Archive for the Cardiff Category

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Midweek Flight to Dublin

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth on May 2, 2018 by telescoper

I’ve just arrived in Dublin after the last regular mid-week flight I’ll have to make from Cardiff because of teaching commitments. Last lecture of term in Maynooth tomorrow, and after that I can be more flexible about the travel.

I’ve generally avoided evening flights since the introduction of the summer schedules. Budget airlines such as FlyBe work on very tight schedules and delays tend to accumulate throughout the day, meaning that incoming planes needed to make evening flights are frequently very late. Sometimes they get so late the plane can’t fly because of restrictions on night flights, in which case they are cancelled. This is much less likely with an earlier flight in my experience.

So I took a chance this evening but as it happened there were no delays I got safely on the bus to Maynooth and got to my flight at a reasonable hour. The plane, by the way, was only about a quarter full.

The picture was taken shortly after takeoff from Cardiff Airport, with South Wales underneath and Devon in the distance.

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In Praise of Research Software Engineers

Posted in Cardiff with tags , , , on May 1, 2018 by telescoper

Yesterday in the Data Innovation Research Institute we held a special event, our first ever Conference for Research Software Engineers. Sadly I was too busy yesterday to attend in person, but I did turn up at the end for the drinks reception at the end.

In case you weren’t aware, the term Research Software Engineer (RSE) is applied to the growing number of people in universities and other research organisations who combine expertise in programming with an intricate understanding of research. Although this combination of skills is extremely valuable, these people lack a formal place in the academic system. Without a name, it is difficult for people to rally around a cause, hence the creation of the term Research Software Engineer and the Research Software Engineer Association.

We have quite a few RSEs associated with the Data Innovation Research Institute in Cardiff – as you can see here. These are quite different from system administrators or other computing support staff as they are involved directly in research, working in teams alongside academics and other specialists.

One of the biggest problems facing RSEs in the UK university system is there isn’t a well-established promotions route for them. For researchers in an academic environment, performance is usually judged through publications, PhD students supervised, grants awarded and so so. Although RSEs play a vital role, especially (but not exclusively) in large collaborations, they do not usually end up as lead authors on papers and generally do not apply for grants in their own name. That means that if they are judged by these criteria they struggle to get promotion and often leave academia to work for higher pay and better terms and conditions elsewhere.

In my opinion, one of the important things that must be done to improve the lot of Research Software Engineers is to construct a career structure in parallel with the academic route  and other grades (such as laboratory technician) but judged by more appropriate criteria tailored to the reality of the job. Writing the necessary grade profiles and getting them agreed by the relevant university committees will take some time, but I think it will pay dividends in terms of better retention and job satisfaction for these highly talented people.

I hope Cardiff can take some sort of a lead in defining the role of an RSE, but this is really a national need. There are pretty uniform grade descriptions for academic and research staff across the United Kingdom so I don’t see any reason why this can’t be the case for Research Software Engineers. They are vital to many research fields already, and their importance can only grow in the future.

 

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Welcome Back To Sophia Gardens

Posted in Cardiff, Cricket with tags , , on April 30, 2018 by telescoper

As a member of Glamorgan County Cricket Club I today received some important news by email.

It seems that at the end of this month (ie today), the sponsorship deal with an electricity company that involved the cricket ground in Cardiff being called the SSE SWALEC Stadium lapses.

From tomorrow, the First of May, therefore, the ground will be known by the far more attractive name of Sophia Gardens Cardiff. That also happens to be the name by which it was known from 1967 to 2007…

I have to admit that I always struggled to bring myself to call it the SSE SWALEC Stadium, so I’m glad that I no longer have to try!

And while we’re on about gardens here is a picture of some flowers I saw in Cathays Park on my way to work this morning.

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Judgement Day

Posted in Cardiff, Rugby with tags , , , on April 28, 2018 by telescoper

I’m up early again on a Saturday, travelling back to Cardiff this weekend for the above event later today. It’s actually a School social event for members of the School of Physics & Astronomy that involves two rugby matches at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, featuring all four Welsh teams in the Guinness Pro 14 tournament: the Blues (from Cardiff); Ospreys (from Neath/Swansea); Scarlets (from Llanelli); and Dragons (from Newport). Tickets for the whole event cost just £10 each…

Should be a good day out! I may post a few pictures from the Stadium, so watch this space.

The scene about 20 minutes before Scarlets v Dragons..

It did fill up: the overall attendance was over 65,000.

The Scarlets versus Dragons match was rather one-sided, ending 33-8 to the team from Llanelli. The thing that struck me most about the game was the dire state of the scrummaging. I think only one scrum completely properly in the whole match! The Dragons also conceded a penalty try after repeated infringements at scrums under their own posts.

After a break we had the Ospreys versus Cardiff Blues. Here is the scene shortly after kick off with the Blues (right) immediately under pressure from the Ospreys (left, in white).

After the first 10 minutes I thought the Ospreys were going to run away with the game but it turned out to be an excellent close-fought contest, of much higher quality than the first. Cardiff were actually ahead for much of the game, despite their atrocious performance at the line out. The match ended 26-23 to the Ospreys, with the winning points coming from a drop goal 2 minutes from the end…

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Cardiff Bound

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth with tags , , , on April 21, 2018 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post using the airport WIFI to fill some time before my flight leaves from Dublin Airport. Once again on a Saturday morning I was up at 5am to get the 6am bus here from Maynooth. The journey back to Cardiff is far from arduous, but I won’t be sorry when I won’t have to do it every week. Fortunately, term is coming to an end and after teaching finishes I won’t be dictated to by the timetables of Cardiff and Maynooth Universities. And after July I won’t have to do the trip at all!

This morning a large group – I believe the correct collective noun is a murder – of crows gathered to give the bus a sendoff. I did think of Hitchcock’s The Birds but the birds in this case were more interested in rummaging through the rubbish bin than attacking any of us waiting for the bus. Incidentally, it was the anniversary of Daphne Du Maurier’s death on 19th April; she wrote the short story on which that film was based.

Anyway, it’s a lovely sunny morning. Yesterday was a nice day too, both in terms of weather and other things. In the afternoon there was a staff barbecue and an awards ceremony at Maynooth University. There was a big crowd already there when I arrived, a bit late because I’d been at a seminar. Standing at the back I couldn’t really hear the speeches. I didn’t win any awards, of course, but I did get a glass of wine and a beefburger.

On my way home I bumped into the President, Philip Nolan, who is the equivalent of a Vice-Chancellor. To my surprise he mentioned a point I had raised in a recent Faculty meeting about the possibility of Maynooth signing up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). To my even greater surprise he went on to say that this was going to be in the University’s strategic plan. Good news!

Anyway, I’d better make my way to the gate.  Have a nice day!

 

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Cardiff to Dublin via Belfast

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff with tags , , , on April 11, 2018 by telescoper

I thought I write a brief post to arising from today’s travel difficulties, really just to make a record of the episode for posterity.

As last Wednesday I got up early this morning (4.30am) to get the 7am FlyBe flight from Cardiff to Dublin, due into Dublin at 8.05am. Having only hand luggage, as usual, I proceeded straight upstairs to the departure area only to find that the screen said the flight was cancelled, and directed passengers intending to travel on it back downstairs to the `Disruption Desk’ .

A long queue had already formed by the time I got there, but I got to the desk fairly quickly. The assistant explained that the cancellation was due to `staff sickness’ (i.e. they were short of a pilot) and the only option on offer was to fly to Belfast whence a bus would be provided to Dublin. The Belfast flight should have left at 6.15am but was being held for passengers to Dublin. I was also given a £5 refreshments voucher.

I thought a moment and then decided to accept this offer. I didn’t have any morning appointments today, but definitely had to get to Maynooth somehow by tomorrow morning as I have a lecture to deliver.

The plane left Cardiff about 7.15am and arrived in Belfast around 8.10am but when I emerged from the arrivals area there was no bus. In fact it took about 45 minutes to arrive, and we didn’t get going until about 8.55am. Many of the passengers were clearly nervous about missing connecting flights in Dublin, including a group of women planning onward travel to the USA, but the trip was fairly uneventful apart from the fact that the toilet was out of commission necessitating a stop so that people could use the facilities in a service station.

I can confirm that there is no visible border between Northern Ireland and the Republic on the road between Belfast and Dublin, although it does change name from A1 to M1 on the way. The distance between Belfast and Dublin by road is about 100 miles and it took just over two hours. I arrived at Terminal 1 of Dublin Airport at 11.05, almost exactly three hours late. I thought that wasn’t too bad a result given the chaos in Cardiff when I left but it was still a frustrating morning. I had to wait until 11.50 for the bus to Maynooth, where I finally arrived about 12.40.

I will of course be submitting a request for the compensation to which I am entitled for the delay, but above all I hope that those whose arrangements were even more seriously disrupted than mine managed to get to where they needed to go in the end.

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Spring comes to Maynooth

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth with tags , , on April 5, 2018 by telescoper

After a good night’s sleep last night I was up early this morning to give my usual Thursday 9am lecture on Computational Physics. It was a bright sunny morning, though there was overnight frost and a distinct chill in the air, as I made my way to Physics Hall. Once there, for the first time this year, I had to close the blinds because the Sun was shining too bright for the projector screen. It has hitherto always been too gloomy outside for this to happen. The picture above (of St Joseph’s Square, on the South Campus) was taken as I left St Patrick’s House after a very nice lunch of roast lamb in Pugin Hall. By this time of day it was pleasantly warm.

Here’s a nice picture of the Library circulated by the Maynooth social media folk earlier today.

library

Anyway, this mornings’s lecture was an introduction numerical solutions of ordinary differential equations, beginning with Euler’s method applied to initial value problems. Further studies of this topic – which is very important for bidding computational physics – will take up the rest of the lectures as we explore the delights of, e.g. Runge-Kutta codes and boundary value problems. This morning’s lecture was followed this afternoon by a two-hour lab session in which the students had to write their own ODE solver.

Among the advantages (for me) of teaching this module is that I’m actually becoming reasonably competent at Python. At any rate I’ve difficult improved my ability to spot bugs in codes written by other people. In fact, it is traditional for the exam in this module to include a question that involves finding 10 mistakes in a piece of Python code. That’s a fun challenge, the only real problem for me being to write a bit of code with only 10 mistakes in it in the first place…

Talking of exams, the timetables for my two current employers are now out. Computational Physics in Maynooth is on Friday 11th May while Physics of the Early Universe in Cardiff is almost a fortnight later, on Thursday 24th May. The Easter recess is shorter here in Maynooth than in Cardiff, where lectures do not resume until April 16th (assuming the UCU strike does not continue), which is why the exams in Maynooth are earlier. I’m grateful there isn’t a clash. I should have ample time to mark the Maynooth ones before the Cardiff ones are due. After the first week or so of May I won’t have to teach in both institutions, so my somewhat hectic schedule should become a little more relaxed from then onwards.

I mentioned the UCU strike above in passing. The UCU leadership has decided that there will be an online ballot on whether to accept the `offer’ recently made by the management organisation UUK. The ballot will be open until April 13th. If the vote goes against acceptance then Cardiff staff will be back on strike from 16th April, and there will be further industrial action over the examination period. I can’t predict what the result of the ballot will be. Although the UCU leadership is recommending acceptance I don’t know anyone personally who intends to vote for it, but there’s a probably a big selection effect there! There is a distinct possibility that examinations will be badly disrupted not only in Cardiff but all over the UK. It’s a very sad state of affairs but all those on strike (and the majority of students) consider the UUK side to be to blame…

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A Time to Resign

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth on April 2, 2018 by telescoper

After a weekend in which I did very little apart from sleeping, eating and doing crosswords, it was time today to get my finger out and start organising for the coming months.

Top of the agenda was writing a letter of resignation from my position at Cardiff University, which I have now done. I’ll hand it in tomorrow. I’ve already told my colleagues there that I was planning to leave this summer, but it’s now time to make it official. After my notice period expires, I will be relocating full-time to Ireland in July.

One of the complications of the resignation process is that I am obliged to use up all my annual leave entitlement before I go. I haven’t taken much this year so I have to sort out how to take it before I go while also ensuring I am still available to carry out my remaining duties and attending meetings that require my presence (eg examiners meetings). I’ll also have to sort out my pension, arrange removal of my office things to Ireland and, finally, return my keys.

When I leave it will only be two years since I went through a similar process at Sussex. I burst into tears on my last day there. I hope I don’t embarrass everyone at Cardiff in a similar way.

My contract at Cardiff was for a fixed term of three years, on a part-time basis. I’ll be leaving a year early, but I think the record will show that I’ve done virtually everything I was brought in to do. In particular the Data Innovation Research Institute has expanded dramatically over the past couple of years and looks set for a bright future, as does the School of Physics & Astronomy in which I am employed for the other half of my time.

When I returned to Cardiff two years ago I had it in my mind to retire when my contract was up but I’m now very excited about the move to Ireland, an opportunity which I hadn’t foreseen at all!

Anyway there’s lots to do in the next few weeks, including my remaining teaching duties in Cardiff and Maynooth, so I’d better get back to it!

P. S. Incidentally, I discovered that one of the readings at Stephen Hawking’s funeral was the beautiful fatalistic passage from Ecclesiastes that begins

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die..

That may have influenced the title of this post…

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Peter Tatchell: Equality is not Enough

Posted in Cardiff, History, LGBTQ+, Politics with tags , on March 23, 2018 by telescoper

On the evening of Monday 12th February, during LGBT History Month, I went to a lecture by Peter Tatchell which was held in the Sir Martin Evans lecture theatre at Cardiff University. I was going to do a post about it but never found the time. Here’s a snap of the title slide I took at the time:

Today I noticed that a video of the lecture had been posted on Cardiff University’s youtube channel which reminded me to say something about it. I admire and respect Peter Tatchell’s integrity and determination, and the way he has stood up against homophobia for more than 50 years is inspirational. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I found myself agreeing with most of the content of this lecture, the main idea of which was that it is not enough for LGBT people to seek equality within a system that is so manifestly discriminatory against whole sectors of the population. The aim of of LGBT campaigners should be to transform society, not to be accommodate within it.

Anyway, here’s his lecture. Form your own opinions!

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Equinoctial Molehills

Posted in Biographical, Bute Park, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on March 20, 2018 by telescoper

Very busy today, what with a return to lecturing in Cardiff and so on, so I’ve just got time for a quick post to mark the fact that the Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere took place today, Tuesday 20th March 2018, at 16.15 UTC (which is 16.15 GMT). This means that the Sun has just crossed the celestial equator on its journey Northward. Some people regard this as the first day of spring, which is fair enough as it does correspond fairly well to the end of the Six Nations rugby.

It wasn’t exactly spring weather when I walked into work this morning, as there are still bits of snow around in Bute Park.

More significantly, a huge number of molehills have appeared. Not quite a mole of molehills, but still quite a few. I’m not sure of the reason for all this molar activity. Perhaps moles have special rituals for marking the Vernal Equinox?

Incidentally I was dismayed to see that my Royal Astronomical Society diary gives the time of the 2018 Vernal Equinox as 16.16 GMT while the wikipedia page I linked to above gives 16.15 GMT. I find a discrepancy of this magnitude extremely unnerving. Or am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

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