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The Man In The White Suit

Posted on 11 November 2024 by Henry Gee

I had to write something down on my blog or I’d explode. It’s all about built-in obsolescence; the rate of technology increase; and how technology manufacturers use their customers as free beta-testers rather than taking time to release products that stand the test of time.

I have been through various iMacs, but my most reliable and trusty iMac was until recently a 24-inch machine that was made in 2009 and now runs OSX Lion 10.7.5, which is the tippiest toppiest OS that it can handle. It’s been the stalwart of my home music-making for years. Part of the reason was the profusion of USB-A ports on the back, and all — and this is vital — an audio input, and a CD burner. Thanks to this it’s been a breeze to make and produce music on this machine, including two albums released on Apple Music and other streaming platforms, using the inbuilt Garageband (that’s GB 2011, version 6.0.5).

I’ve always known that the day would come when I’d have to replace this machine. Lion 10.7.5 is as sophisticated as the poor thing can manage, and browsers don’t work properly any more. The CD burner has conked out.

THOUGHT#1 What have people got against burning one’s own CDs? Why do you have to upload music to the Cloud, which, as one IT professional told me, means Someone Else’s Server? (And I used to able to watch DVDs, too… that facility conked out years ago. Now you have to stream whatever Apple or Netflix or Amazon deign to make available).

I guess I could still spend £££ on an external CD burner if I really wanted to. But there’d be a learning curve and software and drivers and compatibility issues…

… but my old iMac still has that external audio input, which meant that I could record audio direct to Garageband without an interface. And I could save my projects to a USB stick. And, oh yes, burn a CD. The final knell fell a few days ago when I found I could no longer upload music to Soundcloud.

Luckily I have a second iMac, the one I use for social media and writing and other stuff. (For the day job at the Submerged Log Company, everything is kept separate, on yet a third computer, which is a PC). The second iMac is also 24-inch but was made in 2021. It also has Garageband, but I hadn’t used it, as the only physical way in to the machine is by a pair of Thunderbolt ports (equivalent to USB-C). There is still an audio out… but for how much longer, I wonder?

So this weekend I bit the bullet. I did a very necessary clear-up of my files on both computers. I then put everything I needed from the old computer on to a USB-stick. First hurdle — I had to get an adapter cable with USB-A on one end and USB-C on the other.

THOUGHT#2: what was so wrong with USB-A that they had to change it, necessitating my spending £ on adapter cables?

Second hurdle: I ported my existing Garageband projects over and opened the new Garageband. Amazingly enough they all worked… except for the inbuilt instruments, such as drums. This necessitated downloading lots of software. Which refused to work. Aargh.

That’s when I realised that the newness of my new Mac is relative. It is four years old, and so is its version of Garageband. So I upgraded the software to OSX Sequoia 15.1, and Garageband to version 10.4.1. After that I could download all the drums and so on and my existing projects sounded more or less OK.  However, there is a learning curve, as the new Garageband has a lot more features, and I have yet to find all the bits I’m used to.

I have yet to plug in my remote USB keyboard (using a new adapter cable, naturally) and fully expect that there will be much swearing and gnashing of teeth before it works properly.

There remains the issue of the lack of an audio input. My entire system has been assembled and indeed predicated on an audio input. I have an audio sound mixer. I have an audio monitoring mixer. I tend not to use software instruments — I have a rack of old-fashioned keyboards, and occasionally record voices and guitars and other stuff — so I need audio input.

The workaround here was the purchase of an audio-to-USB-C interface (one of these) supplied by my old friend Mr M. F. at PMT in Norwich. As an act of defiance I didn’t order this kit online but went into an actual shop and, you know, actually bought it, from an actual assistant (my friend Mr M. F. as above) and we had a Good Old Chat.

I haven’t plugged this interface in yet. I fully expect to have to download software and drivers and will have compatibility issues, because nothing, but nothing, ever works the way it is supposed to. And all this fuss because my iMac doesn’t have an audio input.

THOUGHT#3: what was so wrong with an audio input that they had to remove it, necessitating my spending £££££ on an audio-to-USB interface?

I guess kids these days make music on a laptop and use software plug-ins for most things. But what about most of us who aren’t kids-these-days, eh?

And anyway, what’s all this about The Man In The White Suit? It’s an old film. Starring Alec Guinness. All about how built-in obsolescence is necessary to make the world go round, or something. And yes, you can stream it. Because of course you can. But only so long as they let you.

Mrs Gee, who as you both know is a Fount of All Knowledge and Wisdom, says I should give it all up and take up knitting instead.

Posted in Apple, GarageBand, Music, obsolescence, PMT, Scarlett 2i2, technology, The Man In The White Suit | Comments Off on The Man In The White Suit

The Dangers of Brilliance

Posted on 10 November 2024 by Athene Donald

As the detailed criteria of REF2029 are being worked through, the issue over the research culture part remains unclear. There are those who think research culture is an irrelevance in the pursuit of excellence, that it is a touchy-feely kind of thing, that woke stuff the last Government didn’t like, and who believe it is obvious what excellence is. This, I believe, is a profound mistake. We need all hands to the pump, as it were, in solving the many global challenges we face, from climate change to the dangers of AI, from (un)healthy ageing to food security. If we assume that the only way to succeed is to continue on the same trajectory we have been, at least throughout my lifetime, we are limiting ourselves. An academic world where success is determined by funding pulled in or space occupied, or even (although less true now than it once was ) the citation index of where you’ve published or the sheer weight of – figurative – paperwork you have produced, then we will never change or become a truly inclusive academic world. Yet the evidence shows diversity matters, and hence replacing like with like in the academic pyramid is short-sighted. Although the business world may slowly be waking up to the benefits to the bottom line of a diverse board or employee base, academia continues to have pockets of resistance. PNAS may publish a paper spelling out that

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

‘However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted….are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities…equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups’

In Physics (as in maths, computing or engineering, but less so in chemistry or the life sciences) there is a great imbalance of the sexes all the way through the system and almost universally around the world. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the belief that you have to be brilliant to be a physicist; and also the belief that brilliance is something that boys (males) have more of than girls (females), a belief that seems to set in really young. Or, as the title of a relatively recent paper puts it “You need to be super smart to do well in math!”, based on studying children in (US) grades 1-4, roughly five to nine year olds. What messages are we giving our children so early on that leads to this belief?

Any physicist, male or female, is likely to have been greeted at some social occasion, when having disclosed their profession with ‘oh you must be so clever/I never could do maths at school’ or some variant of those phrases. It’s boring and embarrassing and I have always felt wide of the mark. I couldn’t do biology at school, my French pronunciation was atrocious and geography left me cold. I admired people who could speak fluent French and easily took on board concepts of frog development or the principal exports of Marseilles (a topic that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time in my geography lessons). It never crossed my mind that I was ‘smarter’ because my abilities lay elsewhere. Yet, apparently, on average, that’s how children and adults alike seem to think.

And this is unhealthy and unhelpful, and it feeds into a research culture many years later that is also unhealthy and unhelpful. It means we have an academy that is weighted in favour of those allegedly (more) brilliant male physicists and, as another recent paper put it, a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment in Physics departments.  They complain that

‘An emphasis on brilliance is harmful because assumptions about who has it are gendered and racialized: when we think of a brilliant person, we tend to think of men and white individuals, not women or people of colour’

And furthermore that this dog-eat-dog competitive culture arises because

‘brilliance is inherently comparative and hierarchical, so the more brilliant one person is perceived to be, the less others are.’

Interventions to alter our children’s attitudes towards the stereotyping of brilliance as a white male trait need to start early in our primary schools. These may be beyond the arena in which the typical academic is likely to get involved (I believe teacher training has a key role to play here, but children learn about cultural attitudes from far beyond the classroom.) Interventions to what and how we value being smart, at the expense of being supportive, generous, willing to do outreach and pastoral care as well as taking on a fair share of ‘departmental housework’ would all make for a better research environment and will be driven by attitudes around recruitment and promotion and, inevitably, REF2029. What incentives do we need to change the mindset we collectively currently inhabit and how can we avoid the perverse incentives that years of thinking about ‘excellence’ as a one-dimensional and easily recognizable criterion too often deliver?

Of course, it isn’t just Physics that has this ‘brilliance’ tag attached to it. In other areas, both Philosophy and Economics tend to get labelled this way too. These are also hugely male-dominated in unhealthy ways. In Philosophy a paper from last year stated that ‘people who identify as women internalize a gender stereotype and perceive themselves as less brilliant, but also share with others (i.e., men) the stereotypes of philosophy as for people who have brilliance and psychology as for people who do not have brilliance.’ The consequence, as they saw it, was that women were more likely to opt for Psychology as a discipline, where brilliance does not factor in in the same way and which ends up having a substantial female majority. As for Economics, my College colleague Diane Coyle has identified this major problem of gendering, both in her book Cogs and Monsters and in an article in the FT (so I hope many economists have read about the issue in one or other place). She highlights one version of the unfortunate ambience of what we value in the seminar room, stating

‘economics seminars are hostile occasions for point-scoring and aggressive challenge’

and in Economics journals where she says

‘Peer review rewards peers, and they are mainly men.’

So, how do we as a society, change our attitudes towards brilliance so that children do not believe that males are more brilliant than females which, in turn, could lead to both a more pleasant work culture and a more equitable gender split across the board? If anyone has any good answers….do let the world know.

 

Posted in economics, education, environment, Equality, philosophy, Science Culture, smart | Comments Off on The Dangers of Brilliance

What I Read In October

Posted on 3 November 2024 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2024-10-02 at 09.32.36Robert Harris: Precipice This exponent of the well-researched historical and occasionally alt-history thriller, often set in Nazi Germany (Fatherland) or Ancient Rome (Imperium, Pompeii, etcetera) sometimes steers very close to actual reality, dramatising  real events that happened to real people (An Officer and a Spy, Act of Oblivion). And that is the case here. The novel starts in July 1914, a few days after Franz Ferdinand had been shot, and describes, in agonising day-by-day detail, the machinations of Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government as Britain was dragged into the ensuing conflict; and continues until May 1915, after the Gallipoli disaster, when Asquith had to enter into a coalition with Bonar Law’s Unionists. It is told largely through the medium of Asquith’s surviving letters to his muse,  Venetia Stanley, who was very much younger. Asquith discussed government business in his letters, some of it secret, and the letters are, in some cases, the only record that survives of cabinet meetings of the time — stuffed as they were with pointed pen-portraits of Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener and their contemporaries. Stanley’s letters do not survive, but Harris makes a good stab at reconstructing the prose of an intelligent, well-bred and well-read woman from an unconventional family (her father was an atheist; her immediate relatives included a Muslim convert and a Catholic bishop, and she married a Jew, Edwin Montagu). Harris makes the argument that the downfall of Asquith’s government was linked to Stanley ceasing to write to him and announcing her engagement to Montagu — and also adds a clever subplot involving the nascent secret intelligence services. What struck me most about this novel (apart from the unbelievable privilege enjoyed by a very small group of people, set apart and insulated from the common herd, and all of whom knew one another) was that these were simpler times. The Prime Minister could afford to spend weekends away at house parties, and walk from Downing Street to go shopping without being recognised. And also that there were at least six deliveries of mail a day. As always with his novels, Harris wears his voluminous research very lightly. One does, however, get rather tired of the amatory declarations in the letters, my dearest darling, my only muse, light of my existence, &c &c. And I couldn’t help reading the title as ‘Prepuce’. Other than that it’s terrific.

IMG_8348Alice Thompson: The Book Collector Within the eldritch and be-tentacled genre that is horror fiction lurks a sub-genre, feminist horror, perhaps best exemplified by The Yellow Wallpaper, a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which the protagonist, a woman suffering what we’d now called postpartum depression, is locked by her husband, for her own good, so he says, in an upstairs room. The story charts the protagonist’s mental disintegration as she becomes obsessed with the patterns of the room’s yellow wallpaper. As it is told in the first person, the events are recounted by an unreliable narrator, so one is never sure whether they are real, or going on inside the narrator’s own head. The Book Collector is a short novel in much the same vein. A young woman called Violet marries the eponymous Bibliophile, and at first her life is idyllic. A fairy tale, in fact. Fairy tales feature very strongly in this story. Especially the old-fashioned kind. You know, the really gruesome ones that the Grimms and others told before they got cleaned up by Disney. But I digress. After Violet gives birth to Felix, her life falls apart and her husband confines her to a lunatic asylum for similarly ‘hysterical’ women. An asylum from which women are being abstracted, mutilated and killed. The novel has all the trappings of the Gothick: dark forests, secret caves, madness, grand houses, bookcases stuffed with dusty grimoires that one really, really shouldn’t look at, let alone read. The writing style, though, is clipped, well-trimmed to a degree and far from the edge of floridity, dissolution and decay that should match the locales. H. P. Lovecraft (very much at the florid end of the spectrum) wrote that the key feature of horror fiction should, above all, be atmosphere, something that stays with you once you’ve closed the book. Atmosphere doesn’t require that the writing is any more than good enough to drive you through the story. Lovecraft’s writing is so bad, it’s brilliant. Thompson’s writing, on the other hand, is perhaps too well-crafted for its subject. So, although parts of this tale are very gruesome, it doesn’t have quite the effect it perhaps should. Fun fact: connoisseurs of 1980s pop trivia will know Alice Thompson as the founding keyboard player in a combo called The Woodentops.

Screenshot 2024-10-19 at 11.25.01Richard Osman: We Solve Murders Yes, it’s him again, the Man on the Telly, and best-selling author of the deservedly acclaimed Thursday Murder Club series of thrillers that have re-invigorated that subgenre known as Cosy Crime. Osman, being a canny sort of chap, has realised that continuing a successful series can result in diminishing returns, so We Solve Murders is the opener to what promises to be a new series. Amy Wheeler is bodyguard, hired out to protect celebrities. Her current client is Rosy D’Antonio, high-living and bestselling author of raunchy crime thrillers. Amy’s father-in-law, Steve, is an ex-cop living in a sleepy village in the New Forest whose weekly highlight is the pub quiz. All three are involved in a twisty turny plot involving the serial deaths of internet influencers and international money smuggling. I have forgotten the plot already, but I did enjoy the ride, very much. Although the canvas is much broader than in the Thursday Murder Club series — inescapably so, as that was, as you’ll recall, an upscale retirement village in Sussex — Osman’s readers will be comforted that the tone is very much the same. Cool, crisp, deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

IMG_8361Elsa Pancirolli: Beasts Before Us Readers with long memories will remember my review of Steve Brusatte’s book The Rise and Reign of Mammals, reviewed here. Pancirolli’s book covers the same ground, and was actually available before Brusatte’s, I believe, but like many things, the plans of mice and men gang aft agley, especially during a pandemic. It covers similar ground, too, concentrating on the oft-forgotten ‘first’ age of mammals that occurred before the ascendancy of the dinosaurs, when the world was dominated by what used to be called ‘mammal-like’ reptiles; before switching to the small, fierce and furry residents of the nocturnal forests when dinosaurs were ascendant in the daytime. It’s a fun and engaging read, especially the parts when the author talks of the often very uncomfortable conditions encountered while prospecting for fossils on windy and rainy Scottish coasts in winter. I didn’t always get the humour, and there was a mite too much political correctness for my taste, but that’s just me. A book done with brio — highly recommended.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.20.41Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) You’ll have seen I’ve already read one of Harris’ closely-worked historical novels this month (Precipice, above). The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. Some of his shorthand survives today: the abbreviations ‘e.g. and NB’ were his, as well as the ampersand (&). It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall by order of Mark Antony. I learned a great deal about the organisation of Roman life from these books, and grasped how much of modern society, especially the legal system, owes to Roman law: the idea of a constitution; debates in the Senate; the whole concept of prosecution and defence; and trial by jury. The whole courtroom drama scenario, in fact, which this series exploits beautifully. Characters from ancient history, too, shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking. I had read Imperium before in dead-tree format but had forgotten much of it by the time I came across Lustrum and Dictator, so I listened to the whole thing as audiobooks.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.23.46Jonathan Strahan (ed.) New Adventures in Space Opera If you’ve enjoyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune,  or practically any popular SF that’s made it to popular cinema, you’ve experienced a sub-genre known as ‘space opera’.  Space Opera is fairly easily defined (by me) as westerns, but set in space. Some of them are really sword-and-sorcery fantasies dressed up with technology (Star Wars is very much in this vein). There is usually a lot of violence, high-tech macguffins (faster-than-light travel, light-sabers, photon torpedoes, matter transportation); what SF nerds call ‘sensawunda’ (fantastic locales, killer robots, Martian princesses, exotic aliens who unconventional word order when they speak, use they must); and plot trumps characterisation. Space Opera used to be the domain of pulp magazine SF from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period that saw the flowering of the careers of many exponents of the genre such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and … er … L. Ron Hubbard. After an eclipse under the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s (Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on) that used SF to explore more social and political themes, Space Opera enjoyed a resurgence with the works of Iain M. Banks. Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, which, although they use all the props, tend to be more cerebral and sophisticated. But Space Opera moves on, finds new writers and audiences (such as Cixian Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy), and it moves on still, to find new means of expression, and, in particular, diversity. New Adventures in Space Opera is a collection of SF stories exploring the outer reaches of contemporary Space Opera. Many of the authors are female (welcome), and there were some creative uses of pronouns (understandable, if sometimes confusing). I have to say, though, I found them a bit disappointing. One of the features of Space Opera — like cheap music — is that it’s catchy. The images it evokes stay in the mind. Nobody who has ever seen The Day The Earth Stood Still will forget the giant robot Klaatu. No-one who has ever read Asimov’s Foundation will forget Gaal Dornick’s first experience of the planet-spanning city of Trantor. No reader of Dune will forget the sandworms. None of the stories in this collection stayed in my mind for more than a few moments after I had finished reading them. Okay, there was one by Alastair Reynolds, but it read like an inferior out-take from his full-length novel House of Suns. The story by Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, like many of his works, resonated with what I shall euphemistically call Current Events. But apart from that — nothing. I think the problem was that I found it hard to engage with the characters. Many of the stories started without context, and this was too hard (for my brain at least) to pick up from the narratives. Maybe I am rather past it, and the new audiences for Space Opera are, to me, like aliens, with philosophies and modes of thought that cannot interface successfully with my own neural structures.

IMG_8389Eric Idle: The Spamalot Diaries I did not realise until recently that Spamalot is a stage musical based extremely loosely on my favourite film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was largely the brainchild of Eric Idle, the Python who wrote a lot of the songs (most famously, ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’). The Spamalot Diaries charts the story of how the musical was brought to life — the backstage drama, the egos, the constant re-writes, the songs written, the songs scrapped, and, poignantly, the wondering why anyone works hard on something they love, only to be frustrated when it never seems to achieve perfection. This could have been a tedious luvvie-fest, but is saved by the touches of darkness that evoke genuine emotion. Oh yes, and there are jokes. Which are funny. I liked the one in which Idle, riding a rickshaw in New York, pretends to be Michael Palin making one of his travel documentaries. You don’t have to know the music to read the book, but it helps, so after I read it I downloaded the musical soundtrack. Spamalot uses the already very thin plot of Holy Grail to send up the whole business of musical theatre itself. ‘The Song That Goes Like This‘ is a brilliant satire on the paint-by-numbers tedium of an Andrew Lloyd Webber score (I appreciate that some readers may disagree, but I’ve sat through Cats and Starlight Express and these are hours I shall never have again). ‘You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)‘ warmed the cockles of this Red-Sea Pedestrian.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.31.21Karen G. Lloyd: Intraterrestrials Before we start to search for life elsewhere in the Universe, there is much still to learn about the life beneath our feet. Deep beneath out feet.  Scientist Karen G. Lloyd tells us about organisms that live in boiling hot springs, inside volcanoes, in the driest deserts, on the highest mountains, in permafrost, and in mud in the deepest depths of the sea, and how they have metabolisms that allow them to survive — just about. To breathe, they don’t necessarily use oxygen, but iron, sulphur, even uranium. Though sometimes they grow so slowly that it might take them millions of years to reproduce. And this, of course, allows us to set some parameters about the necessities for life, not just on Earth, but anywhere in the Universe. So we come full circle. In a text that combines a rigorous work-out of the principles of thermodynamics (TRIGGER WARNING: there are equations) with breathtaking all-action adventure, our intrepid heroine ventures from the high Arctic to deep-sea hydrothermal vents in search of the limits of life. This is one of the most exciting pop-science books I’ve read in ages [DISCLAIMER: The proofs were sent to me so that I could consider writing a blurb].

Posted in Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In October

Climate Change and Seneca Falls

Posted on 3 November 2024 by Athene Donald

Those of you familiar with American women’s call for the vote will recognize the name Seneca Falls. It is situated in picturesque upstate New York, near the top of Lake Cayuga, at the bottom of which sit Ithaca and Cornell University. Its main claim to fame is as the site of the first female convention ‘to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman’ in 1848, well before Cornell (itself an early beacon for female education) was founded. The Seneca Falls Convention was largely initiated by Quakers in this corner of the state, and took place a year after the New York State Assembly had passed a married woman’s property act (40 years before the UK got its act together to allow married women to hold property in their own name once they got married). Although its immediate impact may have been small, it stands as a landmark in the history of women’s suffrage.

One of the attendees and signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments that was the convention’s output, was a woman in her late 20’s who had moved to the town from New York City where she had grown up upon her marriage to an attorney; hre name was Eunice Foote. Although not one of the instigators of the two-day meeting, she was one of the editors of the proceedings. However, it is not the history of the vote or women’s rights I want to discuss here, but some science. Because, although her name is not one I was familiar with a few weeks ago, she does have a real claim to fame, albeit as an amateur scientist – the amateur-ness being inevitable for a woman of her day.

To change tack briefly, one of the perks of having (previously) been Master of a Cambridge College is that occasionally an alumnus/a would present me with a copy of their book. In this way I acquired a somewhat random collection of perhaps ten books which, not least because of their randomness, were (and are) a pleasure to read. One such book was given to me by Peter Stott, a climate scientist from the Met Office who has led various parts of the work of the IPCC. His book, Hot  Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change, is a somewhat terrifying read of his experiences attending and presenting his work on climate change over the last 25 years at different fora, in the face of hostility, disbelief and outright contradiction. Early on he sets the scientific scene for what the Greenhouse Effect is and why human actions have led to such dire consequences for us all. And here I read about Eunice Foote for the first time.

The early recognition of the power of carbon dioxide to trap heat is usually attributed to the work of John Tyndall, dating back to 1859 (when he showed how carbon dioxide interacted with infrared radiation) and 1861 when he discussed the potential consequence of this. However, in 1857 Foote had already published a paper (“Circumstances affecting the heat of the Sun’s rays ” in the American Journal of Science), notable for demonstrating the absorption of heat by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. She was not able, or was unaware of, the role of infrared radiation. But she explicitly said

‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature… must have necessarily resulted’.

The paper had been read to the American Association in 1856 by (a man of course) another scientist from New York State, Joseph Henry of self-inductance fame. She had very limited resources with which to do these experiments – I assume she was someone, like Hertha Ayrton later, who carried out her work in the kitchen – but she did get this paper into print. I’m not sure this is precisely a case of the Matilda Effect, since Tyndall’s work was more rigorous and a better platform on which to build an idea of climate change because it understood the role of infrared radiation and reflectance, but nevertheless Foote identified the challenge and recognized the implications. Whether Tyndall was aware of the work or not, he certainly didn’t cite it in his own papers.

At the time of her work (as of course continues to this day), people were discussing whether women were capable of doing science. It does seem that the US was well ahead of England at that time, because at least the schooling Foote had received (at Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School) had allowed her to study and gain a broad education in scientific theory and practice, before girls had been able to enter serious academic schools at all in England. Queen’s College in London was the first such, and it was only founded in 1848. The work of ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale’ opening up schools (such as Cheltenham Ladies College, North London Collegiate School and my own school, Camden School) where subjects such as science could be taught to young women, really only got going a decade later.

I find it interested that what is still a small rural part of New York State produced, not only the seminal women’s convention, but a seminal piece of science too. Foote’s name is one I must add to my own mental list of ‘women who did early science which then got overlooked’.

 

 

 

Posted in climate change, Eunice Foote, Peter Stott, Women in science | Comments Off on Climate Change and Seneca Falls

Leaving Imperial

Posted on 31 October 2024 by Stephen

Today is my last day at Imperial College London. It marks the completion of exactly 29 years as a member of staff.

Two pictures separated by about 30 years. On the left, young Stephen presented results at the IUCr conference in Beijing in 1993; on the right, older Stephen talking about research assessment reform to funder and university leaders in Tokyo in 2023.

Two talks, about 30 years apart.

I joined Imperial as a young lecturer in Physics on 1st November 1995 and have travelled a long road since then, moving to the Department of Life Sciences a few years later, reaching the rank of professor in 2007, and shifting from structural biology research to work on the management (and culture!) of universities and science when I began writing my Reciprocal Space blog in 2008. I took on new roles at the university: Director of Undergraduate Studies in my department from 2011-15; the university’s first Associate Provost for EDI from 2017-2023; and latterly a College Consul. Outside Imperial I helped to co-found the campaign group Science is Vital and served as vice-chair from 2010-18, joined the board of CaSE from 2012-18, and was chair of DORA from 2017-23.

Such skeletal lists reveal little of the story of my last 29 years. Nor do they have anything to say of the great number of friends and colleagues who provided such depth and colour to the tale.

One day perhaps I will be in the mood to add more meat to my story, but right now I can’t quite grasp how I feel. I’ve said my goodbyes and told people I am relaxed about the next chapter (which will be devoted to caring responsibilities and my part-time role at RoRI), but I in truth I don’t really know what it will be like to no longer be an integral part of an institution that has been such an integral part of my life.

All I know today is that I wanted to mark the occasion.

 

 

 

Posted in science, Scientific Life | Comments Off on Leaving Imperial

The Shape of Life: An Educational Resource

Posted on 25 October 2024 by Henry Gee

I’ve long been a fan of Alaskan artist Ray Troll, so imagine my pleasure when I was asked to guest on his PaleoNerds podcast (which you can find here). And more than that — Ray asked me to script and narrate an animation called the Tree of Life, which is now online here. It’s part of an educational website called the Shape of Life, a new resource for students and teachers of evolutionary biology. Dig in!

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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wisdom

Posted on 24 October 2024 by Athene Donald

I came to Mary Wollstonecraft late, as it were, not even having come across her name until relatively recently. Perhaps that is a shameful admission, but I think she has become much more visible of late, not least due to a variety of interesting books. For me, my first introduction was via Clare Tomalin’s biography (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), via Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (covering the lives both of Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley), through the relevant parts of Richard Holmes’ Sidetracks and just now concluding with Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary.

This last is less a biography of Wollstonecraft, more an exploration of how her intentions and views back then might translate into the 21st century. Some of what was radical at the time (for instance, calling on a man without a chaperone) hasn’t stood the test of time as revolutionary, but other aspects of her life and her clarion call for equality are still highly relevant and as important as ever. How does one make a better society? Well, we’d all like the answer to that one and the answer is as elusive as ever. One central part of the answer Rowlatt comes up with, having talked to what felt at times during reading like a random selection of people ranging from witches to librarians, with many stops in between, is to ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’.

I’m sure readers of my blog all want to do their bit about making the world a better place, but it can feel an impossible challenge. Furthermore, it can also feel – to my mind at least – as if the bit one does do doesn’t compare with what your neighbour is doing (assuming you have a nice neighbour). By this I mean it’s all too easy to feel that you’re not doing enough because someone you know is doing more/bigger/better things/ in wider spheres, and you just feel inadequate. It’s important to remember, and I will do my best to do so when feeling low and as if I’m no longer (as a retired professor) making enough of a contribution, that all one can do is ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’. In other words, however many challenges or problems you know surround you, you can only do so much but doing that – whatever it may be – is still worth doing.

People ask me regularly what my post-retirement plans are. As yet, I don’t know the full answer, although pieces of the jigsaw may be coming together. Those who follow me on social media will know that I’ve recently been appointed as Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council. The Council hasn’t met yet, so I can’t give away any secrets about what we’re going to be doing, but I’m sure bringing a more explicit science grouping within the ambit of DfE can only be a good thing. I thoroughly enjoyed my earlier stint as chair of the equivalent council for DCMS, where the challenge of bringing a diverse group of experts together to make progress on pressing problems I found intensely interesting and also satisfying. Now I’m no longer Master of a college, I can admit that I find such committees more appealing than those, however vital, more concerned with formal governance, of which I have chaired many over the past decade.

In the spirit of the earlier paragraphs, though, I will say that I was very touched by the colleague who responded to my tweet about taking on this role by saying ‘You never stop serving, never stop inspiring!’. I didn’t take up the role either to serve or inspire in any conscious way. I just felt this was a job that was worth doing and that I thought I had the experience to be good at. Sometimes one does things from a sense of duty, and sometimes for personal satisfaction. It is excellent when those two coincide.

I am surprised to find my diary getting quite full with different small tasks, conversations or visits. Not really roles as such, but actions that feel as if they might make a difference to someone or something and also keep my brain in gear. It is nice to feel I have time to read interesting reports that appear, it feels, on a daily basis, about education, skills or innovation (all of which come together in the recently published Industrial Strategy Green Paper, even if I feel that coming together and coherence isn’t always obvious in that document, which highlights skills early on, and then says little about them thereafter). But there is also still a lot of work to do settling into our newly refurbished house and I need to leave time for such domesticity. For the last ten years we’ve been spoiled by living in the equivalent of a ‘tied cottage’, with the College taking responsibility for the usual tedious issues of leaks or hot water systems failing. Now it’s down to us.

There is much to consider in this rebalancing of my life, but I need to hold on to that zest for living that Wollstonecraft showed during her sadly short life, and remember that each of us can only do so much to make the world a better place.

Posted in careers, Equality, retirement, roles, skills | Comments Off on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wisdom

It’s Only Natural

Posted on 20 October 2024 by rpg

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 | Comments Off on It’s Only Natural

Can One Simplify the REF?

Posted on 14 October 2024 by Athene Donald

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 | Comments Off on Can One Simplify the REF?

The Bright Side of Life

Posted on 13 October 2024 by Henry Gee

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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