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A Memoir of Thomas Bewick

Posted in Art, Education, History, Politics with tags , , , on January 11, 2022 by telescoper

Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was a superb illustrator and natural historian who lived in the North East of England. He is celebrated primarily for his fine engravings and woodcuts of wild animals and birds, and humorous vignettes, some of which are quite cheeky, such as this one called “Man Pissing”…

Man Pissing (c.1797, wood engraving on laid paper, 8.9 x 12.5 cm)

You can find many other examples of his fine work here.

Bewick also held radical political views in a time of great social unrest across the continent of Europe. His views were heavily influenced by the terrible conditions of the rural poor in his native Northumberland and the corruption of the Government. In 1822 he began to write his Memoir, which is absolutely fascinating, not least because part of it is devoted to his views about the British Government and the media of the time. Two hundred years later, many of his words still ring true.

Here’s an excerpt from a section covering the period from about 1818 to 1823, a period of domestic instability in Britain that led to acts of protest and brutal suppression, including the Peterloo Massacre of 1819:

The pen of literature was prostituted to overshade the actions of good men, and to gloss-over the enormities of the base. The energies of many members of both Houses of Parliament were unavailing against this compact confederacy of undeserving placemen and pensioners, who were bound together by fellow feelings of self-interest, in which all ideas of public trust were lost in private considerations. They had sinned themselves out of all shame. This phalanx have kept their ground, and will do so till, it is to be feared, violence from an enraged people breaks them up, or, perhaps, till the growing opinions against such a crooked order of conducting the affairs of this great nation becomes quite apparent to an immense majority, whose frowns may have the power of bringing the agents of government to pause upon the brink of the precipice on which they stand, and to provide in time, by wise and honest measures, to avert the coming storm.

A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by himself, CHAPTER XVII.

Plus ça change…

P.S. Not far from where I grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne there is a school for children and young adults with autism called the Thomas Bewick School. His name is well known in the Newcastle area for that reason and his artistic legacy, but I’m not sure his memory is as widely celebrated as it should be. He was a fascinating character.

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Sneachta i Maigh Nuad

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on January 7, 2022 by telescoper

So the exam period is upon us and I’ve spent all day dealing with lots of last-minute issues to do with that. Switching examinations online has led to Departments having to do themselves lots of things that were previously done by the Exams Office. Needless to say this transfer of workload has not been accompanied by a transfer of resources. Grumble, grumble.

Snow!

Anyway I’ll just mention that, aside from the blizzard of emails and administrative tasks, today saw the first snow in Maynooth for 2022. I took the picture this morning after a light dusting. Then it snowed again, more heavily, only for that to turn to turn to rain that washed all the snow away.

Incidentally, this picture on the same day last year…

After a mild holiday season it’s been much colder recently, with a consequent increase in food consumption by the garden birds. I’ll have to replenish my supplies over the weekend. I do feel a bit sorry for the little critters in this weather, even the neighbourhood rook which is constantly trying to demolish my feeders.

Today the Irish Government has announced that Third Level institutions in Ireland will reopen on Monday without any changes in Covid-19 restrictions. We don’t actually start teaching until January 31st, for which I am grateful. I don’t even students or staff crowding into lecture theatres on Monday. Assuming, that is, that there aren’t huge numbers of absences…

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Staff Shortages

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on January 5, 2022 by telescoper

After two weeks of festive cooking for myself – something I was quite happy to do- this evening I thought I would mark Twelfth Night by getting a takeaway from my favourite local Thai restaurant. Sadly, however, this turned out to be impossible because they’re closed. The reason? Staff shortages caused by staff having to self-isolate due to Covid-19.

It’s not a big deal to have to make alternative arrangements for dinner, of course, but it got me thinking about all the other areas of life that are currently having the same problems. Many train services in and out of Dublin have been cancelled because of the lack of available train crew, for example. Ireland’s schools are supposed to reopen tomorrow after the Christmas break and it is likely that many teaching staff will be unavailable.

The timing of the academic term for staff Maynooth University is doing us some favours. On Friday 7th we start the examination period. Across the University, 95% of the assessments taking place are online. In my Department that is 100%, so neither students nor staff have to travel onto campus. Teaching does not start again until 31st January so we have over three weeks to see how the situation develops. Some other third-level institutions in Ireland had exams before Christmas so go straight back to teaching right now and I wonder how staff in those feelings are feeling about the prospect.

My biggest source of stress as Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics this academic year has been the fact that we have been short-staffed since the start of the year, half our teaching staff being temporary lecturers, and student numbers are well up on last year. If just one member of teaching staff were to become ill we would have serious difficulty covering the shortfall. Asymptomatic staff just having to self-isolate could teach online, of course, but someone who is ill can’t be expected to do that.

A specific worry I have for next Semester is the Computational Physics module I will be teaching. Last year we did this entirely online, which went satisfactorily; the subject lends itself fairly well to online teaching. This year however we are expected to be back in the lab. We have more than twice as many students in that class than we had last year so we’ll have to work out how to fit them safely into the relatively small teaching space we have available. We’ll certainly have to do two sessions per week but I may offer students the option of following along at home via Teams if they wish. I’ll decide that after the exams are over.

It is of course possible that the situation deteriorates very badly and we have to go fully online again. Possible, that is, but I think not likely. The Government seems determined not to countenance a return to remote working and probably won’t unless things get very much worse. As things stand, the omicron variant is running through the population like wildfire in terms of infections, but this has not led to ICU admissions or deaths on the same scale as last year.

All these issues are as nothing compared to the stress that must be felt right now by workers in the Health Services. After two years of exhausting work many health care workers are having to cover for staff absences in addition to dealing with an average of 20,000 new Covid-19 cases per day.

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Last Day Off Again

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on January 3, 2022 by telescoper

So I find myself almost at the end of the Christmas break as I did on the same day last year. Today being a Bank Holiday because New Year’s Day was on Saturday, tomorrow is officially my first day back at work. I don’t think I’ll be going back to my office on campus in the morning, though, as I think I can probably manage all the things I have to do from home. I haven’t looked in my mailbox since before Christmas so I imagine I’ll spend most of the day mucking that out.

Thanks to the state of the Covid-19 pandemic I will be working from home most of the time at least until Semester 2 teaching starts. Here is the situation, with cases clearly out of control, but no sign yet of an increase in mortality. We’ll see what happens when the weekly death figures are released on Wednesday.

No doubt as we get back to work there will be detailed instructions on what we can and can’t do. Semester Two of teaching in Maynooth doesn’t start for another 4 weeks so we have a bit of time to see how things progress before deciding what will happen. I expect various edicts will be issued from on high in the next few days.

I have been virtually incommunicado so am not sure how everyone else in the Department has been. I do hope nobody has fallen ill.

The January examination period starts on Friday (7th January) and ends two weeks later (Saturday 22nd January) so getting through that and getting the examinations marked is going to be the first priority. Yet again all these examinations will be in the form of online assessments. We have done this sort of examination before, which makes it a bit easier than last year, but they still cause a lot of stress for staff and students alike. I will have over a hundred scripts to mark and will have to do all of them on screen. I’m not looking forward to that at all, but it has to be done. My first exam is on Saturday afternoon (8th January) but there’s a gap of 10 days until the second one so hopefully I can get the first marked before the second is due.

I was tempted at this point to make a list of all the things I have to do tomorrow, but that would be breaking my resolution to take a complete break so I will leave that until the morning. I have done a few bits and pieces for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, though, as we embark on Vol. 5 (2022).

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Not My New Year’s Resolutions Again

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education on January 1, 2022 by telescoper

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

from Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.

Two years ago, in January 2020, I shared a list of things I planned to do in the (then) New Year. Here they are again for completeness.

  1. Go to more live concerts. Although I enjoy the radio and recordings, I far prefer to listen to live music at concerts. Attending such events helps also support the venues and musicians as without an audience both would die. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t heard any live jazz in Ireland!
  2. See more of Ireland. I moved to Maynooth two years ago but, apart from one visit to Galway and one to Armagh, I still haven’t travelled much beyond the Dublin area. I must get around more, especially to the South.
  3. No more working weekends. I’ve been in the office for at least one day every weekend since I started at Maynooth. I did the same when I was at Sussex too, and seem to have relapsed. I have always had problems managing my own work/life balance but I realize it’s not setting a good example to younger folk to be getting it so obviously wrong. I’ll add not reading work emails at weekends to this.
  4. Be a better colleague. This is something I think one should always strive to be, but I have particular need to improve. I know that over the last four years or so things weighed very heavily on me behind the scenes and I ended up letting people down on too many occasions. I apologize for that and will try to do better in future.
  5. Read more books. I used to be a voracious reader of all kinds of books, both fiction and non-fiction, but I somehow got out of the habit. I now have a stack of unread works that I must try to read before the year is out!
  6. Finish more things! Not unrelated to No. 4 above, I have been very poor over the last few years at completing projects and writing papers. I need to clear the backlog and get on with some new things.
  7. Do more to promote Open Access publishing. I’m not surprised that the status quo in academic publishing is proving hard to dislodge, but I believe that change can be achieved if researchers take the initiative. I’m proud of what we have achieved so far at the Open Journal of Astrophysics but there’s much more to be done.

I achieved very few of these in 2020 or 2021. The pandemic made the first two impossible. Number 3 changed when we had to start working from home, which made it difficult to get away from work at all but since I moved into my house in August 2020 I at least have a study on which I can close the door. I haven’t improved much on the 4th one either, although the reasons for the past two years are different. Likewise with 5 and 6. I have done as much as I possibly can on 7 but there is a lot to do.

It is true however that I haven’t coped with the stress and isolation of being a Head of Department during the Covid-19 era as well as I should. I don’t know whether it is the high levels of anxiety that have sapped my energy or whether I’m just feeling the effects of age.

Anyway, there’s no improvement in sight in terms of workload so I suppose I’ll just cut and paste this old set of non-resolutions into this year and hope that 2020 v3 turns out better than the first two! More immediately I think I will take the opportunity to do a thorough clean-up of the house before the examinations start (a week today).

Finally, today Irish becomes an official language of the European Union so let me take the opportunity to say athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh!

P.S. I note with disappointment that once again I have been denied the opportunity to turn down an award in the New Year’s “Honours”.

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End of Term Blog

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on December 18, 2021 by telescoper

Yesterday was the last day of teaching at Maynooth University for 2021 and, although I didn’t have any teaching to do, I walked to the Department partly to get a bit of fresh air having been stuck at home on Thursday after my booster jab, and partly to collect a few things before the break. I also discovered that a lovely parcel of goodies had been sent to me and I was anxious to collect the items before Christmas.

I’ll be keeping myself to myself over the break, apart from the odd trip to the shops, and am glad to be doing so. We are yet to see the steep increase in Covid-19 cases associated with the omicron variant happening in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. If anything case numbers are currently declining slowly. But the new wave will undoubtedly hit Ireland soon.

UPDATE: not half an hour after I posted this, the HSE announced 7333 new cases of Covid-19 in Ireland, more than double yesterday’s figure and the highest number seen since early January. And this is before the Christmas surge.

The jury is still out on whether omicron is more or less dangerous than previous variants but it is clearly more transmissible, and I don’t see the point of taking chances, so I agree with the Irish Government on the need to take precautions. I don’t think the latest restrictions go anywhere near far enough though.

Yesterday we received at work an email from University management that said, among other things, that

At present the aim is to resume teaching on 31 January, as in Semester 1.

The phrase “as in Semester 1” means that large lectures will be online-only but everything else will be face-to-face. That is a reasonable starting point because the extent of the omicron wave is as yet unknown, but I think it’s more likely than not that in the end we’ll find ourselves doing everything online. I just hope a decision on that is made in reasonable time for us to put Plan B into action. We don’t start lectures again until January 31st and there should be enough data by then to make an informed decision.

I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic but I don’t see any sign that we are anywhere near the end of this pandemic. With a bit of luck we might find that we’re roughly halfway through, but as long as governments allow large pools of virus to circulate, mutations will continue to occur and new variants will continue to emerge. To end this cycle will require a majority of the world’s population to be vaccinated, and I don’t see that happening soon.

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Some Tips on Answering Physics Exam Questions

Posted in Education, YouTube on December 14, 2021 by telescoper

Since I’m currently doing revision classes because the examination period here at Maynooth University begins shortly after Christmas, and some of our students haven’t done examinations for a while because of Covid-19 restrictions, I thought I would use my YouTube channel (which has several subscribers) to present a video version I made last spring of a post I did a few years ago about how to solve Physics problems. These are intended for the type of problems students might encounter at high school or undergraduate level in examinations or indeed in homework. I’ve tried to keep the advice as general as possible though so hopefully students in other fields might find this useful too.

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Last Week Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on December 12, 2021 by telescoper

We’re approaching the end of term here at Maynooth University; the forthcoming week is the last week of teaching, after which we have the luxury of a full week without lectures or tutorials before Christmas itself. Apart from eating and drinking I think I’ll spend most of the holiday sleeping. The first official duty I will have in the new year is on Saturday 8th January when one of my online examinations is due to take place. After that it will be all marking papers and after that it will be preparing teaching for Semester 2…

At this start of this academic year I was quite confident that Semester 2 would find us more-or-less back to normal but that now seems very unlikely. I think that we’re going to be starting Semester 2 at the end of January 2022 exactly the same way that we started Semester 2 in January 2021, i.e. with everything fully online.

As of today, the recent rapid growth in Covid-19 infections seems to have slowed (and cases have been decreasing for a few days) but a Christmas surge seems inevitable and with many people having low protection against the omicron variant and very high case numbers even before the festive period, the period from January to March may be very difficult indeed. I stand to be proved wrong, though, and the trajectory of the pandemic is highly uncertain. We’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out. Fingers crossed.

I have explained before on this blog that I am going to be working from home next week, delivering my last lectures from my study and via recordings. I have better facilities for doing online lectures at home, because the University has failed to invest in decent recording equipment in its lecture theatres.

In any case I only have one full lecture to give in my first-year module (due tomorrow); the other two will be revision classes. I have finished the lectures for my second-year module so was just planning to do a revision class in the Tuesday slot. I did have some other (virtual) meetings in my calendar for next week but most of these have all been cancelled for one reason or another.

The one remaining task is to get all the online exams ready to go in January. We haven’t got the special Moodle spaces set up yet, but I imagine that will happen sometime next week.

By the way, when I responded to the close contact alert I received on Friday I was told I’d be sent an antigen test kit from the HSE. I haven’t got it yet but I suppose it may arrive next week. I still don’t have any symptoms though, and am effectively self-isolating anyway, so I’m not concerned. I just hope I get my booster on Wednesday without having to queue for too long…

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A Date for a Boost!

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education with tags , , , , on December 9, 2021 by telescoper

After expressing concern about the prospects of getting a timely booster jab last night I received an SMS message offering me an appointment next Wednesday for a shot. The text was sent on 8th December, six months to the day since my second jab (8th June). I will once again have to travel to City West in order to receive it, so will have take some time off work but that’s a small price to pay.

I had inferred (incorrectly) that it would take much longer to get a date for booster because most of the people I know in their sixties haven’t had theirs yet and they are higher priority than me. I now realise that may be because they had the AstraZeneca vaccine, which had a longer interval between first and second doses than the 4 weeks for the Pfizer vaccine I had, so had a later second dose than mine.

My third vaccine dose will be of the Moderna vaccine; the previous two were Pfizer/BioNTech. It seems everyone who is getting a shot this month will be getting the Moderna version as Ireland has a large stock of this vaccine due to expire next month. Although its efficacy against the omicron variant is unknown, I will of course attend the appointment.

Yesterday, before I received the text message announcing my booster shot, I emailed the students in my classes to say the remaining lectures of the term will be online-only because of the high levels of Covid-19 in circulation and my waning immunity. Next week’s booster doesn’t change that as next week is the last week of teaching. My plan is to do the lectures live as webcasts and make the recordings available afterwards, which is how I’ve done them the entire term, except I’ll be doing them from home with no in-person audience. Apart, that is, from next Wednesday, when I’ll only be able to offer a pre-recorded lecture as I’ll be at City West when the lecture is scheduled. That will be my last lecture of the Semester, as most of my teaching is concentrated in the early part of the week.

Owing to a combination of Covid-19, Storm Barra and no doubt sheer exhaustion, student attendance at lectures and tutorials on campus has fallen sharply, though attendance at my second-year class has remained quite high. On Tuesday the campus was virtually deserted but about 70% of my class for Vector Calculus & Fourier Series were there. Somehiw, though, I don’t think they’ll mind too much watching the remaining couple of lectures from the comfort of their homes!

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Exams in the Time of Covid

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on December 5, 2021 by telescoper

Not an online examination

With two weeks of teaching to go before the Christmas break in Maynooth we now have a settled plan for our January examinations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. We have decided that all our examinations will be done online, as we have done for all cycles of examinations since May 2020.

It seems that most other third-level education institutions – certainly the “traditional” universities have their examinations in December. At NUI Galway, for example, the examination session starts tomorrow (Monday 6th December) and their examinations will be on campus, despite the objections of the Students’ Union. This is also the case at Trinity College and University College Dublin, though University College Cork is doing most of its December exams online.

Our original plan at Maynooth was to have examinations on campus in January and some students were unhappy at the decision to revert to online examinations. The representations I heard from students in the Department of Theoretical Physics all gave the same reason: that online examinations are more difficult than on-campus examinations. I think this is the opposite of what students in other disciplines might think, but our online assessments focus to a greater extent on problem-solving tasks than the on-campus examinations, which means they are more difficult to do by rote learning and regurgitation.

An open-book exam is obviously easier if it simply requires students to look things up in their notes, textbooks or the web. Such an assessment would not only be easier, but also in my view absolutely pointless. Indeed, any exam, whether online or not, that requires students to use their brains only as memory devices is basically worthless. So our approach is to concentrate on the application of principles learned rather than bookwork.

Anyway, back to the on-campus versus on-line issue. I think campus exam venues, if arranged sufficiently carefully, need not be in themselves be places of high risk for Covid-19 risk, but large numbers of students will have to travel to and from them at the same time, largely on public transport, and there will also be a significant amount of milling around before and after. Large lectures (in the case of Maynooth this means over 250) are being delivered online at all Irish universities and exam halls will frequently have to hold greater numbers than that. It therefore seems to me rather inconsistent to insist on having large exams in person.

Finally, I’ll just note that all my colleagues (lecturers and tutors) are reporting a drop-off in student attendance at lectures and tutorials.  Last Friday the campus was extremely quiet, and I had only about half the expected class in my Vector Calculus lecture. This happens a bit in a “normal” year towards the end of term but is more marked this time round. I’m not surprised at it. With around 5000 new Covid cases per day I think many students are anxious not about lectures but about travelling on public transport and having to wait about on campus outside in the cold. I have been recording all my lectures this term and I don’t mind if students choose to view them remotely. Although we’re still officially teaching on campus, in practice many students are doing their learning online.

 

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