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Back to Life, Back to Reality

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , on January 2, 2010 by telescoper

Today is the 3rd Round of the FA Cup, which traditionally marks the end of the Christmas holidays. In fact, I was going to watch Bristol City versus Cardiff City which was due to be shown live for free on Welsh channel S4C. However, the pitch is frozen and it’s been postponed. So I’ll be taking down the Christmas decorations instead…

Now that it is no longer the season to be jolly, I’ve decided to return to the theme of doom and gloom that prevailed before Christmas. In particular, you may recall that just before Christmas, Lord Mandelson wrote to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to announce a package of £135 million cuts for next year. It has now been confirmed – see the story in the Times Higher – that these cuts are on top of huge cuts arising from decisions announced in the pre-budget statement, earlier in December. Altogether these cuts will amount to over £900 million being taken from the Higher Education budget over the next three years, or about 12.5% of the total.

The reduction in budget amounts to a cut in the “unit of resource” paid by the government directly to universities, and with a review of tuition fees currently being carried out by Lord Browne, the likelihood is that students will have to pay much more in future to make up the difference if the sector is to survive at its current level. This would require lifting the cap on tuition fees, a decision on which will almost certainly be postponed until after the next General Election (due by summer 2010). The combination of immediate cash cuts and uncertainty about the future will cause widespread unease and apprehension throughout the university system, and I think it won’t be long before we start hearing of more closures.

We won’t know what the situation will be in Wales until the Welsh Assembly announces its allocations to HEFCW, the Welsh counterpart of HEFCE. I can’t say I’m optimistic, especially after reading their recent discussion document on the future of higher education in Wales. Things might work out rather better in Scotland, where the university sector seems to be valued more highly than elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Physics will be hit particularly hard by these cuts. It’s an expensive subject to run, and attracts only modest numbers of students paying customers. Savage cuts in research grants and postgraduate funding from STFC will have sent a clear message to university administrators that this is a risky subject to be investing in, a point of view likely to be reinforced by the inexplicably poor showing of physics in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.  The outlook for physics and astronomy  looks even bleaker than for the rest of the university system, at least in England and Wales.

But my fears for the New Year are even wider than that. The deep cuts that have been imposed on Higher Education will save less than £1billion over the next three years. Compare that with the estimated budget deficit for 2009/10 of £178 billion and you’ll realise that it’s a drop in the ocean. The problem is that there’s an election coming up and the government is scared of trying to tackle the problem because of fears it will alienate voters. It has ring-fenced expenditure on politically sensitive things like schools and hospitals so the only things that it can cut are things that potential labour voters don’t care so much about, such as universities. And of course it realises that doing the sensible thing  and putting up income tax would be electoral suicide, although it is absolutely certain that whoever wins the next election will have to do it.

The biggest danger with the strategy of waiting until after the election before deciding to start tackling the debt crisis properly is that before long the international markets are going to realise that Britain is basically insolvent. It is true that the stock market has  recovered from its low point in March 2009, but only slowly and uneasily. The government seems to be assuming that  the markets will politely wait until Britain has gone to the polls before passing judgement on the longer term futue. However,  if sovereign debt rather than private debt becomes a major concern, I don’t think the UK economy will survive until the election without at least one major market correction, and off we’ll be into another, probably deeper, recession. It might not be the UK that sparks this off, but the levels of sovereign debt in Central and Eastern Europe could trigger a market panic that engulfs Britain too. The prospect of a hung parliament could easily give investors the jitters too.

There have been considerable increases in the level of government investment in UK universities over the last decade.  Admittedly, not all of it has been useful – much has been wasted in extra bureaucracy, pointless initiatives and ever-growing Human Resources departments – but at least years of neglect were being reversed.  Now the next few years offer the prospect of all the increases in funding being reversed. Higher education was one of the last sectors to benefit from extra government spending, and it is the first to have it taken away again.

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Space Anomaly

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 17, 2009 by telescoper

After yesterday’s marathon, I’m not planning today to post another lengthy item about the STFC prioritisation exercise which is now public. However, a number of people have asked me about an apparent anomaly in the rankings and, despite the hostile reception I received on the e-astronomer when I posted a comment there, I’ve decided to mention it briefly here in an attempt to explain what looks at first sight like a very strange state of affairs.

BepiColombo (no relation) is a Mercury Orbiter mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was selected as a result of a lengthy Europe-wide process. The UK space science community showed relatively little interest in the mission, but it had sufficient support elsewhere to avoid being cancelled about three years ago. So it was picked for the programme, and is now scheduled for launch in 2014. It will take about 6 years to reach Mercury and will take data for a year or two after that.

As is the case with these big ESA “cornerstone” missions, participating countries are called upon to bid to build instruments to fly on the spacecraft. Although this requires an additional investment from the funding agencies (in this case STFC) beyond the annual subscription, this is essentially the only way of securing a science return for UK Plc on the ESA subscription. The UK is in fact involved in two instruments on BepiColombo, a magnetometer and an X-ray spectrometer, although it is the second of these that has the main funding commitment from STFC. Roughly speaking, STFC has commissioned UK scientists and given them funds to build a UK part of BepiColumbo.

I’ll remark here that I always thought the most interesting thing about Mercury is its magnetic field – it’s quite surprising even that it has one – so given the chance I’d prefer to have seen the UK getting more involved in that. But what do I know? I’m just a physicist…

Anyway, in the UK’s recent prioritisation exercise, BepiColombo was graded 1 on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high), reflecting the relatively low interest in this mission among UK space scientists. Many projects rated 3 were cancelled, and even those rated 4 and 5 are going to have their funds cut by 15 to 20% so it looks very strange to have BepiColombo retained in the final programme, especially if you’re working on an alpha-3 project that’s just been canned.

However, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. While the UK itself wasn’t particularly interested in this mission, it did attract strong support in the rest of Europe. The UK signed up to the whole ESA menu and was thus obliged to go along with it; a la carte was not an option. ESA decides its programme, with UK input, but we do not have a veto. STFC (and previously PPARC) entered into various agreements, including a Memorandum of Understanding, from which it would be disastrous to back out.

I don’t know how much BepiColombo is costing STFC, but it’s likely to run into millions. That money could have supported other things in the astronomy programme, including postdoctoral grants. But before you jump to the conclusion that astronomy has been stitched up, remember that the ESA subscription has also opened up new areas of research through missions such as Planck and Herschel. These are a boon to our research, but the privilege of being allowed to participate in them comes at the price of having to support things the UK astronomy community is less keen on. In this particular example the politics of the situation and the need to fulfil our obligations within ESA have trumped the scientific judgement of the UK community.

To put this another way, would you want to scrap UK participation in this mission if it also meant binning our involvement in Herschel, Planck, JWST and all the rest.

I’m not advocating we scrap BepiColombo any more than we should scrap any of the other primary elements of the ESA programme. However, I do think that the nature of this balancing act should be more widely known. Otherwise, as things stood, it just looks like some vested interest has taken the funds from more deserving causes in order to promote a pet project. I hope I’ve made it clear that did not happen and that STFC had no choice but to fund BepiColombo.

I think it helps to get these things out in the open, in apparent contrast to some colleagues in the space lobby who seem to prefer to silence debate rather than engage with it. It’s no wonder people get suspicious when that’s the attitude shown by those in positions of responsibility on STFC committees.

If I’ve said anything unfair or unreasonable here please feel free to comment, as long as you can refrain from gratuitous abuse…

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Day of Reckoning

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 16, 2009 by telescoper

10.45am. I came in this morning determined to get on with some work to distract my attention from the looming announcement of budget cuts from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). I was up nearly all night worrying about the future, especially for the current generation of postdocs whose careers I’m pretty sure are going to sacrificed in large numbers to balance the books. It reminded me a bit about a poem I posted a while ago: I could not sleep for thinking of the Sky STFC.

Anyway, I’ve spent over an hour trying to write one paragraph of the paper I’m trying to finish and I can’t settle so I thought I’d start a post, with the intention of updating it as the day goes on, the picture gets a bit clearer, and I become increasingly suicidal.

The actual announcement of the result of the prioritisation exercise will appear this afternoon on the STFC website here under the heading

STFC: Investing in the Future

Who said these guys don’t have a sense of humour? What’s underneath is currently completely blank. Hang on, they might have put the result up early in that case…

Most of the blogs and tweets I follow – at least those emanating from this side of the Atlantic – are about this today, so if you’d like to keep up here are some useful links:

Paul Crowther at Sheffield has kept up with all the ongoings and downturnings at STFC and you can expect him to understand it better and quicker than the rest of us  here.

There’s a very good (and nearly anonymous) post about all this on the blog To Left of Centre.

The e-astronomer (Andy Lawrence at the ROE)  has written about this and a lot of important people have commented on it.

Rob Simpson, a PhD student here in Cardiff,  is probably expressing the fears of many younger researchers as is Sarah Kendrew who gives a postdoc perspective.

There’s a list of things astronomical that are probably about to eat the dirt at this website. My bet is that everything on their list will go, plus more. The reason is that most of the things at the bottom of the prioritisation exercise are actually fairly cheap, so just closing a few won’t plug the gap. As a colleague of mine said the other day, “It’s a big shit sandwich, and we all have to take a bite.”

11.15am. If the phrase “going forward” appears anywhere on the STFC announcement page, then I won’t be responsible for my actions…

11.50am. WICKET! Prince c Collingwood b Swann 45. Oh sorry. Wrong blog.

12.08pm. Incoming transatlantic link from the Starving Economist, from whose page I’ve pulled the following comment:

So I’d almost forgotten that other countries are out there, facing the Great Recession as well, and making really stupid decisions in the face of it. IMHO one example of blatant incompetence in an economic sense is being perpetrated by none other than the UK. We kind of look up to them, don’t we? It’s the accent or something. But they are busy tossing some of their world-renowned science, and much of their past investment in such, out the door rather than restructure some of their government funding. Talk about inertia. Their astronomy program appears to be particularly hard-hit. Interesting way to close 2009, the International Year of Astronomy.

I couldn’t agree more. It also reminded that I haven’t made enough of the irony that this is indeed the International Year of Astronomy. For a lot of people it will be the last year they’ll be doing astronomy.

12.25pm. Meanwhile, our man in Madrid, Matt Griffin has been wowing the audience with some of the new results from Herschel. I hope to be able to post a few of them later when the official workshop results go live.

12.45pm. STFC operatives have been phoning project leaders this morning to tell them the bad news. Our head of school, Walter Gear, has got his phone call telling him that our attempt to resurrect Clover will not be funded. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected…

13.15pm. It’s tea-time in sunny  South Africa (with the home side at 159-4) but here in Blighty it’s the long dark lunch break of the soul, waiting for news of the inevitable.

13.30pm. Half an hour to go. Most of the astronomers in the department have now left to travel to Madrid for the big workshop starting tomorrow. They tell me the new results probably won’t be available for public consumption until Friday (18th December). Nothing to sugar the pill, then.

13.55pm. I’m not often right, but I was wrong again. I’ve just noticed that there is already an ESA press release that includes this stunning image of a star-forming region in the constellation of Aquila made using both PACS and SPIRE observations. This is just a first look at part of an extended survey of stellar nurseries that Herschel will be undertaking over the forthcoming months.

14.00pm. And there were are, right on cue. Here is the announcement. As expected, there is a ridiculous attempt to put a positive spin on it all, but you will find immediately, sigh, another 10% cut in research grants to universities (on top of the 25% we already had) to reduce the amount of “exploitation”, plus 25% cuts in the number of PhD students and fellowships “mirroring the overall reduction in the programme”. I read that as meaning that STFC wants, in the long term, about 25% of the astronomers in the UK to go somewhere else and, preferably,  never come back.

I’ll post more when I’ve read the details.

14.10pm. So here’s a quick summary of what projects will be funded in (ground-based) astronomy:

Advanced LIGO, JCMT (to 2012), Gemini (until end 2012), ING (to 2012), KMOS, VISTA, Dark Energy Survey, E-ELT R&D, SKA R&D, SuperWASP, e-Merlin, Zeplin III; Total cost of £87m over 5 years

(the big surprise to me in there is  e-Merlin, which I thought would get the chop) and what won’t

Auger, Inverse Square Law, ROSA, ALMA regional centre, JIVE, Liverpool Telescope, UKIRT. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £16m. Total savings of £29m over 5 years

And on the space side we have the lucky ones:

Aurora, GAIA, Herschel, JWST-MIRI, LISA Pathfinder, Rosetta, Planck, ExoMars, Hinode, Cosmic Vision, Solar Orbiter, Stereo, Swift, Bepi-Colombo; Total cost of £114m over 5 years

and the losers

Cassini, Cluster, SOHO, Venus Express, XMM. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £28m. Total Savings of £42m over 5 years

Note that both Aurora and Bepi-Colombo were both rated very low on scientific grounds but have been retained in the programme, presumably for political reasons.

However, the big downside for everyone is the cut in university grants for “exploitation” that I mentioned above. STFC wants to have lots of expensive facilities, but doesn’t want to fund the modest among of staff needed to actually get science out of them. The stupidity of this decision is made even more depressing by its inevitability.

Even the top-rated projects are getting cuts to their funding. It just shows how little thinking is going on about the actual science that STCF is supposed to be supporting. Isn’t it a more sensible strategy to do a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly? It’s a mess.

14.38pm. From a Cardiff perspective this is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but is still pretty dire. The primary activities for our current astronomy programme, Herschel and Planck, are both very high in the priority list and the relativity group is relieved to see ground-based gravitational wave research, including Advanced LIGO, at the highest priority. Moreover, it looks like what I feared most of all – an immediate clawback of existing grants with consequent immediate redundancies – is not going to happen, owing to what appears to be a last-minute injection of funds from RCUK. We’re still looking at cash cuts though, and we’re vulnerable because so much of our research income comes from STFC.

14.43pm. Not on the STFC webpage, but it appears that they are not going to support LOFAR-UK either.

15.05pm. If you want to read the full outcome of the prioritisation exercise, in terms of a batting order of projects, you can download it here. It includes a recommendation that the top funded (alpha-5) projects should get a 15% cut and those at the next leveldown (alpha-4) should get a 20% cut. However, things will probably turn out worse than that because those cuts were suggested on the basis that only those projects would be funded at all. As it turns out, some alpha-3 projects have made it through also, so the cuts to the higher-rated projects must be larger to compensate. Mustn’t they?

15.24pm. I note that STFC have decided to carry on their programme of outreach activities:

Ongoing support for public outreach and science communication, through continuance of our award schemes and Fellowships, and public engagement and communications, helping to ensure new generations of children are enthused and inspired by science, and encouraged to continue study in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

..so we can kick them in the teeth when they’ve just started a scientific career.

15.30pm. Press release, from Unelected Minister for Science and Innovation, Strategic Defence Acquisition Reform, and Formula 1 Car Racing,  Lord  Drayson of Twitter.  I quote:

… it has become clear to me that there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control.   I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.

Is there a possibility that a light has gone on somewhere to the effect that something must be done to stop STFC killing University research? I hope so. If he can pull something out of the fire before March 2010, though, I’d be very impressed.

16.07pm. I may be clutching at straws here, but it is interesting to join the dots between Lord Drayon’s comment above and the following excerpt from the STFC announcement

discussions would be held in coming months with national and international partners, including universities, departments and project teams, on implementation of the investment strategy. This will include discussions with EPSRC and the University funding councils on the impact of these measures on physics departments in universities.

I doubt if EPSRC is going to come running to the rescue without a great deal of encouragement. However, taken together with the comment above by Lord Drayson, there’s at least a hint of a possibility that a way to protect grants might be found. Calling them “research” rather than “exploitation” grants would be a start…

16.18pm. Press statements from Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, President of the Institute of Physics here and Andy Fabian, President of the Royal Astronomical Society here.

17.08pm. I think that’s enough for the day. It hasn’t been good, but the nightmare scenario was that my own research grant would be terminated immediately and I’d have to break the news to my PDRA. At least that didn’t happen, not yet anyway. I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. But I’m exhausted after sleeping so badly last night, so I think I’ll close this for now. Keep your comments coming if there’s anything significant I missed…

19.45pm Before I settle down with my gramophone records for the evening, I just thought I’d remind anyone not sufficiently depressed at the state of STFC that the drastic cuts announced today do not take account of whatever share of the £600 million “efficiency savings” announced in the budget has been allocated to them. It may look bad now, but it’s probably going to get worse. On that cheery note, I’m going to have a drink and listen to Mahler.

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Interesting Times

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 14, 2009 by telescoper

The next few days promise to be extremely interesting, although there is more than a hint of the Chinese Curse in that statement! Today is the day of our annual departmental Christmas Lunch. That’s not itself the subject of any kind of curse, but if last year’s is anything to go by it may take several days to recover from it. I’m preparing myself for it mentality as I write.

Tomorrow, however, 15th December, is the date of the next meeting of the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. On their agenda is the programme of cuts that is proposed as a result of the recent prioritisation exercises initiated to try to find a way out of their ongoing funding crisis. This programme has been through various committees before reaching the Council and, if the Council accepts it, the plans will be unveiled at a press conference on Wednesday 16th (at 2pm) and those about to die will be informed immediately. I’ll try to post a summary on here as soon as I get the facts.

I don’t have any particular inside information who is going to get the chop, but rumour suggests that there will be cuts right across the board. I think it’s going to be very grim news indeed, especially because there is an additional £600 million of savings to be found over the next few years on top of the current shortfall. It’s bound to be a terrible Christmas for those about to find out their contracts are being axed, and no happy New Years for a while either.

I’m not privy to the Council discussions or to the recommendations that have been passed to them so it’s not my place to say what they should do. However, in the unlikely event that anyone from STFC Council is reading this, I hope he/she at least bears in mind that it is not – or at least it shouldn’t be – the job of the Council simply to rubber stamp everything that is passed before it. I wonder, though, if the current Council has the guts to pass a vote of no confidence in the STFC Executive? I doubt it, because there’s been no reason to have confidence in them for the past two years and no such motion has been carried.

Ironically, later in the week there’s going to be a big jamboree in Madrid, at which the initial results of the Science Demonstration Phase of Herschel will be announced. Quite a few of the Cardiff crowd are going along and will be presenting some of the wonderful things that they’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I’ve seen quite a lot of the data from the SPIRE instrument and it’s truly amazing. At least there’s some (infrared) light among the darkness. However, it’s all covered by an ESA press embargo until Wednesday…

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Budget Bombshell

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , on December 9, 2009 by telescoper

As pointed out by Roger Highfield, there’s some grim news for science and higher education  in today’s pre-budget report by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.

In Chapter 6 of the document there is a  list of cuts to be made in public expenditure as a response to the worse-than-expected state of the public finances. Among them you can find a whopping

£600 million from higher education and science and research budgets from a combination of changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities, science and research; some switching of modes of study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation;

The first means students will suffer because of cuts to the support they will be offered. “Efficiency savings” means what it always means, reducing the level of service to save money. I’ve no idea what “switching of modes of study” means, but I guess it has something to do with having a larger proportion of part-time students. The last bit is completely lost on me. If anyone reading this can translate it into English for me I’d be very grateful.

It is clear that the Research Councils will have to find their share of the efficiency savings. Since the one most directly relevant to me, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is already on the ropes after a series of financial catastrophes this does not augur well the level of cuts expected to be announced in the next few days as a result of their recent prioritisation exercise:

The primary focus of Council’s latest meeting was a review of the programme prioritisation now underway. The chair and deputy chair of Science Board, Professors Jenny Thomas and Tony Ryan, discussed the process of input from advisory panels to the Physical And Life Sciences Committee (PALS) and the Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science Committee (PPAN), and thence to Science Board which will meet 7-8 December to finalise its recommendations to the Council meeting on 15 December. Council agreed the importance of informing the community as quickly as possible after its meeting of the outcome.

So we can expect to hear next week who’s for the shredder. I’m sure STFC were making contigency plans for different possible outcomes, but I’m pretty sure this was close to their worst possible case. Many of us are going to have a very depressing Christmas, as the axe is sure to fall on the astronomy programme in extremely brutal fashion. The cuts will be deep and the injuries sustained will leave scars that will last for many years. The pre-budget statement shows that there’s going to be a long dark tunnel for British science with very little evidence of light at the end of it.

It won’t just be astronomy research that suffers, of course. The Higher Education sector is feeling the pinch already, with redundancies already looming at several institutions. You can place your bets as to how many departments will close over the next year or two, and how many talented scientists will be moving abroad to secure their future rather than stay in a country that seems to place so little value on science.

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Negative Impact

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , on December 2, 2009 by telescoper

After spending the best part of the last couple of days being prodded and poked and subjected to all manner of indignity in the name of medical science, I think it’s appropriate to return to the blogosphere with another rant. Before I start, however, I’d seriously like to thank everyone at the University Hospital of Wales at Heath Park  for making my visit there as brief and painless as possible. Everyone was very kind and very efficient. I’m not going to blog about the details, as Columbo doesn’t like reading about other peoples’ ailments.

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the UK government’s agenda for research, particularly science research, that includes something called “impact”. The Research Excellence Framework (REF; successor to the Research Assessment Exercise, RAE) will include such a thing:

Significant additional recognition will be given where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life

Apparently, however, they don’t really know how to do this so they have set up a number of pilot studies to try to find out. I’d feel a little more comfortable if the bureaucrats had thought about what they were going to do before announcing that our future research funds were going to depend on it. Meanwhile, applicants for grants from any of the research councils must  include a statement of the “economic or social” impact their research will have.

Understandably, those of us working in “blue skies” research are very nervous about this new regime. There is more than a suspicion that the new emphasis on impact is intended to divert funds away from “pure” curiosity driven research and into areas where it can have an immediately identifiable short-term economic benefit. This has led to a petition, with over 13000 signatures, by the University and College Union calling for the impact statements to be abandoned.

I don’t know who is going to assess these impact statements, but unless they have a flawless ability to predict future technology I don’t think fundamental physics is going to score very well at all. To see my point, consider the case of  J. J. Thomson, who is generally credited with having discovered the electron and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906. Thomson made extensive use of cathode ray tubes in his studies; these later found their way into sitting rooms across the world as essential components of the classic television set. But that took decades. I doubt if an impact panel looking at Thomson’s work – even if they were physicists rather than grey-suited bureaucrats – would have found any of it likely to lead to immediate economic benefit. The point is that when he discovered the electron it wasn’t because he was actually trying to invent the television set.

I think there are basically two possible interpretations of this impact business. One is that it is a deliberate plan to wind down fundamental research and use the money saved to subsidise UK industry. The other is that it’s another exercise in pointless box-ticking. I am in two minds. On the one hand, it is clear that the recent behaviour of the Science and Technology Facilities Council shows strong evidence of the former. Fundamental research is being slashed, yet projects involving space technology have been funded on the nod without scientific  peer review. On the other hand, the RCUK Impact “Champion”, a person by the name of David Delpy, has written in the Times Higher to defend the new agenda. Consider the following paragraph

Recently I have read that some believe it is impossible to predict the economic impact of blue-skies research. To be clear, we are not asking for accurate predictions – simply a consideration of potential. Basic research underpins all disciplines and builds pathways to new technologies with economic and social applications. It may build on an existing body of knowledge, connect to other research around the world or attract new industries to the UK. There are many routes to impact. I believe that I could write a statement indicating potential impact for any proposal I have seen, and to hear that bright academics say they can’t do it sounds a little disingenuous.

Champion Delpy thus suggests he could write a statement for any proposal he has seen, which sounds to me like an admission that what is called for is just a load of flannel. In fact, if he’s paid to be the Impact Champion perhaps he should write all the bullshit and save us scientists the need to jump through these silly hoops? Or perhaps we could get one of those little Microsoft Office Assistant things:

Hello. Looks like you’re writing an Impact Assessment. Would you like me to pad it out with meaningless but impressive-looking socio-economic buzzwords for you?

If it’s just another exercise in vacuous bureaucracy then it’s bad enough, but if it is the other possibility then of course it’s even worse. It could be the end for disciplines like astronomy and particle physics as well as the end of Britain’s history of excellence in those areas. I’ve already blogged about my view of short-termism in research funding. Essentially, my point is that government money should be used to fund precisely those things that don’t have immediate economic benefit. Those that do should be funded by the beneficiaries, i.e. commercial companies.

Politicians probably think that all this complaining about impact means that scientists  are arrogantly assuming that the taxpayer should fund them regardless of the cost or the benefit. I can only speak for myself, but I think that’s very unfair. I’m very conscious that my research is funded by Joe Public; that’s one of the reasons I think I should spend time giving public talks and doing other outreach activities. But I think the public funds me and others like me to do “useless” things because, in the end, useless things are more important than money.

The government is probably right to say that the UK economy doesn’t benefit as much from our scientific expertise as is the case with other countries. The reason for that, however, lies not with our universities and research laboratories but with our private industrial and commercial sectors which are, for the most part, managed with a very low level of competence. British universities are demonstrably excellent; our industry is demonstrably feeble. The persistent failure of the private sector to invest in research and development shows that it is in drastic need of a good shake up. British companies, not the taxpayer, should be paying for research that leads to profit for them and for that to happen they will have to learn to engage better with the University sector rather than expecting inventions to be served up on a plate funded by the taxpayer. Universities and research labs should continue do what they’re good at,  maintaining a culture within which curiosity and learning are promoted for their own sake not just as part of the dreary materialistic cycle of production and consumption that is all we seem to be able to think about these days.

So at the end I’ve come to the conclusion that, perhaps, insofar as it can be demonstrated, economic impact should be included in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. Research which leads directly to the economic gain of the private sector is  precisely the type of research that the taxpayer should not be paying for. If it can be proven that a given department has engaged in such activity, its state funding should therefore be cut and it should be told to recover the funds it has misused from the company that has benefitted from it. Economic impact should be included with a negative weight.

And if you think that’s a silly point of view, consider what happens with the other major part of a university’s activity, teaching. Students, we are told, are the primary beneficiaries of their education so they should have to pay fees. In the current regime, however, they only do so when their earnings reach a certain level. If commercial companies are to be the primary beneficiaries of state-funded research, why should they not likewise be asked to pay for it?

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Exploitation

Posted in Poetry, Science Politics with tags , , on October 27, 2009 by telescoper

At the last Meeting of the RAS Council on October 9th 2009, Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), made a presentation after which he claimed that STFC spends too much on “exploitation”, i.e. on doing science with the facilities it provides. This statement clearly signals an intention to cut grants to research groups still further and funnel a greater proportion of STFC’s budget into technology development rather than pure research.

Following on from Phillip Helbig’s challenge a couple of posts ago, I decided to commemorate the occasion with an appropriate sonnet, inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14.

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THIS.INSU(LT)ING.SONNET.

Mr K.O.M.

It seems Keith Mason doesn’t give a fuck
About the future of Astronomy.
“The mess we’re in is down to rotten luck
And our country’s  ruin’d economy”;
Or that’s the tale our clueless leader tells
When oft by angry critics he’s assailed,
Undaunted he in Swindon’s office dwells
Refusing to accept it’s him that failed.
And now he tells us we must realise:
We spend “too much on science exploitation”.
Forget the dreams of research in blue skies
The new name of the game is wealth creation.
A truth his recent statement underlines
Is that we’re doomed unless this man resigns.

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I Did Expect the Spanish Inquisition…

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags , , , on October 14, 2009 by telescoper

So that was it. D-Day.

Our application to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for a rolling grant to cover the next 5 years of astronomy research went in a  few months ago. Over the summer we got feedback from independent referees. But today was the crunch. The dreaded panel visit.

In the old days the grants panel used to visit the applicants at their own institute, chat to the postdocs and staff, help themselves to free food, and generally get a feel for the place over a period of a couple of days. Now, all that cosiness has gone. Nowadays the applicants visit the panel.  Mohammed and the Mountain and all that (except I’m not sure which is which).

A large group of astronomers are involved in this application, but STFC rules permit only three representatives to make the pilgrimage to Swindon in order to testify in front of the experts. I was among the chosen few, although I was not particularly grateful for this honour.

This would have been stressful enough, but there is grim talk of slashed budgets and looming financial disaster for UK astronomy. The successful launch of Planck and Herschel in May, followed by the exceptionally promising snippets of data that we’ve been getting, has strengthened what was already a very strong case. These events should have given us all the cards. The trouble is, it looks like the casino has gone bust.

We were all a bit nervous, I can tell you, as we travelled to Swindon on the early train from Cardiff. Steve Eales is Principal Investigator on the grant and he’s a self-confessed morning person so he went on a ludicrously early train in case something happened to delay him. Derek Ward-Thompson and I followed on a more sensible one, but we all got there safely and on time in the end.

We started with a presentation by Steve which he delivered in superb style, keeping exactly to time but also ticking all the boxes we were asked to cover in the instructions we got. The science updates from the last 6 months are really impressive, and it was all made even more dramatic when he told the panel that the new Herschel images they were seeing were not public and therefore that they shouldn’t look at them.

Then we were due for 45 minutes questioning by the panel. I thought it might be something like Blind Date because there were three of us to do the answering. Question Number One for Contestant Number Two, that sort of thing, except that we anticipated slightly more technical questions and we weren’t expecting Cilla Black to be there.

But there weren’t many questions at all. In fact, I had only one question (on the cosmology part). It was curiously anti-climactic after having had a near-sleepless night worrying about it. This could mean either that they’d already decided to close us down, that they’d already decided we were brilliant, or that they already knew there was no money so there wasn’t any point in asking anything.

So 25 minutes into the 45 allotted we were shown the door and headed back to Cardiff by train. It was like Monty Python in reverse: we did expect the Spanish Inquisition, but it never happened…

We jabbered nervously on the return journey because the adrenalin was still going, speculating about what it all meant but not coming to any real conclusions except that Steve had given a great presentation and that we had all answered the questions as well as we could have been expected to. It’s all out of our hands now.

The trouble is that we’re not likely to get a new grant announcement until April 2010, which is actually when the grant is supposed to start. The postdoctoral researchers we currently employ will have to wait until then to hear about possible extensions to their contracts. Perhaps by April  the management will have sorted out the current STFC crisis so we can get on and do some science with the wonderful new data.

On the other hand, perhaps not….

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Darwin and After

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2009 by telescoper

Another sign that the academic year is back into full swing is that the monthly meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society have started up again after the usual summer hiatus. Since I’ve got a very heavy week coming up, I thought I’d take the advantage of a bit of breathing space in my timetable to attend yesterday’s meeting and catch up with the gossip at the Club afterwards.

The highlight of the day’s events was the annual George Darwin Lecture which was given this year by Neil Gehrels from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on the subject Gamma Ray Bursts and the Birth of Black Holes: Discoveries by SWIFT. This is a very hot topic (of course) and the lecture did full justice to it. The RAS has two other “prize” lectures – the Gerald Whitrow Lecture and the Harold Jeffreys Lecture – which are used to invite eminent speakers from around the world. They’re not always successful as lectures because the speakers sometimes try to make them too specialised and too detailed, but this one was exceptionally clear and well delivered. I enjoyed it, as well as learning a lot; that’s the essence of a good lecture I think.

The main task for visiting speakers when it comes to the George Darwin Lecture is to give their talk without revealing the fact that they hadn’t realised that Charles Darwin had a famous astronomical son!

Then to the Athenaeum, for drinks and dinner, where the current financial crisis at STFC was in the background of a lot of the conversation. Rumours abounded but I didn’t pick up any hard information about what is likely to happen to our funding next year. I suspect that’s because even STFC doesn’t know. After a bit of wine, though, conversation moved onto other,  less depressing, things including football, cheese and the Welsh landscape.

The colleague sitting next to me (an old friend from Queen Mary days, now at Imperial College) reminded me that in January last year Joao Magueijo invited me to give the vote of thanks at his inaugural lecture (as long as I promised to try to make my speech as short and as funny as possible). It turns out his lecture was only twenty minutes long, which didn’t give as much time as I’d hoped to think of something to say so I resorted to a couple of off-colour jokes and a facetious remark about how the brevity of Imperial’s lectures explained why their students never seemed to know anything. I got a very good laugh from the packed lecture theatre, but was told off afterwards by a senior physicist from the Imperial physics department. That particular episode is something I often think about, the pomposity of some of the staff reminding me that I’m not unhappy at not getting a job there I applied for a few years ago.

Actually, I just remembered that they took pictures at the party afterwards so here’s one of me and Joao having a chuckle afterwards. Notice I had put a tie on for the occasion, but Joao’s wardrobe is strictly T-shirts only.

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After Friday’s dinner (roast partridge, if you want to know) I got the last train back to Cardiff from Paddington, snoozing comfortably for a large part of the journey. On time until just outside Cardiff Central, the train then sat motionless on the track almost within sight of the platform owing to the presence of a broken down goods train in front of us. We finally got into the station 50 (FIFTY) minutes late, and I didn’t get home until well after 2am.

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The Very Big Stupid

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , on October 5, 2009 by telescoper

Sitting on the train yesterday coming back from a night at the Opera, I was reading The Observer. Last week’s edition had featured a superb piece by comedian David Mitchell on the topic of research funding. His argument, essentially, was that the government shouldn’t be directing its research funding at areas which will yield immediate economic benefit, but should instead be doing precisely the opposite. It is, he argues, the job of industry to invest in R&D that’s “relevant” to its immediate needs. It is the job of academia to do things driven by pure curiosity. If these happen to pay off it’s of course a good thing, but it’s a bonus and can only be expected to deliver a financial return in the long term.

Funding only that bit of science that can deliver immediate profits is a bit like diverting all the Arts Council grants into pop music or pantomimes when instead it should be funding things that are too experimental to  rely on revenue generated by paid customers, such as the Opera. I couldn’t agree more, but I am a bit biased in respect of that particular example. Although his piece was intended to be humorous, like a great deal of great comedy there is a great deal of truth in it.

This week’s edition of the Observer contained a number of letters about Mitchell’s piece. One called for him to be given a position in the government. Of course that would be inappropriate. He’s an intelligent and forward-thinking person, and would therefore be completely out of place in such a job. Another letter produced the following memorable quote from Frank Zappa which is exactly to the point.

The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

Meanwhile I attended a meeting this morning at which we were informed that all universities in England have been told to plan for cuts in their recurrent grants of about 15% next year. It is likely that Wales will follow suit. Since most of a University’s expenditure is on staff salaries, corresponding reductions will have to be made, either by cutting salaries or (more likely) by making redundancies.

Research Councils are also likely to feel the squeeze which will hit responsive mode grants too. For astronomy and particle physics, who rely on the Science & Technology Facilities Council for their funding, the situation is especially dire because even without the anticipated cuts, that particular organization has an enormous black hole in its  budget anyway.There is a strong likelihood that existing grant funding will be clawed back to plug the gap, with immediate consequences for postdoctoral researchers and a catastrophic long-term effect on morale.

Pure science in the UK faces a very grim period. All three main political parties have promised savage spending cuts after the next election. The Tories have promised a budget within a month of coming to power if they win; they certainly won’t increase  taxes to cover the budget deficit, especially not at the top end of the scale. A Conservative budget is very unlikely to contain any good news for science or higher education generally.

It’s time for us all to get lobbying about the importance of pure research, but the difficulty is that the Research Councils that are supposed to be distributing funds for this purpose are largely populated by politically appointed individuals who can’t or won’t fight the corner. The Chief Executive of STFC, for example, seems to be content to turn his organization into a channel through which government subsidy flows into technology and engineering companies with only a cursory nod in the direction of basic research. I suspect there are many within the higher levels of management of  other research council  who also see the current economic crisis as an opportunity to cut back “useless science” still further.

I’m sure  that in the long run people will look back on all this as a Very Big Example of The Very Big Stupid, but I’m also worried that for many research projects and for many scientific careers there may not actually be a long run.

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