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Two Weeks into Term…

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , on February 17, 2025 by telescoper

I thought that this semester would have had an easier start than the last because I am teaching only one new module (and one familiar one) instead of the two new modules I had last semester. Unfortunately I wasn’t very well before the start of this one and have been struggling to recover so this term hasn’t been easy at all and I’ve had a lot to catch up. At least I’ve managed to stay on top of the lectures and lab sessions and everything so far has gone relatively smoothly. I have to admit though that only two weeks in, I already feel extremely tired. I went to bed at 9pm last night and slept straight through to my alarm at 7am. I’m getting old.

Last week we had our Examination Board meeting for Semester 1 in the Department of Physics. I also attended the Examination Board for the Department of Engineering because I was teaching an Engineering Mathematics module last semester. The students in both Departments should receive their provisional examination results this week, although there have been some gremlins in the campus systems which may lead to a delay in the marks being released.

Semester 2 is a bit more complex than Semester 1 because of a number of interruptions for holidays, etc. The first Monday of this term was actually a holiday, but I don’t actually have lectures on Mondays this term so that didn’t matter, nor will Monday 5th May which is also a holiday. I do, however, have a Particle Physics lecture on Fridays so will miss one on because of the national holiday on April 18th for Good Friday and will have to plan accordingly. The following week (Mon-Fri, starting on 21st April) is the Easter Break, and the week from 17th to 21st March is Study Week (starting with the St Patrick’s Day national holiday on Monday 17th). Although the number of teaching weeks is the same as Semester 1, they are spread out over a longer period with two gaps instead of one. One break is coming up about a month from now, and then another a month after that. This schedule is rather kind to those of us Oldies who tire easily!

Although I’ve kept up with the teaching preparation reasonably well, I have let other things slip. In particular, I have a graduate student getting ready to submit their PhD thesis ahead of an imminent deadline. I promised to read it and supply suggestions/corrections which I have yet to. That’s right at the top of my list for this week.

Talking of PhD students, my first ever official PhD student at Maynooth has already already passed his viva voce examination – about a year ago actually – but owing to bureaucratic delays he won’t graduate until this year, at a conferring ceremony in the March study week mentioned above.

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The Dangers of AI in Science Education

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on January 17, 2025 by telescoper

I’m taking the liberty of reblogging this post from an experienced university teacher of chemistry and physics outlining some of the dangers posed by the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence into science education. It’s quite a long piece, but well worth reading in its entirety

The ethical case for resisting AI

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2025: The Year Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth with tags , , , , on January 1, 2025 by telescoper 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

From Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.

January is named after the Roman deity Janus, who according to Wikipedia, is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Since I did a retrospective post yesterday about 2024 in retrospect, I thought I’d do a quick one today (1st January 2025) to mention a few things looking forward.

January will, as usual, be dominated by examinations, and especially the marking thereof. The first examination for which I am responsible is on January 13th.

February sees the start of a new semester. I’ll be teaching Particle Physics for the first time at Maynooth. I taught this subject for many years at Nottingham and Cardiff (the latter combined with Nuclear Physics), so it should be OK. My other module is Computational Physics which I have taught at Maynooth every year since 2018, apart from 2024 when I was on sabbatical.

The big event in March will be the release of “Q1” data from Euclid. This is only a very small part of the full survey, but is an important milestone and will no doubt attract a lot of press coverage. There’s a blog post by Knud Jahnke here. No doubt I’ll do a few blog posts too. The first full data release DR1 will take place in 2026. The Q1 release is timed to coincide with the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, which this year takes place in Leiden. I won’t be able to attend in person, as it happens during teaching term, but may be able to follow some of the sessions remotely.

In April we will have a very special visitor to Maynooth to deliver the Dean’s Lecture (of which more anon). Much less significantly, I’ll be giving a Colloquium in the Department of Physics.

May will largely be taken up with second semester exams and assessments – there will be a lot of computational physics projects to correct as well as the usual examinations.

The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society takes place in Cork in June. I’ve been to Cork before, but am looking forward to going again.

And then it will be summer. I did a lot of travelling during my sabbatical so I am not planning to travel much in 2025, though I may try to visit some more places in Ireland. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with some research too. This year I am supervising my first MSc project at Maynooth, so that will be an interesting new experience.

And then we’re more-or-less into the next academic year 25/26. That’s beyond my planning horizon. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching, but it may be the same as 2024 (at least for Semester 1). I wonder if I’ll get to teach any astrophysics or cosmology here before I retire? It doesn’t look likely…

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Nearly there…

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on December 19, 2024 by telescoper

Today I completed the lectures for one of my modules, the one on Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering students, and gave the penultimate lecture for Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for final-year Mathematical Physics students. Both were revision lectures. As campus has been very quiet for the last few days I didn’t expect many (if any) students to show up for either of these classes, but some did, although numbers were a long way down on the start of the year.

Campus is always quiet this close to the holiday, but this time there has been a bug going around which has led to a few more absences than usual among students. Some staff have been affected too. I had a mild dose of whatever it was earlier in the week but got over it relatively quickly.

Tomorrow, the last day of Semester 1, I have my last lecture of this term, followed by a couple of final-year project presentations. Then that’s it until 2025. I am already thinking about what to do tomorrow evening to mark the end of term. I haven’t reached any definite conclusions yet, but it will almost certainly involve wine. Then I suppose I’ll have to start my Christmas shopping which will include buying more wine.

I am a bit flush this week because I’ve finally received rebates of overpayment from OVO Energy and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water relating to my former house in Cardiff. I sold this property months ago, after much tedious to-ing and fro-ing, but getting money back from utility companies is like getting blood out of a stone. OVO Energy were particularly bad, violating their statutory obligations. The offer3d me £60 additional payment in recognition of this but, although they eventually settled the bill, they never paid the compensation. It seems they just lied.

In contrast, and giving credit where it’s due, I am grateful to Cardiff City Council for paying back my overpaid Council Tax very promptly.

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Approaching Examinations

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , , , on November 27, 2024 by telescoper

We’re in Week 9 of teaching in the Autumn Semester at Maynooth University, which means we’ve got one eye on the forthcoming Examination Period, which starts on 10th January 2025. Examination papers have already been prepared in draft form, and are now being checked ahead of printing. A draft examination timetable has also been released to staff, but not yet to students in case it has to be revised because of clashes.

I’m still on schedule with both my modules to finish the actual content in time to do use the last week for revision classes, going through past examination papers and generally helping the students prepare for the ordeals of January. There is a continuously-assessed component of both my modules, which counts 20% of the overall grade. One purpose of these assignments is to give the students some practice at the sort of problems they might encounter in the examinations: if they can do the assignments, they shouldn’t be too fazed by the examination questions. The purpose of the coursework is not just about passing examinations, however. I think the only way really to learn about mathematical physics is by doing it; the coursework is at least as important as the lectures and tutorials in terms of actually learning the subject. I think that modern higher education involves drastic over-assessment. Too much emphasis on grades and scores can be detrimental to real learning, but assessment that is formative can be extremely beneficial. Continuous assessment provides a way to give feedback to students on how they are doing, and to lecturers on how well the message is getting across; giving grades to such coursework is really just an incentive to the students to do it. It’s not primarily intended to be summative.

Anyway, back to examinations. One big difference between our examinations in Theoretical Physics in Maynooth and those at other institutions at which I’ve taught (in the UK) is that most of the papers here offer no choice of questions to be answered. Elsewhere it is quite common to find a choice of two or three questions from four or five on the paper. In my module on Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, for example, there are four questions on the examination paper and students have to do all of them for full marks.

One  advantage of our system is that it makes it much harder for students to question-spot in the hope that they can get a good grade by only revising a fraction of the syllabus. If they’re well designed, a few longish questions can cover most of the syllabus for a module, which they have to in order to test all the learning outcomes. To accomplish this, questions can be split into parts that may be linked to each other to a greater or lesser extent in order to explore the connections between different ideas, but also sufficiently separate that a student who can’t do one part can still have a go at others. With such a paper, however, it is a  dangerous strategy for a student to focus only on selected parts of the material in order to pass.

As an examiner, the Maynooth style of examination also has the advantage that you don’t have to worry too much if one question turns out to be harder than the others. That can matter if different students attempt different questions, as students might be penalized if they chose a particularly hard one, but not if everyone has to do everything.

But it’s not just the number of questions that’s important, it’s the duration. I’ve never felt that it was even remotely sensible for undergraduate physics examinations to be speed tests, which was often the case when I was a student. Why the need for time pressure? It’s better to be correct than to be fast, I think. I always try to set examination questions that could be done inside two hours by a student who knew the material, including plenty of time for checking so that even a student who made a mistake would have time to correct it and get the right answer. If a student does poorly in this style of examination it will be because they haven’t prepared well enough rather than because they weren’t fast enough.

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Midpoint at Maynooth

Posted in Biographical, Education, mathematics, Maynooth with tags , , , , on November 11, 2024 by telescoper

Amid all the excitement last week I forgot that it was the sixth teaching week of the Semester. That means that we’re now past the halfway point. Among other things that meant that examination papers were due in on Friday (8th November). That means two papers for each module I’m teaching, one to be sat in January and another for the repeat opportunity in August, so that’s four altogether.

I always find setting examination questions very difficult. In theoretical physics we want to stretch the stronger candidates at the same time as allowing the weaker ones to show what they can do. It’s a perennial problem how to make the questions neither too easy nor too difficult, but it is compounded this time by the fact that I’m teaching two modules for the very first time so judging the right level is tricky.

Another issue is that I’m once again in a situation in which I have to set examination papers without having taught all the material. At least I’ve covered the first half of the content so I have some idea of what the students found difficult, but that’s not the case for the second half. It should be a bit easier next year once I’ve experience of covering the whole syllabus. Assuming, of course, that I’m teaching the same modules again next year, which is by no means guaranteed…

I’m teaching a module on Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for 4th year students and just about ready to switch to the part that comes after the and. I taught a bit of Complex Analysis when I was at Sussex and I’m quite looking forward to it, although it does pose a particular challenge. Some of the class are doing a Double Major in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, and have done quite a lot of Complex Analysis before, while others are doing a Single Major in Theoretical Physics and haven’t really done any. I have to somehow find a way to satisfy these two different groups. The only way I can think of to do that is to teach the subject as a physicist rather than a pure mathematician, with an emphasis on examples and real-world applications rather than in the abstract. We’ll see how this works out over the next few weeks.

P.S. On the subject of Complex Analysis, I just remembered this post from a few years ago.

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Steps to Improve

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on October 18, 2024 by telescoper

Along with all academic staff at Maynooth University I received an email this afternoon from the Vice-President for Research and Innovation, which contained the following request:

Well, I certainly won’t be providing any such lists at any time for this or any similar purpose, let alone by next Wednesday! I will be boycotting the QS World University Rankings and I urge any of my “peers” who are contacted about it to do likewise.

I assume that request this is a panicky reaction to the fact that Maynooth is so low in the current current QS league tables and falling in most others. This decline is a direct result of policies implemented by the Management Team at Maynooth, pushing up a student-staff ratio that is already the highest in Ireland, and starving core activities of resources while squandering millions on management salaries and perks – latest example of which is  €500,000 on a luxury taxi service for “priority staff members”; you can guess who that means. ..

I would prefer that the people in charge of Maynooth University made some attempt to improve teaching and research – you know, the things that a university is suppose to do – rather than try to game these ridiculous league tables. Such an approach, however, seems to be out of the question. Maynooth’s race to the bottom is bound to continue unless and until attitudes change at the top.

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Mental Health and Graduate Studies

Posted in Biographical, Mental Health with tags , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2024 by telescoper

There has been a lot of comment on social media about a recent article in Nature about the mental health of graduate students and the numbers looking for treatment. There are many sources of stress that can have a negative effect on mental health, including financial pressures and poor accommodation to name but two. These aren’t really specific to graduate studies. One that is is the pressure to produce results. That actually continues throughout an academic career – burnout is a very real phenomenon – but it’s probably worse during the “apprenticeship” phase when one is inexperienced and still learning the trade.

“Productivity” is indeed important but should not be interpreted as having to work ridiculously long hours. I remember many years ago commenting on an article that claimed 80-100 hours a week was not unusual. There are people who can sit at their desks for 12 hours a day without producing anything very much at all. It’s not the hours that matter, but what you do with them. In no way will indulging your outside interests (sporting, cultural, political, or “other”…),  or simply relaxing, detract from your ability to do research. As a matter of fact, I think such diversions actually improve your work, as well as (of course) your general well-being.

I think it is fair to say that you have to work hard to do a PhD. I worked hard on mine back in the day. But don’t think that means it has to be a grim slog. I can only speak for myself, but I greatly enjoyed my time as a graduate student. I think this was at least in part because when I was doing my PhD I had plenty of outside interests (including music, sport and (ahem) “nightlife”)  and took time out regularly to indulge them. I did experience mental health problems later during my PhD, but these were not caused by being a research student.

I can think of many times during my graduate studies when I was completely stuck on a problem – to the extent that it was seriously bothering me. On such occasions I learned to take a break. I often found that going for a walk, doing a crossword, or just trying to think about something else for a while, allowed me to return to the problem fresher and with new ideas. I think the brain gets into a rut if you try to make it work in one mode all the time.

There were indeed many times during my time as a research student – and have been since – that I worked extremely long hours – all night sometimes. I wouldn’t say exactly that was because I “enjoyed” it, but that I wanted to know an answer and couldn’t get the problem out of my head.  I’ve stayed up into the early hours of the morning trying to finish a crossword too. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t put it down unfinished. I know that makes me a saddo in many minds, but I think that’s the sort of obsessiveness and tenacity a researcher needs: becoming so absorbed by the task in hand that you don’t notice the passage of time.

I don’t think anyone should try to infer too much from these personal reflections, but I do think there’s one important point that I try to point to every graduate student I advise and that is to look after your mental health. Perhaps the Nature article has a positive side, in that at least graduate students are seeking help. Recognizing that you might have a problem is a very important first step.

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Back to Teaching

Posted in Education, mathematics, Maynooth with tags , , on September 24, 2024 by telescoper

So, after an absence from teaching of over a year, this afternoon I returned to the lecture theatre to give a double session on the module EE206 Differential Equations and Transform Methods. I was a bit apprehensive about having a two-hour slot and it is fair to say that I felt a bit knackered after it, but `then I am getting on a bit. I did have time for a ten-minute break in the middle during which the students could relax and stretch their legs a little. Some of them even came back afterwards.

This module is meant for students on two courses, Electronic Engineering and Robotics and Intelligent Devices, so I will have to think of relevant examples. I’ve got the RLC circuit, of course, but I’ll have to more than that!

If you’re interested you can find an old summary of the module here to see what topics are covered.

The good news from my point of view is that I have a decent room to teach in – complete with chalk boards – and the students seemed pleasant and engaged. I always like to get some interaction going in my classes so it was good to find a reasonable number of people willing to offer answers to questions I asked and indeed willing to ask me questions or request clarification. Overall, I was quite pleased with how it went. You will have to ask the students to see if they agree. At any rate I did manage to get through everything I planned to cover. The class size is about 55, incidentally.

Anyway, today I just warmed up for the module with some revision of basic calculus. I had pessimistically imagined that the students would have forgotten what they did in the first year about this, but in fact quite a few of them remembered quite a lot. I have my second session with this group on Thursday, though that should be a bit easier as it is only one hour instead of two. I will start differential equations proper then.

My remaining teaching sessions this week are all in the Arts Building. I have been quite worried that the rooms I am supposed to use would not be ready in time, but I took a walk around yesterday morning and they are ready (although construction work is going on elsewhere in the block). I was thinking I might have to give these lectures via a remote connection from home as in the old days of the pandemic, but that fortunately is not the case.

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Flying Visit(s)

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on June 2, 2024 by telescoper

So here I am, not in Barcelona. On Thursday night I flew to the fine city of Newcastle upon Tyne to act as external examiner for a PhD candidate. Since I knew I would be arriving quite late I stayed in a hotel near Newcastle Airport. It was just as well I did so because, it being Ryanair, I arrived even later than expected. On Friday morning I took the Metro from the Airport to Haymarket and spent the morning in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University ahead of the viva voce examination.

The PhD candidate was Alex Gough (pictured right, after the examination, with supervisor Cora Uhlemann). Cora being German we were treated to the tradition of successful PhD candidates having to wear a elaborate hat, after the examination (fortunately not during it). Some champagne was consumed, followed by dinner at a nice Indian restaurant on Clayton Street.

For those of you not familiar with how the PhD system works in the UK, it involves doing research into a particular topic and then writing up what you’ve done in a thesis. The thesis is a substantial piece of work, often in the region of 100,000 words (200 pages or so), which is then assessed by two examiners (one internal to the university at which the research was done, and one external). They read copies of the thesis and then the candidate has to defend it in an oral examination, which was what happened on Friday, after which they make a recommendation to the university about whether the degree should be awarded.

There aren’t many rules for how a viva voce examination should be conducted or how long it should last, but the can be as short as, say, 2 hours and can be as long as 5 hours or more. The examiners usually ask a mixture of questions, some about the details of the work presented and some about the general background. The unpredictable content of a viva voce examination makes it very difficult to prepare for, and it can be difficult and stressful for the candidate (as well as just tiring, as it can drag on for a long time). However, call me old-fashioned but I think if you’re going to get to call youself Doctor of Philosophy you should expect to have to work for it. Some might disagree.

Obviously I can’t give details of what went on in the examination except that it was quite long primarily because the thesis was very interesting and gave us lots to discuss. At the end internal examiner Danielle Leonard and I agreed to recommend the award of a PhD. In Newcastle as in other UK universities, the examiners simply make a recommendation to a higher authority (e.g. Board of Graduate Studies) to formally award the degree, but they almost always endorse the recommendation. I’ve never been sure exactly when a successful candidate is allowed to call themselves “Doctor”, actually, but congratulations to Dr Gough!

Anyway, the celebratory dinner ended just after Women’s International football match between England and France (which France won) had finished at St James’ Park and the Metro was consequently crammed full, but I got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour. Thank you to everyone in the group, especially Cora and Ian Moss, for being so friendly and making me feel so welcome during this brief visit.

Tomorrow I shall be heading to the part of not-Barcelona known as Oxford, where I believe there is a University of some sort, to give a lecture about which I’ll post more tomorrow.

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