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Life Cycles

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on March 13, 2010 by telescoper

This was a strange Saturday. Usually I don’t do very much on the weekend, except for a bit of shopping, tidying up, and of course the crosswords. Today, however, was one of our undergraduate Open Days wherein prospective students visit the department (usually with their adoring parents) in order to have a look around, learn about our research, and meet some of the staff that will be teaching them if and when they come here.  Our usual Open Days are Thursdays, but some people find it very difficult to get here on a weekday – parents working, school commitments, etc – so we have a few Saturdays too. Since I live within walking distance of the department I don’t mind taking part.

Bizarrely, my job today was to act as a tour guide around the experimental physics labs. I must be one of the least qualified people in the School to do that, as I’m a theoretical astrophysicist. As it happens, we had two groups to show around today and the other guide was Ant Whitworth, also a theoretical astrophysicist (though one who works on star formation, not cosmology like I do). Ours not to reason why. I got a free lunch out of it anyway, and also managed to find most of the places I was supposed to take the visitors to, most of which I’ve never seen before!

Anyway, it was nice to meet and chat with so many young people interested in physics. I hope to see at least some of them in October. Funding will be very tight this year for new undergraduates and although we’ve asked the University to increase our quota to take more students in, we haven’t so far been allowed to do so. I think that is the situation around much of England too, so I think some might not find a place at their chosen institution. I hope there aren’t too many disappointments when the A-level results come out.

The recruitment of undergraduates for next year is part of the cycle of academic life. We’re currently doing the same thing with postgraduates, although fewer people are involved in that case. The end of term comes up next week, then it’s the Easter break. Soon after that we’ll be back into examinations. Some will be graduating this year and we’ll have to say goodbye to them as they make their way into the big wide world. Others will leave for the summer and return to continue their studies next year.

The cycle of academic life is embedded within that of the seasons too. Today was a beautiful spring day in Cardiff. We’ve had sunny weather for a week or so already, but yesterday and today were the first days mild enough in temperature to be called spring. Yesterday evening as I walked home I noticed it wasn’t dark at 6pm, a sign that the days are getting longer. Soon I’ll be able to walk home through Bute Park,  which I can’t do at present because the gate on the east side is closed at sunset. I did, however, go back that way this afternoon after the Open Day activities were over.

There’s a lot of construction work going on, associated with Cardiff City Council’s plan to turn Bute Park into Bute Lorry Park, and one has to complete an obstacle course to get into it on foot these days. Still, once away from the affected areas the rest of the Park is shaping up again for spring and summer and there was quite a crowd there today, just quietly enjoying it for it’s own sake. You know, like a Park should be. I’m not looking forward to having to dodge juggernauts on the way, which is what is what the future seems to have in store.

Apart from the seasons and the cycle of academic life, I also thought on the way home about another cycle that is about to unfold. A General Election is due to be held this year. It seems like yesterday that I cast my vote in the last one, while I was living in Nottingham. Now the politicians are gearing up for the interminable months of electioneering that inevitably presage such events. I’m not at all sure at this point who I’m going to vote for. I’m disillusioned with the main parties and skeptical of the alternatives.

I heard last night on Twitter of a story that Lord Mandelson has promised that “The Science Budget will be spared from cuts”. That’s interesting because we’ve already suffered plenty. Perhaps the word “further” was accidentally omitted. Not that I believe him anyway. Why should I? It’s obviously just electioneering. Science Minister Lord Drayson also recently announced on Twitter that under the next Labour government, the UK will be the best place in the world to do science. I don’t believe that either, although I do have a little more faith in Drayson than I do in Mandelson.

I think the deep cuts already made to fundamental physics have in any case guaranteed the exodus of a huge number of talented scientists. And that’s emphatically not the result of the recession. It’s the result of deliberate government policy, sustained since 2007. I won’t believe New Labour’s claims about science until they own up and reverse the damage they have done, which I don’t think they’re going to do.

I have to admit that I am very fearful not just for the future of astronomy in the UK, but for the UK as a whole. Although people talk about the country being out of recession, the fact remains that we’re teetering on the brink of insolvency. I have a deep-seated feeling  that this election is critical. Very difficult decisions will have to be made over the next two to three years, and if we get them wrong, we could be propelled into a catastrophic decline. The trouble is, I don’t trust any political party to deliver a coherent plan for the recovery. The more I think about it, the more my optimism ebbs away. I hope I’m proved wrong.

Now after all that I haven’t done the Guardian crossword yet! Where’s my pen?

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Taken for Granted

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , on March 10, 2010 by telescoper

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Astronomy group in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University was informed of the result of its recent application to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for a continuation of its rolling grant. I haven’t been able to post anything about it because it has led to some difficult personal situations and we didn’t want anyone to hear about it other than face to face from relevant members of the department.

In case you weren’t aware, a rolling grant covers a 5-year but a group holding one has to apply for renewal every three years at which point the programme of research is reviewed by a panel of experts. If this review is positive a new 5-year grant is awarded and the two years remaining on the old grant or cancelled. In the case of a negative review, however, there is two years’ grace until the funding is terminated, giving the applicants the chance to try again next time.

At least that’s what used to happen.

The previous Cardiff Astronomy roller supported 6 postdoctoral research assistants (PDRAs) as well as providing other funds for travel, equipment, infrastructure and other staff time. This time we requested an increase, primarily in order to enable us to exploit the wonderful data coming from the Herschel observatory. I joined Cardiff after the last review so I wasn’t included in the existing  funding package. However, I did succeed in getting a standard grant in last year’s grant round which provides support for a 3-year period. This time, I applied to have this grant subsumed into the rolling programme when it completes in 2012. I requested an extension to the 3-years to tide this over until the next rolling grant and bring me into phase with the rest of the group.

That was the idea, anyway. STFC is extremely short of money, so despite what we felt was a strong case for supporting our Herschel work we weren’t particularly optimistic of a good outcome, especially since  additional cuts to research grants were announced last December.  In fact the rolling grant application went in last year, but the process is extremely lengthy. Three of us had to go to Swindon last October to present the case to the grants panel. The panel had apparently completed its work by December, but when new cuts were announced they had to revisit their decisions. That’s why we were only informed at the end of February of the level of support that we would get from April 1st this year.

In fact we received two announcements, one detailing what we would have got had the panel’s original recommendations been followed, then another showing the result of the additional 15% cut decided in December. In the first we were cut from 6 PDRAs to 5, but in the second an additional position was cut leaving us with 4 surviving from the previous grant. Moreover, STFC has basically abandoned the rolling grant concept entirely, and refused us permission to let the previous grant roll out. We had no choice but to accept the new grant, which means that we have insufficient funds from 1st April 2010 to honour contracts already issued to two scientists. Not a pleasant situation to be presented with. We’ve managed to find a way of coping to the extent that nobody will be made redundant in the short-term, but it’s still a time of great uncertainty for those involved.

For my own part, the circumstances are a bit better. The panel did award me an extension of my grant to enable me to merge my research with the rest of the programme by the next review date. They also – unexpectedly, I must admit – gave me a small uplift in my existing funding. I’ll be OK, at least for another 3 years.

Overall, we’re disappointed. The outcome wasn’t as good as we’d hoped but, then again, it wasn’t as bad as we’d feared. Taking into account the standard grant I hold, we’ve gone down from 7 PDRAs to 5. I’ve heard rumours of much more drastic cuts elsewhere, and I’m sure other departments are feeling the pain much more than we are right now. I don’t have a clear picture of what has happened nationally, so I’d be grateful for any information people might be prepared to divulge through the comments box as long as you don’t betray any confidences!

The whole business of securing grant funding can be deeply frustrating, and sometimes the  decisions seem bewildering. However, I’ve been on these panels before and I know how hard it is, so I’m never tempted to whinge. In fact, I’m going to be joining the panel again for this round. Not that I’m looking forward to it very much!

However, I can’t resist ending with a comment about the current management of STFC. It really seems quite absurd to be cutting grant funding at precisely the time that Herschel and Planck are starting to deliver huge quantities of exquisite data.  I say that as a scientist of course, not a civil servant. However, the prevailing mentality at STFC – instigated by the Treasury – seems to be that science part of their remit is much less important than the technology and the facilities. Although the Science Minister Lord Drayson recently announced a proposal that purports to fix some of STFC’s difficulties, this seems more than likely to keep grant funding at a miserably low level for the indefinite future. The STFC management’s readiness to rewrite the rules governing rolling grants, cut funding at absurdly short notice, and raid the grant budget in order to solve problems elsewhere has convinced me that there will be no improvement until there are people at the top that recognize that it’s science that matters, that science is done by people, and that the way to manage those people is not to treat them the way they are doing now.

Especially if they want people to provide free advice to their panels…

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Two Cheers for Lord Drayson

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , on March 4, 2010 by telescoper

The long awaited announcement of Lord Drayson‘s review of the structure of the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC)  has finally appeared together with parallel announcements by STFC and RCUK. There’s already been a lot of reaction on Twitter about this, and it has also reached the  BBC News.

There’s actually not much in the announcement that’s particularly surprising.  The plan is to insulate STFC from the effects of currency fluctuations on its subscription commitments to international organizations, and also to share the cost of large domestic facilities across the whole science programme rather than just STFC on its own. In the shorter term (i.e. 2010-11) STFC will continue to receive some help to deal with the uncontrollable external pressures on its budget.

In the longer term it is anticipated that the subscription to the European Space Agency will move to a new UK Space Agency anyway.

These moves are all good news, and will probably help STFC to reach some level of stability. I am certainly grateful to Lord Drayson for getting involved in this process. It will be a while before we find out how it will work out in practice, but at least it’s a start.

The big problem I see is that STFC may well reach “stability”, but the position of equilibrium looks likely to be one with a very low level of grant funding for astronomy and particle physics. Perhaps I’m being excessively cynical, but it still looks to me like this financial crisis was deliberately engineered in order to squeeze fundamental research by 25%. That has now been achieved, so the grey men of the Treasury can now remove the straitjacket. I don’t see any signal that our grants will return to a sustainable level, however, so the astronomy community will probably continue to wither away. The Drayson review may staunched the flow of blood, but the patient will remain  dangerously  ill unless additional measures are taken. (Too many metaphors, Ed.)

Which brings me to a final point. Having a sensible management structure for STFC isn’t the same as having a sensible STFC management. I know I’m not the only astronomer in the UK to have lost all confidence in the current Chief Executive, Keith Mason. As long as he remains in charge I’m suspicious that any structural modifications will amount to no more than window-dressing and astronomy and particle physics will continue to be neglected in favour of technology-driven projects.

We might – just might –  have stopped going backwards, but in order to start going forwards we need a new leader.

PS. For  the best compilation of sources on the STFC crisis, see Paul Crowther’s pages here.

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Education. Education. Education.

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , on March 2, 2010 by telescoper

I can’t believe it. It’s an outrage. My world has fallen apart. Everything I used to believe in now stands in ruins.The unthinkable has happened. The Conservative Party has had a good idea.

Actually several. 

This is from the Guardian’s coverage of the story:

A Conservative government would immediately overhaul the national curriculum in English, maths and science – and hand control of A-level exam content to universities and academic experts to end “political control” , the shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, said today.

Every child would get the chance to study all three science subjects – physics, chemistry and biology – separately at GCSE and there would be a return to disciplines such as geometry and algebra in tests for 11-year-olds.

The Tories would abolish the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA), the quango in charge of curriculum design, and benchmark the exams sat by children in England against those taken by young people across the world.

Outlining his plan in a speech to the annual conference of the Advisory Committee for Mathematics Education (Acme), Gove suggested that calculus be restored to A-level physics, and statistical concepts such as randomness and prediction – which have been key to understanding the financial crisis – be part of the GCSE curriculum for the brightest students.

“We will make a radical change to the way in which A-levels are designed,” Gove said. “We must ensure that A-levels are protected from devaluation at the hands of politicians. The institutions with the greatest interest in maintaining standards at A-level are those which receive A-level students – our universities.

“The individuals with the keenest interest in ensuring A-levels require the depth of knowledge necessary to flourish at university are our teaching academics. So we will take control of the A-level syllabus and question-setting process out of the hands of bureaucrats and instead empower universities, exam boards, learned societies and bodies like Acme.”

The national curriculum would be reformed to specify core knowledge “based on global evidence for what children can and should learn at different ages”, with changes to be introduced from September 2011.

Science would be divided into the disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology, rather than the hybrid headings currently used, which include “chemical and material behaviour” and “the environment, earth and universe”.

“When we reconstruct the national curriculum, we will ensure that it is built around a basic entitlement to study each of these scientific disciplines in a proper, rigorous fashion,” Gove said.

“We will ensure that each of the three basic sciences takes its place within the curriculum, in significantly greater depth and greater detail than now. Studying what has now become known as triple science should not be an elite activity but a basic curriculum entitlement.”

There isn’t much  in this that I would disagree with. The only thing that makes me nervous is that  abolishing the QCDA and handing over curriculum control to Universities may simply be a cost-cutting measure. I can see a strong possibility that we might have to take on this duty for free at a time when we’re threatened with big cuts in our research and teaching funds.

I’d also say that I think we’d be better off scrapping A-levels entirely – they’re damaged beyond repair, in my view. “Benchmarking” could be achieved quite easily by making British students take the International Baccalaureate.

These things aside, I would strongly endorse the statement that a proper science education should be an entitlement not a privilege. People might sneer at the reintroduction of geometry into the syllabus but I think it’s an excellent idea. Too much education these days consists of the rote-learning of snack thoughts in bit-sized factoid pieces. Too little involves nurturing brains to exploit their full potential to do things other than act as memory devices.  Education is there to help people learn to apply rigorous logical thinking as well as exercising its creative problem-solving powers. Doing classical Euclidean geometry is a wonderful way to develop the idea of a mathematical proof and, in my view, cutting it out of the school syllabus was a very retrograde step and one that should be reversed as soon as possible.

We’ve been going backwards in science education for far too long. Educationalists have convinced our schools that today’s students are not sufficiently intelligent to do science or mathematics and must instead be content to reproduce it. That’s an insult to the intelligence of the younger generation and it means Universities have to do a great deal of remedial teaching before they can get on and do things properly.

I’m no Conservative, but there’s no doubt in my mind that New Labour lost the plot a long time ago so I think the Tory plans are to be applauded.

Not that I’m going to vote for them.

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Cosmic Vision

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 20, 2010 by telescoper

It’s nice to have a bit of science stuff to blog about for a change. Just this week the European Space Agency (ESA) has  announced the results of its recent selection process for part of its Cosmic Visions programme, which represents ESA’s scientific activity for the period 2015-2025.

The selection process actually began in 2007, with over 50 proposals. This list was then whittled down so that there were six candidate missions under consideration for the so-called M-class launch slots (M meaning medium-sized), and three in the L-class list of larger missions. The latest exercise was to select three of the M-class missions for further study. They succeeded in selecting three, but have also kept another, much cheaper, mission in the frame.

As far as I understand it, only two M-class missions are actually envisaged so the race isn’t over yet, but the missions still in the running are:

PLATO.  The PLATO mission is planned to study planets around other stars. This would include terrestrial planets in a star’s habitable zone, so-called Earth-analogues. In addition, PLATO would probe stellar interiors by through stellar seismology. In some sense, this mission is the descendant of a previous proposal called Eddington. (PLATO stands for PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars – I’ll give it 3/10 for quality of acronym).

EUCLID. Euclid would address key questions relevant to fundamental physics and cosmology, namely the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers are now convinced that these substances dominate ordinary matter. Euclid would map the distribution of galaxies to reveal the underlying ‘dark’ architecture of the Universe. I don’t think this is meant to be an acronym, but I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s European Union Cosmologists Lost in Darkness?

SOLAR ORBITER. Disappointingly, this is neither an acronym nor a Greek person. It would take the closest look at our Sun yet possible, approaching to just 62 solar radii. It would deliver images and data that include views of the Sun’s polar regions and the solar far side when it is not visible from Earth.

These are the three main nominations, but the panel also decided to endorse another mission, SPICA, because it is much cheaper than the approximately 500 Million Euro price tag on the other contenders. SPICA would be an infrared space telescope led by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA. It would provide ‘missing-link’ infrared coverage in the region of the spectrum between that seen by the ESA-NASA Webb telescope and the ground-based ALMA telescope. SPICA would focus on the conditions for planet formation and distant young galaxies.

Many of Cardiff’s astronomers will be very happy if SPICA does end up being selected as it is the one most directly related to their interests and also their experience with Herschel which is, incidentally,  continuing to produce fantastic quality data. If SPICA is to happen, however, extra money will have to be found and that, in the current financial climate, is far from guaranteed.

Which of these missions will get selected in the end is impossible to say at this stage. There are dark mutterings going on about how realistic is the price tag that has been put on some of the contenders. Based on past experience, cost overruns on space missions are far from unlikely and when they happen they can cause a great deal of damage in budgets. Let’s hope the technical studies do their job and put realistic figures on them so the final selection will be fair.

Whatever missions fly in the end, I also hope that the Science and Technology Research Council (STFC) – or whatever replaces it – remembers that these are science missions, and its responsibility extends beyond the building of instruments to fly on them. Let’s to hope we can count on their support for research grants enabling us to answer the science questions they were designed to address.

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Results and Transfer Gossip

Posted in Finance, Football, Science Politics, Uncategorized with tags , , on February 6, 2010 by telescoper

I had to skip the usual trip to the Poet’s Corner last night and go home early because the general state of fatigue I’ve been in suddenly morphed into a fever. I went home at 5, went straight to bed, and it was only Columbo’s frantic pawing that woke me up several hours later. I had not only missed a leaving party for Kate Isaak, who is now off to work for the European Space Agency, but also slept all the way through Newcastle United’s splendid 5-1 hammering of Cardiff City in last night’s Coca Cola Championship match at St James’ Park.

Despite home advantage, and the fact that Newcastle won the corresponding away fixture here in Cardiff, I thought this tie would be pretty difficult for Newcastle so I was overjoyed to see the result when I finally roused myself from feverish slumbers. It seems that Newcastle’s recent signings in the January transfer window actually came good, especially Wayne Routledge who gives the side a much-needed injection of pace down the wing. Cardiff City, on the other hand, didn’t buy any players at all because they need all the cash they’ve got to pay off an outstanding tax bill and thwart various winding-up orders that have been served on them. The turbulence behind the scenes seems to have worked its way onto the pitch: the blues are definitely the most erratic team in the division, winning 6-0 only a week or so ago and then getting thrashed 5-1 yesterday.

And just to make  my allegiances clear, I do have a soft spot for Cardiff City and do want to see them do well – except when they’re playing Newcastle. Once a Geordie, always a Geordie…

Results of a different kind were the topic of discussion around the School of Physics & Astronomy yesterday, as it was the official day for tutors to hand the results of the 1st semester exams to their tutees. It’s always great to see students leaving their tutor’s office with a big smile on their face, which happened rather a lot yesterday.  Some, of course, got more disappointing news, but to them I’d just say that it’s only half way through the year so there’s plenty of time to recover. Stick at it, and don’t let setbacks get you down.  I hope to see even more happy faces in June than I did yesterday….

Football teams like Cardiff City aren’t the only things to be enduring financial uncertainty these days, either. Even the Premiership clubs of the university sector are feeling the pinch. Many institutions around the country are planning departmental closures and redundancies, but you know it’s serious when it hits the big colleges in London. Last week University College (UCL) and Imperial both announced plans for large-scale layoffs, and this week they were joined by King’s College which plans to sack 205 academics, including 30 in the School of Physical Sciences and Engineering.

The background to all this is that the cuts announced by Lord Mandelson in December have now been officially passed on to English universities by HEFCE, but one suspects also that in some cases this is being used as a cover for other management decisions. Imperial, for example, is going ahead with the purchase of new property in Wood Lane for a cool £28 million at the same time as cutting academic positions costing a fraction of that.

Amid all the gloom, however, it is nice to be able to report some good news. Cardiff University was almost declared bankrupt in the 1980s when it failed to get to grips with the cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative  government which were similar in scale to those being implemented by New Labour. It was brought back from the brink, however, and since then has managed its finances with almost excessive caution. Other universities have scored spectacular successes in the League tables by spending money freely on fancy research initiatives and overseas campuses, but in the new reality of austerity Britain these may turn out to have been risky ventures.

By contrast, “Safe and Steady” has long been the motto in Cardiff. We might not have done brilliantly in the RAE but the insitution has an extremely sound financial base that should put it in as good position as any to withstand these difficult times. Moreover, we’ve just heard that the University management has agreed that the School of Physics & Astronomy can go ahead and make  four new academic appointments, and that these will be accompanied by substantial startup packages with which the new appointees can begin to equip their own laboratories. This involves a considerable investment in the School from the University’s central coffers and I think it’s fantastic news. I doubt if many UK universities are going to be investing so heavily in physics at this time, so this is an extremely welcome development. It’s always nice to buck the trend.

The adverts will be going out pretty soon, so the transfer window is about to open.  I look forward to meeting our new signings in due course, and I’m confident that they’ll help us climb up the League.

If only I could say the same for Cardiff City…

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Value for Money?

Posted in Art, Biographical, Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on February 4, 2010 by telescoper

Looking at the BBC website at lunchtime while I munched a sandwich I’d bought for £1.40, the item that really caught my eye was a story about the sale of a sculpture at Sotheby’s for £65 million. The starting price for this particular work (L’Homme qui Marche by Alberto Giacometti) was set at £12 million, but only took a few minutes for the bidding to reach its final level. An anonymous bidder now gets to keep the sculpture, which will probably now be kept in a private location, or possibly even a bank vault.

Let me make it clear at the start that I’m not going to embark on a rant about modern art in general or Giacometti in particular. A couple of years ago I went to an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, just north of Copenhagen (in Denmark) and I found his strange elongated figures really fascinating. He started out making small ones that he stretched and scratched  obsessively to get the shape he wanted. Over time the figures got larger, but he didn’t make many of them. I suppose the rarity of his work has something to do with why they are so valuable, which they obviously are.

But when I say they’re fascinating, I don’t necessarily mean £65 million worth of fascinating….

The point that has always really fascinated me about this sort of thing is exactly how something can acquire such an absurdly high commercial value and what it is that makes any collector decide to pay such a huge price. A work of art obviously has some intrinsic worth, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any simple relation between aesthetic, technical or historical considerations and the market value. That’s not just the case for modern art, either. Go to the Louvre in Paris and you’ll see hordes of people clamouring around a small, drab and frankly rather uninteresting painting called the   Mona Lisa –  and ignoring the dozens of wonderful things all around them in the same room, and even in the corridor leading to it. Some process – I don’t know what – has assigned a particular status to this painting and not to others which seem to me to have at least as much value, in an artistic sense. Not that I’ve any right claim my judgement is any better than anyone else’s, of course.

A similarly mysterious process goes on with other collectible things. Take wine, for example. I like a glass of wine now and then – or rather more often than that, if truth be told. I am, however, very fortunate that I don’t have a particularly discerning palate. I can tell the difference between cheap-and-nasty stuff and pretty good stuff but, generally speaking, my taste has saturated by the time the price reaches about £25 a bottle, and often long before that. That’s great because it means I can have a perfectly enjoyable evening drinking a bottle costing £15 when if I’d been an expert I would be unsatisfied unless I spent a lot more.

Years ago I went with a friend of mine to a house clearance in rural Sussex. He was an interior designer and he liked to buy old furniture from country houses and do it up to sell on. It’s a good plan, actually – old furniture is far better made than the modern stuff. Anyway in the middle of a whole load of junk was a case of vintage wine. Not just any wine, either. It was, in fact, Chateau Petrus – one of the finest Pomerols. It wasn’t a specialist auction, however, and nobody seemed to think it had any value. Bidding was slow when it came up in front of the auctioneer so I bid for it. In the end I bought the case (12 bottles) for about £300. When I got it home I realised what I had got. It turned out £300 per bottle would have been cheap. I was scared to open any of the bottles in case the wine was off or I didn’t like it, so I put it away. I sold the case some years later for about £6500.

Having told that story though, my main point is to wonder out loud about those wines that cost thousands of pounds per bottle. There is a roaring trade in these things – even ones that are two hundred years old – but I don’t think their value has anything to do with how  they are likely to taste. In the local wine merchant – conveniently located about 20 yards from my house – price is a good indicator of taste, but the scaling doesn’t apply at the extreme end of the fine wine market. Some other process is involved.

A house also  has a value that doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than what someone will pay to buy it.  But what sets this price? The market, obviously, but that is guided and controlled by Estate Agents who influence values in strange and subtle ways.

I suppose this all just goes to show I don’t know anything about economics, a point I’m now no doubt going to reinforce.

Governments also have to decide how much to spend on different things: health, education, defence, and so on. You can argue with the way their priorities work out at any given time, but the thing that baffles me is what the process is that leads to a decision to spend X on hospitals and Y on education. How can anyone possibly decide the relative value of £1 spent on health versus £1 spent on education?

I strongly support the notion that the government should support the performing arts, such as  the Opera. But how much it should spend is an unfathomable question to me. Some will say nothing, some would say more. Who decides? Clearly someone does.

And that brings us back home to science. The ongoing ructions about the financial crisis  at the Science and Technology Facilities Council –  unfolding in front of a parliamentary select committee –  seem to me to be really about the process by which value is assigned different bits of science by the people who hold the purse strings but probably don’t know much at all about science. I place a high value on astronomical research and, within that field, on cosmology. But that’s a personal judgement. Others will disagree. We all end up working in those areas we find  more interesting than the others so we can’t really be unbiased, but I think I’m more even-handed than many when it comes to the scientific merits of other fields. Having said that, it would take a lot of doing to convince me that the scientific value for money involved in sending, say, another probe to the Moon was anything like as high as, say, exploiting the full potential of the Herschel observatory.

Worse still, all spending on  blue skies research looks like to be cut back severely at the expense of shorter-term activity that leads to immediate commercial spinoffs. Commerce clearly trumps curiosity in the value game. If the STFC debacle was – as certainly seems likely to me – the result of a deliberate high-level decision, then who was it and what were their reasons for placing so little value on the quest to understand the most fundamental properties of the Universe?

And why doesn’t science have patrons like the anonymous buyer of the Giacometti figure? £65 million would solve an awful lot of STFC’s problems, as long as we stop certain people from wasting it on silly moon missions….

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Letter to Lord Drayson from George Efstathiou

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on January 25, 2010 by telescoper

I just had a note from George Efstathiou, Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, about a letter he wrote to Lord Drayson about the STFC crisis. It’s  very much in line with what I was saying a few days ago. It’s good to see someone with some clout stepping into the ring, taking the gloves off, and not pulling his punches (That’s enough boxing metaphors, Ed.)

With George’s permission, I’m including the full text of his letter below; the added links are mine.

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25 January 2010

Lord Drayson
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
Castle View House
East Lane
Runcorn, WA72GJ

Dear Lord Drayson,

I would like to make a few comments concerning your structural review of STFC. I was a member of the Astronomy and Planetary Sciences Board of SERC (1991‐1993) and a member of PPARC Council (2001‐2004) and so I have some experience of previous funding systems.

Overall, I support the proposals put forward by the Royal Astronomical Society Forum and the Institute of Physics. It is extremely important that research grants remain in a reorganized Council rather than transferred to EPSRC. A transfer of the grants line to EPSRC, particularly at a severely reduced level following the STFC prioritization exercise, would recreate the difficulties experienced in the days of SRC/SERC that PPARC was designed to solve. (Namely, the long‐term nature of Particle Physics and Astronomy projects and their reliance on large international organizations).

In analysing the nature of a restructured Council, it is worthwhile reviewing some of the reasons for the difficulties at STFC, and the role of the Chief Executive in exacerbating those difficulties.

Firstly, Keith Mason has openly pursued a policy of transferring funds into areas with potential for short term economic impact at the expense of grant funding to Universities. STFC funds have therefore gone into facilities, innovation campuses and initiatives such as the Aurora programme. Together with a sympathetic Chairman and a Council that included three members of the Executive, this policy went (largely) unchallenged for the first two years of STFCs existence, though I know of not a single research scientist who agreed with it. Financial mismanagement of this policy finally caught up with STFC last year, leading to savage cuts of more than 35% in the grants line (the only `flexible’ part of the STFC budget). These cuts are more savage than the deepest cuts experienced during the Thatcher years. Mason’s attempt to downplay these cuts by referring to previous low points in grant funding is, frankly, risible. Government should be indignant at Mason’s attempt to write‐off the investment in science between the years 2002‐‐2007, which was intended (and succeeded) in improving the volume and quality of research in Universities.

As an example of the tension between economic impact and scientific excellence, BNSC published the Space Exploration Review recommending an increase in funding of £150m per annum and highlighting the MoonLITE bilateral mission. A few days later, the STFC prioritization exercise ranked MoonLITE `below alpha’. Any restructuring must tackle the difficulties of tensioning projects which may have economic benefits but little scientific merit against academic excellence. In my view, academic excellence should be the priority for any restructured Research Council.

Secondly, Mason has held the view (most recently expressed at the Astronomy Forum meeting earlier this month) that the UK has too many scientists involved in exploiting facilities in comparison to the number engaged in developing, building and operating facilities. Again, I know of not a single research scientist who agrees with this view. The science budget has increased significantly over the last decade. The expansion of astronomy and particle physics in UK Universities has been a rational response to the increased availability of funding. As a member of the 2008 RAE Physics panel I was able to see at first hand how this investment has translated into research of the highest international quality. The deep STFC cuts to the grants line will inevitably weaken the research base in UK Universities and may even threaten the viability of some Physics departments. The shock wave following these cuts will eventually be felt across the entire UK science base. Any restructured Research Council must sustain an acceptable balance between support of UK Universities and investment in facilities.

STFC has not given high enough priority to scientific excellence. This is the primary cause of the problems over the last three years. It is why scientific excellence will suffer following the STFC prioritization exercise. This unfortunate outcome has been achieved during a period of increased funding to STFC and despite the allocation of financial bailouts.

Any restructured Research Council must have academic excellence at its core. It must also have a Chief Executive who recognises and values academic excellence.

Yours sincerely

George Efstathiou

cc Professor Michael Sterling, Chairman STFC
Phil Willis, Chair, House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee

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The Management

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on January 24, 2010 by telescoper

After my little trip to Denmark last week, it’s now time to settle into the routine of academic life. Teaching starts tomorrow, and I’m actually quite looking forward to it. I find teaching very rewarding, in a way that’s quite different from research, to the extent that I would hate to see further separation between the two in British universities. Call me old-fashioned.

Inevitably, though, it’s been research that’s been occupying my mind for the past few days. I’ve posted a couple of times recently about the ongoing review of the way astronomy and particle physics research are funded here in the United Kingdom (see here and here). The Science Minister, Lord Drayson, seems keen to find a way to stop research grants  being massacred by overruns elsewhere in the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). His aim appears to be come up with a plan before the end of February to find a way of preventing the situation from getting any worse for science. No doubt the idea of a dedicated British Space Agency will also be thrown into pot, so that the bit of STFC’s current portfolio that deals with space things will probably be hived off elsewhere.

The major question that is occupying the minds of scientists – but perhaps not those of the bureaucrats – is whether the research grants currently dispensed by STFC will continue to be held by whatever STFC morphs into or whether they should go elsewhere, probably to EPSRC.  I sense a predisposition towards the former possibility among many of my colleagues. I recognize that the EPSRC route is not without its problems, but I fear that if we remain with STFC then not only is there a very strong probability that recent history will repeat itself but that the damage done by the current STFC structure will be irreparable.

Behind all this is the issue of why STFC is in such a mess in the first place. When it came into being in 2007, it was immediately saddled with an £80 million operating deficit. Why? There are two theories. One is that it was a mistake, resulting from inept STFC management. The other is that the creation of STFC presented various grey eminences that inhabit the superstructure of British science politics represented by RCUK  with an opportunity to slash expenditure on “useless” science (i.e. particle physics and astronomy) without having to go through the tedious rigmarole of public consultation. I don’t know which of these is the truth but, given the choice, I’d put my money on the latter.

Note the behaviour of STFC’s Chief Executive after the yawning gap was discovered in his organization’s finances. If it was a result of management incompetence then he should have been fired. If he was stitched up by RCUK then the only honorable thing to do for someone with the best interests of science at heart was to resign in protest. Neither of these things happened. This leads me to the interpretation that Professor Mason was a willing participant in the game, a  point of view that is supported by his performance at the Town Meeting in December 2007 where the STFC’s delivery plan was presented to an audience of scientists. The document containing the delivery plan is notable for its upbeat and self-congratulatory tone containing no hints of the financial catastrophe engulfing the organization. It was clearly designed to say exactly what the Chief Executive’s political masters wanted it to say. The gross dishonesty of this publication was revealed by Professor Mason’s presentation, wherein he told us scientists something rather closer to the truth, that STFC was facing financial oblivion. It was an appaling performance.

After a botched and panicky initial attempt to cut science projects, and a public dressing down by the House of Commons select committee, it took another two years for its latest Programmatic Review to emerge. Once again, though, the management of STFC put an absurdly glowing light on the wreckage of UK astronomy, nuclear and particle physics; calling it “Investing in the Future” and making light of the devastating cull of research grants and projects that it is proposing. The message that I glean from all this is that STFC’s problems stem from deliberate policy at a high level, probably at the Treasury, and carried out enthusiastically by a hierarchy of yes-men who will do whatever they are told regardless of what it means for science. Some of these creatures may have started out as scientists, but they’ve definitely gone native when lured into the Whitehall jungle.

Of course the public purse is limited. We have to decide how much to spend on different bits of science. Astronomy or particle physics (or any other discipline, for that matter) has to make its case. Somehow a balance must be struck between all the competing demands for cash. Maybe Britain does have too many astronomers. Or too many particle physicists. Who knows?  My point is: who decides? This kind of thing is too important to be settled behind closed doors by  individuals who lap up whatever their masters feed them like mother’s milk.

The STFC debacle  is just one manifestation of the rampant managerialism that is strangling British civil society. Gone are the days when scientists knew best about science, doctors knew best about medicine and teachers knew best about education. Now we’re all subservient to managers who think they know best about everything. Things are no better at EPSRC, an organization notorious  for its top-down structure, mania for meaningless initiatives, and wholehearted endorsement of the ill-considered impact agenda. What I am saying is that the Haldane principle is dead and buried.

While I was in Copenhagen last week attending the inauguration of the Discovery Center I was struck by the differences between how research is funded in Denmark and in the United Kingdom. This new initiative in particle physics and cosmology is funded as a rolling programme by the Danish National Research Foundation (Danmarks Grundforskningsfond). Way back in 1991, Denmark part-privatised its pension system and a large chunk of the resulting cash was invested in scientific research. The organization funds programmes across an entire range of disciplines (including arts and humanities)  for periods of10 years (or, more precisely, 5 years with an extension to 10 after satisfactory performance; most get extended). The primary criterion for funding these programmes is scientific excellence and the vast bulk of the funds goes to funding PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at Danish universities.

A representative of the foundation (whose name I have regrettably forgotten) spoke at the official inauguration of the Discovery Center to describe the parent organization’s philosophy. In a nutshell his message was: “You’re the scientists. You know about science. We don’t. We’re here to help you hire the best people, then get out of your way. Excellence is what we want to fund, wherever it lies. That’s our only agenda.” As it happens, two out of the nine programmes funded in the last round, including the Discovery Center, were in particle physics.

Of course I was jealous. I was also struck by how similar this organization sounds to the suggestion I made in a blog post before christmas. Of course Denmark is a much smaller country than Britain and it has  a very different economic structure. I’m not saying we could simply copy what the Danes have done without any modification. But the  real reason why such an organization could never get set up in Britain, is that The Management would never allow it…

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A Letter to Lord Drayson

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on January 12, 2010 by telescoper

As reported in the Times Higher, the five chairs of the advisory panels that took part in STFC‘s recent prioritisation exercise have circulated an open letter to Lord Drayson. I’ve taken the liberty of posting the entire letter here.

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UK fundamental science at a crossroads

An open letter to Lord Drayson, Minister for Science

On 16 December the Science and Technology Facilities Council announced the outcome of its “programmatic review”. The results present a dismal future for researchers in fundamental science: particle physics, nuclear physics, astronomy and space physics. In order to balance its books STFC announced cuts to these frontier science discovery areas amounting to about £28m per annum starting in 2012. Although STFC’s total annual budget is more than £450m, the cuts have been targeted at the roughly £175m annual spend on UK projects in these fundamental science areas. The cuts include:

  • an across-the-board reduction of 25 per cent for training of our brightest young scientists;
  • termination of involvement in more than 20 cutting-edge science projects in which the UK plays leading roles;
  • cancellation of support for an additional 20 projects, currently at the early R&D stage, which were planned to form the foundations of the future science programme 10-20 years from now, and in which the UK has international leadership.

 

Even those projects lucky enough to be continued will face cuts advertised at between 10 and 25 per cent, and this on top of cuts to STFC’s university physics grants, announced in the past 12 months, of 25 per cent across the board.

As chairs of STFC’s science advisory panels we represent the several thousand members of the UK’s particle physics, nuclear physics, astronomy and space physics communities. On 21 December we wrote to Professor Michael Sterling, chair of STFC Council, to express, on behalf of our communities, dismay at this terrible outcome. We pointed out the obvious consequences:

  • the waste of much of the significant prior investment made by the UK in forefront science;
  • the loss of hard-won UK leadership in many significant areas;
  • the lack of opportunity for developing future UK strategic opportunities for advancing the scientific frontier, with relevant knowledge exchange impact, on the 10-20 year horizon;
  • the extremely negative message to bright young people about the importance the UK places in cutting-edge, fundamental science, and the career opportunities that follow from training in these areas.

 

The Prime Minister has publicly stated his commitment, which we strongly agree with, to preserve funding for science, seeing it as a key part of the solution to the current economic difficulties. Given that, how could more than 40 internationally leading science projects, and hundreds of studentships, be identified for the chop?

The problem stems from the setting up of STFC in April 2007 as an agency for funding both fundamental science and large (mainly accelerator- and laser-based) facilities used by scientists in other disciplines: for example, biologists and chemists, whose research is funded by the other UK research councils. By December 2007 STFC was already in financial difficulty and announced the need to save £80m over the following three years. The House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee investigated and concluded that STFC had been set up with a shortfall of funds needed to support both the science programme and development and operation of the facilities, and that it had managed the situation very poorly. These problems, inherent at STFC’s inception, have led inexorably to its pre-Christmas announcement to cut the science funding in order to support the operation of its facilities.

The situation has been exacerbated by the collapse of the pound against major currencies: STFC pays about £200m annually in subscriptions (in Euros and Swiss francs) for UK scientists to access major European research centres: CERN, the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and others.

Unless the Government takes action, STFC’s science cuts will almost inevitably lead to:

  • irreparable damage to the high international reputation of the UK in these areas: we will be perceived as an untrustworthy partner in global projects;
  • a “brain drain” of the best UK scientists, university lecturers and professors to positions overseas;
  • a weakening of our capability to attract the best of overseas scientific talent to the UK;
  • a consequent reduction in the provision and quality of UK university physics teaching and training that are essential for the UK’s economic future.

 

It is obvious that STFC cannot continue to stagger between financial crises on an almost annual basis. It is structurally incapable of managing both an internationally leading fundamental science programme and domestic facilities that are used primarily by scientists funded by other research councils. Both the science programme and the facilities operations need to be properly supported by dedicated agencies, and the UK’s globally leading research in particle physics, nuclear physics, astronomy and space physics needs to be protected against exchange rate fluctuations.

Philip Burrows (University of Oxford) – Particle Physics Advisory Panel

Michele Dougherty (Imperial College London) – Near Universe Advisory Panel

Martin Freer (University of Birmingham) – Nuclear Physics Advisory Panel

Philip Mauskopf (Cardiff University) – Particle Astrophysics Advisory Panel

Bob Nichol (University of Portsmouth) – Far Universe Advisory Panel

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