Archive for UCL

The Christopher Backhouse Case

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , on October 13, 2022 by telescoper

I want to thank everyone who has contacted me about the Christopher Backhouse harassment case I blogged about yesterday. Based on what I’ve been told, the details revealed in the Guardian article – which are bad enough – are just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t say any more in case there are further legal developments.

I saw this reaction from Erica Smith yesterday.

This experience must have been absolutely dreadful for her and I sincerely hope yesterday’s announcement allows her to bring some closure to the matter. Many would have given up given the lack of action from the police, but Erica Smith had the courage to pursue a civil action getting a sub poena that led to the identity of her harasser being revealed.

Some of the people who have contacted me are people involved with DUNE. Although the harassment went on for years, none of them knew anything about the case until very recently. They are all very disturbed that this was going on in their midst for so long.

I am not a lawyer but it remains a mystery to me why Dr Backhouse has not faced a criminal prosecution. This seems to have enabled him to simply walk away from all the trouble he has caused?

I have been told that because the online harassment was anonymous – because Backhouse used proxy servers – the US Police could not pursue the matter. However, now Backhouse’s cover has been blown and the evidence is clear, shouldn’t the matter now be referred to the UK Police for him to be prosecuted there, or even extradicted to the USA to stand trial there?

In England & Wales Some crimes of harassment are dealt with summarily (i.e. by a Magistrates’ Court) which means the maximum custodial sentence on conviction is six months. However, more serious offences can be tried in the High Court and according to the Sentencing Council guidelines much longer sentences are possible for more serious offences. I’m no in favour of sending people to prison unless it’s absolutely necessary, but the harassment alone seems to me to warrant it in this case.

Anyway, my purpose in writing this post was really to point out that however strongly I feel about this there is little I myself can do of a practical nature, except encourage people who have further information on this case to take it to the proper authorities and urge others in similar situations to be inspired by the example of Erica Smith.

Update: some further information clarifying some matters related to this case is available on this Twitter thread

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The Christopher Backhouse Harassment Case

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , , , on October 12, 2022 by telescoper

I hardly know what to say about the harassment case involving Christopher Backhouse, a former researcher at University College London covered in today’s Guardian, except that everyone should be aware of just what a shocking case it is. The opening paragraph of the Guardian story gives a taste:

A former academic at University College London must pay almost £50,000 in damages to a former colleague after falsely portraying her as a sex worker on social media as part of a months-long campaign of harassment.

I don’t know Backhouse personally, but he is (or was) apparently a Royal Society Research Fellow working on the DUNE experiment, an underground neutrino physics experiment.

The whole story is very disturbing, not least because the harassment went on for so long. One strange aspect of this case is that the victim of Backhouse’s campaign of harassment, Erica Smith, had to pursue a civil action against him to put an end to his behaviour. One would have imagined that a criminal case would have been more appropriate. I for one think he should be in prison; the description presented in the Guardian article seems to constitute harassment as defined under the Public Order Act 1986 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. If such an offence is committed with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, the offender can be given 6 months’ imprisonment or a hefty fine. Why has Backhouse not been prosecuted?

The article ends with

A UCL spokesperson said Backhouse was no longer employed by the university.

I’m glad at least of that, but I wonder what UCL did during the “campaign of harassment” carried out by Christopher Backhouse and whether he left voluntarily or was sacked. I wonder what they have done to help Erica Smith put her life back together after this horrific episode. Does UCL have a vicarious liability?

This case on its own raises grave questions about the way harassment cases are handled in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL but this is far from the first such case there that has gone public; see e.g. here.

UCL clearly has a lot of work to do to put its house in order.

In more general terms, I’ll repeat what I have said in earlier posts on this issue:

Failure to act strongly when such behaviour is proven just sends out the message that the institution doesn’t take sexual harassment seriously. In my view, confidentiality is needed during an investigation – to protect both sides and indeed the person doing the investigation – but if the conclusion is that misconduct has taken place, it should be acknowledged publicly. Justice has to be seen to be done. Sexual assault, of course, is another matter entirely – that should go straight to the police to deal with.

I’ve talked about protocols and procedures, but these can only ever apply a sticking-plaster solution to a problem which is extremely deeply rooted in the culture of many science departments and research teams across the world. These tend to be very hierarchical, with power and influence concentrated in the hands of relatively few, usually male, individuals. A complaint about harassment generally has to go up through the management structure and therefore risks being blocked at a number of stages for a number of reasons. This sort of structure reinforces the idea that students and postdocs are at the bottom of the heap and discourages them from even attempting to pursue a case against someone at the top.

We are obviously very far indeed from eliminating harassment or the conditions that allow it to continue but although cases like this are very painful, I think they at least demonstrate that we are beginning to see the extent of the problem, and how the measures taken to deal with it are inadequate. We have to work much harder to stop this sort of thing from happening in the first place.

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The Tim Hunt Debacle

Posted in Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , on June 14, 2015 by telescoper

After a whole day off yesterday to recover from an exceptionally busy week I’m back in the office on a Sunday to sort out a few things before leaving tomorrow on a short trip to the Midlands, of which more, perhaps, anon.

In a way I’m quite glad I have been so busy over the last few days, with Exam Boards and the like. Had I had time I might have been tempted to write a post at some point about the Tim Hunt affair which broke on Tuesday. As it turns out, everything moved so quickly that anything I wrote would have been overtaken by events. In any case I didn’t feel that I had much to add to the excellent response written by the Head of the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Prof. Claudia Eberlein, in the Huffington Post on Thursday.  However, now I have a little bit of time I thought I would add a few comments.

I hope it goes without saying that I thought Tim Hunt’s comments about female scientists, made in public at an event in South Korea, were outrageous and indefensible.  My heart sank when I found out what he’d said. I might have believed his story that they were intended to be humorous had it not been for an awful non-apology on Radio 4, which effectively made that line of defence untenable. Nobel Prize winning biochemist he may be, but Tim Hunt clearly has a lot to learn about how to interact with people. When we find ourselves in a hole, most of us have the sense to stop digging.

I know my opinion here differs from that of some of my friends and colleagues, but I also think University College London did the right thing in asking him to resign. I’ve heard it argued that it over the top for him to lose his job over his remarks. But that’s not what happened. In fact, Tim Hunt is in his seventies and has been effectively retired for many years; his position at UCL was honorary (i.e. unpaid). I don’t think the severance of his relationship with UCL can be construed as an excessive punishment. In today’s Observer there’s a piece in which Tim Hunt claims he has been “hung out to dry” . I have to admit that I find his attempt to portray himself as victim to be as nauseating as his earlier apology.  I think UCL were fully justified in severing their relationship with Tim Hunt. This is not an issue of freedom of speech. Tim Hunt had every right to express his opinions. Those opinions are, however, completely incompatible with the values of the institution with which he was associated and his statement of them harmful to the reputation if UCL. He simply had to go.

On the other hand, there’s a lot about this story that troubles me greatly. Although some of the social media reaction to Tim Hunt’s comments was incisively humorous, some was unpleasant and some downright nasty. Worse, the Twitterstorm that raged last week also unleashed the gutter press, chiefly the Daily Mail, whose hacks tried to drag Prof. Mary Collins (Hunt’s wife) into the story. That was unpleasant, even by the standards of the Daily Mail. Mary Collins’ private life has nothing to do with her husband’s failings.

Anyway, I hope that a line will now be drawn under this episode. Tim Hunt should now be left alone to enjoy his retirement. As someone once said of someone else “I’ve nothing against his family, but I’m glad he will be spending more time with them”.

Nobody should be deluded that the departure of one high-profile academic will solve anything.  Tim Hunt was one senior academic stupid enough make offensive comments in public. There are countless others in positions of power and influence who hold very similar opinions but only express them behind closed doors, or under the cover of anonymity. Indeed, I know a number of senior academics who put on a public show of being in favour of equality and diversity but in private have acted deliberately to undermine the careers of, usually junior, female scientists. The culprits aren’t always men, either..

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure I should point that I have never met Tim Hunt so do not know what his views really are. Neither do I have any connection with University College London.

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Why the Universe is (probably) not rotating

Posted in Cosmic Anomalies, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on October 1, 2013 by telescoper

Just a quick post to point you towards a nice blog post by Jason McEwen entitled Is the Universe rotating? It’s a general rule that if  an article has a question for a title then the answer to that question is probably “no”, and “probably no” is indeed the answer in this case.

The item relates to a paper by McEwen et al whose abstract is given here:

We perform a definitive analysis of Bianchi VII_h cosmologies with WMAP observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. Bayesian analysis techniques are developed to study anisotropic cosmologies using full-sky and partial-sky, masked CMB temperature data. We apply these techniques to analyse the full-sky internal linear combination (ILC) map and a partial-sky, masked W-band map of WMAP 9-year observations. In addition to the physically motivated Bianchi VII_h model, we examine phenomenological models considered in previous studies, in which the Bianchi VII_h parameters are decoupled from the standard cosmological parameters. In the two phenomenological models considered, Bayes factors of 1.7 and 1.1 units of log-evidence favouring a Bianchi component are found in full-sky ILC data. The corresponding best-fit Bianchi maps recovered are similar for both phenomenological models and are very close to those found in previous studies using earlier WMAP data releases. However, no evidence for a phenomenological Bianchi component is found in the partial-sky W-band data. In the physical Bianchi VII_h model we find no evidence for a Bianchi component: WMAP data thus do not favour Bianchi VII_h cosmologies over the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) cosmology. It is not possible to discount Bianchi VII_h cosmologies in favour of LCDM completely, but we are able to constrain the vorticity of physical Bianchi VII_h cosmologies at $(\omega/H)_0 < 8.6 \times 10^{-10}$ with 95% confidence.

For non-experts the Bianchi cosmologies are based on exact solutions of Einstein’s equations for general relativity which obey the condition that they are spatially homogeneous but not necessarily isotropic. If you find that concept hard to understand, imagine a universe which looks the same everywhere but which is pervaded by a uniform magnetic field: that would be homogeneous (because every place is identical) but anisotropic (because there is a preferred direction – along the magnetic field lines). Another example of would be s a universe which is, for reasons known only to itself, rotating; the preferred direction here is the axis of rotation. The complete classification of all Bianchi space-times is discussed here. I also mentioned them and showed some pictures on this blog here.

As Jason’s post explains, observations of the cosmic microwave background by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) suggest  that there is something a little bit fishy about it: it seems to be have an anomalous large-scale asymmetry not expected in the standard cosmology. These suggestions seem to be confirmed by Planck, though the type of analysis done for WMAP has not yet been performed for Planck. The paper mentioned above investigates whether the WMAP asymmetry could be accounted for by one particular Bianchi cosmology, i.e. Bianchi VII_h. This is quite a complicated model which has negative spatial curvature, rotation (vorticity) and shear; formally speaking, it is the most general Bianchi model of any type that includes the standard Friedmann cosmology as a special case.

The question whether such a complicated model actually provides a better fit to the data than the much simpler standard model is one naturally answered by Bayesian techniques that trade off the increased complexity of a more sophisticated model  against the improvement in goodness-of-fit achieved by having more free parameters.  Using this approach McEwen et al. showed that, in simple  terms, while a slight improvement in fit is indeed gained by adding a Bianchi VII_h component to the model,  the penalty paid in terms of increased complexity means that the alternative model is not significantly more probable than the simple one. Ockham’s Razor strikes again! Although this argument does not definitively exclude the possibility that the Universe is rotating, it does put limits on how much rotation there can be. It also excludes one possible explanation of the  peculiar pattern  of the temperature fluctuations seen by WMAP.

So what does cause the anomalous behaviour of the cosmic microwave background?

I have no idea.

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