Archive for Times Higher

Newer Entries »

Brake Thread

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on November 26, 2009 by telescoper

Following my post yesterday, the thread of comments relating to the Mark Brake/University of Glamorgan fraud scandal has been removed from the Times Higher story. However, I was logging the thread until very near the end (in fact, until my own  last comment this morning shortly before the comments were closed). I have posted them on a permanent page here to preserve them, but the page is currently offline pending clarification of copyright issues.

I have no idea why the comments were deleted, but I hope it is a sign that the University of Glamorgan is finally investigating this matter. If they are, I expect this matter to reach a speedy conclusion. If not, I will keep you posted on further developments with this and other matters in due course.

I’ve decided to reduce the amout of blogging I do over the next few days to catch up on paper-writing and a few other things, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing if story stays at the top of the page for now.

5 Comments »

Brake Points

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on November 1, 2009 by telescoper

I thought it would be worth giving a short update on the Mark Brake affair I posted about a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t want to go back to the original post let me just say that Mark Brake is  Professor of Science Communication at the University of Glamorgan and it recently emerged that in 2006 he falsely claimed to have a PhD when applying for a research grant.

The biggest development since then is that the Times Higher – a magazine for professionals working in Higher Education – has now picked up the story and ran an article in last week’s issue. That piece also refers to the sacking of an (unnamed) employee who blew the whistle on Brake’s conduct and also to the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Dr Paul Roche from the University of Glamorgan in 2003. I don’t know the full story behind these wider allegations so won’t comment on them here, except to say that I hope that they will be investigated more thoroughly so that the true facts can emerge about what is clearly a very murky affair.

However, these wider issues do not alter the fact that Mark Brake misrepresented his qualifications. There is documentary proof that he did so, and the University of Glamorgan doesn’t deny it either. The UoG is keeping very quiet over the press coverage, simply repeating that it had investigated the matter and let Brake off because it was an “isolated incident”. Presumably this means that it is acceptable to misrepresent your qualifications as long as you only pretend to have one doctorate you haven’t got.

I’m staggered that Brake wasn’t immediately dismissed for this offence, which seems to me to amount to gross misconduct. Most of the people commenting on the news item in the Times Higher seem to agree with me on this, although there is one individual called “Skeptic” who appears determined to defend Brake with whatever  argument he/she could muster no matter how specious. The identity and motivation of this individual remain unclear.

Another commenter, however, raised a very interesting point. Here is Section 2 of  the 2006 Fraud Act:

2 Fraud by false representation

(1) A person is in breach of this section if he—

(a) dishonestly makes a false representation, and

(b) intends, by making the representation—

(i) to make a gain for himself or another, or

(ii) to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

(2) A representation is false if—

(a) it is untrue or misleading, and

(b) the person making it knows that it is, or might be, untrue or misleading.

(3) “Representation” means any representation as to fact or law, including a representation as to the state of mind of—

(a) the person making the representation, or

(b) any other person.

(4) A representation may be express or implied.

(5) For the purposes of this section a representation may be regarded as made if it (or anything implying it) is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention).

I’m no kind of legal expert, but it certainly looks to me that this might apply in this case. The grant application wasn’t in fact successful, but the offence of fraud as defined by this act simply requires intent. The amount of the application was around £285,000, a sizeable sum by any standards. Maybe the Police should look into it.

If Brake didn’t think it would improve the chances of the application being successful, why did he put false information on it? Are we expected to believe that it was an oversight? That he somehow forgot he didn’t have a PhD? I simply can’t believe that to be the case. It is true that many of us are forced to do rapid cut-and-paste jobs when applying for grants and we can make errors that way. However, that would imply that there is a document somewhere from which the cut-and-paste was made that lists a non-existent PhD alongside a genuine MSc. Who would maintain such a document and why?

Even if this were an “isolated incident” it does seem to me to be an extremely serious case of misconduct. However, I note also that numerous references to “Dr” Mark Brake can be found on the internet, including the BBC website. Isn’t it a bit strange how so many people can have formed the opinion that Mr Mark Brake had a PhD?

It’s probably also worth drawing your attention to Mark Brake’s wikipedia page. If you have a quick look at the discussion page of this item you will that an individual by the name of “Rosit” made repeated attempts to block the insertion of a statement of the fact that  Brake had falsely claimed a PhD, arguing that this was libellous. Of course it isn’t. It’s true. Fortunately, the Wikipedia page  is now factual, at least in this specific respect. Most of the rest of it was written by Rosit also and the accuracy and impartiality of the  content is heavily disputed.

You might ask who is this “Rosit” who seems to be so anxious to prevent the truth coming out? Well, Mark Brake’s partner is called Rosi Thornton. Coincidence?

Just in case anyone accuses me of some sort of vendetta, let me make it clear that I have never met Mark Brake and didn’t know anything at all about the false PhD claim until I read it in the local newspaper. I only moved to Cardiff in 2007, after this affair took place. Apart from my incredulity at their behaviour over this matter, I have no axe to grind with the University of Glamorgan either. My persistence in this stems from concern that what appears to be grave  misconduct has gone unpunished. We academics are in the public eye and are at least partly funded by the taxpayer. We and our employers  have to set an appropriate standard. Without that our standing will continue to be eroded.

As I said, the University of Glamorgan appears to be keeping the lid on a matter they appear to have tried to bury once already. I think they would  be much better off getting it all out in the open. If they don’t people might form the opinion that Universities are willing to turn a blind eye to clear examples of gross misconduct when the individuals involved are good at bringing money in.

And I’m sure that never happens….

16 Comments »

The League of Extraordinary Gibberish

Posted in Bad Statistics with tags , , , on October 13, 2009 by telescoper

After a very busy few days I thought I’d relax yesterday by catching up with a bit of reading. In last week’s Times Higher I found there was a supplement giving this year’s World University Rankings.

I don’t really approve of league tables but somehow can’t resist looking in them to see where my current employer Cardiff University lies. There we are at number 135 in the list of the top 200 Universities. That’s actually not bad for an institute that’s struggling with a Welsh funding  system that seriously disadvantages it compared to our English colleagues. We’re a long way down compared to Cambridge (2nd), UCL (4th), Imperial and Oxford (5th=) . Compared to places I’ve worked at previously we’re significantly below Nottingham (91st) but still above Queen Mary (164) and Sussex (166). Number 1 in the world is Harvard, which is apparently somewhere near Boston (the American one).

Relieved that we’re in the top 200 at all, I decided to have a look at how the tables were drawn up. I wish I hadn’t bothered because I was horrified at the methodological garbage that lies behind it. You can find a full account of the travesty here. In essence, however, the ranking is arrived at by adding six distinct indicators, weighted differently but with weights assigned for no obvious reason, each of which is arrived at by dubious means and which is highly unlikely to mean what it purports. Each indicator is magically turned into a score out of 100 before being added to all the other ones (with appropriate weighting factors).

The indicators are:

  1. Academic Peer Review. This is weighted 40% of the overall score for each institution and is obtained by asking a sample of academics (selected in a way that is not explained). This year 9386 people were involved; they were asked to name institutions they regard as the best in their field. This sample is a tiny fraction of the global academic population and it would amaze me if it were representative of anything at all!
  2. Employer Survey. The pollsters asked 3281 graduate employers for their opinions of the different universities. This was weighted 10%.
  3. Staff-Student Ratio. Counting 20%, this is supposed to be a measure of “teaching quality”! Good teaching = large numbers of staff? Not if most of them don’t teach as at many research universities. A large staff-student ratio could even mean the place is really unpopular!
  4. International Faculty. This measures the  proportion of overseas staff on the books. Apparently a large number of foreign lecturers makes for a good university and “how attractive an institution is around the world”. Or perhaps that it finds it difficult to recruit its own nationals. This one counts only 5%.
  5. International Students. Another 5% goes to the fraction of each of the student body that is from overseas.
  6. Research Excellence. This is measured solely on the basis of citations – I’ve discussed some of the issues with that before – and counts 20%. They choose to use an unreliable database called SCOPUS, run by the profiteering academic publisher Elsevier. The total number of citations is divided by the number of faculty to “give a sense of the density of research excellence” at the institution.

Well I hope by now you’ve got a sense of the density of the idiots who compiled this farrago. Even if you set aside the issue of the accuracy of the input data, there is still the issue of how on Earth anyone could have thought it was sensible to pick such silly ways of measuring what makes a good university, assigning random weights to them, and then claiming that they had achieved something useful. They probably got paid a lot for doing it too. Talk about money for old rope. I’m in the wrong business.

What gives the game away entirely is the enormous variance from indicator to another. This means that changing the weights slightly would produce a drastically different list. And who is to say that the variables should be added linearly anyway? Is a score of 100 really worth precisely twice as much as a score of 50? What do the distributions look like? How significant are the differences in score from one institute to another? And what are we actually trying to measure anyway?

Here’s an example. The University of California at Berkeley scores 100/100 for 1,2 and 4 and 86 for 5. However for Staff/Student ratio (3) it gets a lowly 25/100 and for (6) it gets only 34, which combine take it down to 39th in the table. Exclude this curiously-chosen proxy for teaching quality and Berkeley would rocket up the table.

Of course you can laugh these things off as unimportant trivia to be looked at with mild amusement over a glass of wine, but such things have increasingly found their way into the minds of managers and politicians. The fact that they are based on flawed assumptions, use a daft methodology, and produce utterly meaningless results seems to be irrelevant. Because they are based on numbers they must represent some kind of absolute truth.

There’s nothing at all wrong with collating and publishing information about schools and universities. Such facts should be available to the public. What is wrong is the manic obsession with  condensing disparate sets of conflicting data into a single number just so things can be ordered in lists that politicians can understand.

You can see the same thing going on in the national newspapers’ lists of University rankings. Each one uses a different weighting and different data and the lists are drastically different. They give different answers because nobody has even bothered to think about what the question is.

6 Comments »

Going Forward

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on July 22, 2009 by telescoper

Since I’ve recently been officially awarded the title of Grumpy Old Man, I now feel I have the necessary authorization to vent my spleen about anything and everything that really irritates me.

This morning I got my regular monthly credit card statement, something likely to put me in a bad mood at the best of times. However, at the end of the itemized list of payments, I found the following:

WE ARE PHASING OUT CREDIT CARD CHEQUES. GOING FORWARD WE WILL NO LONGER ISSUE ANY CREDIT CARD CHEQUES.

I don’t actually care about the credit card cheques – they’re a ridiculously bad way of paying for things anyway –  but what on Earth is the phrase going forward doing in that sentence?

I’ve taken a swipe at this monster once before, when I blogged about the Wakeham Review of Physics. The example I found then was

The STFC’s governance structure must be representative of the community it serves in order to gain stakeholders’ confidence going forward.

Aaargggh!!

Going forward is one of those intensely annoying bits of office-speak that have spread like Swine ‘flu into the public domain. Pushing the envelope is another one. What does it mean?  Why would anyone push an envelope?

Anyway, the worst problem with going forward is that it is now used almost universally in official documents instead of more suitable phrases, such as in future, or from now on. What particularly irritates me about it is that it is usually part of an attempt to present things in a positive light even when they clearly don’t involve any forward movement at all; often, in fact, quite the opposite. It is just one symptom of the insidious culture of spin that seems to be engulfing all aspects of public life, making it impossible to deliver even a simple message without wrapping it up in some pathetic bit of PR. Any kind of change – whether or not there’s any reason for it, and whether or not it improves anything – has to be portrayed as progress. It drives me nuts!

This sort of language is frequently lampooned by Laurie Taylor in his brilliant weekly column for the Times Higher.  The Director of Corporate Affairs for the fictional Poppleton University, Mr Jamie Targett, contributes regularly to his column, always in meaningless business-oriented gibberish of this type. In fact, shortly after reading the Wakeham Review quoted above, I sent a letter to the Times Higher (which was published there) accusing Jamie Targett of moonlighting from his job at Poppleton to work on the Wakeham Report.

In the case of my credit card cheques, the implication is that the withdrawal of the service represents some sort of progress. In fact, it’s just to save money. A friend of mine who uses a local gym told me today that the gym had recently announced that

Going forward, members of the gym will no longer be supplied with free towels.

They went on to portray this as a great leap forward in caring for the environment, but in fact it is obviously just a way of saving their costs. Likewise with a sentence I found in a railway timetable recently:

Going forward the 8.15 train from Paddington will no longer call at Didcot Parkway

At least it’s still going to call at Didcot when it’s going backwards, which is the obvious implication of this sentence.

I’m glad I’m not alone in my disapproval of going forward.  A year or so ago there was an article on the BBC website making much the same point. However, the amount of going forward has continued to increase. Robert Peston, the BBC business editor, once managed three going forwards in a four minute item on the Today programme.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council has obviously taken this phrase to heart. Their website is chock-a-block with going forward. Here’s an example (referring to a budget cut)

It will result in an approximately constant volume of project activity going forward ..

Obviously, once you start going forward there’s no going back, even if what lies in front of you is financial catastrophe…

PS. Feel free to add your own pet hates via the comments box going forward.

41 Comments »

Newer Entries »