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Writing, Publishing and Blogging

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on June 8, 2022 by telescoper

This morning I saw this bit of guidance about writing a blog produced by a colleague from Maynooth:

I’m not sure how well I’ve followed this guidance over the last 14 years or so but was struck by the assertion that “a blogpost is a publication”. It reminded me of a webinar I did a while ago about Open Access publication which led to a discussion of whether or not a preprint is a publication. Taking the definition of “publish” to be “to issue to the public”, I think it is. In the digital era methods of publication are much simpler and more diverse than in the days when everything was circulated on paper and although I haven’t thought much about it before, I agree on this basis that a blog post is indeed a publication.

That means I have 5942 publications! Or actually 5943 after I’ve published this one. Not counting a couple of hundred “proper” ones, of course…

Anyway I have never really seen a good reason why this blog should be entirely about my professional life. It is true that the most popular posts have proved to be about my research interests but people seem to read the other stuff too so I see no reason to be restrictive.

A dozen years ago I wrote a post about how and why I started blogging, and what follows is an edited version of that.

Lots of people have asked me over the years why I have a blog and why I apparently spend so much time writing it. Well, for me, there are two answers. The first is just that I enjoy writing. I think because of that I’ve always been able to write stuff fairly quickly and developed a little bit of a knack for it. I also sometimes find it easiest to figure out what I actually think about something by trying to write about it. Publishing a post written for this reason is almost irrelevant and there have been a few occasions when I’ve regretted posting items in which I’ve been “thinking out loud” in this way. Sometimes it’s good to remember that people may actually read what you write…

When I started blogging I realized that it gave me the chance to write about things quite different from the usual themes I had previously tackled in publications. I’d written scientific papers, textbooks, lecture notes, popular books and newspaper articles before but most had  been quite strictly controlled by editors and were always related to my scientific work.

It was only after I’d been blogging quite a while that I started doing music and poetry items, entirely for my own amusement, like keeping a scrapbook, but if people actually enjoy things that I’ve put up that they’d never seen before then all the better. I know a lot of people think I’m a pretentious twat for posting about poetry or Opera or modern jazz – some have said as much to my face, in fact – but that’s what I like. There’s enough blogs about pop music, TV celebrities and computer games already, not that I’d be able to write about them. I’m flattered too by the fact that some of my music and other posts have been linked to Wikipedia articles – and, no, I didn’t put them there!

The other reason I had for starting to blog is much more personal. I moved job from Nottingham to Cardiff in 2007, but I got caught up in the credit crunch and was unable to sell my old house for quite a while. I spent far too much time commuting from Nottingham to Cardiff and back for the weekends and got thoroughly depressed, a state of mind not helped by some other issues which I won’t go into. In the middle of this my father died. Though not entirely unexpected, I did have to take some time out to deal with it. He hadn’t left a will, and I had to sort out the legal side of things as well as dispose of his belongings and arrange the funeral. In the aftermath of all that I had pangs of nostalgia for my childhood in Newcastle and an urge to connect with all that through writing down some thoughts and memories. Many of my early posts on here were quite morbidly introspective and probably not much fun for anyone to read, but I found writing them quite cathartic, as indeed I’ve found other posts for different reasons.

Anyway, knowing my tendency to write bits and bobs and then forget about them, quite a few people had encouraged me to start writing a blog but I hadn’t done it because I didn’t know how to go about setting one up. Fortunately, after a public talk I’d given, Phil Brown of the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave me a few pointers to getting started writing a blog. After finally managing to sell off the Nottingham house and after relocating fully to Cardiff, I started blogging in 2008.

So there you are.  That’s some of why and most of how I came to start writing this blog. I wish I could say I had a mission to change the world, but it’s really just partly a big exercise in self-indulgence and partly a piece of occupational therapy.

I would add two things in my defence. One is that I think that among all the other stuff, I do a bit of public service on here. Any bits of news about funding, exciting or controversial science results and things I think my colleagues might find interesting tend to go on here and I do think that’s a useful thing to do. People in my own Department sometimes find things first from reading here, which I think adds a healthy bit of transparency to the otherwise closed world of academic life. The other thing to say is that, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t actually spend a huge amount of time writing the blog. Much of it is recycled and the rest thrown together quite quickly. I know it’s rubbish, but at least its fast…

Some time ago I came across the idea of a “commonplace book“. To paraphrase Wikipedia

Such books came into use in the middle ages and were essentially scrapbooks, filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as aids for remembering or developing useful concepts ideas or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.

Dare I say, just like a blog?

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Exploitation and Surplus Value in Academia

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , on June 7, 2022 by telescoper

After two years of Covid-19 pandemic requiring academic staff to undertake countless hours of unpaid overtime, I’m sure all my colleagues at Maynooth University, especially those whose workloads went through the roof during this time, will be as delighted as I am to learn that the University made a surplus of €13.2 million last year.

I’m reminded of a post I did a while ago about why academic publishing is so profitable. The argument I presented based on Marx’s theory of exploitation which holds not only for capitalist societies but for all class-based societies (including, e.g., feudal societies). In Das Kapital Marx argued that

…living labour at an adequate level of productivity is able to create and conserve more value than it costs the employer to buy; which is exactly the economic reason why the employer buys it, i.e. to preserve and augment the value of the capital at his command. Thus, the surplus-labour is unpaid labour appropriated by employers in the form of work-time and outputs.

The current situation certainly seems like exploitation to me, though it’s not only the staff but also the students who are being taken for a ride.

In a couple of weeks I am supposed to spend yet another Saturday (unpaid) delivering an open-day talk at which I attempt to persuade students to come to Maynooth to study Theoretical Physics. I probably won’t mention that we haven’t got enough staff to teach them effectively, we haven’t had sufficient investment to offer decent levels of teaching infrastructure (e.g. no lecture capture facilities), and they probably won’t be able to find anywhere to live near campus so won’t be able to attend lectures without lengthy commutes. I don’t suppose prospective students care about those things anyway. But I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear about the size of the University’s surplus….

…I bet that will make them feel really good about coming to Maynooth!

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Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh

Posted in Biographical, Irish Language, Maynooth on June 6, 2022 by telescoper

Today has been (and indeed continues to be) the June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland. It is the equivalent of the usual May Bank Holiday in the UK in that both have their origin in the old festival of Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) which falls on the 7th Sunday after Easter. Because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. Here in Ireland the Bank Holiday is always on the first Monday in June whereas on the other side of the Irish Sea it is on the last Monday in May (except for this year when it was moved at the behest of some old Queen).

Although I’m only at beginners’ level in Irish, the phrase Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh gives me a chance to bore you about it. It’s actually quite a straightforward phrase until you reach the last word: “Lá” means “day” and “Saoire” means “leave” or “vacation” so “Lá Saoire” means “holiday”; “i” is a prepositional pronoun meaning “in” and “mí” means “month”. So far so good.

The word for June however is Meitheamh (at least when it is in the nominative singular case). As an Indo-European language, Irish is distantly related to Latin which has six grammatical cases for nouns (actually seven if you count the rarely used locative case). Irish has only four cases – there’s no ablative and, curiously, no real distinction between nominative and accusative (though there is for some pronouns). That leaves nominative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The dative case– used after simple prepositions – is only rarely distinct from the nominative so basically the ones you have to learn are the genitive and the vocative.

Whereas in Latin cases are indicated by changes to the end of noun, in Irish they involve initial mutations. In the example of “mí Mheitheamh” meaning “month of June”, requiring the genitive form of “June”, the initial consonant “M” undergoes lenition (softening) to sound more like a “v”. In old Irish texts this would be indicated by a dot over the M but in modern orthography it is indicated by writing an “h” after the consonant. This is called a séimhiú (pronounced “shay-voo” ). Note the softened m in the middle of that word too but it’s not a mutation – it’s just part of the regular spelling of the word, as is the -mh at the end of Meitheamh. There’s also a softened “t” in the middle of Meitheamh which makes it vrtually disappear in pronunciation. Meitheamh is thus pronounced something like “Meh-hiv” whereas “Mheitheamh” is something like “Veh-hiv”.

Anyway, here’s a picture of Maynooth University Library Cat.

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On Board for Examinations

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on June 2, 2022 by telescoper

We’ve at last managed to finish marking and collating examination scripts, coursework and project reports of various types and the provisional results are all uploaded to the system. I have to say that marking examinations on paper is much less of a chore than doing digital submissions online, though it is still not exactly a simple task and I’m glad it’s over for another year.

Tomorrow morning we’ll have a relatively informal “Pre-Board” meeting to go double-check the results and discuss any isues arising before the full Departmental Examination Board which takes place next week. That’s just for the Department of Theoretical Physics but we also do teaching for the Department of Engineering and there are Pre-Boards and Full Boards for those too.

In between now and the Full Boards we have a Bank Holiday weekend. Not the extravaganza going on over the Irish Sea concerning the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, just the regular Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh we have every year. In any case, there’s more than one old Queen having a celebration this weekend. A nice thing about living in Ireland is that my birthday is always in close proximity to a national holiday.

But I digress.

The Departmental Examination Boards do not quite mark the end of the examinations business for the academic year, as we have the Final Final Examination Board after all the Departmental ones.  That is when marks from all Departments come together to determine the final results for students who are taking degrees in combinations of subjects. The Department of Theoretical Physics has quite a number of students doing Joint Honours with Mathematics, for example, and we don’t won’t know their final results until we see how their Mathematics has gone. It does add an extra level to the process, but I think that’s a price worth paying for the flexibility we offer to students through joint programmes.

This final Examination Board takes place on 22nd June and students will get their marks a couple of days later on 24th June. We have an official Consultation Day (28th June) the following week during which students can get feedback on their examinations as well as discussing options for choices to be made ahead of next year. Even that won’t be the end, because some students will be taking repeat examinations in August, but at least it signals a gap in the assessment cycle during which we can hopefully think of other things for a while.

This year has been challenging, to say the least. There was a piece in the Irish Times recently discussing concerns about lack of student engagement, poor lecture attendance and high dropout rates for students in Irish universities. I discussed some of the reasons for this here. Obviously, until our results are finalized I can’t say anything specific about the impact of all these difficulties on our students, but the post-Covid turmoil undoubtedly has had a significant impact on many students and a severe impact on some. It remains to be seen precisely what the scale of the problem is and what we can do to mitigate it.

The general turbulence in the wake of the pandemic, which is unavoidable, has been exacerbated in my Department by serious staffing issues resulting from deliberate management decisions. This combination has created a perfect storm which in my view could easily have been avoided. I shall refrain from commenting further, except to say that it will take some time to sort out and we’ll probably have similar – though hopefully less severe – issues next year.

One of the difficulties faced by students this summer is that they would not have done traditional written examinations for two years before this May’s set. The online timed assessments we deployed during the pandemic were of “open-book” style but the unseen written papers on campus are not. The challenge posed by these two types of examination are different, and it remains to be seen how well the students – especially those in Years 1 and 2 – have coped with the abrupt switch. Those who get disappointing results will have the opportunity to take repeat examinations (on campus) and those who disengaged entirely will have the chance to repeat the year in full if they so desire, so all is not lost!

Another sign of our gradual emergence from the pandemic is that our Examination Board meeting next week will be attended in person by the External Examiner. She wasn’t able to get here last year owing to  illness so it will be nice to have her present at the Exam Boards and, hopefully, at dinner afterwards.

 

 

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Professorial Position in Observational Astrophysics or Cosmology at Maynooth!

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on May 30, 2022 by telescoper

With about a month to go to the deadline, I thought I would take the opportunity to remind readers that Maynooth University has a Chair (i.e. Full Professor) position in Astrophysics or Cosmology under the Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative (SALI). I blogged about this scheme here and announced this Chair position originally here.

You can find the full announcement of the competition for all the SALI positions here; you can apply for the position at Maynooth here. The position is now also advertised on the AAS Jobs Register here.

The deadline for applications is in July 2022, and the provisional start date is January 2023 (although this is flexible). As well as a good salary (starting at €124,683 at current rates, rising by annual increments to €157,611) the position comes with membership of the Irish public service pension scheme, a defined benefit scheme (comparable to the older version of the UK’s USS which has now been scrapped).

The key rationale for these SALI positions is clear from the statement from Simon Harris, the Minister responsible for Third Level education in Ireland:

“Championing equality and diversity is one of the key goals of my department. The Senior Academic Leadership Initiative (SALI) is an important initiative aimed at advancing gender equality and the representation of women at the highest levels in our higher education institutions.

We have a particular problem with gender balance among the staff in Physics in Maynooth, especially in Theoretical Physics where all the permanent staff are male, and the lack of role models has a clear effect on our ability to encourage more female students to study with us.

The wider strategic case for this Chair revolves around broader developments in the area of astrophysics and cosmology at Maynooth. Currently there are two groups active in research in these areas, one in the Department of Experimental Physics (which is largely focussed on astronomical instrumentation) and the other, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, which is theoretical and computational. We want to promote closer collaboration between these research strands. The idea with the new position is that the holder will nucleate and lead a new research programme in the area between these existing groups as well as getting involved in outreach and public engagement.

It is intended that the position to appeal not only to people undertaking observational programmes using ground-based facilities (e.g. those provided by ESO, which Ireland recently joined), or those exploiting data from space-based experiments, as well as people working on multi-messenger astrophysics, gravitational waves, and so on.

Exciting as this position is in itself, it is part of wider developments and we are expecting to advertise further job opportunities in physics and astronomy very soon! I’d be happy to be contacted by any eligible person wishing to discuss this position (or indeed the general situation in Maynooth) on an informal basis.

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ITP 2022

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on May 25, 2022 by telescoper

Just a quick note to say I’ve spent today not only out of the office but out of Maynooth at the first conference I’ve attended since before the pandemic started. The Irish Theoretical Physics Meeting (ITP22) is taking place from today (Wednesday 25th) to Friday 27th at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. I’ll be commuting from Maynooth for the rest of this week. There is quite a big contingent from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth in fact.

My talk isn’t until tomorrow morning but I chaired one of the sessions this afternoon. It’s an interesting meeting with an eclectic mixture of talks and lots of time for the sort of face-to-face discussion we’ve all missed for so long. If that weren’t enough it’s also a nice change from marking examinations…!

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Maynooth University Library Cat Update

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags on May 24, 2022 by telescoper
Picture Credit: Joost Slingerland

I’ve been at home today, doing the last of my examination marking, doing some Open Journal business, and preparing a presentation for later this week so I’m indebted to my colleague Dr Joost Slingerland for the above picture of Maynooth University Library Cat.

I’ve seen him quite a few times recently, as I’ve been on South Campus to collect exam scripts etc, and he seems in fine feline fettle. In the picture he looks like he’s guarding his Library from unwelcome visitors.

Soon the exams will be over and the campus will be relatively quiet again, though no doubt he will continue to be kept well provisioned and not short of company when he wants some.

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Job Opportunity in Theoretical Physics at Maynooth!

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on May 21, 2022 by telescoper

Just a very quick reblog of this post because the deadline is tomorrow (22nd May) at 23.30. It’s a for a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Theoretical Quantum Physics, interpreted broadly to include quantum computation, quantum information theory, quantum many-body systems, quantum field theory, and applications thereof to condensed matter and high-energy physics, etc.

telescoper's avatarIn the Dark

Just a short post passing on the information that we have a permanent Lectureship (Assistant Professorship) available in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. You can find the details, including a full Job Description and salary, here.

For the purposes of this position we interpret Quantum Physics broadly to include quantum computation, quantum information theory, quantum many-body systems, quantum field theory, and applications thereof to condensed matter and high-energy physics, etc.

This position is the first of several to be advertised across the Departments of Theoretical & Experimental Physics at Maynooth University, in areas including Astronomy and Earth Science, on top of this opportunity at Professorial level in Observational Astrophysics or Cosmology. Watch this space for more details!

The position is available from 1st September 2022 and the deadline for applications is 23.30 on Sunday 22nd May 2022 and you should apply through the Maynooth jobs…

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Mental Health and the Reasons for Burnout

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, Mental Health with tags , , , on May 10, 2022 by telescoper

It is now European Health Week as well as “Employee Wellbeing Month” here at Maynooth University. I’m reminded that ten years ago that I was heading for a breakdown and a subsequent spell in a psychiatric institution so I always try to use this opportunity to encourage friends colleagues and students to do what I didn’t back then, and ask for help sooner rather than later.

Today my colleague from, and former Head of, the Psychology Department at Maynooth shared a piece on twitter that provided me with a new theme, burnout, which is usually described in these terms:

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.

Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.

I’d be surprised if any of my friends and colleagues in the University have not felt at least some of the signs of burnout at some point over the last two years during the which the pandemic drastically exacerbated existing conditions of overwork. I know there’s a tendency among staff to blame themselves for struggling and I know that there’s a even stronger tendency for Management to want staff to blame themselves: “you need to be more resilient” is the catchphrase.

As a counter to this attitude I suggest you read this piece which explains that burnout is not the fault of employees but of the environment created by management. In particular, here are the five main causes of burnout:

  1. Unfair treatment at work
  2. Unmanageable workload
  3. Lack of role clarity
  4. Lack of communication and support from their manager
  5. Unreasonable time pressure

Do any of these look familiar to you? They certainly do to me! I would add a sixth: “6. management determination to make 1-5 even worse in future”. Academic staff on proper contracts are much more expensive than low-paid temporary lecturers on insecure contracts. If you care more about making a profit than providing a quality third level education, why not let the former burn out and replace them with the latter?

My biggest fear is that having seen the lengths to which staff have been prepared to go voluntarily to keep things going during the pandemic, all that has been achieved is to establish in the minds of Management an expectation that this is the way things will be for the indefinite future.

It’s not so bad for me. I’ll be 60 next year and I can see the prospect of retirement on the horizon, but I do worry about what this means for the careers of younger staff.

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Last Day of Term!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on May 6, 2022 by telescoper

So at last we’ve arrived at the last day of teaching for Semester 2 at Maynooth University. My final session – a revision lecture – was actually yesterday. Today I’m on tenterhooks as the students are submitting their Computational Physics project reports ahead of the deadline of 4pm this afternoon and I’m on hand to help with last minute problems. Some have already appeared on Moodle, bucking the fine academic tradition of only submitting things at the very last minute. Students on this module have to do the project in order to pass the module, so I hope they all manage to submit something by the deadline. I saw a few in the lab yesterday afternoon and they seemed to have good results. I just hope they left enough time to write everything up! No prizes for guessing what I’ll be doing next week: marking project reports (and coursework I didn’t have time to correct earlier).

Next week is a study week for the students, so the powers be must think academic staff are going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs until the exam period begins (on Friday 13th). That’s the only explanation I can think of for the proliferation of meetings in my calendar for next week.

After that of course my colleagues and I will be marking examinations. I have papers on Tuesday 17th May and Friday 20th May. I may be able to get the first set of scripts marked before the second set arrives, but maybe not. At any rate we have to get all the marks up on the system well before the Exam Boards take place in early June. That should be easy for me, but not so much for those staff who have exams much later in the cycle.

This term has been marked by low attendances at lectures and tutorials, for a number of Covid-related reasons. We’ve done our lectures in person on campus, but only around a third of the students have been attending. Neither I nor anyone else knows what that will mean for the results of the forthcoming examinations. We’ll just have to wait and see…

At least our Exam Board will take place in person this time as the Covid-19 situation here in Ireland looks reasonably positive which will make it a bit easier to discuss any important matters that may arise.

This has been a tough year, with half our lecturing staff being temporary replacements after one departure, one retirement and one on sabbatical. One member of staff will be returning from sabbatical in September, and we have one permanent position under advertisement (application deadline: 22nd May) but we’re going to be forced employ temporary lecturers again next academic year as it seems unlikely the permanent replacement will be in post by September and in any case we will be a post down even if that post is filled. I don’t like this at all, but I have no choice.

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