Recently in Politics Category

Funding for space missions in the UK was split from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the the UK Space Agency earlier this year. Very roughly, UKSA will fund the missions themselves all the way through to the processing of data, while STFC will fund the science that comes from analysing the data.

To try to be a little more specific, the agencies have put out a press release on this so-called “dual key” approach: “Who does what? — Arrangements for sharing responsibility for the science programme between the STFC and the UK Space Agency.” The executive summary is:

• UKSA

  • ESA subscriptions
  • Mission-specific instruments
  • Operation of UK instruments (Post-launch support)
  • Aurora integrated national programme

• STFC:

  • Early R&D for space science (non-mission specific)
  • Studentships/fellowships
  • Scientific exploitation of missions

This still leaves many of the details of the split unanswered, or at least fuzzy: How do we ensure that government supports the two agencies adequately and jointly? How do we ensure that STFC supports science exploitation from missions that UKSA funds, so that the UK gets the full return on its investment? How do we define the split between “data analysis” and “science exploitation”?

Here at Imperial, we work on both sides of that divide for both Planck and Herschel: we are the home to data analysis centres for both missions, and want to take advantage of the resulting science opportunities. Indeed, as we take the Planck mission ahead towards its first cosmology results at the end of next year, we are already seeing some of these tensions played out, in both the decision-making process of each agency separately as well as in the overall level of funding available in these austere times.

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've come across a couple bits of popular/political culture that give me the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: the uses and abuses of probability theory.

The first is piece by Nate Silver of the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog, dedicated to trying to crunch the political numbers of polls and other data in as transparent a manner as possible. Usually, Silver relies on a relentlessly frequentist take on probability: he runs lots of simulations letting the inputs vary according to the poll results (correctly taking into account the "margin of error" and more than occasionally using other information to re-weight the results of different polls. Nonetheless, these techniques give a good summary of the results at any given time -- and have been far and away the best discussion of the numerical minutiae of electioneering for both the 2008 and 2010 US elections.

But yesterday, Silver wrote a column: A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange which tackles the question of Assange's guilt in the sexual-assault offense with which he has been charged. Bayes' theorem, you will probably recall if you've been reading this blog, states that the probability of some statement ("Assange is innocent of sexual assault, despite the charges against him") is the product of the probability that he would be charged if he were innocent (the "likelihood") times the probability of his innnocence in the absence of knowledge about the charge (the "prior"):

P(innocent|charged, context) ∝ P(innocent | context) × P(charged|innocent, context)

To figure out these probabilities, there are no simulations we can perform -- we can't run a big social-science model of Swedish law-enforcement, possibly in contact with, say, American diplomats, and make small changes and see what happens. We just need to assign probabilities to these statements.

But even to do that requires considerable thought, and important decisions about the context in which we want to make these assignments. For Silver, the important context is that there is evidence that other governments, particularly the US, may have an ulterior motive for wanting to not just prosecute, but persecute Assange. Hence, the probability of his being unjustly accused [P(charged|innocent, context)] is larger than it would be for, say, an arbitrary Australian citizen traveling in Britain. Usually, Bayesian probability is accused of needing a subjective prior, but in this case the context affects and adds a subjective aspect to the likelihood.

Some of the commenters on the site make a different point: given that Assange is, at least in some sense, a known criminal (he has leaked secret documents, which is likely against the law), he is more likely to commit other criminal acts. This time, the likelihood is not affected, but the prior: the commenter believes that Assange is less likely to be innocent irrespective of the information about the charge.

Next: game shows.

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.

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 few months ago, I received a call from someone at the “Public Service Review”, supposedly a glossy magazine distributed to UK policymakers and influencers of various stripes. The gentleman on the line said that he was looking for someone to write an article for his magazine giving an example of what sort of space-related research was going on at a prominent UK institution, to appear opposite an opinion piece written by Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society.

This seemed harmless enough, although it wasn’t completely clear what I (or the Physics Department, or Imperial College) would get out of it. But I figured I could probably knock something out fairly quickly. However, he told me there was a catch: it would cost me £6000 to publish the article. And he had just ducked out of his editorial meeting in order to find someone to agree to writing the article that very afternoon. Needless to say, in this economic climate, I didn’t have an account with an unused £6000 in it, especially for something of dubious benefit. (On the other hand, astrophysicists regularly publish in journals with substantial page charges.) It occurred to me that this could be a scam, although the website itself seems legitimate (although no one I spoke to knew anything about it).

I had completely forgotten about this until this week, when another colleague in our group at Imperial told me had received the same phone call, from the same organization, with the same details: article to appear opposite Lord Rees’; short deadline; large fee.

So, this is beginning to sound fishy. Has anyone else had any similar dealings with this organization?

Update: It has come to my attention that one of the comments below was made under a false name, in particular the name of someone who actually works for the publication in question, so I have removed the name, and will possibly likely the comment unless the original write comes forward with more and truthful information (which I will not publish without permission). I have also been informed of the possibility that some other of the comments below may come from direct competitors of the publication. These, too, may be removed in the absence of further confirming information.

Update II: In the further interest of hearing both sides of the discussion, I would like to point out the two comments from staff at the organization giving further information as well as explicit testimonials in their favor.

Today was the next drip in the ongoing water torture that is the upshot of the government’s funding cuts on UK science: BIS Minister Vince Cable gave the coalition government’s first major speech on science. Rumors have been flying around of cuts of 20-30%, and we have been searching for any hints of the Government’s science strategy in advance of the comprehensive spending review next month.  The two biggest questions have been the overall magnitude of the coming cuts, and how the remaining money would be allocated. Would “economic impact” trump scientific excellence, favoring subjects (irrespective of quality) that can be monetized in the short term over so-called blue-skies research?

Cable indeed highlighted the importance of impact, and eventually boiled down the government’s strategy to funding research that is either “commercially useful” or “theoretically outstanding”. In so doing, he mentioned that 54% of UK science researchers were rated “world class” in the last RAE, and, by implication, that the remaining 46% is in danger. Hearing this, any scientist who has ever evaluated grants for funding councils like STFC would be puzzled: over the last few years we can’t even afford to fund all of the excellent proposals, much less any that aren’t obviously world-class. Indeed: even leaving aside the clear discrepancies between fields in the ratings, what isn’t mentioned in the speech is that this 46% receives less than 10% of all research funding (from 2% to 7% depending on what gets counted as “research funding”). William Cullerne Bown speculates that Cable therefore meant we are in for a 2%-7% cut, which would be seen in the current climate as a huge victory for science (although may only be a precursor to further cuts, in any event). I am not so sure; if he is looking to make large savings in the BIS portfolio this is a good sound-bite to excuse swingeing science cuts. But I, along with almost everyone else, wait and hope.

Jenny Rohn suggests we do more than wait: that we march on Parliament. She has set up a Facebook page to organize the campaign, “Science is Vital”, putting into practice the ideas espoused by Evan Harris at last week’s Science Online 2010 conference and in the aftermath of today’s speech. As long as we can control the message, this can be effective — but we can’t be seen as merely defending our own turf or, what could be worse, as white-coated boffins waving our test tubes at MPs. This isn’t funny, and science needs to be seen, correctly, as vital to the health of the nation.

(For more information and viewpoints on the speech, see posts by Kieron Flanagan, dellybean, Roger Highfield, Evan Harris, The Times Higher, and Peter Coles.)

My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain.

But pretty often I get the chance to see them at their best. In the Physics department at Imperial, we interview students who are on the boundaries between final “degree classifications”, the British system of awarding degrees as First Class, 2.1, 2.2, etc. Last week, I was on the panel for this year’s cohort. And it was a pleasure to sit in front of a few of our students and watch them, in real time, thinking like physicists. Of course this means making the occasional mistake, but it also means that delicious “aha!” moment when they figure something out and (this is the best part) they know that they have, whether it’s finding a sign error in their derivation of the motion of a pendulum, or a thought experiment explaining why Einstein’s relativity makes sense.

For the interviews, I was paired with one of our external examiners, UCL particle physicist and fellow-blogger Jon Butterworth. On the same day as our interview, the Guardian published Simon Jenkins’ latest in a series of risible anti-science screeds, and Jon decided to take him to task neither with reasoned argumentation nor with a counter-polemic, but with parody. As with many great ideas on the internet, this one got picked up and built upon, so that the Guardian, to its credit, eventually gave Jon his own space to reply. Jenkins likely thinks we’re producing too many scientists (Imperial only trains scientists, doctors, and engineers, after all!) but I hope that Jon was pleased with the ones he saw.

So my congratulations to this year’s graduating students, and the best of luck to them whatever they go on to do. Pace Jenkins, the world needs more well-trained scientists like them, not fewer.

I first encountered Cristina Odone as one of the more strident contributors to the BBC Radio 4 Today Show’s “Thought for the day”, a daily three-minute slot inexplicably (to me) handed over to some religious believer.

In her blog post for the Telegraph today, however, Odone has opened up an ad hominem attack on the Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, inarguably the single loudest voice for science in the UK Parliament. She calls him “Dr Death” for the fact that he “believes in euthanasia — … really believes”. I assume by “believes”, she means “supports the legalization of under some circumstances”, and by “really”, well, I’m not sure. Perhaps she is implying he thinks that lots and lots of people should be killed outright. That’s because, she says, “The Lib Dems are now the most secular party in the Britain — and not in a good way. There’s something sinister about a movement that, in my view, doesn’t hold all life precious.” I’m not sure what the “movement” here is, but it is an unfair and illogical leap from support of euthanasia and (as she mentions elsewhere) abortion, a position that plenty of religious people — even Catholics — hold. This isn’t “sinister”, it’s intellectually nuanced, the ability to judge competing values and goods in the complicated real world in which we live.

Luckily, Evan Harris himself, along with many others, have responded to this vile attack. I wouldn’t expect an apology, however, since I assume this is what she “really believes” about us secular types.

(In the interest of fairness, I will say that Odone is on the right side of at least one issue, championing Simon Singh in his fight against the chiropractors.)

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 document.) Even the Conservatives say they want to increase the science budget, endorsing a report from vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur James Dyson (although it is clear that they are even more focused on economic “impact” than Labour).

The parties also engaged in the continuing Science Debate (trending at #scivote on Twitter). Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, tweeted to Manchester Prof, ex-popstar and BBC presenter Brian Cox, who is becoming a very effective media spokesperson for science, “I believe that under Labour, the UK will be the best place in world to do science. Up to us to convince u during election.” I should also say that Drayson, although I don’t always agree with him or trust his electioneering promises, ought to be commended for his openness on Twitter and elsewhere. He is currently canvassing his Twitter followers for ideas for Labour’s “Science manifesto”. Remind him that blue-skies research (such as cosmology — full disclosure, I am not a disinterested observer) pays off — intellectually, culturally, and yes, maybe even financially, in the end.

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 cost in pounds sterling of being a member of international organizations like CERN, ESO and ESA (although the latter would eventually be moved into the nascent UK Space Agency). Second, the costs of running “our large domestic facilities, Diamond, the Central Laser Facility and ISIS” would be separated from the grants — the money for doing physics. This is crucial since these facilities actually don’t themselves do very much physics at all — rather, they use physics to probe the properties of matter in order to do biology, materials science, chemistry and more. So we physicists shouldn’t be saddled with the costs of running these machines.

Alas, these changes, although positive, may be too little, too late, despite the cliché. The amount of money available for grants still seems to remain significantly below the level of a few years ago. There may be perfectly reasonable arguments for decreasing the amount of physics being done in the UK, but we have not had them. Rather, this entire process began with the creation of the STFC, before the financial crisis, with what seemed at the time to be a toxic combination of mistakes and mismanagement. Since then, we’ve been fire-fighting, dealing with sharp cuts without being told about the long-term financial strategy. There have been several “consultation exercises” and “programmatic reviews” but in the curious we-don’t-talk-about-money way that seems to pervade the UK, the community was never really given enough financial information (which, as far as I can tell, should be absolutely all of it) to give truly useful input. Instead, the community just gives “peer review” of the science, but all of the real decisions are made by the so-called Executive — whom, in so doing, have utterly and completely lost the confidence of their community. Indeed, today’s changes, welcome though they may be, seem to have come not because of the Executive, but despite them.

[As usual, Paul Crowther is the best clearinghouse of information; Peter Coles has already weighed in with similar sentiments; and Roger Highfield of New Scientist takes a slightly more positive view, as does the BBC.]