Not Returning to Campus

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , , on August 8, 2020 by telescoper

Well.

Having spent the day yesterday getting our return to campus sorted, the Government last night announced restrictions on the counties of Offaly, Laois and Kildare. Following that a message came round from the President of Maynooth University, Philip Nolan including this:

Following the announcement this evening, the gradual reopening of campus from Monday, 10th August will be paused. Staff who are working from home should, in the main, continue to do so. Staff who are coming on campus to do their work effectively may continue to do so, and in certain circumstances, staff may, with the approval of their Head of Department, return to the campus to work, where it is necessary to do their work effectively or prepare for the coming academic year.

So we’re on hold for a couple of weeks (at least). That’s frustrating but not the end of the world. I don’t imagine we would have had that many people coming in over the next two weeks anyway.

On the bright side the recent outbreaks are very localised and there is a good testing and tracking system in place, which suggests they can be contained through isolation. On the other hand they are large clusters and it only takes a small amount of leakage to trigger a much wider spread.

Of more immediate concern is this:

Unfortunately, the restriction on travel means that it is no longer appropriate to go ahead with the on-campus resit examinations scheduled for next week. We will work with the colleagues involved and where possible we will replace these with online exams at the same times; where this is not possible, we will reschedule the exams at the earliest feasible time. We will of course continue to support our students in their studies in every way that we can.

Obviously we can’t hold examinations on campus if students can’t travel here from other counties. There is also a restriction of six on the number of people at an indoor event which would rule them out too.

Fortunately we have a Plan B and all these examinations will be replaced by online timed assessments. That means a busy couple of days next week – the exams are due to start next Wednesday (12th August) – but it is manageable.

I know a lot of people are angry about the new (partial) lockdown, especially pubs and restaurants. In my opinion the decision yesterday was inevitable given the steep increase in new cases (98 reported yesterday) :

Update: 174 new cases today (Saturday 8th August). Grim.

This growth is dominated by clusters of infections, mostly in meat processing works, in the three counties under lockdown. That includes 80 announced yesterday in the same plant. None of these is particularly close to Maynooth but the country boundaries are the only simple way of imposing local restrictions.

Serious questions do need to be asked, though, about how we got to this situation.

Outbreaks of Covid-19 in meat processing plants have been widely reported elsewhere for months, and Ireland does not seem to have learned from these. There are allegations that the plants involved may not have undergone proper inspections and that public health guidance has not been followed. The present circumstances could well be a result of negligence on the side of the businesses concerned and/or the government. These issues require urgent investigation to prevent possible occurrences elsewhere. If negligence can be demonstrated I sense a large number of lawsuits…

Let me just add one final comment. It seemed to me that the original return to work Roadmap, with five phases, was sensible and that it was working. I had serious reservations when it was decided to try speeding it up. If a carefully thought-out plan is working why change it on the fly?

The announcement of the accelerated Roadmap was interpreted by many in the general population as a signal that the Covid-19 epidemic in Ireland was over. Complacency set in and social distancing rules began to be flouted, especially among younger people.

I’m not saying this is the reason for the clusters in meat factories but it is probably behind the parallel increase in community transmission.

Now the Roadmap is paused and we’re behind where the original version would have put us. You can add impatience and complacency to the reasons we’re in this local difficulty.

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Returning to Campus

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 7, 2020 by telescoper

It’s been a busy day (so far) putting the finishing touches to return to work planning at the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. We have improved the signage and decluttered the main corridor to allow the two-way system to operate.

We’ve also fitted the odd tensor barrier (that’s what the above thing is called) to prevent people wandering into offices uninvited contrary to social distancing requirements.

As well as all that I’ve received delivery of a selection of face masks, hand gel and disinfectant wipes.

All this is because the repeat examination period starts next week and we’re consequently preparing for the second wave (of examination marking) by allowing staff to come onto campus to collect their scripts, which most should be able to do from next week.

Update: owing to the recent increases in Covid-19 cases in Kildare Offaly and Laois, as of this evening, local restrictions have been imposed on these counties. As a consequence the return to work process has been paused and all repeat exams scheduled to take place on campus will be replaced by online timed assessments. Sigh.

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Watch “The Eddington Eclipse Experiment of 1919” on YouTube

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff, YouTube with tags , , , on August 6, 2020 by telescoper

I’d forgotten about this little video made after I appeared on the Pat Kenny show on NewsTalk radio last year. It was just me and the camera in a little room, but it turned out less like a hostage video than I’d feared..

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Implementation Guidelines for Public Health Measures in Higher Education Institutions

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on August 6, 2020 by telescoper

Yesterday I was speculating out loud about where we go from here in order to return to teaching in September. Today I find that there’s actually a guidance document produced by the Irish Universities Association under the auspices of the Health Service Executive. The full document (PDF, 12 pages) can be found here.

The advice focuses on principles rather than practice and a lot of work will have to be done in individual institutions to translate the guidelines into working procedures, but it is welcome nonetheless. I encourage everyone involved in higher education to read it all.

A key issue on everyone’s mind concerns on-campus teaching, so I have selected this paragraph:

This suggests that the social distancing between staff and students and between staff and other staff should be kept to 2m but the spacing between students in lecture theatres, laboratories, etc can be 1m with the proviso that students wear face masks.

Note however that there is a more general restriction that indoor gatherings should involve no more than 50 people. Unless some sort of exemption is granted for HEIs then this, rather than social distancing, may determine the maximum class size.

Allowing us to populate rooms with one metre spacing between students rather than two makes a huge difference to our ability to accommodate students in lecture halls and other teaching spaces, but even so the capacity of most teaching rooms will be much lower than normal. For example, the room I taught my first-year class of ~85 in last year has a nominal capacity of 90. With 1m social distancing that is reduced to 27; with 2m distancing it is down to 18. I don’t know how many students I’ll have next semester, but hopefully it will be more than 27! Assuming that it is, I won’t be able to teach them as a single group.

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Phase Four Postponed

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , on August 5, 2020 by telescoper

Yesterday the Irish government decided to postpone the last phase of its (already revised) Roadmap for Reopening and also make mandatory the wearing of face masks in shops. Phase Four was supposed to start on August 10th and was to include, among other things, the opening of pubs.

The reason for not proceeding with Phase Four is obvious when you look at yesterday’s  new cases graph:

(I keep updating the data here.

Note that the graph is logarithmic on the y-axes so the number of new cases is not large (currently averaging about 45 per day), but the trend is concerning; last week’s average was about 18. Most of the new cases are aged under 45 which perhaps accounts at least partly for the fact that the death curve is not rising: younger people are at lower risk of developing serious problems. The pattern of increasing infections but decreasing mortality figures is quite widespread across Europe, actually.

The recent cases in Ireland are occurring in clusters in particular locations. Of the 45 cases reported yesterday, for example, 33 were in County Kildare most of them at a single factory in Kildare itself (which has now been shut).

There has also been an increase in community transmission, though, which is perhaps even more dangerous than individual outbreaks.

It seems to me that pausing the planned relaxation of restrictions is a sensible thing to do at this stage. To open pubs now – which many continue to argue for – would in my view be extremely foolhardy.

I’m not sure what all this means for the new academic year which is due to start in September nor even the repeat examination period which are due to start next week but if cases continue to increase at their current rate it will severely impact our ability to return to on-campus activities.

 

 

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New KiDS on the Blog!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2020 by telescoper

The above image is from the Kilo Degree Survey, performed using the OmegaCAM instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s VST Survey Telescope at Cerro Paranal in Northern Chile. I got it by googling `Pictures of KiDS’, which was probably unwise.

Here’s another picture, of part of the survey region.

A few people have asked me why I didn’t post about the new results from KiDs which came out last week. The answer is simply that I’ve been a bit busy, but here we go now with a post on the blog about the new KiDs papers. These appear as a bunch of five on the arXiv:

KiDS-1000 Methodology: Modelling and inference for joint weak gravitational lensing and spectroscopic galaxy clustering analysis

KiDS-1000 catalogue: weak gravitational lensing shear measurements

KiDS-1000 catalogue: Redshift distributions and their calibration

KiDS-1000 Cosmology: Cosmic shear constraints and comparison between two point statistics

KiDS-1000 Cosmology: Multi-probe weak gravitational lensing and spectroscopic galaxy clustering constraints

The result that stands out from the latest release is the suggestion that the Universe is about 8% less clumpy than the standard cosmological model suggests. The level of clumpiness is quantified by the parameter S8 which, according to Planck, has a value 0.832 ± 0.013 whereas KiDS gives 0.776 (+0.020/-0.014), a discrepancy of about 3σ. It’s not only the Hubble constant that is causing a bit of tension in cosmological circles!

 

 

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But Beautiful – Tony Bennett & Bill Evans

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on August 4, 2020 by telescoper

I’m kicking myself for having forgotten that yesterday, August 3rd, was the 94th birthday of that great jazz singer Tony Bennett so I’m correcting that omission today by posting one of my favourite recordings of his, a tune written by the famous songwriting pair of Johnny Burke and Jimmy van Heusen, recorded in 1975 with Bill Evans on piano. When one of the greatest ever jazz singers gets together with one of the greatest ever jazz pianists, what could the result be But Beautiful?

Happy Birthday, Tony Bennett!

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics!

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on August 4, 2020 by telescoper

Another new paper has been published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics! This one was actually published last Friday but it being the Bank Holiday weekend I just got round to blogging about it today. This is another one for the Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics section. It’s called Cosmic event horizons and the light-speed limit for relative radial motion and is a sort of pedagogical review of the subject aimed at dispelling some common misconceptions about radial velocities and horizons. The author is Markus Pössel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at Heidelberg.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay:

I’ve taken the liberty of adding the background teaser image in full here, as it is rather groovy:

You can click on the image to make it larger.

You can find the arXiv version of the paper here.

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Lá Saoire i mí Lúnasa

Posted in Uncategorized on August 3, 2020 by telescoper

Today being the first Monday in August it is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. This holiday was created by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 when Ireland was under British rule. While the holiday was subsequently moved to the end of August in England and Wales it has remained at the start of August in Ireland.

I was leafing through my diary yesterday, looking at all the deadlines coming up and wondering whether I could actually take today off*, when I got to thinking more generally about matters calendrical.

In the Northern hemisphere, from an astronomical point of view, the solar year is defined by the two solstices (summer, around June 21st, and winter around December 21st) and the equinoxes (spring, around March 21st, and Autumn, around September 21st). These four events divide the year into four roughly equal parts each of about 13 weeks.

Now, if you divide each of these intervals in two you divide the year into eight pieces of six and a bit weeks each. The dates midway between the astronomical events mentioned above are (roughly) :

  • 1st February: Imbolc (Candlemas)
  • 1st May: Beltane (Mayday)
  • 1st August: Lughnasadh (Lammas)
  • 1st November: Samhain (All Saints Day)

The names I’ve added are taken from the Celtic/neo-Pagan (and Christian terms) for these cross-quarter days. These timings are rough because the dates of the equinoxes and solstices vary from year to year. Imbolc is often taken to be the 2nd of February (Groundhog Day) and Samhain is sometimes taken to be October 31st, Halloween. But hopefully you get the point.

Incidentally, the last three of these also coincide closely with Bank Holidays in Ireland, though these are always on Mondays so often happen a few days away.

Anyway, it is interesting (to me) that the academic year here in Ireland is defined by these dates.

Usually the first semester of the academic year starts on or around September 21st (Autumnal Equinox) and finishes on or Around December 21st (Winter Solstice). Half term (study week) thus includes the Halloween Bank Holiday.

After a break for Christmas and a three-week mid-year exam period Semester Two starts on or around 1st February (Imbolc). Half-term is then around March 21st (Vernal Equinox) and teaching ends around May 1st. More exams and end of year business take us to the Summer Solstice and the (hypothetical) vacation.

So we’re basically operating on a pagan calendar.

The exception is, of course, the date of Easter, which is fixed by a mixture of solar and lunar considerations: Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the full Moon that occurs on or just after the spring equinox. This date moves about between March and April, which is very messy and inconvenient and should, in my opinion, be reconsidered.

*I decided on “yes”.

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R. I. P. John Hume (1937-2020)

Posted in Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , on August 3, 2020 by telescoper

Very sad news arrived this morning of the death at the age of 83 of civil rights campaigner and politician John Hume. He had been suffering from dementia for some time, and passed away earlier this morning in a nursing home in his native Derry. In that sense his death was not unexpected but I know from my own recent experience that won’t make it any easier for his loved ones. Condolences to John’s wife Pat and their family at what must be a difficult time for them.

John Hume, a Catholic, espoused the Irish nationalist cause but through non-violence, which often drew the ire of extremists on either side. Being moderate can be a dangerous position when you’re surrounded by armed factions. He became leader of the SDLP and was a key agent in the peace process that led to the construction of the Good Friday Agreement, a fact that was recognised in 1998 by a share of the Nobel Peace Prize (with David Trimble).

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” it says in the Gospel according to St Matthew. I wish more people – especially politicians – who profess to be Christian took that as seriously as John Hume.

There is a special connection between John Hume and Maynooth. He came here to St Patrick’s College initially to study for the priesthood. He didn’t pursue that aim but instead completed an MA degree in 1964 with a thesis on ‘Social and Economic Aspects of the Growth of Derry 1825 -1850’. Maynooth University recognises that connection with John & Pat Hume postgraduate scholarships and through the Hume building on campus.

John Hume was a man of great courage and integrity who dedicated his life to the cause of peace and mutual respect. He will be greatly missed.

I’ll end with a quote of his:

Ireland is not a romantic dream; it is not a flag; it is 4.5 million people divided into two powerful traditions. The solution will be found not on the basis of victory for either, but on the basis of agreement and a partnership.

And another:

All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity.

Rest in peace John Hume (1937-2020). Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h’anam dílis.

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