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When to Say Yes

Posted on 30 November 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve been writing this blog for more than fourteen years now, incredible though that sounds, at least to me. I rarely look back at what has gone before and if I do, it’s mainly to check I’m not repeating myself. But, looking back recently I was struck by one post I wrote more than twelve years ago about the challenges of saying ‘no’. I can well recall the conversation with AN Other that prompted it. My own situation has changed a lot since then, having been a College Master for ten years and now formally retired. However, trying to make one’s mind up about what to do and what not to do is as much a challenge as ever. I recall one friend saying their choices were made on where their personal contribution could make most difference. The danger with that approach is that one can end up staying in a narrow area in which you are already an expert (although that wasn’t in fact true of him). In my wider work as in my research, I have always wanted to keep expanding my horizons.

Much of what I have done in my life has happened by accident rather than by conscious design. When I give talks about my career I try to stress that this is not always such a bad thing. Sometimes it kicks you out of a rut, sometimes it opens up new opportunities that you might not have actively sought out. In my research, I always tried to keep a ‘safe’ research strand going while I plunged into something new. This meant I had something to fall back on if the new departure failed to ignite for one reason or another. Sometimes I felt stretched beyond my comfort level and there is no doubt I started a number of lines that went nowhere. But, on the whole, I feel it was a good strategy.

So too with what might term extracurricular activities. I may be frequently described as a ‘champion for women’, but I had to start somewhere other than simply with a feeling of annoyance with the little things that were tossed negatively in my direction (many of which I’ve written about previously on this blog). This formal championing arose because I had been interacting with more senior women – notably Julia Higgins and Jocelyn Bell Burnell – about the disadvantages many female scientists operated under; I then found myself being nominated by them to take on chairing the Athena Forum (now I think no more, but it was about promoting women in science). And, in due course, Julia passed on to me an invitation to talk in Austria about the topic of women in science. I wrote about that meeting very early in the lifetime of this blog, and it was a fairly weird experience as I and other externals got caught up in their own internal Austrian issues, but it was also something of a baptism by fire to talk on a subject I had barely begun to master. However, necessity is the mother of invention and that first talk – and all the work I put into preparing it – stood me in good stead as my visibility in this space rose.

I say this as I try to get to grips with new issues in my retirement. The only way to get on top of a new topic is to put in the hours reading the literature, as any new PhD student will know. Often the challenge is where to begin, how to find out what is the ‘right’ reading given the volume of potentially informative material out there with a mere click of a mouse. How to get to the essence of a new problem when there are many voices, not all of which will be helpful or indeed trustworthy? Learning how to critique others’ writing is of course another skill the freshly minted researcher needs to master, but it is not easy from the get-go.

Again, as with trying to work out what tasks to take on, trying to work out whose writing or interviews to trust is something that can be facilitated by talking to others. They don’t need to be people who are in any way closely connected with you, but simply people who are willing to share wisdom and their own experience. In my current situation, they are likely to be the very same people who’ve roped me in to the matter in hand, but as a student they are likely to be your peers as much as your supervisor.

I always feel I ‘fell’ into policy when I was asked, to my surprise, to chair the Royal Society’s Education Committee, a role I took on in 2010. I had to do a crash course then, but it certainly stood me in good stead when I became Master of Churchill College, since I had learned a lot about school education (not something all professors are au fait with) during my 4 year stint as chair. The importance of a good education system for all ages and all abilities is something I continue to be both concerned and interested in. Hence my pleasure when appointed chair of the Department for Education’s Scientific Advisory Council recently, but also my involvement with other activities (such as chairing the Science Policy Educators’ Alliance, a grouping of relevant learned and professional bodies). In particular, and locally, I am currently exploring the situation regarding apprentices in the region in conjunction with key players in this space.

With the creation of Skills England, it has to be hoped that policy – and indeed funding – covering  the whole gamut of education and post-16 skills training will become more coherent. As has frequently been pointed out by many another expert, this is not currently the case. A recent HEPI blog is a case in point. I won’t be writing specifically about the work of the DfE SAC, as that would not be appropriate, but other aspects of the important topic of skills may well find their way into future blogposts as I delve deeper. Who knows?

Posted in Athena Forum, careers, committees, deficit model, Interdisciplinary Science, learning, Londa Schiebinger, macho, Project Implicit, Science Culture, Science Funding, social media, Unconscious bias, Universities | Comments Off on When to Say Yes

On Migration

Posted on 30 November 2024 by Henry Gee

‘Mr Blue Sky‘ is a cheerful pop tune by the Electric Light Orchestra. It is entirely unconnected with Bluesky, the social media phenomenon. It’s been around for quite a while, apparently. The social media phenomenon, I mean, although Out Of The Blue, the album by the Electric Light Orchestra that includes ‘Mr Blue Sky’ came out in 1977. But I digress. Bluesky (the social media phenomenon, please do at least try to keep up at the back), was engendered as recently as 2019 by one Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter (a different social media site), as an experimental platform that allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum users to customise their experience more flexibly than Twitter allowed. but has taken off since the Fall of Western Civilisation (was it really less than a month ago?) with the mass migration from TwiXXtit of many of its more — how can I put this? — ‘intellectual’ — habitués.

Twister was already a bit of a sinkhole. Back in the day, malcontents who wished to express their views had to find a piece of paper and write on it, venting their frustration, often in green ink, and using up every square millimetre of space, after which they’d have to find an envelope; address the envelope to someone (anyone!); buy a stamp, and mail it. In those far-off days when I wrote a science column in the Times (the real one, you know, in London) I’d regularly get mail like that. The sanest letters I received were from inmates at high-security mental hospitals. Not because those correspondents yet at large were necessarily even more dribblingly insane than those who had been incarcerated, but because those who had been locked up were, presumably, taking their medication. With Twittex, anyone at all could say whatever they liked, no matter how hateful, spiteful, ill-considered or loopy, and post it to the world at almost no cost. And they had to do it in 140 characters (ah, those were the days), a limit that doesn’t leave any room for nuance. To be fair, social media have always been prone to such afflictions, as those of us who remember Usenet groups will attest. On the plus side, Tixwart became a great place for people of shared interests to congregate and swap information. People such as scientists, who can rarely afford postage stamps, and, as it happens, mainly lean to the left, and that’s not only those who happen to be Jewish and celebrating Passover (oh, if you insist, here’s a link for the goys).

The clouds gathered when a tech squillionaire called Elon Musk, famous for electric cars and re-usable space rockets, took over Titter and renamed it ‘X’. The cheerful blue bird logo was shot out of orbit by Darth Vader’s ominously black X-wing (Star Wars enthusiasts will no doubt tell me that Darth Vader didn’t fly an X-wing, but I shall ignore them). Mr Musk took perhaps a more active role in the administration of the platform than was entirely appropriate. But it got worse. Mr Musk became rather intimate with the fifthcoming forthcoming next President of the U. S. and A., a person who was voted in by millions despite the fact that his relationship with the truth is, shall we say, elastic. The Fall of Western Civilisation election happened less than a month ago, and how things have changed. Not long after that seismic event I noticed that my tally of followers on X was falling. Looking back, I had not been accruing many new ones for a while. I didn’t think it was something I said, at least, not recently, but then twigged that people were leaving X and moving to Bluesky. I set up an account on Bluesky and now have 1,000 1,100 1,200 followers, a total that seems to be rising faster than house prices in London.

Frank has in these pages talked about alternatives to X for some while (most recently Bluesky), and not long after Mr Musk took over TwitWit I set up an account on an alternative called Mastodon, which, for some reason, hasn’t taken off in quite the same way, perhaps because it’s set up as a collection of independent sub-networks, rather than as a unified entity, but maybe because it is named after an extinct species of elephant. The transition from TwerpTit to Bluesky, on the other hand, is much simpler, perhaps because it was created by the same people. There is even an extension to Chrome which, with a bit of fiddling around, involving drawing a pentagram on the floor in chalk, sacrificing a goat to Ishtar, and earthing oneself to a radiator, allows one to find those of one’s followers on Twix who already have accounts on Bluesky.

I should say that other social media accounts are available (Frank lists some I hadn’t even heard of) and it seems I have five. Or maybe six. Being as I am a recovering palaeontologist, I can reliably count to two, but counting to three or more requires me to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. Each one of my accounts serves a different purpose. Here they are, with tally of my followers.

Bluesky: The trendy alternative to Twerpix. What XTwit used to be like. I have 1,200 followers and rising.

X: The Dark Side. I peaked at just over 3,000 followers. I still have 2,928. Clearly, not all have moved to BlueSky, so I shall be keeping an eye on it still and have no immediate plans to delete it, despite the Muskiness.

Facebook: The time-hallowed way of sounding off, though in a more relaxed way than Twitter. A space which, in my experience, is more for social than professional activities, my feed is forever clogged up with adverts and suggestions for pages to follow which, no matter how hard I try to remove them, keep coming back. I have 1,300 ‘friends’, and a separate page for promoting my books, which has 470 followers.

LinkedIn: Very much geared to professionals, this is not the place where people tend to post pictures of their cats. 1,407 followers and ‘500+ connections’.

Instagram: This very much is the place where people post pictures of their cats. Or in my case, dogs. 487 followers.

IMG_8533

A cat, recently. Also includes a dog.

Mastodon: A social media network that seems to have been eclipsed by Bluesky and is therefore arguably redundant. 48 followers.

These are clearly too many. I have resisted signing up to Threads, and TikTok is for tinies. I’d like to be able to encourage my followers on other platforms to move to Bluesky, but not all of them will. A good friend of mine on X said he wouldn’t move to Bluesky because, he said (and this is the cleaned up version) it was full of pompous sanctimonious self-important lefty scientists who were so up their own bottoms they’d settle down in there with a standard lamp, a comfy chair and a good book. So it’s clear that I am going to have to keep most of my social media accounts. Except possibly Mastodon. I think that species is  due for extinction.

I shall end with a cautionary note. Social media platforms evolve. Some stay around longer than others. Usenet groups are a thing of the past.  MySpace, anyone? Tumblr? Friendfeed? The Tale of Twittr is a cautionary one, and it’s possible, even likely, that Bluesky, too, will soon be riddled with undesirable mastodons  elephants elements. I have a suspicion that at least some of my more recent followers might be bots. Many seem anonymous; are sans profile picture or description; have no followers of their own; have made no posts; and (this is the suspicious part) seem to be following precisely 51 people.

The Electric Light Orchestra predicted this a long time ago. As the lyric to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ has it

Mr. Blue, you did it right
But soon comes Mr. Night creepin’ over
Now his hand is on your shoulder
Never mind, I’ll remember you this
I’ll remember you this way.

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What I Read In November

Posted on 29 November 2024 by Henry Gee

UntitledJasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy was given to me by a colleague, Mr C. S. of Borehamwood, for my entertainment when I was off work with depression over a decade ago. I cannot say why I picked it up now, but I am glad I did. It’s set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to  track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre.  Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty):

‘Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?’ A shaky live picture came on to the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear… ‘Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone … This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown.  The neo-surrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to winning until the police moved in …’

Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.

UntitledIsabella Tree: Wilding Something happened just after I finished reading this book that made me incandescent with fury rather cross. It was news reports from South Wales where homes and businesses had been wrecked by floods from Storm Bert, mere years after having recovered from floods set off by Storm Desmond [honestly, who thinks up these names? — Ed]. All the talk was of strengthening flood defences, which costs £££, when it seems clear that to me (nobody mentioned this on the news) that this is precisely what one should not do.

Ever since Victorian times, engineers have followed the mantra that surface water should be removed as quickly as possible. To this end they have drained marshes, wetlands and water-meadows, and canalised rivers into narrow, straight courses. So now, when rivers flood, the water doesn’t do what it once did — hang around in pools, soak into the ground, and meander. Instead, rivers, now confined by hard engineering, rise rapidly and overtop their banks.

The solutions are, tragically, close at hand, more effective, and much cheaper. Flood defences should be torn down, not built higher. Rivers should be allowed to relax. If necessary, people should be relocated to higher ground. At the very least, they should be discouraged from paving their front yards to make hard standing, so rainwater can soak into the ground. Trees should be planted on slopes to stabilise soil. Fields should be allowed to revert to wetland. Beavers should be reintroduced to dam streams, slowing river flow.

And if you, as a local planning officer,  really are going to be so idiotic as to allow developers to build on floodplains (the clue’s in the name — well, duh)  dictate that they don’t build yet more depressing estates of identikit boxes, but apply some design and engineering thought, and put them on stilts, with an undercroft, so the water can flow underneath. For goodness sake, Grand Designs has been on our screens for a quarter of a century, but for all that it’s had any influence, developers and planning departments obviously do things with their eyes shut. That nobody seems able to understand this is what makes me so angry. Oh, and farmers should allow unproductive or marginal farmland to go a bit wild at the edges. As Isabella Tree shows in this amazing and inspirational book, doing these things improves biodiversity as well as water quality, softens water flow and prevents flooding.

Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts.

The Burrells were up against it.

Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings.

Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning.

She also dispels two other big lies. One is the myth that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison.

Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of  its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig fo Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s frankly criminal Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste.

Rewilding your land seemed like a romantic dream. In current circumstances, discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.

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Chemistry

Posted on 27 November 2024 by rpg

I got distracted from what I wanted to do by looking for some cufflinks I’ve lost. They’re lovely—in the shape of Spitfires, and a present from Jenny.

And I got distracted from that task by discovering some old USB sticks that were full of stuff from before Covid. After tidying them up I went back to looking for the cufflinks, and found a sheet from a notepad with the essentials of the eggnog recipe I’d copied from (one of) my other site(s). That would have been back in September when we were still getting four or five eggs a day from the ladies.

I’d also added the essentials of another recipe, which also has something to do with a story on Magirism, but I’ll let you figure out which one.

None of this helped me find my cufflinks, but it did help me with the first thing I wanted to do, so I guess that’s a bonus.

Still annoyed about the cufflinks though.

Posted in 15MinutePost, chemistry, cufflinks, Don't try this at home, eggnog, Nonsense, saltpetre, wibbling | Comments Off on Chemistry

Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

Posted on 25 November 2024 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019, The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship was published, spelling out just how bad the environment was for would-be female entrepreneurs. She was blunt in the opening words of her introduction

“I firmly believe that the disparity that exists between female and male entrepreneurs is unacceptable and holding the UK back. The unrealised potential for the UK economy is enormous.”

There is no doubt that, in essence, excluding half the population from innovating and helping grow productivity has to be bad news. The Review stated that £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men. Even with a more modest aspiration of matching best-in-class comparator countries, if the UK were to achieve the same average share of women entrepreneurs, this would add £200 billion to the UK economy.  A guide from the British Business Bank directed at would-be female entrepreneurs, highlighted the biases of society that may make it so hard for them to obtain money from the Venture Capital sector. Whether VCs (approximately 90% men) are aware of their biases when making decisions is less clear.

In the five years since the Rose Report, it isn’t obvious that a great deal has changed. Indeed, if anything things seem to be going backwards.  According to data from the Invest in Women Taskforce, all-female founded businesses received just 1.8 per cent (£145m) of the total value of equity investment in the first half of 2024, a fall from 2.5 per cent in 2023.  But this group is not just collecting statistics. This week they have announced a £250M pot for female-led businesses, with allocations being decided by female investment decision-makers across the UK. When the call to create this fund was announced last September, it received strong backing from Rachel Reeves, the first woman to hold the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, who will be attending Task Force events.  The money in the new fund has come from major companies, including Barclays and Aviva. It should kick-start many an enterprising woman’s new company, opening up novel avenues and creating value for the economy. One has to hope that it will also kick-start all VC funders to start thinking seriously about who they fund and who they reject (and why).

Ensuring that aspiring female entrepreneurs have the same access to venture capital funds as their male colleagues, is not just a question of moral fairness, although it is obviously that. It is also important for the growth that the Government is committed to, by creating new businesses and solving problems that may be particularly important for the female half of the population, no small number of people. As one of the Vice Presidents of the European Innovation Bank, Lilyana Pavolova, stated in 2020

“it makes economic and business sense to ensure that women entrepreneurs gain access to the same opportunities for success as their male counterparts.”

Also back in 2020, A PNAS study showed that underrepresented groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, produced higher rates of scientific novelty than their majority counterparts. Worryingly, their novel contributions were shown to be more likely to be devalued and discounted. Without in any sense implying there is a ‘female’ way of doing science, every scientist, engineer, technologist and inventor will approach problems based on their whole life experiences. Sometimes this means they will tackle an issue from a different angle from their (male) neighbour because of their view of the world, and they see areas where innovation can make a big difference that others may perhaps miss. Whether it is underpinning science or upstream technology solutions, perspective will colour any individual’s approach.

One such upstream area is so-called femtech, an area in which companies focus on technology-driven products, services, and software designed specifically to address women’s health and wellness needs. These are typically headed up by women who spot the need and the niche for the novel product. The evidence shows that fundamental research into health problems that predominantly affect women – think endometriosis, where the data has been analysed – are under-researched and underfunded. This underfunding occurs despite the significant economic burden of the disease in terms, for instance, of days off work for those women who are badly affected by the disease.  Women will be very conscious of areas such as this, but femtech reaches far beyond disease. Data shows that slightly over 50% femtech companies are fully female-founded, a figure that can be compared with the 6% of high-growth UK companies which are fully female founded in other sectors. It is a high growth area but could grow more if venture capitalists were more willing to invest in such start-ups.

The money announced by the Invest in Women Taskforce is a welcome addition to the funding portfolio. While many women may not want to be treated differently and, in this specific case, in a sense more advantageously because they are women, the reality is that currently they are being treated differently already, but in the opposite direction. It is to be hoped that, as more people realise that women really are capable of becoming successful entrepreneurs, we will see wider VC funds investing in female-led start ups. And this will be to the benefit of everyone, including the Treasury. Rachel Reeves sees the value in funding female entrepreneurs for growth, innovation and productivity.

 

 

Posted in academia, Alison Rose, appraisal, ASSET 2010, Athena Forum, Austrian science, book review, careers, Equality, Evelyn Fox Keller, femtech, gender, History of Science, innovation, Invest in Women Taskforce, professional training, promotion, Science Funding, Women's Issues | Comments Off on Invest in Women: Venture Capitalists and Female Entrepreneurs

Bluesky again

Posted on 25 November 2024 by Frank Norman

Since my last post in September I’ve grown ever more fond of Bluesky. I look at ex-Twitter less and less. When I do go to Ex-Twitter I still see things of interest, and I retweet a few things, but I’ve not posted any original tweets there for a while.

Growth

Bluesky has grown both in the range of interesting people and posts there and in overall numbers (see this counter – it’s approaching 23mn users at the time of writing).  It feels like it’s the platform of choice for academics who want to leave Muskville. Bluesky is still developing new features, and I’m learning more about how it works.

Mainstream media have noticed its progress, and articles about Bluesky’s growth keep popping up.

Guides

Guides to migrating from Twitter and to using Bluesky are proliferating. I liked what Andy Tattersall said in this thread – he’s trying to encourage people to try Bluesky, but without badgering or guilt-tripping.

There is a guide for academics produced by Ned Potter, a librarian at York university and a couple of guides specifically for scientists, one made by Jonny Coates, preprint and research integrity advocate, and another made by academics Steve Haroz and Mark Rubin

Who to follow?

Starter packs are a feature of Bluesky that has helped its growth. These are curated lists of people/accounts. There is a starter pack for librarians that I found helpful and many more covering a wide range of topics. I also liked the Science Snark and Shitposters starter pack, highlighting posters with attitude. Most of the packs have a disciplinary focus – you can search this starter pack directory to see if there are any in your field. If you really trust the person who has curated the list then you can just blanket follow everyone on the list, otherwise go through and pick accounts you want to follow. Another useful tool created by Theo Sanderson allows you to find ‘people followed by lots of the people you follow’.

As well as following accounts you can try adding some feeds on topics to your profile. This spreadsheet, curated by Brian Krueger, tracks active science-based feeds.

The publishing world is slowly moving towards Bluesky. Some time ago Biorxiv created Bluesky accounts for medRxiv and each of the 24 bioRxiv subject categories. Nature Portfolio created a starter pack with all their editors. EMBO Press is there too while some others (Cell Press, Science, PLOS) have accounts but have not posted yet.

Tech tips

Funnies

I enjoyed this parody of a guide for new users, that I dubbed the Mornington Crescent guide to Bluesky.

Adam Sharp posted about the upset of not being included in a starter pack, which led to someone suggesting a Russell paradox starter pack, of all accounts which are not in a starter pack.

Warnings

Bluesky may not be everyone’s choice, and there’s no guarantee it will remain the flavour of the month.  There have been questions about its owners, and suggestions that strife/toxicity is inherent in all social media platforms, so we should not take too rosy a view.  The most encouraging point is that it has proved possible to move from one place (X) to another place (Bluesky), so if we’ve done it once then we can do it again.

Posted in BlueSky, Social networking | Comments Off on Bluesky again

Compose yourself

Posted on 23 November 2024 by Stephen

Wet Autumn Night - final photo

Apologies, this will be obvious to some, but I have seen enough so-so images on social media to convince me there are others who could post much better pictures if they took just a little bit more care. Smartphone cameras are so good these days that everyone is a photographer. But clearly, everyone isn’t a photographer.

So I thought I’d explain how I created the photo above, taken and edited on an iPhone 13 Pro (apart from one final modification, which we’ll get to t the end). I won’t go into massive detail, but assume people have at least looked at the editing functions available on the iPhone. They’re surprisingly powerful.

I was walking out of Senate House in London on a wet October night when I noticed a large pile of fallen leaves, a street made shiny by the falling rain, and the occasional pedestrian with an umbrella. I pulled out my camera and snapped the image below. I did this quite quickly, just waiting a few moments for someone with an umbrella to walk into the shot.

Wet Autumn Night - take 1
I held the iPhone close to the ground so that the pile of leaves would provide a foreground that screamed Autumn and frame the bottom of the shot. The railings on the right framed the picture on that side.

There’s quite a lot of empty, uninteresting space on the left side of the image, so I cropped closer. This also allowed me to position the pedestrian – the subject of the photo – close to the one-third lines that, for reasons that remain largely mysterious to me, helps to achieve a more balanced shot. It gives the subject room within the image and an interesting position.  Placing the subject at the edge of the frame tends to make for a less harmonious composition.

Wet Autumn Night take 3

The initial photo was also dark but the editing tools allow you to lighten dark areas in ways that are subtle enough to not seem unrealistic. There’s a lot of information captured on the sensor that isn’t necessarily displayed via the camera’s albeit pretty smart automatic settings. On the ‘Adjust’ tab of the editing suite, I hit the ‘Auto’ button (the one with the magic wand). This helped to lighten the shadows, and altered a few other settings. But you can go in and tweak further any of the settings available here. The main ones that I adjusted were to lighten the shadows even more (to about 82 out of 100) and to a a bit of vignetting, which darkens the edge of the image.

On the Filters tab, I selected ‘Vivid Warm’ to enhance the orange-brown tones of the fallen leaves.

Wet Autumn Night - take 2

The image achieved at that stage looked pretty good and I posted it on Bluesky, where it was warmly received (40 likes).

However, The presence of the black car driving past the pedestrian bothered me – it was a distraction. If I’d thought about it at the time, I could have waited a few seconds more for it to disappear into the distance. But I was in a rush.

Instead, I turned to the erase tools that are available within Adobe Lightroom (for which I pay £10 a month to have on my laptop and iPhone). These are AI-powered so all you need to do is roughly mark out the bit of the image that you want to remove and it will do a decent job of figuring out what should have been visible if the car wasn’t there. As you can see from the final image, shown at the top of this most, it remarkably good at this. This clever erase function is the best use of AI that I’ve come across!

And that’s  all there is to it! Except of course, it isn’t. It takes practice to see in your mind’s eye the image that you might be able to make of the scene in front of you. You need to think about where you put the camera so as to create the most interesting composition. Sometimes that also means waiting – for someone to walk into or out of shot (look out especially for clutter in the background), or for the sun to come out. You can correct or even erase a multitude of errors with the editing software, but it is more satisfying to start by capturing something close to the picture you intend.

Posted in science | Comments Off on Compose yourself

Life, Death and Tolkien

Posted on 17 November 2024 by Henry Gee

My recent post on Tolkien got me thinking about some more current issues. There are others who are better guides to Tolkien’s moral philosophy than I. However, the person who finally convinced me, many years ago, that capital punishment was wrong, was not a politician or religious leader, but a fictional character — Gandalf.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo declares to Gandalf that it was a pity that Bilbo had not killed the treacherous creature Gollum when he’d had the chance. ‘He deserves death’, Frodo says. ‘Deserves it!’ I daresay he does,’ replies Gandalf:

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

That was then.

More recently, the British Parliament has been asked to consider a bill that would legalise assisted dying. It has this debate every few years. However,  an increasing number of people are in favour of the idea that people who are terminally ill should be allowed to end their own lives at a time of their choice. The current bill introduces safeguards that are meant to prevent terminally ill people being subject to coercion. Safeguards include independent reviews by two clinicians and a high-court judge. Whatever the safeguards, however, there is an argument that people should be allowed to die with dignity.

Tolkien puts it very well in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, a kind of coda to The Lord of the Rings in which the hero, Aragorn, now more than two hundred years old, decides that the time has come for him to die. As a Númenórean — that is, a human, but of exalted lineage — he has been granted the grace to be able to do this. His wife, Arwen, is full of regret. She is an immortal elf who has traded her immortality for a mortal life, if a long one. ‘Take counsel with yourself, beloved’, Aragorn says,

and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.

Aragorn knows he will have to die, someday, but it will be at a time of his choosing, when he still has the capacity to do so. The passage also highlights the grief of those left behind, suggesting that although such grief is inevitable, it might be made worse when friends and relations are forced to watch a person die slowly and possibly in agony, losing first one facility and then another, and the greatest loss is dignity.

Aragorn’s words seem to me very wise and, in the end, compassionate. It is notable, though, that Tolkien puts such a speech in the mouth of the hero of his epic tale. Tolkien was a Catholic, and as such would probably be horrified by the idea of assisted suicide. Aragorn, though, has a kind of special license. As a Númenórean, he is also, in a sense, prelapsarian, the descendant of people who were never corrupted by the forces of evil in the world.

My own personal view is that we should not accept our fallen condition. Instead we should strive to regain that prelapsarian state. To that end, it should be a fundamental human right — perhaps the most fundamental — that a person has absolute and final governance over their own body. To be sure, we cannot choose whether to be born, or when. However, as if in compensation, we should have the absolute right to, say, have an abortion, change gender, or indeed, die, without the interference of religious leaders, judges or politicians.

I accept that you might not agree with me. And that’s your right, too.

Posted in assisted suicide, human rights, J R R Tolkien, Politicrox, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Life, Death and Tolkien

The Importance of Technicians

Posted on 17 November 2024 by Athene Donald

My last post discussed the ecosystem for those who consider themselves researchers and where it can go wrong if the incentives turn out to be perverse, however logical they seem on the surface. Today I turn to consider the technicians, who make many a lab run smoothly, keep the equipment running and often are the primary source of pastoral care for students who may be struggling. They frequently fall beneath the radar of decision-makers in a university yet can be the people who ensure the undergraduate teaching laboratories function and that the equipment gets fixed when a heavy-handed student has broken something vital. Their funding may be insecure: one fixed term contract followed by another, totally grant-dependent. Relatively few are supported centrally any more.

When I was a PhD student, the group I was in – not particularly large, but with several electron microscopes as their core research tool – there were three technicians, each looking after a different microscope, and a fourth overseeing the equipment needed for sample preparation. There was a workshop technician and a photographer (these were the days when slides were needed for talks and expert wet processing to produce high enough quality photographs for papers; in other words, long before digital processing, Photoshop and the like). All these technicians were there to help and several of them were an integral part of our evenings down the pub. As far as I recall none of them had degrees, although I don’t know what their qualifications were.

I interacted with all of them. One in particular stood out for me, not because he was the most sociable or outgoing, but because he was the one who kindly and patiently fixed the delicate piece of apparatus I kept breaking. I was embarrassed by my clumsiness, whereas he never seemed to express any criticism of my failure as an experimentalist. I have no idea what his background was, what his formal qualifications were, but he was an absolute wizard at putting things back together in his workshop. Some years ago, I went to his funeral.

Many years later, by which time I was running my own research group and had put behind me the dangers of actually touching equipment most of the time, I was interviewing for a mechanical technician to join our group. When I came to appoint the successful candidate, I realised he had the same surname as the hero from my PhD days. Sure enough, he turned out to be the son of the technician who’d looked after me so well all those years before. Subsequently, the son’s son also turned up in the department, although in a less skilled role. Three generations all skilled, all feeling this was a worthwhile career and that the work environment in the Cavendish Laboratory was somewhere they were comfortable.

However, technician posts like these can be hard to fill. It’s not a route that schools particularly highlight when discussing options (the paucity of school careers’ advisors is a problem in its own right). Historically, just as teaching was seen as an aspirational career for a woman who wasn’t going to go to university but could go to a teacher training college, so acquiring HND and HNC (higher national diplomas and certificates if the acronyms are unfamiliar) from your local technical college or polytechnic was seen as a good career move for men for whom university wasn’t an option (and I fear those are the correct gender stereotypes for, say, the 1950s).

That was back when perhaps only 10% or less of the population could get a university place. Times have changed, but the need for technicians has not. Some people will enter the technical workforce with a degree, sometimes even a PhD under their belt. This is not necessarily a satisfactory solution, as Paul Lewis highlighted in his 2019 report. He concluded that often a graduate does not have the correct skillset to complete a job, having too often got good at passing exams rather than ‘doing’ stuff. Additionally, a graduate may rapidly become dissatisfied with the role, feeling that the undoubted skills they do have are being underutilised. Career progression may be limited, which is also a disincentive to stay in the role.

The problem is not going to go away. The Talent Commission was specifically set up to look at the position of technicians in universities and research establishments (disclosure, I was one of the commissioners). Their report, published in 2022, highlighted that the university technical workforce was substantially an ageing population: around half of the technician population in universities were over the age of 50. Of these, almost half had worked at the same institution for twenty years or more. This means that, as these take retirement, a very substantial amount of knowledge will be lost. People like the technicians I worked with are in danger of becoming a disappearing breed.

In order both to celebrate technicians and to encourage institutions to support, mentor and promote the technicians they do have, the Technician Commitment was introduced in 2017, with over 120 signatory and supporter organisations to date. Of the different actions they want to see organisations undertake, one was to give technicians due recognition and a voice in decision-making. When I look at these expectations placed on employers, I feel guilty in particular that almost never did the technicians who did so much to enable a piece of research to come to fruition get included in the author list of papers I wrote.

A notable exception was one electron microscope technician who joined us upon retiring from industry: he had a PhD. I don’t believe the mechanical technician I mentioned earlier (long retired) would have had any expectation of becoming an author, but perhaps he should have done. His contribution to many a paper – by making all the sample holders that were so vital for the synchrotron experiments we carried out – was invaluable and not something the students could do. Furthermore, he made his contribution with few complaints, despite the fact that students almost invariably left things to the last moment before we had X-ray beamtime, so he would suddenly be inundated with requests instead of being able to pace things appropriately.

I hope PIs reading this will think harder about the recognition angle regarding any technicians they employ, as well as the wider terms of the Technician Commitment their institutions may have signed up to. I suspect it is not widely enough disseminated across institutions, so that those who work most closely with the key individuals in a research group know what is implicitly placed on their shoulders. If the technical role is to attract a healthier supply of incoming workers, it is in everyone’s interest that the job is made attractive.

 

 

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Tolkien and Loss

Posted on 16 November 2024 by Henry Gee

I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the most important themes in Tolkien’s work is loss. Loss of technological ability, loss of lifespan, loss of population, loss of — well, let’s not put too fine a point on it — grace, something that might have resonated with Tolkien’s Catholicism and (I think) inherent pessimism.

But there are more playful examples.

The most obvious is the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo stands up in a pub and recites a poem about the Man in the Moon, who decided one day to go to the pub (a favourite Tolkien pastime) where he discovers a sportive cow, a cat that plays the violin, a dog with a sense of humour, animated crockery and cutlery and so on … to which Tolkien adds a rare (and teasing) breaking-the-fourth-wall footnote, that only a few lines of this poem are now remembered. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1973 reprint, page 203), Iona and Peter Opie write of Hey Diddle Diddle that it is probably the best-known nonsense verse in English, which might explain why  ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’, before going on to list the various far-fetched theories as to its origin. Some things are, well, just nonsense.

There is a deeper theme here, though, and one that Tolkien, as a scholar of medieval literature, knew only too well — that the literature that survives from ancient times is a tiny fragment of what might once have been current, and that most tales were never written down. Take Beowulf, for example — a poem that Tolkien knew better than most. The only copy of Beowulf that survives is a late, written manuscript of what was in all likelihood a version of much older story, transmitted orally, whose origins are lost in the fog of the ancient North. The version we have contains hints of yet other stories, and quite a few words, that would have been well known to audiences at the time but of which no other record survives, speaking to a much larger, lost corpus of storytelling. Along with this is the tendency of tales, especially in an oral tradition, to get bowdlerised in each re-telling, progressively worn down until a nonsensical nubbin remains. After centuries of recitation, Hey Diddle Diddle was all that remained of The Man In The Moon. In the same way, Tolkien’s beautiful, powerful and sometimes frightening Elves, and tough, gritty Dwarves, if they were once real, survive only nowadays  as kitsch garden gnomes or filmy fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tolkien loathed Disney — it is the merest coincidence that The Hobbit came out in the same year as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — yet you could read Snow White as the ultimate adulteration of The Lord of the Rings, with Arwen becoming Snow White; Aragorn, the Handsome Prince; Sauron (or Galadriel!) as the Wicked Queen; the poisoned apple as the Ring; The Wicked Queen’s magic mirror as the Mirror of Galadriel; with all the dwarfs and so on as the supporting cast. One must of course beware of reading too much into what is after all a kind of parlour game rather than serious literary criticism.

In that sportive vein, though, and for reasons I need not articulate here, I was reminded of another nursery rhyme.

I had a little nut tree

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg

And a golden pear.

The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me

And all for the sake

of my little nut tree.

Anyone who likes me spends more time than is usual or healthy tolkien to themselves will immediately see in the silver nutmeg and golden pear an echo of the Two Trees of Valinor in The Silmarillion: silver Telperion and golden Laurelin, which, after their slaying by Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, produced, respectively, a silver flower (that became the Moon) and a golden fruit (the Sun). Nothing else would they bear.

But who was the King of Spain’s daughter, and why would she have gone to all that effort to visit one little nut tree? In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the Opies (this time on page 330) are much more specific than they were for Hey Diddle Diddle. They suggest that the rhyme may have celebrated a particular royal visit. The Opies write (page 331):

Edith Sitwell in Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) pictures Lady Bryane, governess-in-ordinary to the young Princess Mary and then to Elizabeth, singing this song to her charges, and remembering a black and terrible shadow, the shadow of Juana of Castile the mad ‘King of Spain’s daughter’, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506. [my emphasis]

Juana of Castile (daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) is known to have visited Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) in 1506. There was a family connection: Juana was the sister of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Juana’s visit, however, was unscheduled. Her ship, sailing from Flanders to Castile, was wrecked on the English coast. As if matters couldn’t get any worse, relations between Juana’s husband Philip and father Ferdinand were at that time extremely strained. Civil war almost broke out to decide who would rule Castile. Although Philip and Ferdinand settled their differences, it suited them both to declare Juana, the legal heir to the throne, as mad, and have her confined. She remained locked up until her death in 1555, aged 75. Whether Juana really was mad, or her madness was a convenient fiction to get a meddlesome female out of the way, is in question. But the story of her madness had a wide currency, and one can see that a memory of her visit to England, combined with the shipwreck, would have cast a shadow.

One is tempted to wonder whether the whole story of Juana of Castile became infused in Tolkien’s mind while working on his legendarium, so that, perhaps, and knowing how his mind worked, the back-story to I Had A Little Nut Tree really relates to the dark, extremely dark, definitively dark visit of Melkor and Ungoliant, who came to Valinor specifically to seek out the Two Trees and kill them, and the story only became attached to Juana as a matter of Tudor historical revisionism.

I do like parlour games like this. Whether they have any literary merit is questionable.

Posted in J R R Tolkien, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Tolkien and Loss