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It’s Only Natural

My daughter got married a couple of weeks ago.

Read that again.

The Elder Pawn got married.

It was one of those glorious days we often get at the end of September, with the sun low in the sky and the photographer crawling over bridges and under hedges to get the best light.

cousins

We showed up in style (I think so, anyway), and my speech went over well. At least four drunk Scotsmen told me how much they liked it, and they should know.

us

Waiting for the pictures from the photographer so you can see me with my Claymore.

Yeah. That was a thing. A joyous thing.

Posted in 15MinutePost, Fun, kilts, Me, offspring, Pawns, swords, Wedding | Leave a comment

Can One Simplify the REF?

The REF is much in the news, with some feathers ruffled by UK Day One’s proposal to simplify the whole process, as detailed in their report Replacing the Research Excellence Framework. I am sure there are academics and administrators up and down the land who would welcome simplification, but not at any cost, metaphorical or otherwise. Ben Johnson, former Government advisor, has written enthusiastically about UK Day One’s plans but, as James Wilsdon has spelled out, simply relying on the totality of funds earned to drive the distribution of Government funding has all kinds of issues underlying it.

Indeed, Wilsdon was the lead author of the important report The Metric Tide (2015), which considered how the REF could be scrapped, something Prime Minister Gordon Brown had wanted back in 2006, and a simple ‘basket of metrics’ used in its place. This would have simplified things, although I suspect metrics beyond the single figure of already awarded grant income was always envisaged back then, but the response of the sector at the time was deeply negative. Metrics, one or many, remove any opportunity of nuance due to circumstances at any level from the individual to the institutional. The Metric Tide spelled this out in great detail. (It won’t surprise anyone that one of the objections I personally would raise is the obvious statistic about how diversity would be negatively impacted, as was made clear by Wilsdon and co-authors.)

When I chaired the REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, early in the cycle for the 2021 exercise, we were asked to consider whether any of a number of metrics could possibly be helpful in assessing work that crossed boundaries. We went through the list provided one by one and unanimously concluded that no, none of them was likely to be a fit measure. And so none was used.

It is tempting to think that using someone else’s decision about what is ‘excellent’, as would be the case if funding were the sole criterion, would be a sensible choice. However, in practice it simply amounts to outsourcing a decision to other, non-calibrated bodies. Even if one stuck with UKRI funding and assumed that all successful UKRI grants were equally excellent, I fear the evidence would not support that quantification. Let me explain why, directly from my own experience.

Back in the ‘olden days’, before UKRI or even BBSRSC was a thing, I sat on a panel of one of BBSRC’s predecessors, the AFRC (the Agriculture and Food Research Council). At that time grant-holders had to write a final report saying what they had achieved with the money they had been given, and we had to assess them. ‘We’ in this case being the same people (since these were standing committees, which met at regular intervals) as had judged the grant good for funding in the first place. It was dismal to see how many grants we must have raved about three or more years previously were then graded poorly once we read the final reports. Now, of course some failures are to be expected if exciting but risky stuff is to be supported, but too often the outcomes just seemed boring, incremental or non-existent. It made for sobering reflections, as we tried to work out why we got things so wrong.

Some of this may have been hype in the original proposal, promising the moon and we were too naïve to see through this. Some of it would undoubtedly have been due to circumstances beyond their control. I can well remember a (BBSRC) grant of mine which got precisely nowhere, largely because the amount of time the central instrument was functioning properly was so limited. We – by which I of course mean the poor postdoc – did our best, and they didn’t waste their time as they tried to work out where the problems lay when the manufacturers weren’t particularly helpful. But, as far as I recall, we only managed to write one paper and that not of a very high quality. These things happen. But too often, reading the final reports it just felt as if the grant-holders had either lost interest or been buried in other tasks so as to be unable to drive the specific research programme with adequate attention. (I may say I don’t believe our assessments made any difference to anything, although obviously in principle bad final reports could have been used to blackball a particular researcher for some time.)

That is clearly a single data point, but highlights with the best will in the world panels making judgements will sometimes get it wrong. The process is inevitably flawed and to allow further money to flow based on it would just exacerbate inequalities. It really is surely better to judge outputs, and judge them with a human eye. However, beyond that rather major problem, it is worth thinking about unintended consequences if this metric replaced the REF. If grant income is what matters, then more people will be writing more grants, and will feel themselves under pressure to write more grants. More panel members will need to be found. More personnel at the funders to administer the proposals and more administrators in the universities to do the costings… and so it goes on. The costs labelled ‘REF may disappear, the bureaucracy that we all recognize now may disappear, but it will turn up elsewhere to service this different ‘simplified’ approach. That really isn’t a solution.

But there is another fundamental problem that even the ongoing REF is still wrestling with. What price excellence for the people working on grants? Just as professors will feel themselves under more pressure to write more grants, once they have been awarded one that pressure will likely get transferred to the researchers on the grant to produce results at speed to make it easier to obtain further funding. There will be more emphasis on more papers, more hours at the bench, more competition to get that Nature paper out swiftly, and less room for work-life balance, compassion and support as people try to find their way through the academic maze. The research culture element is still being argued over, but as a community we should not allow excellence to be interpreted only with regard to outputs and not take people into account. I fear a funding metric would be intensely detrimental to our lab culture, just when people are beginning to take it seriously. We do not need another generation looking just like the present generation, learning how to compete, bully or fail to bring out the best in their teams. It really is a depressing thought.

There may well be a better way of analysing research excellence, but relying on a crude single number is not likely to be it.

 

 

Posted in grants, James Wilsdon, research culture, Science Culture, Science Funding, The Metric Tide | Leave a comment

The Bright Side of Life

It’s always a thrill to get a celebrity endorsement, especially as they don’t happen very often, so I am unreasonably tickled with a review of A (Very) Short &c &c in the book blog of Eric Idle. Just mosey over to his reading blog, or, for the hard of scrolling, read this: 

My favourite book of the year and maybe the decade. Henry Gee is both brilliantly funny and brilliantly informative. So many times I found myself saying out loud “Oh my gawd” as some fact or information came at me. We are not the end of evolution. We are not even the summit of it. We are mistaken about our place in the incredible and very long evolution and continuous breaking of new life forms on earth. I shall read this book again and again. You might find the early chapters a little dense because there are so many monocellular Latin forms of life. Don’t be afraid to skip, move forward, the story gets better and better with incredible chapters on animal life and the evolution of mammals. Learn your place in the Universe, which is both incredible and unlikely and puny. 

This has to be the apotheosis of my zenith this week. Especially as he says my book is ‘brilliantly funny’. Now, that’s a compliment and a half.

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Objects In The Rear-View Mirror, Part 2

The mid-eighties were very busy for me. I have recorded in these annals how a photograph sent me by a well-wisher cast me back to the end of 1987 when I suddenly left Cambridge to join the staff of Nature. Well, it happened again. I’ve just returned from some lab visits where a former colleague — a postdoc when I was a postgrad — dug up this photo:

Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 21.31.10

It shows the delegates at the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy that took place at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1986. I shan’t embarrass anyone reading this who finds themselves in this photo, especially if they are still alive. I am unshockable, though — I am in the middle at the back, and the colleague who sent me the picture is not entirely unadjacent. Looking over this photo is bittersweet given that so many of the people here have shuffled off their mortal coils and gone to join the Choir Invisible.

I have many memories of this meeting, for all that some have been fogged by strong liquor time. This was the meeting where I gave my first platform presentation … at 9am, the day after the Symposium Dinner. I was not particularly chipper, and looked over from the podium at the smattering of green faces before me.

The journey to Belfast was especially memorable. Some people chose to fly, but me and my lab-mate (he knows who he is — yes, he’s in the picture too), being thrifty grad students, decided to go by bus. We went from Cambridge to Victoria Coach Station, looking forward to the adventure of an overnight coach journey to Belfast via Stranraer, and the suitably comfortable National Express conveyance that would get us there. Imagine our surprise and shock when what turned up to take us was an ordinary charabanc in the livery of I forget what, but it might as well have been Honest Ron’s Sunshine Holidays. The seats had no headrests, and during the long road north I would often nod off, resting my head on my lab mate’s shoulder. He got his own back much later as my Best Man, when, in his speech, he confessed to my bride, and the whole party, in portentous tones, that he had a confession to make. ‘I once slept with Henry’, he said, ‘and it was not a pleasant experience’.

The road back was possibly even worse, as the bus broke down at the Watford Gap Service Station on the M1, one of the oldest, and therefore shabbiest, of all rest stops, and did so at the graveyard hour of 4 am or thereabouts. The passengers de-camped while a new charabanc was sent for, during which time my lab mate and I found an early breakfast of toast and marmalade — making the marmalade palatable with dollops of Paddy and Bushmills whiskey that I had bought an off-licence in the Lisburn Road. This was during the ‘troubles’ and the offy was heavily fortified, though in general I found Belfast, and Northern Ireland more generally (as the conference party went on an excursion to the Giants Causeway), a happy and welcoming place. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink. Ah, Happy days.

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Abandon the REF?

Screenshot of the UKDayOne report on their website

On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF.

The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings. It’s standfirst promises that a lighter-touch alternative will have multiple benefits for the universities and the UK:

“The Research Excellence Framework is too bureaucratic and unaffordable. An alternative system would lead to similar funding allocations whilst supporting university finances and promoting technological diffusion, driving regional productivity growth.”

The entire report isn’t very long so I would encourage fellow academics and policy wonks to read the whole thing. There is bound to be a range of reactions.

Research Professional News’s Fiona McIntyre pulled a few lines from my remarks for her piece (£), but in the interests of stimulating further discussion, here below is the full comment that I sent her. It doesn’t capture everything that needs to be said – there are some complicated issues to unpack here – but I don’t have time right now to dig deeper:

“The REF is an easy target because few would mourn its passing, but I found this provocative report thin and disappointing. Two stars. It cherry-picks from the evidence base and provides relatively little meat on the bones of its main recommendations. It elides research quality with citation performance, a problematically narrow perspective which contrasts with the REF’s much richer view of the outputs, environment and impact of UK research. It claims that Australia and New Zealand have abandoned similar exercises, whereas both countries are currently figuring out how to replace them. The report omits to mention the announcement of a new Canadian Research Excellence Framework.

There are some superficially appealing recommendations for reducing bureaucracy, but these don’t seem to have been thought through properly and leave many questions hanging. The authors propose that QR funding should be allocated in proportion of external research income from private, public and philanthropic sectors and argue this would stimulate collaboration with local industry. Universities already leverage funds from these sectors, but there is no discussion of how much extra stimulus would be provided by this change. Nor is there any attention paid to how this would play out within different STEM disciplines or how to manage the enormous (over 10-fold according to their data) shifts in QR funding that some institutions would experience.

The authors argue that longer term funding for “people, not projects”, targeted at “the most promising individual researchers and research groups” would stimulate blue-skies research, reduce precarity and support equality, diversity and inclusion. But how would this work? How would those researchers not funded this way survive in institutions that need them to teach undergraduates? How does this solve precarity for them? How exactly does it improve EDI? On these questions the report is silent. This rather naive approach to policy formulation is underscored by the quaint notion that grass-roots movements like the UK Reproducibility Network can, on their own, drive much needed culture change. UKRN does important work but in my experience drivers of culture change need incentives that bite.

All of which is not to say that we should not be taking aim at the high cost and bureaucratic burden of the REF. This report should certainly stimulate some fresh thinking but that thinking needs to go much deeper than the arguments presented by the authors.”

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The Path Not Taken

One of the last tasks I did as Master of Churchill College, was to partake in an afternoon’s event as part of their alumni weekend, badged as ‘Arts meet Science’. The first, and more substantial part, consisted of various pieces of music, mainly new – or at least newly configured. It had a strong emphasis on women, not least due to the involvement of the Marsyas Trio, who have an ongoing association with the College and who contributed to several of the works. The trio are not only women themselves, but are champions of music by women that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, as their repertoire makes clear. In this particular concert they showcased a piece by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, her Overture in C, which had been arranged for them by a previous Director of Music at the College, Mark Gotham. Hensel was so much more than Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, however much she was stuck in his shadow throughout their short lives, and restricted in what she could do by societal and familial pressures. (If you want to know more about her, I would recommend Anna Beer’s Sounds and Sweet Airs, telling the story of several largely forgotten but impressive women composers.) Mark Gotham, it should be said, exactly exemplifies the ‘arts meets science’ label, as he is now a member of the Cambridge Computer Science Department, having previously been a Professor of Music Theory in Germany.

It would have been possible to make the connection between this musical section and my own talk, in which I briefly discussed my recent book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), by stressing the issues facing women, past and present. Instead, the current Director of Music, Ewan Campbell decided to emphasise the fact that once upon a time I had played the viola. A long time ago! Music was incredibly important to me as a teenager (you can hear more of my experiences by listening to a rather old Desert Island Discs).

It was a respite from a heavy A Level load and a place where friendships formed based on what we were doing together in choir and orchestra. But it was not something I wanted to pursue as a career, despite the urgings of my teacher. I knew I was ‘in demand’ as a viola player, because they are typically in short supply; I knew as a consequence, I got to play with some wonderful musicians who did proceed to professional careers. To play the Schubert String Quintet with four individuals, all of whom made music their lives was a fantastic experience. I was not in their league. When my viola teacher wanted to persuade me to study at one of the London colleges I could immediately see it would amount to a life simply of being a peripatetic teacher, like her, and it did not appeal. Cambridge and Physics beckoned and I never regretted that.

However, the reality is that many teenagers are totally perplexed by what they ‘should’ do. Should, in the sense of a parent or teacher pushing them in a direction they may or may not be comfortable with. Or ‘should’ in the sense that they know little about career choices but someone once mentioned to them that career X is a safe, or interesting, or financially-rewarding career, and therefore they think that must be the right choice, regardless of their interests. England is unusual in forcing teenagers to make choices at an early age, when they know little about themselves, little about the world beyond school and are also very susceptible to peer pressure, which may be ill-informed if not actually ill-intentioned. So, we have a system where too many people make choices that aren’t right for them and/or are not wise.

I believe this early decision making strongly influences girls to steer clear of subjects like Physics, which means our workforce is less diverse than it should be. However, it is dismaying that often schools are unable to provide adequate career advice, due to a lack of resources. Too often A Level choices are not made wisely for a particular career path. A common problem is the belief that taking a single science A Level so as to keep one’s options broad will prove adequate to study some science at university. Usually this isn’t so. Nevertheless, as the Royal Society has been recommending for years, a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum is really important for the 21st century, so that teenagers don’t get forced down narrow paths that then equip them poorly for the world of work later on. To make this work would require many substantial changes in the educational system.

For those for whom university may not be the right choice, navigating the complex system that provides other qualifications, including apprenticeships, can prove to be an impossibly confusing challenge. The funding and qualification landscape is currently tricky to understand and traverse. It is to be hoped that the creation of Skills England will resolve some of these issues regarding tertiary education, and that the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review will consider how best to prepare students for their lives. There is a long way to go.

I feel fortunate, not that I had good careers’ advice – I didn’t get any at all, back in the day – but that I wasn’t confused as to what choices to make. I always knew what I wanted to do (although I would have liked to do German A Level too, but the timetable made that impossible). Many children are less clear in their aspirations, or steered in unhelpful directions that don’t bring out the best in them. For every child there are many possibilities, but at each stage doors tend to close, narrowing options. We may not have a Labour Government that talks in terms of ‘Education, education, education’, as Tony Blair did in the run up to the 1997 election. But we do have a government that is giving skills a higher priority that has been the case in the recent past and, with its mission of breaking down barriers to opportunity, it intends to start with the earliest years of a child’s life.

Each of us are constantly faced with forks in the road, even if we’ve gone a long way down one track before even noticing the decision that was silently made at that fork. I don’t regret not becoming a peripatetic viola teacher but far too many adults will look back at decisions taken by or for them that forced them in a direction that, with hindsight, was a mistake. It is to be hoped that with renewed focus on early years, schools and adult (re)upskilling there will be fewer adults who take a mistaken fork and end up somewhere they wish they’d never got to.

Posted in apprenticeships, broad and balanced, curriculum, decisions, education | Leave a comment

An Anthropological Experiment in Birmingham

I’m not sure that spending my last day as Master of Churchill College at the Conservative Party Conference would have been quite what I expected, but so it was. I was in Birmingham – just as I was in Liverpool last week for the Labour Party Conference – to support the Royal Society’s work around Science 2040. This is their project taking a forward look at what the science system ‘could and should’ look like by 2040. I’m delighted to be associated with it, both as a steering committee member and leading an ongoing piece of work about how career pathways need to develop. An interim report on the project will be published in the spring of next year, but already one strand has been published regarding what science does for the economy. With growth much in the Government’s eyes and words, spelling out the important, if often hard to quantify, contribution science makes to the economy is crucial.

This piece of work has been led by Richard Jones, my friend and erstwhile Cambridge colleague, now Vice President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement at the University of Manchester as well as Professor of Materials Science there. He gave an eloquent introduction to this strand at the reception in Birmingham, stressing how much Birmingham itself, over the last two centuries and more, has contributed to the science and innovation base of the country and how that had significant impact for the economy. Birmingham is of course associated with the Lunar Society of Erasmus Darwin (a polymath and one of my heroes), Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and more.  It may have been a dining club, named after the fact that they met at full moon when it was safest to travel home late in the evening, but it was far more than that. Their friendship and inventions were a sparkling example of how science and innovation go hand in hand and can change the world. The contributions to the economy and our well-being in general are as important now as they were as in the Lunar Society’s time in the last years of the eighteenth centurey. (I’d recommend Jenny Uglow’s book about this group to you if they are unfamiliar to you.)

Attending party conferences is, as someone described it to me, an anthropological experiment. They are certainly unlike any academic conference I ever attended in many respects, if not in all. One similarity I noticed (and in this I was not alone) was that the percentage of women present was low, far lower than at the Labour Party conference. Furthermore, the dress code was very different, even if it was an unwritten rule. Men, overwhelmingly, were in blue suits with white shirts; tie choice was free, but ties themselves did not seem to be optional. In Liverpool the range of clothing for men was distinctly more varied, although I was surprised to see how many women were in dresses (the latter unlike academia, the former much more so). It was sheer chance, but just to confirm stereotypes I passed a couple of what I assume were recent graduates allowed out on the circuit, with one saying to the other ‘since you’re an old Etonian….’.

However, anthropology and more science apart, I mainly attended sessions on skills and apprentices, of which there were many (in Liverpool, the skills talks seemed doomed to be simultaneous, so I actually got to fewer of them there). Asking a question at one event about the apprenticeship levy, when no one had actually mentioned the role and vital importance of the providers as opposed to discussing the employer’s point of view, I was somewhat surprised to have Robert Halfon (one of the speakers) challenge me in response about why Cambridge University was not providing degree apprenticeships – which was not particularly relevant to my question about FE Colleges, but I supposed it meant he didn’t have to answer that. Even more surprising to me was when I walked into the room of a later session, on which he was also a panel member, and he shouted at me across the room, something along the lines of ‘Cambridge is here again; are you stalking me?’. To which my reply was ‘isn’t Cambridge allowed to be interested in apprentices?’. Perhaps my red jacket was equivalent to a red rag to a bull, but I felt he was out of order.

Halfon may have a bee in his bonnet about degree apprentices, but David Willetts (now of course a member of the House of Lords) was having none of it. In a third event on apprentices and skills, Lord Willetts made it absolutely plain he could see no logic in this particular hang-up, explicitly naming both Robert Halfon and Gillian Keegan in this context as having focussed far too much on this. He emphasised that in his view we should be ensuring the apprenticeship levy was spent on the under 25’s to get them into the workplace (Levels 3-5), and not providing Levels 6 and 7 for those already with jobs. All the evidence shows an increasing trend of firms sending those already with significant qualifications on to degree apprentices at the expense of school leavers. David Hughes, CEO of the Association of Colleges and on the same panel, wholeheartedly agreed with Willetts regarding this point.

In the Science 2040 strand of work I’m leading on careers’ pathways, these are some of the issues we’ll be exploring. I feel it is very important that the Royal Society explicitly recognizes that the elite scientific system of its Fellows often rests crucially on the shoulders of others whose qualifications are much more modest, and I was delighted that its five-year strategic plan explicitly recognizes this.

So, as of today and now I’m back in a very wet Cambridge, I am fully retired. It is a very strange sensation. I will miss the day-to-day business of a job and specifically of my colleagues at Churchill College (although I now become a Fellow Emerita). But it gives me the opportunity to explore new avenues – and perhaps write more.

Posted in apprenticeships, conservatives, David Willetts, education, Robert Halfon, Science Culture, skills | Leave a comment

What I Read In September

Screenshot 2024-09-25 at 11.49.19Alastair Reynolds: Aurora Rising I’m always on for one of Alastair Reynolds’ space operas, tinged as they are with a certain gothic menace, so imagine my delight when I came across two that I’d never seen before, Elysium Fire and Machine Vendetta, more on which below. These are sequels, of a sort, to a novel I’d read long ago called The Prefect, now renamed Aurora Rising. I prefer the old title, though it soon become apparent why it was changed. So I re-read it. Aurora Rising is set in the same universe as Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels, in which humans a few centuries hence have colonised the nearby stars, thankfully by slower-than-light propulsion. As I get older I am beginning to get a bit fed up of faster-than-light McGuffins, and sympathise with Arthur C. Clarke who said (in the author’s note to his novel The Songs of Distant Earth) that they are tricks that allow characters to get from A to B ‘in time for next week’s instalment’.  But I digress. Some of the Revelation Space novels are set in the Glitter Band, a utopia of ten thousand habitats in orbit around Yellowstone, a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, just over ten light years from the Earth. Having a large set of mini-planets in orbit around another obviates the need for hyperspace to get between locations (Reynolds managed the same trick with his Revenger trilogy). Managing the diverse societies of the Glitter Band is Panoply, a small police force quartered in a habitat of the same name. One of these policemen, or Prefects, is the rugged and somewhat morose Tom Dreyfus. The action opens when one of the habitats is wrecked by the seemingly deliberate torching by the fusion drive of a starship, one of the ‘light huggers’ used by post-human Ultras who spend decades traveling between the stars. As Dreyfus and his colleagues investigate the atrocity, they discover that not all is what it seems. The Ultras have been framed, with the aim of covering up events that happened eleven years earlier. Back then, the Prefects had to fight off an incursion by a rogue artificial intelligence called the Clockmaker, during which Dreyfus’ wife had been reduced to mental imbecility and his superior, Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier, was subjected to an exquisite torture in which one of the Clockmaker’s devices, the Scarab, was affixed to her neck. As well as denying her sleep, the Scarab will not allow her to come closer than seven metres from another human, on pain of instant death. As if that wasn’t enough, the Prefects have to contend with Aurora, another rogue AI — the result of a disastrous attempt to upload human consciousness into electronic form — whose aim is complete takeover of the Glitter Band because, she says, she can foresee an awful calamity that will submerge all of them a century or two hence. The plot is as clever, twisty and turny as any police procedural (for this is really what it is). There are times when I get tired of characters talking to one another in a series of sarky double negatives, and I do wonder whether the gruff Dreyfus and the saintly Aumonier shouldn’t just get a room, but there were moments when I found myself actually moved by the Prefects’ predicaments and the sacrifices they make to uphold order.

UntitledFloe Foxon: Folklore and Zoology Just when you think scientists have shaken every tree and peered behind every bush, animals previously unknown to science keep emerging into the light which, far from being microscopic, would do you a mischief if they trod on your foot. Such as the okapi in 1901; what became to be known as the saola in 1993; and the bizarre hominin Homo floresiensis, which lived in Southeast Asia for more than a million years but became extinct a geological eye blink ago. Because of this I have a certain sympathy for cryptozoology, the search for unknown animals. Sadly, the reputation of cryptozoology has been tarnished by wishful thinking, fakery and the outpourings of people one might politely refer to as ‘enthusiasts’ who persist in pursuing such phantoms as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Floe Foxon aims to set this aright with a comprehensive inquiry into all claims for such mysterious beasts, debunking all of them, and calling for a more rigorous discipline that takes into account reports from indigenous people about mysterious creatures, not taking them at face value, but sifting them to account for the fact that tales of the unexpected may be more folkloric than fact. This is a worthy aim but the book fails for three reasons. The first is that the references are absolutely all over the place, which would be forgivable in a self-published book (which I originally assumed this was) but not in the product of a supposedly reputable publishing house. The second is that the book promises to explore the importance of indigenous folklore, but hardly touches the subject. And there is no index. It reads like a first draft — I hope Foxon revisits this book to correct these problems, because this could be a valuable work. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me this book in order that I might review it].

Screenshot 2024-09-25 at 11.53.06Alastair Reynolds: Elysium Fire But back to Prefect Dreyfus. A few years after the events in Aurora Rising, a demagogue appears in the Glitter Band called Devon Garlin, who hops from habitat to habitat urging citizens to secede from the already loose society and the governance of Panoply, and ‘take back control’ (that this novel came two years after the Brexit referendum might not be entirely a coincidence). At the same time, a contagion appears to be spreading, and growing exponentially, in which the implants that each citizen has in their brain malfunction and kills them. In a separate storyline, two young boys are raised in seclusion to manifest extraordinary powers of material manipulation in order that they might, one day, rule the Glitter Band. That these things are all connected is no surprise, and Dreyfus and his colleagues weave and wind their way to a solution. Aurora and the Clockmaker are here too, but as two equally matched adversaries, they spend most of their time engaged in stalemate, at least for the moment.

Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 07.36.31Alastair Reynolds: Machine Vendetta Continuing straight on from Elysium Fire, Panoply hatches a superblack project to confine and eliminate Aurora as well as the Clockmaker. Jane Aumonier closes the project, preferring a state of detente between the two artificial intelligences. But the project goes rogue, with disastrous consequences. SPOILER ALERT. the Clockmaker is destroyed, and Aurora is unleashed, a pre-teen Mean Girl with the seemingly limitless power of a god. The jig is up, it seems. It is only thanks to the devious — and, by now, compromised — Prefect Dreyfus, that ultimate disaster is averted. This is the most satisfying of all three Prefect Dreyfus novels, as well as the most serpentine.

 

 

UntitledW. G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn As it was Offspring#2 who recommended The Night Circus, it was Offspring#1 who introduced me to this modern classic. Both now number among my favourite books. The Rings of Saturn made its way to us by a circuitous route. Offspring#1 stumbled on it crabwise through Everywhere at the End of Time, an epic series of concept albums that depicts a person’s journey into dementia, the work of a composer of ambient music called The Caretaker. Seeking for more work by The Caretaker, Offspring#1 found that he’d written the music to a documentary about The Rings of Saturn, which inspired him to seek out the book itself. It’s easy to see why The Caretaker might have been asked to work on a programme about this book — both gravitate towards themes of loneliness, decay and desolation. Sebald was an expatriate German academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a travel journal, made on a walking holiday along the Suffolk coast southwards from Lowestoft, via Dunwich and Southwold. In reality it is a long series of digressions connected together in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, giving it the flavour of that peculiar state of thought one experiences while just on the edge of sleep. There you are, reading (to take one example among many) about a man who spends most of his life making a scale model of the lost Temple in Jerusalem, but before you know it you’re deep into a history of the cultivation of silk moths, with no recollection of how you got from one to the other. There are more literary allusions here than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I grasped. The debt to Borges is obvious and acknowledged. There is also a flavour of Joyce, though one should beware (as Borges himself would have warned) of trying to spot influences. In the end, comparisons fade. This book is sui generis: melancholic, marvellous, magnificent.

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Switching socials

Changing times

When I retired it was an opportunity to make changes in my life. Obviously now I spend less time working (actually no time working), and instead have more time for reading, visiting exhibitions, going for walks/runs, and engaging in other fulfilling but non-remunerative activities. I’m still adjusting the balance but there’s been a big change since my last day of work in July 2022.

In the 21st century this ‘life activity edit’ also entails adjustments to my social media activity. This has been a challenge.

Up to 2022 much of my social media use was work-related, so my Twitter timeline was full of open access, publishing, libraries, scholarly communications and science. I’m still interested in all these things but I’m less committed and have a reduced incentive to engage in a full-throated way. I dip in to discussions and read a little but I don’t feel the need to read everything and keep on top of what’s happening.

Now that I do voluntary work in a music library I want to engage more with the world of music libraries. It’s a much smaller world and I am still new to it so I don’t know people and I have less to say about issues.

These changes prompt me to change my social media approach to reflect the new balance of my interests. However, it is a challenge to build a new network on a different topic and this has been made ten times harder by the disintegration of Twitter and the arrival of multiple alternatives.

The great migration

Since Musk acquired Twitter in late 2022 there has been a stream of people leaving and this has increased each time Musk says something outrageous. There’ve been several articles with titles like Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter and Requiem for Academic Twitter. Often those leaving Twitter switch to a different social media platform and this has stimulated some academics to study the migration phenomenon (eg Tracking the great Twitter migration and Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon). These studies tell you more than you ever wanted to know about social media users, but seem to end up with fairly mundane conclusions – people leave because they’re dissatisfied, they seek out their communities on the new platforms, their posting behaviour is influenced by the differences in configuration and functionalities of the new platforms.

Cory Doctorow is typically insightful in writing about social quitting. He reminds us that the social networks which preceded the Facebook/Twitter generation all went through cycles of boom and bust. Facebook and Twitter have had a much longer boom phase but each of them are now seeing contractions. We shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Others have cautioned that we should be circumspect when choosing a new social media platform. If it is owned by the same people or companies as those responsible for the failing platforms that we are now leaving then they are likely to suffer from the same problems.

Tweet from Stan Carey: I resisted Facebook and Instagram. I swapped WhatsApp for Signal when it was sold. No way in a hundred hells would I consider joining ThreadsDorothea Salo tweet: Nothing does a better job convincing me that my librarian colleagues are LEMMINSG than watching them rush to Dorsey-owned Bluesky and Zuckerberg-owned Threads.

 

 

 

 

Migrate to where?

LinkedIn. The path of least resistance for me would be to quit Twitter and reply on LinkedIn.  I’ve been there a while so have a strong network and I do find plenty of interesting posts and conversations to read and take part in. However, it is work-focused and I don’t see my broader interests reflected there.

Mastodon. I did set up an account here a couple of years back and put a small effort into engaging there. I found some people I knew with OA interests and tech interests. I can see benefits of putting more effort in to Mastodon but I don’t think it will be useful for my new interests in music libraries, and it is a smaller network with a narrower range of people. Some people are enthusiastic about Mastodon: Steve Royle recently explained his shift from Twitter to Mastodon, giving tips for how to get started there. Maria Antoniak has also written a helpful guide for Mastodon newbies. Hilda Bastian has written several blogposts about Mastodon, and how usage has grown, though her last one was over a year ago.

PostNews. A Twitter buddy recommended this site so I set up an account.  Its focus was on news coverage and its model was a bit different.  I didn’t look there often.  It has now closed down altogether.

Spoutible. This is quite US-centric and quite political (leftish). Its founder is Christopher Bouzy, a Black tech entrepreneur.  I like the appearance and the way it works but I haven’t found people there from the community I know.  I’d need to get to know a new group of people and that will take time and much effort.

Trust Cafe. A few years ago I had created an account on WT Social – a site set up by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia renown. I had an initial poke around but rarely visited the site. I see it has now changed name to Trust Cafe, but the old accounts have not yet migrated to the new site. Trust Cafe hasn’t been mentioned much as a Twitter alternative and maybe it is just too small. I’ll explore it a bit more, when I get time.

Tweet: 'hang on honey i just need to check my account on Twitter, Mastodon, [etc etc]'.

Threads. This is the site that Zuckerberg launched to rival Twitter. I setup an account there and it imported my network from Instagram, but this was quite a small network. I look at Threads a bit, mainly when I see adverts on Facebook for posts there. There are some interesting stories though nothing I want to engage with.  I can’t help the feeling that some of the stories posted may not be 100% factual. Jon Worth says that moving to Threads would be going from the frying pan into the fire.

BlueSky.  I found it easier to get started here.  The Sky Follower Bridge browser extension proved very useful, matching accounts on Twitter that I followed to equivalent accounts on BlueSky. Unfortunately it mismatched quite a few accounts, so I started following some randoms on BlueSky. Gradually I’ve added more people to my following list, and increased my followers, and BlueSky feels like a good experience now.

Comparisons. Several people have reviewed some of the new social media offerings, mainly looking at Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon. Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel writing in The Atlantic suggested that Threads is ‘Zombie Twitter’. They were writing in the very early days of Threads though. Jennifer Regala, writing on Science Editor was more enthusiastic about Threads but also liked BlueSky.  She found both platforms incldued people from her communities, but slightly preferred BlueSky. She was not keen on Mastodon, writing ‘Anything that complicated should not be considered social media from my perspective.’

David Gewirtz, writing in ZDNet, was a bit disappointed at the low number of active users in both Threads and BlueSky but suggests we need to be patient. He says that BlueSky has the most potential.  He has a soft spot for Mastodon and says it is ‘a little more complex and a little less inclusive than Twitter’ but it is solid enough, though slow going.

Excerpt from article by David Gewirtz: Had Twitter not launched first, and Mastodon had first mover advantage, I think Mastodon might have been huge. But since it's a late-to-the-party substitute solution that's a little more complex and a little less inclusive than Twitter, it's probably destined to be a bit of an edge system for the foreseeable future. That's not to say there's nothing to like, because it's nice. But it's not going to take Twitter's place as the voice of the online community overall.I frankly doubt anything will. Twitter may well have been of a time and place, and we may never see its like again.

Screenshot

Institutional accounts

Andy Tattersall has looked at why research organisations might stay on the platform and where they have moved to. There are many factors influencing the decision to stay or move. His spreadsheet (still growing) has details of more than 300 institutions with details of their accounts on different platforms. Strikingly, he says that the majority of these new accounts are inactive, so it seems institutions are hedging their bets – setting up in the new places but staying on Twitter for now.

Ned Potter has forcefully argued that academic organisations should leave Twitter, and provided a five-step plan for doing so. He says

By stopping our use of X we will be upholding our values, adapting 
to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform 
no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more 
impactful communications.

The library where I volunteer currently has a Twitter account – engaging with other music libraries and many choirs and orchestras. I’ve not seen a move away from Twitter among those communities, but it’s something we need to keep in mind.

Curating my network

Creating a network on social media platforms is a gradual, organic process which takes time. I read an interesting post by someone and decide to follow them. I see tweets by people at an event I’m attending and I  follow them. Bit by bit I become more connected. When I move to a new platform I start with nothing so I cannot expect to be immediately immersed in interesting posts and conversations. The Sky Bridge extension mentioned above was really useful for me, and perhaps that is one reason that I am finding BlueSky more rewarding. I think regular posting and interacting with other people’s posts are the best ways to become more embedded.

My decision

I’ve read accounts from many others explaining why they have left Twitter; until now I’ve stuck it out. But there’s a limit. Musk’s political comments are increasingly egregious and outrageous and I’ve reached the point when I must make a change.

I plan to focus on BlueSky with a bit of Mastodon too and occasional glimpses at Threads. I’d like to explore Spoutible and Trust Cafe more but realistically I may not have time.

I am not deleting my Twitter account. There’s simply too much conversation still there that I want to read. I intend to refrain from posting on Twitter, but I may find it hard to resist the occasional reply there. I will try out a strategy of politely asking authors of posts I want to engage with whether they are also on BlueSky or Mastodon, or if they have plans to migrate. Otherwise I will screenshot a post and repost on BlueSky.

I hope to see you over there one day soon – I am @franknorman.bsky.social on BlueSky.

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Can scientific productivity be optimized?

 

This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome! 

Black and white image of three people silhouetted on a mountain slope

It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries.

Actually, I’m not sure it is a truth, and I don’t know if it is universally acknowledged – I haven’t looked closely enough at the evidence – but it is a long standing and widely held assumption. However, research funders struggle to operationalise this assumption and the question of why that is the case is the focus of a stimulating recent paper in PLoS Biology from Kevin Gross and Carl Bergstrom on “Rationalizing risk aversion in science: Why incentives to work hard clash with incentives to take risks”.

Gross and Bergstrom bring an economic perspective to the question that provides an insightful framing for some of the wider issues that it raises. Here’s their abstract (with my emphasis and annotations):

Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet, much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting high-risk, high-return research projects. Why don’t the incentives for scientific discovery adequately impel researchers toward such projects? Here, we adapt an economic contracting model to explore how the unobservability of risk and effort discourages risky research. The model considers a hidden-action problem, in which the scientific community must reward discoveries in a way that encourages effort and risk-taking while simultaneously protecting researchers’ livelihoods against the vicissitudes of scientific chance. Its challenge when doing so is that incentives to motivate effort clash with incentives to motivate risk-taking, because a failed project may be evidence of a risky undertaking but could also be the result of simple sloth (I would add “or incompetence”). As a result, the incentives needed to encourage effort actively discourage risk-taking. Scientists respond by working on safe projects that generate evidence of effort but that don’t move science forward as rapidly as riskier projects would. A social planner who prizes scientific productivity above researchers’ well-being could remedy the problem by rewarding major discoveries richly enough to induce high-risk research, but in doing so would expose scientists to a degree of livelihood risk that ultimately leaves them worse off. Because the scientific community is approximately self-governing and constructs its own reward schedule, the incentives that researchers are willing to impose on themselves are inadequate to motivate the scientific risks that would best expedite scientific progress.

The authors’ analysis relies on a mathematical model which I confess I did not completely understand*, so I’ll spare you the details; (those who are more mathematically challenged will still get a lot from the paper if they confine themselves to the Introduction, the box on Hidden-action models and the Discussion).  What I did understand of the model in terms of the codification of risk, reward, scientific value, effort, resources and utility and the explanations of simplifying assumptions seemed reasonable and, notwithstanding the obvious risks of confirmation bias, the two key conclusions that emerged from it resonated with my sense of how research decision-making works:

“[…] scientists seem either unable or unwilling to devise institutions that motivate investigators to embrace the scientific risks that would lead to the most rapid progress. Our analysis here suggests that this state of affairs can be explained at least in part by the interaction between two key structural elements in science: the unobservability of risk and effort on the one hand, and the self-organized nature of science on the other.” 

The “unobservability of risk and effort” is more or less self-explanatory and accounts for the reliance on outputs such as publications as markers of achievement, which are to some degree beyond the control of the researcher. Demand for these outputs in the absence of an assessable record of the intelligence and invention brought to any research effort, is what leads many researchers to opt for safer, less-risky projects that are more likely to result in a paper, albeit one that reports a more incremental finding**.

The role of “the self-organized nature of science” needs a little more unpacking for those who haven’t read the whole paper. What Gross and Bergstrom mean here, I think, is that because the highly specialised nature of scientific endeavours relies so heavily on peer reviewers in the assessment of funding proposals, the key decision-makers have a strong internal sense of the risks attending project failure. They are therefore less willing than a hypothetical social planner charged with maximising scientific productivity to subject applicants to a reward regime that more punitively disfavours incrementalist approaches. The authors argue further that such hypothetical social planners cannot emerge in the first place because they would have to depend on researchers to determine how to value outcomes and would effectively morph into conduits for the collective view of the scientific community.

Several thoughts and questions occurred to me in the immediate wake of the paper’s findings. They are not fully formed, so I offer them only in the interest of provoking further discussion.

Any researcher who has been on the receiving end of a paper or grant rejection – which is pretty much every researcher – would be forgiven for asking themselves how much more punishment they deserve at the hands of Gross and Bergstrom’s social planner. Could it be that the current balance of risk and reward achieves the maximal level of scientific productivity that is commensurate with the desire to accord researchers a reasonable work-life balance? Personally, I don’t think I ever achieved any kind of balance during my time as a jobbing academic trying to carve out a career in research. Current efforts to incorporate research culture and the quality of the lived research process as part of assessment exercises spring from long-standing concerns about the risks and stresses imposed on researchers. One cost not discussed in any detail in Gross and Bergstrom’s analysis is the human cost (though I appreciate they deliberately narrowed the parameters of their model to answer a specific technical question and the human cost factors into the appetite for risk).

Also, is it so difficult to uncover hidden effort? Better line management within research performing organisations could track effort, and perhaps even reward it directly if sufficient intramural funds were available. Researchers would also feel less of a sting from failed grant applications if funders were more open about the uncertainties in decision-making processes that ultimately rely on human judgement; feedback that clearly flags applications assessed as of fundable quality but for which funds were not available could provide some measure of career protection for researchers back at their home institution.

Although Gross and Bergstrom dismissed their hypothetical social planner, Daniel Sarewitz has argued powerfully and provocatively for a more managerial approach to the organization of research, in part to tackle what he sees as the perverse inefficiencies arising because science is permitted undue freedoms to self-organize.

Elsewhere, Michael Nielsen and Kannjun Qiu’s long but very worthwhile essay “A Vision for Metascience” casts Gross and Bergstrom’s social planners as risk-taking “metascience entrepreneurs” empowered to achieve “scalable change in the social process of science. Their ideas for incentivising risk include (among many other interesting but as yet untested suggestions) funding by variance, where grant applications are funded not by being high scoring among reviewers but by polarizing opinion; or failure audits, where grant programme managers are fired if the failure rate of their funded projects drops (yes, drops) below 50%.

Conceivably, the UK’s recently established Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) also embodies an alternative form of the social planner. Modelled on similar Advanced Research Project Agencies in the US (e.g. DARPA, ARPA-E, ARPA-H), ARIA is essentially run by programme directors in a range of topic areas who have the authority to select and fund projects they believe will result in the most significant breakthroughs. I’m not aware of any study that has quantified the scientific productivity of the longer-established American agencies in comparison to more traditional mode of research funding, but their anecdotal (?) reputation was sufficient to persuade the UK government to bet on ARIA. I share the view that this a reasonable bet for the UK to take, even if the funding agency has yet to develop robust criteria to demonstrate its own worth.

A last thought on productivity to throw into the mix: a hidden assumption of the Gross-Bergstrom model is that all research funding is awarded competitively. But what would be the impact on productivity of an ecosystem where researchers were provided with a basic or background level of funding, enough for a single postdoc or research technician, guaranteed for 10 years, in recognition of their hard work? As I’ve argued elsewhere (and some time ago), such a regime could boost the productivity of the research funding ecosystem by reducing the wasted effort of submitting grant applications to funding systems  that have chronically low success rates. Ghent University’s introduction of a form of universal basic research funding is a tentative, small-scale step in this direction.

There are further, broader questions raised by Gross and Bergstrom’s paper. For example, is an analysis centred on individual economic actors weighing the balance of risk and reward in deciding which research projects to undertake the best way to explore questions of scientific productivity? What does it have to say about the impact of different institutional models, which not include not only the APRA/ARIA approaches mentioned above but also experiments in Focused Research Organisations (FROs), innovative academic-industrial fusions such as Altos Labs, or new types of research institution, such as Arcadia Science or Astera?

Finally, I’m not sure how useful it is to talk about maximising or optimising the productivity of science, given the immense diversity and complexity of its processes, outputs and impacts. That’s not to say that discussions of how to improve scientific productivity should figure out optimisation before any policy decisions can be made. Dare I suggest that more incrementalist approaches to improvement represent a more realistic and promising approach? We need to start somewhere – some already have! – and policy makers, no less than scientists, should be prepared to take risks. We will just have to work out the evaluation methods as we go.

I am grateful to James Wilsdon for a critical reading of a first draft of this blogpost.

 

Footnotes

*Although reasonably mathematically literate, I would have benefitted from a fuller description of the equations feeding into the model and suspect many other PLoS Biology readers would too. The Box on Hidden-action Models was useful though!
**One of the simplifying assumptions of the model that did trouble me was that studies resulting in “unpublishable outcomes”, presumably null or negative results, were assigned a scientific value of zero. This is not altogether unreasonable given that null results are rarely written up for publication because they are not rewarded. Journals in search of citations to buttress their impact factors strongly prefer positive results and researchers in search of jobs, promotion and funding, are strongly incentivised to publish in ‘top journals’. But in truth null or negative results are not valueless and their absence from the published research record impacts productivity because the lessons learned from such studies are not logged, leading potentially to unnecessary duplication of effort. If we are interested in understanding the productivity of scientific research, we need better measures of the value of null results, not just a deeper understanding of the tensions between risks and incentives.
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