Biographical | In the Dark

Archive for the Biographical Category

All Blues at School

Posted in Biographical, Jazz with tags All Blues, GCSE Music, Jazz, Miles Davis, Mixolydian mode, music on October 14, 2012 by telescoper

I discovered by accident the other day that the classic Miles Davis composition All Blues has found its way onto the GCSE Music syllabus. I think that’s wonderful. In fact here’s a recording of the track, produced and distributed as “set work” for that purpose:

I never took any qualifications in music at School – although I did get music lessons, I didn’t find them at all inspiring and it took me years to develop a taste for anything other than Jazz, which I knew about mainly from home, because my father was a (part-time) Jazz drummer. There wasn’t much mention of Jazz at School from teachers, and none of my friends were into it, so it became a very private passion, although I’m glad to say it never faded.

Anyway, what little I know about music I picked up by studying on my own, and trying to figure out what was going on by listening to records. All Blues is a really interesting composition to unpick in this way, as it tells you a lot about how Jazz was evolving in the late 1950s (it was released in 1959). Musicians like Miles Davis were experimenting with ways of breaking away from the standard approach to Jazz improvisation based on chord progressions, and one of the routes that developed was modal Jazz. All Blues is particularly interesting because it teeters on the edge between the old approach and the new; it’s clearly based on the traditional 12-bar blues progression but diverges from it in several respects.

A standard blues progression in G might go like this (although there are many variations):

|G|G|G|G|
|C|C|G|G|
|D|C|G|G|

It’s based on just three chords: the tonic (in this case G): the sub-dominant IV (C) and the dominant V (D); the V-IV-I progression in the last four bars is usually called the turnaround.

The progression for All Blues is this:

|G7| G7| G7| G7|
|Gm7| Gm7| G7| G7|
|D7| E♭7 D7| F G|F G6|

While the addition of a major 7th note to the basic triad G isn’t unusual, the two G minor 7th chords are more interesting, because they involve adding a blue note (a flattened third) to the basic chord . But it’s in the last four bars that the harmonies move dramatically away from the standard turnaround. Chromatic chords are included and the usual resolution back to G is subtly changed by the addition of a 6th note (E) to the basic G chord (GBD) at the end; that trick became a bit of a trademark for Jazz of this period.

However, it’s the two F chords that represent the strongest connection with modal harmony. The scale of G major involves F-sharp, so the F is a flattened note (a flattened VIIth). In fact, all the Fs in the piece are natural rather than sharp. For this reason you could argue that this is a piece not played in the key of G major but in the corresponding Mixolydian mode (the white notes on the piano from G to G).

So it’s a blues that’s not quite a blues, but is (appropriately enough) Kind of Blue. There’s so much going on harmonically that the fact that it’s played in 6/8 rhythm (rather than the more usual 4/4 for the Blues) seems almost irrelevant.

Those are just the bare bones, but the improvisations of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane et al. breath life into them and create a living Jazz masterpiece. Although it seems like a complicated tune, apparently what happened at the recording session was that Miles Davis talked the band through the piece, they played it once to get a feel for it, and then recorded the entire track that was released on the album, in one go.

I must have listened to All Blues a thousand times, and I’ve never tired of it. The thing is, though, I could say the same thing about all the other tracks on the album Kind of Blue, about which Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote

Kind of Blue isn’t merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it’s an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence. Why does Kind of Blue posses such a mystique? Perhaps because this music never flaunts its genius… It’s the pinnacle of modal jazz — tonality and solos build from the overall key, not chord changes, giving the music a subtly shifting quality… It may be a stretch to say that if you don’t like Kind of Blue, you don’t like jazz — but it’s hard to imagine it as anything other than a cornerstone of any jazz collection.

Follow @telescoper

3 Comments »

A bit of CBT…

Posted in Biographical with tags CBT, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Depression, National Health Service, Panic Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on October 12, 2012 by telescoper

Up early because a busy day lies ahead, I thought I’d just post this video produced by the National Health Service on the subject of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. I’m posting it just in case there might be someone out there who has been recommended for such a treatment and is reluctant to try it, like I was at first, thinking that it is just a load of psycho-babble.

Well, it isn’t psycho-babble. It works. So if you need it, go for it!

Follow @telescoper

3 Comments »

How many hours per week should a graduate student work?

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags graduate students, PhD on October 11, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s one of those things from Blogland that is flying around the Twittersphere today..

The original post revealed a leaked email “sent to the entire graduate student body enrolled in the well-regarded astronomy program at Unnamed Academy” containing such gems as this:

We have received some questions about how many hours a graduate student is expected to work. There is no easy answer, as what matters is your productivity, particularly in the form of good scientific papers. However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school. No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so. We were almost always at the office, including at night and on weekends.

This missive has already provoked a number of responses (e.g. here and here), but I couldn’t resist putting in a few comments myself.

The first and most obvious thing is that I don’t think the faculty members mentioned above were telling the truth. It’s by no means a new phenomenon for oldies to pretend that they worked harder than the younger generation. “When I were a lad…”, etc. This is either form of delusion that accompanies ageing or a kind of one-upmanship designed to create a impose some sort of authority over the junior members of the department. A supervisor who demands such things of a PhD student is likely to be someone who regards a grad student simply as a form of cheap labour and doesn’t care at all about their development as a researcher or indeed as a human being.

The following sentence gives the game away

No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so.

It is clearly intended to mean “No one told us, but we’re sure as hell telling you…“.

My advice to a young PhD student would be: if your supervisor tells you to put in 100 hours per week on the project, find another supervisor – because he/she clearly hasn’t put sufficient thought into the practical feasibility of your project. The fact is if you have to work 100 hours per week to get your work done you must be exceptionally inefficient or working on a stupid project or simply nuts. Or all three.

The email is correct in saying that it’s “productivity” that counts. I’m sure there are many people who can sit at their desks for 11 hours a day without producing anything very much at all. It’s not the hours that matter, but what you do with them. In no way will indulging your outside interests (sporting, cultural, political, or “other”…), or simply relaxing, detract from your ability to do research. I think such diversions actually improve your work, as well as (of course) your general well-being.

I had plenty of outside interests (including music, sport and nightlife) and took time out regularly to indulge them. I didn’t – and still don’t – feel any guilt about doing that. I’m not a robot. And neither are you.

In fact, I can think of many times during my graduate studies when I was completely stuck on a problem – to the extent that it was seriously bothering me. On such occasions I learned to take a break. I often found that going for a walk, doing a crossword, or just trying to think about something else for a while, allowed me to return to the problem fresher and with new ideas. I think the brain gets into a rut if you try to make it work in one mode all the time.

But there is an element of truth in the paragraph quoted above. There were indeed many times during my time as a research student – and have been since – that I worked extremely long hours. I wouldn’t say exactly that was because I “enjoyed” it, but that I wanted to know the answer and couldn’t get the problem out of my head. I’ve stayed up into the early hours of the morning trying to finish a crossword too. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t put it down unfinished. I know that makes me a saddo in many minds, but I think that’s the sort of obsessiveness and tenacity a researcher needs: becoming so absorbed by the task in hand that you don’t notice the passage of time.

Anyway, as a research student I certainly didn’t work 80-100 hours per week routinely, although I might have done a few times when things were getting interesting. I think an average working week of 40 hours is perfectly fine for a PhD student, as long as you use that time efficiently and are prepared to step up a gear when motivated to do so.

It’s been a while since I last had a poll, so let’s see if we can generate some statistics on this…

Follow @telescoper

37 Comments »

The Week’s Ending

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags Anupam Mazumdar, Cardiff University, Pedro Ferreira on October 6, 2012 by telescoper

A later post than usual for a weekend. I’ve been feeling a bit fragile all day after a very late night last night “playing Bridge” (i.e. drinking and gossiping into the early hours of the morning, with the occasional hand of cards thrown in for good measure). My broadband connection has also been playing up nearly as badly as the connections in my brain, although I don’t think there’s a causal relationship between the two. Anyway, just time for a round-up of, and some reflections on, the events of the past seven days.

This has been the first week of term, so has naturally been extremely busy. I got my first week’s second-year lectures, examples sheets and handouts together last Sunday for a 9am start on Monday morning. There were 104 students on the register, and I was delighted to find that 100 of them actually showed up bright and early for the first session. The lecture wasn’t brilliant unfortunately – I misjudged how many worked examples I could fit into an hour and got a bit rushed as a consequence. Still, at least nobody threw anything at me, and I survived. At the end of the week the students were asked to hand in solutions to some problems, which most of them seem to have done. Unfortunately, however, I neglected to ask for the key to the box in which they are posted before the support staff went home at 5pm, so the scripts are still all in the box. At least that gives me an excuse for not having started to mark them yet.

I gave another lecture this week to the 4-th year Cardiff students taking the Quantum Field Theory lectures from Swansea, to try and fill in a bit of background our lot won’t have learned in other lectures on relativistic quantum mechanics, chiefly the Dirac equation. I really love that sort of stuff, so didn’t mind stepping up to do an impromptu class on it. They seemed to find it reasonably useful, although I went on a bit longer than I should.

Two other events this week in the School were a colloquium by Dr Anupam Mazumdar from Lancaster on Wednesday and a seminar by Prof. Pedro Ferreira from Oxford yesterday (Friday), both of which were related to alternative theories of gravity (i.e. modifications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity). Pedro has co-authored a comprehensive review article on such things if anyone is interested in following up the details. The basic point, however, is that standard cosmology almost all develops from the assumption that gravity and space-time are described by general relativity. That theory is well tested on solar-system scales, but independent tests on the much larger scales involved in cosmology are hard to come by. It’s clearly therefore an important goal to work towards testing alternative theories, as is the case in any scientific discipline.

As well as these specific events there was a steady stream of problems and irritations to do with the teaching timetable: rooms too small, clashes, and so on. This is part of my responsibility as Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s a royal pain in the derrière. However, I think all the bugs have been ironed out and we can hopefully now carry on with a settled teaching programme into the new year.

Looking back on the week I can see so many things I would not long ago have found unbearably stressful, even going to the pub after Friday’s seminar. Such victories, however insignificant they may seem to others, have given me the confidence to face the greater challenges that I know the future has in store.

Follow @telescoper

5 Comments »

Credentialism and Overexamination

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags A-level, credentialism, Ed Smith, education, GCSE, Higher Education, New Statesman, postgraduate, undergraduate on September 30, 2012 by telescoper

Only time for a quick post this morning as I have to go into the department to get my things ready for tomorrow, when the Autumn Semester starts and I have to begin lecturing (at 9am on a Monday morning). Anyway, the text for today’s sermon is provided by Ed Smith’s Left Field column in the New Statesman, the latest issue of which I read yesterday. His topic is the rise of credentialism and the resulting excessive amount of examination in the British school system:

It is now widely accepted that British pupils are excessively over-examined. Teachers are so busy focussing on examinations that there is little time left for education. Exam-led cramming has become the year-round norm – like an election campaign that consumes the whole political cycle. Exams are obviously necessary. But there is an optimal amount of assessment and it has been far exceeded. Grade inflation – notwithstanding this year’s controversial “crackdown” – is simply accepted as a fact.

It’s well said, and it’s not just the school system that suffers from disproportionate emphasis on assessment over education. It’s rife throughout the university system too, starting with the reliance on A-level grades as criteria for assessing students’ suitability for university study, through the “modular” undergraduate degree programmes with examinations twice a year for three or four years.

We examine far too frequently and the effect of this has been to turn the entire education system into a meaningless exercise in box-ticking.

It is an unfortunate irony: in our age of credentialism, exams have never mattered more. And yet they have never been more unreliable as gauges of academic quality.

I’ve felt for some time that in my discipline, Physics (and Astronomy) A-levels are virtually useless as indicators of the suitability of a student for doing an undergraduate degree. Some of the very best students I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach came into my university with modest A-level scores; and some students who came in with perfect grades at school never adjusted to the different, more independent type of study required of an undergraduate.

As Ed Smith points out, the increased emphasis on examination grades hasn’t expanded opportunity either. It may appear to be fairer to base university entrance or award jobs on examination results rather than, say, interviews, but this has just led to a system that can be easily gamed – private tutors, cramming, re-sits to improve grades, and so on. He rightly concludes that the “correlation between exam results and intelligence has been steadily weakening”.

So what’s the alternative? Smith mentions the admissions process at Harvard University, which famously ignores high-school grades and relies on its own interview system. Interviews can be very biased if carried out in an inappropriate way. Subjecting a young person to a 30-minute grilling in a room with a complete stranger can be enormously stressful for applicants who are shy, and would also play into the hands of those whose educational background has involved specific training for such ordeals. But one thing I’ve found by talking to students face-to-face is that it doesn’t take very long to identify precisely those things that the examination system does not: imagination, enthusiasm for the subject, and a flair for thinking on your feet:

One teacher told me with regret that she had to advise her most academic pupil not to display her full intellectual range: in order to secure all the ticks, first you have to stop thinking freely.

If you don’t believe this, take a look at this GCSE Science Examination. A truly intelligent student would struggle to find any correct answer for many of the questions on that paper!

This is why we still place so much emphasis on interviews in the postgraduate admissions system: we take it for granted that all applicants for PhD places will have good undergraduate degrees. What marks out an excellent candidate for a position as research student, however, is not the ability to pass exams but a mixture of creative flair and almost obsessive determination to surmount the difficult challenges involved in independent research. The correlation between these characteristics and degree results is by no means strong.

The problem for a UK University in adopting the Harvard approach is that credentialism is now running the system. Students apply to universities largely on the basis of their predicted A-level grades, lowering their sights if their predicted grades would not be expected to get them into a more “presitigious” department. But departments that take in students with low A-level scores also get marked down in the league tables for taking in “weaker” students. We’re all aware that A-levels are basically useless, but both sides are bound so tightly into the system that there seems to be no escape.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know if there is one, but I’d love to see what would happen if all universities abandoned A-levels and instead set their own entrance examinations and interviews. It would be a huge amount of work, but it would make a refreshing change if universities could gather useful information rather than relying on the uninformative guff produced by the national examination boards.

And here is Smith’s closing remark that rings very true to me for personal reasons,

There is a further dimension to the problem of credentialism. It encourages life’s winners to underestimate their good fortune and to over-rate the extent to which they deserve their success. Far from advancing talent over privilege, credentialism has strengthened the grip of people already at the top.

Follow @telescoper

3 Comments »

Reflections on the Autumnal Equinox

Posted in Biographical with tags Cambridge University, Cardiff University, School of Physics & Astronomy on September 23, 2012 by telescoper

So the autumnal equinox has been and gone again, reminding me that it is now just over four years since I started blogging; one of my very first posts was prompted by the Equinox in 2008. It’s also a reminder that the summer is now well and truly over, and teaching term is about to start. Some of my colleagues elsewhere have started teaching already but at Cardiff, lectures don’t start until 1st October. Next week, however, sees Freshers’ Week, and various other enrolment, registration and induction events. Many students have already arrived, if the crowds of young bewildered people wandering around Tesco yesterday are anything to go by.

Tomorrow is our Board of Studies too, the first one I have to chair as Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Most of the business is to do with tidying up loose ends of the last academic year and planning for the term to come. I’ll have to see whether I can chair it with sufficient ruthless efficiency that we don’t all end up missing lunch.

Anyway, this time of year always reminds me when I left home to go to University, as thousands of fledgling students are doing now. I did it thirty years ago, getting on a train at Newcastle Central station with my bags of books and clothes. I said goodbye to my parents there. There was never any question of them taking me in the car all the way to Cambridge. It wasn’t practical and I wouldn’t have wanted them to do it anyway. After changing from the Inter City at Peterborough onto a local train, me and my luggage trundled through the flatness of East Anglia until it reached Cambridge.

I don’t remember much about the actual journey, but I must have felt a mixture of fear and excitement. Nobody in my family had ever been to University before, let alone to Cambridge. Come to think of it, nobody from my family has done so since either. I was a bit worried about whether the course I would take in Natural Sciences would turn out to be very difficult, but I think my main concern was how I would fit in generally.

I had been working between leaving school and starting my undergraduate course, so I had some money in the bank and I was also to receive a full grant. I wasn’t really worried about cash. But I hadn’t come from a posh family and didn’t really know the form. I didn’t have much experience of life outside the North East either. I’d been to London only once before going to Cambridge, and had never been abroad.

I didn’t have any posh clothes, a deficiency I thought would mark me as an outsider. I had always been grateful for having to wear a school uniform (which was bought with vouchers from the Council) because it meant that I dressed the same as the other kids at School, most of whom came from much wealthier families. But this turned out not to matter at all. Regardless of their family background, students were generally a mixture of shabby and fashionable, like they are today. Physics students in particular didn’t even bother with the fashionable bit. Although I didn’t have a proper dinner jacket for the Matriculation Dinner, held for all the new undergraduates, nobody said anything about my dark suit which I was told would be acceptable as long as it was a “lounge suit”. Whatever that is.

Taking a taxi from Cambridge station, I finally arrived at Magdalene College. I waited outside, a bundle of nerves, before entering the Porter’s Lodge and starting my life as a student. My name was found and ticked off and a key issued for my room in the Lutyen’s building. It turned out to be a large room, with a kind of screen that could be pulled across to divide the room into two, although I never actually used this contraption. There was a single bed and a kind of cupboard containing a sink and a mirror in the bit that could be hidden by the screen. The rest of the room contained a sofa, a table, a desk, and various chairs, all of them quite old but solidly made. Outside my room, on the landing, was the gyp room, a kind of small kitchen, where I was to make countless cups of tea over the following months, although I never actually cooked anything there.

I struggled in with my bags and sat on the bed. It wasn’t at all like I had imagined. I realised that no amount of imagining would ever really have prepared me for what was going to happen at University.

I stared at my luggage. I suddenly felt like I had landed on a strange island where I didn’t know anyone, and couldn’t remember why I had gone there or what I was supposed to be doing.

After 30 years you get used to that feeling.

Follow @telescoper

6 Comments »

AGP Matters

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags Astronomy Grants Panel, Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC on September 20, 2012 by telescoper

Well, just made it back to Cardiff following the (hopefully) final meeting of the Astronomy Grants Panel (AGP) for this year’s round at the Science and Technology Facilities Council HQ in Swindon. It’s been a difficult process – though perhaps not quite as difficult as last year’s round which was completely overloaded with applications. I struggled a bit extra this year because I seem to have caught some sort of nasty bug during my recent travels. No doubt I’ve now infected the rest of the panel via coughing and spluttering too…

Anyway, we got through the business at hand, which basically involved merging two ranked lists produced by the sub-panels to produce an overall priority order for the proposals received. What happens with this list now is that the good folk at STFC carefully calculate the costs of each proposal as they work down through the list and keep going until the money runs out. We don’t know for sure at this stage where the line will fall, but it’s pretty clear that some very good proposals won’t make it. That’s the way it is. There just isn’t enough money to fund all the best research.

I suppose that’s why I always have mixed feelings at the end of an AGP round. It’s good to see the process in operation, because it convinces one that everyone concerned is doing their best to achieve a fair outcome, but it’s very sad that some proposals will fall just short with potentially terrible consequences for those whose livelihoods depend on STFC funding. This accounts for the not inconsiderable quantity of gallows humour displayed by AGP members.

Of course the AGP doesn’t actually award grants. It makes recommendations which are then endorsed (or not) by the STFC Science Board. So although we’ve now done our job, it will take a while until the formal grant announcements start appearing, in November probably.

Anyway, I’ve been on the panel for 3 years now, which is the normal ~~sentence~~ term for an AGP member, so I have the feeling I might be “rotated” off after this round, whereupon it will be up to some other ~~mug~~ esteemed researcher to take my place performing this ~~thankless task~~ valuable bit of community service.

Follow @telescoper

5 Comments »

Views of Arizona

Posted in Biographical with tags Arizona, Cathedral Rock, Flagstaff, Meteor Crater, Sedona on September 18, 2012 by telescoper

On the way to the airport on Sunday with my chauffeur, John Peacock, we took the opportunity to make a few detours to take in some of Arizona’s breathtaking scenery. The heat was also fairly breathtaking. I don’t really know how people manage to live out there, actually. Anyway, here are a few snaps I managed to capture with my phone camera.

The first is of course Meteor Crater, which is about 45 miles from Flagstaff:

The crater is about 170m deep and has a diameter of about 1.2km. You can see some mining equipment and other gear at the bottom. Initially people thought there would be the remains of a big iron meteorite buried underneath the crater, but magnetic tests showed that there was no so such thing. Modern understanding is that the meteorite vaporised on impact; evidence for this is found in tiny bits of fused iron that can be found as far as 7km from the impact site.

Here are another two pictures of the beautiful rocky landscape of Arizona which comprises various kinds of sandstone of different hues, including one which is just like terra cotta. Here’s an example of the spectacular formations you can find on the way from Flagstaff to Sedona:

This is Cathedral Rock in the afternoon sunshine

Well, that’s enough exotic travel pictures. Now I’m off to Swindon.

Follow @telescoper

9 Comments »

“The Universe is Expanding…”

Posted in Biographical, Film, The Universe and Stuff with tags Annie Hall, Expanding Universe, Woody Allen on September 16, 2012 by telescoper

Well, that’s the meeting over with. Now I’m off for a bit of sightseeing before going back to Phoenix for the evening flight back to London. I might be able to post some pictures when I get back, but for the mean time I’ll sign off with this clip which Michael Way used to end the last talk of the meeting!

Follow @telescoper

1 Comment »

In the Dark

Archive for the Biographical Category

All Blues at School

A bit of CBT…

How many hours per week should a graduate student work?

The Week’s Ending

Credentialism and Overexamination

Reflections on the Autumnal Equinox

AGP Matters

Views of Arizona

“The Universe is Expanding…”

Categories

Top Posts

Pages

Get your RSS links here..