More sad news today: the wonderful actress Honor Blackman, best known as Cathy Gale, John Steed’s first sidekick in The Avengers, and as Pussy Galore in the Bond film Goldfinger, has passed away at the age of 94.
Rest in peace, Honor Blackman (1925-2020).
Follow @telescoperI just heard via Twitter that Margaret Burbidge has passed away at the age of 100. I send my condolences to her friends, colleagues and family.
Margaret Burbidge will perhaps be best remembered as the first author anniversary of the classic work of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle in 1957 (a paper usually referred to as B2FH after the initials of its authors). It’s such an important contribution, in fact, that it has its own wikipedia page.
One of the interesting astronomical things I’ve acquired over the years is a preprint of the B2FH paper. Younger readers will probably not realize that preprints were not always produced in the electronic form they are today. We all used to make large numbers of these and post them at great expense to (potentially) interested colleagues before publication in order to get comments. In the age of the internet people don’t really bother to make hard copies of preprints for distribution any more.
Anyway, here’s a snap of it.
Sadly all of the authors have now passed away Margaret Burbidge did much more than that paper, of course. She made important contributions over a wide range of topics in astrophysics and will be greatly missed.
Rest in peace, Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020)
Follow @telescoperOne of the far from unpleasant side-effects of the lockdown here in Maynooth is that you notice the birds much more.
For one thing the marked decrease in traffic means that birdsong a lot more audible, which is very pleasant; for another, some otherwise rather shy species are to be seen out and about. I saw (and heard) one of these critters fo on Maynooth Campus yesterday when I went for my daily constitutional:
It’s a song thrush. I’ve never seen one on the campus before. I’ve also seen various colourful finches from time to time.
The resident bird population of Maynooth University campus is dominated by various members of the crow family: Jackaws, Rooks, Hooded Crows, Magpies, etc. They’re still around but they live mainly by scavenging and there are far fewer people around leaving far less stuff to scavenge, they seem to be roaming farther afield. Yesterday, however, I noticed that a couple of Magpies swooped on the cat’s dish after he’d finished his lunch to see if there was anything left to eat. They must be hungry.
Outside my flat there’s a group of tall trees. Yesterday afternoon I watched from a window for a full twenty minutes as a rather large and clumsy Rook tried to balance precariously on a long slender twig right at the top. Why it didn’t perch on one of the thicker branches lower down instead, I don’t know.
It struck me as an excellent metaphor, but I’m not sure for what.
Follow @telescoperIn the light of the Covid-19 restrictions currently in place, Maynooth University has issued updated guidance to students about the rest of the Semester.
Of particular concern to students is what will happen to their examinations, usually held in the second half of May.
Here the guidance begins:
The university examinations will not take place this semester in the usual format. The examinations will be replaced by remote assessments, including assignments, timed remote assessments and in some cases video interviews. As far as possible assessments will be completed by the scheduled dates. We plan to have resit examinations in August as usual.
There has been a lot of work and discussion going on behind the scenes to come up with ways of doing without the usual in situ examinations and the solutions proposed will no doubt vary considerably from discipline to discipline.
In the case of Theoretical Physics the vast majority of our examinations will be in the form of a timed assessment as mentioned above. What this means is that a test of similar format to the usual examinations will be made available in the form of a pdf file for students to download at home at a specific time. They must then scan and upload their answers, within a given time limit, extra time being added to formal duration of the assessment to allow for doing this.
There are two main potential difficulties with this approach.
One is that the students will not be invigilated and may cheat, either by referring to notes or other material (e.g. online) or by colluding with others. I believe the former risk can be mitigated (a) by the time limit and (b) by designing an assessment that emphasises problem-solving rather than rote learning (which, frankly, is what we should be doing anyway). Collusion is more difficult to deal with but we can at least require students to make a declaration that the submission is their own and reserve the right to interview afterwards.
The second (and, I believe more serious) source of difficulty is on the side of the student. This approach will require students to have somewhere at home where they can do the test, as well as access to the Internet and a scanning device of some sort. They will only have to download a relatively small pdf but the upload may cause problems. A scanned pdf would be easier to upload than, for example, pictures taken using a phone camera (which may be rather large files).
Still, given that there is a period of six weeks before these assessments are due to take place, I hope the vast majority of students will be able to put appropriate arrangements in place. We can also provide a dummy test so they can check that everything works satisfactorily.
These proposals are not ideal, but few things can be in the situation we are in. I do think this is a reasonable approach for our students because at least it means they can prepare using past examination papers knowing that the timed assessment will be similar in form. I think dumping an entirely new and unfamiliar kind of assessment on students now, at a time of already high stress, would have been grossly unfair.
Follow @telescoperQuite a few people have been asking me how the Maynooth University Library Cat is coping with the lockdown. I always visit him when I take the daily exercise (usually after lunch) allowed by the Covid-19 restrictions. I know that others are looking after him too so he’s doing well.
When I saw him yesterday he was asleep in his box. He emerged to climb onto his wall to eat the food I put out, paused for a photo-opportunity on his usual post, then descended to ground level for a quick wash, after which he went back into his box to resume his kip.
Incidentally, you will see in the middle picture that the metal gate near his spot is now locked so it’s not possible to get from the South Campus to the North Campus past the Library. Not for us hoomans, I mean. The cat can manage it!
Follow @telescoperIf you are missing your regular seminar experience because of the Coronavirus lockdown, Shaun Hotchkiss has set up a YouTube channel just for you!
The channel features technical talks rather than popular expositions so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but for those seriously interested in cosmology at a research level they should prove interesting.
Here’s an example in which Julien Lesgourgues talks about (not measuring neutrino masses with cosmological data.
Follow @telescoperThe current restrictions resulting from the Covid-19 outbreak have forced many of us academics to adapt to using IT in ways we hadn’t even imagined just a month ago. It’s not only remote teaching via virtual learning environments with live and/or prerecorded video lectures, but also meetings held by videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Few of us have had much training in the use of these things, so when it comes to Information Technology we’re all winging it. Still, necessity is the mother of invention and we just have to get on with it.
I’m gradually getting used to Microsoft Teams, for example. I’ve even got proper kit to wear.
Incidentally, yesterday I learned that the expression ‘to wing it’ actually comes from the Theatre, where it alludes to an actor studying their lines in the wings (at the side of the stage) because they haven’t had time to learn their part before the performance (usually because they are replacing another actor at short notice).
Nowadays ‘winging it’ means generally improvising or making it up as you go along. I’m finding winging it to be rather hard work but quite fun, actually. While we’ve been trying to flatten the Covid-19 curve the learning curve has definitely been getting steeper.
Follow @telescoperUnder the Covid-19 restrictions currently in force in Ireland we’re not supposed to journey further than 2km from home.
The other day I went to the shops near me and decided to try out a helpful app that draws the 2km limit on a map.
Here’s what I got:
So it seems I can go anywhere in Maynooth without breaking the rules. Alarmingly, however, I see that if I’m not careful I could end up crossing the border from County Kildare into County Meath!
Towards the South is the famous Junction 7 on the M4 which in normal times features on the traffic news on the radio with alarming frequency because of one snarl up or another. I don’t suppose there will be much more of that for a while.
One of the pleasant side effects of the lockdown is a drastic reduction in vehicle traffic. That in turn means that I wake up to the sound of birdsong rather than car engines. That’s one part of this I’ll enjoy while it lasts.
Follow @telescoperOne of the things I’ve written about on this blog quite frequently is how important the treatment of uncertainty is in science, both in the application of the scientific method itself and in the communication of results to a wider audience. This blog post makes a similar point about the presentation of results from modelling the spread of Covid-19.
Yesterday, a group in Oxford released a paper that implied that a signifcant fraction of those in the UK may already have been infected. This was quickly picked up by numerous media outlets who highlighted that coronavirus could already have infected half the British population. James Annan has already discussed it in a couple of post, but I thought I would comment briefly myself.
To be clear, I certainly have no expertise in epidemiology, but I do have expertise in computational modelling. So, I coded up their model, which is described in Equations 1-4 in their paper. They were also doing a parameter estimation, while I’m simply going to run the model with their parameters.
The key parameter is $latex rho$, which is the proportion of the population that is at risk of severe disease, a fraction of whom will die (14%). They explicitly assume that only…
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In the Dark 