I’m still at home at 10am on a weekday, which is unusual, but that’s because I’m soon going to be doing the familiar schlepp to Heathrow airport in order to get a flight to Copenhagen. The purpose of this little trip is to participate in a PhD examination at the Niels Bohr Institute. I’ve never taken part in a Thesis Defence in the Danish system before, although I’ve done many equivalent examinations elsewhere, so I’m quite looking forward to finding out how it works. Will it be much different from the system we have in the UK? Probably, as it is a much more public occasion. Will that necessarily make it better? I don’t know. I was reading the thesis last night, actually, and it’s very interesting which is another reason to look forward to the occasion. I might even get time for some shopping too.
Anyway, before going to the airport I am going to pop along to the local polling station. Today is the day for the Election of the Police and Crime Commissioner for the South Wales Police Area. I’m going to the polling station not because I have a burning desire to vote – the list of candidates is extremely uninspiring – but because I feel I should register a protest at this farcical waste of public money at what is supposed to be a time of austerity. The political class in this country has never been held in lower esteem than at present and the last thing we need is more politicians, helping themselves to six-figure salaries at taxpayers’ expense. More politicians does not mean more democracy. We already have local council elections, Welsh Assembly elections, General (Parliamentary) Elections and European Parliament Elections. We don’t need any more! This Election is a complete waste of time and money.
I intend, therefore, to visit the polling station and, instead of putting a cross in a box, write a strongly (but politely) worded message voicing my opinion on the matter thus spoiling my ballot paper. It will be the first time I’ve ever done such a thing, but this is the first time we’ve had such a stupid election.
It’s Hallowe’en again, and although I feel I should concoct something appropriate, I really don’t have time. I’ve decided therefore to recycle a couple of items I’ve previously posted on this lamentable occasion.
We never had Halloween when I was a kid. I mean it existed. People mentioned it. There were programmes on the telly. But we never celebrated it. At least not in my house, when I was a kid. It just wasn’t thought of as a big occasion. Or, worse, it was “American” (meaning that it was tacky, synthetic and commercialised). Cue this seasonable clip from Fry & Laurie
So there were no Halloween parties, no costumes, no horror masks, no pumpkins and definitely no trick-or-treat when I was a lad.
Having never done trick-or-treat myself as a child, I never really had any clue what it was about until relatively recently. I’d always assumed “Trick or Treat?” was a rhetorical question or merely a greeting like “How do you do?”.
In fact my first direct experience of this perculiar custom didn’t happen until I was in my mid-thirties and had moved to a suburban house in Beeston, just outside Nottingham. I was sitting at home one October 31st, watching the TV and – probably, though I can’t remember for sure – drinking a glass of wine, when the front door bell rang. I didn’t really want to, but I got up and answered it.
When I opened the door, I saw in front of me two small girls in witches’ costumes. Behind them, near my front gate, was an adult guardian, presumably a parent, keeping a watchful eye on them.
“Trick or Treat?” the two girls shouted. Trying my best to get into the spirit but not knowing what I was actually supposed to do, I answered “Great! I’d like a treat please”.
They stared at me as if I was mad, turned round and retreated towards their minder who was clearly making a mental note to avoid this house in future. Off they went and I, embarrassed at being exposed as a social inadequate, retired to my house in shame.
Ever since then I’ve tried to ensure that I never again have to endure such Halloween horrors. Every October 31st, when nightfall comes, I switch off the TV, radio and lights and sit soundlessly in the dark so the trick-or-treaters think there’s nobody home.
That way I can be sure I won’t be made to feel uncomfortable.
Anyway, despite my own reservations about Hallowe’en, I’ve decided to resurrect the following little video which seems to be appropriate for the occasion. It’s made of bits of old horror B-movies but the music – by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-kickers is actually the second single I ever bought, way back in 1973. I wonder if you can guess what the first one was?
A late post this evening, as I’m just back from a short visit to Brighton. I travelled down there yesterday evening and stayed with an old friend in a house I lived in for a time about 25 years ago. I spent most of today meeting some of my future colleagues at the University of Sussex, who made me feel very welcome, and also catching up on some important things to be dealt with when I take over there in the new year. It’s all part of a gradual process of acclimatisation which I’ll need to do so I don’t take ages getting up to speed when I officially start. I didn’t get much time to wander about the town, but many Brighton memories have flooded back over the last couple of days. Cue an old favourite track that I listened to this evening on the train on the way home. It’s from a lovely album recorded by the unlikely combination of John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. They were men of different musical generations, but they admired each other enormously. It’s clear from the relaxed nature of this collaboration that neither felt he had any points to prove; each adapts his style to suit the other, with gorgeous results.
Well, after what seems like ages the news is now official. I’ve been appointed Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. I’ll be taking up my new job on 1st February 2013. I was actually offered the job back in September and decided pretty quickly to accept it, but there have been quite a few things to sort out before the news could be made public. Anyway, yesterday the University of Sussex decided it was time to make a formal announcement, and there we are.
As I am quoted as saying in the press release it will definitely be a wrench to leave Cardiff. I’ve really enjoyed living and working here for the last five years or so, and will miss the staff and the students of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. I’m especially grateful for the help and support I received during the difficulties I experienced this summer. However, I felt the position at Sussex represented an exciting opportunity to make a fresh start which would offer new and exciting challenges and which I couldn’t afford to turn down. It means a lot that my Cardiff colleagues – particularly the Head of School, Walter Gear – have accepted my decision in such good spirit, and are doing everything possible to smooth the transition.
As it also explains in the official news item, I’m not exactly a stranger to Sussex. I did my DPhil there (from 1985-88) and stayed on for a couple of years as a PDRA (1988-90). That was a long time ago, of course. In fact, in those days I was a member of a School called “MAPS” (Mathematics and Physics). I’ve been back to Sussex on numerous occasions over the past twenty-odd years, usually discovering that some reorganisation had happened – Maths separated from Physics, changes of building, and so on. Now, ironically, I’ll return to a School that, on paper at any rate, looks very similar to the old MAPS and is even back in the same building! Plus ça change.
I won’t be leaving Cardiff immediately, of course. I’m still an employee of Cardiff University and will do my best to carry out my duties until the end of January. That means I’ll carry on lecturing as normal, and will be around to mark the examinations after Christmas. I also have two PhD students and three final-year projects students, and will be travelling back to Cardiff regularly to ensure they continue get as much supervision as they need even after the (formal) end of my employment here. I’ll also be continuing to collaborate with folks in Cardiff (and elsewhere) on, e.g., the Herschel ATLAS survey.
The position of Head of MPS at Sussex only became available because of the untimely death of the previous Head of School, David Axon, in April this year, so I’m fully aware that the circumstances that have given me such a wonderful opportunity have also brought much sadness to David’s colleagues and loved ones. I only hope that I can build on the many excellent things he did during his time at Sussex, and so eventually earn the respect and acceptance of the School.
Many of my colleagues at Cardiff have expressed sadness that I’ll be leaving. But just as there are exciting developments in the pipeline at Sussex, so are there different but equally exciting things in store at Cardiff. In no way will my departure have a negative impact on the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. Quite the contrary, in fact. There will now be a bit more headroom in the budget that I’m sure will help bring at least some of the School’s plans to fruition.
And anyway, as I said previously, I’m not going just yet. I’ll probably keep the house in Cardiff until the spring (at the earliest) so I’ll be back here regularly, especially when it’s Opera season. And having branches in both Brighton and Cardiff for a while might even give me an excuse to have two 50th birthday celebrations next year!
Twenty-five years ago I was living in Brighton as a graduate student at the University of Sussex. On October 16th 1987 (a Friday) I woke up to find the electricity had been cut off. Without breakfast I struggled out to find the street lined with fallen trees, smashed cars and houses with broken windows. This was the Great Storm of 1987 which, according to weather forecaster Michael Fish, was “not a hurricane” and I had slept through the whole thing…
Here’s the infamous weather forecast broadcast on the Thursday evening
and here is the BBC News from the following day:
I’m sure my readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will be anxious to share their recollections of that wild and windy night through the comments box!
It’s been a while since I updated my photo on this site, so this afternoon I asked a friend of mine to take a picture. It turned out to be more appropriate for In the Dark than I’d expected…
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.
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.
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!
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…
I’ve been rummaging through my old second-year undergraduate notes and papers trying to compare what I did when I was a student with what we’re asking current second-year undergraduates to do. Since I’m now teaching a fairly mathematical second-year course, it is interesting to look at how the content compares with the Mathematics papers I took way back in 1984.
Looking at these two examinations it’s clear that some of the content is similar (e.g. vector calculus, Fourier transforms) but some big things are entirely missing from our second-year syllabus, specifically Laplace transforms and group theory. The absence of the latter is a matter of particular regret because it’s such a beautiful subject that I think leads onto a deeper understanding of physics than a lot of the other things we make the students learn.
The other striking thing is that the marks for different bits of the questions are not given. That was standard in my day, but nowadays we usually indicate how many marks are available for each part. Moreover, the style of examination is such that even the number of correct answers needed for full marks isn’t given; it just says “You are advised to answer complete questions rather than fragments”.
Anyway, as usual, I’d be interested in comments on the content and difficulty especially from current students in the unlikely event that they have nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than have a look at it! For my part, I’ll be in the department getting next week’s lecture materials sorted. Heigh-ho.
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted. I do not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with the opinions or statements of any information or other content in the comments on this site and do not in any way guarantee their accuracy or reliability.
