from this monumental work, which takes over three hours to perform but I wanted to post this particular excerpt here for the benefit of those people who find Bach’s music dry and academic. If you can find any piece of music in any idiom as emotionally expressive as this, then I’d love to hear it.

The aria is set for a countertenor playing the part of Peter, and it conveys his feelings of shame and remorse after having betrayed Jesus. Nowadays it is often sung by a female singer in the mezzo soprano or contralto range and it works pretty well done like that too. The point is that feelings such as this are universal. We all – men and women, christian and non-christian – come to know what it is to feel like this, just as we all come to know about pain and death. It’s the fact that we all know that we will die that gives the story of the Passion it’s tragic power.

The structure of the piece is quite simple, in fact, consisting of a repeating  figure of a rising minor 6th interval  followed by a descending minor 3rd. This is a hook used in a lot of tunes, especially Jazz standards. The idea is to start below the tonic and then jump above it, later relaxing down onto it. Most tunes then move on somewhere else after this motif but, Bach rests there to build tension through an unresolved expectation of movement.  In the clip below the (Hungarian) singer Julia Hamari spends a full 4 seconds on that tonic note (the sustained B at 1:10-1:15). While she holds it, you can hear the tonal centre gradually shift from the root chord (Bm) to the subdominant (Em) through the cellos’ 3-chord progression G-B7-Em, in a cadence produced by adding only a single note, each time, to the sustained B: first G (to create the major triad GB below the root), then F# (for the B7 sound, ie, the V-th of the Em), and then E for the resolution. It’s so simple, only a genius could make it work.

The rhythm is interesting too. The time signature is 12/8, which is what is used in many slow blues compositions. Bach arranges the 12 notes in each bar runs of triplets that go down the natural minor scale of B. Hamari sustains that B over 9 beats: GGG-F#F#F#-EEE. This is like the walking bass lines used in jazz, but this one is relentlessly descending adding to the atmosphere of sadness and contrition.

This aria has all the hallmarks of Bach’s great work.  A beautifully memorable melody and an interesting harmonic progression form the foundations. Add to that the tragic, weeping sound of the bowed strings in the orchestra, the plucked cello notes symbolising Peter’s tears,  and the solo obbligato that Yehudi Menuin referred to as the most beautiful music ever written for the violin. Even then you don’t get the full picture, because this is so much greater than the sum of its (admittedly great) parts. What makes it so wonderful is how Bach captures the feeling of guilt and remorse so naturally. It’s not overwrought and we don’t feel manipulated. Even the extensive repetition of the phrase Erbarme dich feels so genuine. What more can be said?

Perhaps just one more thing. I think Julia Hamari’s performance of this piece is sensational. Watching her it’s difficult not to form the impression that she is completely at one with the music and the feelings that it expresses. She looks like she’s in a trance, acting as a vehicle for music that’s coming from some other place entirely. But where? I often feel this way watching great Jazz improvisers, finding it hard to rid myself of the notion that somehow the instrument is playing them rather than the other way around. I’m not a religious man, but music like this is, to me, nothing short of miraculous.

PS. Remembering that this is meant to be an astronomy blog, I’ll add that scientist and author Lewis Thomas once suggested how the people of Earth should communicate with the universe:

I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

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For unto us a child is born

Posted in Music with tags , , , on December 21, 2009 by telescoper

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year you will now that 2009 is the 250th anniversary of the death of George Frideric Handel, the great composer who was born in what is now Germany but who moved to London in 1712 and became an adopted Englishman, taking up Britisch citizenship in 1727. BBC Radio 3 has been celebrating all year, and I’ve heard lots of Handel’s prolific output for the first time thanks to them. I am a bit ashamed that I have put any Handel on here so far. I certainly don’t mean to imply that I don’t like his music – far from it, in fact – he’s so good that I can even put up with the harpsichords. Sometimes. I guess it’s just that I never got around to it and wasn’t sure what to pick.

Anyway, it’s time to correct this error of omission. This is an appropriate time of year, in fact. Like many brought up in England (or Wales), one of the essential rituals of Christmas time is listening to Messiah. This is a little strange because it was originally intended to be performed at Easter. Another strange tradition is that everyone (orchestra, choir and audience) stands during the famous Hallelujah Chorus. Legend has it that this is because King George II stood when he heard it and, following Royal protocol, everyone else had to stand too. For some reason, over two hundred years later it still happens. It’s just one of those things that stuck.

However, after much thought, I decided not to use the Hallelujah Chorus here, but not because I don’t like it. It’s a thrilling piece and full of nostalgia for me too. The reason is that for many people it’s all they ever hear, and there’s a lot more to Messiah than that. So I’ve gone for another piece, which suits the season especially well and also exemplifies Handel’s gift for vocal and orchestral writing. This sprightly and engaging version was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

My compliments of the season!

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The Known Universe

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags on December 20, 2009 by telescoper

It’s the last Sunday before Christmas and it’s still very cold here in Cardiff, although so far at least we’ve escaped the snow. I’ve been putting my feet up, watching the football (Newcastle 2 Middlesborough 0) and doing the Christmas crosswords in the newspapers and magazines (haven’t finished Azed yet, it’s a toughie). Anyway, I don’t want to let this self-indulgence stop me from posting something so how about this marvellous little video produced by the American Museum of Natural History. It’s already been posted on a few other blogs, but hopefully a few of you won’t have seen it. Enjoy!

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Dark Squib

Posted in Bad Statistics, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on December 19, 2009 by telescoper

After today’s lengthy pre-Christmas traipse around Cardiff in the freezing cold, I don’t think I can summon up the energy for a lengthy post today. However, today’s cryogenic temperatures did manage to remind me that I hadn’t closed the book on a previous story about rumours of a laboratory detection of dark matter by the experiment known as CDMS. The main rumour – that there was going to be a paper in Nature reporting the definite detection of dark matter particles – turned out to be false, but there was a bit of truth after all, in that they did put out a paper yesterday (18th December, the date that the original rumour suggested their paper would come out).  There’s also an executive summary of the results here.

It turns out that the experiment has seen two events that might, just might, be the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that are most theorists favoured candidate for cold dark matter. However, they might also be due to background events generated by other stray particles getting into the works. It’s impossible to tell at this stage whether the signal is real or not. Based on the sort of naive  frequentist statistical treatment of the data that for some reason is what particle physicists seem to prefer, there’s a 23% chance of their signal being background rather than dark matter. In other words, it’s about a one-sigma detection. In fact, if you factor in the possibility of a systematic error in the background counts – these are very difficult things to calibrate precisely – then the significance of the result decreases even further. And if you do it all properly, in a Bayesian way with an appropriate prior then the most probable result is no detection. Andrew Jaffe gives some details on his blog.

There is no universally accepted criterion for what constitutes a definite detection, but I’ve been told recently by the editor of Nature himself that if it’s less than 3-sigma (a probability of about 1% of it arising) then they’re unlikely to publish it. If it’s 2-sigma (5%) then it’s interesting, but not conclusive, but at 1-sigma it’s not worth writing home about never mind writing a press release.

I should  add that none of their results has yet been subject to peer review either. I can only guess that CDMS must be undergoing a funding review pretty soon and wanted to use the media to show it was producing the goods. I can’t say I’m impressed with these antics, and I doubt if the reviewers will be either.

Unfortunately, the fact that this is all so inconclusive from a scientific point of view hasn’t stopped various organs getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and starting to beat about the bush with it. New Scientist‘s Twitter feed screamed

Clear signal of dark matter detected in Minnesota!

although the article itself was a bit better informed. The Guardian ran a particularly poor story,  impressive only in the way it crammed so many misconceptions into such a short piece.

This episode takes me back to a theme I’ve touched on many times on this blog, which is that scientific results are very rarely black-and-white and they have to be treated carefully in appropriate probabilistic terms. Unfortunately, the media and the public have a great deal of difficulty understanding the subtleties of this and what gets across in the public domain can be either garbled or downright misleading. Most often in science the correct answer isn’t “true” or “false” but somewhere in between.

Of course, with more measurements, better statistics and stronger control of systematics this CDMS result may well turn into a significant detection. If it does then it will be a great scientific breakthrough and they’ll have my congratulations straight away, tempered with a certain amount of sadness that there will be no UK competitors in the race owing to our recent savage funding cuts. But we’re not there yet. So far, it’s just a definite maybe.

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Herschel Delivers the Goods

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 18, 2009 by telescoper

It’s a bit lower key than I’d hoped because of Wednesday’s catastrophic announcements, but some of the first science results from Herschel are now available online. I’ve taken most of the following text from our own Herschel Outreach site here at Cardiff University.

Herschel scientists are currently meeting in Madrid to present the results from the Science Demonstration Phase of the Herschel mission. This is the phase of the mission where the satellite and its instruments are stretched to their full capabilities. A number of results involving the SPIRE instrument and astronomers from the UK have been presented. Professor Matt Griffin, SPIRE Principal Investigator, said

The Herschel Science Demonstration meeting is what the SPIRE team has been looking forward to since the start of the project more than a decade ago, and the results being presented are even better than we dared hope before launch. Not only are the observatory and the instrument working very well, but it is already clear that in this unexplored region of the spectrum, the Universe is even more interesting than we thought.

As well as the images presented below, more scientific results are being presented at the meeting in Madrid, some of which will be shown here in due course. I’ll just show you a quick taster of a couple of the things Cardiff astronomers are looking at.

A region of the Virgo cluster as seen in optical light by Sloan Digital Sky Survey (left) and in far-infrared by SPIRE 250m image Image credit: SDSS (left), ESA/Herschel/HeViCS Key Project (right)

Above is a region of the Virgo cluster, a large cluster of galaxies around 50 million light-years from our galaxy. The left panel shows a region containing four galaxies in optical light, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, while the right panel shows the region as seen by SPIRE at 250mm. The galaxies in the Virgo cluster are kept together by their mutual gravitational attraction. However, the galaxies do move relative to each other, and when they pass close to each other they can pull gas and dust into clumps and streams which stretch between the galaxies. Dr Jonathan Davies, of Cardiff University, and Principle Investigator of the Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey, for which this image was taken, commented that “far-infrared observations such as this give us an unprecedented insight into the behaviour of gas and dust in galaxy clusters, and further observations should yield some very exciting results”. The area of emission above the galaxy NGC4435 is very faint as seen in optical light, but much brighter in the far-infrared as measured by SPIRE. Also notable from this region is the relative brightness of the galaxies NGC4406 and NGC4402. NGC4406 is a giant elliptical galaxy, and so very bright in the optical, but is almost invisible in the far-infrared. This shows that it has already used up the majority of its gas and dust in forming the stars.

SPIRE image of the GOODS-North region. Image credit: ESA/Herschel/HerMES Key Project

On the left is shown an area of sky called the “Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey” (GOODS), which has been observed by many telescopes at a range of wavelengths, and now by SPIRE in the far-infrared. It is an area of sky devoid of foreground objects, such as stars within our Galaxy, or any other nearby galaxies, and is a little larger than the area of the full moon as observed from Earth. The image is made from the three SPIRE bands, with red, green and blue corresponding to 500µm, 350µm and 250µm respectively. Every fuzzy blob in this image is a very distant galaxy, seen as they were 3—10 billion years ago when the star formation was very widely spread throughout the Universe. Dr Seb Oliver, of University of Sussex and PI of the HERMES survey for which this image was taken, said

Seeing such stunning images after just 14 hours of observations gives us high expectations for the full length observations over much larger regions of the Universe. This will give us a much clearer idea of how star formation has progressed throughout the history of the Universe.” The redder objects are either more distant, as the expansion of the Universe has stretched, the light more since it was emitted by the galaxy, or much cooler than the bluer galaxies. This is the first time much of the Cosmic Infrared Background, discovered in the 1990s, has been resolved into the individual galaxies. Studying these galaxies at this early stage of the Universe will allow astronomers to test their models of star and galaxy formation.

I’d add that although this is probably the least photogenic of the images just released, it’s the sort of thing that fascinates those of us of a statistical persuasion because it’s such a challenge to wring as much science as possible from data that test the limits of the instrument’s capabilities. However it takes a great deal of time and detailed analysis to do justice to the quantity and quality of the data that’s coming in from Herschel. If our grants  get cut then we’ll find it very difficult to deliver this science in a timely fashion, and that would be a ridiculous state of affairs given the investment that’s already gone in to building this marvellous observatory.

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Space Anomaly

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 17, 2009 by telescoper

After yesterday’s marathon, I’m not planning today to post another lengthy item about the STFC prioritisation exercise which is now public. However, a number of people have asked me about an apparent anomaly in the rankings and, despite the hostile reception I received on the e-astronomer when I posted a comment there, I’ve decided to mention it briefly here in an attempt to explain what looks at first sight like a very strange state of affairs.

BepiColombo (no relation) is a Mercury Orbiter mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was selected as a result of a lengthy Europe-wide process. The UK space science community showed relatively little interest in the mission, but it had sufficient support elsewhere to avoid being cancelled about three years ago. So it was picked for the programme, and is now scheduled for launch in 2014. It will take about 6 years to reach Mercury and will take data for a year or two after that.

As is the case with these big ESA “cornerstone” missions, participating countries are called upon to bid to build instruments to fly on the spacecraft. Although this requires an additional investment from the funding agencies (in this case STFC) beyond the annual subscription, this is essentially the only way of securing a science return for UK Plc on the ESA subscription. The UK is in fact involved in two instruments on BepiColombo, a magnetometer and an X-ray spectrometer, although it is the second of these that has the main funding commitment from STFC. Roughly speaking, STFC has commissioned UK scientists and given them funds to build a UK part of BepiColumbo.

I’ll remark here that I always thought the most interesting thing about Mercury is its magnetic field – it’s quite surprising even that it has one – so given the chance I’d prefer to have seen the UK getting more involved in that. But what do I know? I’m just a physicist…

Anyway, in the UK’s recent prioritisation exercise, BepiColombo was graded 1 on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high), reflecting the relatively low interest in this mission among UK space scientists. Many projects rated 3 were cancelled, and even those rated 4 and 5 are going to have their funds cut by 15 to 20% so it looks very strange to have BepiColombo retained in the final programme, especially if you’re working on an alpha-3 project that’s just been canned.

However, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. While the UK itself wasn’t particularly interested in this mission, it did attract strong support in the rest of Europe. The UK signed up to the whole ESA menu and was thus obliged to go along with it; a la carte was not an option. ESA decides its programme, with UK input, but we do not have a veto. STFC (and previously PPARC) entered into various agreements, including a Memorandum of Understanding, from which it would be disastrous to back out.

I don’t know how much BepiColombo is costing STFC, but it’s likely to run into millions. That money could have supported other things in the astronomy programme, including postdoctoral grants. But before you jump to the conclusion that astronomy has been stitched up, remember that the ESA subscription has also opened up new areas of research through missions such as Planck and Herschel. These are a boon to our research, but the privilege of being allowed to participate in them comes at the price of having to support things the UK astronomy community is less keen on. In this particular example the politics of the situation and the need to fulfil our obligations within ESA have trumped the scientific judgement of the UK community.

To put this another way, would you want to scrap UK participation in this mission if it also meant binning our involvement in Herschel, Planck, JWST and all the rest.

I’m not advocating we scrap BepiColombo any more than we should scrap any of the other primary elements of the ESA programme. However, I do think that the nature of this balancing act should be more widely known. Otherwise, as things stood, it just looks like some vested interest has taken the funds from more deserving causes in order to promote a pet project. I hope I’ve made it clear that did not happen and that STFC had no choice but to fund BepiColombo.

I think it helps to get these things out in the open, in apparent contrast to some colleagues in the space lobby who seem to prefer to silence debate rather than engage with it. It’s no wonder people get suspicious when that’s the attitude shown by those in positions of responsibility on STFC committees.

If I’ve said anything unfair or unreasonable here please feel free to comment, as long as you can refrain from gratuitous abuse…

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Poem for the Day

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 17, 2009 by telescoper

October, 1803 

These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:
Even rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
With words of apprehension and despair:
While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
Men unto whom sufficient for the day
And minds not stinted or untilled are given,
Sound, healthy, children of the God of heaven,
Are cheerful as the rising sun in May.
What do we gather hence but firmer faith
That every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath;
That virtue and the faculties within
Are vital,–and that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?

(by William Wordsworth).

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Day of Reckoning

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 16, 2009 by telescoper

10.45am. I came in this morning determined to get on with some work to distract my attention from the looming announcement of budget cuts from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). I was up nearly all night worrying about the future, especially for the current generation of postdocs whose careers I’m pretty sure are going to sacrificed in large numbers to balance the books. It reminded me a bit about a poem I posted a while ago: I could not sleep for thinking of the Sky STFC.

Anyway, I’ve spent over an hour trying to write one paragraph of the paper I’m trying to finish and I can’t settle so I thought I’d start a post, with the intention of updating it as the day goes on, the picture gets a bit clearer, and I become increasingly suicidal.

The actual announcement of the result of the prioritisation exercise will appear this afternoon on the STFC website here under the heading

STFC: Investing in the Future

Who said these guys don’t have a sense of humour? What’s underneath is currently completely blank. Hang on, they might have put the result up early in that case…

Most of the blogs and tweets I follow – at least those emanating from this side of the Atlantic – are about this today, so if you’d like to keep up here are some useful links:

Paul Crowther at Sheffield has kept up with all the ongoings and downturnings at STFC and you can expect him to understand it better and quicker than the rest of us  here.

There’s a very good (and nearly anonymous) post about all this on the blog To Left of Centre.

The e-astronomer (Andy Lawrence at the ROE)  has written about this and a lot of important people have commented on it.

Rob Simpson, a PhD student here in Cardiff,  is probably expressing the fears of many younger researchers as is Sarah Kendrew who gives a postdoc perspective.

There’s a list of things astronomical that are probably about to eat the dirt at this website. My bet is that everything on their list will go, plus more. The reason is that most of the things at the bottom of the prioritisation exercise are actually fairly cheap, so just closing a few won’t plug the gap. As a colleague of mine said the other day, “It’s a big shit sandwich, and we all have to take a bite.”

11.15am. If the phrase “going forward” appears anywhere on the STFC announcement page, then I won’t be responsible for my actions…

11.50am. WICKET! Prince c Collingwood b Swann 45. Oh sorry. Wrong blog.

12.08pm. Incoming transatlantic link from the Starving Economist, from whose page I’ve pulled the following comment:

So I’d almost forgotten that other countries are out there, facing the Great Recession as well, and making really stupid decisions in the face of it. IMHO one example of blatant incompetence in an economic sense is being perpetrated by none other than the UK. We kind of look up to them, don’t we? It’s the accent or something. But they are busy tossing some of their world-renowned science, and much of their past investment in such, out the door rather than restructure some of their government funding. Talk about inertia. Their astronomy program appears to be particularly hard-hit. Interesting way to close 2009, the International Year of Astronomy.

I couldn’t agree more. It also reminded that I haven’t made enough of the irony that this is indeed the International Year of Astronomy. For a lot of people it will be the last year they’ll be doing astronomy.

12.25pm. Meanwhile, our man in Madrid, Matt Griffin has been wowing the audience with some of the new results from Herschel. I hope to be able to post a few of them later when the official workshop results go live.

12.45pm. STFC operatives have been phoning project leaders this morning to tell them the bad news. Our head of school, Walter Gear, has got his phone call telling him that our attempt to resurrect Clover will not be funded. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected…

13.15pm. It’s tea-time in sunny  South Africa (with the home side at 159-4) but here in Blighty it’s the long dark lunch break of the soul, waiting for news of the inevitable.

13.30pm. Half an hour to go. Most of the astronomers in the department have now left to travel to Madrid for the big workshop starting tomorrow. They tell me the new results probably won’t be available for public consumption until Friday (18th December). Nothing to sugar the pill, then.

13.55pm. I’m not often right, but I was wrong again. I’ve just noticed that there is already an ESA press release that includes this stunning image of a star-forming region in the constellation of Aquila made using both PACS and SPIRE observations. This is just a first look at part of an extended survey of stellar nurseries that Herschel will be undertaking over the forthcoming months.

14.00pm. And there were are, right on cue. Here is the announcement. As expected, there is a ridiculous attempt to put a positive spin on it all, but you will find immediately, sigh, another 10% cut in research grants to universities (on top of the 25% we already had) to reduce the amount of “exploitation”, plus 25% cuts in the number of PhD students and fellowships “mirroring the overall reduction in the programme”. I read that as meaning that STFC wants, in the long term, about 25% of the astronomers in the UK to go somewhere else and, preferably,  never come back.

I’ll post more when I’ve read the details.

14.10pm. So here’s a quick summary of what projects will be funded in (ground-based) astronomy:

Advanced LIGO, JCMT (to 2012), Gemini (until end 2012), ING (to 2012), KMOS, VISTA, Dark Energy Survey, E-ELT R&D, SKA R&D, SuperWASP, e-Merlin, Zeplin III; Total cost of £87m over 5 years

(the big surprise to me in there is  e-Merlin, which I thought would get the chop) and what won’t

Auger, Inverse Square Law, ROSA, ALMA regional centre, JIVE, Liverpool Telescope, UKIRT. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £16m. Total savings of £29m over 5 years

And on the space side we have the lucky ones:

Aurora, GAIA, Herschel, JWST-MIRI, LISA Pathfinder, Rosetta, Planck, ExoMars, Hinode, Cosmic Vision, Solar Orbiter, Stereo, Swift, Bepi-Colombo; Total cost of £114m over 5 years

and the losers

Cassini, Cluster, SOHO, Venus Express, XMM. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £28m. Total Savings of £42m over 5 years

Note that both Aurora and Bepi-Colombo were both rated very low on scientific grounds but have been retained in the programme, presumably for political reasons.

However, the big downside for everyone is the cut in university grants for “exploitation” that I mentioned above. STFC wants to have lots of expensive facilities, but doesn’t want to fund the modest among of staff needed to actually get science out of them. The stupidity of this decision is made even more depressing by its inevitability.

Even the top-rated projects are getting cuts to their funding. It just shows how little thinking is going on about the actual science that STCF is supposed to be supporting. Isn’t it a more sensible strategy to do a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly? It’s a mess.

14.38pm. From a Cardiff perspective this is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but is still pretty dire. The primary activities for our current astronomy programme, Herschel and Planck, are both very high in the priority list and the relativity group is relieved to see ground-based gravitational wave research, including Advanced LIGO, at the highest priority. Moreover, it looks like what I feared most of all – an immediate clawback of existing grants with consequent immediate redundancies – is not going to happen, owing to what appears to be a last-minute injection of funds from RCUK. We’re still looking at cash cuts though, and we’re vulnerable because so much of our research income comes from STFC.

14.43pm. Not on the STFC webpage, but it appears that they are not going to support LOFAR-UK either.

15.05pm. If you want to read the full outcome of the prioritisation exercise, in terms of a batting order of projects, you can download it here. It includes a recommendation that the top funded (alpha-5) projects should get a 15% cut and those at the next leveldown (alpha-4) should get a 20% cut. However, things will probably turn out worse than that because those cuts were suggested on the basis that only those projects would be funded at all. As it turns out, some alpha-3 projects have made it through also, so the cuts to the higher-rated projects must be larger to compensate. Mustn’t they?

15.24pm. I note that STFC have decided to carry on their programme of outreach activities:

Ongoing support for public outreach and science communication, through continuance of our award schemes and Fellowships, and public engagement and communications, helping to ensure new generations of children are enthused and inspired by science, and encouraged to continue study in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

..so we can kick them in the teeth when they’ve just started a scientific career.

15.30pm. Press release, from Unelected Minister for Science and Innovation, Strategic Defence Acquisition Reform, and Formula 1 Car Racing,  Lord  Drayson of Twitter.  I quote:

… it has become clear to me that there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control.   I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.

Is there a possibility that a light has gone on somewhere to the effect that something must be done to stop STFC killing University research? I hope so. If he can pull something out of the fire before March 2010, though, I’d be very impressed.

16.07pm. I may be clutching at straws here, but it is interesting to join the dots between Lord Drayon’s comment above and the following excerpt from the STFC announcement

discussions would be held in coming months with national and international partners, including universities, departments and project teams, on implementation of the investment strategy. This will include discussions with EPSRC and the University funding councils on the impact of these measures on physics departments in universities.

I doubt if EPSRC is going to come running to the rescue without a great deal of encouragement. However, taken together with the comment above by Lord Drayson, there’s at least a hint of a possibility that a way to protect grants might be found. Calling them “research” rather than “exploitation” grants would be a start…

16.18pm. Press statements from Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, President of the Institute of Physics here and Andy Fabian, President of the Royal Astronomical Society here.

17.08pm. I think that’s enough for the day. It hasn’t been good, but the nightmare scenario was that my own research grant would be terminated immediately and I’d have to break the news to my PDRA. At least that didn’t happen, not yet anyway. I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. But I’m exhausted after sleeping so badly last night, so I think I’ll close this for now. Keep your comments coming if there’s anything significant I missed…

19.45pm Before I settle down with my gramophone records for the evening, I just thought I’d remind anyone not sufficiently depressed at the state of STFC that the drastic cuts announced today do not take account of whatever share of the £600 million “efficiency savings” announced in the budget has been allocated to them. It may look bad now, but it’s probably going to get worse. On that cheery note, I’m going to have a drink and listen to Mahler.

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Sad Streets

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on December 15, 2009 by telescoper

I noticed yesterday that an old post of mine about my childhood in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, was attracting some interest. It’s one of the interesting things about running a blog that, quite often, an old post you thought was dead seems to get someone’s attention who sends it  on to some others and then, all of a sudden, it’s getting dozens of readers. I’m not sure who or what was having a look at this particular one, but it did spur me on to try to dispel my hangover after the staff Christmas lunch by having a look around the web to see if anything new had turned up since I last posted about Benwell.

At first I was delighted to find this photograph, taken sometime in the sixties,  showing the old trolley bus terminus at Delaval Road. This view is eastwards, looking along Benwell Lane towards Newcastle itself. The road going south towards the river (to the right) is Delaval Road and the complicated system of wires overhead enabled the electrically powered trolley buses to turn around and head back into town. These buses were phased out when I was little, but I remember them quite clearly, especially the rather comical palaver involved in trying to keep them attached to the wires.

To the left of the picture you can see a wall with trees behind. This marked the southern end of a small wood (“The Spinney”) inside which was the small cottage we lived in. The road behind the camera, the continuation of Benwell lane, is Whickham View.

It was nice to see this picture. It made me all nostalgic. Benwell was never actually Belgravia, of course. It wasn’t at all a wealthy neighbourhood and parts of it were quite rough, but my childhood there was pretty happy and there was a real sense of community to the place, helped by the presence of lots of little shops and good transport links.

Now look at essentially the same view, taken in 2009.

Superficially, the area hasn’t changed that much but all the shops are boarded up and all the houses abandoned. Even the road itself is in a state of disrepair. In fact, all the once busy streets leading down towards the Tyne to the south of Benwell Lane are now quite deserted and the whole area scheduled for demolition. You can see many more pictures of this depressing scene here.

I moved away from Newcastle in 1982 when I went to University. I therefore missed the terrible effect that the recession of the 1980s had on the streets I had grown up in. It also had a direct effect on my father, who separated from my mother when I was about 12. He ran a small business selling educational supplies (paper, pens, art materials etc) to schools and pre-school playgroups. Most of it was wholesale but he also ran a small shop which, at first, was on Benwell Lane. In fact it was one of the two shops you can see by the light blue car in the first picture, although this snap was taken a while before he took it over. I think it was a cake shop before that.

After some modest success he moved just along the road a bit to slightly larger premises on the corner of Whickham View and Delaval Road, i.e. just to the right of where the camera is positioned on the opposite side of the road to the greengrocers.  He lived in a flat above this new shop, which formerly sold wool and was run by an old lady called Mrs Ludgate.

As time went on and the recession bit harder, the social and material fabric of Benwell gradually deteriorated. There were increasingly frequent burglaries and car thefts. It became a no-go zone at night. His  business started to fail and debts began to mount. The stress of watching the neighbourhood falling apart and coping with the constant threat of break-ins at the shop and his flat eventually got too much for him. He packed everything he could into his van and fled to the South coast to live with his sister in Weymouth, leaving the dilapidated shop and all his debts behind. I’m sure there’s a similar story behind all the other empty shops in Benwell.

Looking at these bleak photographs of the deserted streets and houses of my youth filled me with sadness, not least because they seem like portents of the future of British science. In ten years time will we all be poring over pictures of abandoned observatories and research labs?

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