This afternoon, for the first time in a while, I encountered Maynooth University Library Cat at his customary position. Unfortunately he didn’t seem favourably disposed and when I tried to take his picture he turned his back on me. Luckily I was with a colleague who was strategically positioned to take the snap above.
I’ve been at home marking examinations almost all day and have decided to knock off until tomorrow when hopefully I can finish the job. I say almost all day because I took a break this afternoon to back to campus to collect some papers that I didn’t get yesterday because they were from students sitting the examination for various reasons in alternative venues on campus rather than the main examination room.
What I do with examination scripts is mark one question at a time rather than one script at a time. What I mean by that is that I go through every script marking all the attempts at Question 1, then I start again and do all the Questions 2, etc. I find that this is much quicker and more efficient than marking all the questions in each script then moving onto the next script. The reason for this is that I can upload into my mind the model answer for Question 1 so that it stays there while I mark dozens of attempts at it so I don’t have to keep referring to the marking scheme. Other advantages are that it’s easier to be consistent in giving partial credit when you’re doing the same question over and over again, and that also you spot what the common mistakes are more easily.
It’s a fairly monotonous job and I find my concentration starts to wander if I try to do too many in one go. Fortunately the exam papers are organized in batches (separated by elastic bands as in the photograph) so I usuallly take a break – as a sort of self-reward- after each batch to break things up. Each batch usually takes a couple of hours or so, so the breaks often end up as times to have lunch and tea. In terms of the timing it’s rather like a game of cricket, actually.
Today I corrected Question 1 in two batches before lunch, then another between lunch and tea. At that point I took a walk into town to do a few errands and then collected the remaining scripts from campus, which I have now just finished correcting. Some people will accuse me of being lazy, taking breaks like this, but I think it’s more efficient to do it this way. Trying to mark examinations for hours on end inevitably leads to more errors, so in the long run it takes longer to complete the job. Slow and steady does it.
I remember using a similar approach when I wrote my thesis many years ago. That’s a much bigger job, of course, but I found what worked for me was to plan out each chapter in terms of sections of roughly equal length, write each in turn and take a break when I’d finished it. Writing a thesis of around 200 pages may seem a daunting task, but if you split it into 1000-word chunks spread over three months or so it’s quite manageable – and you can plan to take time out for relaxtion along the way to avoid getting too burned out by the process.
Anyway, I’ve now finished all the attempts at Question 1 in this examination, including those in the extra scripts I picked up today. Question 1 consists of a set of short problems and is altogether worth 50% of the examination mark, so I’m actually abouty halfway through the marking. There three questions left, each longer than the pieces of Question 1 and worth 25% of the overall mark. Students are supposed to answer two. I’ll start on Question 2 in the morning and hopefully by this time tomorrow evening I will have marked all three, and that will be that. Until the next one…
Lecturers at Maynooth University are supposed to be available on the telephone to deal with queries from students concerning their examinations. This morning I was “on call” for the first time in 2025 and indeed the first time since 2023. Since I live in Maynooth I decided to come into campus in case of a query so I could go to the examination hall to deal with it if required. In the event, however, the examination passed off without incident and nobody called.
I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all morning though. It seemed a good opportunity to go through the accumulated coursework for this module applying various exemptions for medical or other reasons so that when I’ve marked the scripts I can immediately combine the results with the CA component.
So here I am again, with a stack of an examination scripts to mark. The picture shows about 50 papers, part of the collection from my module on Differential Equations and Transform Methods. I want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February. I plan to spend the next couple of days correcting these, adding up the marks, combining those with the coursework, and preparing everything for upload to the system. I want to get this task out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February.
The January examination period starts tomorrow (10th January), so I thought I’d do a quick post on the topic of examinations. First of all let me wish the very best of luck everyone at Maynooth or elsewhere taking examinations in the next few weeks. I hope at least that the exam halls are nice and warm!
As the first examination for which I have responsibility is not until Monday 13th – unlucky for some! – I’ll have to wait to find out how any of my students have done but let me take this opportunity to pass on a few quick tips.
Readers of this blog are welcome to add other tips through the comments box below!
Snow-happy hicks of a boy’s world –
O crunch of bull’s-eyes in the mouth,
O crunch of frost beneath the foot –
If time would only remain furled
In white, and thaw were not for certain
And snow would but stay put, stay put!
When the pillar-box wore a white bonnet –
O harmony of roof and hedge,
O parity of sight and thought –
And each flake had your number on it
And lives were round for not a number
But equalled nought, but equalled nought!
But now the sphinx must change her shape –
O track that reappears through slush,
O broken riddle, burst grenade –
And lives must be pulled out like tape
To measure something not themselves,
Things not given but made, but made.
For now the time of gifts is gone –
O boys that grow, O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill –
Here is dull earth to build upon
Undecorated; we have reached
Twelfth Night or what you will … you will.
by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
From Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.
January is named after the Roman deity Janus, who according to Wikipedia, is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Since I did a retrospective post yesterday about 2024 in retrospect, I thought I’d do a quick one today (1st January 2025) to mention a few things looking forward.
January will, as usual, be dominated by examinations, and especially the marking thereof. The first examination for which I am responsible is on January 13th.
February sees the start of a new semester. I’ll be teaching Particle Physics for the first time at Maynooth. I taught this subject for many years at Nottingham and Cardiff (the latter combined with Nuclear Physics), so it should be OK. My other module is Computational Physics which I have taught at Maynooth every year since 2018, apart from 2024 when I was on sabbatical.
The big event in March will be the release of “Q1” data from Euclid. This is only a very small part of the full survey, but is an important milestone and will no doubt attract a lot of press coverage. There’s a blog post by Knud Jahnke here. No doubt I’ll do a few blog posts too. The first full data release DR1 will take place in 2026. The Q1 release is timed to coincide with the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, which this year takes place in Leiden. I won’t be able to attend in person, as it happens during teaching term, but may be able to follow some of the sessions remotely.
In April we will have a very special visitor to Maynooth to deliver the Dean’s Lecture (of which more anon). Much less significantly, I’ll be giving a Colloquium in the Department of Physics.
May will largely be taken up with second semester exams and assessments – there will be a lot of computational physics projects to correct as well as the usual examinations.
The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society takes place in Cork in June. I’ve been to Cork before, but am looking forward to going again.
And then it will be summer. I did a lot of travelling during my sabbatical so I am not planning to travel much in 2025, though I may try to visit some more places in Ireland. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with some research too. This year I am supervising my first MSc project at Maynooth, so that will be an interesting new experience.
And then we’re more-or-less into the next academic year 25/26. That’s beyond my planning horizon. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching, but it may be the same as 2024 (at least for Semester 1). I wonder if I’ll get to teach any astrophysics or cosmology here before I retire? It doesn’t look likely…
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.
T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets.
I wasn’t really planning on posting a retrospective of the year 2024, but the rain is pouring down outside so I’ve decided to use up a bit of time before going out in the hope that the rain stops.
The past year has been very busy with significant life events. One particular highlight has to be a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sydney in February. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to visit Australia again, but if I do I’ll take it! Shortly after returning from that trip I went back to Barcelona until the summer, leaving briefly for visits to Rome (Euclid Consortium Meeting), Valencia (Department Colloquium), Newcastle (to do a PhD examination) and Oxford (to give the inaugural Pride talk at the Department of Physics).
Unfortunately, at that point my laptop gave up the ghost so I had to come back to Maynooth a little earlier than planned to salvage what was on it and get a new one. And so ended my sabbatical. I’d like to take the opportunity again to thank everyone at the Universities of Barcelona and Sydney for making me feel so welcome and, of course, to Maynooth for granting me a full-year sabbatical in the first place.
As well as giving me some time for my own research, the year saw significant progress with the Open Journal of Astrophysics, both in terms of numbers of papers published (120 in 2024) but also some much-needed work on automation and an increase in the size of the Editorial Board. It’s hard to predict what will happen in 2025, but I’m glad that a significant number of members of the astrophysics community seem to be regarding OJAp as a viable avenue for communicating their results.
I will also mention – for those that care – that the Open Journal of Astrophysics is now listed in Scopus, but all the numbers they have published about the journal are inaccurate. I have spent months trying to get them to correct the figures but, although they have admitted errors, they have failed to do so. My next step will be to take legal action against Scopus (which is based in The Netherlands) under the Dutch Civil Code.
The big event workwise at Maynooth was the merger of the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics into a single Department of Physics. So far this has been largely paper exercise. What will result from it in the long term remains to be seen. I was given two new modules to teach last Semester and have another new one next Semester (as well as one I’ve done before). Although this made for a heavy workload, it wasn’t as bad as what happened after the only other sabbatical I’ve had in my career. I got a one Semester sabbatical when I was at Nottingham, but the Department simply moved my first-semester teaching to the second semester in addition to what had already been allocated for the second, so I had a double teaching load when I got back!
There has been a significant change in my personal circumstances too. During 2024 I finally completed the sale of my former home in Pontcanna, Cardiff. I had intended to do this years ago, but the pandemic and subsequent workload issues made it difficult to travel and sort this matter out. In the meantime bought my house in Maynooth with a mortage so I owned two properties, one of which was empty for much of the time. After much stopping and starting, and being badly let down by more than one prospective buyer, the Cardiff house is now sold. I now feel much less delocalised. I also felt very rich when the proceeds hit my bank account, but only briefly. I used a big chunk to pay off my mortgage and put the rest into fixed-term investments for retirement.
Anyway, writing about Sydney reminded me that there are parts of the world in which it is 2025 already, so let me end with a “Happy New Year” and a few interesting numerological facts about the number 2025:
P.S. It’s still raining.
P.P.S. Athbhliain faoi shéan agus faoi mhaise daoibh!
This morning I saw an announcement (dated 19th December 2024) that the Université Paris-Saclay has, to its credit, ceased its activity on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and now known as Elon Musk’s personal mouthpiece. I have written about why individuals and institutions should leave Twitter several times before, e.g. here.
According to the Saclay announcement:
It comes following changes to the platform’s content policy, which is no longer in compliance with the European Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, making the platform incompatible with the universal values that the university and its community share.
Bravo!
But why are so many other universities still supporting Twitter/X? I suppose it may be because many of them have specifically employed staff to broadcast news about themselves on this platform and without it they’d have nothing to do. That’s not a very good argument, in my opinion. I’m sure other bullshit jobs can be found. Another possibility, of course, is that they just don’t care. Given the prevalence of toxic management in higher education these days, this may well be the real reason. Whatever the motivation I find it deeply shaming to be working for an institution that is still happy to tout for trade in a neo-Nazi chatroom.
I very much doubt my own institution’s management will take the correct ethical course. The Maynooth University leadership doesn’t even follow the institution’s own Statutes, so I doubt that a mere EU Code of Conduct will have any influence on them. I do hope, however, the decision by the mega-University Saclay – one of the world’s top research institutions may influence others to do the right thing. As well all known, University “leadership” these days largely involves copying what others do.
It’s not only universities, and not only via Xitter, that institutions are being degraded by their association with Elon Musk. The venerable Royal Society still counts him as a Fellow, despite his overtly antiscientific dissemination of false information and his support for far-right extremism. I don’t know how Musk was elected an FRS in 2018, perhaps before the worst of his character became widely known, but the fact that he remains a Fellow tarnishes the reputation of that organization.
P.S. I had the opportunity to visit Saclay about 13 months ago.
I noticed on tonight’s TV schedule that there’s a live broadcast on RTÉ One of Midnight Mass from St Mary’s Church, Maynooth.
Unfortunately, it clashes with another Christmas tradition, Die Hard, on TG4.
Since Christmas is approaching rapidly, I thought I’d share this video of the first ever public performance of Christmas setting for Chamber Choir, Gallery Schola and Organ from Dr Ryan Molloy, based on a newly-composed text by Maynooth University Professor of Old Irish, David Stifter. It was recorded in the impressive chapel of St Patrick’s Pontifical University during the annual carol service at Maynooth which took place this year on 17th December. The Irish title Rétglu etir rind means “a star among constellations”.
In the Dark 