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Honours and Admissions

Posted in Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , on June 18, 2012 by telescoper

Time for a quick comment on the Queen Birthday Honours List for 2012 which, if you’re interested, you can download in full here.

The honours system must appear extremely curious to people from outside the United Kingdom. It certainly seems so to me. On the one hand, I am glad that the government has a mechanism for recognising the exceptional contributions made to society by certain individuals. Musicians, writers, sportsmen, entertainers and the like generally receive handsome financial rewards, of course, but that’s no reason to begrudge a medal or two in recognition of the special place they occupy in our cultural life.  It’s  good to see scientists recognized too, although they tend not to get noticed so much by the press.

First of all, therefore, let me congratulate space scientist, and occasional commenter on this blog, Professor Monica Grady on her award of a CBE. I also couldn’t resist commenting on the award of a knighthood to the Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council

..Professor Michael Sterling, who has turned round the Science and Technology Facilities Council

according to the official government announcement; the emphasis is mine. The phrase “turned around” is an interestingly frank way of putting it, and a refreshing admission from a very high level  that STFC was in disarray under its previous management.

Although I’m happy to see recognition given to such people, as I did last year on this occasion I can’t resist stating my objections to the honours system for the record. One is that the list of recipients  of certain categories of award is overwhelmingly dominated by career civil servants, for whom an “honour”  goes automatically with a given rank. If an honour is considered an entitlement in this way then it is no honour at all, and in fact devalues those awards that are  given on merit to people outside the Civil Service. Civil servants get paid for doing their job, so they should have no more expectation of an additional reward than anyone else.

Honours have relatively little monetary value on their own, of course so this is not question of financial corruption. An honour does, however, confer status and prestige on the recipient so what we have is a much more subtle form of sleaze. One wonders how many names listed in the current roll of honours are there because of political donations, for example.

I wouldn’t accept an honour myself, but that’s easy to say because I’m sure I’ll never be nominated for one. However, I imagine that even people like me who are against the whole system are probably still tempted to accept such awards when offered, as they generate good publicity for one’s field, institution and colleagues. Fortunately, having less than a cat in hell’s chance of being nominated, I’m never going to be tempted in that way!

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The Communications Data Bill is both Stupid and Wrong

Posted in Politics with tags , , , on June 14, 2012 by telescoper

No time for a lengthy post today, but then again I don’t think this topic merits one.

The government’s draft Communications Data Bill has now been published. The measures contained in this Bill would allow the security services to snoop at will on emails, web browsing, social network sites, internet phone calls, etc.

In other words it will give the government license to pry into personal communications between law-abiding individuals without any need for a warrant. The potential for abuse is obvious, so much so that it can only have been drafted by a government that intends to abuse it if and when it becomes law. It’s yet another deliberate erosion of our civil liberties and a further step towards a totalitarian state. Big Brother is here.

On top of all that, the proposed law is also entirely useless. All the measures proposed can be circumvented by anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of IT. Even me. It won’t catch criminals, at least not important ones, because they’ll know the (easy) ways around it. This law will simply be used by the government to spy on anyone it doesn’t like the look of.

And that could be you.

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49 not out

Posted in Biographical, Finance, Politics with tags , , on June 5, 2012 by telescoper

Yesterday having been my birthday – which Her Majesty The Queen kindly declared to be a national holiday – I am now just a year short of a half-century. HMQ has decreed that today is also a national holiday, thus giving me the chance to get rid of my hangover before returning to work a year older on Wednesday.

Fortunately I didn’t have to endure the Queen’s Official party at Buckingham Palace on TV  last night, and instead went to see the fabulous Lady Boys of Bangkok who are in Cardiff all week as part of their UK Tour. They perform in the purpose-built mobile Sabai Pavilion which for this week is situated in Cardiff Bay. Not only did I enjoy the show, I also escaped being hauled up on stage and turned into part of the act. Other members of the audience weren’t so fortunate…

I suspect most of the audience there were also celebrating birthdays or other special occasions, but some were probably just trying to escape from the all-encompassing Jubilee celebrations, of which I’m sure I’m not alone in being completely bored.  So bored, in fact, that I can’t even be bothered to go into the whole Monarchist versus Republican thing.

Still, at least I wasn’t forced to work as an unpaid steward at the stupid river pageant on Sunday, and required to sleep rough under London Bridge, under threat of losing my benefits. Slavery is another fine British tradition.

I think the people who focus on getting rid of the  Monarchy are misguided. Of course it’s an undemocratic and anachronistic institution, but it only has a symbolic status; it doesn’t have any actual power. The real threat to democracy is not the Royal Family, but the rampant capitalism that taken the world’s financial systems to the brink of chaos. Only when we’ve come up with a sensible plan for the world economy in the post-capitalist era – which, in my view, is approaching rapidly – will it be worth making the effort to remove some of the tattered decorations left behind by the old system.

The ongoing financial crisis gripping the world’s economy only exists because governments were persuaded of the need to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite losses in the banking sector. Bankers like capitalism when it comes to making profits, but are happy to fall back on socialism when they make a mess. Now the bankers’ losses have turned into a crippling burden of sovereign debt that could take decades to pay off. And who profits from this? The people who made the mess in the first place.

There is an obvious solution to this problem. A one-off tax of 20% of the accumulated wealth  of the top 10% of the population would raise a staggering £800 billion for the Treasury. This option isn’t even discussed in Parliament because our politicians know their masters wouldn’t like it. And so we go on squeezing ordinary folk and letting the rich off the hook. I don’t think this can go on forever without someone figuring out that we’ve been royally had.

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Local Politics

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , , on May 6, 2012 by telescoper

By way of reminding myself for future reference I thought I’d do a quick post about the results of Thursday’s local elections.

I live in the Riverside ward within the area administered by Cardiff City Council. When I moved here in 2008 there were three Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) councillors. That was just after an election in which the Welsh Labour party had done badly, and also to some extent reflected the particular nature of the Pontcanna area which is within Riverside ward, in that it has a sizeable Welsh-speaking population many of whom work for the  media, especially the BBC.

Last year we had a by-election, won by Iona Gordon for Labour, so going into this year’s elections there were two Plaid councillors and one Labour. The result of the 2012 vote was very bad for Plaid, who lost their two remaining candidates to Labour. So in four years I’ve gone from living in a Plaid Cymru stronghold to a Labour stronghold.

The pattern in Riverside ward was repeated across Cardiff, so that Labour achieved a sizeable overall majority, with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru all losing seats:

Before the elections the Council was run by a LibDem/Plaid Coalition and such was the swing against these parties that Council Leader Rodney Berman lost his seat, although in apparent desperation to cling onto his salary he demanded two recounts before giving up. Afterwards he spoke to the press claiming that the result in Cardiff was down to Westminster politics rather than local issues.

I don’t think so.

I certainly voted on local issues and so did many of the people I talked to. The former administration of the Council was awful in many respects, including proven maladministration over the decision to build a waste incinerator. I’m not the only person to have remarked on the plethora of pointless roadworks going on in the city, including narrowing the busiest thoroughfares, and of course the ongoing over-development of Bute Park.

No, Mr Berman. You were voted out because you did a lousy job.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that Labour will do any better but I very much doubt they can do any worse. I hope I’m not proved wrong.

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On the Buses

Posted in Politics with tags , , , on April 13, 2012 by telescoper

It seems that while I’m away there’s been a to-do and a hoo-ha about advertisements on London buses. It all started with this rather innocuous advertisement placed by the campaigning organization Stonewall…

Apparently this upset a couple of minority religious sects, the overtly homophobic Anglican Mainstream and Core Issues which apparently has a mission to convert happy homosexual people into miserable heterosexual ones by a mixture of coercion, brainwashing and quack psychology. It’s strange that Christian groups like this have such an obsession with homosexuality. Aren’t there more important things for a Christian to be doing, like being kind to the poor and loving your neighbour? Anyway, these folks responded with a bus advert of their own:

Following a number of complaints about the latter, and an intervention by the Mayor Boris Johnson, Transport for London decided to remove the second set of advertisements on the grounds that

We don’t believe these ads reflect TfL’s commitment to a tolerant and inclusive London.

Actually, I think it’s a shame that the Anglican Mainstream adverts were removed. For a start, it’s one of the prices of living in a free society that you have to put up with views you don’t like. More importantly, however, the clumsy and childish nature of the tit-for-tat response from the “religious” fringe to Stoenwall’s pithy original reveals them as the mean-spirited dullards that they are. Their implicit reference to voodoo therapies as “gay cures” will hopefully now receive wider scrutiny in the media, and be exposed for what it is i.e. dogma-inspired pseudoscience. These folk would be more honest if they just took out adverts saying “We hate gay people”, but the disguise is so transparent that’s the message they carry anyway. I am confident publicity campaigns like this are counter-productive in the long run, so let them stand up and be counted. By their slogans shall ye know them.

The Advertising Standards Agency – correctly, in my view – deemed both sets of advertisements acceptable. It was a decision by Transport for London to ban the second set. I don’t think that’s contrary to the spirit of free speech. Anglican Mainstream or any other group has the right to print and distribute literature, organize demonstrations and what have you. It is however, up to newspapers, television companies and radio stations to decide whether they feel comfortable carrying advertisements by organizations promoting messages that run counter to their own code of conduct.

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The Budget – a Pictorial Guide

Posted in Finance, Politics with tags , , on March 21, 2012 by telescoper

Courtesy of the BBC Webshite.

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Worries for Science in Spain

Posted in Finance, Politics, Science Politics with tags , on March 10, 2012 by telescoper

I recently received the following email letter, concerning the state of science funding in Spain.  As well as passing it on to colleagues I thought I would post it on this blog where it might have wider impact:

Dear colleague,

You probably know very well how the global crisis is affecting southern Europe, and in particular Spain. Some of us are promoting a campaign among the worlwide scientific community to prevent our conservative government from straining even more the science system in Spain, that so many successes has obtained in the last decade, but whose future is now at stake.

In the next few weeks, and contravening recommendation from the European Commission stating that public deficit control measures should not affect Research and Development (R&D) and innovation, the Spanish Government and Parliament could approve a State Budget for 2012 that would cause considerable long-term damage to the already weakened Spanish research system, contributing to its collapse.

There is an open letter that we are sending to distinguished scientists all over the world, including many Nobel Prize Winners and Members of Academies of Science, asking them to sign, support the motion and spread the word:

http://www.investigaciondigna.es/wordpress/sign

Please do help us by signing the letter and passing it on to your colleagues.

Kind regards,

Alexander Knebe

The “open letter” you can read by clicking on the link contains some interesting – and alarming – information that has serious implications for our colleagues not only in Spain but elsewhere in Europe. Take a look, for example, at the following picture that shows the fraction of GDP being invested in science:

This isn’t just about Spain, although the situation is clearly especially serious for Spanish Science. It’s a timely reminder that the UK is also well below the EU average in terms of science spend. Is it a coincidence that the EU’s worst-performing economies are all on the right of this figure? Is that where we want the UK to be too?

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Offa’s Irrelevance

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , on February 18, 2012 by telescoper

There is leader column in today’s Grauniad about the University entrance system which, it rightly says, is “in a mess”. It’s good to have discussion of this subject in the press but the problem is that, in the typical fashion of a Guardian editorial, this piece is worthy in sentiment but misses the basic point entirely.

The reason for visiting the theme of student access to Higher Education at this point is the kerfuffle surrounding the appointment of the next boss of Offa – the Office For Fair Access – a quango set up by the previous New Labour Administration to ensure that universities do everything possible to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to go to University. A laudable aim, but doomed to failure at the outset. The reason for this is that the system of post-16 education is fundamentally flawed (as it clearly is), then no “Access Czar”, however powerful, can hope to accomplish the vast amount of reverse-engineering required to ensure that universities can cope with failures earlier in the system. Just look at how useless Ofgen has been at regulating energy prices, for example, another case of a flawed system impervious to a quango’s attempts to improve it.

The point which is missing – and which our political masters and the educational establishment alike refuse to acknowledge – is that GCE Advanced Levels are neither an adequate preparation for University study nor a reliable way to select applications on their suitability for a given course. People who actually work in Higher Education know that this is true, but the Power That Be won’t recognize it and instead maintain that A-levels constitute a “Gold Standard”. The fact is that in the hands of Examination Boards that compete for business by lowering their standards, A-levels have become nothing other more than base metal, and tarnished to boot.

If I had my way we wouldn’t use A-levels at all to determine whether a student gets a place at their chosen University. I’ve seen so many examples of absolutely brilliant students who entered Cardiff University with modest A-levels – often having not got into their first choice institution and coming to us through the clearing system – that I’m sure there are many excellent potential students out there who didn’t get into university at all. The other side of the coin is that many students who get top A-level grades across the board don’t flourish at university at all. It’s my experience that A-levels are no guide at all to a student’s ability to do well on a course.

If you don’t believe this, then ask yourself the following question. If Cambridge only takes students with grade A* at A-level, why don’t all their students end up with First Class Degrees?

Any attempt to fix the severe problems that beset the student entrance system must begin with a recognition that this is where the fault lies.

So what’s the solution? I think it is to scrap A-levels entirely, and give the system of pre-university qualifications over to the people who actually know what students need to know to cope with their courses, i.e. the universities. There should be a single national system of University Entrance Examinations, set and moderated by an Examination Board constituted by university teachers. This will provide the level playing field that we need. No system can ever be perfect of course, but this is the best way I can think of to solve the biggest problem with the current one. Not that it will ever happen. There are just too many vested interests happy with the status quo despite the fact that it is failing so many of our young people.

Good luck to whoever it is that takes over at Offa, but it won’t make any difference who’s on the bridge because the ship is already on the rocks.

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Why not pardon Turing?

Posted in History, Politics with tags , , , , on February 9, 2012 by telescoper

I couldn’t resist a quick comment or two on the government’s decision not to issue a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, in the matter of his his criminal conviction for homosexuality, recently announced by Lord McNally. This is Lord McNally’s reply to a question asked by Lord Sharkey:

The question of granting a posthumous pardon to Mr Turing was considered by the previous Government in 2009.

As a result of the previous campaign, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal posthumous apology to Mr Turing on behalf of the Government, describing his treatment as “horrifying” and “utterly unfair”. Mr Brown said the country owed him a huge debt. This apology was also shown at the end of the Channel 4 documentary celebrating Mr Turing’s life and achievements which was broadcast on 21 November 2011.

A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

In other words he is using the argument that Turing was properly convicted of behaviour that was considered an offence at the time so that conviction should not be negated.

This argument is entirely specious. A pardon is an act of clemency or forgiveness, exercised under the royal prerogative whenever advised by the government. It is not the mechanism for overturning wrongful convictions, so the observation that this conviction was lawful at the time is a red herring. Moreover, in what I consider to be an entirely analogous situation, all soldiers convicted and executed for cowardice in World War I actually received pardons in 2006. Their actions were also considered punishable at the time. This sets a clear precedent. Why is the Turing case logically different?

The answer to that is that if Turing were to receive a pardon, why should all the other gay people convicted of the criminal offence of being homosexual not also receive pardons? Why does it matter logically in this case that Turing was a brilliant mathematician who made immense contributions to the Allied effort during World War II? What about those gay men who were prevented from joining the services because of their sexuality? Why should one’s brilliance or eminence in a given field lead one to be treated differently under the law? Wouldn’t that just be saying “yes, he was gay, which is a problem, but we’ll forgive him because he made up for it in other ways”?

I think the government’s primary motivation for denying a pardon in this case is in fact the argument I just gave: that they should then have to pardon everyone convicted of homosexuality…

Of course you might ask in that case why it is that people are campaigning for a pardon for Turing in particular? Why not campaign for a universal pardon? I admit that it’s slightly illogical to do so, but it’s a question of pragmatism. Arguing the case for Turing in particular provides a focus which hopefully will lead to a wider resolution of the issue.

Asking for a posthumous pardon isn’t asking for very much, but I suspect the government is more worried about those people still alive who were convicted of homosexuality before 1967, which is when such acts were decriminalized. The case for denying pardons in this situation, when pardons were granted in the case of the executed WWI troops, therefore rests entirely on the possibility that there may be some pesky people who were convicted of homosexuality in the past but who unfortunately, unlike Turing, are not yet dead.

That’s the message this decision sends from the government to gay people.

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Graffiti Politti

Posted in Art, Politics with tags , , , on February 9, 2012 by telescoper

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