Archive for May, 2019

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Exercising the Franchise

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on May 24, 2019 by telescoper

First thing this morning I cast my vote in Maynooth, the polling station for which is in the Presentation Girls School, a Catholic Primary School. It wasn’t amazingly busy inside but there was a steady flow of people coming through. There were 8 desks dishing out ballot papers, more desks than you usually get at a polling station in the UK. There were three ballot papers, one for the European Parliament, one for the Local Council, and one for the Constitutional Referendum.

Anyway, Polling Card in hand I eventually found the right desk. Having done my homework last night I ranked all 17 candidates for the European Parliament Elections and all 9 for the Local Council Elections, copying my preferences from a piece of paper I had taken with me. The Single Transferable Vote system must making counting quite a lengthy process so it will take some time before the results are known.

At least I got to vote, which many EU citizens in the UK were unable to do. There’s a major scandal brewing about what looks like deliberate disenfranchisement. These things shouldn’t happen in a democracy, but apparently in the United Kingdom they do.

I had a very busy morning after arriving at the Department so I’ve just discovered that Theresa May has resigned. Part of me is delighted as I thought she was callous and mean-spirited as well as being useless. Apparently she cried when she read out her resignation statement. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to burst out laughing.

The feeling of happiness that the current PM is leaving is however tempered by the very high probability that whoever replaces her will be even worse…

So I’m now heading off to Dublin again for the second session of IQF 2019 after which I’ll be going to the Gaiety Theatre for a performance of the Magic Flute, an Opera about Particle Physics.

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LiteBIRD Newsflash

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on May 23, 2019 by telescoper

Just a quick post to pass on the news that the space mission LiteBIRD has been selected as the next major mission by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA and  Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).

LiteBIRD (which stands for `Lite (Light) satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection’) is a planned space observatory that aims to detect the footprint of the primordial gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in a form of a B-mode polarization pattern. This is the signal that BICEP2 claimed to have detected five years ago to much excitement, but was later shown to be a caused by galactic dust.

It’s great news for a lot of CMB people all round the world that this mission has been selected – include some old friends from Cardiff University. Congratulations to all of them!

I’m not sure when the launch date will be, but the mission will last three years and will be at Earth-Sun Lagrange point known as L2.It will be a very difficult task to extract the B-mode signal from foregrounds and instrumental artifacts so although there’s joy that it has been selected, the real work starts now!

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Irish Quantum Foundations and Other Matters

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 23, 2019 by telescoper

So here I am then, at Irish Quantum Foundations (IQF) 2019 which is being held in the Hamilton Building (shown above), and hosted by the School of Mathematics of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, which is sometimes known as Trinity College, Dublin for short.

I got here a bit later than I originally planned as some last-minute things came up this morning to do with next week’s events. I’ll have to skip tomorrow morning too, for similar reasons. When I did get going this morning I had to stand all the way from Maynooth to Connolly because the train was packed. At least it was reasonably on time though.

Anyway, the schedule of IQF 2019 is rather varied and I’m looking forward to the parts of it that I can attend.

Among the things I have been dealing with to do with next week are  submitting the final version of pedagogical piece about the Eclipse Expeditions of 2019 which should be published very soon in Contemporary Physics (at least in the online version) and writing a short piece for RTÉ Brainstorm (which will appear on Monday 27th May), and sorting out an appearance on Newstalk Radio next week. How I’ll get time to finish my exam marking in the middle of all this I don’t know!

 

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Should students be (financially) compensated for strike action by lecturers?

Posted in Cardiff, Education, Politics with tags , , , , on May 22, 2019 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog will know that last year I was still employed part of the time at Cardiff University and during that period I was participating in strike action called by the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) over pensions. As a result of that action students on my module on Physics of the Early Universe missed quite a lot of lectures (and I was docked a large fraction of my pay).

I refused to do extra lectures after the strike was over to make up for those lost, as it seemed to me that defeated the point of the strike action, but I did make notes available for the students (which I do anyway). Students were also given access to recordings of the previous year’s lectures on the same module. I know some lecturers also adjusted their examinations and/or other assessments to exclude material that had not been covered.

It seems practice for dealing with this (admittedly difficult) situation has varied from institution to institution, and some students who feel that they missed out as a result of the strike have apparently asked to be compensated by their University. Institutions could of course pay compensation to students out of the money saved by not paying lecturers, but that wouldn’t go very far because only a small part of the £9000+ students pay in fees goes to the salaries of teaching staff. Another issue is that I recall one or two students didn’t come to lectures even before the strike started. Should they be compensated too?

Anyway I thought this might be an interesting topic for a poll, so here goes:

As always views are welcome through the comments box too!

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An Informational Approach to Cosmological Parameter Estimation

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on May 22, 2019 by telescoper

In order to avoid having to make a start on examination marking I was having a trawl through the arXiv this morning when I found an interesting paper by Stephens & Gleiser called An Informational Approach to Cosmological Parameter Estimation. The abstract is:

You can download a PDF of the full paper here.

I haven’t had time to go through the manuscript in detail but while it doesn’t seem to say very much of a specific nature about the Hubble constant tension issue, it does introduce an approach which is new to me. The Jensen-Shannon Divergence is a variation on the familiar Kullback-Leibler Divergence.

Anyway, I’d be interested in comments on this from experts!

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Voting Matters in Ireland

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , on May 21, 2019 by telescoper

Arriving back in civilization last night I discovered that my polling card for Friday’s voting has arrived at last along with instructions on the Referendum to be held alongside the Local Council Elections and the European Parliament Elections, all held on 24th May.

I’m looking forward to casting my ballot. It is a new experience for me to vote here in Ireland. Both elections are held under Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote) which seems to me a very sensible system. One ranks the candidates in order of preference with votes progressively reallocated as the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated. You can rank all the candidates or just some. In the system employed here one ranks the candidates in order of preference with votes progressively reallocated in various rounds until one ends up with the top n candidates to fill the n available seats. Surplus votes from the top candidates as well as those of eliminated candidates are reallocated to lower-preference candidates in this process.

The Local Elections involve filling 40 seats on Kildare County Council, with five councillors representing Maynooth. The nine candidates are listed here, in case you’re interested.

For the European Parliament Elections things are a bit more complicated. For the purposes of the EU elections Ireland is divided into three constituencies: Dublin, Ireland South and Midlands North West. I am in the latter, which elects four MEPs. There are 17 candidates for this constituency, listed here.

As a relative newcomer to Ireland I first sorted the candidates into three groups: (i) those that I would be happy to see elected, (ii) those that I don’t really like but could tolerate, and (iii) those that I wouldn’t like to see representing me under any circumstances. There are plenty in the latter category. There seems to be a law in Ireland that there has to be at least one deranged simpleton on every ballot paper, and there are several in this election. I will choose my lower-preference votes to ensure that none of these dickheads, especially racist gobshite Peter Casey, benefit from my vote in any way.

Although the STV system seems very sensible to me, it does lead to a rather lengthy counting process – especially if everyone does what I plan to do, i.e. rank all the candidates instead of just their favourites.

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The Week Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth, Opera, The Universe and Stuff on May 20, 2019 by telescoper

Well, my little jaunt back to Wales is almost over and I’ll soon be heading back to Maynooth for a very busy rest of the week.

The two examinations I’ve set this term are tomorrow (Engineering Maths) and Wednesday (Computational Physics). I’ll try to make a start on the marking as soon as I get my hands on the scripts, but on Thursday and Friday there is the annual Irish Quantum Foundations meeting, which this year is being hosted by Trinity College Dublin. I gave a talk at the same event last year, but this time I’m just in the audience.

Some time on Friday I have to cast my vote in the elections to the Local Council and European Parliament being held in Ireland. There is also a referendum to do with changing the law on divorce.

And after all that, on Friday evening, I’ll be paying my first ever visit to the famous Gaiety Theatre in Dublin for my first ever experience of Irish National Opera.

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Does it move for you?

Posted in Art with tags , on May 20, 2019 by telescoper

I’ve posted a couple of items like this before. It’s a static image that is supposed to appear to move in some sort of swirly fashion when you look at it. All it does for me is give me a headache. Does it move for you?

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Fascism is coming..

Posted in History, Politics with tags , on May 19, 2019 by telescoper

Rally for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Earl’s Court, London July 1939.

Beer-brandishing ‘Man of the People’, Oswald Mosley.

Fascism is coming; probably a slimy Anglicised form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika.

George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.

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Walter’s Leaving Do

Posted in Cardiff, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 18, 2019 by telescoper

As I had little window of opportunity before the start of exam marking season and other goings-on in Maynooth I decided to make a quick trip back to Wales back in Cardiff for the weekend.

I flew back on Thursday evening. It had been a busy day and I’d only had a sandwich for lunch so I went into the bar in Dublin Airport to get a beer and a burger. Who did I bump into there but Professor Walter Gear…

Walter was Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University when I joined it in 2007, so and was he persuaded me to leave Nottingham. He was a very good Head of School and, in particular, he helped a lot when I had mental health problems seven years ago.

Anyway after twenty years in Cardiff during which he built up the School and particularly the world-leading Astronomy Instrumentation Group there, Walter has left for a new position as Dean for Science and Engineering at NUI Galway, in Ireland.

He was in Dublin Airport because he was travelling back to his leaving do in Cardiff, which I turned up for on Friday. There were drinks and speeches and presents and it was nice to see some old friends there and in the Flute and Tankard afterwards. It was a good send-off.

I’m sure that Walter (who was born in Ireland) enjoy his new role in the Emerald Isle very much indeed. Galway is quite a distance from Maynooth (almost 200 km) but I hope we will be in regular contact.

Anyway I should mention that there are advertisements out for a Research Associate in Sub-mm Astronomy and and a Lecturer in Astronomy (with an emphasis on the same) in Galway. I’m sure these will prove very attractive to many applicants!

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