Peter Coles has blogged about his latest experiences on the UK Astronomy Grants Panel (chaired by Andy Lawrence), so I thought I’d mention that I’ve spent the last couple of days up in Glasgow, not attending the UK National Astronomy Meeting, but as a member of the Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). Our job is to review the requests from members of the UK astronomy particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy communities to get involved in large projects: telescopes, particle accelerators, facilities and satellites. We evaluate the proposals and make recommendations to the Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics Science...
Many different strands of the discussion of the UK science budget are coming together, starting with last week’s announcement of STFC’s restructuring. This week the Royal Society released its report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity”, arguing that this is a crucial time to emphasize and invest in science, rather than pull away from it. “Science is one of the jewels in our crown but it yields its dividends over decades.” (I believe that the US National Academy of Sciences has said similar things in the past, even more strongly, but I haven’t been able to find the appropriate...
The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of the Government) has announced “new arrangements” for STFC (press-release version here or here) . Basically, the government will try to insulate grant funding from two big sources of uncertainty. First, BIS would [attempt to] protect STFC from fluctuations in international currency rates which impact the...
I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics. For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is something like £70 million in the red. When all this started about two years ago, one of the main criticisms of the STFC management (beyond wondering how they could have got themselves — and us — into this predicament to begin with) was that they...
While I’ve been galavanting across Europe and the USA, the ongoing UK science-funding crisis has entered a new, possibly even grimmer, phase. The STFC itself is so strapped for cash it will only be issuing grants lasting until October 2010, instead of the usual two or three years. This is rumored to be engendered by a new £40 million shortfall and related to the ongoing reviews of STFC science and facilities such as big telescopes and membership in international collaborations like CERN and the European Space Agency. The results of these reviews and consultations have started to come in, and...
[Warning: this post will be fairly technical and political and may only be of interest to those in the field.] I spent the first couple of days this week stuck in a room in Cambridge with about 40 of my colleagues pondering a very important question: what is the future of the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the UK? Organized by Keith Grainge of Cambridge’s MRAO, and held at Cambridge’s new Kavli Institute for Cosmology, the workshop brought together a significant fraction of the UK CMB community, from Cambridge itself, Cardiff, Imperial, Manchester, Oxford and elsewhere. With the...
Right now, the UK’s astronomy and nuclear/particle physics research council, STFC, is supposedly undergoing a series of “consultations” with the community to try to figure out exactly which of the many possible big-ticket items (telescopes, satellites, particle detectors, etc.) the community wants to pursue. In the meantime, however, things are proceeding in their usual autocratic way, as our financial overlords attempt to deal with the financial shortfall that a combination of bad luck, the global financial crisis, their own mismanagement, and government policy (in no particular order), has bequeathed the council. Following on the cancellation of the Clover CMB experiment,...
So, apologies for taking so long between posts. For now, I’ll blame twitter and its ADD version of blogging, because that at least lets me point to an interesting meeting that went on last week: the .Astronomy Conference on Networked Astronomy and the New Media. the conference brought together several related strands of astronomical computing, from the grid (the Virtual Observatory), to “citizen astronomy” (Galaxy Zoo, which is apparently being upgraded to “Universe Zoo”, Google Sky, and blogs and podcasts), to hacks and mashups built on top of current bits of distributed infrastructure, not to mention twitter itself. (Connectivity is...
Thanks to Dave for pointing out that the final results of the STFC programmatic review sweepstakes popularity contest consultation exercise have been released. Following on from the recommendations, which grouped all projects into five projects, the STFC Council has decided where and how the money will flow. The best news overall is that only the very lowest band of projects will no longer be funded, rather than two lowest as had originally been planned. As expected, Imperial Astrophysics has fared relatively well, with continued support for Planck, Herschel, Scuba II, UKIDSS, LISA Pathfinder and XMM Newton. Overall, it looks like...
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck, Herschel, Scuba II, UKIDSS, LISA Pathfinder and XMM Newton appear to have survived the cut. However, It is important to stress that these reports are not the final conclusions of the Programmatic Review. These conclusions will be reached by STFC Council using these reports to...
Today’s obligatory pointer to the latest on the ongoing UK physics-funding crisis: the “Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills” committee has released a pretty scathing report, mostly slamming STFC’s handling of the situation (and refuting most of its arguments for how it got us into this mess to begin with). The BBC’s Today show had interviews confirming these points with Committee Chair Phil Willis MP and Brian Cox. At this point, the best we could hope for in the short term would be a small amount of emergency funding to close some of the most gaping holes (and as a measure...
I’ve been distracted from preparing a presentation trying to make the sure the UK (and, yes, our group at Imperial in particular) gets its fair share of the dwindling UK astrophysics budget: Newsnight has a pretty extensive package, filmed over the last few weeks, discussing the ongoing astrophysics funding issues. Most impressive was the strong editorial line, starting with always-irascible host Jeremy Paxman’s opening comment that “the consequences [of the funding cuts] haven’t been thought through. And they could be dire.” From there, Susan Watts presented interviews with luminaries such as Astronomer Royal and Royal Society President Martin Rees (describing...
For the last decade, astronomers worldwide have slowly been bringing together the infrastructure to create a “Virtual Observatory” — uniform access to astronomy data from different telescopes, with different sorts of instruments, taken by different astronomers at different times. Very quickly in the process, astronomers realized that the main problems lay not in the underlying technology, but in creating a set of standards so that it would be easy to set that data up for access and to view and manipulate that data with a common set of tools. AstroGrid is the UK’s VO project, and they released their software...
I’ve spent the last couple of days at a meeting of the STFC Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). We evaluate all of the large project proposals (big telescopes, satellites, detectors for particle and nuclear physics) that are submitted to the funding council. Despite the still-unresolved crisis in STFC funding, projects are still being proposed, and some of them even funded. It was eye-opening being on the other side of the table for a change — although I can’t really talk about what we saw. But the best part of the two days was the following quote which appeared on one...
In an unexpectedly rational decision, STFC (UK astronomy’s funding council, if you haven’t been paying attention) and the board of the Gemini telescope, have come to some sort of agreement to reinstate UK observing time for the time being, with the further statement from Gemini that “The Board asks that the Chair and Designated Members, including the UK, meet face-to-face at the earliest opportunity to further discussion of possible continued UK involvement in Gemini.” (Via Andy Lawrence.)...
Many others have been doing their best to disseminate information on the UK Physics funding crisis (especially Sheffield Prof Paul Crowther) but it’s probably worth pointing out the latest repercussion (which has already been picked up by the BBC): despite a bid to remain involved at a reduced level, it looks like the UK will be forced to completely withdraw from the Gemini telescope consortium. This is particularly dangerous for astronomers here, as Gemini-North was the only large telescope (about 8 meters in diameter) in the Northern Hemisphere to which the UK had access. Now, half the sky will be...
Today we heard that the (bizarrely agglomerated) UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills will be significantly cutting the physics budget that comes through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). STFC was formed earlier this year out of PPARC (Particle Physics and Astrophysics) and the CCLRC (which ran big facilities like the Rutherford Appleton Lab). When it was formed, we were told this would enable better science. But it seems we may have been sold a bill of goods: the science program is being saddled with what is, essentially, CCLRC’s debt, in the form of an £80 million shortfall...
Congratulations to Dr Brian May, PhD, for successfully defending his PhD thesis, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”. At the time of his defense, I was up in Durham, lecturing to the mostly younger incoming class of STFC-supported UK grad students. Best of luck to them, too, and let’s hope they can finish before their funding runs out in three or four years and so won’t have to make do with a less interesting career like Brian’s....