Recently in Academia Category

The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years working on the Square Kilometre Array, the massive next-generation radio telescope being developed in the UK and internationally.

The detailed circumstances of his death aren’t yet known, and I hope that they remain irrelevant except for their tragic untimeliness. Much more important is that we remember his contributions and his friendship. My condolences to his wife, his family and his friends in Oxford and throughout the world.

I’ve spent the last few days in the northern half of Great Britain. Wednesday, I was an external examiner for a (successful!) PhD exam at the Durham University. Thursday, I was at the University of Glasgow in service to the other end of the PhD experience in the UK, giving a one-hour lecture on the Cosmic Microwave Background at the STFC summer school for incoming students.

But after the summer school I woke up early for the Caledonian Sleeper up to Fort William in the Western Highlands. I rode through some of the UK’s most spectacular landscape, hills and lochs in the morning fog:

Once I got to Fort William (a typically characterless UK town, unfortunately), I hit the trail, walking along the last few miles of the West Highland Way, taking in some detours to the Cow Hill Summit and the iron-age Dun Deardail Fort. The local hills, including Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Britain, were nestled in low-slung cloud all day:

Along the way, I spotted flora and fauna

and the occasional designed object:
I thought this might be a not terribly well-hidden bird hide, but in fact it’s Outlandia, a treehouse artist’s studio suspended midway up a hillside forest. And I could feel the stress and cares (of my admittedly pretty easy life as an academic in a prestigious institution) fall away, mindful not of telecons, teaching and reports, but of just putting one foot in front of the other, and staring at those hills and lochs. Legend has it Macbeth lived on an island in this one:

More photos of my wandering, staggering, walking and ambling here.

And as an added bonus, here are the Mekons, with their own take on walking in the British countryside:

(Cockermouth is a town in Cumbria near the Lake District, although this was apparently filmed in Wales, Scotland and Leeds. And this being from the Mekons, it’s as much about armageddon and the Rolling Stones as walking in the countryside.)

Today, our Astrophysics Group at Imperial College submitted our first application for a new STFC “Consolidated Grant”.

These are intended to cover all of the astrophysics being done in the department for three years at a time, combining aspects of former so-called “standard” and “rolling” grants, both of which it replaces. (If you don’t know what those are, you probably don’t care.) It remains to be seen whether this new system ends up with the best or the worst of the two old ones, and whether it brings the promised economies of scale resulting from fewer, larger grants.

For us, at least, it’s more work for the first few years: we will complete our consolidation with the rest of our department in another application in only one year’s time.

We — the whole community — are worried by the changeover to a new system (and not only because we fear change). This happens now that the funding situation has stabilized after a few years of decline — down to a level about half of its 2006 maximum. Worse, a higher than average number of groups are applying this year. Will this be met with a proportionally higher allocation of funds? Or will groups just have to try again (as we are in a year)? John Womersley, Director of STFC Science Programmes answered some of these questions at the National Astronomy Meeting a few weeks ago, but the answers were, perhaps understandably, equivocal.

This was my first chance to be the Principal Investigator on a large grant proposal in the UK. All the usual problems with organizing a team of academic scientists apply: we’re bad at managing (at least, I am), we are bad at being managed, it’s like herding cats, etc. Still, we pulled together just in time, with the more-than-able help of various administrators who put up with our delays and last-minute changes.

And now, we wait…

I’ve just finished another term, in fact the heaviest teaching load I’ve ever had at once: a twenty-six hour lecture course, three hours a week as one of several computer lab “demonstrators”, and another four hours or so per week in first-year student tutorials.

For those from outside of the Imperial system: our tutorials are small group meetings during which we go over a selection of the problem sheets handed out during the week in the lecture courses; here, like most of the UK, these are not explicitly marked, but instead the students get the solutions a week or so after they are handed out. The tutorial session is one of the few chances for any sort of discussion or feedback.

The tutorials can be fun and even challenging (but I’m glad I get to see the answers before the students). It is heartening to see the students trying — sometimes struggling — to really understand the problems. However, the fourth hour in a week going over the same problems can get repetitive; there aren’t that many different questions the students ask.

On the other hand, lab demonstrating doesn’t offer much intellectual at all. I have mostly supervised computer labs, which involves standing around while the students work their way through a “script”, writing programs and (we hope) learning about programming. I admit that I don’t think this is a particularly efficient use of my time: although considerable overall high-level organization is needed, the labs themselves could be (and indeed are, partially) monitored by graduate students. Unfortunately, they don’t get more than beer money for their trouble — and postdocs don’t get paid at all.

The best part of undergraduate teaching for me, though, is lecturing. When it goes well, it can be a remarkably effective way of communicating. Of course, it doesn’t always go well. Sometimes I’m not as well-prepared as I would like, or sometimes I don’t even understand the material as well as I need to. Sometimes the students don’t have the background that I thought they did. And sometimes the material is just hard, too hard to really get the first time through. Even problem sheets and studying for exams isn’t always enough: I certainly admit that I didn’t really understand much of the material that I now use every day until I was in graduate school, applying it in the course of my research. And some stuff I didn’t understand until I had to teach it (which implies that there is plenty of physics that I still don’t understand, so still much more to learn).

This term’s Cosmology course felt pretty good: after three years not only do I understand the material, but also I understand something about how to explain it to not-yet-expert upper-level physics students. The downside of this is that my explanations get a bit longer every year, so it gets harder and harder to squeeze in the most exciting material which inevitably has to come at the end, building on the foundation of the rest of the course.

This year, the Physics Department has an artist-in-residence, Geraldine Cox. Among her many other cool projects, she has been lurking in the back of our lecture theatres, sketching furiously. Many thanks to her for these pictures of me at the blackboard, in one of my favorite striped shirts:

(The graph on the upper left is labeled “Do we live in a special time?” — We seem to live at a time labeled by the vertical line, just as the Universe is transitioning from being mostly made of “matter” — the middle of the three plateaus in the graph — to mostly something very like Einstein’s cosmological constant, or the so-called “Dark Energy” — the rightmost plateau, which may go on infinitely far to the right. So we might have expected to find ourselves near a plateau rather than a one of the few times in between. This is an anthropic argument, and must be treated with care.)

As always, I welcome feedback, anonymous or otherwise, from any of my students on this course or any other. (When I asked for some comments a few weeks into the term, the most amusing came from the student who praised my voice and asked if I was a singer — which doesn’t jibe with the other, less positive, comments on my American accent….)

Finally, today was one of the high points of post-graduate teaching: one of my students, Jude Bowyer, passed his PhD viva with his thesis, Local Methods for the Cosmic Microwave Background. Well done to the soon-to-be Dr. Bowyer!

This week is the 100th anniversary of one of the most important events in the Labor movement (at least back in the US): the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster in which the garment factory’s sweatshop conditions led to the death of almost 150 workers, mostly Jewish immigrant women, locked by their bosses into their lower-Manhattan factory while the fire raged. This tragedy had remarkably swift and positive repercussions, spurring the growth of the once-powerful International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and resulting in a new regime of labor laws actually intended to help workers and not their employers. (The New York Times is commemorating the fire on one of their blogs.)

So I am saddened and a little guilty that I will not be participating in the labor action being called for this week by my own union. The University and College Union represents academics in UK higher education institutions. In this precarious time for Universities, especially here in England, I am glad, in principle, that there is a union representing academics, a group of people who certainly aren’t in it for the money, and deserve at least a modicum of recompense, job security, and respect.

In principle. In practice the UCU has spent much of the last decade or so in the news not fighting for workers’ rights but because of the stance of some of its more radical (but sadly misguided) members toward Israel than for trying to improve the condition of its own workers.

Now, however, they’re trying to take on an issue that will certainly impact all of us (academics): pensions, which our employers contend have to dwindle in the light of supposed economic realities. I suspect and fear that, in the long run, the employers may actually be right, given the ageing and long-lived population, as is well known. But I also suspect that they are not negotiating with everything appropriate on the table. Hence, an impasse, and one that if not resolved will certainly harm all of us: academics, administrators and, not least, students. During this last week of our term, with only two hours of lectures left in my course, I would have preferred “action short of a strike” that would have enabled me to fulfil my teaching duties and my responsibilities toward my (blameless) students. Although, yes, I appreciate that the whole point of a strike is to cause harm, and show how indispensable we workers are, but this relies on generating sympathy for the workers, and anger directed at the employers. But with the rather woeful PR job by the UCU, I doubt many of our students would have known why their lecturers aren’t around.

I try not to ask too much of my readers, but this post and the next are about a couple of worthwhile causes I’ve come across of late.

The first project is the BBC World Challenge competition, supporting “social entrepreneurs”, grassroots projects making an impact in the developing world. One of the twelve finalists, e.quinox, is an initiative founded by students from Imperial College. Along with students at the Kigali Institute of Technology, the team is developing solar-powered devices for rural electrification, “Electric Kiosks”, three of which have already been deployed in Rwanda.

Please vote for the team — the only one led by students — and support this fantastic project.

I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science community have begun to realize that the radio interviews and opinion pieces in more and less likely outlets may not be enough. Needless to say, blogs like this one (or even much more visible ones) tend to preach to the converted. Prompted in part by Evan Harris’ talk at Science Online 2010, many scientists and supporters of science realized that we need to talk directly to the people who actually hold the purse strings: Government and Parliament.

In particular, biologist, blogger, musician and novelist Jenny Rohn idly suggested doing something about it. As occasionally happens online, this struck a nerve, and Jenny very quickly found herself organizing something of a movement: Science Is Vital. Right now, the campaign is organizing four main activities:

• An online petition;
• A campaign to write letters to MPs;
• A rally outside of Parliament on 9 October; and
• Lobbying Parliament with a meeting on 12 October.

The campaign has already received explicit support from The Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, Nature, and many more organizations, as well as eminent scientists (and the occasional celebrity). But this isn’t and shouldn’t be restricted to scientists: we’re not doing this to protect our livelihoods (alright, we’re not only doing it to protect our livelihoods), but because, well, science is, in fact, vital to the health of the nation — that’s why so many other countries, faced with similar financial problems, are planning to increase research spending. An excellent post in the Guardian’s Data Blog details the streams for science funding in the UK and compares the level to Japan, the US and Germany. Britain is already the most cost-effective scientific nation by some measures; there is no real fat to be cut.

Nonetheless, here it seems more and more likely that we’ll have to deal with cuts of something like 15 percent to the overall science budget, and exactly how that plays out in the face of considerable fixed costs such as subscriptions to CERN and the European Space Agency is unknown (William Cullerne Bown at Research Fortnight has run the numbers for a variety of scenarios for enacting a nightmarish 30% cut. They are all miserable.) No matter what the level, one unintended consequence is likely: instead of the Government’s stated ambition of getting rid of the worst of British science (not that there is very much sub-par science being done here already), the Guardian article about the brain drain that may (will?) follow drastic cuts to science funding is already showing that the cuts may have an even worse effect, driving the best scientists out of Britain.

(Worse still, let’s not forget that this year’s yet-to-be proposed cuts are just the latest in an ongoing shrinking of the physical sciences budget, in particular, over the last few years, ever since the formation of the ill-starred STFC form the former PPARC and CCLRC councils, which began life with an £80 million budget shortfall.)

So, please, if you support science in the UK, sign the petition, attend the rally (unfortunately, I’ll be out of the country), and write your MP. For what it’s worth, here’s the letter I wrote to mine, Andy Slaughter (Labour, Hammersmith, London):

Dear Mr Slaughter,

I am one of your constituents, and am also a Professor of Physics at Imperial College.

You are probably aware that science funding has been under severe pressure for the last several years, first under the previous Labour government, and now, along with so much else, under the Coalition.

Science is crucial to the economic and social future of the UK. It would be devastating for the UK to give up its position as almost certainly the second most powerful country in the world, after only the USA, in higher education and scientific research. Even today (again, after several years of cuts to grants in the physical sciences), the vast majority (over 90%) of research funding goes to world-class scientists, as judged by the latest Research Assessment Exercise. It is impossible to cut this without reducing the amount of excellent research produced in the UK. Moreover, threats of such cuts are already making scientists consider their options — most other countries are increasing, rather than decreasing, their science budgets not despite but because of the economic downturn and growing deficits.

The evidence is clear that investing in research brings a range of economic and social benefits, and that severe cuts at the very moment that our competitor nations are investing more could jeopardize the future of UK science.

Hence, I am sure that you will take the opportunity in the coming weeks to

• sign EDM 767 – Science is Vital;
• join me in signing the Science is Vital petition; and
• attend a lobby in Parliament on 12 October (15.30, Committee Room 10).

The Science is Vital coalition, along with the Campaign for Science and Engineering, are calling upon the Government to set out a supportive strategy, including public investment goals above or at least in step with economic growth. Without such investment and commitment the UK risks its international reputation, its market share of high-tech manufacturing and services, the ability to respond to urgent and long-term national scientific challenges, and the economic recovery.

I look forward to hearing from you. Do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to discuss these matters.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Jaffe

A week or so ago, I had an extended “conversation” on Twitter with two very old friends, Erik Davis and Ted Friedman. Erik’s a writer, specializing in “modern esoterica” which ranges from psychedelia and Led Zeppelin to Philip K Dick and Cthulu. Like me, Ted’s an academic, but he’s Professor of Communication at Georgia State University, who works on movies, digital culture, and is writing a book on Marx, Buddhism and pop culture. We all worked together on a college music ‘zine, back when those required paper and glue to put together (at least we had laser printers). And both Erik and Ted were trained in the lit-crit practice of 80s academia. They’re both damn smart, but their outlook on the way the world works and how we interpret it differs from mine, trained by what’s by now many years as a scientist.

So I thought it might be thought-provoking to present and annotate our discussion.

(It wasn’t completely trivial to recreate a linear narrative from the Twitter stream. For those of you unfamiliar with the conventions of Twitter, “@” is used to direct a message to a particular user, but everything is out in the open. Because of the infamous 140-character limit, I’ve occasionally combined successive messages (“tweets”) into a single statement. Also, I’ve changed the usernames for Ted, Erik and me to save space and make things a bit more legible; those limits, along with the slight time delays, and the distractions over the more than an hour that this lasted means that it doesn’t exactly follow a linear narrative. Finally, I’ve also put in some links to some of the articles and books mentioned.)

Ted:@Erik Exactly! The virus metaphor is too Darwinian/Freudian/scientistic/empiricist. Reflects Dawkins’ own vulgar Darwinism.

Andrew:@Ted (and @Erik) “Vulgar” darwinism?

I entered the conversation late, but I was amused by the description of Dawkins’ ideas as “vulgar” Darwinism (which Erik takes the opportunity to joke about).

Erik:RT @Andrew: @Ted “Vulgar” darwinism? I love it when Darwinism wears pink hot pants and swears like a sailor!

Ted:@Erik Magic’s a much more accurate metaphor for how culture works: Mysteriously. Unpredictably. Irrationally.

Ted:@Andrew See Gould’s critiques of Dawkins in The New York Review of Books. He’s primarily slamming evolutionary biology as Social Darwinism. But he’s also critiquing Dawkins for not accepting Gould’s concepts like spandrels and punctuated equilibrium.

Erik:@Ted Perhaps too quick to say that magic is irrational though. Emergent perhaps. Metaphorical. Unbound. But not methinks irrational.

This is when I started to get interested, but worried — I’m all for using “magic” as a metaphor, but nothing more.

Ted:@Andrew And Dawkins’s Darwinian fundamentalism is of a piece with his fundamentalist atheism. Compare to Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton.

And this really annoyed me: it’s wrong to use “fundamentalism” in this way (even though the application of the term to Darwin and Dawkins comes from Gould’s essay.) Armstrong and Eagleton’s recent work has attempted to be a more nuanced view of the ongoing science/religion debate, but in fact I find them to be well-written and well-thought-out sociology, but entirely miss the point that religion really does make claims about what happens in the real world, and that those claims, when tested, almost inevitably end up wrong. If you remove those claims, most believers wouldn’t recognize what is left as religion.

Ted:@Erik Good point. Depends what counts as rationality. Magic is the domain of the unconscious rather than consciousness.

Andrew:@Ted Nonetheless Dawkins is correct on both counts… (Armstrong and Eagleton are better writers, but still wrong.)

Ted:@Erik In Campbellian terms, magic is part of the Special World. As Alan Moore says, “it’s all true as long as you understand that it’s all going on in your mind.” Although that’s too cut-and-dried to explain synchronicity and action at a distance.

I couldn’t actually find that Alan Moore quote, but it sounds like something he would say. This is where I thought we would get agreement — magic is a way of interpreting the world. But it quickly became clear they wanted a more real magic than I am willing to grant, given what I know about the way the Universe works.

Erik:@Ted I would say more that magic (as a practice) is the interface between consciousness and the unconscious, a mode of mediation.

Erik:@Ted agreed. the “weird shit” still exceeds the mind-only theory. thank gods!

Andrew:@Erik @Ted Hmmm, I am all for weird shit — but all in the mind. To me, that’s the amazing power of the sub- and un-conscious.

Ted:@Erik And then there’s the stuff I really don’t have a handle on, like Rupert Sheldrake’s theories, remote viewing, and entheogens.

Ted:@Erik I like the idea that vulgar Marxism was when Engels pimped Karl out for a hot night on the town.

Ted:@Andrew Don’t you encounter tons of weird shit in your day job? Isn’t the challenge in making a TOE thinking outside the box (or collider)?

Ted:@Erik Great book on this subject: Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads. Dismantles cognitivism via phenomenology.

Erik:@Ted Looks good! I am pleased that the embedded-enactionist consciousness folks are on the rise agin the neural mechanists.

Andrew:@Ted Of course there’s natural weird shit, too. But no need to explain, say, synchronicity, as anything more than pattern-matching. Yes, I am a (boring? pedantic?) arch-rationalist…

Erik:@Andrew I am not trying to dismantle realism (good luck) but I’m talking shit thats weirder than that. And, ya know, shit happens!

Ted:@Andrew Maybe. But pattern-matching is how we make meaning. Synchronicity resonates for the same reason as great art. The sublime. Numinous.

Ted:@Erik I like that! It lives in the limnal spaces, like the edge of the forest, the Star Wars cantina, the frontier.

I do so love that my friends have moved from Jungian synchronicity and highbrow religious studies to the Star Wars cantina in just few 140-character messages.

Ted:@Andrew Disagree. Dawkins and Armstrong are speaking at cross-purposes. Armstrong argues God is a metaphor. Dawkins says “just a metaphor.”

Ted:@Andrew To Armstrong, a world without God is a world missing a very useful word to describe a big part of what it means to be human.

Ted:@Andrew And Dawkins’s and Hitchens’s impoverished hermeneutics demonstrates how much their scientism has cost them - and all of us.

Andrew:@Ted “But pattern-matching is how we make meaning.” My point exactly — complete agreement!

Ted:@Andrew Armstrong and Jung see the disenchantment of the universe as both a given and a challenge. #fsfmedia

Ted:@Andrew My favorite response to Dawkins and Hitchens: Stephen Batchelor’s Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist. He’s a zen existentialist.

Andrew:@Ted Disagree that Dawkins’ & Hitchens’ hermeneutics are impoverished: all meaning comes from us. What could be better?

Erik:Synchro in the house: just as I was about to transcribe the word “happy” from a PKD ms [Philip K Dick manuscript]. I pressed a weird key combo and got a smiley face.

Ted:@Andrew I’m judging by excerpts, interviews and reviews, I admit. What I read suggested Dawkins is uninformed in the history of theology.

Andrew:@Ted He is better-informed on theology than 99.9% of believers.

Ted:@Andrew Meaning Dawkins found it unnecessary to study the discourse of his opponent, rather than attempt to understand, engage, synthesize. That speaks to a empiricist, technocratic arrogance, and ultimately a lack of skepticism towards one own’s assumptions.

Erik:@Andrew Dawkins may know as much theology as believers (ie, not much), but he don’t know shit about religion as a social/antho phenomenon.

Ted:@Andrew But Batchelor isn’t a believer. Armstrong and Eagleton have come to be, but remain curious and skeptical.

Andrew:@Ted I don’t disagree re: Dawkins’ tactics, but I’m all for “empiricist arrogance”. It beats “truthiness” any day.

Ted:@Andrew Harold Bloom is an atheist, but his book on American Religions is more sophisticated and sympathetic than most believers’ texts.

This is why these discussions often flounder: we can’t quite decide if we’re talking about ontology — what the world is made of, epistemology — how we interpret the world, or sociology — how is it that these systems of interpreting the world came to be (I hesitate to use the word “evolve”)

Ted:@Andrew There isn’t only a believer/nonbeliever split. There’s also a fundamentalist (believer or atheist)/skeptic (openminded) split. Skepticism is too useful a word to cede to Skeptical Inquirer and Penn & Teller. Skeptics question orthodoxy. Fringe-science weirdos with real scientific chops, like Rupert Sheldrake and Charles Tartt, are skeptics too.

Actually, the line between “skeptic” and “crackpot” is pretty well-marked…

Andrew:@Ted Category error: Dawkins &c not fundamentalist in same sense as religious types. Skepticism is part of method.

…as is the line between fundamentalists and proponents of well-tested scientific theories.

Ted:@Andrew Disagree. Empiricist arrogance leads to orthodoxy, incuriosity, and silencing skeptics. Synchronicity is more than truthy.

Andrew:@Ted I’ll let you call yourself a skeptic if you never call me a fundamentalist.

Ted:@Andrew Sorry, didn’t mean you! Dawkins just pisses me off.

Andrew:@Ted No offense taken — he annoys me, sometimes, too. But (I am steadfast on this) he is right on the facts!

Andrew:@Ted @Erik This is a fab conversation but it’s late here… I’m sure there’s more to discuss later if you want to keep it up.

Ted:Scientists: any opnion on this new book by a philosopher and a cognitivist, What Darwin Got Wrong? See this for an Overview @Andrew

Ted:@Andrew Oops - I’m late for lunch myself. Catch you all later!

So by the end, we inevitably agreed to disagree, waylaid by the need for food and drink. I do think the world is weird as hell, but that’s because all of the meaning that there is comes from our incredibly puny but incredibly powerful minds, and plenty of the weirdness comes out of those very minds. But all together, the world is still and only “a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing then another” (as the philosopher David Lewis had it, following Hume). We may see patterns and want to call it magic, or synchronicity. But eventually we tame those patterns and relate them to one another and get to make a rigorous system out of it.

Needless to say, this is my gloss — Ted and Erik may well disagree. In recompense, let me do my best to pimp my friends: you should buy Ted’s book, Electric Dreams, and at least one of Erik’s too.

We get most of the official feedback on our teaching through a mechanism called SOLE — Student On-Line Evaluations — which asks a bunch of questions on the typical “Very Poor” … “Very Good” scale. I’ve written about my results before — they are useful, and there is even some space for ad-hoc comments, but the questionnaire format is a bit antiseptic.

On some occasions, however, students make an extra effort to let you know how they feel. Last year, I received an anonymous paper letter in the old-fashioned snail-mail post from a student in my cosmology course which said, among other statements, that I should “show appropriate humility and shame by not teaching any undergraduate courses at all this coming year.” Well, that year has come and gone, and I was not absolved of teaching responsibilities, so I soldiered on.

Today, I received another anonymous letter, from a most assuredly different student, who said that this year’s cosmology course “is without a doubt the most interesting undergraduate course I have taken at Imperial.” This would have left me ecstatic, except that this otherwise well-intentioned and obviously smart student managed to put the envelope in the mailbox with insufficient postage, which meant that I had to trudge across to the local mail facility and pay the missing 10p, along with a full £1 fee/fine! (If the author of the letter happens to read this, please consider a donation of £1.10 plus appropriate interest to the charity of your choice!).

It would be self-serving of me to make too much of this, beyond noting that, although I did make some significant changes in this year’s course, these letters more likely indicate the very different reactions that a given course can engender, rather than a vast improvement in my teaching.

My apologies to both students if they would have preferred I not quote them on-line, but such is the price of anonymity.

I just received the SOLE (Student On-Line Evaluation) results for my cosmology course. Overall, I was pleased: averaging between “good” and “very good” for “the structure and organisation of the lectures”, “the approachability of” and “the interest and enthusiasm generated by” the lecturer, as well as for “the support materials” (my lecture notes), although only “good” for “the explanation of concepts given by the lecture”, with an evenly-dispersed smattering of “poor” and “very good” —- you can’t please all of the people all of the time. That last, of course, is the crux of any course, and especially one with as many seemingly weird concepts as cosmology (the big bang itself, inflation, baryogenesis, …). So perhaps a bit of confusion is to be expected. Still, must try harder.

The specific written comments were mostly positive (it’s clear the students really liked those typed-up lecture notes), but I remain puzzled by comments like this: “Sometimes 2-3 mins of explanation (which is generally good) is reduced to one or two words on the board which are difficult to understand when going over notes later.” Indeed — I expect the student to take his or her own notes on those “2-3 mins of explanation”, if they were useful and interesting. But many of the comments were quite helpful, about the pace of the lectures, the prerequisites for the course, and, especially, the order in which I use the six sliding blackboards in the classroom.

So, thanks to the students for the feedback (and good luck on the exam…).