Recently in Academia Category

This week I received the results of the “Student On-Line Evaluations” for my cosmology course. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I thought that this, my fourth and final year teaching the course, had gone pretty well, and I was happy to see that the evaluations bore this out: 80% of the responses were “good” or “very good”, the remainder “satisfactory” (and no “poor” or “very poor”, I’m happy to say). I was disappointed that only 23 student (fewer than half of the total) registered their opinion on subjects like “The structure and delivery of the lectures” and “the interest and enthusiasm generated by the lecturer”.

The weakest spot was “The explanation of concepts given by the lecturer” with 5 for satisfactory, 11 for good and 7 for very good — I suppose this reflects the actual difficulty of some of the material. In the second half of the course I need to draw more heavily on concepts from particle physics and thermodynamics that undergraduate students may not have encountered before, concepts that are necessary in order to understand how the Universe evolved from its hot, dense and simple early state to today’s wonderfully complex mix of radiation, gas, galaxies, dark matter and dark energy. Without several days to devote to the nuclear physics of big-bang nucleosynthesis, or the even longer necessary to really explain the quantum field theory in curved space-time that would be necessary to get a quantitative understanding of the density perturbations produced by an early epoch of cosmic inflation, the best I can do is give a taste of these ideas.

And I really appreciated comments such as “Work with other lecturers to show them how it’s done”. So thanks to all of my students — and good luck on the exam in early June.

Somehow I’ve managed to forget my usual end-of-term post-mortem of the year’s lecturing. I think perhaps I’m only now recovering from 11 weeks of lectures, lab supervision, tutoring alongside a very busy time analysing Planck satellite data.

But a few weeks ago term ended, and I finished teaching my undergraduate cosmology course at Imperial, 27 lectures covering 14 billion years of physics. It was my fourth time teaching the class (I’ve talked about my experiences in previous years here, here, and here), but this will be the last time during this run. Our department doesn’t let us teach a course more than three or four years in a row, and I think that’s a wise policy. I think I’ve arrived at some very good ways of explaining concepts such as the curvature of space-time itself, and difficulties with our models like the 122-or-so-order-of-magnitude cosmological constant problem, but I also noticed that I wasn’t quite as excited as in previous years, working up from the experimentation of my first time through in 2009, putting it all on a firmer foundation — and writing up the lecture notes — in 2010, and refined over the last two years. This year’s teaching evaluations should come through soon, so I’ll have some feedback, and there are still about six weeks until the students’ understanding — and my explanations — are tested in the exam.

Next year, I’ve got the frankly daunting responsibility of teaching second-year quantum mechanics: 30 lectures, lots of problem sheets, in-class problems to work through, and of course the mindbending weirdness of the subject itself. I’d love to teach them Dirac’s very useful notation which unifies the physical concept of quantum states with the mathematical ideas of vectors, matrices and operators — and which is used by all actual practitioners from advanced undergraduates through working physicists. But I’m told that students find this an extra challenge rather than a simplification. Comments from teachers and students of quantum mechanics are welcome.

Imperial Astrophysics is sponsoring a new series of public lectures, “The Sensual Universe: Astrophysics for the Five Senses”.

The first will concentrate on touch: The Impact of Sex In Space, presented by Dr Saralyn Mark (and unlike most of us around with a “Dr” in front of our names, Dr Mark really is an MD). Despite the name, it should be completely Safe For Work, and will happen next Tuesday, 17 April 2012 at 18:30, in Blackett Laboratory Lecture Theatre 1 here at Imperial. Attendance is free but registration is essential: email astro-outreach@imperial.ac.uk or call 020 7594 7531 stating the number of required tickets.

The next one will be given by our own Dr Subu Mohanty, on taste: Beer in Space, on 23 May 2012.

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