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Lost and Found!

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 5, 2020 by telescoper

Here’s another post that demonstrates that I’m getting even more absent-minded in my old age.

On Friday I lost my phone. I was pretty sure I had it with me when I went to work but couldn’t find it when I was getting ready to leave for home. I hadn’t actually used it while I was at work on Friday so I convinced myself that I’d left it at home. I was wrong.

I was a bit worried that the delivery people on Saturday might assume I wasn’t in when they couldn’t contact me by the number I gave them, but they did turn up and all was well.

As soon as I got back to work this morning, I tried to retrace all the steps I’d taken on Friday in the hope of finding the missing item, but without joy. Just before leaving the office to give my lecture at 11am, increasingly worried, I emailed security to ask if anyone had handed in a phone. It was I thought a last resort.

When I got back to the office I found to my great relief an emailed reply saying that a phone matching the description I’d given had indeed been handed into them. It had been found by a cleaner in the John Hume Building (in which I gave a lecture on Friday).

I went straight over to the security lodge and proved that it was my phone, which was easy because it has fingerprint recognition. When I’d done that I was asked to sign for it and was reunited with my phone (which was undamaged). As I turned to leave I asked where it had been found. The answer left me a bit. shocked. It was found in the lecture theatre I’d been teaching in… in the waste bin!

I gave a lecture on Friday in the John Hume building but can’t really understand how my phone ended up in the bin. I remember seeing a bin near the desk at the front, so I guess I must have accidentally knocked it off the bench while trying to set up the camera.

Above all though I realised just how lucky I had been. I reckon 99 times out of 100 the cleaner would have just emptied the bin without further thought. This time, though, perhaps because there was nothing else in the in it (as the lecture theatres are largely empty these days), the cleaner spotted it and did the right thing. Had the bin been full of other rubbish it would probably not have been seen.

Losing my phone would have been hugely inconvenient on top of all the other causes of stress these days so I’m very glad I’ve got it back.

All’s well that ends well.

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To Level Five?

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on October 4, 2020 by telescoper

When I saw that 613 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Ireland on Saturday (3rd October) it seemed obvious that the situation in Ireland was getting out of control:

Note that on this graph the new cases have been growing in a roughly linear fashion for at least a month. Since the y-axis is logarithmic this means the growth of the pandemic is roughly exponential. The  7-day moving average up to and including Saturday was 448, with no sign of an end to the upward trend.

After a meeting yesterday, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) reviewed the following statistical developments:

In the light of these it decided to recommend an immediate jump to the highest level of restrictions, Level 5, for the entire country:

Level Five isn’t quite the same as what happened in March, largely because Schools and Colleges are intended to remain open, but it means the same widespread shutdown of the private sector. This escalation is supposed to last at least 4 weeks.

This is of course a recommendation. The imposition of these measures is up to the Government, which has to balance public health measures against economic damage. Presumably will make a decision sometime this week. Will they have the guts to stand up against the hospitality industry?

The problem is that the Government announcing restrictions and people actually abiding by them are not the same thing at all. It only takes a few people to flout the rules for the pandemic to take hold once more, and while many people are behaving sensibly, there is ample evidence of people not doing so.

What this means for us at Maynooth University remains to be seen.

 

UPDATE: The Government this afternoon rejected the advice of NPHET and instead moved the country to Level 3. I hope they know what they’re doing.

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Week Ending

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth on October 3, 2020 by telescoper

It’s the Saturday after a very tough week. At least I’ve got an excuse for lounging about at home because I’m waiting for a new bed to be delivered. Since I moved into my new house I’ve been sleeping in a single bed, in what will be the spare room, but when the bigger bed arrives I’ll be able to move into the main bedroom.

Last week was a tough one at work. Switching teaching online at short notice was only part of it. The building work that started late still isn’t finished so I’ve got more disruption from that to look forward to when I return to the Department on Monday.

I did at least get through the first week of online teaching. The newly installed Panopto system (which we used when I was in Cardiff) works very well, although the cameras are a bit limited. This system can webcast a lecture as well as recording it to be viewed later. I always assumed most students would watch the lectures after the event but as it turned out a majority actually viewed them live.

The sudden switch to online teaching was designed to restrict the number of students travelling to and from the University but nobody seems to have thought very much about those actually living on campus. In the case of Maynooth University that includes a sizeable fraction of first-year students whose first experience of university life is much poorer than in a normal year. I feel very sorry for this cohort but I suppose circumstances made this inevitable.

The official University line, as explained in an email (inevitably) sent out to Department Heads on Friday evening), is that teaching will be online at least until Study Week ( the week beginning 26th October). I think it’s overwhelmingly probable that we teach like this for the entire semester and there is a good chance that it will be the entire academic year. I think it would benefit us all, staff and students, if this decision were made now. There is no end in sight to Covid-19 and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

Update: the bed arrived this afternoon. It required “some self assembly”: though not on the scale of IKEA furniture that was quite hard work because the frame parts are very heavy. It’s done now though and I’m looking forward to sleeping in it tonight.

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Teaching Improvisation

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on September 29, 2020 by telescoper

The sudden switch of all our teaching online on Friday has necessitated a certain amount of improvisation. I had intended to do my introductory session on Mechanics and Special Relativity to first-year students as a kind of interactive workshop using the blackboard in Physics Hall. When we were told to move everything online I thought I’d just do yesterday’s session from my office which has quite a good blackboard and a setup I had already tested. Unfortunately however an office refurbishment project I was assured would be finished before the start of teaching but which has barely started meant that yesterday there was constant hammering and drilling in the Department. That made it impossible to do an online lecture (or do anything else) in my office. I knew there would be nobody in Physics Hall, though, so I did the lecture there to an empty room.

The camera provided in that room is fixed to a monitor at once side of the theatre and is therefore useless for capturing the blackboard, so I used my laptop camera plus a handy litter bin to raise it up. It wasn’t great but was better than nothing.

You might ask why I don’t do this from home. The answer to that is that I haven’t yet got an internet connection in the new house, so I can do online activities from there.

You might also ask why a refurbishment job, which could have been completed at any point during the summer when the building was empty, has only just started now we’ve started teaching again. If I had an answer I would tell you. I think the six people whose offices are currently unusable would like to know too, though at least they can work from home. It’s tough enough trying to keep everything together these days without this.

Fortunately today a colleague in the Department of Psychology found me a quiet place to work. It’s a small windowless cubicle normally used for experiments. At least it’s quiet. I think the next step will be a padded cell somewhere.

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On the Exploitation of Postgraduates

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on September 27, 2020 by telescoper

Thinking through the implications of Friday’s announcement for teaching I saw the following advice sent out to students from Maynooth University

For the next few weeks most lectures will move online. You will be invited on-campus for practical classes, tutorials and for the teaching which requires a lot of interaction.

I can’t see significant numbers of students travelling to campus for a tutorial when they have no other teaching sessions but thinking about this yesterday I was struck by the decision that tutorials should go ahead while lectures shouldn’t. Tutorials are largely given by postgraduate students and it seems extremely unfair to me that they should be required to run the risk and incur the expense of travelling to campus in order to carry out in-person teaching, when full-time staff can minimize their chances of infection by staying at home and teaching remotely.

I’ll therefore be instructing all postgraduate tutors in my Department that they are not expected to run their tutorials on campus.

Yesterday I moaned about university staff being taken for granted but the situation is even worse for postgraduate tutors, who make an invaluable and essential contribution to teaching but are often treated horrendously badly by universities.

Take for example the scandalous situation at NUI Galway, where postgraduate students are being required to undertake 120 hours of unpaid teaching duties per year. The University’s justification for this is the following

Contributing to teaching is an integral part of the training of a research Master’s or PhD student. Teaching assists you in the acquisition of generic and transferable skills, and is an important element in the formation of a research graduate.

This may well be true but it does not constitute an argument why such work should be unpaid. I would argue that an even more “important element in the formation of a research graduate” is learning not to allow oneself to be exploited.

One of the very few things I can say I achieved in my time at Sussex was to abolish the use so-called Graduate Teaching Assistantships in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences that required postgraduates to do unpaid teaching and make all such work voluntary and paid.

I am well aware of the reason why Galway is trying this on – it’s the chronic underfunding of Ireland’s universities and colleges exacerbated by rampant managerialism – but that’s no excuse for institutionalised exploitation. I wholeheartedly support the postgraduates at Galway refusing to carry out unpaid teaching duties and hope the University will withdraw this unjustified and iniquitous policy.

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Third Level at Level Three and Back to Square One

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , on September 26, 2020 by telescoper

I spent a big chunk of yesterday assigning students to groups and organization rotations to allow them to attend lectures on campus at Maynooth University in a manner consistent with public health guidelines relating to Covid-19. Then, late yesterday afternoon, the Irish Government announced that all third-level institutions should move practically all* their teaching online. In effect, all higher education institutions have been raised to Level Three on the Government’s scale of restrictions.

This announcement came as a shock, not least because of the timing. Announcing drastic changes on the Friday before the Monday teaching is due to start has bounced a huge number of lecturers (including myself) into having to work all weekend to revise our plans and to contact students to tell them in time that they shouldn’t come onto campus on Monday morning. As far as I am aware there was no discussion of this move with the University sector. It’s yet another example of those in authority taking for granted the willingness of academic staff to work at weekends.

Maynooth University had anticipated some of the changes by reducing the maximum class size to 30 but the Government announcement is much more stringent than these. It seems to have been motivated by developments in universities elsewhere at which high levels of infection have arisen. The extent to which these are due to transmission in lecture halls and laboratories as opposed to student residences is unclear to me though. Many of our students are already on campus. I’m not sure that having them here but cooped up in halls will achieve very much.

Institutions like Maynooth University have spent all summer putting in stringent measures to comply with public health guidance to allow in-person teaching for the new semester. Now it is clear that was all a complete waste of time and resources. Moreover, the decision to keep students off campus is tantamount to an admission that the measures previously suggested by the HSE were inadequate.

I know colleagues at other institutions that made the decision some months ago to go online this Semester are saying “I told you so”. They’re justified in feeling a bit smug. All our attempts to bring students onto campus have achieved is to distract us from putting more time and resources into preparations for online teaching. We tried because we think the on-campus teaching is valuable to the student experience. I think it was worth a shot, but it has come to naught. We’re now back where we were in March. It’s very frustrating, to put it mildly, to have spent so long on a fool’s errand.

Anyway, all our lectures will be online from next week for the foreseeable future. The official Government line is “for two weeks”, but that’s what we were told on March 12th. I think it’s much more likely that we’re online for the entire academic year.

I’m not going to mention the considerable number of other things that went wrong last week, but I trudged home last night overwhelmed with fatigue. And term hasn’t started yet. I’m too old for all this.

* There is a possible exemption for laboratories and other practical sessions, as well as small-group tutorials. Students in experimental subjects will therefore get some tuition on campus. As for tutorials, though, I can’t really see students travelling for a tutorial when they have no lectures to attend on campus, so we’ll probably move them online too.

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Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowships

Posted in Maynooth with tags , on September 25, 2020 by telescoper

Looking for something to take my mind briefly off the business of preparing for next week’s start of teaching I thought I’d use the medium of this blog to advertise the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowships which have just been announced by the Irish Research Council.

These positions are of one or two years’ duration starting from 1st October 2021. The research relating to the fellowship can be in any discipline (including Astrophysics and Cosmology, hint hint….) and can be held in any University in the Irish Republic (including Maynooth, hint hint..). These positions are intended for early career researchers; applicants are required to have a PhD by the end of May 2021 but not have been awarded it before the end May 2016.

The deadline for completed applications is 19th November 2020.

For further information, see here.

Anyone interested in applying to hold one of these positions in Maynooth is welcome to contact me privately for advice and/or assistance!

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The Autumnal Equinox 2020

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 22, 2020 by telescoper

So here we are then. The Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern hemisphere) takes place this afternoon at 14.31 Irish Time (13.31 UT).

Though  the term `equinox’  refers a situation in which day and night are of equal length which implies that it’s a day rather than a specific time, the equinox is more accurately defined by a specific event when the plane defined by Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun’s disk (or, if you prefer, when the centre of the Sun passes through the plane defined by Earth’s equator). Day and night are not necessarily exactly equal on the equinox, but they’re the closest they get. From now on days in the Northern hemisphere will be shorter than nights and they’ll get shorter still until the Winter Solstice.

For many people the autumnal equinox is taken to be the end of summer, though there is a saying around these parts that `Summer is Summer to Michaelmas Day’ (September 29th). Looking back over the posts I’ve written at this time of year since I started blogging in 2008, it’s noticeable how many times we’ve had a window of good weather around the autumnal equinox. In Wales such a warm spell in late September is called Haf Bach Mihangel – “the little summer of St Michael”.

Here’s a sample excerpt from the post I wrote in 2008 on this:

The weather is unsettling. It’s warm, but somehow the warmth doesn’t quite fill the air; somewhere inside it there’s a chill that reminds you that autumn is not far away.

I find this kind of weather a bit spooky because it always takes me back to the time when I left home to go to University, as thousands of fledgling students are about to do this year in their turn.

It has been quite warm here in Maynooth recently too. Last night I mowed the lawn in the evening sunshine, which may well be the last time I do that until spring. The weather turned a bit colder overnight and the weather forecast suggests the little summer may be over.

Anyway, this is Welcome Week in Maynooth and, barring any sudden changes of plan, we’re due to start teaching on Monday 28th September. I’ve been keeping an eye on the registrations of students as they come in as well as starting to get my notes, problem sheets, recordings and other teaching materials together. I have to say that hasn’t been helped by the decision to install a new fire alarm system in the Science Building this week. I had to go home early because of the constant din of the sounders being tested.

I have to admit I’m very apprehensive about the forthcoming semester and beyond. It’s impossible to predict where we will be by the next equinox in March, or even by the Solstice in December. Covid-19 cases are increasing and it doesn’t seem that anyone has a clue how to stop the `second wave’ surging through the population this autumn. The September equinox is often said to to be the start of Astronomical Autumn. This year more than ever it seems to herald that Winter is coming.

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Plan B for Teaching

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on September 21, 2020 by telescoper

Yesterday’s Covid-19 figures for Ireland were a bit of a shocker, with 396 new cases (241 of them in Dublin). The latest 7-day average is 283.1 new cases per day. We haven’t seen figures like this since April. Here’s the latest log-linear graph:

Just a reminder: I keep a complete record of the daily figures here.

The surge in cases in Dublin is the the reason for the imposition of additional restrictions. Although we’re not in Dublin, many of our students travel to campus from the areas of West Dublin where the rate of infection is high (such as Tallaght) so Maynooth University has decided to ‘escalate protective measures‘. This means, among other things, that the maximum class size for in-person lectures on campus is 30.

So this morning I’ve been grappling with the implications of this for our teaching plans in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Student registrations are coming in now and though they are not complete we have a much better idea of how many students we will have in each class. The limit of 30 really just makes a difference to second year Mathematical Physics modules where the class size is around 40. We had intended to teach these all together but now they will need to be split into two groups to be taught separately. It will also impact our teaching for Engineering and Product Design, both of which have more than 30 students in class.

The remaining issue is the first year Mechanics & Special Relativity module MP110 which is a much larger class that I’d already decided to split into three groups. The problem would arise if the size of these groups exceeded the capacity constraints. First-year registration has not yet finished but it looks at the moment that we’ll be OK with Plan A. Possibly.

One of the difficulties will be communicating the arrangements to new students in time for the start of lectures on Monday 28th September, a week today. It is important that we don’t have students turning up for sessions to which they have not been assigned. There will be a lot of messages flying around about this for the rest of this week and over the weekend. Even even set up a departmental Twitter feed which you can follow here:

If the situation in Dublin (and nationally) continues to deteriorate we may well be back in the situation in which we found ourselves in March, with everything going online but that isn’t where we are at the moment. The limit of 30 on class sizes is a challenge, but it is our intention that lectures in Theoretical Physics will go ahead on campus starting next Monday.
How long it will take to move to Plan C is anyone’s guess.

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Garden Birds

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , , on September 20, 2020 by telescoper
A blue tit at the peanuts

The previous owner of my house left a bird feeder in the shed so I decided to see what sort of birds would come if I put it up. The feeder has quite a wide mesh so I bought a sack of peanuts, filled it up, and suspended from one of the trees.

Almost immediately a group of starlings arrived and took turns at pecking at the contents. I know that some starlings are resident all year round, but there is an annual influx of migratory birds around autumn. It seems a bit early for the continental starlings which usually start to turn up in October. Anyway, they seem ravenously hungry but are rather messy eaters and keep dropping bits on the ground.

The principal beneficiary of the starlings’ messiness is a robin, whose tactic is to wait underneath for peanuts from above. It does not seem keen to attempt the acrobatics needed to feed directly from the feeder. Sparrows do this too, but not when the robin is around as the robin chases them off; robins are feisty little critters. This one isn’t afraid to have a go at the much larger starlings if they descend to ground level.

There are at least two blue tits that visit the garden but they rarely get the chance to get at the peanuts before being scared off by yet more starlings. The picture above is an exception.

To help the smaller birds I bought a second feeder with a finer mesh that the starlings can’t get into this and filled it with mixed seed. The blue tits have this to themselves but obviously like the nuts too and will go to that feeder if there are no starlings.

Yesterday one of the many resident jackdaws tried the peanut feeder but failed in its mission as it was too big to hang on.

So far apart from those mentioned above I’ve also seen a chaffinch and a great tit but mainly it’s been blue tits and starlings. Of course I’m not in during the day so there might well be other species of garden visitor that I don’t see.

I’m thinking of getting a third feeder (for fat balls, etc) but I’m told that around here that will just mean a garden permanently full of rooks jackdaws and magpies. Any suggestions for alternative feeding mechanisms that might attract a wider variety of birdlife are welcome!

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