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Against Anonymity

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on August 24, 2013 by telescoper

There’s been quite a lot of reaction on the interwebs about a recent decision by the Huffington Post to block anonymous comments in an attempt to prevent abusive behaviour, which is a serious problem on many websites. Many argue that this won’t stop trolls from trolling, which is of course true. What it might do is make some people think twice before they post a comment. It might also allow appropriate (possibly legal) action to follow up more extreme examples.

My own feelings about this are quite complicated actually. I don’t really care about randomly abusive comments from anonymous lowlife. I’ve learned to ignore such things, except when the abuse appears that it might come from, say, someone in your workplace. Some time ago something like that happened to me and I found it so distressing to think that a colleague or student might be behind it. That’s even worse than when somebody does such things brazenly under their own identity.

The Huffington Post’s policy is just one illustration of a wide issue,, namely to what extent one has a right to anonymity. I’m not at all sure what the law says on this or what it should say, in fact, especially when it comes to the internet.

In Britain we don’t have identity cards (not yet anyway), so there’s a sort of de facto right to anonymity there. However, with the increasing levels of surveillance and state intrusion into people’s lives, that is changing. The  issue generated by the Huffington Post, however, is how the right to anonymity extends into the blogosphere (or the internet generally) rather than how it applies in other spheres of life.

Some blogs I know are anonymous but I happen also to know who writes them. I presume the authors have reasons for wishing to conceal their identities so I wouldn’t dream of revealing them myself. However, these are all sites run by reasonably civilised people and it’s very unlikely that any of them would use their anonymity to engage in abusive or defamatory activities. If one of them did, I wouldn’t have any qualms at all about exposing their identity, but I’m not sure whether that would be a legally acceptable course of action.

But anonymity still makes me a  bit uncomfortable. In academic life we come across it in the context of refereeing grant applications and papers submitted to journals for consideration. Usually the default is for referees to remain anonymous is such situations. Most referees are fairly conscientious and if they have criticisms they are usually presented politely and constructively. There are, however, some exceptions. Fortunately these are few and far between, but there are some individuals who take the opportunity provided by anonymity to be downright abusive. Us old hands have sufficiently thick skins to brush such attacks off, but vitriolic comments made on papers written by inexperienced scientists (perhaps even research students) are completely out of order. This probably wouldn’t happen if referees didn’t have the right to remain anonymous. On the other hand, having your identity known might make it difficult for some  to write critically of, say, the work of more senior scientists. Perhaps the answer is to retain anonymity but for the journal editor, for instance, to monitor the reports produced by referees and reprimand any who transgress.

Going back to the subject of blogs, provides me with an opportunity to describe some of the behind-the-scenes issues with running this blog. In the beginning I decided to have an open comment policy so that anyone and everyone could comment without any form of intervention. That turned out to be a disaster because of the number of automatically generated  SPAM comments that clogged up the boxes. I therefore switched on a SPAM filter so it could veto obvious garbage, but otherwise kept an open policy. The alternatives offered by WordPress include one that requires all comments to be from people registered at the site (which I thought would probably be a deterrent to people only wanting to comment on the odd post). Another option is to maintain a blacklist which treats all messages from persons on the list as SPAM. It’s also possible to block all comments entirely, of course, but I enjoy reading most of them so I think it would be a shame to do that just because of a few breaches of netiquette.

All went fairly well and I only had to ban a couple of individuals for abuse. I did for a time receive a stream of crudely abusive comments (of a personal nature) from various anonymous sources. These were mostly depressingly puerile and they didn’t affect me much but I did find it very disconcerting to think that there are people sitting out there with nothing better to do.

Since WordPress notifies me every time a  comment is posted, it is quite easy to remove this junk but I found it very tiresome (when there were several per day) and eventually decided to change my policy and automatically block comments from all anonymous sources. Since this requires a manual check into whether the identity information given with the comment is bona fide, comments from people who haven’t commented on this blog before may take a little while to get approved.

There are still comments on here which may appear to a reader anonymous (or with a pseudonym) on here, but these are from people who have identified themselves to me with a proper email address or who the software has identified through their IP address or information revealed by their web browser (which is probably more than you think…). I’m happy for people to comment without requiring they release their name to the world, and will do my best to ensure their confidentiality, but I’m not happy to publish comments from people whose identity I don’t know.

If you’re interested, as of today approximately 17500 comments have been published on this blog. The number rejected as SPAM or abuse is about 350,000 (many of them from a Mrs Trellis of North Wales). That means that only about one comment in twenty is accepted.

Am I denying freedom of speech by rejecting anonymous comments? I don’t think so. If you want freedom of speech that much, you can write your own blog (anonymous or otherwise). And if every sight of this blog makes you want to write abusive comments, perhaps you should exercise your freedom not to read it.

I’d be interested to know from any fellow bloggers if they have the same problems with abusive comments. If not, perhaps I should start taking it personally!

More generally, I will not accept anonymous comments on the subject of the anonymity of comments, but any other contributions are welcome via the box.

Unless you’re banned.

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Trivial Hirsute

Posted in Beards, Biographical with tags , , , , on August 18, 2013 by telescoper

There’s been a lot going on in the world of beards recently. There’s the  Daily Fail story about how “hipster beards” are threatening the razor industry.  I don’t think it will be long before they run a story about the effect of facial hair on house prices. Then of course there’s the fuss about Jeremy Paxman’s appearance on Newsnight with a beard, which unleashed a storm of pogonophobia. Looking on the bright side, this served to generate some very positive publicity for the Beard Liberation Front, regular updated from which you can find on Keith Flett’s Blog.

Of course the Beard Liberation Front is essentially light-hearted in nature, but it does underline some rather serious points about the society we live in. First, is the obvious one. With so much terrible news going on in the world, who cares whether the presenter has a beard or not? In other words, it’s symptomatic of the superficiality of our celebrity-obsessed culture.

But there’s more than that. On the rare occasions I’ve been involved in media work I overheard many conversations about how such-and-such a scientist was no go for television because he had a beard. Why should that be? I think part of the answer can be found in Howard Jacobson’s piece in Saturday’s Independent: in that beards generally make their wearers look older. Nowadays, that, by definition ,means “unsuitable for TV”. You may have wisdom and gravitas, but if you don’t look like you belong in a boy band you’re just a beardy-weirdy and therefore out of contention.

Incidentally, I was of course clean-shaven when I had a few brief encounters with television, but my big chance for fame and fortune lapsed when I did a screen-test for the BBC, only to be told that I “lacked gravitas”. I doubt if a beard would have helped.

Back to my point.  I think I’ve established that bPogonophobia clearly has a significant overlap with ageism. Moreover, because it’s about jumping to conclusions about people based on their appearance  it also overlaps with racial prejudice. Men with beards are of not of course a persecuted minority, which is why the Beard Liberation Front can afford to engage in so much humorous self-parody, but it still succeeds in holding up a mirror to other, more sinister, forms of discrimination.

As for myself, I have no aspiration to become a hipster. I am far too old for that anyway. But I have always hated the chore of shaving in the mornings (and again later if I have to go out in the evening). I have frequently gone as far as growing a goatee beard, only to get rid of it because I didn’t like it much. The first time I grew a full beard was last summer. It wasn’t planned, but a consequence of a fairly long period of ill-health during a large part of which, for various reasons, I was unable to shave. When I began to recover, I shaved off the growth not so much because I disliked the beard in itself, but because it was an unwelcome reminder of what I’d been through. I wanted a fresh start. Having avoided any major recurrence this summer, I decided to have a go at growing a full beard again and am quite pleased with the result. At least it’s more convincing than Paxman’s.

Although not as grey, it has turned out rather similar in style to that of Ernest Hemingway as he is seen in this famous photograph by Yousuf Karsh:

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I have to admit, though, that the opinions of others are mixed. The best comment I got was from a work colleague who said that she liked my beard very much, only to add, with immaculate timing, “because it covers half of your face”. I guess I’ll just have to hope that Beard Power eventually carries me through to wider acceptance.

PS. For the physicists among my readers here is an old post of mine about the role of beards in the development of thermodynamics.

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The Expanding University

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on August 10, 2013 by telescoper

Well, I’m a bit busy today – despite the fact that it’s a weekend – so I’m just going to take the opportunity post here  a news item from my employer which has already been posted on the University of Sussex website. 

–o–

The School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) will have 63 academics at the start of the 2013-14 academic year – an increase of 58 per cent from February, when only 40 were in post.

The expansion follows a very successful few years for the School, during which the number of students starting degrees in Physics and Astronomy at Sussex has grown almost threefold.

The department has also climbed to 5th in The Times Good University Guide 2013 and Mathematics was ranked in the top 10 for academic support in the 2012 National Student Survey (NSS).

From September, Physics and Astronomy will have 40 academics, up from 25 in February. There are 12 new posts as well as three replacements, including the arrival in February of Professor Peter Coles, who replaced the late Professor David Axon as Head of School.

Mathematics is increasing from 15 academics to 23, with five of these arrivals being new positions. In particular, three new professors will join the Department this year.

Professor Coles says that overseeing this expansion has been his main focus since returning to Sussex. He says: “When I arrived, plans were already under way to get new people in and I knew this had to be my priority in my first few months as Head of MPS.

“We had an incredibly high calibre of applicants for all the posts and, in many cases, have been able to appoint more than one person. For one of the posts in Astronomy, the shortlist was so strong that we have actually appointed four excellent academics in that area. We couldn’t miss that opportunity.

“Our three  new chairs in Mathematics are joining us from Denmark, Greece and Italy, bolstering the School’s international outlook.

“We have been strategic in our appointments to encourage growth into new areas for us, such as probability and stochastic modelling on the Mathematics side, and materials-based experimental research on the Physics side. We anticipate further strategic expansion in these areas in the near future.

“These appointments also represent a step towards more interdisciplinarity and better crossover between the two departments within the School, and indeed with other schools such as Life Sciences, developing still further the University’s traditional strength in interdisciplinary research.

“And, most importantly of all, students in MPS will benefit from more study choices and smaller class sizes.”

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A Sussex Alumna

Posted in Biographical, Television, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on August 9, 2013 by telescoper

I had a very nice meeting this morning with Sir Harry Kroto, who is back in the UK for the summer. We chatted about a number of exciting things going on at Sussex University and beyond, in the middle of which I remembered a film featuring my former  PhD Student from Nottingham days, Emma King. The film was part of a series about young scientists made by the Vega Science Trust (which Harry set up) and it was originally broadcast on BBC 2 as part of The Learning Zone.

Emma is a graduate of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Sussex University. As an undergraduate at the University of Sussex she made history when she became the first woman to win the top prize at the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year award despite tests at school which showed that Emma was not only slightly dyslexic, but that also had very poor arithmetic skills and she says “a nearly non-existent visual memory.” None of that stopped her completing her PhD thesis (on magnetic fields in cosmology) in 2006.

p.s. After completing her PhD, Emma changed career and now runs this outdoor event venue.

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An Integral Appendix

Posted in Biographical, Cute Problems, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on August 7, 2013 by telescoper

After the conference dinner at the Ripples in the Cosmos meeting in Durham I attended recently, a group of us adjourned to the Castle bar for a drink or several. I ended up chatting to one of the locals, Richard Bower, mainly on the subject of beards. I suppose you could call it a chinwag. Only later on did  we get onto the subject of a paper we had both worked on a while ago. It was with some alarm that I later realized that the paper concerned was actually published twenty years ago. Sigh. Where did all that time go?

Anyway, Richard and I both remembered having a great time working on that paper which turned out to be a nice one, although it didn’t exactly set the world on fire in terms of citations. This paper was written before the standard “concordance” (LCDM) cosmology was firmly established and theorists were groping around for ways of reconciling observations of the CMB from the COBE satellite with large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution as well as the properties of individual galaxies. The (then) standard model (CDM with no Lambda) struggled to satisfy the observational constraints, so in typical theorists fashion we tried to think of a way to rescue it. The idea we came up with was “cooperative galaxy formation”, as explained in the abstract:

We consider a model in which galaxy formation occurs at high peaks of the mass density field, as in the standard picture for biased galaxy formation, but is further enhanced by the presence of nearby galaxies. This modification is accomplished by assuming the threshold for galaxy formation to be modulated by large-scale density fluctuations rather than to be spatially invariant. We show that even a weak modulation can produce significant large-scale clustering. In a universe dominated by cold dark matter, a 2 percent – 3 percent modulation on a scale exceeding 10/h Mpc produces enough additional clustering to fit the angular correlation function of the APM galaxy survey. We discuss several astrophysical mechanisms for which there are observational indications that cooperative effects could occur on the scale required.

I have to say that Richard did most of the actual work on this paper, though all four authors did spend a lot of time discussing whether the idea was viable in principle and, if so, how we should implement it mathematically. In the end, my contribution was pretty much limited to the Appendix, which you can click to make it larger if you’re interested.

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As is often the case in work of this kind, everything boiled down to evaluating numerically a rather nasty integral. Coincidentally, I’d come across a similar problem in a totally different context a few years previously when I was working on my thesis and therefore just happened to know the neat trick described in the paper.

Two things struck me looking back on this after being reminded of it over that beer. One is that a typical modern laptop is powerful enough to evaluate the original integral without undue difficulty, so if this paper had been written nowadays we wouldn’t have bothered trying anything clever; my Appendix would probably not have been written. The other thing is that I sometimes hear colleagues bemoaning physics students’ lack of mathematical “problem-solving” ability, claiming that if students haven’t seen the problem before they don’t know what to do. The problem with that complaint is that it ignores the fact that many problems are the same as things you’ve solved before, if only you look at them in the right way. Problem solving is never going to be entirely about “pattern-matching” – some imagination and/or initiative is going to required sometimes- but you’d be surprised how many apparently intractable problems can be teased into a form to which standard methods can be applied. Don’t take this advice too far, though. There’s an old saying that goes “To a man who’s only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. But the first rule for solving “unseen” problems has to be to check whether you might in fact already have seen them…

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Beard Facts

Posted in Beards, Biographical with tags on August 6, 2013 by telescoper

I received this very enlightening infographic via @Albertthegoat on Twitter and thought I’d share it here:

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…but shouldn’t it be “instinctively”?

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The Road to Edinburgh

Posted in Biographical with tags , on July 29, 2013 by telescoper

And so, after a pleasantly relaxing weekend in Newcastle after the end of last week’s conference in Durham, the latest leg of my little UK tour finds me in the fine city of Edinburgh. I originally intended to travel by train, but my folks offered to drive me here instead. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t all that great:

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It took a bit longer to get here than I’d hoped, which left me feeling a bit guilty that they had to turn right around and go back (after a spot of refreshment near the hotel) while I had a short nap in the cosy B&B kindly booked for me by the Royal Observatory. Anyway, I have quite a bit of work to do this evening and tomorrow. After that I’ll be flying back to Gatwick and thence to Brighton, where I’ve got even more to catch up on. There’s no rest for the Head of School…

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No more ripples?

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 27, 2013 by telescoper

Well, that’s the Ripples in the Cosmos meeting in Durham over and done with, and I’m back in Newcastle for a few days before moving on to Edinburgh next week. I’m not sure I’ll be able to blog much over the next few days because my internet connectivity will be a bit limited.

Anyway, the meeting was very exciting, as you can tell from the picture showing me (with the beard) and Brian Schmidt (with the Nobel Prize):

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Yesterday it was my job to round off the meeting with some concluding remarks leading into a panel discussion. I have to admit that although the programme for the conference was clearly designed in order to generate provoke discussion, I was a little disappointed that so few people said anything controversial. I’ve long held that there are too many cosmologists willing to believe too much, and this was further evidence that the scepticism that is a necessary part of a healthy science has been replaced by widespread conformity, especially among the young; when I was a lad the students and postdocs were a lot more vocal at meetings than they are now. Perhaps this is characteristic of a change in culture of cosmology? To get a job nowadays it’s virtually essential to climb onto one of the big bandwagon projects, and to keep your place you have to toe the party line, refrain from rocking the boat, not speak out of turn, and avoid making ripples (That’s enough metaphors. Ed).

Anyway, I think there are still a great many things in modern cosmology we don’t understand at all, and I think a few more of the older generation should show the way by questioning things in public. In fact only got asked to do the concluding remarks because Jim Peebles was unable to come to the meeting. Jim’s an immensely distinguished physicist who has probably done more than any other living person to develop the standard cosmology, but he’s also never been afraid to play devil’s advocate. We need more like him, willing to articulate the doubts that too many of us feel the need to suppress.

It’s amazing how much progress we have made in cosmology over the last few decades, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to get complacent. Cosmology is about the biggest questions in science. That alone makes it an exciting subject to work in. It’s an adventure. And the last thing you want on an adventure is for the journey to be too comfortable.

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The Mysterious Mr Ripples

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on July 24, 2013 by telescoper

So here I am in the fine city of Durham, in the North Midlands, for a meeting entitled Ripples in the Cosmos. I travelled by plane from Gatwick to Newcastle on Sunday afternoon, and got there eventually – after a two-hour delay caused by the aircraft we were meant to fly on having a technical problem and needing to be replaced by another. Anyway, I spent Sunday with my folks. Thinking it was only going to be a half-hour drive to Durham, we left early on Monday morning so I’d be in time to chair the first session.

Unfortunately, major roadworks on A1 intervened and we got stuck in traffic near the Metro Centre in Gateshead. Fortunately, various people at the conference caught my Twitter updates and a deputy was arranged. I got there about 30 minutes late and I took over after the coffee break.

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After the day’s conference I wandered up to Durham Caste (left), where I had a room booked for the week. However, when I got there they had no record of my reservation. The porter was very helpful and let me connect to my email to check, and I retrieved the confirmation of my booking. In exasperation, I looked through the papers he had relating to room bookings, and found one in the name of “Mr Ripples”. Not even “Professor Ripples”, mark you.

 

The mysterious Mr Ripples not having appeared to claim his room I surmised that the similarity of his name to the title of the conference might indicate that perhaps some administrative error might have been made. The porter agreed, changed the name from Mr Ripples to Professor Coles and gave me a key.

Anyway, Durham Castle is a rather splendid place to stay.  Breakfast is to be had in grand surroundings complete with walls decorated with suits of armour, swords and other historical weapons. This environment, together with the continuing warm weather, as well of course as the excellent conference talks, has made this very enjoyable week so far.  Apart from the nagging doubt that Mr Ripples could suddenly turn up and demand his room, the only problem is the ringing of bells all through the night.

The conference dinner is this evening, and it’s in the Great Hall of Durham Castle so I won’t have far to stagger home to bed…

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Equal Marriage!

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , on July 15, 2013 by telescoper

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I just heard that the Equal Marriage Bill has now passed its Third Reading in the House of Lords – without a vote – and now just requires the Royal Assent to become the Equal Marriage Act, allowing couples of the same sex the right to marry.

I find this quite an amazing thing. When I came to the University of Sussex as a graduate student in 1985, Brighton was one of the most gay-friendly cities in the UK, if not the world. However, the veneer of tolerance was often very thin. Homophobic prejudice was still commonplace, and it was by no means uncommon for that to turn into violence, as I know to my own cost. The Local Government Act of 1988 included Section 28, which enshrined anti-gay attitudes in law. I would never have imagined at that time that, just 25 years later, a law would be passed allowing people of the same sex to marry. It still seems barely comprehensible that attitudes can have changed so much in the second half of my lifetime. Equality in marriage doesn’t mean equality in everything, of course, and prejudice obviously hasn’t vanished entirely, but it’s a start.

It’s probably all come a bit too late for me to get married. I think I’m destined to remain forever an ineligible bachelor,  but I hope at least I’ll get invited to quite a few weddings in the near future. There’s quite a lot of catching up to do…

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