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The Week’s Ending

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 6, 2012 by telescoper

A later post than usual for a weekend. I’ve been feeling a bit fragile all day after a very late night last night “playing Bridge” (i.e. drinking and gossiping into the early hours of the morning, with the occasional hand of cards thrown in for good measure). My broadband connection has also been playing up nearly as badly as the connections in my brain, although I don’t think there’s a causal relationship between the two. Anyway, just time for a round-up of, and some reflections on, the events of the past seven days.

This has been the first week of term, so has naturally been extremely busy. I got my first week’s second-year lectures, examples sheets and handouts together last Sunday for a 9am start on Monday morning. There were 104 students on the register, and I was delighted to find that 100 of them actually showed up bright and early for the first session. The lecture wasn’t brilliant unfortunately – I misjudged how many worked examples I could fit into an hour and got a bit rushed as a consequence. Still, at least nobody threw anything at me, and I survived. At the end of the week the students were asked to hand in solutions to some problems, which most of them seem to have done. Unfortunately, however, I neglected to ask for the key to the box in which they are posted before the support staff went home at 5pm, so the scripts are still all in the box. At least that gives me an excuse for not having started to mark them yet.

I gave another lecture this week to the 4-th year Cardiff students taking the Quantum Field Theory lectures from Swansea, to try and fill in a bit of background our lot won’t have learned in other lectures on relativistic quantum mechanics, chiefly the Dirac equation. I really love that sort of stuff, so didn’t mind stepping up to do an impromptu class on it. They seemed to find it reasonably useful, although I went on a bit longer than I should.

Two other events this week in the School were a colloquium by Dr Anupam Mazumdar from Lancaster on Wednesday and a seminar by Prof. Pedro Ferreira from Oxford yesterday (Friday), both of which were related to alternative theories of gravity (i.e. modifications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity). Pedro has co-authored a comprehensive review article on such things if anyone is interested in following up the details. The basic point, however, is that standard cosmology almost all develops from the assumption that gravity and space-time are described by general relativity. That theory is well tested on solar-system scales, but independent tests on the much larger scales involved in cosmology are hard to come by. It’s clearly therefore an important goal to work towards testing alternative theories, as is the case in any scientific discipline.

As well as these specific events there was a steady stream of problems and irritations to do with the teaching timetable: rooms too small, clashes, and so on. This is part of my responsibility as Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s a royal pain in the derrière. However, I think all the bugs have been ironed out and we can hopefully now carry on with a settled teaching programme into the new year.

Looking back on the week I can see so many things I would not long ago have found unbearably stressful, even going to the pub after Friday’s seminar.  Such victories, however insignificant they may seem to others,  have given me the confidence to face the  greater challenges that I know the future has in store.

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Lectures by Video

Posted in Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 2, 2012 by telescoper

I spent a short while this morning sitting in on a lecture from one of our fourth-year modules, on Quantum Field Theory. Nothing obviously remarkable about that, except that the lecture was in fact delivered by Prof. Graham Shore of Swansea University and I was sitting in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University with a group of twenty or so Cardiff undergraduates.

This was the first lecture our students have received from Swansea as part of an arrangement to share some teaching. There was a plan to do it last year, but it fell apart owing to technical problems. When I took over as Director of Teaching and Learning earlier this year I was determined to make it work. I have long felt that many of our 4th-year students were losing out on some advanced topics, especially in particle physics, owing to the lack of expertise in that area here. Indeed, the lack of expertise in particle physics here in Cardiff is so extreme that our students have had to put up with being taught by me! Likewise Swansea’s undergraduates have missed out a bit on some topics we do here, especially astrophysics and gravitational physics. This division of labour dates back to the old federal University of Wales where it was decided for strategic reasons not to compete in these two areas of “big science” but to allow Cardiff to do astronomy, astrophysics and gravitational physics and Swansea the particle stuff. It was a sensible decision from a research point of view, but it meant that the two relatively small physics departments here in South Wales could offer their undergraduates more restricted choices of advanced topics  than at bigger universities.

Not for the first time, the web has furnished a solution. After a few technical problems – not entirely sorted out, to be honest – we’ve finally established a video link. The initial setup is temporary, but we will (hopefully by next week) have a permanent, high quality videoconferencing suite for future use. It will probably take some time for lecturers and students on both sides to get used to it, but sitting in this morning I found it more than satisfactory from the point of view of audibility and legibility. The only problem really is that the static camera shot makes it a bit claustrophobic. I’m not sure whether there’s a way around that without spending a fortune on multiple cameras.

Anyway, to mark this historic occasion I thought I post another video lecture on Quantum Field Theory just to give you a flavour of the content and the experience. This is by David Tong of Cambridge University as seen in a lecture recorded by the Perimeter Institute in Canada.

 

Anyway, in the spirit of openness, and because I couldn’t stay for the whole session,  I’d be interested to hear what any Cardiff students thought of the experience either in private or through the comments box..

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Cardiff – The Video

Posted in Bute Park with tags , on September 24, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s a nice video promoting Cardiff as a perfect place to be a student.  I presume it doesn’t mention the Opera because that’s for old fogeys like me rather than bright young things like them, but it does feature quite a few other things that might surprise you if you’ve never visited the city before, including Bute Park…

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Reflections on the Autumnal Equinox

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on September 23, 2012 by telescoper

So the autumnal equinox has been and gone again, reminding me that it is now just over four years since I started blogging; one of my very first posts was prompted by the Equinox in 2008. It’s also a reminder that the summer is now well and truly over, and teaching term is about to start. Some of my colleagues elsewhere have started teaching already but at Cardiff, lectures don’t start until 1st October. Next week, however, sees Freshers’ Week, and various other enrolment, registration and induction events. Many students have already arrived, if the crowds of young  bewildered people wandering around Tesco yesterday are anything to go by.

Tomorrow is our Board of Studies too, the first one I have to chair as Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Most of the business is to do with tidying up loose ends of the last academic year and planning for the term to come. I’ll have to see whether I can chair it with sufficient ruthless efficiency that we don’t all end up missing lunch.

Anyway, this time of year always reminds me when I left home to go to University, as thousands of fledgling students are doing now. I did it thirty years ago, getting on a train at Newcastle Central station with my bags of books and clothes. I said goodbye to my parents there. There was never any question of them taking me in the car all the way to Cambridge. It wasn’t practical and I wouldn’t have wanted them to do it anyway. After changing from the Inter City at Peterborough onto a local train, me and my luggage trundled through the flatness of East Anglia until it reached Cambridge.

I don’t remember much about the actual journey, but I must have felt a mixture of fear and excitement. Nobody in my family had ever been to University before, let alone to Cambridge. Come to think of it, nobody from my family has done so since either. I was a bit worried about whether the course I would take in Natural Sciences would turn out to be very difficult, but I think my main concern was how I would fit in generally.

I had been working between leaving school and starting my undergraduate course, so I had some money in the bank and I was also to receive a full grant. I wasn’t really worried about cash. But I hadn’t come from a posh family and didn’t really know the form. I didn’t have much experience of life outside the North East either. I’d been to London only once before going to Cambridge, and had never been abroad.

I didn’t have any posh clothes, a deficiency I thought would mark me as an outsider. I had always been grateful for having to wear a school uniform (which was bought with vouchers from the Council) because it meant that I dressed the same as the other kids at School, most of whom came from much wealthier families. But this turned out not to matter at all. Regardless of their family background, students were generally a mixture of shabby and fashionable, like they are today. Physics students in particular didn’t even bother with the fashionable bit. Although I didn’t have a proper dinner jacket for the Matriculation Dinner, held for all the new undergraduates, nobody said anything about my dark suit which I was told would be acceptable as long as it was a “lounge suit”. Whatever that is.

Taking a taxi from Cambridge station, I finally arrived at Magdalene College. I waited outside, a bundle of nerves, before entering the Porter’s Lodge and starting my life as a student. My name was found and ticked off and a key issued for my room in the Lutyen’s building. It turned out to be a large room, with a kind of screen that could be pulled across to divide the room into two, although I never actually used this contraption. There was a single bed and a kind of cupboard containing a sink and a mirror in the bit that could be hidden by the screen. The rest of the room contained a sofa, a table, a desk, and various chairs, all of them quite old but solidly made. Outside my  room, on the landing, was the gyp room, a kind of small kitchen, where I was to make countless cups of tea over the following months, although I never actually cooked anything there.

I struggled in with my bags and sat on the bed. It wasn’t at all like I had imagined. I realised that no amount of imagining would ever really have prepared me for what was going to happen at University.

I  stared at my luggage. I suddenly felt like I had landed on a strange island where I didn’t know anyone, and couldn’t remember why I had gone there or what I was supposed to be doing.

After 30 years you get used to that feeling.

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Open for Clearing in Physics and Astronomy

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2012 by telescoper

It being A-level results day, I thought I’d try a little experiment and use this blog to broadcast an unofficial announcement that, owing to additional government funding for high-achieving subjects, the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University is able to offer extra places on all undergraduate courses starting this September for suitably qualified students.

An institutional review of intake numbers by HEFCW (Higher Education Funding Council for Wales) resulted in the award of extra funded places for undergraduate entry in 2012. Of particular benefit are those STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects seen as strategically important by the UK government. Therefore, the School of Physics and Astronomy is pleased to announce acceptance of late UCAS applications from those candidates expected to achieve our entrance requirements.

Those current applicants who have already applied through the standard UCAS procedure and who have been offered places need not be concerned as these new places are IN ADDITION to those we were expecting to fill.

Applications can be made through Clearing on UCAS after discussions with the Admissions Team.

Course codes (for information)

BSc Physics (F300) and BSc Astrophysics (F511)

MPhys Physics (F303) and MPhys Astrophysics (F510)

BSc Physics with professional placement (F302)

BSc Theoretical and Computational Physics (F340)

BSc Physics with Medical Physics (F350)

Course enquiries can be made to Dr Carole Tucker, Undergraduate Admissions Tutor, via email to Physics-ug@cardiff.ac.uk or call the admissions teams on 029 2087 4144 / 6457.

Good luck!

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Five Years On

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on July 1, 2012 by telescoper

So here we are then. July 1st 2012. Five years to the day since I started my job here in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. Cardiff students reading this will probably be surprised that I haven’t been here for longer than that, because it no doubt seems to younger folks that the staff must have been here since the Boer War. In fact, though, I’ve only been here long enough to see one generation of MPhys students through from induction to graduation; the second such group will graduate in a couple of weeks.

There’s a wikipedia page listing all the important events of July 1st 2007 but owing to some form of administrative error my move to Cardiff isn’t listed there. I notice that July 1st 2007 was also a Sunday, incidentally.

Thinking back to 2007 all I can remember was that my departure from Nottingham appeared to precipitate a collapse in the world’s financial system, ushering in the Credit Crunch just when I put my house in Beeston on the market, with the result that it took me the best part of a year to sell it and buy one here in lovely Pontcanna. In the meantime I had to rent a flat in Cardiff in which I lived during the week and travel back and forth to and from Nottingham at weekends. Actually, the weather in the summer of 2007 wasn’t too different from that of 2012; heavy rain in June and July that year led to the Severn flooding, causing considerable problems for my weekly commute.

Coincident with being the fifth anniversary of my arrival here from Nottingham, today is also the day that I’m officially promoted to Deputy Head of School and Director of Learning and Teaching. Or is it Director of Teaching and Learning? Anyway, five years isn’t exactly a meteoric rise through the ranks but I’m still shocked to have been placed in a position of such responsibility. I fear that the Peter Principle may be doubly appropriate.

The reason I got landed in it was given this opportunity for career progression was the departure of Derek Ward-Thompson to a position of Director of the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute at the University of Central Lancashire (in the Midlands); there was a farewell party for Derek at the Poet’s Corner on Friday which I attended briefly before heading off to the concert I wrote about yesterday. After fourteen years in Cardiff, Derek will be missed around here and I wish him well in his new job.

Meanwhile, life goes on. The last five years have certainly had their ups and downs, both personal and professional, but I’ve definitely got no regrets about moving here. I wouldn’t have predicted in 2007 that I’d be able to gather such a wonderful group of PhD students (Jo, Geraint and Ian), for example, nor that I’d find Cardiff undergraduates such fun to teach, especially as project students.

Here’s to the next five years!

PS. I am tempted to joke that Derek’s move from Cardiff to UCLAN improves the quality of astronomical research at both institutions. But of course I wouldn’t dream of saying anything like that…

🙂

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Cardiff Schools and Colleges

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , , on June 25, 2012 by telescoper


There was a mighty kerfuffle around these parts last week, stirred by an email from the Vice-Chancellor “designate”, Prof. Colin Riordan. The incoming Vee-Cee doesn’t take over until September, but he’s clearly planning to do some pre-emptive reorganization.

The Cardiff University is currently divided into academic Schools and administrative Directorates. There are 27 Schools, including Physics & Astronomy where I work. The current system is a bit unusual in that the Heads of these Schools report directly to the Vice-Chancellor. Some other universities have an extra organization layer on the academic side, sometimes called Faculties.  Cardiff University used to have faculties, actually, but it lost them some time ago. The same could be said for many of its staff, come to think of it.

Anyway, Prof. Riordan has decided that he doesn’t want to have to talk to 27 Heads of School and has proclaimed that Cardiff will have a new structure consisting of three Faculties Colleges into which the existing schools will be grouped in thuswise fashion:

 

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Cardiff Business School

Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning

Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Cardiff School of European Languages, Translation and Politics

Cardiff School of History, Archaeology and Religion

Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

Cardiff Law School

Cardiff Centre for Lifelong Learning

School of Music

Cardiff School of Social Sciences

School of Welsh

College of Biomedical and Life Sciences

School of Biosciences

School of Dentistry

School of Healthcare Studies

School of Medicine

Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies

School of Optometry and Vision Sciences

Cardiff School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

Wales Deanery / School of Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education

School of Psychology

College of Physical Sciences

Welsh School of Architecture

Cardiff School of Chemistry

Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics

School of Earth and Ocean Sciences

Cardiff School of Engineering

Cardiff School of Mathematics

School of Physics and Astronomy

I didn’t realise before that some Schools are called “Cardiff School of….” or even “Welsh School of…” and others just “School of…”. I wonder why? Anyway, you can see that we’re now in the College of Physical Sciences along with Chemistry, Engineering etc and, um, Architecture. The new arrangement may also provide me with an opportunity to find out what “Informatics” means…

Having these new-fangled Colleges means that there are positions available as Heads thereof, and existing Heads of Schools have been invited to apply, hence a flurry of CV polishing.

Fortunately for all concerned, I’m not eligible.

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The End of the Viva

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , , , on June 13, 2012 by telescoper

I’m stuck at home today, waiting for UPS to come and collect a defective printer. Any time between 9am and 7pm, they said. Very helpful. Anyway, I’ve got plenty to do while I’m here, catching up on STFC Astronomy Grant Panel business that I’ve been too busy to attend to. Also, this week’s Private Eye has just arrived in the post, so I’ll take a break at some point to do the crossword by Cyclops. It’s a lovely day. Pity I can’t sit in the garden. I’d miss the doorbell when the carrier arrives.

Anyway, the past two days have been largely given over to the business of examinations in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University. The External Examiners spent a big slice of Monday doing viva voce examinations of selected candidates; not just those on borderlines, but also some others for “calibration”. I wasn’t involved in them this year, but have taken part in the past as External in various places. Obviously these examinations are very stressful for the students, and also quite difficult to conduct fairly, but sometimes provide useful insights in the cases where a student’s marks put them on a knife-edge between two degree classifications (or even between pass and fail).

Anyway, in its infinite wisdom Cardiff University has decided to scrap the viva voce examination after next year. From 2014 onwards we’ll just have to apply a formula to deal with borderline cases; the algorithm involves counting how many modules were passed at the higher level, etc. Actually, I probably agree with this for the purposes of classifying degrees. Twenty minutes’ questioning under stress can hardly be expected to yield much objective  information about a candidate’s knowledge of the subject that dozens of written papers and other assessments. Often, in my experience, students (especially the shy ones) are so nervous that the shutters come down almost straight away.  I would  prefer a system which is algorithmic as possible, so everyone knows what the rules are, rather than relying on subjective judgements.

As external, I always found the viva examinations a useful way of getting feedback from the students on their course which can be fed back – either usefully or not – to the department. In losing the viva  for drawing up the classification lists, I hope that we can find another way for the externals to talk to students in some other context to get some feedback about the course. Perhaps they could attend for project talks, or something like that?

Yesterday, the entire Board of Examiners (including Externals) gathered to go through all the individual cases and draw up the Honours List. I was delighted when I saw all the consolidated marks in advance of the meeting, to see how well how many of our students had done. There were one or two difficult cases, but in the end we produce the lists. As I went back to my office, students were already gathering in the corridor by the noticeboard where it is always placed as soon as the definitive final version has been prepared, shortly after the meeting closed.

Soon I heard whoops of joy and laughter and had a quick look to see the students congratulating one another. As always on such occasions, I was tempted to go along and chat to a few of them but, as always, I resisted doing so. It’s a time for them, the students, not us, the staff.

Anyway, congratulations to all those who had good news yesterday!

I hope your hangovers aren’t too bad…

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Teaching (about) Physics

Posted in Education with tags , , , on June 10, 2012 by telescoper

So the academic year nears its end. This week we have the dreaded meetings of the Examination Boards, complete with External Examiners, ordeal by viva voce for selected students, and finally the lists go up announcing success (or otherwise) for this year’s finalists. It’s all a lot of work – and I’m sure also extremely stressful for the students waiting for their results.

If it’s any consolation for any students reading this post, I can assure you that there’s no lack of stress on this side of the fence either. I always feel a sense of dread opening the packets of examination scripts, and this year was no different. Have I set the exam too hard? Will the marks be a fair reflection of the students’ ability? Have they learned anything at all from the hours I spent droning on? These questions are all the more apt for a third-year class, since these are the papers that really count in determining the final outcome of their course. When the lists go up later this week, one’s delight at the sight of happy (or relieved) faces is always tempered by sadness when things have obviously gone wrong.

Coincidentally, I noticed the other day that a former student from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University posted an item on her blog giving her view of her degree. It’s a very frank assessment of her own opinion of the course she took, including a list of her  three favourite courses. None of the ones I lectured are amongst them, by the way, in case you think I’m mentioning it for egocentric reasons. Indeed, I’m pretty confident that I’m one of the lecturers she didn’t like at all!

The main thing is that, for better or worse, our course involves an enormous amount of contact time with academic staff.  In the new fee regime students will pay the same £9K for a science course as they would for the Arts and Humanities:

See, doing a Physics and Astronomy degree, I had about 20 contact hours. With lab time. so in one month I had out stripped the BA people for an entire academic year. So in the 12 weeks of one semester, I have had more contact time than they will get in their entire degree. Worth it?

As for whether we make the best use of the time we devote to teaching, that’s a different matter. We have in fact recently overhauled the entire curriculum so we’ll see whether that has the desired effect. One can’t please all of the people all of the time, so we’ve tried to introduce new teaching methods – e.g. fewer lectures, more problems classes – to try to engage better with more students. Only time will tell whether it works.

Anyway, although it’s not one of the topics of her post, Harriet’s blog brought something from the back of my mind where it usually lurks ready to trouble me when I start to think about teaching physics. The point is that most of us involved in teaching physics at University level think that what we should be doing is training people to be professional physicists. That means teaching them to do physics the way it is actually done by people who do research. That means that, especially in Astronomy, students have to grapple with strange unit systems, peculiar terminology and quite a lot of maths. Those aren’t put into our courses in order to torment students – they’re there in the curriculum because they’re there in the world of (astro)physics research. It would be dishonest for us to pretend we were training physicists if we made out that it was all easier than it actually is.

What I mean to say is that I don’t think it should be our job to present physics in a way that’s different from (specifically easier than) the way it is  done at the coalface, in the world of scientific research.  What we should be doing is giving students the skills and confidence to solve the difficult problems a scientist can expect to confront in that situation. To be honest I don’t think we do that particularly well either, but that’s the aim. And that’s why our courses are mainly taught by people who actually do physics and why we claim our teaching is research-led.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Especially in earlier years, much of the undergraduate curriculum – Newtonian Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, etc  – is not “frontier” stuff so probably doesn’t require an active researcher to teach it. On the other hand, none of that is exactly easy so anyone who is going to teach it competently needs to have mastered it themselves. And in later years, the more specialist material and projects certainly require an active research environment.

Anyway, the point is that  in the new fee regime science courses will attract the same level of funding as courses in, e.g. English Literature. But a course in Physics requires physicists to teach it, while a course in literature does not require a team of successful novelists. Given the fact that the way we teach physics is more expensive by a very large margin, should we be rethinking our approach to the basic physics degree, and leave all the fancy research-led stuff to Masters courses?

Should we really be trying to teach all our students how to do physics? Or should we just be teaching them about physics?

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Astronomy Jobs at Cardiff!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 1, 2012 by telescoper

Just a quick post to advertise a couple of job opportunities in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University. For further details you can look at the official website, but here is an outline:

Two Faculty Positions in Astrophysics

Observational and theoretical studies of star-formation and/or extrasolar planetary systems.

The School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University has immediate vacancies for two permanent faculty appointments in Astrophysics.  We are seeking experts in observational and theoretical studies of star-formation and/or extra-solar planetary systems to conduct world-class research and research-led teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level.  The appointments will be at any level from Lecturer to Professor depending on the experience of the candidate; we expect at least one of the appointments to be at a junior level.

Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University has undergone substantial expansion in the past few years and has very strong research groups in gravitational-wave physics, astronomical instrumentation, extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, star-formation and condensed matter physics.  There are presently 18 academic staff involved in astrophysics and relativity, with 15 post-doctoral researchers and 22 PhD students.

The appointment will be made at a level commensurate with experience.

The advertisement is also available on the AAS Jobs Register, or will be when they get their act together and put it online. The AAS website is just one of a number that have been recently improved, with the result that they’re much less efficient than they were before.

Anyway, I’m just passing on the advertisement so please don’t send me your CVs! If you’d like to apply please do so using the official Cardiff University jobs page, which also has a lot of general information about the City and the University.

P.S. There have been quite a few job vacancies in astronomy around the UK recently – Edinburgh, Surrey, Liverpool, Exeter etc. I wonder why that is, and where the money is coming from?

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