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Of the Rings of Power

Posted on 2 September 2024 by Henry Gee

In a famous letter to publisher Milton Waldman, probably written in late 1951 (No. 131 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), Tolkien wrote:

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy story … The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Despite the objections of purists, then, Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and the ongoing Amazon Prime TV series The Rings of Power, carry the imprimatur of the creator, whatever one might think of their intrinsic artistic merits.

As for creation, Tolkien, who was deeply religious, also had very specific views. Creation, as in authorship, is really what he termed ‘sub-creation’, for all, he believed, stem from the action of the Creator. As such, an author should hold on to their works but lightly, and not become too enamoured of their beauty. The relationship between authors and their works is a central theme in Tolkien’s legendarium — what became The Silmarillion, from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are, effectively, spin-offs. The whole thing is driven by the covetousness of the Elven-smith Feanor for his own creations, the Silmarils, whence the entire saga of apocalyptic disaster in which the Elves are utterly defeated by the forces of evil. The theme is reprised in the story of the creation of the rings of power. A cautionary tale, indeed, and on the grandest of canvases.

All of which justifies, amply in my view, adaptations of an author’s works that do not adhere strictly to the author’s own beliefs or intentions, still less those of that author’s admirers. This is especially true in Tolkien’s case, given the evidence for how he wished his myth-making to propagate. For all that there will be some who find it hard to take, there can be no adaptation of Tolkien that is not in the canon, by definition.

This need not apply, however, to one’s aesthetic judgements of the works in and of themselves. Although there were some aspects of Peter Jackson’s adaptations I found irritating, my unease rested with choices made by the scriptwriters rather than the fact that the films had been made, still less that they deviated from the books. Mostly, I loved them. With an adaptation, one must first own that books are different from films. Books leave a great deal to the imagination of the reader, but in films, everything must be shown. And because ‘everything’ accounts for an awful lot, a great deal must be left out. Characters are merged or cut entirely for the sake of the narrative. Time is compressed.

There are other problems, too, thrown up by the fact that Tolkien chose to ‘tell’ as much as ‘show’. In The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, we are told of events that happened long ago, or going on simultaneously but elsewhere. The action frequently stops so someone can recall an ancient tale, or sing a song in of days gone by. And in Elvish, to boot. That, of course, is part of the charm. Tolkien acknowledged that glimpses of distant vistas enriched the reading experience. For those readers who wanted more, he added, there were appendices to The Lord of the Rings, more than 100 pages of background to the events and personalities of Tolkien’s invented world between the fall of Morgoth, the Great Enemy, at the end of the First Age (or ‘Elder Days’) and the matter of The Lord of the Rings itself, at the end of the Third. Because the appendices (I am so tempted to call them ‘Supplementary Information’) are nearly all by necessity telegraphic and annalistic, they leave plenty of room for ‘other minds and hands’ to fill in the gaps.

The makers of The Rings of Power have seized this opportunity with both hands. Even though they have invented a great deal, both in plot and characterisation, they have remained true (more or less) to the story told in the Supplementary Information Extended Data Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. They have also explained a great deal that Tolkien left vague or contentious.

For my reflections on the first episode of the first series of The Rings of Power, see here and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, for the entire first series here, where you can remind yourself of events and brush up on the necessary background. From here on in there are spiders spoilers (and, yes, also some spiders).

I’ve watched the first three episodes of the second season series of The Rings of Power, and here is a recap of the story so far. In no particular order, as they say on all the game shows, the Numenoreans return home after their ultimately disastrous intervention in the ‘Southlands’ (that is, Mordor), during which Elendil’s son Isildur is lost, and the Queen-Regent Miriel is blinded. When they arrive, they find that the ailing king, Tar-Palantir, has died. The population turns toward her cousin and chancellor Pharazon, already a wily power-player, convinced that Tar-Palantir, and by implication Miriel, are too close to the elves. (This rings true to Tolkien’s conception. As the centuries war on in the history of Numenor, the elves became less and less trusted until only a few ‘faithful’ had any dealings with them).

Back in Middle-earth, the refugees from the Southlands who have not switched sides to Adar’s orcs have converged on Pelargir, a small port once established by the Numenoreans but seemingly abandoned, the wood and thatch hovels of the Southlanders built amid the ruined stonework. Isildur makes his way there, helped by his faithful horse (echoes of Peter Jackson’s Aragorn-horse relationship in the film of The Two Towers) but he’s missed the boat home. During his adventures, Isildur escapes from the captivity of giant spiders (no Tolkien story is really complete without giant spiders).

Elsewhere, Elanor Brandyfoot, the harfoot (that is, proto-hobbit) has thrown in her lot with the Stranger, and is eventually joined by her best friend Poppy. They are slogging across a desert in Rhun (the East) looking for the constellation, or asterism, that the Stranger is looking for, which will give him some clue to what he’s supposed to be doing. This looks like a major boo-boo to me. To look for unfamiliar stars, you have to go south, not east. Tolkien explicitly says at one point in The Lord of the Rings that Aragorn had once journeyed to Harad (the south, much further than the ‘Southlands’), ‘where the stars are strange’. As they go, Elanor and Poppy are trying to give the Stranger a name, and come up with various preposterous archaic-English or gothic-sounding names of the kind that hobbits would eventually call themselves, but seem to circle around the word ‘Gand’. This discussion has important resonances with Gandalf’s encounter with Bilbo at the start of The Hobbit, in which Gandalf expounds on the sometimes strained relationship between names as and of themselves, and the things to which they refer. ‘I am Gandalf’, he says, ‘And Gandalf means “me”‘. Names, as Tolkien (being a philologist) would have been the first to understand, are important. The Stranger himself has recurring dreams about finding a wizard’s staff (the ‘gand’,  or ‘wand’, in Old Norse). The wanderers come to the attention of a sorcerer living in Rhun. I wonder whether this is one of the two so-called ‘blue wizards’, unnamed in the Lord of the Rings, who went east and fell out of the tales?

Khazad-Dum, the kingdom of the dwarves, has hit on hard times. Hot-headed Prince Durin has fallen out with his father, King Durin III. An earthquake, possibly sparked by the eruption of Mount Doom,  has shaken its structure, such that the giant windows in the mountain-walls the dwarves use to admit light (and grow crops) have collapsed, and all is dark. Here we meet Narvi, the dwarf who (in The Lord of the Rings) collaborated with Celebrimbor to make the Doors of Moria — prefigured in the graphics that accompany the opening titles.

The Three Rings of the elves, having been forged by Celebrimbor, return to Lindon. Elrond is convinced that they can only lead to bad things, given that Halbrand (now exposed as Sauron) was involved in their forging, but Galadriel and Gil-Galad, with the help of the wise old ship-builder Cirdan, convince him that Sauron never touched them (it’s a point of ring-lore that the Three remain pure und uncorrupted by Sauron’s touch). Indeed, when the elves invoke their power, the fungoid decay that appears to afflict Lindon goes away and the Sun comes out. Which is nice. It’s fairly clear, though, that the rings are addictive. Clearly, there’ll be trouble at t’mill.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the first three episodes is the development of Sauron as a character. In a flashback to the very start of the Second Age, just after Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron tries to rally the remaining orcs to his banner, but the orcs, led by Adar, rebel, and ‘kill’ him. But Sauron cannot be killed so easily. Although seemingly crushed to a pulp, Sauron’s blood, gore and general squishy goo slowly reassemble until they become a kind of animated ball of black worms (imagine wet spaghetti soaked in squid ink) that slithers around the landscape for centuries, before ambushing a human and thus reassuming human form. Clearly, Sauron needs a method of domination that goes beyond mere persuasion. This is where the idea of rings of power come from, and why Elrond is so suspicious of the three rings made so far, even if Sauron had never touched them. But back to Sauron: we follow his progress until he meets Galadriel at sea, taking up the story in the first series.

Sauron needs more rings, though, and returns to Celebrimbor in Eregion, revealing himself as a divine figure, Annatar, Lord of Gifts (this part is true to Tolkien’s conception). Crucially, he lets Celebrimbor assume that he is a messenger sent from the Valar to assist people in Middle-earth combat evil — the exact purpose, as it happens, of the wizards, or Istari, of which the Stranger is (or seems to be) one. Annatar does not tell lies, as such, but he steers others to imagine things that aren’t true, playing on their own vanity. (The two-handers between Annatar and Celebrimbor are masterpieces of scriptwriting and acting). As Galadriel says in another scene, Sauron (as Halbrand) had played her ‘like a harp’, telling her the things she wanted to hear.

Lastly, about Adar. This character does not appear in Tolkien as such, but helps resolve the vexed issue of the origin of orcs. Tolkien is explicit that orcs reproduce in the usual way, and in this series we actually meet girl orcs and baby orcs. But there seems to be a great deal of variety among orcs, and, elsewhere it seems clear that orcs can be manufactured from base matter (articulated very well in film by Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings); and, again, that orcs were elves, captured and tortured by Morgoth. If that were true, there would have to have been an awful lot of captured elves. This caused Tolkien a lot of problems, and in some very late writings he spilled a lot of ink wondering if orcs had souls, or were capable of independent agency, and other matters. The scriptwriters of The Rings of Power have resolved all of this. Adar is quite plainly one of a relatively small number of captured and corrupted elves, who then propagate orcs in a variety of ways — he refers to his orcs as his ‘children’. They plainly do have independent agency to some degree, and are not necessarily slaves of Sauron. It is this that Sauron seeks to resolve by use of the domination that the use of rings imposes.

There is more to come. We are yet to meet Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights, characters from The Lord of the Rings, excised from Peter Jackson’s films for perfectly good reasons of pacing. There’ll also be some ents, and also stoors — cousins of the harfoots, the river-bank-loving proto-hobbits stock whence Gollum emerged.

It’s plain, at least from the first three episodes, that the makers of The Rings of Power have upped their game. It’ just as beautiful, but this time the acting and writing have risen to match it. Morfydd Clark (Galadriel), Robert Aramayo (Elrond), Prince Durin (Owain Arthur) and especially the gorgeous Sophia Nomvete (Durin’s redoubtable wife Disa) are as outstanding as they were in the first series, among a cast too strong and numerous to describe individually, but this time Charles Edwards (Celebrimbor) has risen in stature — possibly because the writing is better. But the star turn has to be Charlie Vickers as Sauron. Everyone loves a good baddie, especially a baddie as complex and conflicted as Sauron who, as Tolkien says, started out as one of the good guys.

The best bit, though, is the score, by Bear McCreary. He takes the mood established by Howard Shore in his fabulous scores for The Lord of the Rings films (Shore also wrote the main title for The Rings of Power) but makes it all his own, especially with his use of brass and choirs. McCreary, like Shore, uses leitmotifs, and after a couple of listens you’ll be humming Galadriel’s theme without knowing it. But beware Tom Bombadil’s theme, which has become something of an ear worm which I find myself humming as I wake.

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Getting Feedback

Posted on 1 September 2024 by Athene Donald

Academics do not necessarily get regular or even useful ‘performance reviews’, call them what you will. Businesses typically take this a lot more seriously, but a recent report highlights the many problems that can arise even with the best of intentions. Unsurprisingly, it turns out a lot of bias (around both gender and ethnicity) lurks within the feedback given to their teams, irrespective of whether by male and female managers.

If you’ve been appraised by your supervisor, or anyone else from your department, a few key phrases may stick in the mind. These may have been the most helpful or the least helpful/hardest to swallow. One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given, mid-career, was not to accept too many refereeing tasks but, for instance, simply to accept roughly the same number of papers to referee as I was myself submitting in any given year. It was a practical and actionable piece of advice, whether it was right or wrong, and it helped me put in context that to others I might have looked like I was being too much of a slave to duty if I was refereeing two or three times the number of my own submissions. By contrast, a colleague came out of an appraisal fuming. Having laid out what he felt were the problems he was facing in the fine balancing act of being a young academic, his appraiser had said ‘I can see you have problems’. Empathetic maybe; useful most certainly not, it only made my colleague feel worse and that, somehow, he shouldn’t have been having those particular problems.

In many businesses, receiving feedback is a much more regular occurrence, but it is clear that significant numbers of managers don’t make a good job of it, even if they are ostensibly ‘ticking the boxes’ required by their HR department. Two features stand out for me from this recent report from Textio: firstly, that comments are so often unhelpful and stereotypical, and secondly that men are more likely to internalise the positive and women, by a massive margin, the negative. It is hard to imagine these observations do not apply in academia too. An additional set of their conclusions relates to the highest performing workers, who appear to be given the least useful advice and who, the evidence shows, are therefore more likely to quit (and of course, good workers are more likely to be able to get another job easily).

In the past I’ve written about being accused of being emotional – not, as it happens, during an appraisal but over the phone. It turns out that this is a word (and no one will probably be surprised to hear this) directed commonly at women: the report states that whereas 78% of women in their survey had had that tossed in their direction, only 11% of men. (I wonder if people don’t regard getting angry or losing their temper as a show of emotion, but I digress.) Women were also more likely to be badged as unlikeable than men, although not by such a large margin. Ethnicity matters too. White workers were the most likely to be described as likeable (at 41%), whereas only 10% of East Asian and 11% of South Asian employees were described this way. Black and Hispanic/Latino employees were least likely to be deemed to be intelligent, and so it goes on. Bias was widespread.

What do you remember from an appraisal? It turns out women were seven times more likely to internalise negative comments than men, whereas men were up to four times as likely to remember the positives. This ties in with stereotype threat, a concept introduced by Claude Steele and described in detail in his book Whistling Vivaldi.  It is the concept that, if you belong to a minority (in whatever sense) you are held back by the fear of conforming to the stereotype of that minority. That might be about women in tech or black students doing maths exams, which was the situation Steele first studied. But the criticism that you are emotional, for instance, is exactly what women fear and so it sticks in the mind more than many other comments. This is as true at conferences as in appraisals, as many a woman will attest after a bout of hostile questioning implying – or even explicitly stating – that the speaker is stupid or ignorant, regardless of the capabilities of the questioner (who may too often simply be grandstanding for their own benefit).

As for the comments about high performers, which seem to have a particular definition hard to replicate in a laboratory setting, too often they receive unhelpful feedback perhaps in the form of a cliché, the examples given in the report being as ‘she left it all on the field’ and ‘he thinks outside the box’. What are you supposed to do with such phrases? They don’t tell you what you could do better or what specific goals you should or should not be seeking. The most useful feedback is that which gives you something to work towards and a timescale on which to do it. Generalised clichés don’t offer that opportunity and can be frustrating (again something many an academic will recognize, I’m sure). The report suggests employees are twice as likely to think about seeking a new job if the feedback they receive is unhelpful.

This is a US study of businesses, so the parallels are bound not to be exact for UK academics whom I take to be the majority of my readers, but there should certainly be food for thought here for anyone involved in leading or managing other people in any setting. We should not be wasting the talent of those coming up through the ranks in pointless exercises. Good feedback can, however, be immensely helpful at critical junctures in a career.

Posted in appraisal, careers, emotional, minorities, Science Culture, stereotype threat | Leave a comment

What I Read In August

Posted on 30 August 2024 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2024-08-28 at 18.39.05Peter F. Hamilton: The Chronicle of the Fallers (The Abyss Beyond Dreams/ Night Without Stars) Another month, another enormous bonkbuster from Peter F. Hamilton. Back in June I reviewed the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained) in which the prosperous Commonwealth of human planets, all neatly linked together by railways and wormholes, is invaded by a hostile alien force whose sole goal is conquest and the elimination of all life apart from itself. Last month I reviewed the Void Trilogy in which the Black Hole at the centre of the Galaxy turns out to be a micro-universe, the Void, in which different physics applies — including telepathy — but whose consumption of energy threatens to swallow the rest of the Galaxy. The Chronicle of the Fallers is another two-volume whopper that’s a continuation, in a way, of all the others, creating a seven volume series. In The Abyss from Dreams, Nigel Sheldon — a major character from the Commonwealth Saga — infiltrates the Void in attempt to find Querencia, the planet on which much of the action of the Void Trilogy takes place. By mistake he lands on a different planet in the Void, also colonised by humans, called Bienvenido. The humans here face a constant threat from space — aliens called the Fallers who are a cross between the threads of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight novels, and zombies, who either take over humans, or eat them. On Bienvenido, a young soldier, Sivasta, obsessed with the Fallers, rises to power and becomes a kind of Marxist dictator. As a result of Nigel Sheldon’s trying to disarm the Fallers at source, Bienvenido is ejected from the Void and finds itself in real space — but circling a lonely star in the intergalactic void. Now we move to Night without Stars. This star system is a kind of sin bin in which transgressive civilisations congregate. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the Fallers eventually win, though not without the human population having been transferred back to the Commonwealth, with the aid of another of the Commonwealth’s star turns, genetically engineered super-sleuth Paula Myo. Often exhilarating, increasingly exhausting, my impression after reading these novels was one in which McGuffins tend to predominate over story. Hyperdrives, ultra drives, easy voyages between galaxies, weapons that destroy stars, wormhole generators, re-life, rejuvenation, accelerated development from infancy to adulthood in a month, telepathy, telekinesis, transcendence into post-physical status, sentient robots, aliens of every kind: if a character (and the characterisation is excellent) face a problem, some new gizmo should be able to help them out. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these novels, because I did, very much. But one can have too much of a good thing.

Screenshot 2024-08-28 at 18.42.53Tom Lathan: Lost Wonders We hear a great deal about how the encroachment of humans is driving many species  to extinction. What we hear much less about is extinction at the sharp end, on a case-by-case basis. Here Tom Lathan presents ten case histories of species that have become extinct very recently, that is, in the 21st century, their demise known to the very day. The only one anyone is likely to have heard of is Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise of the Galapagos. Others include birds, bats, fish, snails, and a shrub. The time, energy of efforts expended by conservationists to keep the various species alive in the face of natural disasters and bureaucratic ineptitude add up to a poignant read, but in the end I was left waiting for the other shoe to drop. All the species lived on small islands or in remote, patchy habitat and would very likely have gone extinct anyway, and rather soon, whatever anyone did. Some were close relatives or even variants of other, known species, so their existence and extinction rather depended on one’s viewpoint as a taxonomist. Lathan didn’t broaden his outlook to, say, consider other threatened species that represent much deeper lineages: the tuatara, say, or the aye-aye. More importantly, he didn’t explore whether the extinction of a few species of which nobody had heard might be the thin end of the wedge. That once one starts to pull at the seemingly insignificant threads of an ecosystem, first one species goes, and then another, until the whole thing collapses. And he doesn’t address the perhaps unfashionable view that, by creating new and novel patches of habitat, and moving animals and plants around, human activity might actually have increased biological diversity. In which case the efforts of conservationists to save endangered endemics, while laudable in and of themselves, look increasingly like Canute trying to stem the tide on command. Nature is much bigger than humanity, against which the efforts of humans to demand that nature stays exactly as it is looks a lot like hubris. DISCLAIMER: An uncorrected proof of the book was sent to me by the publisher. The book will be published in November.

Screenshot 2024-08-28 at 18.48.34Lavie Tidhar: Central Station I can’t remember if I ever visited the central bus station in Tel Aviv, though it’s highly likely, given that I visited Israel in 1985 and traveled extensively round the country by bus. Like all major transport hubs, I suspect that it was and is a magnet for people of every kind, and generated its own kind of life. In Central Station, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar has inflated it into a spaceport that separates Jewish Tel Aviv from Arab Jaffa in a near-future Balkanised Israel-Palestine. People go through Central Station to reach other parts of the world via sub-orbital spaceplanes, or, via space stations, to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. The novel is less a narrative than accounts of the intertwined lives of the people born, raised, living in, working in, and passing through. The people are a stew of ethnicities, and include alien elements, people grown in labs and then forgotten about and left to grow up as street kids; and the ‘others’ who are more digital than human. There is a panoply of religions, including ones presided over by robots. There are knowingly playful references to other SF stories, and some rather good Jewish jokes (I was fond of the robot who, while invoking the Nine Billion Names of God, served as a mohel to the local Jewish community). The most poignant scenes involve the hard-bitten robotniks: human soldiers killed in battle but patched together with machinery and sent back to fight in wars that everyone has forgotten and whose results turn out, in the end, to have been meaningless. The robotniks are the beggars of Central Station who appeal not for cash, but for spare parts. They speak a dialect called Battle Yiddish (which is basically just Yiddish), different from the argot of many residents of the Station, which is Asteroid Pidgin (which is basically just Pidgin). There is overt racism, too — to a young woman who has been converted into a strigoi, a kind of bio-weapon with many characteristics of a vampire. Good science fiction (and this is very good) is not necessarily about the future, but a genre in which ordinary people are presented with extraordinary situations, thus providing a satirical or even allegorical commentary on the way we live now. Parallels with the ongoing chaos of the Middle East are not hard to find.

UntitledLavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look squeaky-clean. Assassination is Avi’s middle name, it seems, and he doesn’t question who it is he’s popping off. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of short stories and vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. There is enough blood to satisfy even the most rabid fan of Tarantino. At the heart of it all — and the only common feature of all the tales — is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. Several real people have walk-on parts. Some, such as Chaim Topol and Ofra Haza, will be recognisable to an international readership, but there are lots more who will, I suspect, mean nothing to anyone (such as me) not steeped in Israeli popular culture. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. In Israel, 18 July, 1995 is as much ‘The Day the Music Died’, as Altamont, or the death of Buddy Holly, are remembered in the US. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else. Postscript: in Hebrew, maror refers to the ‘bitter herbs’ that are eaten at the Jewish festival of Passover in which Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt.

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Does Working from Home make you more Productive?

Posted on 26 August 2024 by Athene Donald

Does working from home (and hybrid working) improve productivity or the opposite? Two recent reports have come to slightly different conclusions, and I suspect this is not surprising because the answer almost certainly is ‘it depends’. Clearly if you are a waiter or a bus driver, a night-club bouncer or a hairdresser, the question really doesn’t arise. You have to be at the appropriate place of work to carry out those roles and no amount of negotiation with management will change that. The jobs that lend themselves to hybrid/fully wfh are the ones available to those with higher levels of education, but certainly not all. If you are a researcher carefully tending a cell line, bacteria or some GM mice, you may well need frequent attendance, perhaps even at anti-social hours. If you are the researcher looking at the fluorescent images taken from these same organisms, you are quite likely to be able to do that from home. So, that different research gives different answers may not be surprising, since like should only be compared with like.

The study in Nature published in June looked at behaviours in a specific Chinese technology firm. It concluded – as its title says – that hybrid working improved retention without damaging performance. In other words, workers felt happier when they were allowed to stay away from the company site on agreed days, and there was an accompanying reduction of a third in workers who quit. That would definitely look like a winning formula. However, the wider-ranging US study covering many different kinds of employer, came to more nuanced conclusions. Firstly, whether working from home made workers more or less productive depended on who you asked: the workers thought their productivity had gone up, but the managers disagreed and thought it had fallen. The Stanford researchers meta-analysis showed that the managers were right, and productivity did fall by 10-20%.

However, it does depend on what you think you are measuring. If you are a worker who no longer has to commute every day, you may well believe your productivity has gone up because the total time you spend to complete your work has decreased for apparently the same output. But, because the manager doesn’t factor in that travel time, all they may note is the output has dipped because the worker spends more time surfing the web, making additional cups of coffee or playing with the dog. In this context, the outcomes of a pilot experiment in my local (South Cambridgeshire) council is interesting, because they found that nearly all measures (22/24 measures) showed improvement when the working week was cut to four days – this was not about working from home, just about working at all.  This didn’t stop the last government trying to forbid the four-day week as ‘not value for money’, even if there was no evidence of this, just an assumption that five days work had to be better than four. Once again, recruitment and retention were found to improve.

How does improved retention factor into productivity? The loss of a worker has significant implications for a firm, the more skilled the worker is the greater the cost, some of which is real financial cost, some is more indirect due to knock-on effects on other workers. The CIPD lists four types of effect, and firms should consider these when contemplating whether a slight loss in daily productivity of a worker on a hybrid pattern of working is more than offset by the less obvious costs associated with losing the worker. These four are related to the administration of resignations, costs associated with recruitment and selection, sorting out and paying for cover during the vacancy and induction and training for the new employee when recruited. This last factor also means there may be an extended period of training when the new employee simply isn’t able to contribute fully to the required work. Loss in productivity due to the high churn of employees through job dissatisfaction, may therefore be helpfully offset by facilitating a hybrid form of working to increase the happiness and well-being of employees. The Nature study of the Chinese technology company explicitly calculates savings due to the reduction in employee loss, based on the figure of US$20,000 cost per employee lost.

However, if considering fully remote working, working from home for five days a week, there are some other factors that need to be considered. Induction is obviously one. How does a new employee learn about their role and who the key individuals they need to interact with are? This was a lesson many people had to face up to during the pandemic and it won’t have been easy. How do you mentor someone you’ve never met if you’re their manager? How do you build new relationships or find a common interest with someone if you’re not bumping into them in the tearoom? As scientists, those chance and perhaps interdisciplinary interactions can be incredibly fruitful (not to mention the challenges of dealing with committee dynamics over Zoom, as I wrote about previously at the height of the pandemic). Fully working from home may be particularly attractive for those with caring responsibilities or disabilities, so there is a real danger that these people will end up more marginalised and disadvantaged when it comes to progression due to the lack of face-to-face contact. A very recently published study from the University of Durham also highlighted that gender stereotypes in the home are alive and well, and women working from home are far more likely to struggle to separate work from their family needs than men, with all the obvious downsides.

All this goes to show that there is no single answer to is working from home good or bad for productivity? It depends on so many factors from the individual to the sector, from the type of work to the pattern of working from home. Employers need to factor in the cost of losing employees against any possible loss of productivity. Researchers in the academic sector probably have more choice than most. Presenteeism is enforced by only a sub-section of professors – although undoubtedly there are some who judge the worth of a student by how long they are prepared to spend at the bench – and for the professors themselves there is likely to be a lot of flexibility. It is hard to think that hybrid working isn’t here to stay, but we should make sure we optimise how that plays out and recognize the costs and benefits for different sections of the workforce.

 

Posted in careers, Equality, hybrid, job satifsfaction, mentoring, retention | Leave a comment

More Than A-Levels

Posted on 20 August 2024 by Athene Donald

Last week saw the annual media interest in A-Level results (at least in England). Commentators noticed, for instance, the substantial increase in STEM subjects, with over 100,000 students taking Maths. This figure was remarkable as it was the first time any discipline has exceeded that significant figure. Depending on their positioning, in some cases this led to a bemoaning of the fact that arts and humanities subjects are not thriving in the same way although, bucking the past few years’ trend, foreign language take up had increased. From the opposite perspective, others picked up the fact that there was a substantial increase in those taking Physics A-Level, although little improvement in the percentage of girls taking the subject.

However, the mainstream media glossed over the results for qualifications other than A-Levels, although they were not the only results announced that day. You have to look in the more specialist press to find any reference to BTECs or T-Levels. It is true that several times as many A-level exams were sat as BTECs (over 800,000 compared with slightly over 200,000 exams respectively), but nevertheless, there are a lot of students whose futures will be determined by their performance in these latter exams. As for T-Levels, despite a huge amount of money and effort having been put into what the last government hoped would be a transformation of vocational studies for the 16-19 age group, a mere 7,380 students sat these exams. Perhaps even more worryingly, over one quarter of those who started a course at this level did not complete it. In contrast to the relatively young T-Levels, BTECs have been around for a long time and are recognized by many universities as an appropriate entry path. Nevertheless, the Tory Government was in the process of ‘defunding’ these courses in favour of the unproven T-Levels; Labour has already said it will put a pause on any changes while it considers the wider landscape.

There are various issues that underlie the problems with T-Levels: the requirement of a 45-day relevant work placement is hard to accomplish if the local area can’t provide an appropriate employer; course lecturers seem to struggle with the demands of the course and universities don’t (at least yet) seem willing to recognize the qualification in the way they do BTECs. The spread of courses is also still quite limited, with only about two thirds of the planned subjects yet being rolled out. But one issue stands out, that is symptomatic of so much of our society, and that is the incredibly uneven gender split across the courses. T-Levels in construction were overwhelmingly taken by men (albeit only 318 students in total started the course): building services engineering had just 9 women enrolled this year – 3 per cent of the cohort – and onsite construction had 5 women, i.e 4 per cent of the total students. Construction (perhaps surprisingly, since it must happen everywhere) was also an area where placements seemed particularly hard to find and drop out rates were around 10%. This should be contrasted with the education and early years T-Level, where the cohort was almost entirely women: 94 per cent of the 1,533 enrolled students. This was similarly true for health where 91 per cent of the 1,044 students were women. Just as with A-Levels (as with the percentage of women taking Physics), societal expectations seem to have driven an unwholesome gender split across the courses.

There is no doubt that the area of post-16 education is somewhat incoherent, particularly if you are not following the ‘standard’ linear path that does not consist of A-Levels followed by University. It is incoherent in terms of both funding and regulation. If you want to get a sense of the complexity facing students, colleges and employers of what this landscape looks like, last month’s report, Augar Reviewed, from the EDSK think tank is a good place to start. A Government review published a year ago looks specifically at T-Levels and why they have not got off to a good start.

This all is rather serious for the economy. If we want, as a nation, to drive growth, improve productivity and be the innovative nation every Government wants of us, then we need not to waste the talent of many of our teenagers by providing an incoherent system which is likely to fail them. Skilled and semi-skilled workers are in short supply, for instance in the construction industry, and technicians who understand how to get the best out of equipment or use spreadsheets to help with logistics are vital to small companies wanting to thrive in the current market-place. Employers frequently bemoan the lack of workers like this when trying to fill posts, yet we seem unable, as a nation, to create a system which trains and values such individuals.  Schools are not provided with the wherewithal to create a careers service that helps young people make the right decisions, or indeed what decisions actually need to be taken. It is to be hoped the Skills Commission, promised by Labour in their manifesto, brings coherence and logic both to the qualifications landscape and to the funding regime which supports this, bringing employers, education providers and local government together to create a better framework for post-16 education. It is a positive step forward that a unifying structure is at least being considered to try to remove the fragmentation and ‘them and us’ landscape we currently occupy in England, where only A-Levels are deemed worthy of mainstream media attention.

Posted in BTECs, careers, education, funding, productivity, T Levels | Leave a comment

In Transition

Posted on 16 August 2024 by Athene Donald

Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the rather wonderful and spacious Lodge provided by the College for the Master and back to our newly refurbished and significantly smaller house of more than 40 years. Despite the house being extended during the refurbishment, there still seems not to be enough space for the life-time’s accumulated detritus of a couple of academics. Maybe others have long since thrown away, not only the lecture notes for the first course they ever gave, but also their own undergraduate notes, but not me. I am always amazed by the neatness – not to mention legibility – of the notes I took at pace during my own student days, but I have definitely subscribed to the view you never know when they will come in useful. Just occasionally (for instance, when setting exam questions) they have – although that is not a task I will have to face up to in the future.

I have spent an inordinate amount of what one might term ‘creative’ time, time that could have been spent writing this blog for instance, trying to work out where furniture might fit in rooms that aren’t quite the same size as they used to be due to large amounts of additional insulation being introduced (we’ve come off gas and are now running an air-source heat pump, which really requires extensive wall insulation to be effective). Further complications arise from the fact that, during our ten-year absence more furniture has been acquired. This dates from when I emptied my late mother’s house and brought back some ancient, familiar, solid-if-battered items which fitted neatly into the Lodge. Sadly, they fit less neatly into our house, and that only after endless drawing and redrawing of room layouts. I have to offer most sincere thanks to the hard-working team who managed to get my grandmother’s lovely old desk (probably more correctly termed a bureau) up two flights of twisting stairs to my new office location in a loft conversion. It was no mean feat, but they accomplished it with great good humour, if also a lot of sweat.

During this move into the next, and completely uncharted part of my life that amounts to full retirement, I have spent many, many hours going through my belongings and throwing out what I can. Clearly this wasn’t enough to get the volume down to the point needed, and the process will need to continue, although perhaps a little more slowly now the move is actually accomplished. I do feel as if my headspace has been full of moving logistics for months. Various items have still to find a home, and several rooms contain an extraordinary number of boxed-up books for which we still lack bookshelf space. These may definitely be first world problems, but problems they certainly are.

I have learned over the past month or two that my strength is no longer that of a young person, nor is my stamina. But that doesn’t mean I want to sink permanently into an armchair by the fire. I will definitely be wanting to use, at least in some part-time capacity, the different skills I believe I have acquired during my career. So, I am on the look-out for challenging opportunities in areas where I hope I have gained expertise, both as a professional scientist and as a leader of an institution. Mentally I have been trying to work out what I enjoy and what I can do but with less enthusiasm. Everyone who has been through a similar process has warned me not to take on roles just for the sake of it, but to be sure anything I do take on genuinely aligns with my interests and strengths.

In the meantime, the net effect of this transition has meant that the creative time and mental bandwidth that I used to put towards writing this blog regularly have not been available to me recently. Time will tell whether, now that phase is mercifully over, I revert to writing as frequently as I used to. It was always a task I found satisfying and, in some ways, liberating, as I moved away from the formal prose of paper-writing to something a bit more personal and free-form; where I could choose my topic and approach, building on whatever matters of interest (and sometimes dismay) crossed my path.

Those of you who read this frequently in the past (and I note I am approaching the 14th anniversary of starting this blog next week) will know that one topic I often used to write about was the issue of women in science. Having written a book on the subject published last year, it would be nice to think that everything that needs to be said about this I have said. Sadly, that is clearly not so, and the issues have not gone away (see this year’s A Level results, for instance, which show how the proportion of students taking A Level Physics who are girls remains stubbornly low). More may yet need saying here, although I doubt I will be writing another book on the subject. Nevertheless, I think in the back of my mind is the feeling that, on the assumption I keep writing, I will broaden the topics I write about. Watch this space to see how this pans out….

 

Posted in Blogging, Churchill College, moving house, writing blogs | Leave a comment

What I Read In July

Posted on 28 July 2024 by Henry Gee

Richard Fortey: Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind Richard Fortey is best known as an author (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) and palaeontologist (Trilobite!) but as his sparkling memoir A Curious Boy revealed, he’s been a skilled amateur mycologist since boyhood. Now you can go on a fungus foray without ever leaving your armchair in the company of someone who really knows his Armillarias from his Amanitas. [DISCLAIMER: I have written a longer review of this forthcoming title for a magazine].

UntitledPeter F. Hamilton: The Void Trilogy (The Dreaming Void/ The Temporal Void/ The Evolutionary Void) I started to read this years ago but it didn’t seem to make much sense, and I was put off by fantasy elements that didn’t seem to sit well with the SFnal framing. Now I know the reason — the Void Trilogy follows on pretty much directly from the Commonwealth Saga (Pandoras Star, Judas Unchained) I reviewed last month, and is best read (or, in my case, listened to) straight after. The action takes place some hundreds of years after the Commonwealth Saga. It’s been found that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t really a black hole, but an entirely separate universe whose laws are rather different. Time flows faster, for one thing. And Commonwealth technology doesn’t really work. Instead there is … psychic power. Telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Two thousand years earlier (in Void time) a ship from the Commonwealth managed to get in  to the Void — whose barrier seemingly prevents most incursions — and lands on a planet called Querencia, where the crew and their descendants revert to a kind of medieval-grade society (with telepathy). In the greater universe, dreams of the life of Edeard, a powerful psychic from Querencia, leak out and are received by a human called Inigo, who founds a religion called Living Dream whose aim is to migrate into the Void and achieve fulfilment — at the risk of making the Void expand to consume the Galaxy. The rest of humanity aims to stop this happening. But matters are made more complicated by the fact that since Commonwealth times, humanity has split into a series of factions that either embrace or reject technology. The most techno-enthusiastic are the Accelerators who want to enter the Void as a way of jacking them up to ‘post-physical’ status, again risking Void expansion.  And there’s lots more (each one of these three volumes is enormous). Needless to say I enjoyed it hugely. The larger-than-normal amount of woo was countered by characterisation of a depth not often seen in SF. Many of the key characters carry over from the Commonwealth Saga, so we really do get invested in their fates.

Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 07.35.15John Long: The Secret History of Sharks John Long is an Australian palaeontologist interested in fossil fishes. Here he recounts the evolutionary history of sharks. Conventional wisdom has these iconic predators patrolling the seas pretty much unchanged for 400 million years. But a closer look shows that they have evolved in all sorts of interesting ways, morphing out of all the dangers and obstacles that the Earth has thrown at them. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

 

 

 

Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 07.36.47Brian Clegg: Brainjacking Disinformation. Misinformation. Misdirection. Personal Truths. Alternative Facts. Influencers. Product placement. Deepfakes. Stage magic. Advertising. Marketing. From the dawn of advertising to modern social media, we risk drowning in floods of information designed to change our minds — such is ‘brainjacking’. Brian Clegg explains the long history of brainjacking and shows that some of the purported effects are exaggerated, whereas others really should worry us. A plain-speaking guide to our modern post-truth world. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

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It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

Posted on 23 July 2024 by Henry Gee

UntitledI’ve long wanted to patronise this shop, but I’d have to disguise myself as a helpful Labrador.

Posted in Silliness | Comments Off on It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This song has no title

Posted on 14 July 2024 by rpg

Jenny has mentioned the non-existent summer.

It’s certainly been ‘variable’, with autumnal mornings and more than an inch of rain in 12 hours one day last week. I haven’t quite kept to my commitment to blog ‘about once a week or so’, although I’m quite pleased with my record this year.

Other variables have included Rhea, our ‘best hen’ who was so insistent we chose her when we collected her and Iris three years ago next month. She’s not laid one of her gorgeous blue-green eggs since May, and was off her feed and we really thought we were going to lose her. She’s perked up a bit, and although she still likes to sit with her eyes closed during the day, she does come running when she thinks there might be chance of  corn or mealworms.

Rhea

Joshua was keen to try cricket, so I signed him up to the local under 11s squad and he’s been going along after school on Monday evenings. I keep promising to give him some batting and bowling coaching but something always gets in the way.

Striding

Striding confidently to the wicket

The two of us went down to the woods this morning, but I’d forgotten my chainsaw trousers so we couldn’t coppice the stand of birch that’s been on my mind for some time now. On the upside, his air rifle skills are getting better and better,

So here I am, as the day rolls inexorably towards evening, thinking of our upcoming trip to Tuscany and trying to get in the mood with a rather fine red, while hoping the weather holds over there for the next month or so.

Grosseto

There’s some kind of sporting event on this evening and we’re going to a friend’s so the kids can watch TV while we drink beer.

On the whole, it could be worse.

Writing

And that reminds me–‘A momentary lapse of reason’ is approaching its denouement. Check it out at Lablit.

 

Posted in hens, Italy, Joshua, Me, offspring, weather, wibbling, wine | Comments Off on This song has no title

In which I dream of escape

Posted on 14 July 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
Garden scene with flowers

Alternative reality?

Sometimes everything just seems too much. As the non-existent summer rolls on – 14C mornings of rain or overcast, wool sweaters taken back out from storage – I find my stress level to be the only thing heating up. As I prepare the course I lead for its next academic year, there are also manuscripts to edit, review articles to write, grants and papers to peer-review, interim reports to file for current grants, collaborations to tend, talks to compose, PhD upgrade reports and final dissertations to examine.

And above all the relentless admin: pushing research agreements and material transfer requests through a reluctant quagmire of legal bureaucracy, wrangling finances, applying for ethical approval, seeking reimbursement for business expenses – the thousand natural shocks that academic flesh is heir to, culminating inevitably in spiritual death by tedium. Physically, I am finding the commute increasingly difficult: my joints ache from the amount of miles I need to walk, and when I get home, I want nothing more than to lie down, without the energy for all the creative things I used to do.

I turned down a family outing to the woods to stay at home this morning, seeking some inner peace in the rare sunshine. Here on the back patio, solar fountains trickle, flowers bob in their containers – cosmos, zinnias, mallows, marigolds. Wind shushes in the tall trees, and the metallic tapping of beaks on feeders lets me know without having to look up that the sparrows and tits have forgotten I’m here, not a few yards away and only partially screened by the apricot tree sagging under its weight of rose-gold fruit.

Although the growing season has been severely retarded this year, all around me the crops are steadily progressing: tomatoes and tomatillos, strawberries and blueberries, chokeberries and blackberries, courgettes and pumpkins, runner beans and beets, carrots and lettuces, sweetcorn and kale, spinach and chard, potatoes and garlic. The greenhouses are home to cucumbers, chilli and celery, pots of fragrant herbs. The cherries, gooseberries and raspberries are past, but apples, pears, figs, plums, hops and cobnuts swell in the wings; grapes clusters hang heavy amid groping tendrils that seem to grow meters overnight. It is the time of year when you can breeze round the garden foraging for your breakfast or dinner, returning with handfuls of produce whose “food distance” is measured in feet and inches, not miles. Our girls are working hard, too: bees filling their clever waxy combs with nectar, hens laying their daily eggs.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to end all this stress. Just to walk away from the job and do something else, something where the amount of effort you put in is reflected equally by what you get out, where the crushing uncertainty of whether you will get enough grants to carry on to the next phase is no longer relevant. Or even more extreme: taking early retirement, and being in the garden whenever I like.

I was chatting with some colleagues earlier in the week at a scientific conference, so I know that the idle fantasy of just stopping is almost universal, on and off, amongst academics of a certain age. What keeps me going is how long I have worked to be where I am, and how important the scientific cause is. I may be only a tiny cog turning on the fringes, and it may be a constant struggle for existence, but this wretched infection afflicting 400 million people a year is not going to just go away on its own. Grants-wise, I’m sorted for the next few years at least, with a good probability of new ones slotting in to take their places. I want to do what I can, for as long as I can, even if some weeks it feels like I’m going to break.

Posted in careers, Gardening, Research, Science Funding, staring into the abyss, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which I dream of escape