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Back to Life, Back to Reality

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

Today is the 3rd Round of the FA Cup, which traditionally marks the end of the Christmas holidays. In fact, I was going to watch Bristol City versus Cardiff City which was due to be shown live for free on Welsh channel S4C. However, the pitch is frozen and it’s been postponed. So I’ll be taking down the Christmas decorations instead…

Now that it is no longer the season to be jolly, I’ve decided to return to the theme of doom and gloom that prevailed before Christmas. In particular, you may recall that just before Christmas, Lord Mandelson wrote to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to announce a package of £135 million cuts for next year. It has now been confirmed – see the story in the Times Higher – that these cuts are on top of huge cuts arising from decisions announced in the pre-budget statement, earlier in December. Altogether these cuts will amount to over £900 million being taken from the Higher Education budget over the next three years, or about 12.5% of the total.

The reduction in budget amounts to a cut in the “unit of resource” paid by the government directly to universities, and with a review of tuition fees currently being carried out by Lord Browne, the likelihood is that students will have to pay much more in future to make up the difference if the sector is to survive at its current level. This would require lifting the cap on tuition fees, a decision on which will almost certainly be postponed until after the next General Election (due by summer 2010). The combination of immediate cash cuts and uncertainty about the future will cause widespread unease and apprehension throughout the university system, and I think it won’t be long before we start hearing of more closures.

We won’t know what the situation will be in Wales until the Welsh Assembly announces its allocations to HEFCW, the Welsh counterpart of HEFCE. I can’t say I’m optimistic, especially after reading their recent discussion document on the future of higher education in Wales. Things might work out rather better in Scotland, where the university sector seems to be valued more highly than elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Physics will be hit particularly hard by these cuts. It’s an expensive subject to run, and attracts only modest numbers of students paying customers. Savage cuts in research grants and postgraduate funding from STFC will have sent a clear message to university administrators that this is a risky subject to be investing in, a point of view likely to be reinforced by the inexplicably poor showing of physics in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.  The outlook for physics and astronomy  looks even bleaker than for the rest of the university system, at least in England and Wales.

But my fears for the New Year are even wider than that. The deep cuts that have been imposed on Higher Education will save less than £1billion over the next three years. Compare that with the estimated budget deficit for 2009/10 of £178 billion and you’ll realise that it’s a drop in the ocean. The problem is that there’s an election coming up and the government is scared of trying to tackle the problem because of fears it will alienate voters. It has ring-fenced expenditure on politically sensitive things like schools and hospitals so the only things that it can cut are things that potential labour voters don’t care so much about, such as universities. And of course it realises that doing the sensible thing  and putting up income tax would be electoral suicide, although it is absolutely certain that whoever wins the next election will have to do it.

The biggest danger with the strategy of waiting until after the election before deciding to start tackling the debt crisis properly is that before long the international markets are going to realise that Britain is basically insolvent. It is true that the stock market has  recovered from its low point in March 2009, but only slowly and uneasily. The government seems to be assuming that  the markets will politely wait until Britain has gone to the polls before passing judgement on the longer term futue. However,  if sovereign debt rather than private debt becomes a major concern, I don’t think the UK economy will survive until the election without at least one major market correction, and off we’ll be into another, probably deeper, recession. It might not be the UK that sparks this off, but the levels of sovereign debt in Central and Eastern Europe could trigger a market panic that engulfs Britain too. The prospect of a hung parliament could easily give investors the jitters too.

There have been considerable increases in the level of government investment in UK universities over the last decade.  Admittedly, not all of it has been useful – much has been wasted in extra bureaucracy, pointless initiatives and ever-growing Human Resources departments – but at least years of neglect were being reversed.  Now the next few years offer the prospect of all the increases in funding being reversed. Higher education was one of the last sectors to benefit from extra government spending, and it is the first to have it taken away again.

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Another kick in the teeth…

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on December 23, 2009 by telescoper

I shall  attempt to beat the weather tomorrow and fly up to the North-East for Christmas break. This blog will therefore be offline for a few days (if I succeed in getting airborne). I wish I had a bit of good news to post before the holiday, but I’m afraid there’s even more bad news. Yesterday, Lord Mandelson (yes,  another unelected member of the government) has written to the Chairman  of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) outlining their budget for 2010-11.

The letter confirms £180 million in efficiency savings from the 2009 Budget and an £83 million deduction following last year’s grant letter. On top of those there’s another cut of £135 million ““the higher than expected costs of student support during the economic downturn”. Of this cut, £84 million will be switched from capital baselines, leaving a £51 million cut in teaching grant.  The letter says these savings should be delivered “in ways that minimise impact on teaching and students”, but doesn’t say who should bear the maximum impact. It also says “greater efficiency, improved collaboration and bearing down on costs will need to be combined with a commitment to protect quality and access”. In other words, all we have to do is supply a high-quality service at bargain-basement prices. Easy.

The research element of the funding is held roughly constant (at the obvious expense of teaching): “we have agreed to switch £84 million from your capital baselines, so that the reductions to the teaching grant can be held to £51 million.” Although the research funding is maintained in level, Mandelson says “securing greater economic and social impact will be important over the next year”. Not thinking in the short term, then. Next year will do.

The letter also asks HEFCE to develop proposals on:

  • Creating a more diverse higher education landscape, by increasing the range of alternatives to the full-time three year degree;
  • Maximising the impact that higher education makes to the economy by supporting the programmes with highest economic and social value;
  • Supporting research concentration to underpin our world class ranking, while continuing to support excellence in research;
  • Developing a standard set of information about higher education, so that all students can exercise informed choice about courses and institutions.

What these points really mean is:

  • Realising that slashing student support and increasing fees is going to deter many students from doing a degree, Mandy wants us to make up for it by offering more part-time degrees so students can work full-time as well as studying. Bad news for laboratory-based subjects.
  • Impact again. I’ve explained what that means already
  • In the letter, Mandelson makes clear the “Government’s presumption in favour of more, rather than less, research concentration”. Apparently they don’t care about doing the best research possible, just doing it in a smaller number of places. Idiotic. More worryingly still, Mandelson asks HEFCE to suggest how to achieve this in the 2010-11 allocations. In other words he wants HEFCE to tweak the funding  allocations arising from the 2008 RAE even further to stamp out excellence that isn’t sufficiently “concentrated”.
  • One size clearly fits all in Mandy’s Discount House of Higher Education.

Finally, Mandelson leaves us with the following message of goodwill

Over the next year, moving towards a sustainable position on pensions within the sector will be a key challenge

In other words, “I’m after your pensions too….”

Merry Christmas, Lord Mandelson. It’s a good job you’ll be out on your ear after the next election. But then I assume you’ve got a nice fat pension stashed away already.

9 Comments »

Dark Squib

Posted in Bad Statistics, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on December 19, 2009 by telescoper

After today’s lengthy pre-Christmas traipse around Cardiff in the freezing cold, I don’t think I can summon up the energy for a lengthy post today. However, today’s cryogenic temperatures did manage to remind me that I hadn’t closed the book on a previous story about rumours of a laboratory detection of dark matter by the experiment known as CDMS. The main rumour – that there was going to be a paper in Nature reporting the definite detection of dark matter particles – turned out to be false, but there was a bit of truth after all, in that they did put out a paper yesterday (18th December, the date that the original rumour suggested their paper would come out).  There’s also an executive summary of the results here.

It turns out that the experiment has seen two events that might, just might, be the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that are most theorists favoured candidate for cold dark matter. However, they might also be due to background events generated by other stray particles getting into the works. It’s impossible to tell at this stage whether the signal is real or not. Based on the sort of naive  frequentist statistical treatment of the data that for some reason is what particle physicists seem to prefer, there’s a 23% chance of their signal being background rather than dark matter. In other words, it’s about a one-sigma detection. In fact, if you factor in the possibility of a systematic error in the background counts – these are very difficult things to calibrate precisely – then the significance of the result decreases even further. And if you do it all properly, in a Bayesian way with an appropriate prior then the most probable result is no detection. Andrew Jaffe gives some details on his blog.

There is no universally accepted criterion for what constitutes a definite detection, but I’ve been told recently by the editor of Nature himself that if it’s less than 3-sigma (a probability of about 1% of it arising) then they’re unlikely to publish it. If it’s 2-sigma (5%) then it’s interesting, but not conclusive, but at 1-sigma it’s not worth writing home about never mind writing a press release.

I should  add that none of their results has yet been subject to peer review either. I can only guess that CDMS must be undergoing a funding review pretty soon and wanted to use the media to show it was producing the goods. I can’t say I’m impressed with these antics, and I doubt if the reviewers will be either.

Unfortunately, the fact that this is all so inconclusive from a scientific point of view hasn’t stopped various organs getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and starting to beat about the bush with it. New Scientist‘s Twitter feed screamed

Clear signal of dark matter detected in Minnesota!

although the article itself was a bit better informed. The Guardian ran a particularly poor story,  impressive only in the way it crammed so many misconceptions into such a short piece.

This episode takes me back to a theme I’ve touched on many times on this blog, which is that scientific results are very rarely black-and-white and they have to be treated carefully in appropriate probabilistic terms. Unfortunately, the media and the public have a great deal of difficulty understanding the subtleties of this and what gets across in the public domain can be either garbled or downright misleading. Most often in science the correct answer isn’t “true” or “false” but somewhere in between.

Of course, with more measurements, better statistics and stronger control of systematics this CDMS result may well turn into a significant detection. If it does then it will be a great scientific breakthrough and they’ll have my congratulations straight away, tempered with a certain amount of sadness that there will be no UK competitors in the race owing to our recent savage funding cuts. But we’re not there yet. So far, it’s just a definite maybe.

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Space Anomaly

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 17, 2009 by telescoper

After yesterday’s marathon, I’m not planning today to post another lengthy item about the STFC prioritisation exercise which is now public. However, a number of people have asked me about an apparent anomaly in the rankings and, despite the hostile reception I received on the e-astronomer when I posted a comment there, I’ve decided to mention it briefly here in an attempt to explain what looks at first sight like a very strange state of affairs.

BepiColombo (no relation) is a Mercury Orbiter mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was selected as a result of a lengthy Europe-wide process. The UK space science community showed relatively little interest in the mission, but it had sufficient support elsewhere to avoid being cancelled about three years ago. So it was picked for the programme, and is now scheduled for launch in 2014. It will take about 6 years to reach Mercury and will take data for a year or two after that.

As is the case with these big ESA “cornerstone” missions, participating countries are called upon to bid to build instruments to fly on the spacecraft. Although this requires an additional investment from the funding agencies (in this case STFC) beyond the annual subscription, this is essentially the only way of securing a science return for UK Plc on the ESA subscription. The UK is in fact involved in two instruments on BepiColombo, a magnetometer and an X-ray spectrometer, although it is the second of these that has the main funding commitment from STFC. Roughly speaking, STFC has commissioned UK scientists and given them funds to build a UK part of BepiColumbo.

I’ll remark here that I always thought the most interesting thing about Mercury is its magnetic field – it’s quite surprising even that it has one – so given the chance I’d prefer to have seen the UK getting more involved in that. But what do I know? I’m just a physicist…

Anyway, in the UK’s recent prioritisation exercise, BepiColombo was graded 1 on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high), reflecting the relatively low interest in this mission among UK space scientists. Many projects rated 3 were cancelled, and even those rated 4 and 5 are going to have their funds cut by 15 to 20% so it looks very strange to have BepiColombo retained in the final programme, especially if you’re working on an alpha-3 project that’s just been canned.

However, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. While the UK itself wasn’t particularly interested in this mission, it did attract strong support in the rest of Europe. The UK signed up to the whole ESA menu and was thus obliged to go along with it; a la carte was not an option. ESA decides its programme, with UK input, but we do not have a veto. STFC (and previously PPARC) entered into various agreements, including a Memorandum of Understanding, from which it would be disastrous to back out.

I don’t know how much BepiColombo is costing STFC, but it’s likely to run into millions. That money could have supported other things in the astronomy programme, including postdoctoral grants. But before you jump to the conclusion that astronomy has been stitched up, remember that the ESA subscription has also opened up new areas of research through missions such as Planck and Herschel. These are a boon to our research, but the privilege of being allowed to participate in them comes at the price of having to support things the UK astronomy community is less keen on. In this particular example the politics of the situation and the need to fulfil our obligations within ESA have trumped the scientific judgement of the UK community.

To put this another way, would you want to scrap UK participation in this mission if it also meant binning our involvement in Herschel, Planck, JWST and all the rest.

I’m not advocating we scrap BepiColombo any more than we should scrap any of the other primary elements of the ESA programme. However, I do think that the nature of this balancing act should be more widely known. Otherwise, as things stood, it just looks like some vested interest has taken the funds from more deserving causes in order to promote a pet project. I hope I’ve made it clear that did not happen and that STFC had no choice but to fund BepiColombo.

I think it helps to get these things out in the open, in apparent contrast to some colleagues in the space lobby who seem to prefer to silence debate rather than engage with it. It’s no wonder people get suspicious when that’s the attitude shown by those in positions of responsibility on STFC committees.

If I’ve said anything unfair or unreasonable here please feel free to comment, as long as you can refrain from gratuitous abuse…

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Day of Reckoning

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 16, 2009 by telescoper

10.45am. I came in this morning determined to get on with some work to distract my attention from the looming announcement of budget cuts from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). I was up nearly all night worrying about the future, especially for the current generation of postdocs whose careers I’m pretty sure are going to sacrificed in large numbers to balance the books. It reminded me a bit about a poem I posted a while ago: I could not sleep for thinking of the Sky STFC.

Anyway, I’ve spent over an hour trying to write one paragraph of the paper I’m trying to finish and I can’t settle so I thought I’d start a post, with the intention of updating it as the day goes on, the picture gets a bit clearer, and I become increasingly suicidal.

The actual announcement of the result of the prioritisation exercise will appear this afternoon on the STFC website here under the heading

STFC: Investing in the Future

Who said these guys don’t have a sense of humour? What’s underneath is currently completely blank. Hang on, they might have put the result up early in that case…

Most of the blogs and tweets I follow – at least those emanating from this side of the Atlantic – are about this today, so if you’d like to keep up here are some useful links:

Paul Crowther at Sheffield has kept up with all the ongoings and downturnings at STFC and you can expect him to understand it better and quicker than the rest of us  here.

There’s a very good (and nearly anonymous) post about all this on the blog To Left of Centre.

The e-astronomer (Andy Lawrence at the ROE)  has written about this and a lot of important people have commented on it.

Rob Simpson, a PhD student here in Cardiff,  is probably expressing the fears of many younger researchers as is Sarah Kendrew who gives a postdoc perspective.

There’s a list of things astronomical that are probably about to eat the dirt at this website. My bet is that everything on their list will go, plus more. The reason is that most of the things at the bottom of the prioritisation exercise are actually fairly cheap, so just closing a few won’t plug the gap. As a colleague of mine said the other day, “It’s a big shit sandwich, and we all have to take a bite.”

11.15am. If the phrase “going forward” appears anywhere on the STFC announcement page, then I won’t be responsible for my actions…

11.50am. WICKET! Prince c Collingwood b Swann 45. Oh sorry. Wrong blog.

12.08pm. Incoming transatlantic link from the Starving Economist, from whose page I’ve pulled the following comment:

So I’d almost forgotten that other countries are out there, facing the Great Recession as well, and making really stupid decisions in the face of it. IMHO one example of blatant incompetence in an economic sense is being perpetrated by none other than the UK. We kind of look up to them, don’t we? It’s the accent or something. But they are busy tossing some of their world-renowned science, and much of their past investment in such, out the door rather than restructure some of their government funding. Talk about inertia. Their astronomy program appears to be particularly hard-hit. Interesting way to close 2009, the International Year of Astronomy.

I couldn’t agree more. It also reminded that I haven’t made enough of the irony that this is indeed the International Year of Astronomy. For a lot of people it will be the last year they’ll be doing astronomy.

12.25pm. Meanwhile, our man in Madrid, Matt Griffin has been wowing the audience with some of the new results from Herschel. I hope to be able to post a few of them later when the official workshop results go live.

12.45pm. STFC operatives have been phoning project leaders this morning to tell them the bad news. Our head of school, Walter Gear, has got his phone call telling him that our attempt to resurrect Clover will not be funded. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected…

13.15pm. It’s tea-time in sunny  South Africa (with the home side at 159-4) but here in Blighty it’s the long dark lunch break of the soul, waiting for news of the inevitable.

13.30pm. Half an hour to go. Most of the astronomers in the department have now left to travel to Madrid for the big workshop starting tomorrow. They tell me the new results probably won’t be available for public consumption until Friday (18th December). Nothing to sugar the pill, then.

13.55pm. I’m not often right, but I was wrong again. I’ve just noticed that there is already an ESA press release that includes this stunning image of a star-forming region in the constellation of Aquila made using both PACS and SPIRE observations. This is just a first look at part of an extended survey of stellar nurseries that Herschel will be undertaking over the forthcoming months.

14.00pm. And there were are, right on cue. Here is the announcement. As expected, there is a ridiculous attempt to put a positive spin on it all, but you will find immediately, sigh, another 10% cut in research grants to universities (on top of the 25% we already had) to reduce the amount of “exploitation”, plus 25% cuts in the number of PhD students and fellowships “mirroring the overall reduction in the programme”. I read that as meaning that STFC wants, in the long term, about 25% of the astronomers in the UK to go somewhere else and, preferably,  never come back.

I’ll post more when I’ve read the details.

14.10pm. So here’s a quick summary of what projects will be funded in (ground-based) astronomy:

Advanced LIGO, JCMT (to 2012), Gemini (until end 2012), ING (to 2012), KMOS, VISTA, Dark Energy Survey, E-ELT R&D, SKA R&D, SuperWASP, e-Merlin, Zeplin III; Total cost of £87m over 5 years

(the big surprise to me in there is  e-Merlin, which I thought would get the chop) and what won’t

Auger, Inverse Square Law, ROSA, ALMA regional centre, JIVE, Liverpool Telescope, UKIRT. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £16m. Total savings of £29m over 5 years

And on the space side we have the lucky ones:

Aurora, GAIA, Herschel, JWST-MIRI, LISA Pathfinder, Rosetta, Planck, ExoMars, Hinode, Cosmic Vision, Solar Orbiter, Stereo, Swift, Bepi-Colombo; Total cost of £114m over 5 years

and the losers

Cassini, Cluster, SOHO, Venus Express, XMM. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £28m. Total Savings of £42m over 5 years

Note that both Aurora and Bepi-Colombo were both rated very low on scientific grounds but have been retained in the programme, presumably for political reasons.

However, the big downside for everyone is the cut in university grants for “exploitation” that I mentioned above. STFC wants to have lots of expensive facilities, but doesn’t want to fund the modest among of staff needed to actually get science out of them. The stupidity of this decision is made even more depressing by its inevitability.

Even the top-rated projects are getting cuts to their funding. It just shows how little thinking is going on about the actual science that STCF is supposed to be supporting. Isn’t it a more sensible strategy to do a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly? It’s a mess.

14.38pm. From a Cardiff perspective this is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but is still pretty dire. The primary activities for our current astronomy programme, Herschel and Planck, are both very high in the priority list and the relativity group is relieved to see ground-based gravitational wave research, including Advanced LIGO, at the highest priority. Moreover, it looks like what I feared most of all – an immediate clawback of existing grants with consequent immediate redundancies – is not going to happen, owing to what appears to be a last-minute injection of funds from RCUK. We’re still looking at cash cuts though, and we’re vulnerable because so much of our research income comes from STFC.

14.43pm. Not on the STFC webpage, but it appears that they are not going to support LOFAR-UK either.

15.05pm. If you want to read the full outcome of the prioritisation exercise, in terms of a batting order of projects, you can download it here. It includes a recommendation that the top funded (alpha-5) projects should get a 15% cut and those at the next leveldown (alpha-4) should get a 20% cut. However, things will probably turn out worse than that because those cuts were suggested on the basis that only those projects would be funded at all. As it turns out, some alpha-3 projects have made it through also, so the cuts to the higher-rated projects must be larger to compensate. Mustn’t they?

15.24pm. I note that STFC have decided to carry on their programme of outreach activities:

Ongoing support for public outreach and science communication, through continuance of our award schemes and Fellowships, and public engagement and communications, helping to ensure new generations of children are enthused and inspired by science, and encouraged to continue study in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

..so we can kick them in the teeth when they’ve just started a scientific career.

15.30pm. Press release, from Unelected Minister for Science and Innovation, Strategic Defence Acquisition Reform, and Formula 1 Car Racing,  Lord  Drayson of Twitter.  I quote:

… it has become clear to me that there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control.   I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.

Is there a possibility that a light has gone on somewhere to the effect that something must be done to stop STFC killing University research? I hope so. If he can pull something out of the fire before March 2010, though, I’d be very impressed.

16.07pm. I may be clutching at straws here, but it is interesting to join the dots between Lord Drayon’s comment above and the following excerpt from the STFC announcement

discussions would be held in coming months with national and international partners, including universities, departments and project teams, on implementation of the investment strategy. This will include discussions with EPSRC and the University funding councils on the impact of these measures on physics departments in universities.

I doubt if EPSRC is going to come running to the rescue without a great deal of encouragement. However, taken together with the comment above by Lord Drayson, there’s at least a hint of a possibility that a way to protect grants might be found. Calling them “research” rather than “exploitation” grants would be a start…

16.18pm. Press statements from Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, President of the Institute of Physics here and Andy Fabian, President of the Royal Astronomical Society here.

17.08pm. I think that’s enough for the day. It hasn’t been good, but the nightmare scenario was that my own research grant would be terminated immediately and I’d have to break the news to my PDRA. At least that didn’t happen, not yet anyway. I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. But I’m exhausted after sleeping so badly last night, so I think I’ll close this for now. Keep your comments coming if there’s anything significant I missed…

19.45pm Before I settle down with my gramophone records for the evening, I just thought I’d remind anyone not sufficiently depressed at the state of STFC that the drastic cuts announced today do not take account of whatever share of the £600 million “efficiency savings” announced in the budget has been allocated to them. It may look bad now, but it’s probably going to get worse. On that cheery note, I’m going to have a drink and listen to Mahler.

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Interesting Times

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 14, 2009 by telescoper

The next few days promise to be extremely interesting, although there is more than a hint of the Chinese Curse in that statement! Today is the day of our annual departmental Christmas Lunch. That’s not itself the subject of any kind of curse, but if last year’s is anything to go by it may take several days to recover from it. I’m preparing myself for it mentality as I write.

Tomorrow, however, 15th December, is the date of the next meeting of the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. On their agenda is the programme of cuts that is proposed as a result of the recent prioritisation exercises initiated to try to find a way out of their ongoing funding crisis. This programme has been through various committees before reaching the Council and, if the Council accepts it, the plans will be unveiled at a press conference on Wednesday 16th (at 2pm) and those about to die will be informed immediately. I’ll try to post a summary on here as soon as I get the facts.

I don’t have any particular inside information who is going to get the chop, but rumour suggests that there will be cuts right across the board. I think it’s going to be very grim news indeed, especially because there is an additional £600 million of savings to be found over the next few years on top of the current shortfall. It’s bound to be a terrible Christmas for those about to find out their contracts are being axed, and no happy New Years for a while either.

I’m not privy to the Council discussions or to the recommendations that have been passed to them so it’s not my place to say what they should do. However, in the unlikely event that anyone from STFC Council is reading this, I hope he/she at least bears in mind that it is not – or at least it shouldn’t be – the job of the Council simply to rubber stamp everything that is passed before it. I wonder, though, if the current Council has the guts to pass a vote of no confidence in the STFC Executive? I doubt it, because there’s been no reason to have confidence in them for the past two years and no such motion has been carried.

Ironically, later in the week there’s going to be a big jamboree in Madrid, at which the initial results of the Science Demonstration Phase of Herschel will be announced. Quite a few of the Cardiff crowd are going along and will be presenting some of the wonderful things that they’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I’ve seen quite a lot of the data from the SPIRE instrument and it’s truly amazing. At least there’s some (infrared) light among the darkness. However, it’s all covered by an ESA press embargo until Wednesday…

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Author Credits

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on December 10, 2009 by telescoper

I’ve posted before about the difficulties and dangers of using citation statistics as measure of research output as planned by the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF). The citation numbers are supposed to help quantify the importance of research as judged by peers. Note that, in the context of the REF, this is a completely different thing to impact which counts a smaller fraction of the assessment and which is supposed measure the influence of research beyond its own discipline. Even the former is difficult to measure, and the latter is well nigh impossible.

One of the problems of using citations as a metric for research quality is to do with how one assigns credit to large teams of researchers who work in collaboration. This is a particularly significant, and rapidly growing, problem in astronomy where large consortia are becoming the exception rather than the rule. The main questions are: (i) if paper A is cited 100 times and has 100 authors should each author get the same credit? and (ii) if paper B is also cited 100 times but only has one author, should this author get the same credit as each of the authors of paper A?

An interesting suggestion over on the e-astronomer addresses the first question by suggesting that authors be assigned weights depending on their position in the author list. If there are N authors the lead author gets weight N, the next N-1, and so on to the last author who gets a weight 1. If there are 4 authors, the lead gets 4 times as much weight as the last one.

This proposal has some merit but it does not take account of the possibility that the author list is merely alphabetical which I understand will be the case in forthcoming Planck publications, for example. Still, it’s less draconian than another suggestion I have heard which is that the first author gets all the credit and the rest get nothing. At the other extreme there’s the suggestion of using normalized citations, i.e. just dividing the citations equally among the authors and giving them a fraction 1/N each.

I think I prefer this last one, in fact, as it seems more democratic and also more rational. I don’t have many publications with large numbers of authors so it doesn’t make that much difference to me which you measure happen to pick. I come out as mediocre on all of them.

No suggestion is ever going to be perfect, however, because the attempt to compress all information about the different contributions and roles within a large collaboration into a single number, which clearly can’t be done algorithmically. For example, the way things work in astronomy is that instrument builders – essential to all observational work and all work based on analysing observations – usually get appended onto the author lists even if they play no role in analysing the final data. This is one of the reasons the resulting papers have such long author lists and why the bibliometric issues are so complex in the first place.

Having dozens of authors who didn’t write a single word of the paper seems absurd, but it’s the only way our current system can acknowledge the contributions made by instrumentalists, technical assistants and all the rest. Without doing this, what can such people have on their CV that shows the value of the work they have done?

What is really needed is a system of credits more like that used in the television or film. Writer credits are assigned quite separately from those given to the “director” (of the project, who may or may not have written the final papers), as are those to the people who got the funding together and helped with the logistics (production credits). Sundry smaller but still vital technical roles could also be credited, such as special effects (i.e. simulations) or lighting (photometic calibration). There might even be a best boy. Many theoretical papers would be classified as “shorts” so they would often be written and directed by one person and with no technical credits.

The point I’m trying to make is that we seem to want to use citations to measure everything all at once but often we want different things. If you want to use citations to judge the suitability of an applicant for a position as a research leader you want someone with lots of directorial credits. If you want a good postdoc you want someone with a proven track-record of technical credits. But I don’t think it makes sense to appoint a research leader on the grounds that they reduced the data for umpteen large surveys. Imagine what would happen if you made someone director of a Hollywood blockbuster on the grounds that they had made the crew’s tea for over a hundred other films.

Another question I’d like to raise is one that has been bothering me for some time. When did it happen that everyone participating in an observational programme expected to be an author? It certainly hasn’t always been like that.

For example, go back about 90 years to one of the most famous astronomical studies of all time, Eddington‘s measurement of the bending of light by the gravitational field of the Sun. The paper that came out from this was this one

A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919.

Sir F.W. Dyson, F.R.S, Astronomer Royal, Prof. A.S. Eddington, F.R.S., and Mr C. Davidson.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A., Volume 220, pp. 291-333, 1920.

This particular result didn’t involve a collaboration on the same scale as many of today’s but it did entail two expeditions (one to Sobral, in Brazil, and another to the Island of Principe, off the West African coast). Over a dozen people took part in the planning,  in the preparation of of calibration plates, taking the eclipse measurements themselves, and so on.  And that’s not counting all the people who helped locally in Sobral and Principe.

But notice that the final paper – one of the most important scientific papers of all time – has only 3 authors: Dyson did a great deal of background work getting the funds and organizing the show, but didn’t go on either expedition; Eddington led the Principe expedition and was central to much of the analysis;  Davidson was one of the observers at Sobral. Andrew Crommelin, something of an eclipse expert who played a big part in the Sobral measurements received no credit and neither did Eddington’s main assistant at Principe.

I don’t know if there was a lot of conflict behind the scenes at arriving at this authorship policy but, as far as I know, it was normal policy at the time to do things this way. It’s an interesting socio-historical question why and when it changed.

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Budget Bombshell

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , on December 9, 2009 by telescoper

As pointed out by Roger Highfield, there’s some grim news for science and higher education  in today’s pre-budget report by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.

In Chapter 6 of the document there is a  list of cuts to be made in public expenditure as a response to the worse-than-expected state of the public finances. Among them you can find a whopping

£600 million from higher education and science and research budgets from a combination of changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities, science and research; some switching of modes of study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation;

The first means students will suffer because of cuts to the support they will be offered. “Efficiency savings” means what it always means, reducing the level of service to save money. I’ve no idea what “switching of modes of study” means, but I guess it has something to do with having a larger proportion of part-time students. The last bit is completely lost on me. If anyone reading this can translate it into English for me I’d be very grateful.

It is clear that the Research Councils will have to find their share of the efficiency savings. Since the one most directly relevant to me, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is already on the ropes after a series of financial catastrophes this does not augur well the level of cuts expected to be announced in the next few days as a result of their recent prioritisation exercise:

The primary focus of Council’s latest meeting was a review of the programme prioritisation now underway. The chair and deputy chair of Science Board, Professors Jenny Thomas and Tony Ryan, discussed the process of input from advisory panels to the Physical And Life Sciences Committee (PALS) and the Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science Committee (PPAN), and thence to Science Board which will meet 7-8 December to finalise its recommendations to the Council meeting on 15 December. Council agreed the importance of informing the community as quickly as possible after its meeting of the outcome.

So we can expect to hear next week who’s for the shredder. I’m sure STFC were making contigency plans for different possible outcomes, but I’m pretty sure this was close to their worst possible case. Many of us are going to have a very depressing Christmas, as the axe is sure to fall on the astronomy programme in extremely brutal fashion. The cuts will be deep and the injuries sustained will leave scars that will last for many years. The pre-budget statement shows that there’s going to be a long dark tunnel for British science with very little evidence of light at the end of it.

It won’t just be astronomy research that suffers, of course. The Higher Education sector is feeling the pinch already, with redundancies already looming at several institutions. You can place your bets as to how many departments will close over the next year or two, and how many talented scientists will be moving abroad to secure their future rather than stay in a country that seems to place so little value on science.

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Negative Impact

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , on December 2, 2009 by telescoper

After spending the best part of the last couple of days being prodded and poked and subjected to all manner of indignity in the name of medical science, I think it’s appropriate to return to the blogosphere with another rant. Before I start, however, I’d seriously like to thank everyone at the University Hospital of Wales at Heath Park  for making my visit there as brief and painless as possible. Everyone was very kind and very efficient. I’m not going to blog about the details, as Columbo doesn’t like reading about other peoples’ ailments.

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the UK government’s agenda for research, particularly science research, that includes something called “impact”. The Research Excellence Framework (REF; successor to the Research Assessment Exercise, RAE) will include such a thing:

Significant additional recognition will be given where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life

Apparently, however, they don’t really know how to do this so they have set up a number of pilot studies to try to find out. I’d feel a little more comfortable if the bureaucrats had thought about what they were going to do before announcing that our future research funds were going to depend on it. Meanwhile, applicants for grants from any of the research councils must  include a statement of the “economic or social” impact their research will have.

Understandably, those of us working in “blue skies” research are very nervous about this new regime. There is more than a suspicion that the new emphasis on impact is intended to divert funds away from “pure” curiosity driven research and into areas where it can have an immediately identifiable short-term economic benefit. This has led to a petition, with over 13000 signatures, by the University and College Union calling for the impact statements to be abandoned.

I don’t know who is going to assess these impact statements, but unless they have a flawless ability to predict future technology I don’t think fundamental physics is going to score very well at all. To see my point, consider the case of  J. J. Thomson, who is generally credited with having discovered the electron and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906. Thomson made extensive use of cathode ray tubes in his studies; these later found their way into sitting rooms across the world as essential components of the classic television set. But that took decades. I doubt if an impact panel looking at Thomson’s work – even if they were physicists rather than grey-suited bureaucrats – would have found any of it likely to lead to immediate economic benefit. The point is that when he discovered the electron it wasn’t because he was actually trying to invent the television set.

I think there are basically two possible interpretations of this impact business. One is that it is a deliberate plan to wind down fundamental research and use the money saved to subsidise UK industry. The other is that it’s another exercise in pointless box-ticking. I am in two minds. On the one hand, it is clear that the recent behaviour of the Science and Technology Facilities Council shows strong evidence of the former. Fundamental research is being slashed, yet projects involving space technology have been funded on the nod without scientific  peer review. On the other hand, the RCUK Impact “Champion”, a person by the name of David Delpy, has written in the Times Higher to defend the new agenda. Consider the following paragraph

Recently I have read that some believe it is impossible to predict the economic impact of blue-skies research. To be clear, we are not asking for accurate predictions – simply a consideration of potential. Basic research underpins all disciplines and builds pathways to new technologies with economic and social applications. It may build on an existing body of knowledge, connect to other research around the world or attract new industries to the UK. There are many routes to impact. I believe that I could write a statement indicating potential impact for any proposal I have seen, and to hear that bright academics say they can’t do it sounds a little disingenuous.

Champion Delpy thus suggests he could write a statement for any proposal he has seen, which sounds to me like an admission that what is called for is just a load of flannel. In fact, if he’s paid to be the Impact Champion perhaps he should write all the bullshit and save us scientists the need to jump through these silly hoops? Or perhaps we could get one of those little Microsoft Office Assistant things:

Hello. Looks like you’re writing an Impact Assessment. Would you like me to pad it out with meaningless but impressive-looking socio-economic buzzwords for you?

If it’s just another exercise in vacuous bureaucracy then it’s bad enough, but if it is the other possibility then of course it’s even worse. It could be the end for disciplines like astronomy and particle physics as well as the end of Britain’s history of excellence in those areas. I’ve already blogged about my view of short-termism in research funding. Essentially, my point is that government money should be used to fund precisely those things that don’t have immediate economic benefit. Those that do should be funded by the beneficiaries, i.e. commercial companies.

Politicians probably think that all this complaining about impact means that scientists  are arrogantly assuming that the taxpayer should fund them regardless of the cost or the benefit. I can only speak for myself, but I think that’s very unfair. I’m very conscious that my research is funded by Joe Public; that’s one of the reasons I think I should spend time giving public talks and doing other outreach activities. But I think the public funds me and others like me to do “useless” things because, in the end, useless things are more important than money.

The government is probably right to say that the UK economy doesn’t benefit as much from our scientific expertise as is the case with other countries. The reason for that, however, lies not with our universities and research laboratories but with our private industrial and commercial sectors which are, for the most part, managed with a very low level of competence. British universities are demonstrably excellent; our industry is demonstrably feeble. The persistent failure of the private sector to invest in research and development shows that it is in drastic need of a good shake up. British companies, not the taxpayer, should be paying for research that leads to profit for them and for that to happen they will have to learn to engage better with the University sector rather than expecting inventions to be served up on a plate funded by the taxpayer. Universities and research labs should continue do what they’re good at,  maintaining a culture within which curiosity and learning are promoted for their own sake not just as part of the dreary materialistic cycle of production and consumption that is all we seem to be able to think about these days.

So at the end I’ve come to the conclusion that, perhaps, insofar as it can be demonstrated, economic impact should be included in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. Research which leads directly to the economic gain of the private sector is  precisely the type of research that the taxpayer should not be paying for. If it can be proven that a given department has engaged in such activity, its state funding should therefore be cut and it should be told to recover the funds it has misused from the company that has benefitted from it. Economic impact should be included with a negative weight.

And if you think that’s a silly point of view, consider what happens with the other major part of a university’s activity, teaching. Students, we are told, are the primary beneficiaries of their education so they should have to pay fees. In the current regime, however, they only do so when their earnings reach a certain level. If commercial companies are to be the primary beneficiaries of state-funded research, why should they not likewise be asked to pay for it?

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The Academic Journal Racket

Posted in Open Access, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on November 18, 2009 by telescoper

I’ve had this potential rant simmering away at the back of my mind for a while now, since our last staff meeting to be precise.  In common, I suspect, with many other physics and astronomy departments, here at Cardiff we’re bracing ourselves for an extended period of budget cuts to help pay for our government’s charitable donations of taxpayer’s money to the banking sector.

English universities are currently making preparations for a minimum 10% reduction in core funding, and many are already making significant numbers of redundancies. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us here in Wales yet, but I suspect it will be very bad indeed.

Anyway, one of the items of expenditure that has been identified as a source of savings as we try to tighten our collective belts is the cost of academic journals.  I nearly choked when the Head of School revealed how much we spend per annum on some of the journal subscriptions for physics and astronomy.  In fact, I think university and departmental libraries are being taken to the cleaners by the academic publishing industry and it’s time to make a stand.

Let me single out one example. Like many learned societies, the Institute of Physics (the professional organisation for British physicists) basically operates like a charity. It does, however, have an independent publishing company that is run as a profit-making enterprise. And how.

In 2009 we paid almost £30K (yes, THIRTY THOUSAND POUNDS) for a year’s subscription to the IOP Physics package, a bundled collection  of mainstream physics journals. This does not include Classical and Quantum Gravity or the Astrophysical Journal (both of which I have published in occasionally) which require additional payments running into thousands of pounds.

The IOP is not the only learned society to play this game. The Royal Astronomical Society also has a journal universally known as MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) which earns it a considerable amount of revenue from its annual subscription of over £4K per department. Indeed, I don’t think it is inaccurate to say that without the income from MNRAS the RAS itself would face financial oblivion. I dare say MNRAS also earns a tidy sum for its publisher Wiley…

If you’re not already shocked by the cost of these subscriptions, let me  outline the way academic journal business works, at least in the fields of physics and astronomy. I hope then you’ll agree that we’re being taken to the cleaners.

First, there is the content. This consists of scientific papers submitted to the journal by researchers, usually (though not exclusively) university employees. If the paper is accepted for publication the author receives no fee whatsoever and in some cases even has to pay “page charges” for the privilege of seeing the paper in print. In return for no fee, the author also has to sign over the copyright for the manuscript to the publisher. This is entirely different from the commercial magazine  market, where contributors are usually paid a fee for writing a piece, or  book publishing, where authors get a royalty on sales (and sometimes an advance).

Next there is the editorial process. The purpose of an academic journal – if there is one – is to ensure that only high quality papers are published. To this end it engages a Board of Editors to oversee this aspect of its work. The Editors are again usually academics and, with a few exceptions, they undertake the work on an unpaid basis. When a paper arrives at the journal which lies within the area of expertise of a particular editor, he or she identifies one or more suitable referees drawn from the academic community to provide advice on whether to publish it. The referees are expected to read the paper and provide comments as well as detailed suggestions for changes. The fee for referees? You guess it. Zilch. Nada.

The final part of the business plan is to sell the content (supplied for free), suitably edited (for free) and refereed (for free) back to the universities  paying the wages of the people who so generously donated their labour. Not just sell, of course, but sell at a grossly inflated price.

Just to summarise, then: academics write the papers, do the refereeing and provide the editorial oversight for free and we then buy back the product of our labours at an astronomical price. Why do we participate in this ridiculous system? Am I the only one who detects the whiff of rip-off? Isn’t it obvious that we (I mean academics in universities) are spending a huge amout of time and money achieving nothing apart from lining the pockets of these exploitative publishers?

And if it wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the matter of inflation. There used to be a myth that advances in technology should lead to cheaper publishing.Nowadays authors submit their manuscripts electronically, they are sent electronically to referees and they are typset automatically if and when accepted. Most academics now access journals online rather than through paper copies; in fact some publications are only published electronically these days. All this may well lead to cheaper publishing but it doesn’t lead to cheaper subscriptions. The forecast inflation rate for physics journals over this year is about 8.5%, way above the Retail Price Index, which is currently negative.

Where is all the money going? Right into the pockets of the journal publishers. Times are tough enough in the university sector without us giving tens of thousands of pounds per year, plus free editoral advice and the rest, to these rapacious companies. Enough is enough.

It seems to me that it would be a very easy matter to get rid of academic journals entirely (at least from the areas of physics and astronomy that I work in). For a start, we have an excellent free repository (the arXiv) where virtually every new research paper is submitted. There is simply no reason why we should have to pay for journal subscriptions when papers are publically available there. In the old days, the journal industry had to exist in order for far flung corners of the world to have access to the latest research. Now everyone with an internet connection can get it all. Journals are redundant.

The one thing the arXiv does not do is provide editorial control, which some people argue is why we have to carry on being fleeced in the way I have described. If there is no quality imprint from an established journal how else would researchers know which papers to read? There is a lot of dross out there.

For one thing,  not all referees put much effort into their work so there’s a lot of dross in refereed journals anyway. And, frustratingly, many referees sit on papers for months on end before sending in a report that’s only a couple of sentences. Far better, I would say, to put the paper on the arXiv and let others comment on it, either in private with the authors or perhaps each arXiv entry should have a comments facility, like a blog, so that the paper could be discussed interactively. The internet is pushing us in a direction in which the research literature should be discussed much more openly than it is at present, and in which it evolves much more as a result of criticisms and debate.

Finally, the yardstick by which research output is now being measured – or at least one of the metrics – is not so much a count of the number of refereed papers, but the number of citations the papers have attracted. Papers begin to attract citations – through the arXiv – long before they appear in a refereed journal and good papers get cited regardless of where they are eventually published.

If you look at citation statistics for refereed journals you will find it very instructive. A sizeable fraction of papers published in the professional literature receive no citations at all in their lifetime. So we end up paying over the odds for papers that nobody even bothers to read. Madness.

It could be possible for the arXiv (or some future version of it) to have its own editorial system, with referees asked to vet papers voluntarily. I’d be much happier giving my time in this way for a non-profit making system than I am knowing that I’m aiding and abetting racketeers. However, I think I probably prefer the more libertarian solution. Put it all on the net with minimal editorial control and the good stuff will float to the top regardless of how much crud there is.

Anyway, to get back to the starting point of this post, we have decided to cancel a large chunk of our journal subscriptions, including the IOP Physics package which is costing us an amount close to the annual salary of  a lecturer. As more and more departments decide not to participate in this racket, no doubt the publishers will respond by hiking the price for the remaining customers. But it seems to me that this lunacy will eventually have to come to an end.

And if the UK university sector has to choose over the next few years between sacking hundreds of academic staff and ditching its voluntary subsidy to the publishing industry, I know what I would pick…

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