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Missing the bus – a photographic story

Talking about social media

Almost a year ago I joined the u3a – a group for people with time on their hands. Members are mostly, but not exclusively, retired people. I have joined several groups in my local u3a branch, including a recently-formed social media group. There are eight of us in this group and we meet regularly to talk and learn from each other about aspects of social media, taking turns to lead on some topic or other. We’ve been led through Instagram, Bluesky (that was me), hashtags, design, analytics, and alt text (me again).

Last week we dived into photos: how to grab attention with a photo and how to tell a story in a photo. We were guided through this by an actual photographer who is the partner of one of the members. He talked us through some key elements of a good photo – strong colours (apparently red is good), lines, positioning key objects (centrally, or in thirds), triangular relations between groups of objects. He illustrated these features with some classic photos taken by acknowledged greats of the camera.

The challenge

He had also set us some advance homework. In preparation for the meeting each of us was asked to take a photo that told a story.

Usually I just take a photo because I think something looks interesting or amusing. I take pictures that please me due to their colours or shapes, or quirkiness. When I post photos on social media I will try to say something about each one, and sometimes use a series of photos to tell a story. But I haven’t often tried to take a single photo that tells a story, so I had to think a bit about this.  For the homework I needed to choose a theme or narrative for my photo and I decided that a missed bus would be my subject.

Millions of us take buses every day and many will have mixed feelings about them. They can be uncomfortable and frustrating, but as a non-driver I rely on buses very heavily so I am attached to my regular bus routes.

The story

I frequently take the bus between Crouch End and Muswell Hill, the W7. It’s quite frequent but can be unreliable, not least because there are so often roadworks along the route. It is famously a bus route that people love and hate, joining up two town centres that are not served by any tube or rail station.

My plan was to take a photo of a bus just leaving the bus stop on Crouch End Broadway, to encapsulate the frustration of just missing a bus. OK, it’s not a major tragedy to miss a bus but when you’re in a hurry and everything else is going wrong in the day it can be devastating.

The photo – version one

Last week I was on my way to the music library in Crouch End (where I volunteer) and I saw a W7 pulling away from the bus stop. I was short of time so I hurriedly took a photo. I was pleased because it included the Crouch End clocktower, a very recognisable local landmark. Thus the photo identified a time (from the clock) and a place. In another stroke of luck there was a yellow sign warning about the closure of one the roads on the bus route, bearing out the unruliness of the service.

A red bus leaving a bus stop

I was so pleased with this that I didn’t really look too closely at the picture. The story elements were all there and I thought I’d cracked the assignment. I was so wrong.

The judgement

At our meeting it was pointed out that my photo was a bit of a jumble – the street scene was too busy with details. As I had taken it in a hurry I’d not had time to frame it nicely or take a series from which to choose. I’d possibly nailed the story (in my head at least) but not produced a good photo. I had tried to capture an instant in time, but the chance of creating a decent photo in a single shot was rather low.

A couple of the other group members had taken some really good photos, not so much instants in time, but taking their time to choose the scene and plan the shot.

I wished that I had done justice to my subject, and to my skills. I felt I’d really missed the bus.

The photo – version two

A few days after our meeting I was back on the Broadway and decided to try again. I took a little more time choosing my vantage point. When a bus came I took a few shots, reducing the clutter in the shot and introducing some lines. I even waited for a second bus, in order to take a few more shots. I still had some traffic in the shot, but much less than before. I achieved a better positioning of the bus, the clocktower and the parade of shops curving off to the right. It’s not perfectly balanced but much better than version one.

A red bus leaving the bus stop. Clocktower and parade of shops in background.

Missing the bus in Crouch End Broadway

More people would perhaps improve it – someone running after the bus, for example. But people aren’t my strong point – I prefer buildings and scenery.

I think I’ve learnt something from the experience. It always pays to take some thinking time when setting up a shot.

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Conduct Unbecoming – how can the Royal Society escape its Musk box?

Four months after my open letter calling on the Royal Society to take action over Elon Musk FRS’s breaches of their code of conduct had attracted thousands of signatures from the scientific community, but only a very muted response from that most learned organisation, I was beginning to think I should let the matter go. After all, Musk is no longer part of the Trump administration, his relationship with the president having exploded in spectacularly bitter fashion a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps the Royal Society was also thinking that Musk’s departure would allow them to draw a veil over all the unpleasantness stirred up by their failure to call Musk to account?

But then last week my friend Professor Andrea Stella reminded me why the issues at stake are so important. He announced that he had returned his 2014 Royal Society Faraday Prize in protest at their unwillingness to address Musk’s promotion of disinformation, his disregard for evidence, and his role in degrading the US research ecosystem. It was a bold, principled stand, inspired in part by the lecture given recently at the Royal Society by the  2024 Faraday prize winner, Professor Salim Abdool Karim.

Having now watched the lecture myself, I can see why Andrea was spurred to act.

Professor Karim is an eminent South African epidemiologist and virologist. But rather than speaking about viruses and public health, he took as his subject “Science under threat: the politics of institutionalised disinformation.” It was lucid, it was logically structured, it was evidence based, and it was a coolly devastating analysis of the tactics deployed by populists and would-be dictators (Trump, Erdoğan, Orban, Zuma…) – and their fellow-travellers – to seize power and wealth. 

The major casualties of this “state capture” are truth and the institutions that exist to uncover and protect it – our universities and the wider enterprise of science. Many of us have watched in horror as this process of capture has slowly unfolded in the US in recent months, directed by President Trump and enacted in large part by Elon Musk FRS. But not, it would seem, the Royal Society.

The title of Prof Karim’s lecture “Science Under Threat” echoes the title of a statement that the Royal Society put out in the days following media reports of my open letter. But the contrast in content could not be starker. 

Karim’s lecture brought a laser-like focus to the problem, naming Trump and Musk as major players in dismantling both US science and the American aid that deploys that science to save lives. By contrast, as the months tick silently by following the Royal Society’s promise “to look at potential further actions” in response to events in the US, its statement rings increasingly hollow. 

It said it “will use its voice and the expertise of our Fellows to resist the various challenges to science,” but offered no comment on the fact that one of their own Fellows is the embodiment of those “challenges”. In opting not to deal directly with the concerns raised by Mr Musk’s actions, the Royal Society gives the impression of dispensing with the community’s values when standing up for them might involve difficult choices. It is this neglect of its responsibilities that has diminished the Society’s reputation among many within the scientific community that it claims to represent. 

Defending the Royal Society’s stance over Musk, its President has asked the community to focus “on what unites us rather that what divides us” instead of getting embroiled in political matters. That’s an admirable sentiment, but it has to recognise that the unity of the scientific community is founded on shared values and norms. As Professor Karim has shown so eloquently, in a world awash with the politics of lies and disinformation, it is more important than ever that institutions of science to speak up for discourse that is rooted in evidence and truth. The Royal Society cannot dodge its duty by pretending that all political questions lie outside its purview.

For many of us, this episode has been a sad turn for an organisation that has built an international reputation as a bastion of science over the past 350 years. How might the Royal Society find a way to recover? 

The beginnings of an answer can be found in one of Prof Karim’s slides:

Karim-combat-disinformation

So far, in its efforts to address the Musk issue the Royal Society has stumbled over each of these five steps. Yes, it has issued a statement; and yes, it has allocated a tranche of public money to attract international scholars, including those fleeing persecution in the USA. But overall, it has grievously misjudged the moment and the scale of the threats to science and scientific freedom from a US administration in which one of its own Fellows has played a leading role.

The Royal Society needs to pick itself up, acknowledge the injury, and take specific measures to repair its standing.

First, it needs to demonstrate that it can deal effectively with the conundrum created by Mr Musk’s behaviour. The outcome of the correspondence on this issue between Musk and the incoming President, Sir Paul Nurse, should be made public – even if it has come to nothing. The Royal Society cannot continue to hide behind appeals to confidentiality when its code of conduct has been breached so openly and flagrantly. It has to be better at communicating with the community it claims to represent.

Second, the Royal Society must ensure it is not caught out again by one of its Fellows pivoting from science to more questionable activities, political or otherwise. It now has to update its code of conduct to deal with cases where Fellows engage in behaviours that are divorced from evidence and truth-telling, while still allowing for political pluralism and robust, good-faith debate.

Finally, it should deliver on its promise of action and outline as soon as possible it plans to advocate for science amid the rising tide of misinformation. In this endeavour it might usefully ally with the social science expertise to be found at the British Academy.

A scientific community that has been greatly unsettled by the Royal Society’s fumbling of recent events will surely be encouraged by news that it is striving to learn the lessons. And so might Professors Sella and Karim.

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I asked, ChatGPT answered

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

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What I Read In May

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

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Skills, What Skills?

The answer to many of today’s problems seems to lie in the magic word ‘skills’, but this word can be used to mean so many different things, depending on audience and context, that in itself it is far from sufficient to cure anything. Yet, it is absolutely right to focus on the general area as one that needs attention, it’s just that it needs so much attention it might be better if we could find a new, more discerning vocabulary.

To some, skills means a technical skill: say that of a plumber or an electrician, whereas to others it might mean ‘soft skills’, such as teamwork and communication. The skills level could refer to someone with a PhD or someone who left school with few formal qualifications at all. It could mean foundational skills such as numeracy or literacy, or advanced skills such as operating a clean room or flow cytometry equipment. And who the provider of such skills should be will obviously depend on which skills we’re talking about. Certainly, all of schools, FE Colleges and universities need to be included in the list of providers, as well as employers.

If the work of Skills England is to progress, as they finally move out of their shadow form into solid reality, they have to know what challenges they need to face up to. Their new Board, announced this week, has their work cut out for them. Their remit is potentially vast, charged with: bringing coherence to the current incoherent state of play; working out where the ‘skills gaps’ are (which begs the question of which sorts of skills); shaping technical education to respond to the current needs, including how the new Growth and Skills Levy (the new name for the Apprenticeship Levy) can be spent; and provide advice on how this will feed into a clear plan appropriate for a growth economy. No small order then.

Under the old Apprenticeship Levy there had been a steady drift towards higher level qualifications at the expense of fresh school leavers, and already it is clear this will no longer be permissible: formally, level 7 (i.e. Masters Level) apprenticeships will only be available to those aged 21 and under, in essence stopping this route. Such a change was advocated earlier in the year by Alison Wolf in her policy primer Saving Apprenticeships, a publication containing, as she put it to me in a private conversation, ‘far more than you ever wanted to know about apprentices’. It is indeed a comprehensive discussion of the state of play at the time of writing (it was published at the start of this year).  She wanted a clear distinction between these higher level apprentices, which she saw as essentially employers accessing CPD on the cheap for their employees, and apprenticeships enabling youngsters to get their foot on the job ladder or adults seeking to gain new, sub-degree, qualifications and skills.

Adult education has long been a poor child of the education system. Gone are the days of easy access to multiple evening classes provided locally to allow those who had struggled at school to have a second chance at gaining qualifications. Money is too tight in the sector for much to be available. Furthermore, particularly at FE Colleges, there is often a shortage of teachers. But if (and so far it is an ‘if’, as it’s not really happened substantially yet as people try to work out how to make best use of it) AI is going to remove many jobs, there will be a pressing need for adults to retrain for where the jobs still are. In many more technical areas, FE teachers are in short supply because the pay is so dismal compared with what they could earn elsewhere (as is true for Physics teachers in schools). Indeed, FE lecturers are paid badly by any standards, typically about £10,000 less than an experienced school teacher.

With the plans for revitalising the construction industry workforce recently announced, adult learners will potentially benefit from £14 million of adult skills funding for construction to be devolved to local mayors. This initiative is expected to support up to 5,000 additional adult learners, and new level 2 courses relevant to the sector will be set up. So specific goals for the revised Growth and Apprenticeship levy are beginning to emerge.

Plans such as these are all very well, but every apprenticeship – at whatever level – needs an employer to take them on and to cover much of the cost, including salary. At present, there are far more people wishing to start an apprenticeship than openings available. The construction industry works largely with small firms covering, perhaps, just one or two specialities (electrical, plumbing and so on). These typically act as sub-contractors as part of a larger job and may well struggle to cope with trainin someone just starting out, not to mention being put off by the complexity of the current course landscape (anyhow limited by local availability and transport), funding mechanisms and overall bureaucracy. So, there are many challenges in ensuring a steady supply of SMEs willing and able to take a school-leaver (or, indeed, an adult) on an apprenticeship which will need to be ironed out if the ‘skills’ arena is to progress as the economy needs.

Thus, although the advent of Skills England, and the direction of travel implied by both the Growth and Opportunity Missions, suggest an ecosystem that is changing, the nature of that change and the effectiveness of new initiatives, structures and any new funding to handle the ‘skills’ agenda remains to be seen. Explicit disaggregation of what ‘skills’ are, so that in any context it is clear everyone is talking about the same thing, will be required if appropriate interventions can be successfully introduced as part of any new strategy.

Posted in Alison Wolf, apprenticeships, careers, education, FE Colleges, Growth and Skills Levy | Leave a comment

Choosing Your Image

We all know people who seem quintessentially comfortable in their own skins, who effortlessly fit in to whatever group they want to belong to and reign supreme in their world (at least socially). But, note my use of the word ‘seem’. It is worth pondering whether that is their own lived reality.

I’m prompted to this train of thought by hearing a Radio 3 presenter discuss Edward Elgar as someone who ‘often felt an outsider’. His reputation now implies that he represents the height of Edwardian ‘pomp and circumstance’, the imperial zeitgeist. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, he would seem to have been right inside the system of the day. Yet, as a self-taught musician, that was apparently not his own sense of self. He felt an outsider, because he hadn’t been trained in the formal schools of music like his peers.

I can think of many colleagues who occasionally have let their masks slip to let their insecure inner self creep out. The amazingly successful professor, with prizes a-plenty to their name, who clearly was damaged by being a nerd at their posh public school where the ‘in set’ were the Rugby players. Knowing that, I could see how he always felt that he was on the outside, however much others felt that’s where they were while he was a key central player in the research environment.  It didn’t make him an easy person for others to interact with. Or the Fellow of that grandest of Cambridge Colleges, Trinity, who admitted he never felt he truly belonged because he had been educated elsewhere, whereas many on the fellowship were Trinity through and through. The College may have changed (after all, its current Master Sally Davies was not Cambridge educated at all), but that feeling of being an outsider will probably go with him to the grave.

Or there was the senior colleague to whom I was once unburdening myself of the feeling of not fitting in as a female physicist, who startled me by saying when things went wrong for him, or when people were rude, he tried not to believe it was because he was a Jew. Despite having known him and worked closely with him for many years, I’d never known (or indeed thought about) his religious affiliation. For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.

Reading Simon Fanshawe’s book, The Power of Difference, has introduced the word ‘covering’ into my lexicon. I knew the concept because, now I know it is a name, I know how I have used it at different times. It’s not dissimilar to ‘code-switching’, to move between different manners of speaking (something Michelle Obama discusses as a black woman navigating a predominantly white world in her book The Light We Carry); or to the ‘masking’ behaviour of autistic girls Gina Rippon discusses in her recent book The Lost Girls of Autism. Whatever you call it, you’re probably familiar with behaviour along these lines – at least unless you’re incredibly sure of yourself. The feeling you need to act a role in order to fit in with whatever group you’re currently amongst.

The time I remember doing this best, or perhaps I mean worst as I look back at how I behaved with some horror, was at an annual conference in my field. Being one of a paltry number of women, I wanted – fairly consciously – to be ‘one of the boys’. One who was welcome down the pub and seen as a good laugh. So I adopted a persona which was not my own; somewhat raucous and laughing at the double entendres of my associates, downing pints. At some point I decided I had had enough. Perhaps I felt secure enough in my affiliation to the in-crowd to feel I could drop that un-me persona, but I’m sure there will be a generation of men who believed that was the true me.

Was it worth doing? Maybe. It certainly seemed so at the time, yet in retrospect it just feels distasteful. There is a price to pay for acting outside one’s true self. It is important to work out what really matters and what is less important. In order to progress, in science or wherever, it may require you to put on a false sense of confidence as you give a conference presentation or take on some new committee role. That is probably worth doing since no one wants to listen to the lecturer mumbling away inaudibly (however exciting the results), or dropping the committee papers on the floor – less likely in this paperless age admittedly – due to nerves. But pretending to be someone you are not in other ways – as I did when I assumed a cheeky, extrovert and raucous character – is hardly necessary and may backfire. These are difficult balancing acts to get right. Yet each of us, every day, is faced with decisions big or small about how to portray oneself and align it with who we really are.

Posted in covering, fitting in, Science Culture, self-confidence, Simon Fanshawe | Comments Off on Choosing Your Image

What I Read In April

I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 07.53.15Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.

 

 

IMG_8871Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would  put in the lavatory of  one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..

 

 

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.12.31Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.29.12Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.

 

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.47.30Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of  human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.

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In which I lurk on the edges of the playground

Sunny path lined with blooming cow parsley, nettle and hawthorn

I’ve just finished Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground. This is not a book review (although I can highly recommend it), but more of a reflection on its aftertaste. Cryptic spoilers below.

I’d consider the book ‘lab lit lite’ – there are three scientist characters whose work is ancillary to the main plot. This is not really a story about science as a profession. It’s more a cautionary tale/homage of artificial intelligence and human over-reach, somewhat reminiscent of two of his earlier works, Galatea 2.2 and Bewilderment, with a Gaia-esque dash of The Overstory thrown in.

And at its base, like a celestial plug-hole, the hard gravity of Urbana-Champaign, pulling the reader into the author’s recurring collegiate dreamscape. Like most of us, I suppose, there is nothing more compelling than the place where we learned to adult for the first time. I have similar feelings for the small campus in Oberlin, Ohio, where the scent of apple blossoms in the present day never fails to propel me back to the springtime of senior year, when I was riven with unrequited love and about to set off to earn a PhD in Microbiology on the other side of the country. It is no exaggeration to say that the future seemed to stretch out into infinity, then, much as it probably does now for my 11-year-old son.

As always, Powers has made me feel existential. Not that I need much of a catalyst in that department, these days. The slightest thing can set me off as I move ever further along the timeline, and occasionally contemplate what might lie beyond. I feel genuinely old: I am plagued by aches and pains, alongside low-level exhaustion of the body and spirit. The deaths of singers and actors that inspired me as a youth seem to happen on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, the roller-coaster of lab-related acceptance and rejection hurtles onward – one grant and paper in the former category this past week, and one grant in the latter – but it no longer feels so high or so low – just the bland normality of my precarious academic situation, averaging out.

In my heart, I also sense the cooling down of political fire to the numb embers of resigned acceptance. The thought of organising a petition, let alone a full-scale street rally, seems like something from another life. I have passed the torch long ago, and do not envy them the fight ahead.

And does anything lie beyond? Most days, I think not. But occasionally I get glimmers of potential. Yesterday, after Joshua’s last rugby training session of the year, I felt weary and sat down on a bench well away from the furore, watching my son queuing for a sausage bap and then fussing over the ketchup packets, while across the crowd, Richard was chatting with another rugby dad, smiling at some shared joke. Neither of them knew where I was, nor had yet registered my absence. And that’s when I wondered if this might be what the afterlife is like: not being a ghost, inserted no matter how incorporeally into the lives of your successors, but simply a silent point-of-view. A regard of fondness and familiarity, with the grief of separation totally blunted. You could follow your friends and family forever, a mute, all-seeing omniscient narrator who no longer has skin in the game. I am not sure if this is heaven or hell, to be honest. But, as I write these words, I suddenly realise that this concept might be part of what Powers was getting at when he skilfully unfolded his jaw-dropping reveal at the novel’s end.

Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s the dregs of a bank-holiday weekend, cold and blustery. I’ve crossed a few gardening tasks off my list, admired Richard’s runner bean supports, made stinging nettle soup from plants (carefully) foraged from the path behind the rugby club, enjoyed some me time.

Still very much of this world, and taking nothing for granted.

Posted in careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Lablit, staring into the abyss, The ageing process, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which I lurk on the edges of the playground

What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?

We frequently hear the word ‘skills’ tossed about, as in ‘there’s a skills shortage’ or ‘a skills mismatch’, but put a bunch of people in a room, and ask them to discuss skills, and – with no additional qualifying words – people will head off in a myriad different directions. Having been involved in two very different round tables recently, with skills as the topic of discussion, I can vouch for the diffuseness of the ensuing conversation, meaning that it is hard to drill down into any specific aspect of the challenge.

There is no doubt this topic is a challenge, something recognized by the Government in myriad ways. Skills England – charged with ‘bring[ing] together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions’, no small task – is about to spring into existence as soon as the snappily titled Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill has completed its passage through Parliament. Imminent, we are told. Then, if you read the Industrial Strategy Green Paper back in the autumn you would have seen skills mentioned as a key barrier (indeed, the first in the long bullet point list of barriers). It is encouraging to note that the February minutes of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council (ISAC) identify that Members noted that ‘people and skills cuts across all workstreams and growth-driving sectors, requiring a focused join-up between the ISAC, Skills England and the Department for Education.’ And that Phil Smith, the new Chair of Skills England, is ex officio  a member of the ISAC. Continuing on the theme of how skills transcends Government departments and that the Government fully recognizes this, they feature in both the Growth Mission and the Opportunity Mission.

However, as I say, my experience of a bunch of people sitting over a nice dinner with skills as the topic of discussion shows just how multi-dimensional the problem is. To different people it might mean (in no particular order):

  • What is AI going to do to jobs and hence the skills people will need in the future?
  • How can NEETS be best supported?
  • Are we producing the right number of doctoral students in the right fields?
  • What should happen to the apprenticeship levy as it morphs into the Growth and Skills Levy?
  • What would lead to an optimum form for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement when it finally takes effect?
  • What should be done to make sure graduates leave university with the ‘soft’ or transferable skills employers seek?
  • How should regional variations in skills needs be handled?
  • What can philanthropy do to help socio-economically disadvantaged students?
  • What should be done to upskill adults whose jobs are disappearing?

You can see the list is long and varied and, in a couple of hours discussion while the food is served and wine consumed, it is impossible to come up with any in-depth solutions to any, let alone all, of them. But, the length of the list illustrates the scale of the problem, even before one starts worrying about the finances of any potential solutions one might dream up.

To reflect some of the issues I’m currently involved with in the Cambridge area, let me turn to one specific issue, that of asking what should be done to ensure that the well-recognized problem of an ageing technician workforce is addressed,. Even focussing just on this specific topic can be a minefield. Who is a technician? Are we talking about those with PhDs who go on to join research groups and make a significant contribution through a detailed understanding of a crucial and complex piece of kit, or are we talking about an animal house technician who may have left school at 16 with few qualifications under their belt?

Recently, there has been more attention focussed on technicians in the HE workforce by the work Kelly Vere has led at Nottingham University: the TALENT Commission and the accompanying Technician Commitment. More than 120 organisations have now signed up to the latter, demonstrating a determination to treat this part of their employee base with more care and attention. But that doesn’t in itself address the technician pipeline. Who becomes a technician and what qualifications do they or should they possess? It’s back to skills. I have previously argued that universities should play a more substantial role in training young people for these roles, whether or not they are going to stay in the HE Sector, as part of their ‘civic duty’. Universities should be in a better position to train school leavers, for instance, than a small start-up in a region, but these people may go on to make a substantial contribution to the regional economy through their ability to translate new ideas (‘diffusion’) and contribute to absorptive capacity.

Some of these could easily enter this technician pathway through an apprenticeship. Although it has been stated that there will be changes made to the current Apprenticeship levy, possibly including the removal of Level 7 (Masters) courses from its remit, the full shape of the changes is yet to be revealed. The changes to convert the current system into a future ‘Growth and Skills Levy’ need to ensure that employers invest more productively into the training of their workforce, to counter years of decline. Alison Wolf has persuasively argued that a clear distinction should be made between investment in apprenticeships for those first joining the workforce, and upskilling existing employers through degree apprenticeships (levels 6 and 7, corresponding to degree and masters’ courses), something that essentially amounts to CPD. Both are clearly important, but also significantly different and should be formally recognized as such.

No one should be in any doubt that the issue of skills is a problem. However one drills down into the question, the challenges are manifest. But, in order to make progress, it really is important to know which part of the question one is addressing, rather than lump everything together in one large basket of headaches labelled ‘skills’.

Posted in absorptive capacity, apprenticeships, careers, education, Technician Committment, technicians | Comments Off on What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?