Archive for April, 2022

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A Term for Exhaustion

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on April 13, 2022 by telescoper

Today I gave Lecture 20 in my final-year module on Advanced Electromagnetism which was about dipole radiation. That means I have four lectures remaining. All I have left to cover is the interaction between electromagnetic fields and waves and various types of medium, which means I’m more-or-less on track. Next week is the Easter vacation for the students so my next lecture won’t be for about a fortnight.

I’m looking forward to the Easter break, which actually starts on Friday. Surprisingly Good Friday isn’t actually a Bank Holiday in Ireland, though Easter Monday is, but the University is closed on that day. I don’t have any lectures on Fridays this term anyway so it doesn’t make any difference to me. My last teaching session before the break is tomorrow after, a two-hour Computational Physics Lab session.

This term has been both exhausting and dispiriting. Student attendance at lectures and tutorials has fallen to very low levels: I’m getting only about 30-40%. I discussed some of the possible reasons for low engagement here. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the May Examinations as a result of this lack of participation, but at least we get a break before we have to confront that.

There are other issues weighing me down too, but it’s probably best I don’t write about them here. Suffice to say that I’m very tired and frustrated and I don’t think a week off will do much to change that. On the bright side my term as Head of Department is due to end on August 31st 2022, just 140 days from now…

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Derry Girls – The Best Bits of Sister Michael

Posted in Television with tags , , , on April 12, 2022 by telescoper

I was a latecomer to the TV comedy series Derry Girls but I soon became a fan. Indeed, the finale of Series 1 is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television. I can now barely contain my excitement that the third and final series starts tonight (on the soon-to-be-destroyed-by-the-Tories Channel 4). Anyway, to whet your appetite here are some of the best bits of Sister Michael (memorably played by Siobhán McSweeney).

Update: the 1st Episode of Series 3 was very funny but in order not to give out spoilers I won’t mention the cameo by Liam Neeson.

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Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on April 11, 2022 by telescoper

There’s a recent paper on the arXiv by Rousi & Laakso (both based in Finland) with the above title and the following abstract:

Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being archived on public open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 35 active overlay journals. While the results show an increase in the number of overlay journals in recent years, the current presence of overlay journals is diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. The majority of overlay journals publish articles in the natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences. Overlay journals are commonly published by groups of scientists rather than formal organisations and overlay journals may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. Nearly none of the investigated journals charge fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effectiveness of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories, and researchers willingness to publish in overlay journals will determine the models wider impact on scholarly publishing.

You can find a discussion of overlay journals in general here, where I learnt that the term “overlay journal” was coined back in 1996 but it obviously took quite a long time to implement the idea in functioning platforms. The paper is well worth reading. It contains some analysis of journal citation metrics but because most of the journals are young this information is very sparse. The Open Journal of Astrophysics of course gets a mention. It doesn’t yet have a Journal Impact Factor. Some of the journals in the Rousi-Laakso paper have a JIF but this dates from a time before the journal flipped to overlay state. For your information, the JIF for year n is based on citations received in that year for papers published in years n-1 and n-2. The Open Journal of Astrophysics should qualify for a JIF for 2021 based on papers published in 2019 and 2020 but Clarivate (who control such things) doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to issue one.

I think Journal Impact Factors are a waste of time. Why use journal level metrics when there is plenty of information at the article level? On the other hand the bean-counters in charge of science funding in several countries (including Italy) insist that papers resulting from this funding should be published in papers with a high JIF so I’m aware that not having a JIF is a limiting factor for some.

Of course many fields do not use the arXiv, but there is no reason why the principle of the overlay journal could not be applied to other forms of repository. There has been a culture in physics and astronomy of circulating preprints for a very long time now, and it may take a while for this to permeate into other disciplines.

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French Election Update

Posted in Politics with tags , on April 10, 2022 by telescoper

The first round of voting in the French Presidential Election is under way today and it reminded of this clipping from a few years ago:

(Read the caption.)

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Massive Excitement

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on April 9, 2022 by telescoper

Last week’s announcement of a new high-precision estimate of the mass of the W boson by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab has generated a lot of excitement in the news because it doesn’t seem to fit the predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Here is a graphic showing the latest result (which is not a new measurement, but a new analysis of old data) together with some previous values:

The units of the measurements are MeV/c2 and the latest number is 80,443.5 ± 9.4 MeV/c2 while calculations based on the standard model give 80,357± 4 [inputs]± 4[theory] MeV/c2. The difference is small but apparently significant, though I’m not sufficiently expert to understand all the details of the statistical analysis.

If true, this result has implications for the Standard Model because although this model has free parameters which have to be measured rather than obtained from theory, the model does imply relationships between these parameters. The reason this applies to particle masses is that these are affected to a greater or lesser extent by interactions with all the fields present in the theory. The first thing you learn when you study particle physics is that it’s not primarily about particles, it’s about fields. The mass of the W-boson is significantly affected by the mass of the top quark and the Higgs boson both of which have been measured to some level of accuracy, but the new W measurement doesn’t seem fit with these known values.

Anyway, here is the discrepancy with the top quark mass

So it’s definitely interesting, though it clearly needs further analysis: there could be uncorrected systematics in the measurement, for example. Also, as far as I know, some of the other masses feeding into this calculation may turn out to be wrong.

Incidentally, a student asked me yesterday why there’s no corresponding measurement for the Z-boson. The answer I gave (which I think is correct) is that the mass of the Z is already known much better than the W because it, being neutral, can decay into an electron-positron pair, both of which are easy to measure, but the W, being charged, has to decay into a charged lepton and a neutrino (or antineutrino) combination and the latter is much harder to deal with experimentally.

P.S. For some comments by a physicist who knows much more about this stuff than I do, see here.

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Meanwhile, back to Covid…

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on April 8, 2022 by telescoper

So here we are, at the end of the 9th teaching week of Semester 2 at Maynooth University. There are three more weeks of lectures before the end of term, either side of a one-week break for Easter.

It was decided weeks ago that we all have to proceed on the basis that the Covid-19 pandemic is all over.

Case numbers are still very high though:

The above picture is a bit misleading because it shows only cases confirmed by PCR tests fewer of which are being done now than previously. The HSE data hub also records daily antigen tests which are typically of the same order but higher than the PCR results. The real level of infection is therefore at least twice the level shown in the picture. That’s the bad news. The good news is that positive results from both PCR and antigen tests do seem to be falling, as do hospitalizations and ICU admissions. The mortality rate has also remained low during this phase of the pandemic. The logical inference is that wall of protection afforded by vaccines is holding despite the high level of infections. We’re clearly in a less dangerous phase of the pandemic than we were last year.

But, equally clearly, the pandemic is not all over.

The number of absences due to illness or self-isolation is high for both staff and students. I’ve noted before on this blog that although third level institutions were put under great pressure to return to on-campus teaching, many students are just not attending lectures, tutorials and laboratories in person.

As well as having to look after their own health, many students haven’t been able to secure local accommodation for this Semester, partly because of a general shortage and partly because the 21/22 academic year started late and in chaotic fashion making it impossible for first years to sort out satisfactory living arrangements. It looks like this will happen next year too.

Third-level education isn’t the only sector feeling significant residual effects of the pandemic, but it is one in which problems have been exacerbated by the unrealistic expectations of Government and University managements.

Anyway, after so much disruption we approach the end-of-year examination period with considerable trepidation. For first- and second-year students these will be the first examinations they have taken on the campus; third-years will not have taken on-campus exams since January 2020. The style of our online examinations was necessarily different to the traditional format so in the Exam Halls the students will find themselves in very unfamiliar territory. In particular, we used “open-book” exams so students could use notes, textbooks and other resources to do the examinations. This won’t be the case in May.

How will the results turn out?

We can only wait and see.

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Elliptical Discussions

Posted in Cute Problems, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on April 7, 2022 by telescoper

It’s the ninth week of Semester 2 and I’m coming to the end of lectures and laboratory sessions for my Computational Physics module; for the remaining three weeks (plus the Easter vacation) the students in this class will be mainly concentrating on the mini-projects that form part of the assessment.

This afternoon, though we had a session on how to transform higher-order differential equations into sets of coupled first-order ODEs suitable for vectorization and consequent solution using standard techniques. The problem we focussed on today was the simple problem of orbital motion of a test particle under the gravitational force in plane-polar coordinates, which can be prepared for physical solution thusly:

This sort of thing reminds me of my undergraduate theory project at Cambridge, where I did a similar thing to solve the equations governing the action of a four-level laser, though that was in Fortran rather than Python. In my own solution I used Python’s off-the-shelf solver odeint.

I like the orbital motion problem a lot because it’s a bit more than a coding exercise: students have to think about how to choose initial data, how to test the their code and interpret the results. Even before that there’s the issue of what units to use; SI units are a bit daft for astronomical problems. For solar system calculations it makes sense to use Astronomical Units for distances and years for time; in such a system it’s easy to work out that GM is just 4π2, which avoids having to deal with ridiculously large or ridiculously small numbers.

Anyway, the fun thing about this lab was that once everyone had got their code working they could try setting initial data to get a circular orbit as a special case, explore how the shape of elliptical orbits depends on the input data, how to make an unbound orbit, and so on. It’s important to understand the output of a numerical calculation in terms of basic physical principles. All that led to a discussion in class of solar system exploration, transfer orbits, what would happen if the mass of the Sun suddenly changed, or if G was a function of time, and lots of other things.

I find sessions like this that encourage students to explore problems themselves very rewarding and I think they add a valuable extra dimension to standard teaching formats. I hope the projects that they’ll be doing from now on – involving topics in areas ranging from atomic physics, cosmology, particle physics and climate science, and done in groups – will provoke even more discussion of this type.

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A Bird in Rhetoric House

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , on April 6, 2022 by telescoper

Following on from my post of yesterday, I just remembered that I recently saw this on Twitter:

Geo the Jackdaw

This is Geo the Jackdaw paying a visitor to the Geography Department of Maynooth University which is located in Rhetoric House. He was a regular visitor there before the Covid-19 campus closure and suddenly reappeared a few days ago after a gap of two years.

Geo is very tame, as you can see, but also full of mischief – he especially enjoys playing with pencils, knocking things over, and tearing up bits of paper.

In fact there are a great many jackdaws on campus – and lots of rooks too – but they’re mostly not as bold as Geo. Two jackdaws regularly visit my garden but they’re not at all domesticated and scarper as soon as I make an appearance, which is just as well because they’re usually engaged in some sort of vandalism.

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Accommodation Not Wanted

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on April 6, 2022 by telescoper

A month ago I posted an item about the fact that I had offered the spare room in my house as accommodation for a refugee from the War in Ukraine. Over 20,000 refugees have now arrived in Ireland but I have just been told that the accommodation I offered is not suitable. That’s mainly because the greatest need is for homes suitable for families with children rather than single persons; I only have one room and it doesn’t have en suite facilities. Also most of the refugees are female and the assessors would probably be nervous about placing a woman in a house with a strange man like me.

I feel slightly less bad about this than I might have done before reading that only about 40-50% of the accommodation pledged to the Irish Red Cross has been assessed as suitable.

I also note that a number of host families are finding the job of providing accommodation to often traumatized people very difficult and many refugees have been returned to processing centres because the hosts are unable to cope. I might well have ended up feeling the same.

Anyway, at least I offered. I would have felt bad if I hadn’t. Now I’ll just have to try to find some other way to help…

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A Bird in the House

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on April 5, 2022 by telescoper

I’m told that in some cultures it is believed that a bird flying into your house is a sign of impending death. I hope that isn’t true because I’ve been having regular avian visitations recently.

It started last week when, after a spell of lovely sunny days, the weather suddenly took a turn for the worse. One day I went outside to put some rubbish in the bin. I left the patio doors from the kitchen/diner to the garden open for just a few minutes and closed them when I got back in. It was a few minutes later that I heard a flapping sound and looked up to see a robin trying to get out through one of the windows by my kitchen sink. It must have sneaked in while I was preoccupied, presumably because it was a lot warmer inside than out. It must have had the house under surveillance to have managed to get in during such a narrow window of opportunity.

I was a bit worried for the robin’s safety as I have seen birds get into a panic when they find themselves indoors and I thought it might do itself an injury. It was a regular event at my junior school years ago for a sparrow to get in and fly around in a panic before teacher managed to open a window and shoo it out. More recently I remember a pigeon somehow contrived to fall down the chimney in my house in Nottingham, emerging flapping and fluttering and scattering soot everywhere. It was very difficult to get that one to leave as it was completely disoriented. My cat nearly caught it a couple of times before it finally escaped.

Anyway, the robin situation wasn’t anything like that. Although I thought my reappearance in the kitchen might spook it, it seemed to recognize me as the human person who provides food. It just hopped onto the top of the open door leading from the kitchen to the hall and stared at me. I went slowly back to the patio doors, opened them both and stood aside. After sizing up the necessary flight path, the robin made a perfectly orderly exit. Robins seem harder to frighten than some other birds.

Since then the robin has been a regular visitor to the house, entering whenever the doors are open and leaving when it has had enough. It’s been inside more-or-less every day for a week (but not today).Once it helped itself to some leftovers in a pan on the hob but most visits have just taken the form of a general inspection: poking around in the shelves, checking out the furniture, and so on. I should try to take a photograph of it, but I’ve never yet had a camera to hand during a visit. I suppose the robin is now quite comfortable coming into my house and may become a regular guest. I don’t mind, although I hope it minimizes the amount of guano it deposits.

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