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?
It’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!
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.
Today’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.
Although 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 …
A businessman is on a luxury yacht, celebrating his recent acquittal in a high-profile fraud trial, when the yacht sinks in mysterious circumstances off the coast of Sicily. The businessman is one of six people on board who are missing, presumed dead. Just last week, the businessman’s co-defendant in the aforementioned fraud trial died in a mysterious road accident while out running in Cambridgeshire.
Using Bayesian methods, calculate the probability of these two events being a coincidence. Show your working. To the police.
Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008) was an immensely gifted saxophonist and clarinet player who was also an accomplished arranger and composer who worked for many big bands. His most famous piece as an arranger was Four Brothers which he wrote for Woody Herman’s fantastic saxophone section of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff and Herb Steward. My first encounter with Giuffre as an instrumentalist was in the opening track of the 1958 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day playing a tune called The Train and the River which has been a favourite of mine for many years. Back then he had a quite accessible style that blended jazz with folk elements, but he later developed a freer and more “modern” approach, including the use of electronic instruments and elements of jazz/rock fusion. I recently read a biographical article about him and – for obvious reasons – was intrigued that in 1985 he made an album called Quasar so I thought I’d share the title track here. Giuffre is on soprano sax on this one.
Although I won’t myself be able to attend, I’m happy to be able to use the medium of this blog to advertise the above public event which is taking place in the first week of September on the back of a week-long conference to celebrate the career of Professor Tom Ray of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. That in turn follows hard on the heels of the Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) which takes place in Galway on 29th and 30th August.
Anyway, the public event on 3rd September is free to attend but you need to register here, where it is described thusly:
The Newgrange Passage Tomb, a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland, is one of the most remarkable examples of Neolithic art and architecture, dating back to around 3200 BC. This ancient structure, with its intricate stone carvings and precise alignment with the winter solstice sunrise, reflects the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of its builders.
With starkly different technology, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, represents the pinnacle of modern astronomical achievement. JWST is designed to peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, capturing images and data from the formation of the earliest galaxies to the atmospheres of planets outside of/beyond our solar system.
Despite being separated by millennia, both Newgrange and JWST underscore humanity’s enduring quest to understand our place in the cosmos through the study of the stars and the universe.
As part of the celebration of the career of Professor Tom Ray the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institute of Physics are delighted to host a public event on Newgrange and JWST. This is in recognition of Tom’s long interest in archaeoastronomy and Newgrange in particular, and his involvement with the JWST through the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI).
The talk will be delivered by Dr. Frank Prendergast, archaeoastronomer and Emeritus Research Fellow at Technological University Dublin, and Professor Gillian Wright, European Principal Investigator of MIRI and Director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh.
I couldn’t resist sharing the following, which I found here.
One day Lord Byron gave his publisher, John Murray, a handsomely bound Bible, its cover graced with a flattering inscription. Murray proudly displayed the book on a table where it would be seen by his many guests.
One day a visitor, admiring the book, noticed that at John 18:40, in the line ‘Now Barabbas was a robber,’ Byron had crossed out the word ‘robber’ and substituted… ‘publisher’.
You can probably figure out why I found it amusing!
Thomas Campbell 1777–1844 Scottish poet: attributed, in Samuel Smiles A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murray (1891) vol. 1, ch. 14; see Bible
This goes to show two things: one is that not everything you find on the internet is true; the other is that very often the things that aren’t true really should be.
P.S. Fans of the classic TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will no doubt remember in Episode 1 that George Smiley uses the variation “Barabbas was a bookseller” when he is making a purchase in an antiquarian bookshop before he notices that he is being followed by Peter Guillam…
It’s Saturday morning and time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This will be a short post because there is only one paper to report this week, being the 68th paper in Volume 7 (2024) and the 183rd altogether. It was published on Thursday August 15th 2024.
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.
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In the Dark 