Archive for January, 2020

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The Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative Begins

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on January 3, 2020 by telescoper

I was caught on the hop this morning by the formal announcement that twenty new professorships for women have been created in Ireland. I hadn’t expected this announcement to come so quickly since the idea was only floated in November 2018. There is a piece in the Irish Times about today’s announcement here.

I blogged about this scheme here when it was announced, a little over a year ago. The appointments are to be in areas where there is “clear evidence” of significant under-representation of women, such as physics, computer science and engineering.

I’m delighted that two of these new positions will be at Maynooth University, one in Computer Science and one in Physical Geography (in the area of Climate Science). These areas were selected as being of particularly high strategic priority.

The 20 new Chairs represent the first tranche of positions out of 45 planned under the Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative. I understand there will be two further rounds. I do hope that we might get a position in physics at Maynooth in a subsequent round. I note however that there will be a Professorship in Theoretical Physics at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. I’ll be sure to pass on the advertisement here when it appears.

Reactions to this scheme among people I know have been very varied, so it seems a good topic on which to have a simplistically binary poll:

For the record, I should state that although I had reservations when about this scheme when it was first announced, largely due to lack of detail about how it was to be implemented, I am now very enthusiastic about it and hope it is successful in its aims.

I will however also repeat that this initiative should not distract attention away from the need for Irish higher education institutions to have much better promotion procedures; see, e.g. here. There are plenty of female academics at lecturer level in Irish universities, but they seem to face serious difficulties getting promoted to Professorships.

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Not my New Year’s Resolutions

Posted in Biographical, Music on January 2, 2020 by telescoper

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

from Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.

I said yesterday that I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions (largely because I know I’m no good at keeping them) but in an idle moment this morning (or should I say “a period of reflection”?) I posted on Twitter a few things I hope to achieve in 2020 and thought I’d share them here.

In no particular order:

  1. Go to more live concerts. Although I enjoy the radio and recordings, I far prefer to listen to live music at concerts. Attending such events helps also support the venues and musicians as without an audience both would die. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t heard any live jazz in Ireland!
  2. See more of Ireland. I moved to Maynooth two years ago but apart from one visit to Galway and one to Armagh I still haven’t travelled much beyond the Dublin area. I must get around more, especially to the South.
  3. No more working weekends. I’ve been in the office for at least one day every weekend since I started at Maynooth. I did the same when I was at Sussex too, and seem to have relapsed. I have always had problems managing my own work/life balance but I realise it’s not setting a good example to younger folk to be getting it so obviously wrong. I’ll add not reading work emails at weekends to this.
  4. Be a better colleague. This is something I think one should always strive to be, but I have particular need to improve. I know that over the last four years or so things weighed very heavily on me behind the scenes and I ended up letting people down on too many occasions. I apologise for that and will try to do better in future.
  5. Read more books. I used to be a voracious reader of all kinds of books, both fiction and non-fiction, but I somehow got out of the habit. I now have a stack of unread works that I must try to read before the year is out!
  6. Finish more things! Not unrelated to No. 4 above, I have been very poor over the last few years at completing projects and writing papers. I need to clear the backlog and get on with some new things.
  7. Do more to promote Open Access publishing. I’m not surprised that the status quo in academic publishing is proving hard to dislodge, but I believe that change can be achieved if researchers take the initiative. I’m proud of what we have achieved so far at the Open Journal of Astrophysics but there’s much more to be done.

There are some others, but they’re too personal to put on here!

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The New Year’s Old Year Blog Statistics

Posted in Uncategorized on January 1, 2020 by telescoper

Here we are then, in 2020. I thought I’d see in the New Year by following the tradition of doing a quick blog about this blog.

Once upon a time, in the good old days, in the dim and distant past, WordPress used to publish an annual statistical summary page for its bloggers, but it has discontinued that practice so now I’ll just write my own brief summary based on the data available via the usual dashboard.

For those interested I got about 340K hits last year, just over 930 a day, with about 168K unique views. That’s down quite a bit (~19%) since last year. In fact 2019 saw the lowest visitor numbers here since 2010. I guess interest in my ramblings is waning out there. I’m just surprised it has taken so long!

Despite the sharp decrease, I still get more readers than I ever thought I would when I started way back in 2008 so I think I’ll keep going, at least for now.

Incidentally, there are 1652 followers of In The Dark on WordPress itself. These are fellow bloggers who use the built-in reader to access posts. I don’t know whether or not these are counted in the above visitor numbers.

In 2019 there were 1963 comments, also down sharply on last year. In the same period, however, posts received 1898 ‘likes’; that’s a big increase on last year’s figure. The most liked category, incidentally, was Poetry.

Altogether, since this blog started in 2008 to the end of 2019, it has been viewed about 4.1 million times by a total of 1.4 million unique visitors (though, obviously, all my visitors are unique).

Athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh go léir!

P. S. I don’t really go in for New Year’s resolutions but I really hope that this year I can sell my old house, buy a new one, and complete my relocation to Ireland.

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