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Late in the Year

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags , on December 12, 2020 by telescoper

I’ve noticed over the last few months that things coming from the UK to Ireland are getting heavily delayed en route, which is probably a sign of things to come. Last year my Royal Astronomical Society diary arrived in October. This year’s – complete with new logo – arrived yesterday (Friday 11th December):

The subscription to Physics World that comes with my IOP membership has suffered even worse disruption. Since I moved to Ireland I noticed that copies of this magazine take at least 6 weeks to arrive. After the pandemic started however, they stopped coming altogether until I contacted the Institute of Physics last month. They sent a package of replacement issues, which arrived promptly. The December issue arrived last week, in a white paper envelope instead of the usual plastic covering. Why that would make a difference to its speed of delivery I don’t know, but it seems to.

Usually I get an IOP wall planner every year, but the 2021 version hasn’t arrived yet. I’m not too worried about that, however, as the 2020 planner in my office is probably the item that proved of least use for me in 2020. Come to think of it, I haven’t had much call to use the RAS diary, either…

Some weeks ago I ordered a couple of chairs through a website with a “.ie” address. The chairs were actually made in Spain though and had to make the journey to Ireland through the UK. This process took much longer than I thought it would but when I queried with the supplier I was eventually given a delivery date of last Sunday (6th December). They didn’t show up. Using the tracking facility supplied by the company, the two packages seemed to have been lost. The customer service people had no information either. I was about to cancel the order and asked for a refund, but they showed up in Ireland on Thursday night; I received delivery this morning and am very happy with them. All’s well that ends well, I suppose, though the disruption to shipments coming through the UK is obviously not going to stop anytime soon.

My strong preference in shopping online is to buy from local (i.e. Irish) companies. Sometimes, though, businesses based elsewhere have a website in Ireland but nothing else. A lesson from this episode is to check carefully where the goods are actually going to be sent from before you order. Those that have to travel through England will probably arrive very late.

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The Advent of Covid

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth on December 10, 2020 by telescoper

I witnessed this disturbing scene last night as I walked home through Courthouse Square in Maynooth. Look at them – not a single one wearing a mask!

Perhaps however they have formed a social bubble so we can forgive that, and the lack of social distancing?

Nevertheless I was confused as to what was going on until I worked it out. The child in the front has obviously fallen asleep with its head on a Frisbee and the others are waiting for it to wake up so they can get it back.

With this Mystery solved, continued my journey to Supervalu, where they were sadly out of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh so I bought a bottle of wine instead.

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Another Week Ending

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, GAA, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on December 4, 2020 by telescoper

As this term staggers on I once again arrive at a weekend in a state of exhaustion. Still there are just two teaching weeks left for this term so soon it will be the Christmas break. At least there won’t be any teaching then, though there will be other things to do before the examinations start in January.

I’ve managed to keep a reasonable pace up in both sets of lectures. The last one due this term is for Vector Calculus and Fourier Series, on Friday 18th December, but I think I may be able to complete the module content on the Tuesday lecture which means the students will be able to have a bit more time to relax before Christmas or, alternatively, a bit more time for revision. I hope it’s the former, as I imagine the students are at least as tired as we staff are. This has been a difficult year for everyone.

At Maynooth University, lectures for Semester 2 start on February 1st 2020. That will give us a bit of time to see how the Covid-19 pandemic progresses before deciding exactly how we’re going to approach teaching. Other universities that resume earlier have less time to make this decisions. I fear that the number of cases may rise rapidly over the three weeks remaining before Christmas, even before the Christmas break itself, and we therefore might have to go fully online next term. What I don’t want to happen is what happened in September, namely that we made elaborate plans for lecture rotations and tutorial groups that were then ditched because the Coronavirus situation changed. That was quite demoralizing because it involved a great deal of effort that was wasted.

Being a Department of Theoretical Physics we don’t have the problems facing the more experimental subjects that require extensive laboratory classes which are difficult to do under social distancing. Next term however we do have Computational Physics, which has laboratory classes, so I’ll have to decide how much of that we can do in person and how much students will have to do online using their laptops. I hope we can return to full in-person lab sessions, but we can’t be that will be possible right now. In any case computer labs are far easier to run online that practical chemistry or physics labs, so I think we will be able to do a reasonable job whatever the circumstances.

For added fun, next term I’ll be teaching a new module; 4th Year Advanced Electromagnetism. Although there’s always a lot of work required to teach a module for the first time, I am actually looking forward to doing this one as there’s some interesting physics in it (especially relativistic electrodynamics). I may try to squeeze a bit of plasma physics in too. But will it be online or on campus, or a mixture of both? Time alone will tell.

Anyway I’m looking forward to this weekend being as stress-free as possible. There’s a good start tonight, as Newcastle’s game against Aston Villa has been postponed due to Covid-19 so no anxious looking at the score this evening. The rest of the weekend will be dominated, for me, by the two semi-finals of the All Ireland Gaelic Football Championship (Cavan versus Dublin tomorrow and Mayo versus Tipperary on Sunday). It seems to be written in the stars that the final should be Dublin versus Tipperary, the two teams that played on Bloody Sunday, but time will tell on that one too.

Update: Dublin did indeed comfortably beat Cavan on Saturday but Mayo beat Tipperary in a high scoring game in a foggy Croke Park on Sunday (Mayo 5-20 Tipperary 3-13). The final will therefore not be a rerun of the 1920 final.

That’s enough rambling. Have a good weekend.

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Three Years in Maynooth

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on December 1, 2020 by telescoper

It’s 1st December 2020 which means that it’s now been three whole years since I started my job as Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University, in County Kildare in the Irish Republic.

Until the Summer of 2018 I was working part-time at Cardiff and part-time in Maynooth, which required a lot of flying to and from between Wales and Ireland.  That situation would have been impossible to sustain during the pandemic for reasons of quarantine and also because FlyBe went bust. The timing of my move to Maynooth was providential in many ways apart from that.

I didn’t think it would take me the best part of three years to buy a house in Ireland, but owing to a combination of circumstances it took until the end of this summer to do that. Still, all’s well that ends well and I’m very happy with my home.

When I first arrived in Maynooth I stayed in St Patrick’s House (above), part of the Roman Catholic seminary on Maynooth University’s South Campus. I took this picture of the corridor I was on the night I arrived because it reminded me of  The Shining:

The arrival of the Covid-19 Pandemic earlier this year has been another completely unexpected development. I wonder what fate has next in store?

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Out of the REF

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth with tags , , , , on November 25, 2020 by telescoper

I was talking over Zoom with some former colleagues from the United Kingdom last week, and was surprised to learn that, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 Research Excellence Framework is ploughing ahead next year, only slightly delayed. There’s no stopping bureaucratic juggernauts once they get going…

One of the major plusses of being in Ireland is that, outside the UK academic system, there is no REF. One can avoid the enormous workload and stress generated by this exercise in bean-counting My memories of the last REF in 2014 when I was Head of School at Sussex are quite painful, as it went badly for us then. I hope that the long-term investments we made then will pay off, though, and I hope things turn out better for Sussex this time especially for the Department of Physics & Astronomy for which the impact and environment components of the assessment dragged the overall score down.

The census period for the new REF is 1st August 2013 to 31st July 2020. Not being involved personally in the REF this time round I haven’t really paid much attention to the changes that have been adopted since 2014. One I knew about is that the rules make it harder for institutions to leave staff out of their REF return. Some universities played the system in 2014 by being very selective about whom they put in. Only staff with papers considered likely to be rated top-notch were submitted.

Having a quick glance at the documents I see two other significant differences.

One is that in 2014, with very few exceptions, all staff had to submit four research outputs (i.e. papers) to be graded. in 2021 the system is more flexible: the total number of outputs must equal 2.5 times the summed FTE (full-time equivalent) of the unit’s submitted staff, with no individual submitting more than 5 and none fewer than 1 (except in special cases related to Covid-19). Overall, then there will be fewer outputs than before, the multiplier of FTE being 2.5 (2021) instead of 4 (2014). There will still be a lot, of course, so the panels will have a great deal of reading to do. If that’s what they do with the papers. They’ll probably just look up citations…

The other difference relates to staff who have left an institution during the census period. In 2014 the institution to which a researcher moved got all the credit for the publications, while the institution they left got nothing. In 2021, institutions “may return the outputs of staff previously employed as eligible where the output was first made publicly available during the period of eligible employment, within the set number of outputs required.” I suppose this is to prevent the departure of a staff member causing too much damage to the institution they left.

I was wondering about this last point when chatting with friends the other day. I moved institutions twice during the relevant census period, from Sussex to Cardiff and then from Cardiff to Maynooth. In principle, therefore, both former employees could submit my outputs I published while I was there to the 2021 REF. I only published a dozen or so papers while I was at Sussex – the impact of being Head of School on my research productivity was considerable – and none of them are particularly highly cited so I don’t think that Sussex will want to submit any of them, but they could if they wanted to. They don’t have to ask my permission!

I doubt if Cardiff will be worried about my papers. Among other things they have a stack of gravitational wave papers that should all be 4*.

Anyway, thinking about the REF an amusing thought occurred to me about Research Assessment. My idea was to set up a sort of anti-REF (perhaps the Research Inferiority Framework) based not on the best outputs produced by an institutions researchers but on the worst. The institutions producing the highest number of inferior papers could receive financial penalties and get relegated in the league tables for encouraging staff to write too many papers that nobody ever reads or are just plain wrong. My guess is that papers published in Nature might figure even more prominently in this

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Four Weeks To Go

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on November 23, 2020 by telescoper

As I await another Zoom meeting I remembered this cartoon from last week’s Private Eye, which sums up the prevalent mood amongst academics these days (and no doubt people in other kinds of job too).

At the start of this morning’s Panopto lecture I realised that there are still 4 weeks left of this Semester before the Christmas break. I was a bit surprised by that as this term seems to have lasted a decade already. The time certainly hasn’t zoomed by. Still, at least I’ve more-or-less kept up with my planned schedule of lectures in both of my modules without slipping. I may even be able to finish lectures to my 2nd year Vector Calculus in time to do a bit of revision in the final week.

That’s not to say other things haven’t slipped. The greatly increased time for teaching needed to move everything online hasn’t left much time for research or anything else. I keep meaning to work in the evenings to deal with outstanding things but mostly I find once I’ve done the necessary admin and teaching stuff all I can do is sleep. It seems that I’ll have to work over Christmas to finish off the backlog. Given that I didn’t have a holiday this summer that’s not ideal, but it’s unlikely I’ll be going anywhere over the “festive” season owing to Coronavirus restrictions so I might as well make the best of it.

We don’t have much idea how things will work out next Semester. The politicians seem to be wanting universities to have more on-campus teaching in the New Year. They also want to end the current restrictions to end before Christmas. In fact the current regime is suppose to end on December 2nd, which is next week, and cases are still running around 400 per day. I don’t think they can do both of these and for the Covid-19 situation to remain under any semblance of control. I think the likeliest scenario is that cases surge over the next few weeks and the Christmas break and we have to go back into full restrictions in January or February.

There is however the prospect of a vaccine or vaccines being available fairly early next year so maybe the end of this is in sight. I really hope we can get back to campus normality at some point in 2021. I do feel very sad about the effect all these restrictions has been having on the students. It’s not just having to have remote lectures. I think having a lecturer in the same room is an advantage, but the loss of it is not the worst issue. We encourage our students to work with each other in their learning, and I’m sure students learn at least as much from each other as they do from the lecturer. Peer group learning is more difficult when your peers are sitting in separate locations most of the time.

Earlier today I found myself using the phrase “getting back to normal” in connection with plans for next teaching year. Then I realise that we staff know what we mean by “normal” but our first-year students don’t. I have a feeling that may might find it more difficult to adjust to the old normal than they did to the new one.

And in any case many of our students in all years did not take up accommodation in Maynooth at the start of this year because of the remote teaching. Even if we did on campus lectures or tutorials next term, I suspect many will stay at home anyway to avoid substantial cost of rented accommodation. We will therefore have to continue making material available online whatever happens.

Anyway, what may or may not happen next Semester is to a large extent out of my hands so I won’t be making any firm decisions on what approach I will be taking until much closer to the start of Semester 2 In the meantime the goal is to fight the exhaustion and try get through to the end of term in one piece.

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On the GAA

Posted in Biographical, History, Sport with tags , , , , , on November 22, 2020 by telescoper

Since moving to Ireland almost three years ago I have (somewhat unexpectedly) become a fan of GAA and regularly watch both hurling and Gaelic football on the TV, which is quite often.

Ireland is very keen on sports generally, with big followings for both rugby and soccer but, at least in terms of attendances, hurling and Gaelic football are by far the most popular sports in Ireland. That’s quite remarkable because these are entirely amateur games. One of the great things about the GAA is that it’s a real grass roots organization, where even games between local clubs can attract very big crowds. (I’m talking about the pre-Covid era there, obviously.) The players tend to be local and there’s a strong involvement of the community in the local clubs.

Hurling is my favourite GAA sport – the level of skill on display is truly awesome and it’s played at an amazingly fast tempo – but I do watch the football when I can too and am more gradually getting into it. Incidentally, these two sports are played on the same pitches with the same goals and the same number of players on each side (15) and have basically the same rules – with a player’s hurley (stick) in hurling being in one-to-one correspondence as far as the rules are concerned with a player’s foot in Gaelic football. The ball of course is bigger in football; the small one used in hurling is called a sliotar. Scoring is the same in both: 1 point getting the ball between the two posts over the bar as in rugby and a goal (3 points) for getting the ball into the back of the net below the bar.

I took a break in the early afternoon yesterday to watch the All Ireland Quarter Final match in the hurling between Galway and Tipperary, an entertaining match played in fine weather which was won by Galway 3-23 to 2-24. Later on, I settled down to watch the Leinster provincial final between Dublin and Meath live from Croke Park in the evening. Given that this match was on the same day as Bloody Sunday it was preceded by a solemn commemoration of those that died a hundred years ago which I thought was beautifully done. Here’s a video tribute made by the GAA itself, played at the end of the pre-match commemoration along with specially-composed music.

After the match there was a wreath-laying ceremony involving the players which was unfortunately spoiled on the television broadcast by a commentator who talked all the way over it.

The match itself was a very one-sided affair, which was effectively all over by half time (when the score was Dublin 2-12 Meath 0-2). It ended Dublin 3-21 Meath 0-9, which is a margin of 21 points: quite a thrashing for Meath. I’m not an expert, but the Dublin side were far more mobile and inventive than Meath and thoroughly deserved their win.

There wasn’t a crowd of course. I think the commemorative event would have been even more emotional if there had been. Watching the actual match though it struck me that we’re all getting used to watching sport in an empty stadium. It’s probably going to take some getting used to the noise when (if) live audiences eventually return.

UPDATE: Tipperary beat Cork in Munster final this afternoon to win it for the first time in 85 years. The team were wearing replica jerseys of those worn by the Tipperary team that played Dublin in 1920.

After all the provincial finals, including a surprise win for Cavan over Donegal in Ulster, the four teams in the semi-finals of the All Ireland Senior Football Championship in 2020 is exactly the same as it was in 1920. The final, between Dublin and Tipperary, was not played until 1922.

(The match played on Bloody Sunday was a Challenge Match not part of the Championship.

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Dreams, Planes and Automobiles

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 20, 2020 by telescoper

I’ve blogged before about the strange dreams that I’ve been having during this time of Covid-19 lockdowns, but last night I had a doozy. I’ve recently been doing some examples of Newtonian Mechanics problems for my first-year class: blocks sliding up and down planes attached by pulleys to other blocks by inextensible strings; you know the sort of thing.

Anyway, last night I had a dream in which I was giving a lecture about cars going up and down hills taking particular account of the effects of friction and air resistance. The lecture was in front of a camera and using a portable blackboard and chalk, but all that was set up outside in the middle of a main road with traffic whizzing along either side and in the presence of a strong gusty wind. I had to keep stopping to pick up my notes which had blown away, dodging cars as I went.

It would undoubtedly make for much more exciting lectures if I recorded them in such a situation, but I think I’d be contravening traffic regulations by setting up in the middle of the Straffan Road. On the other hand, I could buy myself a green screen and add all that digitally in post-production…

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An Image for Autumn 2020

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 on November 17, 2020 by telescoper

If there’s an image that sums up Autumn 2020 for me, this is it:

I can hardly go anywhere these days without seeing the disagreeable sight of a discarded face mask at some point. I wish people would take more care when disposing of these things!

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Diversity in Physics – LGBTQ+ STEMDay

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, Cardiff, LGBTQ+ with tags , , , , on November 14, 2020 by telescoper

The nice people involved with Physics at Cardiff University, Prism Exeter and the GW4 group generally have organized a (virtual) event to celebrate Diversity and Inclusion for LGBTQ+ STEM Day 2020 which is to take place on November 18th (that’s next Wednesday). I’m very honoured to have been invited to give a keynote talk at this event, the poster for which is below, and am looking forward to it.

There’s a blog post here that gives more information about the event, including how to register in order to receive the Zoom connection.

I won’t be able to stay for the whole event as I am teaching later that day. I’d have been particularly interested in the session on Open Science…

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