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Clover Story

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags Clover, Physics World., STFC on April 2, 2009 by telescoper

Just a quick note for those interested in the story of Clover, Physics World have run a news item on their website.

You may also like to read the article by Alan Heavens over on the e-astronomer.

Note added on Monday 6th April: the Nature slant on the story is now published online, complete with quote from yours truly…

Another update (9th April). Welsh Newspaper The Western Mail has now run a story on the clover cancellation and there was a short item on the BBC Radio Wales News this evening.

Another update (14th April). A statement from Walter Gear, Principal Investigator of the Clover project, about the current status of Clover has been placed on the Cardiff University School of Physics & Astronomy web pages.

Update: 22nd April 2009. Here is the text of a piece I wrote for today’s Research Fortnight:

An undeserved end

Science projects don’t get much purer than CLOVER, an experiment designed to search for evidence of the existence of primordial gravitational waves by making ultra-sensitive measurements of the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background.

From its vantage point in the Atacama Desert in Chile, CLOVER was intended to probe the state of the universe when it was less than a billionth of a billionth of a second old, to test our understanding of the Big Bang theory. Unfortunately, the Science and Technology Facilities Council says it is cancelling funding for the experiment.

Gravitational waves have been studied theoretically and are known to be intimately related to the structure of space-time itself, the understanding of which is arguably the fundamental goal of modern science. The first discovery of the presence of gravitational waves will lead to the emergence of a brand new area of physics. In anticipation of this new science, the CLOVER team—entirely British, with members in the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester—has established a technical capability in the UK that is second to none. Cancellation will prevent the team from making direct experimental observations of the universe that would not only have been of immense scientific importance, but could also have had deep cultural significance.

So if CLOVER is so good, why is it being cancelled?

The answer lies in an unfortunate combination of circumstances. CLOVER was initially funded in 2004, with
£4.8 million from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, one of the forerunners of the STFC. This budget was not sufficient to complete the experiment, for two main reasons. First, the original grant did not include the costs of setting up a site, which was originally to be provided by overseas collaborators in Antarctica. When this option fell through, the cost of the alternative site in Chile (approximately £0.8m) had
to be found. Second, there were delays due to technical challenges, such as the need to develop some of the world’s most sensitive far-infrared superconducting cameras. So, the CLOVER team was unable to complete the project within the original budget, and went back to the STFC to request extra money. This brought a third factor into play.

Since 2007, the research councils, including the STFC, have changed their method of funding university-based research. In the new full-economic-costs regime, costs are substantially higher than at the time of the original award. These elements combined to leave the CLOVER team with a shortfall of about £2.6m, bringing the overall cost to completion to about £7.5m, although the increase in resources required would be only around 20 per cent if calculated on the pre-FEC basis of the initial funding.

Unfortunately, despite receiving strong support from the scientific community and being rated extremely highly in recent prioritisation exercises, the STFC Council has decided that it does not have the funds and has abruptly cancelled the CLOVER experiment.

The background to this decision is one of dire financial circumstances within the research council. Created in 2007, the STFC was set up with insufficient funding to continue all the programmes that it inherited from its predecessors. The deficit (of around £80m) has led to swingeing cuts in research grants over the past year. The pound has also fallen dramatically against the euro, increasing the cost of subscriptions to the European Space Agency, Cern and the European Southern
Observatory. The balance sheet of the STFC is now in total disarray. CLOVER is the first casualty in what may become a large-scale cull of fundamental science projects.

The STFC’s decision on CLOVER means that an important instrument will be lost, and the millions already spent on it wasted. The technology will be difficult to replace. The many gifted scientists who have been working on CLOVER will have to leave the UK to continue in the field, and are unlikely to return. Their fate is unlikely to tempt younger people into a career in science either.

In cancelling CLOVER, the council has effectively closed the door on UK involvement in cosmic microwave background science in general, an area that has already led to two Nobel prizes for physics. The decision also provides worrying evidence that the STFC seems to be turning away from fundamental science towards technology- driven projects. For example the lunar probe Moonlite has recently won funding for initial development studies without ever passing through the rigorous peer review required of CLOVER. If this really is the way the STFC is going, then we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for British astronomy.

The Waste Land

Posted in Poetry, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags Clover, Keith Mason, Poetry, STFC, T.S. Eliot on April 1, 2009 by telescoper

APRIL is the cruellest month, sending
Clover into the dead land, ditching
The great for the dire, erring
Dead heads caused spring pain.
Keith Mason fucked it up, smothering
Good science with tons of shit, ending
Our little dream; we’re the losers.

After The Waste Land, Part I: The Burial of the Dead, by T.S. Eliot.

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Clover and Out

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags B-mode, Clover, Cosmology, gravitational waves, Inflation, parity, Physics, Quiet, Spider, STFC on March 31, 2009 by telescoper

One of the most exciting challenges facing the current generation of cosmologists is to locate in the pattern of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background evidence for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by models of the Universe that involve inflation.

Looking only at the temperature variation across the sky, it is not possible to distinguish between tensor (gravitational wave) and scalar (density wave) contributions (both of which are predicted to be excited during the inflationary epoch). However, scattering of photons off electrons is expected to leave the radiation slightly polarized (at the level of a few percent). This gives us additional information in the form of the polarization angle at each point on the sky and this extra clue should, in principle, enable us to disentangle the tensor and scalar components.

The polarization signal can be decomposed into two basic types depending on whether the pattern has odd or even parity, as shown in the nice diagram (from a paper by James Bartlett)

The top row shows the E-mode (which look the same when reflected in a mirror and can be produced by either scalar or tensor modes) and the bottom shows the B-mode (which have a definite handedness that changes when mirror-reflected and which can’t be generated by scalar modes because they can’t have odd parity).

The B-mode is therefore (in principle) a clean diagnostic of the presence of gravitational waves in the early Universe. Unfortunately, however, the B-mode is predicted to be very small, about 100 times smaller than the E-mode, and foreground contamination is likely to be a very serious issue for any experiment trying to detect it.

An experiment called Clover (involving the Universities of Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester) was designed to detect the primordial B-mode signal from its vantage point in Chile. You can read more about the way it works at the dedicated webpages here at Cardiff and at Oxford. I won’t describe it in more detail here, for reasons which will become obvious.

The chance to get involved in a high-profile cosmological experiment was one of the reasons I moved to Cardiff a couple of years ago, and I was looking forward to seeing the data arriving for analysis. Although I’m primarily a theorist, I have some experience in advanced statistical methods that might have been useful in analysing the output. It would have been fun blogging about it too.

Unfortunately, however, none of that is ever going to happen. Because of its budget crisis, and despite the fact that it has spent a large amount (£4.5M) on it already, STFC has just decided to withdraw the funding needed to complete it (£2.5M) and cancel the Clover experiment.

Clover wasn’t the only B-mode experiment in the game. Its rivals include QUIET and SPIDER, both based in the States. It wasn’t clear that Clover would have won the race, but now that we know it’s a non-runner we can be sure it won’t.

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Hard Cash

Posted in Science Politics, Uncategorized with tags HEFCE, HEFCW, Research Assessment Exercise on March 19, 2009 by telescoper

The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) has finally announced its cash allocations for Welsh Universities over the period 2009-10. The settlement of English Universities (produced by HEFCE) has been public for quite a while already.

On the back of a poor showing in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by Cardiff University we were all braced for a cut in our recurrent grant, which has indeed turned out to be the case. Our total grant for teaching and research has been cut in cash terms by about 1.3% with most of the hit coming in the QR money that was allocated according to the RAE. This cut amounts to losing about £2M from the University’s budget and, including inflation, is more like a 3% cut in real terms.

That sounds bad enough (even the fact that there is a minus sign is pretty poor), but there are exacerbating factors on top. First, the National Pay Agreement has given University staff large pay rises over the past year or so. Given the large fraction of a University’s budget that goes on salaries, this means that a positive change in the grant would have been required to keep pace with the increased cost of staff wages. I’m ignoring other sources of income, of course, such as external research grants and endowments but the latter are less important to us in Cardiff than they are, for example, in Oxbridge. Moreover, the recent dire performance of the various University pension schemes has led to the proposal – virtually certain to be agreed – that the employers’ contributions should rise by 2%. This also has a big effect on the University’s budget.

The particular implications of all this for the School of Physics & Astronomy are yet to be worked out in detail, but a safe working assumption is an effective cut in our own budget of about 10%. Unless we can drastically increase our external income then some of our planned activity will have to be curtailed. With STFC having a budget crisis of its own, there seems little prospect of increasing our income from that source so it looks like we’re in for a challenging time.

There were winners in Wales, notably Swansea which has enjoyed a cash increase of about 10%, and some even bigger losers than Cardiff such as Lampeter, already a struggling institution, which has to endure a cut of 9% in its HEFCW grant.

The funding allocations for English Universities have been handled a bit differently to Wales, partly by the introduction of transitional relief to assuage the pain of some large Universities who would have suffered large drops in grant. HEFCE also ring-fenced funding for Science Technology and Medicine (STEM) subjects which helped out places like Imperial College, who would otherwise have had a cut; as it is, their allocation is up by 0.1% in cash. There was no attempt by HEFCW to implement this type of damage limitation, although it did put some extra money into STEM subjects from “other resources”.

It’s interesting to note that Cardiff’s share of the QR funds is actually steady at about 50% which is roughly where as a result of the previous exercise. Application of the English formula in 2001 would have given Cardiff 75% of the QR funding in Wales, which was decided to be politically unacceptable so it was capped at 50%. I think HEFCW used the English formula this time because it kept Cardiff at the level HEFCW wanted it at…

Furthermore the settlement for England as a whole is a tad more generous than Wales. The overall cash settlement for Welsh Universities is up by about 1.66% over last year, whereas that for England is up by 4.1%. The origin of the difference is in the QR funds which in England are up by 7.7% in cash terms but rise by a much lower amount in Wales. This isn’t HEFCW’s fault of course: it has to work with the funds allocated to it by the Welsh Assembly.

Among the English Universities to have done well overall are two that I used to work at. The University of Nottingham has a total grant that has increased by about 9.6% and Queen Mary has trumped that with 10.4%. However, another of my previous haunts, the University of Sussex is one of the few English institutions to have a cash cut like Cardiff’s. Their total grant is cut by 1.4%, which is a tough deal for them. I think the ring-fencing of STEM subjects probably hasn’t helped Sussex as much as some other institutions, as its traditional research strengths are in Arts and Humanities. The biggest loser in England is the troubled Thames Valley University, which has a cash cut of 11.7%. Ouch!

I think I’ve made it clear (here, here, here, here and here) that I think the RAE was a bit of a botch generally and that Physics was particularly badly done by. The outcome has certainly hit Cardiff School of Physics & Astronomy hard. I still can’t understand why our research was rated so poorly. Nature papers with over a thousand citations were not graded 4* by the panel, or at least not when submitted from Cardiff.

When I moved here, I had dreams of building up a nice little cosmology group but it looks like there’s not much chance of this happening, unless we find some way of getting some more money into Welsh physics. Welsh University Physics Alliance anyone?

But the cards have now been dealt. At least we know what sort of hand we’ve got. Now we have to get on playing it as best we can.

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A Welsh Affair

Posted in Science Politics with tags HEFCE, HEFCW, Institute of Welsh Affairs, Research Assessment Exercise, Welsh Assembly Government on February 26, 2009 by telescoper

Today I had the “pleasure” of attending a day-long conference called Funding, Risk and Innovation: Wales’s Engagement with Science Policy organized by the Institute of Welsh Affairs and sponsored by, amongst other organizations, the Institute of Physics. I had hoped that this would give me an insight into the landscape of Welsh science politics which might bear fruit in the future. As if.

Unfortunately, but alas predictably, there wasn’t much of interest. I think the first presentation of the day perfectly illustrated the whole problem. Opening the batting was Ieuan Wyn Jones, Deputy First Minister and Minister for Economic Development, from the Welsh Assembly Government or WAG. He gave a motherhood-and-apple-pie talk about how important science was to the future of Wales, took a few questions and then left. Those of us scientists who had gone to the meeting hoping for engagement between politicians and scientists were left to discuss things between ourselves. Hardly the point.

Next was Phil Gummett, Chief Executive of HEFCW who gave the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (which I’ve blogged about here, there and everywhere). To my dismay he announced that HEFCW are indeed going to use the 0:1:3:7 weighting formula adopted by HEFCE, but has found a bit more cash which it will add to the pot of money allocated to 4*. However, unlike in the case of English universities, HEFCW is not going to apply any protection to STEM subjects (Science, Technology & Medicine). In the case of my own department at Cardiff University, which got a very low assessment of 4* research, this is very bad news.

When I got home this evening I read the same news in the Times Higher. I could have found this out without wasting a day sitting in a ghastly conference room in the soulless Cardiff Novotel. Still, the lunch wasn’t bad.

Phil Gummett struck me as quite a reasonable chap who is trying to do the right thing, but whose hands are tied by the Welsh Assembly which has decided that Higher Education in Wales is not as high a priority as Further Education, with the result that the funds available to HEFCW for research is less than it would be for English universities. University STEM departments in Wales altogether receive about £10M less from HEFCW than they would get from HEFCE if they were in England. For physics, this will probably get worse after the 2008 RAE.

The reason for this pessimism is that, as I’ve noted before, Physics did rather badly in the RAE compared to other discplines, with a significantly lower fraction of work assessed at 4* (world-leading). Since the funding formula is heavily weighted by the 4* element, physics will suffer relative to other disciplines. HEFCW will not attempt to correct this. I think the Chair of the Physics panel, Sir John Pendry, must shoulder at least some of the blame for the gross anomaly that this represents.

It remains to be seen what happens to physics nationally, but I fear the RAE may undo a decade of very effective positive campaigning about the importance of physics. I’ve already heard from various Heads of Physics departments around the country (even those who have done well in the RAE) who have been asked by their Vice-Chancellors why they have done so much worse than other disciplines.

The final thing he said was that HEFCW would make its allocations as block grants to the Universities concerned and that they should make their own decisions as to how to allocate the funds to the departments. This sort of thing always annoys me. It’s admitting that the formula is probably stupid, so passing the buck to the institutions to sort out the mess themselves.

I spoke to a nice lady from Cardiff University’s planning department in the afternoon who said that they weren’t sure how they were going to allocate funds to Schools after the HEFCW grant was announced, and that the University as a whole was probably going to lose out in research funds, despite having 54% of all the 4* research in Wales.

The big problem is the funding gap caused by the WAG’s policy. Devolution has had a negative effect in science funding in Wales, while in Scotland it has had the opposite effect. The Scottish parliament seems much more interested in science than does the Welsh Assembly. Indeed, per capita, Scottish Universities have a much heavier level of research investment even than those in England, which in turn are much higher than in Wales.

EPSRC‘ recently allocated £82M to UK universities to fund doctoral training centres. In all, it allocated grants to 45 universities. Wales has 5% of the UK population, but not a single grant went to a Welsh university. Of the 1200 or so students these centres will train, not a single one will be in Wales. I can’t believe the Scottish assembly would have let such an outcome happen in Scotland.

Further strangulation of research funds is inevitable unless the WAG is persuaded to change its mind about the importance of science. But if the politicians don’t stay to listen to the arguments, how will this happen?

Over lunch I chatted to various physicists from Swansea University. Several of them had come to the meeting, but I was the only representative from Cardiff. There was a strong steer from the RAE panel for physics in terms of closer collaboration so we chatted a bit about possibilities for that. I think the consensus was that we’re probably going to be bounced down the road anyway so the best way forward would be to come up with a plan of our own instead of having someone else’s.

I promise not to mention the RAE again, until the final allocations are published in April!

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The Problem of the Steady State

Posted in Science Politics with tags astronomy, postgraduate, STFC on February 24, 2009 by telescoper

Just as a quick postscript to my recent item about proposed changes to the method of funding PhD students by STFC, let me point out the following simple calculation.

Assume that the number of permanent academic positions in a given field (e.g. astronomy) remains constant over time. If that is the case, each retirement (or other form of departure) from a permanent position will be replaced by one, presumably junior, scientist.

This means that over an academic career, on average, each academic will produce just one PhD who will get a permanent job. This of course doesn’t count students coming in from abroad, or those getting faculty positions abroad but in the case of the UK these are probably relatively small corrections.

Under the present supply of PhD studentships an academic can expect to get a PhD student at least once every three years or so. At a minimum, therefore, over a 30 year career one can expect to have ten PhD students. A great many supervisors have more PhD students than this, but this just makes the odds worse. The expectation is that only one of these will get a permanent job in the UK. The others (nine out of ten, according to my conservative estimate) above must either leave the field or the country to find permanent employment.

The arithmetic of this situation is a simple fact of life, but I’m not sure how many prospective PhD students are aware of it.

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Scientiae Doctores

Posted in Science Politics with tags astronomy, Bologna Agreement, postgraduate, STFC on February 22, 2009 by telescoper

The season for recruiting new research students is well and truly upon us and at the same the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is consulting about changing the way that it allocates PhD studentships to departments.

Most postgraduate students studying for PhDs in Astronomy are funded by STFC (although some Universities also fund their own internal studentships). The result of this arrangement is that successful applicants to a PhD course can receive a stipend which amounts to about £13K per annum. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it is a stipend rather than a salary so it’s tax-free. Since a PhD student also remains a student and therefore qualifies for various other fringe benefits (Council Tax, student discounts, etc), it’s not actually a bad deal for the student. Anyway, if it were significantly more then it’s possible PhD students would have to start paying back their student loans, which would make things worse. STFC also pays a tuition fee to the University concerned, but this is done directly and the student doesn’t even see that element of the funding.

Since about 1995, PPARC and then STFC has funded research studentships in areas within its remit by means of peer review. Departments have bid for studentships (every two years) and a panel awards an allocation depending on the quality of the bid. Of course, everyone asks for many more studentships than are available so what you get is a fraction of what you ask for. I wrote the application for the first ever quota studentships for the Astronomy group at the University of Nottingham, and did it again a couple of times after that. Each time, despite going into best bullshit mode to write the case, I was frustrated by the relatively small number of studentships we were awarded. Although we succeeded in building up gradually from zero to 2-3 per year, it was a very slow process.

In recent years, the funding mechanism has evolved slightly so that studentship fees and stipends were devolved to the departments concerned in terms of Doctoral Training Grants (DTGs) rather than being administered centrally by PPARC/STFC. In the old days, students used to get their stipend from PPARC/STFC whereas now they are paid by their department from a cash grant.

Anyway, for various reasons (chief among them being no doubt to save administrative costs) STFC has decided to consult on changes to the mechanism for allocating the DTGs to the various departments around the country. The most serious proposed change is to follow the practice at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and dispense with peer review. Instead, the proposal is to award studentships based on a formula involving how successful the department is at obtaining postdoctoral research assistant (PDRA) support from STFC.

Here is the proposed formula:

Specifically, the studentship award per department should be proportional to the product of volume and average quality per academic within the department, that is to:

V * Q

The Committee has followed guidance in developing measures of V and Q that are non-subjective, repeatable and transparent. The volume V is defined as the number of academics (including Fellows) eligible to hold STFC research grants. The quality Q is measured by the number of STFC-funded PDRAs (P) awarded per academic (i.e. P/V), since this measures the success of the academic staff in securing STFC funding for PDRAs through peer-review. More precisely we define quality per academic as Q = [1 +(P/V)].

Although the Committee felt this definition of quality applied primarily to responsive-mode PDRAs, it agreed that PDRAs on project grants should be included, but with a weighting, relative to responsive-mode, of 0.33.

Using these definitions, the Committee recommends that the studentship award per department should be proportional to a simple product of volume and average quality per academic within the department, that is to:

N(students) µ V * Q

where Q = [1 + (P/V)]

And so the departmental quota is proportional to:

V[1+(P/V)] = V+P

In addition, recognising that very small departments offer more limited training opportunities on their own, a threshold is proposed, such that no studentships are awarded for V < 3. Instead, these very small departments/groups would be able to collaborate with other larger departments in seeking STFC studentship support.

Hence

N(students) µ V+P for V ³ 3

= 0 for V < 3

The constant of proportionality is chosen such that the total number of studentships equals the number available for allocation.

I think this is a fairly reasonable proposal, actually. The one thing I don’t really understand relates to the fact that STFC doesn’t just fund PDRAs on its grants, but under the Full Economic Cost regime (FEC), it also pays for fractions of academic staff effort for people working on its projects. On my recent successful STFC grant, for example, I was awarded 25% of my time (i.e. 0.25 FTE, full-time-equivalent) to do the research as well as a PDRA. Since the proposal above will have to cope with the question of what staff are “eligible” then why not make the quantity V proportional to the total FTEs funded, or at least only count those for whom some FEC time is allocated? And why not include staff FTE in the Q-factor too?

My guess is that such a modification wouldn’t make much difference to astronomy departments, but the original proposal has caused cries of anguish from particle physicists. This is because the number of PDRAs in particle physics is much smaller than in astronomy, so many large groups face a big reduction in their PhD quota. Including FEC numbers in the mix might well smooth the transition for them. For your information, the number of PDRAs per active astronomy researcher is around 0.5 at present.

Anyway, the deadline for consulting on this has passed (on February 20th) so we now wait to see what STFC actually does. Probably the consultation period is a purely cosmetic exercise anyway and what will emerge is exactly what was proposed.

If you ask me (and nobody did), all this is mere tinkering. I think there are serious problems with graduate funding in the UK and these require much more radical remedies. At the risk of (and indeed with the intention of) being provocative, here is my diagnosis and suggested remedies:

There are too many PhDs in astronomy. STFC funded 160 studentships in 2006, compared with 88 in 2000. There are nowhere near enough PDRA positions to accommodate this number of PhDs in academic research. And even those who get their first PDRA position have very limited prospects of getting a permanent job. The result is a generation of disaffected students employed as low-paid assistants for 3-4 years and then thrown aside when they have got their PhD.
Of course, applicants for PhD places don’t know what research is really like and some will leave academia of their own volition when they find out that it’s not for them. In my experience, though, most graduate applicants simply don’t realise how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Less than one in ten can possibly stay in research in the long term, and the more PhDs are funded the worse the odds against them become.
The short duration of a British PhD disadvantages our students with respect to those from the USA or continental europe, who all do a lengthy Masters course before taking their PhD. These take at least 5 years to complete. The result is that our home-grown PhDs are seriously disadvantaged in the job market against competitors from abroad. Similar points have been made forcefully by Ian Halliday.
My remedy is simple. Reduce the number of studentships but extend each one to five years and require each hosting department to provide a proper graduate school with intensive graduate-level courses to make up for the progressive reduction in content of undergraduate physics courses.
Even more unpopularly, I think the UK should scrap 4 years Masters (MPhys) programmes and embrace the structure of the Bologna agreement, i.e. a universal 3+2+3 structure of 3 years Bachelors, 2 years’ Masters and three years PhD.
Currently STFC stipends can only be paid to UK nationals and residents. It’s an open secret that most departments would preferentially recruit European physics graduates to their PhD positions if they were allowed to do so, because their undergraduate preparation is much better than that provided in UK universities. I propose that we abandon this protectionism and open up PhD opportunities to European applications, just as we would legally have to do if a PhD were considered to be a job.
Finally, I think the UK should consider the introduction of a common graduate entrance examination, perhaps based on the US GRE, to ensure the maintenance of appropriate standards for postgraduate entry and eligibility for STFC funding.

There are of course some advantages to the current British PhD system. For one thing, the PhD is earned very quickly. I was 25 when I got my PhD, and already had several publications. Most of my European collaborators were at least 30 before they got theirs (additional years have to be added for national service in many countries, but we don’t have it in the UK). But I am painfully aware that my technical knowledge outside the immediate area of my PhD is much thinner than most academics in the field. Now, in middle age, I feel like a long-distance runner who had inadequate preparation, went off too fast at the start of the race, and is now struggling along while people overtake him with monotonous regularity.

The nature of research in astronomy and cosmology has changed so much in the 20 years since I got my PhD that the old system has to go. Instead of tinkering with funding formula, driven principally by the need to save adminstrative costs within STFC, we need a radical overhaul of the entire graduate education system in the UK, involving all research councils and their political masters.

Unfortunately, though, for the time being at least the politicians have other more pressing matters to worry about, such the collapse of the economy.

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Executive Roast

Posted in Science Politics with tags DIUS, Physics, Science, STFC on February 6, 2009 by telescoper

The Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (Keith Mason) was recently summoned to the House of Commons Select Committee on Innovation, Universities and Skills. The video of his inquisition is now available for your enjoyment (but not his) here.

(I tried embedding this using vodpod but it didn’t work, so you’ll just have to click the link…)

Notice how in traditional fashion the light was shining in his eyes throughout. I suppose I should really feel sorry for him, but somehow I don’t. He may not be entirely responsible for the budgetary crisis currently engulfing STFC, but he handled the aftermath so badly that the damage done to relations between STFC and the community of physics researchers that rely on it for funding will take a long time to fix.

Anyway, if you can’t be bothered to watch the whole show here are some of the salient points in a summary that was passed to me by an anonymous source; I was too busy laughing to make my own notes, but I’ve added a few comments in italics. For those of you not up with acronyms, DIUS is the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and CSR stands for the Comprehensive Spending Review.

KM insisted that STFC had been successful in giving the UK unprecedented opportunities for doing world class science, and by the end (though by that stage his most aggressive interlocutor, Ian Gibson, had left) appeared to have earned the committee’s grudging respect (though I suspect that was for the way he played a tricky wicket as much as because he had persuaded them out of their deep concerns about his management of the STFC)

Among the many issues raised were the following:

KM agreed to hand over the letter detailing the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s 2007 spending review allocation to MPs for scrutiny.
He denied that the external review of STFC had been a “total
whitewash” on the grounds that it had not been given sufficient time to thoroughly interview a cross section of staff during the review or to do other than take the STFC’s self-assessment document, upon which their work was based, at “face value” without being able to find out if the majority of STFC staff actually agreed with its content. On the contrary staff had made their views known ‘vociferously’.
Challenged about the perceived overrepresentation of the executive council on the STFC council KM said that, while it had affected the perception held in the community, it made “no difference” to the outcomes (a point which the committee repeatedly contested). He added that STFC takes full account of community input via the advisory panels and science board. It’s simply not true, he insisted, that the executive dominates the Council; rather it ensures it is properly informed so that decisions are well founded. However he acknowledged that communications had not been good – hence the new arrangements (Director of Communications appointment); Great, another spin doctor – PC .
An extra GBP 9M had been freed up by DIUS reducing STFC’s liabilities to exchange rate variations from the first 6 to 3 m pa over the triennium. Of this 6 would go to exploitation grants and 3 to HEIs to promote knowledge transfer. So 6M will be used properly and the rest wasted – PC .
He stated that Jodrell Bank had no long term future in radio astronomy since its location exposed it to too much ‘noise’ – but that was for Manchester University (which STFC would continue to support via E-MERLIN and SKA) to determine. It will take a silver bullet to kill that particular zombie -PC
KM also voiced the opinion that here was no tension between being simultaneously responsible for developing STFC labs/campuses and funding HEIs through grants; on the contrary it enabled better utilisation of resources bearing in mind the role of STFC which is BOTH to promote science AND its societal /economic benefits. In other words he wants the flexibility to continue robbing Peter to pay Paul – PC
For this reason (as well as reasons of administrative complexity)
STFC had rejected Wakeham’s recommendation to ring fence the ex-PPARC budget line in the forthcoming CSR. Ditto
KM argued that Daresbury was not being treated unfairly in relation to Harwell (there was a good deal of probing about this by North West MPs) .

My own view having watched most of the video is that Professor Mason must have an incredibly thick skin to shrug off such a sustained level of antipathy. Some of it is crude and abusive, but it’s quite impressive how well informed some of the members are.

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Physics Funding by Numbers

Posted in Science Politics with tags Cardiff University, HEFCE, HEFCW, Physics, Research Assessment Exercise, SFC on January 29, 2009 by telescoper

I just read today that HEFCE has decided on the way funds will be allocated for research following the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. I have blogged about this previously (here, there and elsewhere), but to give you a quick reminder the exercise basically graded all research in UK universities on a scale from 4* (world-leading) to 1* (nationally recognized), producing for each department a profile giving the fraction of research in each category.

HEFCE has decided that English universities will be funded according to a formula that includes everything from 2* up to 4* but with a weighting 1:3:7. Those graded 1* and unclassified get no funding at all. How they arrived at this formula is anyone’s guess. Personally I think it’s a bit harsh on 2* which is supposed to be internationally recognized research, but there you go.

Assuming there is also a multiplier for volume (i.e. the number of people submitted) we can now easily produce another version of the physics research league table which reveals the relative amount of money each will get. I don’t know the overall normalisation, of course.

The table shows the number of staff submitted (second column) and the overall fundability factor based on a 7:3:1 weighting of the published profile multiplied by the figure in column 2. This is like the “research power” table I showed here, only with a different and much steeper weighting (7,3,1,0) versus (4,3,2,1).

1. University of Cambridge	141.25	459.1
2. University of Oxford	140.10	392.3
3. Imperial College London	126.80	380.4
4. University College London	101.03	298.0
5. University of Manchester	82.80	227.7
6. University of Durham	69.50	205.0
7. University of Edinburgh	60.50	184.5
8. University of Nottingham	44.45	144.5
9. University of Glasgow	45.75	135.0
10. University of Warwick	51.00	130.1
11. University of Bristol	46.00	128.8
12. University of Birmingham	43.60	126.4
13. University of Southampton	45.30	120.0
14. Queen’s University Belfast	50.00	115.0
15. University of Leicester	45.00	114.8
16. University of St Andrews	32.20	104.7
17. University of Liverpool	34.60	96.9
18. University of Sheffield	31.50	92.9
19. University of Leeds	35.50	88.8
20. Lancaster University	26.40	88.4
21. Queen Mary, University of London	34.98	85.7
22. University of Exeter	28.00	77.0
23. University of Hertfordshire	28.00	72.8
24. University of York	26.00	67.6
25. Royal Holloway, University of London	27.96	67.1
26. University of Surrey	27.20	65.3
27. Cardiff University	32.30	64.6
28. University of Bath	20.20	63.6
29. University of Strathclyde	31.67	60.2
30. University of Sussex	20.00	55.0
31. Heriot-Watt University	19.50	51.7
32. Swansea University	20.75	48.8
33. Loughborough University	17.10	41.9
34. University of Central Lancashire	22.20	41.1
35. King’s College London	16.40	38.5
36. Liverpool John Moores University	16.50	35.5
37. Aberystwyth University	18.33	23.8
38. Keele University	10.00	18.0
39. Armagh Observatory	7.50	13.1
40. University of Kent	3.00	4.5
41. University of the West of Scotland	3.70	4.1
42. University of Brighton	1.00	1.8

It looks to me that the fraction of funds going to the big three at the top will probably be reduced quite significantly, although apparently there are funds set aside to smooth over any catastrophic changes. I’d hazard a guess that things won’t change much for those in the middle.

I’ve left the Welsh and Scottish universities in the list for comparison, but there is no guarantee that HEFCW and SFC will use the same formula for Wales and Scotland as HEFCE did for England. I have no idea what is going to happen to Cardiff University’s funding at the moment.

Another bit of news worthing putting in here is that HEFCE has protected funding for STEM subjects (Science, Technology and Medicine) so that the apparently poor showing of some science subjects (especially physics) compared to, e.g., Economics will not necessarily mean that physics as a whole will suffer. How this works out in practice remains to be seen.

Apparently also the detailed breakdowns of how the final profiles were reached will go public soon. That will make for some interesting reading, although apparently everything relating to individual researchers will be shredded to prevent problems with the data protection act.

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What’s all the Noise?

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags ARCADE-2, astronomy, Cosmology, Milky Way, NASA on January 18, 2009 by telescoper

Now there’s a funny thing…

I’ve just come across a news item from last week which I followed up by looking at the official NASA press release. I’m very slow to pick up on things these days, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

The experiment concerned is called ARCADE 2, which is an somewhat contrived acronym derived from Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics and Diffuse Emission. It is essentially a balloon-borne detector designed to analyse radio waves with frequencies in the range 3 to 90 Ghz. The experiment actually flew in 2006, so it has clearly taken considerable time to analyse the resulting data.

Being on a balloon that flies for a relatively short time (2.5 hours in this case) means that only a part of the sky was mapped, amounting to about 7% of the whole celestial sphere but that is enough to map a sizeable piece of the Galaxy as well as a fairly representative chunk of deep space.

There are four science papers on the arXiv about this mission: one describes the instrument itself; another discusses radio emission from our own galaxy, the Milky Way; the third discusses the overall contribution of extragalactic origin in the frequency range covered by the instrument; the last discusses the implications about extragalactic sources of radio emission.

The thing that jumps out from this collection of very interesting science papers is that there is an unexplained, roughly isotropic, background of radio noise, consistent with a power-law spectrum. Of course to isolate this component requires removing known radio emission from our Galaxy and from identified extragalactic sources, as well as understanding the systematics of the radiometer during its flight. But after a careful analysis of these the authors present strong evidence of excess emission over and above known sources. The spectrum of this radio buzz falls quite steeply with frequency so appears in the two long-wavelength channels at 3 and 8 GHz.

So where does this come from? Well, we just don’t know.

The problem is that no sensible extrapolation of known radio sources to high redshift appears to be able to generate an integrated flux equivalent to that observed. Here is a bit of the discussion from the paper:

It is possible to imagine that an unknown population of discrete sources exist below the flux limit of existing surveys. We argue earlier that these cannot be a simple extension of the source counts of star-forming galaxies. As a toy model, we consider a population of sources distributed with a delta function in flux a factor of 10 fainter than the 8.4 GHz survey limit of Fomalont et al. (2002). At a flux of 0.75 μJy, it would take over 1100 such sources per square arcmin to produce the unexplained emission we see at 3.20 GHz, assuming a frequency index of −2.56. This source density is more than two orders of magnitude higher than expected from extrapolation to the same flux limit of the known source population. It is, however, only modestly greater than the surface density of objects revealed in the faintest optical surveys, e.g., the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (Beckwith et al. 2006). The unexplained emission might result from an early population of non thermal emission from low-luminosity AGN; such a source would evade the constraint implied by the far-IR measurements.

The point is that ordinary galaxies produce a broad spectrum of radiation and it is difficult to boost the flux at one frequency without violating limits imposed at others. It might be able to invoke Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) to do the trick, but I’m not sure. I am sure there’ll be a lot work going on trying to see how this might fit in with all the other things we know about galaxy formation and evolution but for the time being it’s a mystery.

I’m equally sure that these results will spawn a plethora of more esoteric theoretical explanations, inevitably including the ridiculous as well as perhaps the sublime. Charged dark matter springs to mind.

Or maybe it’s not even extragalactic. Could it be from an unknown source inside the Milky Way? If so, it might shed some light on the curiosities we find in the cosmic microwave background that I’ve mentioned here and there, but it seems to peak at too low a frequency to account for much of the overall microwave sky temperature.

But it does have a lesson for astronomy funders. ARCADE 2 is a very cheap experiment (by NASA standards). Moreover, the science goals of the experiment did not include “discovering a new cosmic background”. It just goes to show that even in these times of big, expensive and narrowly targetted missions there is still space for serendipity.

In the Dark