Archive for September, 2024

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Farewell to the Hume Doctoral Scholarships

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , on September 13, 2024 by telescoper

If you are a final year student and were thinking of applying for one of the John and Pat Hume Doctoral Scholarships in order to fund a PhD at Maynooth University, then don’t bother. University Management – as usual in the case of anything without consultation or discussion – has decided to scrap the scheme. How this squares with the ambition to increase PhD numbers stated clearly in the Strategic Plan is anyone’s guess. Why it has been decided to aim a wrecking ball at Maynooth’s research activity is another question. Clearly it’s not shortage of funds: the University accounts reveal huge surpluses and just this week yet another administrative position with a six-digit salary (enough to fund at least 5 PhD students) was advertised. We can’t expect to have research students and a legion of overpaid bureaucrats, can we?

John Hume (a Maynooth alumnus and co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) died in 2020 and Pat Hume (John’s wife), who died in 2021; the John and Pat Hume Scholarships were created in their honour. The decision to extinguish that honour just a few year after their deaths is just crass. Let’s hope the inevitable backlash will bring about a change of mind. This blog may be banned on campus, but word will spread.

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Space Week in Maynooth!

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on September 12, 2024 by telescoper
Euclid View of the Perseus Cluster

The annual Space Week in Ireland is from October 4th – 10th this year. As we have done for the previous couple of years, we will be putting on an event at Maynooth University. When I say “we”, I mean the Department of Physics collectively – I was away in Barcelona at the time of last year’s event so couldn’t give a talk, but I did one the year before. I’ll be doing a talk this year too. The description of my talk reads:

Two of the greatest mysteries in modern science concern the nature of the dark matter and dark energy we think dominate the Universe. In this talk I will explain how the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, launched last year, is designed to shed light on the “dark side” of the cosmos, present some of the early results, and show how you can get involved in analyzing Euclid data.

Anyway, this year’s event will be on Wednesday 9th October. The event is open is open to all and will be held in the picturesque surroundings of the TSI building. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance. You can do that here. The event has sold out for both the last two years – with over 400 attendees – so it’s best to book early!

Register on Eventbrite

You can find more details about the programme here. It may change so I’ll post the final programme nearer the event.

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An Anniversary of a Century

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags on September 11, 2024 by telescoper

While I remember, here is a quick post to mark the fact that the 100th paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics was published a year ago today (on 11th September 2023).

In the year that has passed since that milestone we have published a further 91 papers. I expect we will pass the 200 mark sometime next month. It’s an accelerating Universe!

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A Room with a View

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , on September 11, 2024 by telescoper

I thought I’d share with readers – at least those off campus, as access to this blog remains banned by Maynooth University – the view from the window of my new office:

Well, what did you expect to see from a Maynooth University office window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across …

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The Big Four and Your Work

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on September 10, 2024 by telescoper

In Agatha Christie’s novel The Big Four (left) the great detective Hercule Poirot tries to identify the members of sinister group of unscrupulous individuals bent on world domination.

When it comes to the world of academic publishing, the members of the The Big Four are somewhat easier to identify, though no less unscrupulous. They are Elsevier, Spring-Nature, Taylor & Francis, and John Wiley & Sons who have cornered almost 50% of the lucrative market in scholarly books and journals and the eye-watering profits that go with that territory.

Recently, however, these companies have found a new way of boosting their profits still further. This involves selling their “content” to tech companies in order to train the generative AI algorithms known as Large Language Models. The latest to do this is Wiley, which has already cashed in to the tune of $44 million. Wiley has not given its authors the right to opt out of this deal nor will authors be remunerated. Others outside the Big Four are also cashing in. Oxford University Press, for example, which publishes Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has done similar deals.

This sort of arrangement provides yet another reason to avoid the commercial publishing sector. Do we become academic researchers in order to be mere “content creators” for Wiley and the rest?

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Maynooth University’s Privatized Network

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , on September 9, 2024 by telescoper

Quite a few people have contacted me to ask why my access to this blog is banned on Maynooth University campus, as indicated at the top of yesterday’s post. As far as I can see, the block applies not only to this site (telescoper.wordpress.com aka telescoper.blog) but every site with an IP address or addresses (a pair in my case) hosted on the WordPress.com domain. I don’t know how many sites that is, but it’s a lot.

When I asked IT Services at Maynooth why I could neither read no write to my own blog via the campus network, it was explained to me that at some point one of the sites hosted on WordPress was involved in a phishing operation so the whole domain was blocked by the “external provider” as it is deemed a security risk. Actually WordPress.com has very strict control of its security, so this allegation is potentially defamatory and damaging to WordPress business. I wouldn’t be surprised if they take legal action. It doesn’t damage my business of course, as I make no money from this blog, but I nevertheless find it extremely annoying. In any case it seems to me an unreasonable and disproportionate restriction.

It was in February 2024 (while I was away in Australia) that Maynooth University privatized its computer network, handing over control of it to a company called Agile Networks. Apparently, this “external provider” now has complete control over web access from Maynooth University and is not accountable to the University for its actions. It, not the University, decides what websites can be accessed by staff and students. So much for academic freedom.

I might add that there has been a plethora of network service outages recently, so I was amused by the self-congratulatory tone of Agile Networks represented by its takeover of Maynooth’s internet access, e.g.

It has revolutionised the campus. It has made every outdoor area of the campus a viable classroom.

That may be true, but it merely reflects the fact that Maynooth does not have anywhere near enough indoor teaching or student study spaces. I’m sure students will be delighted that it is now deemed acceptable for them to study in the “viable classroom” of the great outdoors, complete with freezing cold and pouring rain!

Anyway, I contacted WordPress to tell them of the problem and they confirmed that nobody from either Maynooth University or Agile Networks has contacted them about the alleged security breach. They said

The ideal situation would be that the service provider reviews our documentation and whitelists the IP…

The situation is obviously not ideal…

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A New Term

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags on September 8, 2024 by telescoper

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS BANNED ON MAYNOOTH UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

I’m well and truly back from sabbatical: I spent most of Friday filling in forms.

It is now just two weeks before teaching resumes after the summer break. To add even more excitement to this, the building housing the rooms in which half of my scheduled lectures (and many of those of my colleagues) are to take place is still a construction site. The work was supposed to be completed by September 1st. Will the rooms be ready by September 23rd? I have no idea. What will we do if they’re not? I have no idea. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I still have the blackboard in my study that I used to give remote lectures during pandemic times. I wonder if I’ll be using it again? I thought this time round we would have a relatively smooth introduction to term, as opposed to the mad scramble caused in previous years by delayed Leaving Certificate results, but…

Among the new arrivals will be a cohort of students on our MSc in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. I understand we have approximately 9 students which is not a bad start for a new postgraduate course. That means we’ll have to think up some projects for them to do. I might do that this afternoon, in fact.

Anyway, this coming week we have the first Departmental Meeting of the (new) Department of Physics. Hopefully we might find out how the merger is actually meant to work in practice. The day after that we meet the new (Interim) Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering. Incidentally the President of Maynooth University made this appointment in a way that is in direct conflict with the Statutes of the University. That’s par for the course at Maynooth these days, I’m afraid, as is the censorship of this blog.

This time next week we’ll be looking ahead to Welcome Week when the new students arrive and have a chance to look around and choose their modules. The local Facebook page is alive with messages from desperate students and their parents looking for accommodation in or near Maynooth. The University likes to boast about how many more students it will have this year, but not a thought is given to where they will live. The strain of having to travel long distances to campus, combined with the high cost of living necessitating many students to take on more-or-less full time employment, looks likely to ensure that drop-out rates climb still further.

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A Question of String Theory

Posted in The Universe and Stuff on September 7, 2024 by telescoper

The answer to the question is that “it’s as long as a piece thereof..”

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Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on September 7, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning again so here’s another report on activity at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 73 and the total published by OJAp up to 188.  We’ve still got a few in the pipeline waiting for the final versions to appear on arXiv so I expect we’ll reach the 200 mark fairly soon.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on September 4th 2024,  and in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Massive Black Hole Seeds”  by John Regan of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University and Marta Volonteri (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France). This article presents a discussion of the pathways to the formation of massive black holes, including both light and heavy initial seeds.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. Those of you who are paying attention will see that there is a bit of a glitch on the left hand side where software has thrown a line break in between the two author names. I have no idea what caused this so I raised a ticket with Scholastica and no doubt it will soon be fixed.  (Update: it is now fixed, 12th September 2024). You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper has the title “The future of cosmological likelihood-based inference: accelerated high-dimensional parameter estimation and model comparison” and was published on 5th September 2024. The authors are Davide Piras (Université de Genève), Alicja Polanska (MSSL) , Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway, London), Matthew A. Price(UCL) & Jason D. McEwen (UCL); the latter four are all based in the UK. This paper, which is in  the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, describes an accelerated approach to Bayesian inference in higher-dimensional settings, as required for cosmology, based on recent developments in machine learning and its underlying technology.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

That concludes this week’s update. More  next week!

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Congratulations to the Class of 24!

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , on September 6, 2024 by telescoper

After almost a whole week of conferring ceremonies at Maynooth University, today was the day that this year’s Theoretical Physics students graduated. We all know that theoretical physicists are la crème de la crème so they were obviously keeping the best until last. Anyway, congratulations all!

Here’s a suitable image from Private Eye years ago:

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