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Top Ten Dubious Science Facts

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , on August 22, 2012 by telescoper

Yesterday evening I joined in a bit of fun on Twitter posting dubious science facts which you can find by looking for the hashtag #dubioussciencefacts if you’re a person who tweets. The idea was to come up with amusing, misleading or just silly statements about science, with as thin a veneer of truth as possible.

The 140-character limit on Twitter makes this kind of game quite challenging, but also quite enjoyable to join in. Anyway, for those of you who don’t tweet, I thought I’d post ten examples of my own creation along with an invitation to contribute your own through the comments box by way of audience participation. Please try to keep your contributions shorter than 140 characters…

Here are my ten:

  1. Galileo is a much more famous scientist than his co-workers Figaro and Magnifico
  2. If the Earth were the size of a golf ball, Jupiter would be as big as Colin Montgomery
  3. It is possible for a spaceship to boldly go faster than light, but only if it uses a split infinitive drive
  4. Organic chemistry is a lot tastier than normal chemistry but also much more expensive
  5. Parity is an important concept in particle physics: PhD students get the same salaries as professors in that field
  6. Galaxies appear to have a flattened shape because they are usually observed using Cinemascopes
  7. Dyson spheres are sources of vacuum energy
  8. The Earth’s rotation means that it will soon have to leave the Solar System in order to throw up
  9. The Coriolis Effect is called the Siloiroc Effect in the Southern Hemisphere
  10. Physics used to be called “natural philosophy”, which means it is philosophy without any bits of fruit in it

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The Astronomy Career Problem – it starts with the PhD

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , on October 14, 2011 by telescoper

Just time for a quickie today, as I’ve got to run an examples class before dashing off on the train to London to attend the annual George Darwin Lecture which, this year, is to be given by Michael Turner with the title From Quarks to the Cosmos. I expect it to be very enjoyable and may well write a report at the weekend.

Yesterday evening there was a discussion on twitter (#astrojc) about the astronomy careers problem. I didn’t take part – in fact I didn’t realise it was happening – as I was slaving over the Private Eye crossword at the time.

Anyway, it gives me the excuse to rehash an argument I have presented before, which is that most analyses of the problems facing young postdoctoral researchers in astronomy are looking at the issue from the wrong end. I think the crisis is essentially caused by the overproduction of PhDs in this field. To understand the magnitude of the problem, consider the following.

Assume that the number of permanent academic positions in a given field (e.g. astronomy) remains constant over time. If that is the case, each retirement (or other form of departure) from a permanent position will be replaced by one, presumably junior, scientist.

This means that over an academic career, on average, each academic will produce just one PhD who will get a permanent job in academia. This of course doesn’t count students coming in from abroad, or those getting faculty positions abroad, but in the case of the UK these are probably relatively small corrections.

Under the present supply of PhD studentships an academic can expect to get a PhD student at least once every three years or so. At a minimum, therefore, over a 30 year career one can expect to have ten PhD students. A great many supervisors have more PhD students than this, but this just makes the odds worse. The expectation is that only one of these will get a permanent job in the UK. The others (nine out of ten, according to my conservative estimate) above must either leave the field or the country to find permanent employment.

The arithmetic of this situation is a simple fact of life, but I’m not sure how many prospective PhD students are aware of it. There is still a reasonable chance of getting a first postdoctoral position, but thereafter the odds are stacked against them.

The upshot of this is we have a field of understandably disgruntled young people with PhDs but no realistic prospect of ever earning a settled living working in the field they have prepared for. This problem has worsened considerably in recent  years as the number of postdoctoral positions has almost halved since 2006. New PhDs have to battle it out with existing postdoctoral researchers for the meagre supply of suitable jobs. It’s a terrible situation.

Now the powers that be – in this case the Science and Technology Facilities Council – have consistently argued that the excess PhDs go out into the wider world and contribute to the economy with the skills they have learned. That may be true in a few cases. However, my argument is that the PhD is not the right way to do this because it is ridiculously inefficient.

What we should have is a system wherein we produce more and better trained Masters level students  and fewer PhDs. This is the system that exists throughout most of Europe, in fact, and the UK is actually committed to adopt it through the Bologna process.  Not that this commitment seems to mean anything, as precisely nothing has been done to harmonize UK higher education with the 3+2+3 Bachelors+Masters+Doctorate system Bologna advocates.

The training provided in a proper two-year Masters programme will improve the skills pool for the world outside academia, and also better prepare the minority of students who go on to take a PhD. The quality of the  PhD will also improve, as only the very best and most highly motivated researchers will take that path. This used to be what happened, of course, but I don’t think it is any longer the case.

The main problem with this suggestion is that it requires big changes to the way both research and teaching are funded. The research councils turned away from funding Masters training many years ago, so I doubt if they can be persuaded to to a U-turn now.

This won’t solve the existing careers crisis, of course, but in order to make things better you first have to stop them getting worse.

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Dissembling Nature

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on July 16, 2011 by telescoper

Interesting that the Journal Nature is introducing a registration wall for its News pages. These pages have previously been free and, we’re told, will remain so. However, in order to access them one will now have to give a name and email address.

I heard about this On Wednesday (13th July) on  Twitter (via @NatureNews):

OK, we’ve got some news that may annoy: @NatureNews is going to start requiring registration to view some of our free news stories. (1/2)

Don’t panic! All the news is still free. We’re just going to ask for a name and an email. (2/2)

(For those of you not among the Twitterati I should point out that messages on Twitter have to be less than 140 characters long, hence the use of two tweets in this case).

My immediate reaction – and that of manyof my colleagues – is that this looks very much like the strategy pursued by the Times online edition. First introduce registration, then shortly afterwards turn it into a paywall. In the meantime can collect all the email addresses in order to send marketing spam to those who have registered.

I inquired as to what they were planning to do with the email addresses they would be harvesting in this way, but didn’t get a satisfactory reply. Then I received a message from another branch of the Nature twitter operation, @npgnews:

@telescoper Hi Peter. Thanks for your comments. We’re about to send a series of tweets in response to Nature News registration.

Being a reserved British type I was a bit annoyed by the  “Hi Peter”  from someone I don’t know and have never spoken to before, but didn’t respond. Instead I waited with baited breath for the in-depth explanation of what Nature is going to do. Eventually it came, in three tweets:

Thx for your comments about the Nature News registration system. We’re asking all readers to introduce themselves by registering once (1/3)

Registration enables free access to the Nature News content, which remains unchanged. (2/3)

We’re working hard to expand and introduce more tailored services for readers and registration is necessary for that (3/3)

To say I found this disappointing would be an understatement. What a load of flannel. Note the word “enables” in Tweet No. 2. Free access was previously enabled to everyone, but is apparently to be disabled in order to facilitate the collection of user data for some unspecified purpose. Tweet No. 3 is a masterpiece of non sequitur. Why does expansion of Nature News require a database of email addresses? And what can “more tailored services” mean other than restricting access? Needless to say, I won’t be registering. There are other plenty of other sources of science information

Nature is of course a business operation, and you have to see this move against the wider backdrop of traditional publishing companies trying to find the way forward in the digital age. As a commercial enterprise, they are entitled to charge customers, although I wish they would be a little more honest about their intention to do so. I would remind them however, that The Times‘ paywall has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of the negative an effect it has had on the readership figures. Given the revelations of the past weeks about the behaviour of News International, I bet people who were foolish enough to register are now wondering who has their personal information now. Will Nature News go the same way?

More importantly, however, as a scientist, I think that Nature’s policy of copyrighting and restricting general access to scientific papers is fundamentally wrong and is actively damaging science. I believe that scientific results should be in the public domain, as should the data on which they are based. Open access is the way it should be. In the past, publishers greatly assisted in the dissemination of research both between academics and to the public. Now, I’m afraid, the academic publishing industry is simply parasitic, and it is a threat to the health of scientific research. Fortunately, I don’t think a drastic remedy is needed; it will wither away on it’s own. Let’s just let Nature take its course.

 

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The Mailstorm

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on October 17, 2009 by telescoper

Yesterday The Daily Mail – loathsome ragbag of hate-mongering lies masquerading as a newspaper – ran a piece by columnist Jan Moir on their website that sank below the level of the gutter and into the deepest depths of sheer evil.

The piece was about Stephen Gately, a singer and former member of the group Boyzone, who died suddenly over a week ago at the age of 33. Although the coroner declared his death to be of natural causes, the circumstances surrounding his death do remain a little unclear. However, anyone with any degree of sensitivity would have treated the matter as a private one and refrained from intruding in order allow his friends, family, and, especially, his partner to come to terms with what had happened. Anyone with any degree of sensitivity, that is. Not Jan Moir.

You see, Stephen Gately was gay. That’s no big deal for many people these days, but for the Daily Mail it made him a target for a post-mortem hatchet job. No need to worry about the laws of defamation as you can’t libel the dead. No need to check the facts, just sit down and let the vitriol pour out. Right up Jan Moir’s street.

This poisonous excuse for a human being composed a piece with the title. Why there was nothing `natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death. This wasn’t journalism of course. Jan Moir hadn’t uncovered any new facts about the case. Nothing she wrote was backed up by any evidence. It was simply an exercise of blind bigotry, achieved through insinuation and deliberately designed  to pander to the prejudices of the Daily Mail’s readership.

For example

… fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again

Well I’m sorry, Jan, but they do. Fit young people  drop dead while walking along the street too. A number of medical conditions can lead sudden unexpected death in apparently healthy people.

 Here’s another example, in which the monstrous Moir expands the horizons of her rant to encompass racism

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment.

Bulgarian? Must be dodgy. Must have been a kinky threesome. Shows that the civil partnership of Gately and his partner Andrew Cowles was meaningless. All gay men are at it like rabbits all the time. They’re all irretrievably sleazy. We all know that. We read about it in the Daily Mail.

As a matter of fact, the third man was  Georgi Dochev (yes, Bulgarians have names too) , an old friend of the couple. It seems quite a reasonable alternative hypothesis that the three of them came home after a night out and simply crashed out wherever they could. I don’t know whether that was the case or not. Neither does Jan Moir, but she obviously didn’t want the absence of relevant facts to get in the way of a story.

Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships. Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages.

 Sheesh. I won’t go on unpicking this odious item otherwise I’ll get angry again. I hope I’ve made the point. In any case Charlie Brooker in the Guardian has already done a much better job than I could.

Anyway, as soon as I found out about this piece (via Facebook) I fired off a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission as it was clearly in violation of Sections 1, 5 and 12 of their Code of Practice. Meanwhile a storm brewed up on Twitter (of which I am not a member) and so many people filed complaints to the PCC that their website crashed.  The Daily Mail’s own readership – not known for their liberal attitudes – roundly condemned the piece through the comments facility. Finally, and perhaps most importantly from the point of view of having an impact on the Mail itself, several advertisers (including Marks & Spencer and Nestlé) pulled their adverts off the website because they wanted to disassociate themselves from the opinions expressed there. The loss of advertising revenue probably means a lot more to bosses at the Daily Mail than any appeal to decency or respect.

The piece is still there, but has been heavily edited and has a new title. It’s still offensive, though. I’ll be following subsequent events with interest and have already made plans to burn Jan Moir in effigy at the forthcoming bonfire night celebrations on November 5th. I hope the Daily Mail shows her the door too.

Looking back on this affair a day later, I have to say that in a way I’m actually glad Jan Moir wrote the piece. Thoroughly disgusted as I am by what she wrote I feel bound to defend her right to say what she thinks. Gagging such people is not the answer. That piece tells us exactly the kind of creature she is. She can’t squirm out of this by offering a half-baked apology and saying it was just a joke. The Daily Mail published, and Jan Moir is damned. May she rot in hell.

Another thing this episode demonstrates the immense power of Twitter to do real good. I had previously thought of it as a trivial bit of net gimmickry. Now I’m seriously thinking of joining Twitter in the hope of adding one more voice to the campaign to save pure science from the oblivion it seems to be headed for.

The problem is that Twitter works through messages limited to 140 characters in length. Since I can’t seem to write a blog post in less than a thousand words I don’t think my tweets will be very effective..

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