Examinations in May

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on May 5, 2025 by telescoper

In the Irish language, the month of May is called Bealtaine after the old Celtic festival that marks the mid-point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. May Day is Lá Bealtaine, one of the so-called Cross-Quarter Days that lie halfway between the equinoxes and solstices. The Bank Holiday associated with this day is not May 1st, as it is throughout Europe, but the first Monday of May, which this year means today. I’m therefore officially off work, though I have quite a few things to do so will be working from home for most of today.

This Bank Holiday offers a bit of a breather before the end of teaching term (Friday May 9th) and the start of the Examination period (Friday May 16th). There are just four more days of teaching, and I have just a couple more lectures to do. In a normal week I would have a Particle Physics tutorial this Monday afternoon, but instead I have offered to do one next Monday (12th) to go through the last assignment which is due in on Friday. The examination for Particle Physics is on 27th May, which is one of the last of the year; this is a final-year module so for many students it will be their last examination at Maynooth.

My Computational Physics students are working on their projects which are due in on Friday 9th; that gives me about a week to grade them before the examinations start. The Computational Physics written examination is on Monday May 19th and if all goes to plan I will have the projects marked before I embark on the examination scripts. Instead of formal teaching sessions, the computing lab, together with demonstrator assistance, is at the disposal of the students for their projects during this time. I anticipate plenty of last-minute acitivity in Thursday’s session!

Anyway, on Friday I have to give a Departmental Colloquium as well as my final Particle Physics lecture. Then, to mark the end of teaching, I’m going to the National Concert Hall to listen to some music. The next morning I’ll have to get up very early for the Darkness Into Light, which involves a 5km walk ending at sunrise.

After next week attention will turn to examinations. For me that’s not only in Maynooth. I haven’t mentiond it on here before but I have agreed to act as External Examiner for undergraduate Physics programmes at Imperial College, London, for the next few years. The meeting of the Examination Board there is not until July, which is long after ours in Maynooth so there will be no clash, but I have been doing some work (vetting papers, etc) alongside my own work. The examinations at Imperial take place roughly alongside ours, but there are so many more students there than at Maynooth that a longer time is needed for grading the scripts so the end of the process is much later.

In the past, I’ve been External Examiner in a number of UK universities. The last was Cambridge, in fact, where my term ended in 2017 while I was still working in Cardiff. I haven’t done any since moving to Ireland: being Head of Department, especially during lockdown, did not allow me the time. My term as External at Imperial will last until I retire, so this is the last such job I’ll be doing.

There’s quite a lot of work involved with being an External Examiner, but I always find it interesting to see how other institutions run their programmes. As well as providing feedback and, if necessary, advice to the Institution I always pick up interesting ideas from them too. Imperial’s Physics programmes are much broader than ours, so there’s a huge difference in scale, but I’m sure there will be things to learn. I mean in general terms, of course. All the details are confidential, for obvious reasons.

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Wyn Evans for Chancellor of Cambridge University!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , , , on May 4, 2025 by telescoper

I thought I’d post a quick follow-up to this post about the campaign by Prof. Wyn Evans to be the next Chancellor of Cambridge University. When I posted that item, Wyn was seeking enough nominations to stand for election. I’m very glad to pass on the news that he got over 100 nominations, more than twice the number required to stand for election. He is therefore an official candidate for the election that will take place in July. I am a graduate of Cambridge University and have registered to vote in the forthcoming election.

P.S. This all reminds me that a mere 40 years ago I was preparing for my finals at Cambridge. I still have the papers I sat then and will share them on the anniversary for old times’ sake. The first papers were on Wednesday 22nd May 1985.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 03/05/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 3, 2025 by telescoper

Saturday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It’s been a recording-breaking week: since the last update we have published no fewer than ten papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 54 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 289.

The first paper to report is “Subspace Approximations to the Focused Transport Equation of Energetic Particles, I. The Standard Form” by B. Kippenstein & A. Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This paper, which was published on Monday 28th April 2025, presents a hybrid analytical-numerical method to solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the transport of energetic particles. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Next is “The Importance of Subtleties in the Scaling of the ‘Terminal Momentum’ For Galaxy Formation Simulations” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This presents a technical discussion of issues surrounding the proper modelling of supernova blast waves and their effects in numerical simulations of galaxy formation. It was published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The final version can be found on arXic here.

Next one up is “Local variations of the radial metallicity gradient in a simulated NIHAO-UHD Milky Way analogue and their implications for (extra-)galactic studies” by Sven Buder (ANU, Australia), Tobias Buck (U. Heidelberg, Germany), Qian-Hui Chen (ANU) and Kathryn Grasha (ANU). This one was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a numerical study of the variation of chemical abundance with radial position in galaxies and the implications of this for galaxy formation. Here is the overlay:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week is “Zooming In On The Multi-Phase Structure of Magnetically-Dominated Quasar Disks: Radiation From Torus to ISCO Across Accretion Rates” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and 14 others based in the USA and Canada. This was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents very detailed numerical study of the structure of magnetized quasar accretion disks. The overlay is here:

You can find the official final version on arXiv here.

Next is “Tomographic halo model of the unWISE-Blue galaxies using cross-correlations with BOSS CMASS galaxies” by Alex Krolewski, Jensen Lawrence, and Will J. Percival (U. Waterloo, Canada). This one was also published on 29th April 2025, which was a busy day(!), but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper describes using the halo model to create mock samples unWISE-Blue galaxies, applicable to other tomographic cross-correlations between photometric samples and narrowly-binned spectroscopic samples. The overlay is here:

The final version of this one can be found on the arXiv here.

Number six for this week is “StratLearn-z: Improved photo-estimation from spectroscopic data subject to selection effects” by Chiara Moretti (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Maximilian Autenrieth (Imperial College, UK), Riccardo Serra (SISSA), Roberto Trotta (SISSA), David A. van Dyk (Imperial) and Andrei Mesinger (SNS Pisa, Italy). This was published on Thursday 1st May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This one is about estimating photometric redshifts using an approach that relies on splitting the source and target datasets into strata based on estimated propensity score. The overlay is here:

 

The official version can be found on arXiv here.

Next is “The Impact of Galaxy-halo Size Relations on Galaxy Clustering Signals” by Joshua B. Hill and Yao-Yuan Mao (U. Utah, USA). This one was also published on May 2nd 2025 and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses the challenge of identifying a specific galaxy halo property that controls galaxy sizes through constraints from galaxy clustering alone. The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of the paper on arXiv here.

The next paper is “Detection of Thermal Emission at Millimeter Wavelengths from Low-Earth Orbit Satellites” by Allen Foster (Princeton, USA) and an international cast of 90 others, which is too many to list individually. This one was also published on Thursday May 1st but is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.  The paper discusses the experimental detection of thermal emission from satellites and a discussion of the implications for astrophysical observations, especially time-domain astronomy. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version of the paper on arXiv here.

The penultimate paper of this week is “Pseudo-Cls for spin-s fields with component-wise weighting” by David Alonso (U. Oxford, UK). This one was published yesterday (Friday 2nd May 2025).  The paper presents an approach to power spectrum estimation appropriate for data with anisotropic noise properties or for which complicated masks are required.  It can be found in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

 

The final version of this paper is on arXiv here.

The last paper this week is “The past, present and future of observations of externally irradiated disks” by Planet formation environments collaboration: Megan Allen (U. Sheffield, UK) and 52 others. This paper was published on Friday 2nd May in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.  It presents a review of research on the effects of the ultraviolet radiation environment on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll just add that there were quite a few gremlins at Crossref this week, particularly yesterday. I usually do the publishing first thing in the morning but yesterday’s papers were held in a queue for most of the day pending registration. Usually it just takes a few minutes, but for these I had to wait several hours but we got there in the end. Although ten papers is more than we have ever published in a week, we still haven’t had a week in which we’ve published on every working day!

Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

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Euclid on Sky

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 2, 2025 by telescoper

I haven’t posted much recently about the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission but I’ve got an excuse to remedy that today as I’ve just seen that the Special Issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics called Euclid on Sky has at last been published (with a date of 30th April 2025). This contains the main mission and instrument overview papers as well as scientific papers relating to the Early Release Observations. All the individual papers have been on arXiv for some time already.

You can access the Special Issue here.

The main mission overview paper has 1139 authors (including yours truly); that’s definitely the longest author list I’ve ever been on! The arXiv version has been available for almost a year and has already got 254 citations. Here is the abstract:

The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

Here’s Figure 1.

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May and the Poets – Leigh Hunt

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on May 1, 2025 by telescoper

I almost forgot that today is Poetry Day Ireland which this year has a theme of “May Day” so here’s a romantic yet whimsical offering that seems tailor-made to mark the start of the month of May.

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

by James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

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Darkness into Light

Posted in Maynooth, Mental Health with tags , , on May 1, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick note to advertise that I’m taking part in Darkness Into Light in Maynooth on Saturday, 10th May, from 4.15am, to raise vital funds for Pieta and people affected by suicide and self-harm.

You can help keep Pieta’s essential services FREE and available to anyone who needs them by donating now to help me reach my fundraising goal. Every euro counts. Even a small donation can make a big impact. You can contribute to my fundraiser here.

Together, we can light up the darkness and create a brighter future for everyone.

Thank you so much for your support

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Corroding Ireland’s Public Institutions

Posted in Education, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on April 30, 2025 by telescoper

There’s an article in yesterday’s Irish Times with the headline Irish universities take millions of euro from big business. Are they too close for comfort? and the lede Many higher education institutions now rely on industry-sponsored professorships, research and scholarships to plug State funding gaps. The piece is behind a paywall, but it is based on public policy document by colleagues at Maynooth university that isn’t. In fact you can read it here. The abstract is

This policy paper explores private sector funding of higher education institutions in Ireland. Large corporations are providing financial support to Irish universities in multiple ways including supporting research projects and research centres, establishing professorships in the company name, funding physical infrastructure, and providing scholarships and other supports for students. A lack of publicly available data about the scale and scope of industry funding of Irish universities constrains a comprehensive understanding of how the private sector is engaging with and influencing Irish universities. While industry funding of higher education is often framed as a benefit to Irish society, the risks associated with private sector funding of higher education appear not yet widely considered in the Irish context. International research on industry funding of universities shows that these risks include: (1) an erosion of support for academic endeavours that may not be perceived as having commercial value, (2) corporate capture of the public-good mission of universities to legitimise profit-seeking priorities in policy discourse, and (3) the distraction of academic attention away from social and economic policies that prioritise human health and ecological health. This paper warns of the challenges of preserving the integrity and independence of academia in a higher education landscape increasingly shaped by profit-seeking objectives and market-driven priorities. Policy recommendations include a renewed commitment to strong public investment in universities and greater transparency about the scale and scope of industry funding of higher education in Ireland including a publicly accessible database of all private sector funding. 

This article elucidates many of the worries that I’ve had for some time about the corrosion of Ireland’s public universities. It’s not just that going cap-in-hand to the private sector inevitably means a focus on applied research but also that our lords and masters seem to think university teaching is simply about preparing graduates to go and work for Google. There is much more to university education than skills training.

It also occurred to me reading the piece that what it says about universities is also true about other public institutions. The one that sprang first to mind is the Irish public service broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). This is funded by a license fee, as is the BBC. Unlike the BBC, however, its TV broadcasts also carry advertisements to supplement the income generated by the fee. To attract advertising it has broadcast content that is more like what you would expect from a commercial channel, including imported soap operas and the like. The management of RTÉ has also been involved in a number of dodgy practices, including sponsorship deals and secret payments, that have led to a corrosion of trust in the organization.

I think RTÉ would be far better off concentrating on the current affairs, documentaries, culture and sports programming that it does well than try to compete with other channels for advertising revenue. Then it would truly be a public service broadcaster, funded by the public to serve the public. Universities should be like that too, funded by the public to serve the public, rather than commercia,l interests or the vanity of those in charge.

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Spring Undergrowth – Joan González

Posted in Art, Barcelona with tags , , , on April 29, 2025 by telescoper
by Joan González (c. 1901/2, gouache on paper, 648 x 502 mm, Tate Gallery, London).

The artist Joan González was born in Barcelona, and lived from 1868 to 1908; the title of this work in Catalan is Sous-bois Printanier.

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The Spanish Power Outage

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Euclid with tags , , on April 28, 2025 by telescoper

The first I knew about today’s massive failure of electricy grids across the Iberian peninsula was at 4 o’clock this afternoon, when I tuned in to a regular Euclid telecon and found that the expected speaker wasn’t able to give their presentation because there was no power in Spain. I was subsequently shocked to discover the scale of the outage, the cause of which remains unknown (at least to me). I’ve often thought that Ireland’s power grid was a bit unstable but I’ve never known the whole country to be shut down!

It all reminded me of the 2003 power blackout in the North-Eastern USA and Canada.

There has been speculation about an “unusual atmospheric phenomenon” being the cause, but that seems somewhat implausible. Indeed, nothing I’ve read so far about the cause of this event makes much sense.

This time last year I was in Barcelona, and today’s events got me thinking what it would have been like to be there without any power. The apartment I was living in was all-electric so there would have been little I could do – no light, no cooking, no air conditioning, no internet, no TV, no radio. I was on the top floor and the lift was powered by electricity so I would have had to use the stairs to get in or out. It would have been an interesting experience to see the city in total darkness from my balcony.

Had I been in the Department of Physics when the power went off I probably would have had to walk home, as the Metro would not have been running and with all the traffic lights off the roads would be even more chaotic than usual. That would have meant a walk of an hour or so, which would have been annoying, but feasible. Come to think of it, people actually on the Metro when the failure happened would have been stuck in a tunnel which must have been very unpleasant.

Anyway I hope all my friends and colleagues in Spain are not too badly inconvenienced and that this very weird event doesn’t lead to any serious issues. I understand the power supply to hospitals is secure, which is a relief. I must admit though I am very curious to learn the cause of this catastrophic failure. Was it human error? Deliberate sabotage? Or was it really an “unusual atmospheric phenomenon”? No doubt there will be a full investigation and we’ll find out in due course.

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Quasimodo Sunday

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on April 27, 2025 by telescoper

One of the useless facts stored in the increasingly inaccessible recesses of my memory is that the first Sunday after Easter is sometimes called Quasimodo Sunday, not for Hunchback of Notre Dame, but from the start of the traditional introit to the roman liturgy for this day: Quasi modo géniti infántes… (“in the manner of newborn babes”).

This year in Maynooth University Quasimodo Sunday is the last day before the students return after a short Easter break for the remaining two weeks of teaching of the Spring Semester. It’s just less than two weeks of teaching, actually, because Monday 5th May is a public holiday. This will be a very busy period as we have not only to finish teaching our modules, but also to complete grading any remaining assessments ahead of the examinations that start on 16th May. I have just four lectures and two tutorials remaining in Particle Physics but I have one assignment still to correct (which I intend to do this afternoon) and there will be one more due in at the end of term (Friday 9th May). In Computational Physics the only item on the agenda for students is the project work also due in on 9th May, at which point I will have reports from 32 students to grade. Then there’s the examinations…

I also have another important job to do over the next couple of weeks, which I can’t write about here. I had hoped to start on it a few weeks ago but that plan was stymied by a bureaucratic delay, so I actually only got started last Friday. It looks like I’ll have to do it alongside everything else during the next two weeks. I won’t post about it until it’s finished, but I’m optimistic that it will turn out well.

Oh, and I’m giving a Colloquium in the Department of Physics on 9th May too. It’s all go.

The weather was mostly rather grim over the Easter break but has improved today and the forecast for the next few days is good. I propose to mow the lawn before starting on my grading tasks. I have let the grass grow for a while, resulting in a splendid crop of dandelions which, among other things, are good for the bees. Dandelions are generally thought of as weeds but the I find the splashes of yellow colour all around very easy on the eye and do not share the desire that some people have to destroy them on sight. In fact there seem to be more around than I’ve noticed in previous years. I’ll let the ones at the back of my house carry on for a while, but I’m sure others will soon grow in the front after I mow the lawn.

Update: mowing was hard work because the grass was still rather wet.  I gave it a rough cut and will go over it again in a couple of days when what’s left will hopefully be dry.

As well as dandelions, there are quite a few cowslips here and there:

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