Now here’s something you don’t see every day. Not if you live in the United Kingdom anyway. This satellite picture taken yesterday (which I nicked from the University of Dundee) shows completely clear skies over virtually the whole country…
..but hang on. What’s that coming up from the South West, just in time for the Jubilee celebrations?
Follow @telescoperI know it’s tempting fate to post something with a title like Long Long Summer, but we’ve had such lovely warm weather for the last week or so I couldn’t resist putting this up while the sun’s still shining. I particularly wanted to share this track (a) because it matches the weather perfectly and (b) because it’s by the great Dizzy Gillespie Quintet of 1962 with Lalo Schifrin on piano, man best known as a prolific composer of film and TV scores. The band also featured Leo Wright, a very under-rated saxophonist and flautist. They all play terrifically on this original composition by Lalo Schifrin. There’s also a chance to see an interesting collection of photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, and his amazing cheeks!
Follow @telescoperLast night I went with some friends to the Wales Millennium Centre in sunny Cardiff Bay; not, this time, for an Opera but to see a movie. Well, not just to see a movie but to listen to the soundtrack performed live at the same time. It turned out to be a fascinating and memorable evening, enjoyed by a very large audience.
The film was the classic 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring the great Bela Lugosi as the Count. This version – the first of many variations on the theme – was based very closely on the 1927 Broadway play in which Lugosi also played the title role. The music we heard was specially composed to accompany Dracula by Philip Glass, and the man himself was there to perform it. Philip Glass, I mean, not Count Dracula. The musicians numbered six in total, actually, as Philip Glass was joined by the Kronos Quartet and together they were directed by Michael Riesman, who sat with his back to the audience watching the film on the big screen.
Although the musicians started a bit ropily, they soon pulled themselves together and it became obvious that the music was going to bring a significant new dimension to this pioneering old horror movie. In fact, as a very early “talkie” the original film had no musical score at all and very few sound effects of any kind. The music composed by Philip Glass brings extra dramatic intensity to some of the movie’s iconic sequences, such as the battle of wills when Dracula tries to mesmerise Professor van Helsing. The insistent repetition which is characteristic of Glass’ minimalist approach adds urgency where needed, but there are also contrasting passages of relaxed beauty. The score is also beautifully understated where it needs to be, simple enough not to distract attention away from the screen.
The passing years have not been particularly kind to the film. The effects are often unconvincing (to say the least), especially the bats-on-strings, some of the acting very hammy, and the audio quality was so poor that the dialogue was often so muffled as to be barely audible (and not helped by bad mixing with the music).
Once you look past these superficial aspects, however, it’s not difficult to understand why this film is regarded as such a classic, because it is a highly original piece of work. It’s a far cry from a modern gore-fest, of course. The horror is implied rather than made explicit; all the actual blood-sucking happens out of shot. But the unsettlingly disjointed narrative, full of unexpected changes of scene and unexplained goings-on, gives it a dream-like feel and conjures up a unique sense of atmosphere. Although it it is now extremely dated, it doesn’t take that much imagination to understand why it created a sensation way back in 1931, with people apparently fainting in shock in the cinema. It also made a huge amount of money at the box office.
Vampire movies are replete with their own set of clichés – the crucifixes, the absent reflections, the bats, etc etc – but this is the daddy of them all. The one thing that surprised me was the lack of garlic; the favoured protection against this particular member of the Undead is Wolfsbane (a member of the Aconite family of attractive yet lethally poisonous flowering plants; I used to grow a variety called Monk’s-Hood in my garden when I lived in Nottingham).
In the end, however, Dracula owes it all to the mesmerising screen presence of Bela Lugosi. This film made his name, and he was to spend most of the rest of his career typecast as a horror villain. His later years represented a downward spiral. Trouble with sciatica led doctors to prescribe him with opiates, on which he became hooked. His drug addiction made him notoriously unreliable and work dried up. His career dwindled away into obscure bit parts in poor quality B-movies.
Although Bela Lugosi had his limitations as an actor, he didn’t deserve his fate. I’ve said before on here that I think people should be judged by their best work rather than by their worst, and so it is with Bela Lugosi. He was, and remains, the Count Dracula.
I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything yet by the legendary Zoot Money so here he is with the Big Roll Band doing a cover version of Jimmy Smith’s The Cat. This is one for the Oldies, I guess, since it’s from way back in 1966.
I suppose that posting this will reveal that I’m more of a Mod than a Rocker, although if truth be told I’m not really that much of either. Now, where’s my Lambretta?
Follow @telescoperI wasn’t going to post about this but then I realised nobody seemed to have used the obvious headline so thought I might as well knock out a quickie.
Yesterday, after much to-ing and fro-ing an announcement was finally made concerning the site of the Square Kilometre Array. The two contenders for the honour of hosting this superb project were South Africa and Australasia (both Australia and New Zealand get a bit, actually).
So who won?
Well, formally the decision was to split the project between both. At first sight this looks like a political compromise, but wiser heads than me disagree and say that this an excellent outcome on science grounds. I’d be interested to hear opinions on that, in fact.
In any case, a quick skim through the STFC announcement makes it clear that South Africa actually gets the lion’s share of the actual dishes, which will be operated alongside the Meerkat facility, and will do what I think is the more exciting science. Having been to Cape Town just recently I know how much the SKA project means for astronomy in South Africa so I’m delighted for them that the outcome is so positive.
It does, however, remain to be seen what the implications of this decision are for the overall cost and scientific value-for-money, but for the time being the thing I’m most pleased about is that a decision has been reached. I think the SKA project is by far the most exciting ground-based astronomy project around, and it will be very exciting to watch it grow.
Follow @telescoperHere’s the official complete and unabridged version of Mike Taylor’s excellent point-by-point rebuttal of the Guardian article I posted about yesterday. Read it!
Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable.
It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments. I did, but because my response was too long for the Guardian‘s comment field, I had to break it into three parts [part 1, part 2, part 3].
Here is the whole thing — Together At Last!
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As we discuss the access crisis and Academic Spring, it’s great that the Guardian is allowing a platform to representatives of the academic publishing industry. It gives them a chance to demonstrate how utterly bankrupt their position is, and it’s kind of Graham Taylor to oblige. His article is a catalogue of distortions and mispresentations from start to finish.
I don’t…
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With Cardiff likely to be in the grip of Olympic Torch fever I decided yesterday to avoid the crowds as much as possible and take in a bit of culture in the form of a concert at St David’s Hall. My usual route into work being blocked by the closure of Bute Park to the public I walked into the city centre, paid in a few very welcome royalty cheques at the bank, and went to St David’s in person to book a ticket. I had no problem getting a good seat, but the staff issued dire warnings about getting here in good time for the 7.30 start as the Olympic Torch would be passing right in front of the venue just before the concert.
Despite the crowds I reckoned I had time for a quick pint (or two) in the Poet’s Corner before kick-off. Walking there from my office I saw a few people on Newport Road waiting for the Torch and its entourage, but not all that many. While I drank and chatted with a couple of PC regulars, the noise of a helicopter circling announced the arrival of the flame in our vicinity. I was almost tempted to pop outside for a look, but although the Olympic Torch was outside, the beer was inside and a man must have priorities in life.
So about 6.45 I headed off towards St David’s Hall. There were people out and about, but no more than you’d expect on a sunny Friday evening. Traffic had already re-started and disruption seemed fairly minimal. I don’t know where the Torch had got to by then but I arrived at the Hall at 7.00 to find a crowd watching it on the Big Screen in the Hayes. I went straight in and had a nice glass of wine.
When I got into the auditorium for the evening’s concert I was a bit taken aback, not only by the huge size of the orchestra (particularly the brass section) but also by its unusual arrangement: the strings were divided in two, arranged more-or-less symmetrically with cellos and basses to far left and far right. I was also initially perturbed that my favourite handsome violinist was not in his usual place, but I soon located him and all was well with the world.
The concert, featuring the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by associate guest conductor Francois-Xavier Roth, was broadcast live last night on BBC Radio 3, incidentally, and you can listen to a recording here.
The unusual orchestral arrangement was needed for the first piece of the concert, called Sound and Fury, by contemporary French composer Philippe Manoury. This is a work that’s full of contrasting moods, set against an overall concept relating to the battle between order and chaos. Passages in which stable melodic lines can be identified evolve into savage cacophony and back again; there are also sequences where the two halves of the orchestra act as two independent forces, challenging and responding to each other across the stage. Not exactly easy listening, but fascinating nonetheless.
After the interval we had the two “main pieces” of the evening, played by a more conventional orchestral line-up. First was the First Violin Concerto by Dmitry Shostakovich with soloist Daniel Hope (dressed, I have to say, in a horrible shiny suit). The open movement, entitled Nocturne, is striking for its lightness, and the apparent simplicity of its singing solo lines. The second movement Scherzo, darker and more intense, is followed by a wonderful slow movement marked Passacaglia, the end of which is marked by a fiendishly difficult solo cadenza that bridges into the final Burlesque. Daniel Hope played it with great verve and confidence, but in the context of the overall work I found it a bit gratuitous. Still an impressive piece, though, with many of the hallmarks of Shostakovich’s great symphonies.
The last piece was Images pour Orchestra by Claude Debussy. While the preceding Shostakovich work is perhaps a symphony masquerading as a suite, Images is definitely not a symphony. It’s a series of impressionistic and enigmatic vignettes of very differing mood. It’s in three movements, but the central one is itself divided into three distinct parts, so it is really five movements. The opening one includes, to my surprise, the Northumbrian tune The Keel Row and there are references to Spanish and French folk songs later on. The whole impression you get listening to this work is similar to walking through an art gallery looking at paintings that relate to each other in some ways, but contrast in others, or perhaps reading an anthology of poems by different poets.
Three different works from the 20th century, each with a very characteristic voice of its own and each with much to enjoy made for an absorbing concert. St David’s Hall was rather sparsely populated – the Cardiff audience is notoriously conservative in its musical tastes, and the Olympic Torch business wouldn’t have helped – but those that had made the effort were extremely appreciative at the end.
Having got my musical fix for the week I headed home. It must have only been about 9.45, but the concert in Bute Park seemed to have ended already. The city was busy, but not unusually so. The barricades had gone, and the buses were running again. I walked home through Sophia Gardens in the deepening twilight and saw a bat flying nimbly in silhouette against the crescent moon. Whatever happens in the future, that Image will be a treasured memory of Cardiff.
Follow @telescoperThere’s an article in this morning’s Grauniad in which a representative of the academic publishing industry, by the name of Graham Taylor, tries to counter the vociferous criticism that has been aimed at this sector in recent months. Mr Taylor is right when he comments that most of the furore relates to the issue of Open Access, i.e. the fact that academic articles are often hidden behind paywalls when published, even when the research on which they are based is funded by the taxpayer.
Mr Taylor actually claims that the publishing industry is all for open access. Perhaps this is true, but if that’s the case it’s because they’ve been forced to that point by pressure from external agencies. The latest sign of this pressure is a petition in the US to force taxpayer-funded research out into the open. I’m sure academic publishers are smart enough to read the writing on the wall, so it has now become politic for them to pretend that the proposals for open access were what they wanted all along.
However, the main thrust of Mr Taylor’s argument is that we must ensure that any new model of academic publishing is “sustainable”. What he means by that is that he wants academic publishers to be able to sustain their healthy profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer. I disagree with his arguments in almost every respect, so much so that it actually made me rather angry to read the piece.
Here’s an example
The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving.
This description bears very little relation to what happens in my field. Journals do not “solicit” manuscripts – they just wait for submissions to arrive. “Managing peer review” merely involves farming the job out to unpaid external referees. “Editing and preparing scripts”? All journals I deal with require authors to typeset and copy-edit their own papers. “Producing the articles” is done by the authors! Moreover, everyone in my field also publishes their work for free on the arXiv. Articles can be disseminated over the internet at negligible cost via a number of routes as well as the arXiv.
No, Mr Taylor, the process of academic publishing you describe in your article went out the window years ago. Now virtually everything is done by academics apart from the bit at which the academic publishers really excel – the imposition of extortionate costs to maintain your profits. The fact is that the academic publishing industry is not only redundant but also parasitic. The only viable solution is to bypass it altogether.
Another particularly specious bit of argument is the following:
Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.
This may be the case, but the problem is that the money that underwrites this thriving export industry is taken from a budget that was intended to be spent on research. As the science budget dwindles – yes, it is dwindling – an ever-increasing proportion is being devoted to supporting these racketeers. Can you imagine the outcry if taxpayer’s money were used to support other private publishing interests, perhaps even the porn industry?
And consider this:
However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.
The real scandal is that the cost of journal subscriptions has gone up at all when the real cost of digital publishing has plummeted over the same period. All the price increase has done is line the pockets of folk who seem to think they have a God-given right to sponge off the public purse. And so what if they have created a plethora of extra journals? That’s just to acquire more raw material to mark up and sell on to the gullible consumer.
Returning to the subject of Open Access, Mr Taylor argues for a model in which scholarly publishers can continue to fleece the research sector but in a way that’s different from their current racket. They want authors to pay a huge fee up-front (a “paper management fee” perhaps £2000) to have their paper published. Such a system would have the merit of making research available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, but in terms of its function as a scam it is just as ludicrous as the current racket. Since authors do all the work anyway, there’s no reason to charge an amount anything like this. It simply does not cost £2000 to publish papers on the internet! Any fee of this magnitude would just be fed to the parasites.
The activities of academic publishing industry are no longer relevant when it comes to dissemination of research results; academics can do that for ourselves. You have done very well for yourselves at our expense, but you’ve been rumbled. Time to face the music.
Follow @telescoperHere’s a cute little video produced by the excellent folk of the Royal Observatory Greenwich about the forthcoming Transit of Venus, and how such events can be used to establish the distance scale of the Solar System..
Follow @telescoperTomorrow, Friday 25th May 2012, the Olympic Torch Relay will arrive in Cardiff on its way across the United Kingdom to its eventual destination in London’s East End. Why this is so interesting I don’t know. I think it would be a lot more fun if they made a real race out of it; Olympic Torch versus Olympic Fire Extinguisher, for example. Instead the Bearer of the Torch (and associated entourage of security men) will head into Cardiff from the direction of Newport, run around randomly for a bit in the city to maximise traffic disruption, and then head into Bute Park where it will start off a “free” concert for 15,000 people.
Cardiff City Council has clearly gone a bit berserk in its desire to throw money around and try to create an event to bolster its sense of its own importance. Whatever happened to the age of austerity? We’ve obviously got money to burn!
For example, these Olympic Rings were put up some weeks ago in Cathay’s Park, in front of Cardiff’s fine City Hall:
Quite nice. Very few Olympic events are actually happening in Cardiff, of course, and those that are seem to be attracting negligible interest, so one wonders why it is necessary. It also cost £300,000. That’s about £60,000 per ring. Just saying.
The preparations for tomorrow’s Bute Park extravaganza have been going on for two weeks, with a huge section (Coopers Fields) closed to the public, the intrusion of dozens of heavy vehicles carving up the turf, and the closure of the cycle paths.
Here’s a view through the railings at the area chosen for the “free” pop concert. Of course it’s not actually free. It’s just the people who are going to it that don’t have to pay. Tickets were apparently distributed by some kind of ballot, although I don’t recall ever seeing it advertised. Nobody I know managed to get any tickets either. I wonder who did? One possible explanation is that there are 15,000 tickets, and the number of people employed by Cardiff City Council is..er…15,000. Coincidence?
The concert venue is ringed with burger, pizza and chip vans and is sponsored by Coca Cola. Apparently the irony of marking a celebration of athletic achievement in this way seems to have escaped the organizers.
Last night I walked home through Bute Park. The weather was lovely and quite a few people were out in the Park enjoying the sunshine, crammed into the small part near the Castle that is still open to the public. Juggernauts like this were moving in and out of the Park along the footpaths:
Is this really the right way to treat a public park? You could say that it’s a special occasion, but a similar thing happened just a month ago, and no doubt other events will happen throughout the summer. It’s a park, for pity’s sake, not a building site! The number of heavy vehicles thundering around the footpaths has increased enormously since the decision to build a new road entrance a few years back. The effect on the Park’s environment of all this traffic has been devastating.
And then there’s this:
As this lorry turned to head towards the South exit of the Park – that’s the one that was supposed to have less traffic through it when they built the new road – there wasn’t enough clearance and it ploughed into the branches of a tree. The person who had been walking in front of the lorry saw me taking a picture and asked me to stop. They don’t want any evidence of the damage they’re doing, obviously.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Coopers Fields will be completely trashed by the 15,000 strong crowd tomorrow night. You can also bet that the Council will do all it can to conceal the cost of clearing up afterwards, even if it does bother to repair the damage. It’s very sad that beautiful Bute Park is being treated in such a way.
In fact I think it’s criminal.
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In the Dark 