It behoves me to disappear from the blogosphere for a couple of days – perhaps not even as long as that – so there will be a (hopefully) short interlude until I return.
A Time to Offer
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags CAO, CAO offers, Leaving Certificate, Maynooth University, MH201, MH204, MH206 on August 28, 2024 by telescoperToday is the day that students across Ireland receive offers of places at Third-Level Institutions to start next month; the full set of CAO points required for different courses in different institutions are available in searchable form here and in a more user-friendly interface here. I have been away on sabbatical for a year so have been out of the loop for admissions. In past years I got an idea of how things were going from Open Days, etc, but not this time round.
This is of course just the first round of offers so things may change significantly over the next week or two. Students now have to decide whether to accept their first-round offer or try to change course. They have until next Tuesday to do this. Departments won’t know how many new students they have for a while yet.
The official low-tech results for Maynooth (in the lower right of the page shown above) are here. Minimum points required for Maynooth’s – and indeed Ireland’s – most important course, MH206 Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, are 513 this year, up a from 493 last year. Here’s a graph of how the CAO points for this course have varied over the years since 2010:
The entry level has been rather steady but note that Leaving Certificate grades have been adjusted upwards for the past few years so 500 points in 2024 is not equivalent to the same number in (say) 2016. The above graph doesn’t show how many students were recruited each year either.
MH201 General Science is 350 this year (same as last year); MH204 Physics with Astrophysics is 383 this year, up slightly from 376 last year. MH101 General Arts – the most popular course at Maynooth and indeed in all Ireland – has a first round offer of 307 this year, down from 310 last year. Most courses I have looked at in Maynooth have first-round offers this year similar to or lower than last year. Across all institutions, required points have fallen or remained unchanged for about 57% of courses.
This is interesting because it contrasts with news stories about grade inflation on the Leaving Certificate; I blogged about this here. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the CAO points needed for a course is largely a matter of demand versus capacity rather than academic performance. For the last few years Maynooth University has been recruiting more and more students, putting pressure on accommodation, teaching loads and campus space. It seems likely that the desire to keep this trend going is at least part of the reason for the continued falls in CAO points here. This is probably happening to some extent across the sector, though Maynooth has a more urgent need for more students: to pay for the legions of new managers it has appointed. The race to the bottom will really accelerate when the Covid-era Leaving Certificate adjustment is removed.
Update: here is the traditional supplement from Thursday’s Irish Times:
Blog Blocked
Posted in Maynooth with tags firewall, IT Services, Phishing, Wordpress.com on August 27, 2024 by telescoperI discovered today that this blog is not reachable via the campus network at Maynooth University. I wasn’t actually trying to write a post, which I sometimes do at lunchtimes or after work, but simply to send a link to this blog post to a colleague in the Department. I found I couldn’t make a connection to the blog, getting the dreaded ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT when I tried to do so. I thought it was strange as no other websites were affected and I had no problem connecting to this site from home.
In order to find out what was going on I raised a ticket with Maynooth University IT Services reporting the issues. I quickly got a response saying explaining that this was not the first time they had seen this issue with this particular hosting service (i.e. wordpress.com). It went on:
We were subjected to a phishing campaign originating from a site that shares your hosting address and those addresses are now denied by our firewall policy.
As the phishing origin server is still extant we cannot safely whitelist this IP …without risk of exposing our network to a repeat attack.
Blocking the entire WordPress.com domain because one of its sites was used in a phishing attack seems like overkill to me, but at least the explanation isn’t that the University Management decided to block the blog on campus because I have been critical of its policies. Or is it?
In the past I have sent students links to various educational blog posts from time to time. It looks like I’ll have to stop doing that as they’re not going to be readable on campus unless the firewall policy changes.
Requiem for the Croppies – Seamus Heaney
Posted in History, Poetry with tags Enniscorthy, Irish Rebellion 1798, Poem, Poetry, Requiem for the Croppies, Seamus Heaney, Society of United Irishmen, United Irishmen, Vinegar Hill on August 26, 2024 by telescoper
“The Croppy Boy”, a monument in Tralee, County Kerry. Created by Kglavin, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> via Wikimedia Commons
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.
by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
This poem is about the Battle of Vinegar Hill which took place outside Enniscorthy in County Wexford on 21st June 1798. It was part of the Rebellion of the United Irishmen. The term “croppy” refers to the short cropped hair worn by the rebels, most of whom went into battle carrying only pikes against the artillery and muskets of the crown forces. The battle was a heavy defeat for the United Irishmen over a thousand of whom were killed in what Heaney calls the “final conclave” where the last hopes for the rebellion to succeed were finally crushed. The poem’s final line depicts the barley in the pockets of dead rebels growing through the soil used to bury them, suggesting that the dream of independence would live on.
Coming of Age in a Low-Density Universe
Posted in Biographical, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags Dark Energy, dark matter, George Ellis, nature, The case for an open Universe on August 25, 2024 by telescoperI was reminded just now that 30 years ago today, on 25th August 1994, this review article by myself and George Ellis was published in Nature (volume 370, pp. 609–615).
Sorry for the somewhat scrappy scanned copy. The article is still behind a paywall. No open access for the open Universe!
Can this really have been 30 years ago?
Anyway, that was the day I officially became labelled a “crank”, by some, although others thought we were pushing at an open door. We were arguing against the then-standard cosmological model (based on the Einstein – de Sitter model), but the weight of evidence was already starting to shift. Although we didn’t predict the arrival of dark energy, the arguments we presented about the density of matter did turn out to be correct. A lot has changed since 1994, but we continue to live in a Universe with a density of matter much lower than the critical density and our best estimate of what that density is was spot on.
Looking back on this, I think valuable lessons would be learned if someone had the time and energy to go through precisely why so many papers at that time were consistent with a higher-density Universe that we have now settled on. Confirmation bias undoubtedly played a role, and who is to say that it isn’t relevant to this day?
Research Ireland: a wasted opportunity?
Posted in Science Politics with tags Irish Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland on August 25, 2024 by telescoperThe Government of Ireland has announced the Members of the Board of the newly-formed agency Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. The names are:
- Dr Eoin O’Sullivan
- Anne Vaughan
- Professor Niamh Moloney
- Professor Valeria Nicolosi
- Dr. Godfrey Gaston
- Professor Rebecca Braun
- Patricia Quane
- Lorraine Allen
- Leonard Hobbs
You can find biographies, together with one of the Chair, Michael Horgan, here. Looking through the list I see just one practising scientist, Valeria Nicolosi, who is an industrial chemist specialising in nanoscience. Among the other biographies you will find expertise in technology, entrepreneurship, and generic businessy things. but very little to do with actual research. And there’s nobody at all on the Board to champion fundamental science or any other curiosity-driven research. It appears that the misguided short-termism of Science Foundation Ireland is to be continued into the new organization.
Like many scientists working in Ireland, I was optimistic that the merger of the IRC with SFI would provide an opportunity to rebalance Ireland’s research ecosystem to have less emphasis on applied research. I hope I’m proved wrong, but it looks like that opportunity is to be squandered.
New Student Accommodation in Maynooth
Posted in Maynooth with tags Main Street, Maynooth, Student Accomodation, The Duke on August 24, 2024 by telescoper
I was interested to see a new advertisement for “student accommodation” in Maynooth containing the picture on the left. It’s a new development called The Duke, which was formerly a bar and nightclub called The Duke and Coachman and, before that, The Leinster Arms. It is a prime location on Main Street, and had been empty for a while, so it is good to see it being put to use.
I was walking past the place this afternoon so took a picture of it (right). As you can see, the reality is quite different from the advertisement. I think someone has been doing a bit of photoshopping! In fact the development is nowhere near finished; the area behind it is a construction site. That’s why the advertisement has no photographs of the interior.
I didn’t post this because of the photograph, however. The point is the price. A double room will cost €1500 per month (after you’ve paid a €800 letting fee). That seems very pricey for student accommodation! For comparison, a single en suite room in campus accommodation at Maynooth costs €650 per month.
Apparently there will be 90 rooms in this development. While accommodation is much needed, 90 rooms represent a drop in the ocean when there are over 15,000 students at Maynooth University, and the University Management wants that number to keep increasing so it can afford to pay for the legions of new managers it has appointed. Where will they live?
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2406.17751v2, Open Journal of Astrophysics, SN 2024ggi, supernovae, The Open Journal of Astrophysics on August 24, 2024 by telescoperIt’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Once again this week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being the 69th paper in Volume 7 (2024) and the 184th altogether. It was published on Wednesday 21st August 2024.
This week has been a bit strange, actually. We have actually accepted four papers that I was expecting to publish this week but only one has been published because the authors of the others have not yet put the final versions on arXiv. I suppose this is due to ongoing holidays and they’ll appear in due course. The other thing that happened was that when I published the paper below I discovered that the Crossref system was down for a scheduled upgrade that took a whole day to complete. Although I published the paper on 21st August I couldn’t register the metadata, etc, until 22nd August. Just as well I didn’t have more to do really!
Anyway, the title of the latest paper is is The compact circumstellar material of SN 2024ggi: another supernova with a pre-explosion effervescent zone and jet-driven explosion and it is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The author is Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa, in Israel; the paper presents a possible explanation of then properties of recently-observed supernova SN 2024ggi.
Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
Leaving Certificate Results
Posted in Bad Statistics, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags Applied Mathematics, ireland, Leaving Certificate, Leaving Certificate 2024, mathematics, Normal Foley, Physics on August 23, 2024 by telescoperToday’s the day that over 60,000 school students across Ireland are receiving their Leaving Certificate Results. As always there will be joy for some, and disappointment for others. The headline news relating to these results is that a majority (68%) of grades have been scaled up to that the distribution matches last year’s outcomes. This has meant an uplift of marks by about 7.5% on average, with the biggest changes happening at the lower levels of grade.
This artificial boost is a consequence of the generous adjustments made during the pandemic and apparent wish by the Education Minister, Norma Foley, to ensure that this year’s students are treated “fairly” compared to last year’s. Of course this argument could be made for continuing to inflate grades next year too, and the year after that. Perhaps the Minister’s plan seems to be to keep the grades high until after the next General Election, after which it will be someone else’s job to treat students “unfairly”. Anyway, you might say that marks have been scaled to maintain a Norma Distribution…
One can’t blame the students, of course, but one of the effects of this scaling is that students will be coming into third-level education with grades that imply a greater level of achievement than they actually have reached. This is a particular problem with a subject like physics where we really need students to be comfortable with certain aspects of mathematics before they start their course. It has been clear that even students with very good grades at Higher level have considerable gaps in their knowledge. This looks set to continue, and we will just have to deal with it. This issue was compounded for a while because Leaving Certificate grades were produced so late that first-year students had to start university a week late, giving less time for the remedial teaching that many of them needed. At least this year we won’t have that problem, so can plan some activities early on in the new Semester.
Anyway, out of interest – probably mine rather than yours – I delved into the statistics of Leaving Certificate results going back six years for Mathematics (at Higher A and Ordinary B) level, Physics and Applied Mathematics which I fished out of the general numbers given here.
Here are the results in a table, with the columns denoting the grade (1=high) and the numbers are percentages:
You can seen that the percentage of students getting H1 in Mathematics has increased a bit to 12.6% after falling considerably from 18.1% in 2022 to 11.2% last year (2023); note the huge increase in H1 from 2020 to 2021 (8.6% to 15.1%). Another thing worth noting is that both Physics and Applied Mathematics have declined significantly in popularity since 2019 from 7210.
Now that the results are out there will be a busy time until next Wednesday (28th) when the CAO first round offers go out. That is when those students wanting to go to university find out if they made the grades and university departments find out how many new students (if any) they will have to teach in September.
P.S. When I was a little kid we used to call a “Certificate” a “Stiff Ticket”. I just thought you would like to know that.
On a French Letter
Posted in Literature, Pedantry with tags French, French language, La mort aux anglais on August 22, 2024 by telescoperAlthough I studied French for five years at school I never learned the correct way to end an item of private correspondence in that language. It’s quite a subtle business in English whether to use “Yours Sincerely”, “Yours Faithfully”, or “Best Regards”, or some other alternative. Anyway, I stumbled across an old example of a French letter the other day which reveals what the French do write at the end …
In the Dark 