REF Nightmares

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Athene Donald

In a moment of frivolity I sketched out how a REF committee in a dysfunctional department might pan out. As chair of my own local REF committee, I am delighted to say my own  experiences bear no relationship to this sad state of affairs, however complex our discussions may get.

It’s been a long time since I’ve visited  the Department of Paintball Studies, but I thought it was time to drop in to see how they were progressing with their preparations for the REF (Research Excellence Framework for non UK readers; what follows may seem a little parochial).

Tempers were decidedly frayed at the last departmental committee meeting discussing progress on their submission, as every element seemed to cause friction. The long-running argument about which sub-panel their Unit of Assessment was to be entered for had been resolved some months ago by a diktat from on high: Sports and Exercise Science it was to be. No one had actually quite come out and said ‘You, Engineers? Ha!’, but the silence every time the Head of Department had hinted that some of his staff thought that was where they belonged had been deafening. Ultimately, those parts of the department most opposed to this choice had subsided into irritated acquiescence, but it clearly is doing nothing to improve the atmosphere when proposed outputs are being scored, since certain individuals have not spoken to each other since the decision had been made.

Even if everyone was on speaking terms, it was always going to be a challenge trying to assess how a rather bad monograph on the relevance of paintballing to help unravel the philosophy of aggression and war compares with 2 highly technical outputs on the trigger action and nozzle design of paintguns, (well regarded by the 3 people who have read the papers and gone on to cite them, but otherwise fairly invisible). This is made all the worse as these topics do not sit comfortably under a Sports Science umbrella. On the other hand, Dr Ogle, who had spent much of the last year working up – and even publishing – ideas on the comparative value of using paintball gear versus beachballs (accompanied by the requirement for females to don bikinis), felt very smug that his work fitted right in to a ‘sporting’ panel. Consequently he expected to get a set of straight 4*s ( although a ghost of the phrase ‘dream on’ could be heard floating across the committee room sotto voce every time he showed signs of triumphalism on this score).

The 10 page document released by ‘the centre’ regarding how diversity issues should be included in the Environment Statement had the Head of Department spluttering into his coffee. His imagination was running riot at the idea that his entire department might beat a path to his door demanding maternity leave, something his brain had clearly not got to grips with previously. Dr Jobsworth deftly managed to defuse the situation by pointing out that only one of the women in the department was under the age of 50 and therefore likely to be ‘at risk’ of doing such a thing.

Of course the other contentious issue in the Environment Statement was provoked by the need to demonstrate ‘leadership’ from individuals in the department. The trawl for such metrics has clearly proved something of a challenge. One of the professors can list a whole page of strong examples – with accolades such as election to the National Academy for Leisure Activities, winner of the coveted Botham Medal for Recreational Excellence, and Plenary Lecturer at last year’s International Conference on Managerial Sports held in Hawaii to his credit. Most of the rest of the department can’t even lay claim to a poster prize or travel grant, as I have heard the PVC with responsibility for the REF point out with distinct sourness as she groans over some of her colleagues’ academic weaknesses. Even the latest recruit to the department, hired as an academic superstar, failed to capitalise on his alleged plethora of media contacts to nail the 6am Alternative Sports slot (broadcast on the first Saturday of each month) on the local radio programme that he had boasted about at interview.

The Impact Case studies quite clearly have the potential to be the most divisive element of all. The absence of a firm grip on reality by several academics was very obvious while I was in attendance. One member wants their conversation with an employee of ‘Britain’s the Toymakers’ about the accuracy of rifles on their plastic soldiers to be written up as an example of the societal impact of his work about the ratio of internal to external bore dimensions on paintball guns.  This conversation actually took place some time before the company was bought up by a US-based firm in 1997, and so sits outside the 15 year time span allowed anyhow; despite this he has by now been refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer for some months. Another is claiming huge public engagement metrics as a result of once taking his son (but not his daughter) to a local paintballing range and giving an ex tempore talk about his research when standing next to the coffee machine to a bemused audience of other parents. He is trying to link this event to the ‘extreme popularity’ [sic] of the activity for corporate team bonding events; unsurprisingly the rest of the department are unconvinced.  They do have at least one strong case: the design of spray nozzles was indeed influenced by a patent produced by a member of the department and he has a letter from one of the manufacturers to say so, albeit this letter neglects to mention any monetary value to the supposed benefit and so is a bit thin on metrics to determine ‘reach and significance’.

After an hour or so of listening to the wrangling and ill-tempered conversations I was only too glad to make my escape to my own REF panel. It is always good to be reminded just how delightful and rational one’s own companions are.

Posted in Research | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Being Distracted in Paris

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Athene Donald

It’s not so long ago that I wrote about the lack of opportunity one typically has at conferences to appreciate the interesting places one gets to visit. As a counter to that slightly depressed commentary, I should add that I have specifically had some brilliant trips to Paris over the years, associated with work (as well as other trips such as my honeymoon!) although not, in most cases, actual conferences. Paris is in my view an amazing city; a good size to be able to walk all around – unlike London or New York – and I have always felt very safe there, although I’m sure there are bits that it might be less wise to visit. For the last few years – aside from a couple of wonderful trips courtesy of L’Oreal – ESPCI (which is one of the Grandes Ecoles in Paris) has been the excuse for an annual autumnal visit, as I serve on their International Steering Committee (ISC).  Previously, in the wake of my last 2 trips to ESPCI, I have talked about the situation for women in France and the rather special education that students receive at ESPCI, but this time I’d like to remark on the cultural side of my trip.

Each year, ESPCI not only works the ISC hard, but also ensures we get a bit of ‘play’ and some excellent meals in famous restaurants and even, one year, on a rather damp Bateau Mouche. These events tend to start late in the day after a hard day’s work and run long into the night, at least by my standards. It makes for lengthy and tiring if rewarding days. In previous years the ‘play’ component has consisted of trips to a couple of museums and a concert. This year we were treated to a guided tour of the Paris Observatory, where we were shown around personally by James Lequeux, described as ‘astronome émérite à l’Observatoire de Paris’ on the web (who also happens to be the father of the ESPCI’s Scientific Director François Lequeux and, for any neutron scatterers amongst my readers, the brother-in-law of Henri Benoit).

We got to clamber around on the roof – with fine views of the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon and other notable churches extending as far as Sacré-Coeur on the distant horizon – and look at the impressively large Brunner refractor telescope housed in its purpose-built dome. The building itself predates the Greenwich Observatory by several years: the Paris Observatory was built in 1667-72 and is the oldest observatory in the world, built during the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV. Greenwich was not founded until 1675. It is an impressive structure with a wide range of interesting objects on display. Many of these are, as one would expect, directly relevant to the development of observational astronomy, but some also relate to terrestrial surveying. Triangulation neatly explained by triangles, for instance, in some early mapping studies, and a coloured map of France based on Cassini III’s measurements (1756) is also on display. In this context it should be noted that four successive generations of the Cassini family acted as the first four Directors of the Observatory: Cassini I (Giovanni Domenico) 1671-1712, Cassini II (Jacques) 1712-56 , Cassini III (de Thury) 1756-84 and Cassini IV (Compte de Cassini) 1784-93. These dates refer to the periods when they were Directors, not their lifetimes.

Casssini2

1810 sculpture of Cassini I (Jean Dominique Cassini) prominently displayed at the Paris Observatory.

Not having made a study of the history of astronomy, my knowledge was sketchy and, as I discovered, very Anglo-centric. It’s always good to be reminded that England, or in this case Greenwich, is not necessarily the centre of the universe: the French have their own meridian, a brass line reaching across the ‘Meridian Chamber’, whose position was first established in 1667 as the observatory was set up. And outside the north-facing window is a fine straight road continuing the line of the meridian for a fair distance. When I asked one of the other (French) members of the party about the meridian, he instantly got out his iPhone to check the web for more information and came back with the fact that the English and French worked out a compromise about the meridian to the effect that the English could ‘have’ zero longitude but would have to convert to meters. If true, I think devilish British cunning came into play here, as miles are still alive and well in much of our countryside, but I haven’t found this story myself so maybe I was being wound up. In fact it wasn’t till 1884 that the zero meridian was finally determined to be situated at Greenwich, after an international conference (largely swung, as far as I can find out, by the Americans who had already adopted the British rather than French meridian).

Most of the objects on display were down to one or other of the Cassini’s, with Cassini I’s map of the moon’s surface (including a non-existent heart-shaped feature and a moon maiden: these, we were told, may have been in tribute to his wife), many instruments and the later Cassinis’ work on surveying all on display. But the object which most took my fancy was a copy of Newton’s Principia given to him by Edmond Halley, and with a dedication from Halley to Cassini I (you can see this in Figure 1 here but we got to see the pages open in a display cabinet). What we were told by Lequeux was that this book was presented by Halley to Cassini I in gratitude for Cassini having given Halley the idea that comets might return, shortly before the comet that bears his name was discovered. When I tweeted this fact the next morning, historians of science were less convinced that what I was told was true, with a swift response coming that the idea was actually due to John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal who was based at Greenwich; subsequently there was a hint of a retraction of this point of view.

I can’t comment further on this, as a quick search on the web does not substantiate the anecdote. What is well known is that Principia was not a book that made much of an inroad into French thinking until well into the 18th century, when it was translated into French by Emilie du Chatelet, who was Voltaire’s mistress and invited Voltaire to come and live with her and her husband in an aristocratic ménage-a-trois. She is one of those rather invisible women of science from the past who – like Mary Somerville  and Ada Lovelace – really came into her own when getting her teeth into a job of translation. Then she could take the original work and weave in more ideas of her own, as described in Patricia Fara’s book Pandora’s Breeches.

The presence of the Principia, and other notes on display nearby associated with the Dutch scientist Christiaan Hugyens, served to remind me just how international science was back during the 17th and 18th centuries, something at least briefly impeded later by the French Revolution and its aftermath but not as much deterred as one might have expected by the relative difficulties of travelling at the time. Young gentlemen like Halley were expected to go on a ‘Grand Tour’, and if he happened to drop in on the Paris Observatory, perhaps stay there for some weeks or months, that was regarded as absolutely fine. Hugyens, meanwhile, was an early FRS despite being based in Paris and The Hague and mainly simply in correspondence with Londoners like Hooke and Newton.

So, for once, my work-based trip gave me an opportunity to get to grips with some history of science, as well as fulfilling my main role for ESPCI. I got to see some fascinating objects, and learned how uncritical my thinking had been about Greenwich’s central role in our astronomical and nautical past. However, I appreciate by writing this as such a novice in the topics I touch upon, despite having tried to check my facts I am laying myself open to correction on many fronts from the historical perspective. Please take it simply as a homage to some amazing bygone scientists.

Posted in History of Science | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

To Blog or Not to Blog

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Athene Donald

The challenge of using social media as a way to overcome the frequent invisibility of women in science was at the heart of the recent #SoLo12 Women In Science session organised by Seirian Sumner and Nathalie Pettorelli (see the Storify here). Their aim for the session was to discuss how social media could help bring women out of the shadows; the collection of blogs prepared in parallel with the physical session,which have been written by women at all stages of life, highlight some of the positives as well as the challenges of using these media to raise one’s profile (they are all listed under ‘News’ on this site).

Looking back, it is painfully clear that women’s place in the history of science is small, and is perceived to be even smaller than it actually was because people too easily downplayed the contributions that were made.  A series of recent events have focussed on the historical situation, such as those at the Royal Society (covered here by Ed Yong)  and a recent meeting of the Women’s History Network (described here). Lurking in the opening sentence of this paragraph is also that only-too-familiar spirit of unconscious bias, so that where women did play a part, their contribution was often minimised by those around them who were perhaps unused to crediting women with anything beyond being decorative. In consequence, their contributions have never re-emerged from the shadows. But, what is past is past and today we need to worry not only about the women already contributing to fantastic discoveries in science, but those who are just setting out on a path through scientific education and their early careers. We need to make sure that that low visibility does not persist.

Hence the need for the #SoLo12WIS session last weekend which took up these themes and considered issues such as:

  • Are there risks in openly identifying yourself as female?
  • How can social media help raise your profile?
  • What are the wider benefits for your career?
  • How do you begin?
  • What is the purpose of blogging?

If you want some excellent reading about why women should be using social media, and what they need to be aware of before embarking on such an adventure, I strongly recommend you browse the diverse collection of views represented by the various associated blogs. One of the more recent ones comes from the US-based FemaleScienceProfessor, who was one of my own early role models as I set out on my blogging career.  She it was who introduced me to the idea of blogging as a form of online mentoring, an idea I love; an idea which also provides yet another reason for women to jump in and blog, since your reach can be much wider (if unknown) than face-to-face mentoring can provide.

Women may indeed be more prone than men to see risks in writing under their own names, and in some cases clearly with extremely good reason (Rebecca Watson’s name was mentioned in this context at the session; she has been the subject of much disgusting vitriol). But women may also simply be too risk-averse to start blogging, fearing less concretely that they ‘aren’t up to it’ or ‘they wouldn’t know what to say’. I know some women, at all stages of their careers, who have expressed anxieties along these lines and to some extent the only way to overcome it is to try something out. The blog can always softly and suddenly vanish away, like a boojum, if it turns out not to work for you – but you will never know if you don’t try.  Based on what I’ve learned in the last 2+ years of blogging I would say benefits I hadn’t seen coming include that I’ve improved and diversified my writing skills and found a brand new set of lovely online acquaintances, as well as had a lot of fun.

However, there are other subtle questions that underlie the question of to blog or not to blog. If you start a blog, what then? How do you get a readership? Do you have to do that dreadful thing ‘self-promote’ in order to make sure people read it and is that anathema for many would-be bloggers (as for women in other instances as I discussed here)?  What follows from here on is my own personal experience; maybe others will not relate to this but, as a senior woman who is expected to be past the stage of nerves and reticence, let me speak out. I found it painful to self-promote at the outset, but I have more or less got inured to doing so through Twitter. But as recent experiences showed me, there is more to it than just that, and support from friends is vital in keeping fighting the good fight.

At this point let me introduce a different thread of recent events in the blogosphere: The Good Thinking Society’s Science Blog prize, announced a few weeks back. This is, as far as I know, the first of its kind in the UK and with a prize of £1000 not to be sniffed at. Entry was by self-nomination, so it did not need the ‘great and good’ to nominate you; it needed you to have enough chutzpah yourself to apply. The shortlist was announced this past week and I am thrilled, not to mention surprised, to find myself on it. I am also delighted to find there are several other women on it: Dorothy Bishop, Suzi Gage and Kat Arney, this last as part of a trio of bloggers writing for Cancer Research.  I remarked on this visible female presence on Twitter, commenting that in the light of the anxieties expressed about blogging at #solo12wis it was good to see women coming through on the shortlist. Explicitly I said

In light of issues raised at #solo12wis great that 3/10 women on Good Thinking Society’s Science Blog Prize shortlist

(which was inaccurate given the Cancer Research’s Blog involved Kat Arney, although I hadn’t twigged that at the moment of tweeting, so the number should have been 4 – to make it 4/12)

But it’s encouraging anyhow given some offline discussions I’d had with reticent women

To which Ed Yong (another name on the 10-strong shortlist) replied

As someone who acts as a role model for said reticent women, i think you count twice 😉

Which was very kind of him, but based on an entirely false assumption in this case as I pointed out

Thanks but who said I wasn’t one of them? I had to be encouraged to apply …

A point confirmed by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore   and Uta Frith

I can confirm reticence was demonstrated and persuasion was necessary.

What is the moral of this story? I think it’s at least twofold. Firstly, the support – or mentoring – of others is hugely important for us all, and can be the make-or-break difference in some instances and not just in this narrow sphere of blogging. Sarah-Jayne and Uta approached several women bloggers they knew to encourage us to apply, recognizing all the factors I described previously that tend to hold women back from ‘self-promotion’. It was not merely in the abstract I mentioned in that earlier post, that the blogging prize’s rules of self-nomination might deter some women: I had felt that barrier myself.

I am sure it doesn’t need to be women encouraging women, as it was in this case; it wouldn’t surprise me to know Ed Yong himself had done something similar with his circle of female blogger friends. What is needed is the encouragement that one isn’t behaving as a ‘naughty little girl’, impertinently pushing oneself forward and stepping out of line. Early societal messages received by young girls somehow teach so many that it is not appropriate to self-promote, although it probably isn’t consciously imposed or even consciously received.  I certainly know that I felt very uncomfortable filling in a self-nomination form that required me to write down why I thought my blog was so great, and I wouldn’t have done it without encouragement.

The second ‘moral’ is equally important: just because one is senior does not preclude feelings of anxiety, reticence or general lack of self-confidence lurking beneath what may look like a calm exterior. I’ve said this previously about impostor syndrome; what I’m describing here is different but it is a close relation of that complaint. Those setting out on their careers should realise one of the key differences between themselves and those further up the ladder may be that you learn to control and mask anxieties as time passes, not that they vanish overnight on some joyous occasion. I would guess that some specific fears probably do fade away but others never do. Comparing myself with those around me, I suspect that every individual has a different spectrum of activities that still seem terrifying long after others have paled into insignificance. I would also speculate that women are no different from men in this, but women are more likely to allow themselves to be paralysed or held back by these anxieties whereas, the encouragement to risk-taking to which boys and young men are often exposed may make it easier for them to trample on their fears. So, anxious women out there, I guess my take-home message is

‘find supporters, take risks and stamp on those fears’

Advice I will continue to try to follow myself.

Note This post is cross-posted on the SpotOn website here.

Posted in Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments

To Begin at the Beginning

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Athene Donald

It seems obvious: any piece of writing should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But how often have I heard the lack of structure moaned about by those folk who have to read some prose, in particular supervisors reading their student’s work. Not infrequently I have been given a draft manuscript which has seemed to meander all over the place without obvious structure. The discipline of structured writing is often missing from our (English) education system and science students early on in their careers are given little opportunity to write extended prose on which to hone their skills. Getting to the stage of PhD thesis-writing without having had opportunities to practice their literary skills on more modest pieces of text can be a formidable challenge for an anxious student and it’s not surprising some of them struggle.

Clearly, any thesis should have an introduction and literature review to begin with, a middle meaty bit where the description of methods and all those fascinating results (even null results) are described; finally there is the ‘end’, some conclusions to wrap the whole thing up and some imaginative (possibly even fantastical) ideas and speculations about what could be done next by any succeeding student, building on what has been teased out in the thesis.

If writing a novel – say a whodunnit – it seems pretty obvious you need to start writing at the beginning, set the scene and introduce the cast of characters, work through all the complexities of the plot designed to obfuscate just Who Did Do It, and finally have the denouement which Reveals All. Although I have never attempted to write a novel, I find it hard to imagine not writing the chapters in that order. To do so would be immensely challenging to keep consistency of the plot: little clues need to be introduced at the correct moment so they can be developed later; characters have to mature and grow in the text as they would in real life.  Maybe it is possible to write brief vignettes out of order, descriptive passages without key parts of the plot lurking within, but could one write large chunks of the end before the beginning? As I say, I find that hard to imagine.

However, when it comes to thesis writing, I find students often start in the middle. For them, at least some of them, it seems to work. Perhaps they want to start with their results so they know if there are holes that need to be plugged with further experiments; perhaps they want to start with something simple like the experimental methods chapter while they try out their composition skills. If this works for them, well and good. As with so many things in life, there is no single right way to tackle a thesis and far be it from me as a supervisor to impose some rigid structure which merely paralyses rather than assists them. But, and of course there is a but or I wouldn’t be writing this, it does make it hard for me the supervisor trying to critique the writing as it lands on my desk non-sequentially.

If the results are written before the methods, then how can I be sure the methods will actually contain all those vital little bits of detail that certainly haven’t appeared in the results chapter?  A confident student can assure me that of course they know they need to do this but, with deadlines approaching and the student getting ever more stressed, those small points may ultimately escape their attention.  If the literature review, because it can seem straightforward verging on the boring, is left to the end, then all those cross references during the discussion may get hopelessly entangled not to say mangled. It is embarrassing if it is one of the examiners who picks up, either that crucial references are completely absent or, more commonly, the papers listed in the bibliography have got garbled. Modern software ought to make this easy to keep a check on; but attention to detail can get mislaid in the final, frantic push to submission.

So, I still try to nudge students to the linear model. To begin at the beginning so that all cross references are easy to make, back to their first appearance – by reference or section number as appropriate; to maintain a steady progression through experiments of increasing complexity until, as in the whodunnit, the ultimate denouement reveals the coherent story which brings the disparate chunks of work to a logical(ish) conclusion.

I should end by pointing out that these remarks do not relate to any current student I am supervising, or indeed to any particular student from the past. They are general remarks based on reading many theses over the years and were provoked by talking to Elizabeth Simpson, a retired scientist-cum-writer from Imperial College, whom I met last week at an evening celebrating science and mathematics at my old undergraduate college, Girton College, of which she was also an alumna. Being back in the college certainly took me back to my own Cambridge beginnings.

Girton

I haven’t been back to Girton more than a handful of times since I’ve been on the academic staff in the University, and it was definitely a case of Memory Lane, both in terms of the sheer atmosphere and familiar architecture, and the faces I saw there. The tutor who had fined me (the vast sum of £10 I believe) after my 21st birthday party – shared with about 10 others –got out of hand in the very same Stanley Library in which I was now called upon to talk about the joy of physics; she was there! The long echoing corridors felt very much the same, down which the sound of girls sobbing (only girls, it was at the time a single sex college) during exam season would echo sending shivers up the spines of those who had not yet succumbed. And, unbidden, the memory flooded back of my own first timid entry into the college back in 1970 when power cuts, I think due to striking power workers, meant my admission interviews were conducted by candle light and we dined off cold spam. That was my beginning in Cambridge. Perhaps it didn’t look auspicious at the time, but it has led to some excellent times in the more than four decades since!

 

Posted in Communicating Science, Research | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments