Archive for June, 2010

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Cosmology on its beam-ends?

Posted in Cosmic Anomalies, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 14, 2010 by telescoper

Interesting press release today from the Royal Astronomical Society about a paper (preprint version here) which casts doubt on whether the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe supports the standard cosmological model to the extent that is generally claimed. Apologies if this is a bit more technical than my usual posts (but I like occasionally to pretend that it’s a science blog).

The abstract of the paper (by Sawangwit & Shanks) reads

Using the published WMAP 5-year data, we first show how sensitive the WMAP power spectra are to the form of the WMAP beam. It is well known that the beam profile derived from observations of Jupiter is non-Gaussian and indeed extends, in the W band for example, well beyond its 12.’6 FWHM core out to more than 1 degree in radius. This means that even though the core width corresponds to wavenumber l ~ 1800, the form of the beam still significantly affects the WMAP results even at l~200 which is the scale of the first acoustic peak. The difference between the beam convolved Cl; and the final Cl is ~ 70% at the scale of the first peak, rising to ~ 400% at the scale of the second.  New estimates of the Q, V and W-band beam profiles are then presented, based on a stacking analysis of the WMAP5 radio source catalogue and temperature maps. The radio sources show a significantly (3-4σ) broader beam profile on scales of 10′-30′ than that found by the WMAP team whose beam analysis is based on measurements of Jupiter. Beyond these scales the beam profiles from the radio sources are too noisy to give useful information. Furthermore, we find tentative evidence for a non-linear relation between WMAP and ATCA/IRAM 95 GHz source fluxes. We discuss whether the wide beam profiles could be caused either by radio source extension or clustering and find that neither explanation is likely. We also argue against the possibility that Eddington bias is affecting our results. The reasons for the difference between the radio source and the Jupiter beam profiles are therefore still unclear. If the radio source profiles were then used to define the WMAP beam, there could be a significant change in the amplitude and position of even the first acoustic peak. It is therefore important to identify the reasons for the differences between these two beam profile estimates.

The press release puts it somewhat more dramatically

New research by astronomers in the Physics Department at Durham University suggests that the conventional wisdom about the content of the Universe may be wrong. Graduate student Utane Sawangwit and Professor Tom Shanks looked at observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite to study the remnant heat from the Big Bang. The two scientists find evidence that the errors in its data may be much larger than previously thought, which in turn makes the standard model of the Universe open to question. The team publish their results in a letter to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I dare say the WMAP team will respond in due course, but this paper spurred me to mention some work on this topic that was done by my friend (and former student) Lung-Yih Chiang. During his last visit to Cardiff we discussed this at great length and got very excited at one point when we thought we had discovered an error along the lines that the present paper claims. However, looking more carefully into it we decided that this wasn’t the case and we abandoned our plans to publish a paper on it.

Let me show you a few slides from a presentation that Lung-Yih gave to me a while ago. For a start here is the famous power-spectrum of the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background which plays an essential role in determining the parameters of the standard cosmology:

The position of the so-called “acoustic peak” plays an important role in determining the overall curvature of space-time on cosmological scales and the higher-order peaks pin down other parameters. However, it must be remembered that WMAP doesn’t just observe the cosmic microwave background. The signal it receives is heavily polluted by contamination from within our Galaxy and there is also significant instrumental noise.  To deal with this problem, the WMAP team exploit the five different frequency channels with which the probe is equipped, as shown in the picture below.

The CMB, being described by a black-body spectrum, has a sky temperature that doesn’t vary with frequency. Foreground emission, on the other hand, has an effective temperature that varies with frequency in way that is fairly well understood. The five available channels can therefore be used to model and subtract the foreground contribution to the overall signal. However, the different channels have different angular resolution (because they correspond to different wavelengths of radiation). Here are some sample patches of sky illustrating this

At each frequency the sky is blurred out by the “beam” of the WMAP optical system; the blurring is worse at low frequencies than at high frequencies. In order to do the foreground subtraction, the WMAP team therefore smooth all the frequency maps to have the same resolution, i.e. so the net effect of optical resolution and artificial smoothing produces the same overall blurring (actually 1 degree).  This requires accurate knowledge of the precise form of the beam response of the experiment to do it accurately. A rough example (for illustration only) is given in the caption above.

Now, here are the power spectra of the maps in each frequency channel

Note this is Cl not l(l+1)Cl as in the first plot of the spectrum. Now you see how much foreground there is in the data: the curves would lie on top of each other if the signal were pure CMB, i.e. if it did not vary with frequency. The equation at the bottom basically just says that the overall spectrum is a smoothed version of the CMB plus the foregrounds  plus noise. Note, crucially,  that the smoothing suppresses the interesting high-l wiggles.

I haven’t got space-time enough to go into how the foreground subtraction is carried out, but once it is done it is necessary to “unblur” the maps in order to see the structure at small angular scales, i.e. at large spherical harmonic numbers l. The initial process of convolving the sky pattern with a filter corresponds to multiplying the power-spectrum with a “window function” that decreases sharply at high l, so to deconvolve the spectrum one essentially has to divide by this window function to reinstate the power removed at high harmonics.

This is where it all gets very tricky. The smoothing applied is very close to the scale of the acoustic peaks so you have to do it very carefully to avoid introducing artificial structure in Cl or obliterating structure that you want to see. Moreover, a small error in the beam gets blown up in the deconvolution so one can go badly wrong in recovering the final spectrum. In other words, you need to know the beam very well to have any chance of getting close to the right answer!

The next picture gives a rough model for how much the “recovered” spectrum depends on the error produced by making even a small error in the beam profile which, for illustration only, is assumed to be Gaussian. It also shows how sensitive the shape of the deconvolved spectrum is to small errors in the beam.

Incidentally, the ratty blue line shows the spectrum obtained from a small patch of the sky rather than the whole sky. We were interested to see how much the spectrum varied across the sky so broke it up into square patches about the same size as those analysed by the Boomerang experiment. This turns out to be a pretty good way of getting the acoustic peak position but, as you can see, you lose information at low l (i.e. on scales larger than the patch).

The WMAP beam isn’t actually Gaussian – it differs quite markedly in its tails, which means that there’s even more cross-talk between different harmonic modes than in this example – but I hope you get the basic point. As Sawangwit & Shanks say, you need to know the beam very well to get the right fluctuation spectrum out. Move the acoustic peak around only slightly and all bets are off about the cosmological parameters and, perhaps, the evidence for dark energy and dark matter. Lung-Yih looked at the way the WMAP had done it and concluded that if their published beam shape was right then they had done a good job and there’s nothing substantially wrong with the results shown in the first graph.

Sawangwit & Shanks suggest the beam isn’t right so the recovered angular spectrum is suspect. I’ll need to look a bit more at the evidence they consider before commenting on that, although if anyone else has worked through it I’d be happy to hear from them through the comments box!

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Homeopathic A&E

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on June 13, 2010 by telescoper

Just finished my last batch of exam marking and am off to do today’s Azed so no time for a proper blog but I couldn’t resist putting up this brilliant skit on homeopathic medicine, passed on to me by Anton.

I offer this as my contribution to  homeopathy awareness week.

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Alternative Galaxy Dynamics Examination

Posted in Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 12, 2010 by telescoper

Time Allowed: ~1/H0

Study the following video and answer the questions below it. Or else.

1. Use the information provided about the Earth’s orbital speed to estimate the mass of the Sun. (Assume a circular orbit; 1 AU is 1.5 × 1011 m.)

2. Use the information provided about the Sun’s motion around the Galactic Centre to estimate the total mass interior to the Sun’s orbit. (Assume a circular orbit and that the mass distribution is spherically symmetric; you may quote Newton’s shell theorem without proof.)

3. Use the answer to Q2, and other information provided in the video, to estimate the mean matter density in the Milky Way.

4. Use the information provided about the size, shape and stellar content of the Milky Way to estimate the mean number-density of stars interior to the Sun’s orbit.

5. Use the answers to Q3 & Q4 to estimate the mean mass-to-light ratio of the Galaxy.

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Mozart and Mahler, Unfinished

Posted in Biographical, Music with tags , , , , on June 11, 2010 by telescoper

I’ve spent most of today trying (and failing) to complete what’s left of my examination marking. Now I’ll have to finish it during the weekend, because I stopped this evening in order to catch a concert by the BBC National Orchestra (and, for the latter part) Chorus, of Wales at the splendid St David’s Hall here in Cardiff. It was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, in fact, so if you happened to listen in at 7pm this evening then I was among the applauds. The programme was introduced by Catherine Bott, whose voice I’ve heard many times on the radio but have never actually seen before in the flesh, so to speak. There she was on stage doing the intro, as large as life. And that’s really quite large, I can tell you.

The concert featured two uncompleted works. First we had a piece completely new to me, which was intended to be the first movement of  Gustav Mahler‘s 10th Symphony.The composer died a hundred years ago in 1910 having only just started this work.  I’ve never heard this music before and it both fascinated and surprised me. It’s quintessentially Mahler in many ways, but it’s a strange opening for a symphony because it’s a very long Adagio movement (lasting about 30 minutes). I wonder how long the entire symphony would have been if Mahler had finished it? And how would it have developed?

I thought the single movement we heard was extraordinarily beautiful but then ever since I was introduced to Mahler I’ve been a complete devotee. In fact, I  think if I could listen to Mahler all day I probably wouldn’t bother thinking about anything else at all.  Thank you, John.

After the interval we heard the Mozart Requiem, with  four excellent soloists and a choir added to the orchestra. Mozart only really finished two sections of this work, and we heard the standard completion of the rest of it done by Süssmayr. I don’t think anybody knows for sure exactly what was done by Mozart and what wasn’t, but the opening section is so spine-tinglingly marvellous it just has to be authentic Mozart. On the other hand, the sections for four voices don’t seem to have the magic that Mozart managed to conjure up in his operas so perhaps they aren’t of the same provenance. There’ll always be a mystery about this work, and I guess that will always be among its fascinations. In any case, even a little Mozart will always go a very long way.

Just over £20  for seats so close that I could read the score of the first Cello too. And people ask me why I moved to Cardiff!

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Universities Challenged

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , , on June 10, 2010 by telescoper

The news headlines over the last couple of days have been dominated by remarks made by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, who has called for a radical overhaul of the way UK universities are organized and funded. Predictably, his comments set alarm bells ringing about the savage cuts likely to be coming our way, but I hope it’s not just about slash-and-burn and that some imagination is applied to the problem of sorting out the mess the system has become. We’ll see.

According to a piece in the Guardian, for example, Willetts suggested that some students could study at smaller local colleges instead of going to a big university, but these colleges would teach courses designed and administered by the larger “elite” institutions, such as the University of London. This suggestion isn’t  exactly new because it’s actually how things used to work many years ago. In fact, Nottingham University, where I used to work used to be Nottingham University College and its degrees, along with those of a number of similar provincial universities, were University of London degrees. Nottingham University only got the power to award its own degrees in 1948. Of course, there wasn’t really such a thing as distance learning in those days, so there’s a possibility that a 21st Century revival of this basic idea could turn out very differently in terms of how things are actually taught.

On the up side of this suggestion is the fact that it would be a lot easier to maintain standards, if examinations were set by a common body. On the down side is the fact that the distinctive flavour of speciality courses taught in different colleges, which is a strength of research-led teaching, would be lost. In between these positives and negatives there is a huge grey area of questions, such as where the funding would go, precisely which universities should administer the changes and so on. A lot of thinking and planning will be  needed before anything like this could be implemented.

Let me add two more specific comments to this. First, I think Willetts’ suggestion would make a lot of sense here in Wales where it could be easily implemented by returning to the old University of Wales.  As I’ve mentioned before, as well as suffering from many of the problems besetting the English university system, the Principality has a few extra ones all its own. Among the most pressing is the proliferation of small colleges and the consequent duplication of administrative systems. I think a great deal of money could be saved and teaching quality improved by cutting out the unnecessary bureaucracy and having the smaller places administered by a larger central University (as Willetts imagined with the University of London).

My other comment is specific to my own subject, physics (and astronomy). The problem with this – and other laboratory based STEM subjects – is that it’s very difficult to imagine how they can actually be taught at all at degree level without access to research laboratories for, e.g., project work. This is why physics is only taught in 40-0dd of the 131 universities and colleges around the UK. You can call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t think it’s either possible or desirable to separate teaching from research in science subjects in the way this plan seems to suggest. I know some colleagues of mine disagree strongly with this, but there you go.

Behind this proposal is the issue of student funding, as it is at least partly motivated by the suggestion that students could stay at home and study at a local college instead of moving to a university further away, which would necessitate them taking out student loans which the Treasury has to pay out. 

There’s also the issue of fees. At the moment students in England are expected to pay a flat-rate annual fee of £3225. In addition to this the government pays to the University concerned an amount called the “Unit of Resource”. Last year, in England, the basic amount was around £4K but there is multiplier for more expensive courses. Clinical medicine, for example, attracts four times the basic rate. Subjects like physics and chemistry get a multiplier of 1.7 (so each student comes with around £6.7K of funding). Subjects with no laboratory component, i.e. most Arts and Humanities courses,  just get the bog-standard amount.

I think there’s an obvious problem with this system, namely that physics (and other science subjects) are  much more expensive to teach than the formula allows for. The total income per student for an arts subject would be about £7.2K, while that for physics is about £10K. Why bother with all that expensive laboratory space and shiny new kit when the funding differential is so small. That’s another reason why so many universities have scrapped their physics departments in favour of cheaper disciplines that generate a profit much more easily.

Coincidentally I attended a lunch yesterday with some of our soon-to-be-graduating students. I’ve been a member of a committee working on updating our Physics courses and we wanted to discuss the proposed changes with them. One of the group was a mature student who had already done an English degree (at another university). She said that a physics drgee was much harder work, but was impressed at how much more contact she had with staff. Like most physics department, virtually all our teaching is done by permanent academic staff. Students doing  Physics at Cardiff get about three times as many contact hours with staff as students doing English. It’s unfair to compare apples with oranges, but I’m convinced the funding model is stacked against STEM subjects.

The awful financial climate we’re in has led to a general sense of resignation that the government contribution to university education (the Unit of Resource) is going to decrease and the student contribution go up to compensate. However, there’s a Catch-22 here for the Treasury. If the tuition fee goes up students will have to borrow more, and the Treasury doesn’t want to take on more  subsidised student loans. It seems much more likely to me that the cuts will be achieved by simply reducing the number of funded places. However, in the light of what I argued above, I think this is a great opportunity to think about what is the correct Unit of Resource for different subjects. If we all agree the country needs more scientists and engineers, not less, I’d argue that funded places elsewhere should be cut, and that the difference between arts and science units of resource also be substantially increased.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that there should be zero-rated courses, i.e. those which students are welcome to take if they pay the full cost but to which the government will not contribute at all. That should put an end to the Mickey Mouse end of Higher Education provision once and for all.

PS. A review of the tuition fee system is currently taking place but isn’t due to report until the autumn. It is led by Lord Browne who was formerly the boss of BP. I wonder if there’ll be any leaks?

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The Garden of Eros

Posted in Poetry with tags , on June 9, 2010 by telescoper

I was drawn to the idea of using this poem by Oscar Wilde as a blog post simply because I wanted something timely to celebrate the abundance of lovely flowers in my Garden, especially the Honeysuckle which has started dispensing an extraordinary perfume in the evenings. I hadn’t seen this poem before yesterday, but noticed that the (superb) first verse mentions the month of June, which made it especially timely:

It is full summer now, the heart of June,
Not yet the sun-burnt reapers are a-stir
Upon the upland meadow where too soon
Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see his treasure scattered by the wild and
spendthrift breeze.


Once I started reading it, however, I was completely captivated. Amongst other things, it’s a lament against the growth of materialism in the 19th Century. Although the language is as over-the-top as you would expect for Oscar Wilde, it’s a beautifully sustained work and Wilde’s natural flair for words shines throughout. He refers in admiration to a large number of other poets (including Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, Rossetti and William Morris), but I think it’s unfortunate that Wilde isn’t as much appreciated as a poet as he is as a playwright.

It’s not really feasible to post the entire text because it’s so very long but fortunately I found an excellent reading that lasts about 15 minutes so it’s split over two youtube-sized chunks. I hope you find time to listen to it all and simply bask in the glow of a true genius…

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Pecha Kucha

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , on June 8, 2010 by telescoper

A few months ago I was invited to take part in an evening of Pecha Kucha in a hotel in Geneva. I’ll try anything once, so I agreed. I have to admit, though, that I wasn’t actually very good at it. Neither were any of the other scientists present.

No idea what a Pecha Kucha is? Well then you’re probably not an architect or an artist or a designer. Then again, you’re reading this blog so that’s pretty much a given anyway. Pecha Kucha is a style of presentation at which arty types display their portfolios in a strictly disciplined format. The standard form is twenty slides with twenty seconds allowed for each one, i.e. a total time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The timing is ruthlessly regulated.

Those of us scientists used to taking at least a few  minutes per slide find this format very challenging, but then that’s because we tend to have text and equations on our slides and they take some explaining. Designers and the like tend to just show pictures, and these should – if they’re any good – be pretty self-explanatory. I guess this is why the Pecha Kucha format is de rigeur in such disciplines while it has yet to catch on in physics.

I only just survived my initiation into the strange world of Pecha Kucha. Before being told what it was I thought it was a mountain in the Andes. I was reminded about it this morning by a tweet from John Butterworth (a particle physicist who, incidentally, has a nice blog of his own) confessing similar trepidation to what I experienced before I lost my Pecha Kucha virginity. The first time can be disappointing, but I hope he survived his inauguration.

Looking back on it though I think this might be an interesting idea to try in a physics context. We’re trying increasingly hard these to teach our physics and astronomy students transferable skills, but when it comes to presentations we’re fixated by the traditional presentation format. Why not get undergraduate students to do a Pecha Kucha about their project, instead of a 20-minute lecture? Why not include a Pecha Kucha in the PhD viva?

The more I think about it, the more attractive the idea seems. Has anyone out there tried a physics Pecha Kucha?

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Cauchy Statistics

Posted in Bad Statistics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 7, 2010 by telescoper

I was attempting to restore some sort of order to my office today when I stumbled across some old jottings about the Cauchy distribution, which is perhaps more familiar to astronomers as the Lorentz distribution. I never used in the publication they related to so I thought I’d just quickly pop the main idea on here in the hope that some amongst you might find it interesting and/or amusing.

What sparked this off is that the simplest cosmological models (including the particular one we now call the standard model) assume that the primordial density fluctuations we see imprinted in the pattern of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and which we think gave rise to the large-scale structure of the Universe through the action of gravitational instability, were distributed according to Gaussian statistics (as predicted by the simplest versions of the inflationary universe theory).  Departures from Gaussianity would therefore, if found, yield important clues about physics beyond the standard model.

Cosmology isn’t the only place where Gaussian (normal) statistics apply. In fact they arise  generically,  in circumstances where variation results from the linear superposition of independent influences, by virtue of the Central Limit Theorem. Noise in experimental detectors is often treated as following Gaussian statistics, for example.

The Gaussian distribution has some nice properties that make it possible to place meaningful bounds on the statistical accuracy of measurements made in the presence of Gaussian fluctuations. For example, we all know that the margin of error of the determination of the mean value of a quantity from a sample of size n independent Gaussian-dsitributed varies as 1/\sqrt{n}; the larger the sample, the more accurately the global mean can be known. In the cosmological context this is basically why mapping a larger volume of space can lead, for instance, to a more accurate determination of the overall mean density of matter in the Universe.

However, although the Gaussian assumption often applies it doesn’t always apply, so if we want to think about non-Gaussian effects we have to think also about how well we can do statistical inference if we don’t have Gaussianity to rely on.

That’s why I was playing around with the peculiarities of the Cauchy distribution. This comes up in a variety of real physics problems so it isn’t an artificially pathological case. Imagine you have two independent variables X and Y each of which has a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and unit variance. The ratio Z=X/Y has a probability density function of the form

p(z)=1/\pi(1+z^2),

which is a form of the Cauchy distribution. There’s nothing at all wrong with this as a distribution – it’s not singular anywhere and integrates to unity as a pdf should. However, it does have a peculiar property that none of its moments is finite, not even the mean value!

Following on from this property is the fact that Cauchy-distributed quantities violate the Central Limit Theorem. If we take n independent Gaussian variables then the distribution of sum X_1+X_2 + \ldots X_n has the normal form, but this is also true (for large enough n) for the sum of n independent variables having any distribution as long as it has finite variance.

The Cauchy distribution has infinite variance so the distribution of the sum of independent Cauchy-distributed quantities Z_1+Z_2 + \ldots Z_n doesn’t tend to a Gaussian. In fact the distribution of the sum of any number of  independent Cauchy variates is itself a Cauchy distribution. Moreover the distribution of the mean of a sample of size n does not depend on n for Cauchy variates. This means that making a larger sample doesn’t reduce the margin of error on the mean value!

This was essentially the point I made in a previous post about the dangers of using standard statistical techniques – which usually involve the Gaussian assumption – to distributions of quantities formed as ratios.

We cosmologists should be grateful that we don’t seem to live in a Universe whose fluctuations are governed by Cauchy, rather than (nearly) Gaussian, statistics. Measuring more of the Universe wouldn’t be any use in determining its global properties as we’d always be dominated by cosmic variance..

 

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Among the Crachach

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , on June 6, 2010 by telescoper

Catching up on the news by looking through my copy of last week’s Times Higher, I came across an account of a speech made by Welsh Assembly Minister Leighton Andrews about the Future of Higher Education in Wales. I mentioned this was coming up in an earlier post about the state of the Welsh university system, but wasn’t able to attend the lecture. Fortunately, however the text of the lecture is available for download here.

There is some discussion of positives  in the speech, including a specific enthusiastic mention of

the involvement of the School of Physics and Astronomy in the international consortium which built the Herschel Space Observatory.

I was pleased to see that, especially since much of the rest of it is extremely confrontational. Much of it focusses on the results of a recent study by accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper that revealed, among other things, that  52% of the funding provided by the Welsh Assembly Government for higher education goes on adminstration and support services, with only 48% to teaching and research. Mr Andrews suggests that about 20% of the overall budget could be saved by reducing duplication and introducing shared services across the sector.

I can’t comment on the accuracy of the actual figures in the report, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were correct.  They might shock outsiders to the modern higher education system but most universities – not just those in Wales – seem to employ at least as many administrative staff and support staff as “front-line” teachers and researchers. I’m likewise sure that the Welsh Assembly employs many more such staff than there are Members…

Within academic Schools we need to employ staff to handle financial matters, student records, recruitment, admissions,  and general day-to-day administration. On top of that we have technical staff, to support both research and teaching laboratories as well as computing support staff. Add them all together and you definitely have a number comparable to the number of academic staff,  but  they don’t account for 52% of our salary bill because they are generally paid less than lecturers and professors. The mix in our School is no doubt related to the specific demands of physics and astronomy, but these staff all provide essential services and if they weren’t there, the academic staff would have to spend an even greater part of their time doing such things themselves.

As well as the staff working in individual Schools there are central administrative departments (in Cardiff they’re called “directorates”) which don’t employ academics at all. I have no idea what fraction of Cardiff’s budget goes on these things, but I suspect it’s  a big slice. My own anecdotal experience is that some of these are helpful and efficient while others specialise in creating meaningless bureaucratic tasks for academic staff to waste their time doing. I think such areas are where 20% savings might be achievable, but that would depend on the University having fewer and less complicated “initiatives” to respond to from the WAG.

The Times Higher story discusses the (not entirely favourable) reaction from various quarters to Mr Andrews speech, so I won’t go into it in any more detail here.

However, I was intrigued by one word I found in the following paragraph

 I was interested to learn recently that some members of university governing bodies have been appointed on the basis of a phone call. Who you know not what you know. It appears that HE governance in post devolution Wales has become the last resting place of the crachach.

Crachach? Being illiterate in the Welsh language this was a new one on me. However, I found an article on the BBC Website  that revealed all.

The term used to denote local gentry but 21st century crachach is the Taffia, the largely Welsh-speaking elite who dominate the arts, culture and media of Wales and to a lesser extent its political life.

It goes onto say

The Vale, Pontcanna and Whitchurch are crachach property hotspots while barn conversions in Llandeilo and cottages in Newport, Pembrokeshire, provide weekend retreats.

Hang on. Pontcanna? That’s where I live! I wonder if they let foreigners join the crachach, provided of course they learn the Welsh language? I note however that “arts culture and the media” is their remit, so science apparently doesn’t count. Perhaps I could start a scientific wing? Maybe those Welsh lessons will be useful after all. I’m told that the crachach always manage to get tickets for the big rugby matches…

On a more serious note, however, that part of Leighton Andrews’ speech stressed the importance of university governance. If he’s true to his word he should look into the Mark Brake affair. I think the taxpayers of Wales have a right to know what’s been going on.

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Signs of the Times

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 5, 2010 by telescoper

Well, I’m back from sunny Copenhagen to a very muggy Cardiff. I arrived by train just as this afternoon’s rugby match between Wales and South Africa finished so I got caught up in the crowds and had to follow a lengthy diversion to get home. I was a bit tetchy with the heat and feeling a bit tired, but feel a bit mellower now after a nice shower. Apparently it was a cracking game, with Wales losing narrowly to the Springboks in the end. I missed it all.

Not feeling like doing anything more energetic blogwise, I thought I’d just put up a few pictures of the trip before making dinner. I heard while I was in Copenhagen that there are plans to relocate the historic Niels Bohr Institute to new accommodation nearby. I’m very attached to the old place and I think it will be a terrible shame if the original buildings are flogged off or bulldozed. I believe that’s not going to happen but I’m not sure what their fate is going to be. Anyway, I asked one of the locals, Tamara Davis, to take a picture in front of the sign outside the old NORDITA  building, looking grumpy, to show my disapproval. I think she caught the mood perfectly.

Actually, Tamara isn’t really a local because she’s Australian, but she spends a couple of months a year in Denmark at the Dark Cosmology Centre, which is about ten minutes’ walk from the Niels Bohr Institute. I sat next to her at the conference dinner and found out that she’s also an international quality Ultimate Frisbee player. I wish I could pretend I knew what that was, but it sounds impressive. The fact that she’s training for a major event at the moment meant that she wasn’t drinking much wine so, being a gentleman, I drank the surplus on her behalf.

I wonder if there’s such a sport as Penultimate Frisbee?

Here’s another picture in front of the same building, featuring some folks from the workshop.

From left they are Dominik Schwarz (Bielefeld, Germany), Anthony Lasenby (Cambridge, UK), Carlo Burigana (Bologna, Italy),  Sabino Matarrese (Padova, Italy) and Paolo Natoli (Rome, Italy).

Last one shows the view in the evening sun looking down towards the picturesque old harbour area, called Nyhavn. I took this in anticipation of a nice cold beer among the crowds of people out enjoying themselves in the lovely weather. I wasn’t disappointed!

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