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Maynooth Open Day Preview

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 25, 2020 by telescoper

No sooner has the examination period finished when we have to start thinking about admissions again. There is an Open Day at Maynooth coming up on Saturday 27th June. Covid-19 restrictions still being in place this is once again a virtual event that will take place between 10am and 2pm. I will be online for that period to answer queries about Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Maynooth University. You can sign up for the event here.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here is a little video introduction I recorded for the Open Dday for our Double Major BSc programme in Theoretical Physics & Mathematics (codename: MH206)

 

 

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Becoming a Culchie…

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on June 23, 2020 by telescoper

Among all the other things going at the moment, most of them to do with Covid-19, I am in the process of trying to buy a house. I did toy with the idea of moving to Dublin but property prices there are ridiculously high and I wanted to avoid having to commute, so I decided to stay local, not that houses are very much cheaper here in Maynooth…

Another factor has been my arthritis. It’s not at all bad at the moment, but a while ago I was viewing a property which was very nice but had very steep and narrow stairs and I suddenly struck me that in a few years’ time they would probably be quite difficult to manage. Eventually I found a lovely bungalow near Maynooth and last week had my offer on it accepted. There’s a lot that can go wrong from here but all the paperwork, survey, valuation and other stuff is proceeding and I am hoping to move into the new house towards the end of the summer. Fingers crossed. I know that a lot can go wrong in the house-buying business so I’m taking nothing for granted.

There are many similarities in the house buying saga here in Ireland compared to the United Kingdom (where I have bought and sold several properties over the years), but one big difference is the auction process. Estate agents here in Ireland are generally called auctioneers, actually. In order to register to bid you have to first show that you have the necessary funds and then you can place a bid online. It’s easy in an auction to get drawn in so far that you end up spending more than you wanted to, so I decided on an absolutely upper limit on how high I would go. Fortunately the bidding stopped well below that.

There are a few other differences between the UK and Ireland. One is that if you buy a new house here you have to pay VAT on it, which is a considerable increase in cost. Another is that stamp duty is just 1% in Ireland, whereas for a property of similar price in England it would be 5%. Other than that the business of mortgages and valuations and surveys and Land Registry is all tediously familiar.

When I told a friend what I was buying and where he described my putative new house as a “Culchie Bungalow”.
I’d heard the word Culchie before but decided to look it up. The original meaning was a person from rural Ireland, but nowadays it refers more-or-less to anybody who lives outside Dublin. I was quite surprised however to see that Maynooth is specifically mentioned as a place where culchies live on the wikipedia page

Anyway, I don’t mind being called a culchie. I’ve been called a lot worse over the years!

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Scrambled Phases

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 22, 2020 by telescoper

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the imminent start of Phase 2 of the Irish Government’s Roadmap for Reopening after the closures enforced because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since then the Irish Government has decided that there will only be four phases instead of five, and many elements of the programme will be moved forward. For example, all travel restrictions within the Republic will be lifted from next Monday (29th June), which is when Phase 3 is due to commence. It has also been announced that hairdressers, barbers, nail and brow salons, beauty salons, spas, make-up application services, tanning, tattooing and piercing services will re-open. I find that surprising, as I find it hard to see how such services can be provided at low risk of transmitting Covid-19.

In fact I find the whole idea of accelerating the Roadmap rather worrying. I hope I’m proved wrong, but it seems to me that the Government is rushing this. There are worrying signs in Germany that the R-number is increasing significantly and undue haste in opening business may lead to a similar rise. It must be stressed that the number of cases involved in Germany  is rather small and most are confined in local outbreaks that can be contained. Nevertheless, this remains a concern.

At the moment the situation looks stable, with new cases at a very low level:

I do worry however that, since only a very small fraction of the population (at most a few percent) have been infected with Covid-19, there will be very little resistance if Covid-19 starts to spread again.

As for my own work situation here at Maynooth University, what happens in Phases Three and Four is all a bit hypothetical, because we’re still stuck in Phase One! The University management is being extremely cautious about allowing anyone back to work at all until various protocols are agreed, risk assessments carried out, and staff training delivered. It seems likely therefore that we will reach Monday’s scheduled start of Phase 3 before we are even ready for Phase 2. In practice, therefore, the various phases of the Roadmap are no longer relevant in this particular setting. I think I’ll remain the only person coming in to the Department for quite some time!

I fully understand and support the careful approach adopted  by the University, of course, and the delay doesn’t matter that much as our teaching semester is now finished and, being theorists, we can all work from  home reasonably effectively. It must be more of a challenge for laboratory-based researchers. My main concern is  I’d be very surprised if all the other organizations and businesses due to open next Monday are as cautious. The last thing we need for people to cut corners and send us all back to square one.

 

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Challenges Past and Future

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

Yesterday afternoon we held our Departmental Examination Board in Theoretical Physics (via Microsoft Teams*) which all went remarkably well in the circumstances.

The most challenging thing to happen yesterday afternoon was that a bloke came to cut back the bushes outside my office with a very large and noisy hedge trimmer. I thought I was going to have to contend with that all afternoon but it seems he had done most of it the day before and only came back yesterday to finish off. He left before the Exam Board started.

The next stage of our Exams process is for all the Departmental results to be collated for those students on joint programmes before the final University Board takes place about ten days from now. After that students will get their results.

That doesn’t quite finish examination matters for 2019/20 however because some students will need to take repeat examinations in August. These will be a week later than usual as a knock-on effect of the extra week we were given to mark and correct the May exams. We anticipate that at least some of the repeats will be the traditional `in person’ on campus style, but some may be online timed assessments like the ones we held in May. That depends a bit on how the Covid-19 pandemic pans out in Ireland over the next few weeks (and of course how many students actually take repeats, as social distancing generates a capacity issue for the examination halls).

At the moment we are optimistic because the number of new cases of Covid-19 is low and stable. That coulld change, of course, if the virus starts to spread again so we have to have contingency plans.

Even more uncertain is what will happen in September, although I have been very annoyed by some reports in the media that seem to have been actively trying to put students off coming to University next academic year on the grounds that there won’t be any lectures. We certainly plan to offer as much face-to-face teaching as possible and I think other third-level institutions in Ireland will do likewise. There will of course have to be a backup if there is another lockdown, which may mean switching back to remote teaching at relatively short notice, but at least we’ve done that once already so know much better now what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless I would encourage all potential students not to believe everything they read in the media nor be deterred from attending university by rumours from sources who don’t know what they are talking about.

Earlier this week I was starting to think about how we might build the required flexibility into our teaching for next year and two main things struck me.

The first is that while we have more-or-less been forced into making various kinds of video material available to students, this is something that I feel we should have been doing already. I’ve long felt that the more types of teaching we incorporate and the wider range of learning materials we provide the better the chance that students find something that works for them. Even if we do have a full programme of lectures next year, it is my intention to continue to provide, e.g., recorded video explainers as well because they might augment the battery of resources available to the student.

Some time ago I had to make some policies about `reasonable adjustments’ for some disabled students learning physics. In the course of providing extra resources for this small group I suddenly thought that it would be far better, and far more inclusive, simply to make these resources available to everyone. Likewise, we’ve been forced to adjust to providing material remotely but we should be thinking about how to keep the best things about what we’ve done over the last few months and embedding them in the curriculum for the (hopefully Coronavirus-free) future and not regard them all as temporary special measures.

The other thing that struck me is in the same vein, but a little more speculative. Over the last many years I have noticed that students use printed textbooks less and less for learning. Part of that may be because we in a digital age and they prefer to use online resources. The switch to remote learning has however revealed that there are some students who are disadvantaged by not having a good internet connection. I just wonder whether this might lead to a resurgence in the use of textbooks. I’ll certainly be making a strong recommendation to the new first-year students in Theoretical Physics that they should get hold of the recommended text, which I have previously regarded as an optional extra.

*At one point I got muddled up between Teams and Zoom and called it Tombs. It was a grave error, but it can only be a matter of time before Microsoft Tombs actually arrives…

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Marking Time

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on June 12, 2020 by telescoper

In among all the other things I have to do I’ve just finished marking my portion of examinations and other assessments in time for next week’s Examination Boards. I have to attend two (virtually), one for Theoretical Physics and one for Engineering Mathematics. You may recall that, this year, along with many other universities, we switched from the usual examination format to online timed assessments.

Obviously I can’t talk about any actual results here but I can relay a few general points.

First, there were remarkably few hitches in the examination process. I would like to say that I was totally confident that the new system would work, but I’m afraid I was very nervous during the examination period. I’m glad that I was proved wrong. That’s not only due to very hard work by the teaching staff in getting everything together to go online and the technical support staff for ensuring the submission portals could handle the load, but also due to the students who coped admirably well with the new assessment style.

That said, I think if we are going to have such assessments again in the future there are things we could improve.In particular the mathematical nature of our work means that students have to do their working, diagrams etc by hand and sometimes the quality of scanning made the resulting submissions very difficult to read. If we had had time we could have offered more training to the students on how to scan their work more legibly, so next time we will probably do that too. Indeed we will probably be doing most of the coursework that way next term so they will probably get more practice anyway.

Printing the work out usually made the legibility problem worse, so I generally marked as much as I could on the screen. We don’t have very good software for doing this in bulk so it was painfully slow. I estimate it took me about three times as long to mark an examination script this way than doing it on paper. I’d be very interesting to hear via the comments box of any suggestions or recommendations of software to help this process!

The main purpose of this post however is to say a very public thank you to all the teaching staff in the Department of Theoretical Physics and to our admirable Departmental Administrator Suzie  for working so hard in difficult circumstances to get everything done in time!

 

 

 

 

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Time for Phase 2 in Ireland

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , on June 7, 2020 by telescoper

Tomorrow (June 8th) sees the start of Phase 2 of Ireland’s Roadmap for Reopening. You can see that, as of yesterday, the number of confirmed cases per day is small and stable after three weeks of Phase 1, which has justified proceeding to Phase 2.

Incidentally, since the Covid-19 outbreak took hold in Ireland there have been daily press briefings by the Department of Health. Yesterday’s was the last of these: from now on the updates will be twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Data will still be released every day but there won’t be a press conference every time. I’ve been following these every day for three months so this will be quite a change to the routine!

Moving to Phase 2 means that most shops will be able to reopen (subject to social distancing measures being in place), people will be able to travel much further (anywhere within your own county and 20 km into another) and there will be a limited return to work (subject to the completion of various protocols, risk assessments, etc).

For us at Maynooth University there won’t be a sudden change. Staff who can will continue to work from home (which is basically everyone in the Department of Theoretical Physics) but labs will gradually reopen for research when the necessary arrangements are in place. Other than that Phase 2 will be very similar to Phase 1.

On Friday, however, the Taioseach announced that the Roadmap would be accelerated so that Phase 4, starting 20th July will, if all goes well, be the last, though measures will be in place for some time after that.

That’s good news of course but it’s all dependent on there being no second wave. As a cautionary tale, take a look at the numbers for Covid-19 Iran:

Iran has been experiencing a second wave of new cases for some time now, and this looks set to produce more cases than the first, but this has only recently resulted in an increase in daily mortality figures:

Note the lowest number of new cases per day in Iran was just under 1000. That’s far fewer than the United Kingdom, which has chosen to undo its restrictions far more rapidly in Ireland. The number of confirmed new cases in Ireland reported yesterday was just 24; in the United Kingdom the figure was 1557. In my opinion there is a strong possibility that the UK will follow a similar trajectory to Iran…

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Public Lectures?

Posted in Education, Maynooth on June 5, 2020 by telescoper

Taking a break from marking examinations and other assignments I was thinking about the next academic year. Although we’re planning to give as much teaching as possible in face-to-face form from September,  it is likely that we will have some material online. In fact I found the short video summaries I did last term were quite popular with students so I may well carry on doing them even if we were to return completely to normal as a supplement to the live experience.

Thinking about this a bit further I reckon I should put all such material on Youtube so that anyone who wants to access it can do so. I don’t think there will be a huge demand for them in the general public, but for me it’s more a point of principle. As my teaching is funded by the public purse, it seems reasonable to me that what I produce should all be in the public domain wherever possible. That obviously excludes some teaching activities (e.g. labs and tutorials) but I don’t see why I shouldn’t do it with lectures or other video content.

If you object on the grounds that students pay a €3000 `student contribution‘ to attend university in Ireland and would be annoyed if I gave away what they’re having to pay for, then I’d reply that that money is not supposed to cover tuition – just student services and examinations.

I know many of my colleagues disagree with this, so I thought I’d do another totally unscientific poll to see what others think. Not that it will change my mind….

 

 

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The Mains in Maynooth

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , on June 4, 2020 by telescoper

I don’t often post about local news but I thought for a change while I’m taking a break from examination marking I’d just mention a little local difficulty here in Maynooth.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning (2nd June) I was surprised by the amount of (stationary) traffic on the Straffan Road beside my flat. I later had to pop into the bank on Main Street and discovered that the reason was major roadworks reducing the traffic to one lane and necessitating the introduction of stop/go manual signals to replace the traffic lights. Unlike today, Tuesday was a hot day and the ensuing traffic jam caused a few frayed tempers among impatient drivers.

The roadworks are to do with the laying of a new water main, which is being done in phases. The job started down Parson Street a few weeks ago when construction work resumed (after a break for Covid-19 reasons) and gradually moved up towards the Castle. This was less disruptive than the current phase which is on Mill Street. This is the main thoroughfare from Maynooth both North to Moyglare and West to Kilcock. The works here have caused tailbacks all the way through the town. There are barriers along Main Street to enforce single line traffic which have turned the centre of town an obstacle course. This type of signal is very heavy on manpower: there must be at least 20 people standing at junctions operating the signs and signalling to each other. It’s working reasonably well, though, all things considered.

Here are a couple of snaps I took on Mill Street, first looking south towards Main Street and Leinster Street:

Here’s one looking North over the bridge towards Manor Mills shopping centre on the left:

The roadworks take up entire lane. There is no vehicle traffic visible because I took the picture just before traffic was allowed in from the bottom end of Mill Street.

I am a bit surprised that the new water main is being laid in a trench running right along the middle of one lane, rather than to the side, but I’m told that isn’t unusual in Ireland. When I asked someone the other day what the works were for he said “they’re replacing the old lead pipes”. I didn’t actually believe that there could still be lead water mains, but I’m told it is true. There has been so little public investment here that much of Ireland’s infrastructure is Victorian.

Anyway, although the constant traffic jams are a bit annoying (and noisy) it’s good that they’re doing this work. At the moment Ireland is experiencing something approaching a drought and is estimated that over 25% of the water in the system is being lost through leaky pipes.

I think that if there are no delays they should be finished by tomorrow evening (5th June) but as of this evening it seems that they still have a lot to do!

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Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , on June 1, 2020 by telescoper

So here I am in Maynooth where it is a lovely sunny day and a Bank Holiday. Looking back through this blog I realise that this is my third June Bank Holiday in Ireland. Tempus fugit!

To celebrate the occasion here is a picture of Maynooth University Library Cat which I took when he was on post waiting for food a couple of days ago.

The June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland is actually the equivalent of last week’s late 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. I understand Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit went down on the Disciples.

Anyway, because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. When the authorities decided to fix a statutory holiday at this time of year, presumably to reduce administrative difficulties, the UK went for late May and Ireland for early June. Whit Sunday was actually yesterday (31st May) so this year Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh coincides with Whit Monday.

Incidentally, when I was a lad, ‘Whit Week’ was always referred to as ‘Race Week’. Geordie Ridley’s famous music hall song The Blaydon Races begins “I went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the 9th of June, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty Two on a summer’s afternoon…”. Easter Sunday fell on 20th April in 1862, so Whit Sunday was on 8th June. After raucous scenes at the Blaydon Races, they were scrapped and replaced with a Temperance Festival on the Town Moor in Newcastle which evolved into one of the largest open-air funfairs in Europe, The Hoppings, although I suppose there was any of that this year.

This year the Bank Holiday is a bit strange, what with the Covid-19 restrictions, and I still have exam marking to do, but I have decided to put the autoreply on for my work email and take the day off.

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Covid-19 in Ireland: the Pandemic’s Progress

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth on May 29, 2020 by telescoper

I noticed last night when I was updated the numbers and graphs on my Covid-19 page that it is now 90 days since I started counting on 28th February. By way of an update here are the latest graphs (as of last night):

Mindful of a study that suggests that the general public do not understand log plots – I have had some angry messages on Twitter accusing me of deliberately misleading people by using a log axis – here are the daily updates on linear plots, first the record of new cases:

And second the recorded new deaths:

The latter appears rather noisy because of low numbers.

You may notice that these plots look a little different from those presented elsewhere (e.g. here). That is because I have treated the various retrospective corrections that have been made in a different way from others, generally by adjusting the cumulative totals but not the daily figure. For a full explanation of what I’ve done see the notes here. I also haven’t smoothed the data at all. Other representations tend to use a 7-day moving average to get rid of weekly artifacts of reporting, especially the “weekend effect” by which there appear to be fewer deaths on Saturday and Sunday.

If you don’t like log plots then you really won’t like this one, which is a plot of daily cases against the cumulative number on log-log axes:

I like this plot because I think the message is clear: it would give a straight line if the cases were growing exponentially, which was the case initially. You can see that both cases and deaths are well past this stage. In Ireland it seems the Covid-19 pandemic is under reasonably good control. According to the experts the value of the reproductive number R in Ireland is in the range 0.4 to 0.5, and it seems community transmission of the disease has almost stopped.

I haven’t left Maynooth since February so I’ve been here all through the lockdown. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve seen have been observing the restrictions. I can just think of just one occasion that was an exception, on the way into the local supermarket, when someone failed to observe the 2m social distancing when he pushed past me while I was washing my hands with the gel provided. When told by an assistant that he had to wait in line and wash his hands before coming in he refused and was then told to leave, which he eventually did after unleashing some foul language. He was obviously drunk, but probably a twat even when sober. Maynooth is a small and rather quiet place (especially when there are no students around, like now) and there may be worse issues elsewhere, but it does seem that Irish folk are behaving very sensibly.

For the record, as of last night there were 24,481 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland and 1,639 people have died. That means that the number of deaths per million of population is approximately 332. That’s a lot fewer per capita than the UK (officially 553, but probably more like 900) a lot larger than, say, Denmark (which is of a similar size) which is on 98 Covid-19 deaths per million population or Norway which is on 44. The reason for the large number despite the stricter lockdown than the United Kingdom, seems to have been the number of deaths in care homes.

On this basis I’d summarise the situation by saying that Ireland hasn’t done all that well when you look at it in the cold light of day, but it could have been a lot worse. Credit is due to the medical experts for their leadership.

Another thing worth mentioning is that according to the experts the fraction of the population that has been infected with Covid-19 is probably around one per cent and is very unlikely to exceed five percent. That means that if the infection begins to spread again then it will do so with very little resistance and the exponential phase we saw in March will recur.

So what next?

Ireland is currently in Phase 1 of a the Roadmap, a programme of gradual and justifiably reduction of the restrictions imposed to halt the spead of Covid-19. Phase 2 is supposed to begin on June 8th. However, next Monday (1st June) is a bank holiday and we have very good weather at the moment – it’s about 27 °C outside as I write this. That, together with the good news from the Covid-19 data may well convince some people to forget about the restrictions and start having barbecues, go to the beach, etc. There must be some concern that this may trigger a second wave, which will at best cause delays on the Roadmap and may require a second total shutdown.

There is a thoroughly reprehensible opinion piece in the Irish Times today by Stephen Collins that on the one hand deliberately encourages mass disobedience if the government “doesn’t move to ease the lockdown measures”. Bu the government has moved to ease the lockdown measures. Quite rightly, though, the movement is slow and cautious. People need to be patient and continue listening to the experts, not people like Stephen Collins.

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