Latest posts

Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

Posted on 30 March 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee produced its report into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. It states in no uncertain terms that ‘Action must be taken that truly moves the dial’, recognizing that the issue of diversity is a problem of long-standing, yet evidence and recommendations from previous studies and analyses have not transformed the landscape. It has to be hoped that this is the report that finally does shift things, so that STEM is a genuinely inclusive environment whatever one’s gender, skin colour or familial background.

I wrote previously about the evidence Katherine Birbalsingh gave to this committee, in which she claimed girls didn’t like hard maths and that this was the reason so many chose not to study Physics at A Level. Her remarks at the time were not well received (see e.g. this write up) and do not get significant coverage in the final committee report, which states guardedly in the summary that

‘The evidence our inquiry received offered no consensus as to the reasons for this difference—male dominated-environments, and pre-existing societal expectations being suggested causes.’

Nothing about girls not liking hard maths there.

The original call for evidence was broad, but the bulk of the report focusses on school years rather than what happens in universities and thereafter. My own (written) evidence covered both stages in an individual’s life, but only the former was raised at the in-person evidence session I presented at last May.  It is very clear that the Committee perceives significant limitations in the current school system when it comes to encouraging anyone and everyone to see themselves as a potential future scientist. As it puts it

‘In our view, it is important that all children are able to see themselves in what they learn from an early age. A diverse national curriculum—that contains female scientists, for example—is one low-cost way of ensuring this. Similarly, the careers advice and support pupils receive from the earliest years should promote diverse and inclusive role models.’

I would like to think this report will get attention and traction, but it isn’t clear to me that that is usually the fate of such Select Committee reports. However, it is high time the lack of diversity in STEM gets sorted, to resolve all the downstream impacts on innovation for our economy, good decision-making by scientifically-trained policy-makers, not to mention a healthy education system and fairness and opportunity for all.

Not just for the boys

I discuss many of the same issues (albeit with a specific focus on the issues women face rather than the challenges for other minorities) in my upcoming book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more Women in Science, which is due out from OUP in May (August in the USA). I am certainly hoping this book is read, not just by those who are in the midst of traversing the tricky career ladder of science, but parents, teachers and policy-makers. As Birbalsingh demonstrated in her remarks to the committee, many a (head)teacher seems unaware of the assumptions they make, assumptions that the social science literature simply does not support. The IOP has spent many years trying to make clear just how much the ethos of the school impacts on choices children – boys and girls, around different disciplines – make. But still far too many schools persist in treating boys and girls differently, with the result we see few female engineers and few men entering English degrees.

I believe the problems start right from the time a child is born, with societal expectations imposed on them in the toys they play with (read Let Toys be Toys various studies and blogs to exemplify this), or the clothes they wear. The explicit message that ‘I’m too pretty to do math’, once emblazoned on a T shirt for sale, I think has been eradicated, but implicitly that message remains and is heard by many a girl. Of course not all schools or families pursue such gender stereotyping, but far too many do and, it would seem, including Birbalsingh’s own school (Michaela, in North London).

And, as numerous posts on this blog have pointed out over the past decade and more, the experiences of women as they move up the academic ladder pile on to these early years’ experiences to make many a woman question what they are doing in science, and whether they belong. The boring familiarity of attending a conference or meeting where the men are introduced with their proper academic titles and the women reduced to a plain Mary Smith may be trivial in one sense, but it is demeaning and highlights that women aren’t fully recognized in the groves of academe. It is equally likely to occur when experts are lined up in the media, when somehow the expertise of the woman is frequently downplayed while all the honorifics of the man are enumerated.

The Commons Select Committee report highlights many of these issues at school and in the scientific professions. Diversity requires we, collectively as a society, do better. I hope that the report receives the attention it deserves and stimulates action. As I anxiously wait to get my hands on a hard copy of my own book, and to see how it fares in the public eye, I have to hope my own contribution in this space will also help to ‘move the dial’. Society needs many more people to become aware of the systemic problems still facing women and other minorities in STEM fields. This is not only or necessarily to take blame upon themselves for being misogynist. The situation is more nuanced than that in general, because it is the whole culture we bring our children up in that is at fault, damaging both boys’ and girls’ life chances in working out what they really want to do, and what their talents are best suited for. Only when we resolve these challenges will society derive the maximum benefit from all its members in solving the numerous huge problems that the world faces.

 

Posted in Commons Select Committe, education, exclusione, Katherine Birbalsingh, Science Culture, Systemic Change, Women in science | Comments Off on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

In which I capture the present, but forget why

Posted on 19 March 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Ancient history (1997): does anyone map plasmids anymore?

I have always been a compulsive chronicler, ever since I was a small child starting off my first journal. I still write an entry nearly every day, taking a few months to fill in all the pages with my increasingly illegible scrawl, then adding the bound notebook carefully to the stack of hundreds of others fading in cupboards in my study – decades of events, sucked irrevocably into the past and largely forgotten.

This habit suited me well over the three decades that I worked at the lab bench, writing down every last experimental detail alongside taped photographs, x-ray films, plasmid maps, nucleotide sequence outputs. I captured not just the process, but analyses, conclusions, next steps – even a few unscientific expressions of joy or misery. These entries contain smudges of chemicals, coffee stains, and even what I suspect were tears. For all I know, some of the pages might even be faintly radioactive.

In more recent years, I have felt a strong compulsion to chronicle my home life beyond just what I write in my journals. It was actually Richard’s idea to start a family almanac when we moved to our ‘forever home’ back in 2015. Near the end of our fifth volume now, we both record weather observations, gardening activities, adventures in home-brewing and produce preservation, and any other domestic event that might be worth remembering: pandemic lowlights, comets and meteor showers, hen memorabilia (acquisition, laying habits and deaths), significant illnesses. After a few years we started to see patterns, certain events happening very close to the same time each year: the flight of ant queens, the first appearance of particular butterflies, the flowering of the first snowdrops, crocuses, ornamental cherries, daffodils, tulips, the onset of powdery mildew infection in our courgette patch.

Around the same time, we started a cookbook too – just an A4 notebook where we scribbled down our favourite food experiments or taped in printouts from online recipes or cuttings from magazines. These two volumes are encrusted in batters, grease, fruit stains and God knows what else. I like to think that a thousand years from now, scientists might be able to bring back some extinct forms of life with it.

In the past year, I’ve developed an urge to re-discover some of the more creative areas of my life that I haven’t fed in many years. I’ve started playing the piano again regularly, which I haven’t done since I all but abandoned the instrument at about Grade 8 proficiency when I went off to university. And following a bout of severe laryngitis that largely obliterated my singing voice in 2018, I recently decided to start taking weekly lessons to see if I could rehabilitate my vocal cords. A few months in and I am not only nearly back to where I used to be, but I am learning techniques that should make me sing even better, with a larger range.

Colored pencil sketches of flowers

Last weekend’s entry (Clockwise from top left: Magnolia, hyacinth, circus, evening primrose, wild garlic)

But the most exciting development has been resuming regular sketching. I’ve always loved to draw, especially botanical subjects, but do it only rarely. Inspired in part by Emma Mitchell’s flower sketches on Twitter, and Katherine May’s excellent book “Wintering”, I decided to start a botanical journal, capturing emerging flowers and plants in our garden every Sunday, not only practicing my technique but also documenting the changing of the seasons. After I spent quite a bit of money on a 72-piece set of Lyra coloured pencils and a hardbound book of fine vellum from Strathmore, I was worried that I might abandon it after the first entry. But the project has taken on a life of its own, and it’s satisfying to watch the pages fill up week after week, blossoming like a garden in springtime.

Last weekend, however, I did have a little wobble, wondering why I am so compelled to get all of this stuff down on paper. In the past, when my life stretched out forever, I assumed that the chronicles would come in handy, a reference to consult whoever I wanted to remember a forgotten aspect of my journey on this planet. But now I’m not so sure. Why go to all the trouble? Who is it for? I can’t imagine anyone being interested, even my own family tree once I am gone; unlike a laboratory notebook, it’s not even useful: nobody will need to see how I did it, or reproduce the result. All these hours, days, years of active chronicling, sometimes at a considerable cost (for it takes time and energy that I sometimes feel I cannot spare): what is the point? The experience of doing it, living through it more intensely by recording it? But no – if it was only for the process, I wouldn’t save anything: I’d discharge my heart and soul onto the pages and then throw them away. It seems the saving is part of it, but I no longer know why.

It’s a sobering feeling: in the past, there was only the evangelical certainty that I must gather and accumulate this diverse evidence. Now the stacks of dusty journals seem to look at me and say, “Well?”

Posted in academia, art, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Music, Nostalgia, The ageing process, work-life balance, Writing | Comments Off on In which I capture the present, but forget why

What’s the easiest way to become a less lazy photographer?

Posted on 18 March 2023 by Stephen

I’m thinking of becoming a less lazy photography. Can you help?

Reflections of Brussel's Grand Place in the window of a baroque building

Brussels window.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I enjoy a bit of photography from time to time, since I have an annual tradition of posting my favourite photographs at the end of each year. Photography is something I’ve enjoyed since childhood. I was probably only seven or eight when I got my first camera. As a teenager I set up camp on weekends in my dentist father’s darkroom to make my own black-and-white prints. I was happy to make the switch to digital, and happier still as the iPhone camera developed into a credible substitute for a compact digital camera, though I enjoy the versatility that comes with a camera that has interchangeable lens. Long a fan of Canon digital SLRs, I made the switch a few years ago to the smaller, lighter and mirrorless Olympus OMD E-M5 MkIII. Recently, I’ve rather greedily treated myself to a high-quality compact camera, the Ricoh GR IIIx, convincing myself it would be a great travel supplement to my iPhone and that I wanted to develop my street photography.

But even with all that gear, I’m a lazy photographer. All my photos are taken as jpegs and imported straight into Apple Photos, which comes free on every Mac. There they can be lightly edited, sorted and archived. I pay for iCloud storage so that I have access to all my photos on my computer, iPad and iPhone.

I like to think that I have a good eye for colour and composition, and a reasonable understanding of how to play with or control light and shade; so I confine myself to fairly minimal editing in Photos – straightening a wonky horizon, cropping, tweaking the highlights, shadows and saturation, and maybe adding a bit of sharpening. And then I’m done.

Lately, I’ve been wondering about doing more. I know that if I were to shoot in RAW, I would have a lot more control over the edit. I would have even more control if I invested in a better editing programme, such as Adobe’s Lightroom. But so far I’ve been put off by the hassle and perhaps kidding myself that my composition doesn’t need the extra help.

A blogpost by David Bradley, who is a very fine photographer, particularly of wildlife revealed to me just how much improvement can be gained from using good digital tools. The post explains his workflow for getting a sharp shot of a bird in flight, which involves shooting in RAW, and processing the image in DxO’s PureRaw2 programme to remove noise, before importing into Lightroom for further sharpening and adjustments to the exposure. He also recommends using Topaz’s Sharpen AI tool in some cases, which can deal with motion and other forms of blurring. The result is impressive.

I think I’m nearly ready to jump, not least because Mrs C and I will be going on safari in Kenya in the summer and, while I’m not expecting to return with photographs that would be worthy of National Geographic, I would like to feel that I had done my best with the opportunity. First, though, I would like to hear more about other people’s workflows. There are so many tools out there that it can be a bit bewildering and, as I think I’ve mentioned already, I’m a lazy photographer.

Posted in science | Comments Off on What’s the easiest way to become a less lazy photographer?

Renaissance Man?

Posted on 5 March 2023 by Athene Donald

This week the sad news of the death of physicist and erstwhile colleague Tom McLeish was announced, a soft matter theorist and committed interdisciplinarian – as well as a committed Christian. He is particularly associated with developing theories for the flow of polymer melts, theories he would illustrate with interesting demonstrations (often involving his arm and a sleeve to show how polymer chains of different shapes would move, if I recall correctly) and a fruity vocabulary. Not, I should say, improper language, but involving raspberries, for instance, to describe the associating polymeric structures that formed in certain melts, impacting on their flow; I am sure there were several other foody descriptions that now escape me.

What follows are personal recollections, and they may well be blurred by the passage of time. For instance, when did I I first meet him? Was he still a PhD student or had he progressed to being a postdoc? He spent time working on the flow of polymers at Courtaulds, looking at instabilities in spinning fibres. I wrote a couple of papers with him, the second some time after he had left Cambridge, looking at the motion of polymer chains in the glassy polymers I studied experimentally. I also remember introducing him to my collaborator of the time at the late lamented blue chip company, ICI. Tom subsequently built up a long term and highly successful collaboration of his own with the company, which led to much improved computer visualisation of flows in the complex geometries of a polymer processing factory, work he did as part of a large consortium which he led.

Tom moved from Cambridge first to Sheffield as a lecturer and, when still very early in his career (or as we said at the time, at a young age) moved to Leeds to take up the chair recently vacated by Ian Ward. Ian had been a key early mover in the mechanical properties of solid polymers (and wrote a book of that name; my own copy of this is well-thumbed) but was very much an experimentalist. Tom’s arrival in Leeds necessarily involved something of a reorientation of the work there in the Physics Department, including as part of the IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Centre) in polymers, set up in 1989 before Tom came and which was joint with Durham and Bradford. I think it must have been daunting for Tom to take on such a leadership role when only in his early 30’s, but I don’t think I ever heard him fret about it, although he did talk to me before he formally accepted the job.

Tom spent many successful years in Leeds before he moved to Durham to take up the role of PVC in Research there. Whilst there his enormous range of interests became much clearer. I know how much he enjoyed having an ‘excuse’ to visit departments far removed from his background and to interact with a huge range of colleagues, without ever ceasing to be a physicist. But he took enormous interest in the medieval Bishop Grosseteste (Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253) and his theories of light and, when he moved to his final position at the University of York, once his stint as PVC was over, his title was explicitly not that of your average 21st century physicist, instead taking the (historic) title of Professor of Natural Philosophy, but holding it in the Physics of Life Research Group (like me, over the years his interests had moved from synthetic polymers to those of living origin).

Looking at the York website, though, it is clear how diverse his interests had become, including being a Member of Management group for the Centre for Medieval Studies and a Member of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. His Christian faith became ever more visible too, including in the 2014 book he wrote using the biblical Book of Job as its basis, Faith and Wisdom in Science. His last book, published in 2019, Poetry and Music in Science, has a wide sweep, as suggested by its subtitle: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art. He, like me, did not believe in a ‘two cultures’ approach to life. He served on the REF2021 Physics sub-panel, and was very exercised by how interdisciplinary research was being treated: he chased me to make sure that I was paying due attention to it in my role as Chair of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel for the exercise.

I am sure that his faith was hugely important to him in the months leading up to his death, once pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed last summer. I last saw him at a conference in the spring, when he still seemed to be in fine form. He kept on tweeting during the months after his diagnosis (which he publicly disclosed over Twitter), and it was obvious how much solace he derived from music – he played the French Horn – with frequent comments on the BBC Radio 3 offering. Indeed, my last exchange with him was about something on Radio 3.

He was only 60, cruelly young to die. From the comments I have already seen (for instance over Twitter) it is clear how many people he helped, mentored and developed scientifically. His range of collaborators, within the UK and far beyond, was extensive. At the Royal Society, where he had succeeded me as Chair of their Education Committee, his passion for science, education and outreach was remarked upon to me this week as we all mourned his loss.

RIP Tom. You will be missed by so many.

 

Posted in ICI, interdisciplinary, Interdisciplinary Science, polymer melts, Research, Tom McLeish | Comments Off on Renaissance Man?

John Jackson OBE (1934 – 2023)

Posted on 5 March 2023 by Erika Cule

It is good to read about a life well-lived, I think. Especially if you struggle with your own existential dread. (Following Covid, isn’t that all of us, to a degree?)

My mother’s Uncle, John, to us “Uncle John” even though he was actually Great Uncle John, died last month. The funeral will take place next week. It’s a sobering moment for us as a family, because John represents the last living blood relative of my grandparents’ generation on both sides. John leaves behind his second wife, Pat, his two sons and my mother’s two cousins Alistair and Andrew and their families, an enormous number of lives touched, and, well, us. Me.

John Jackson RIP

I cribbed this picture from the Burton Albion FC website. I hope they don’t mind.

I got to know John a little in his retirement, my adulthood. Before that he was someone we went to a football match with one time and a face in family photographs from a time before I have memories. But following the death of my grandfather George, John’s brother, J and I would stop by John and his wife Margaret’s place in the midlands on the way to or from the Lake District. After George and my other remaining grandparents died in rapid succession within a matter of months in the early 2010s, my whole immediate family gravitated towards our parents’ and grandparents’ siblings, as if putting out tendrils, desperate to connect to what remains of each other here on Earth. Redoubling our efforts with more obscure branches of our family trees.

Family photo from 1988

Family photo circa 1988

I knew little of John’s life before he retired, I only read about it just now in two articles in the local press.

I had known that John was active with Burnley Albion FC, his local football club, and instrumental in its work in the community. I hadn’t known, although it doesn’t surprise me to learn, that through his previous role with Burton Albion Community Trust he had been instrumental in enabling the Pirelli Stadium to become a vaccination centre during the pandemic. Our whole family is quite “light under a bushel”, I am perhaps less this way inclined personally but in general it is in our family culture to be understated.

I knew John for his warm hospitality, his unlikely fandom for Russell Brand, the sincerity with which he welcomed us as a newly married couple and with which he talked with me over the years as we grappled as a family with our history and with our future. I remember how he took his own tragedy and worked with his son to make a BBC Documentary on a systematic problem in UK Hospitals, always with care and love and never with self-pity. His late wife Margaret was an astonishing character, and following her death John never wallowed but carried on, welcoming J and I, holding my hand when the marriage failed, building relationships and being at the centre of his community.

I know John’s death isn’t about me, but he won’t mind being part of something bigger – that was him in life for sure. I want to note somehow how different birth and death look once one believes. When John was dying, I felt calm and steady; I prayed because that’s what I do now, and I listened to others grieving and grappling. Coincidentally seeing as it’s John’s funeral this week I held a newborn for the first time in several years too, the much-longed-for son of a friend; I gazed into its unseeing eyes, my heart unable to hold onto this miracle. Babies are have been Simply Marvellous, but Everything Is Different Now.

Lots of love to John and his family, and blessings aplenty to my new friend’s new life, also, as it happens, a “J”.

Posted in Burton Albion FC, Faith, in loving memory, John Jackson, Life, obituary, unlikely fandom | Comments Off on John Jackson OBE (1934 – 2023)

What I Read In February

Posted on 28 February 2023 by Henry Gee

UntitledDale E. Greenwalt: Remnants of Ancient Life There is more to fossils than bones and stones. Very rarely. soft tissue is preserved too, and Dale Greenwalt reviews what we can and cannot know about ancient life from the occasional scrap of chitin, cellulose, protein or DNA that niggardly posterity chances to leave behind. DISCLAIMER: I read a proof copy sent to me by a publication for whom I am writing a longer review.

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-02-13 at 05.56.02Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography The High Frontier is a lawless place. But as Tim Marshall explains in this very readable guide to the latest in space exploration, the absence of rules makes space a dangerous place — for everyone on Planet Earth. The space programs of all the major and minor players are set out, as are the various dangers as they scramble for territory above our heads. It then goes all fizzy and futuristic at the end, and inexplicably misses out the most likely habitat for humans in space – hollowed-out asteroids, planetary surfaces being too difficult and expensive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent an advance copy by the publisher.

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-02-22 at 06.47.56Robin Dennell: From Arabia To The Pacific: How Our Species Colonised Asia Our species began as a hunter of open savannah in Africa. When it left Africa into Asia, it had to contend with environments as harsh and as different as arctic tundra and tropical rainforest – which it conquered as no other species has done, simultaneously driving all other hominids to extinction. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. It’s an academic text, but don’t let that put you off, as it’s never less than completely readable. It is, though, printed on that shiny paper academic publishers seem to love, you know, the grade that makes even slim volumes like this weigh a ton. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

 

UntitledArthur C. Clarke: The Deep Range I seem to have lost my reading mojo, so, frustrated by a deeply cerebral novel I could barely start, let alone finish ( I might succeed one day) I turned to this good old-fashioned SF from the good old-fashioned Arthur C. Clarke, an undemanding adventure in which a washed-up astronaut conquers his fears of space by mastering the secrets of the deep. It was written in 1957, and it shows, but I’ll make no apology for having enjoyed every minute.

Comments Off on What I Read In February

Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Posted on 21 February 2023 by Athene Donald

It is depressing to learn that the Treasury is essentially constraining any capital spending from the Department of Housing, Levelling Up and Communities. Whereas when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State there might have been some optimism that he ‘got’ the need for investment in left-behind regions, the way the Department’s budget has so far been spent has suggested that there is not such a strong will overall across Government, and notably within the short-term financially-focussed Treasury. As Jack Shaw for the IPPR put it

‘Contrast the culture of innovation supported by EU funding with the Shared Prosperity Fund’s culture of bean-counting.’

The loss of these EU Structural Funds is a real blow for many areas, since these were allocated inversely according to the local level of economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding. The same relationship does not exist in allocations from the replacement Shared Prosperity Fund, as many commentators have noted. The more deprived areas are losing out to better-heeled regions in ways that are hard not to see as driven by political imperatives more than the need to level up. Furthermore, again to quote Jack Shaw,

‘the methodology underpinning the Shared Prosperity Fund bears limited relation with its stated policy objectives.’

An interesting recent report from the Centre of Cities, which contains a wealth of data to digest, highlights the inequalities across the regions, or more specifically across cities up and down the land. I live in Cambridge, a superficially wealthy city, though a previous report from the same organisation has identified it as the most unequal city of all. It has a great number of citizens with high levels of education, but it also has high levels of pollution together with exorbitant house prices which are second only to London. My city is not particularly typical. It seems to sit near the top or bottom of just about every figure of merit this report analyses. It sits at the very top of cities when it comes to rate of growth of the population over the decade to 2021, with an increase of 17.9%, closely followed in second place by Peterborough at 17.2%. The area is booming (which of course drives the prices of houses ever upwards), with the highest number of ‘new economy’ firms. However, our roads are choking us, public transport is still woeful into the city centre – although the council wishes to introduce a congestion charge along with improved transportation links – but cycling is available to anyone fit enough, including students, who happens to have the luxury of living close enough to their place of work to make that feasible (but beware that pollution).

Skills and education are taken seriously in Cambridge. At 3.4% of the population, it has one of the lowest rates in the country of workers with no formal qualifications. In my College we take apprentices seriously in teams like maintenance and catering, so even those who join us not having thrived at school can hope to gain useful qualifications, whether or not they choose to stay employed here. At the other end of the scale, Cambridge has one of the highest levels of the population with Level 4 or above qualifications at 63.5%, beaten only by Edinburgh and Oxford.

That high level of skills in the Cambridge population is of course immediately relevant to the city’s success. At the other end of the scale, Burnley has more than 5 times as high a percentage of people with no qualifications coupled with less than half as many as Cambridge with Level 4 or above education. Burnley, like many another northern de-industrialised city, has fallen into a low skills, low wage equilibrium. For families where the breadwinner lost their job in the mines or mills a generation or more ago, there may be a feeling of helplessness, a belief that a decent job is not there for them, with little concomitant motivation to stay on in education to gain qualifications that may take them nowhere, or to upskill later in life. The Centre for Cities report has a lot to say about these people who are demoralised to the point of not attempting to enter the workforce or to seek a new job when they lose theirs. These are people they call ‘involuntarily inactive’.

One of the problems with the Levelling Up White Paper is how little it had to say about skills. There has been a little more information published recently about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), although how helpful that will be in practice for those involuntarily inactive in regions where skilled, even semi-skilled jobs are in short supply, remains to be seen. Who will want to take on a substantial loan in mid-life with no certainty of a well-paid job at the end, a situation made even more unpalatable if there are several family dependents? Helpful though the LLE may be for some, it is far from a universal panacea to resolving the distressed face of places like Burnley.

Along with upskilling must be the creation of relevant jobs in local industry.  All the evidence is that anchor industries play a crucial role in the economy of a city, not least because non-graduates are much less likely to move away from their home towns than those with higher qualifications. Lincoln has thrived through the combination of a new(ish) university and employers like Siemens, a vision vigorously pursued by their former VC Mary Stuart.

But sometimes there are employers seeking a skilled workforce who cannot find them. To return to my own local area, but moving a bit further from Cambridge, at a recent meeting organised by the Royal Society in Norwich, we heard from a company based in Suffolk about their employment needs. Here was a firm, with a full order book, but it couldn’t attract the skilled and semi-skilled people it needed, with local youth not seeing being a machine operative, for instance, as of interest to them. The area is not rich in alternative industries, but still they could not attract those leaving school, and local courses were not particularly geared to their needs. Further education colleges in the area, as elsewhere, are now even more hampered in development due to the government’s recent reclassification of them as public sector. This change means they are now subject to strict government lending restrictions and effectively barred from taking out commercial loans, making capital expenditure almost impossible, preventing them from expanding or changing emphasis in their courses. This particular Suffolk CEO who spoke, felt that developments at Sizewell C, not that far away, would suck up many of those who might otherwise have thought about joining their company – and additional skilled labour for the construction of the site would need to come from much further afield.

Only if we start to see joined up thinking across Government – from the Department of Education, through DHLUC to the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – will there be any hope of seeing improvements in our urban areas, ensuring a match between the skills provision and local need as well as decent funding to go along with this, thereby creating jobs and hope where currently there is little of either.

Posted in Centre for Cities, education, Equality, Further Education, Shared Prosperity Fund, skills | Comments Off on Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Celebrating a Pioneering Engineer

Posted on 6 February 2023 by Athene Donald

Constance Tipper (née Elam) was born on this day in 1894. Although some years ago I gave a talk at TWI, just outside Cambridge, to the Tipper Group – a group which endeavours to promote diversity and inclusion to wider audiences – and was introduced then to her name, I am only just learning what a remarkable woman she was. One who undoubtedly has suffered from the Matilda effect, with her name and achievements effaced by other, more famous male engineers. I am indebted to Michael Thouless, a former Fellow of Churchill College and the son of another former Fellow and Nobel Prize winner, the late David Thouless, for bringing her achievements to my attention over dinner a short while ago.

Tipper was a metallurgist who studied Natural Sciences in Cambridge at Newnham College during the early years of the twentieth century. Thereafter she worked briefly at the National Physical Laboratory and then at the Royal School of Mines (part of Imperial College London) for more than a decade, but during which she also worked at times in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, my old department. She worked closely with various men whose names are well known, including GI Taylor, with whom she won the Royal Society’s Bakerian Medal in 1923. The lecture – which I assume was actually given by Taylor – was published that year.

Tipper Bakerian

I will return to the rather sad anecdote about the evening of the lecture in a minute, but first I should admit to a mea culpa. I won the Bakerian Award in 2006 and have been saying ever since I was only the second woman to win the award after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1972. This is clearly entirely wrong, given that Elam/ Tipper won it in 1923 as part of that pairing with Taylor; I will admit I had never thought to check the listings that far back. Had I done so I would realise that even if Tipper was the first, after her there was a second woman who won the award as part of a pair: William Hardy & Ida Bircumshaw won it for a paper entitled Boundary Lubrication – Plane Surfaces and the Limitations of Amontons Law in 1925 (pairings seemed quite common during these years). Aside from the fact that Bircumshaw was also known as Ida Doubleday (presumably her maiden name), and she published a few papers on lubrication in the early 1920s, I can find out nothing about this second woman. But there it stands, there were two women winners of the Bakerian Medal before Dorothy Hodgkin, so I was in fact the fourth female winner, albeit the first two were not sole winners and did not deliver a lecture themselves.

After my own lecture, back in 2006, the Royal Society kindly laid on a dinner. That was true for Constance Elam except…she was invited when no one realised that CF Elam was not a man. Unfortunately, the Royal Society dining club of the day was not open to women joining the dinners. She appears to have been very gracious about this, apparently writing

‘I am sorry to have given you so much trouble. But it is my misfortune rather than my fault that I do not happen to be a man. I felt very much honoured on receiving your invitation, although I realised that it had been sent under a misunderstanding.’

I hope no one would be so conveniently understanding today, but I can confirm that women certainly are able to dine. All Elam/Tipper got back then in lieu of the dinner was a ‘nice box of chocolates’ apparently.

After Constance Elam married and became Constance Tipper, she worked in Cambridge but, as for so many spouses then and now, for many years she was more of a hanger-on in the University than a formal employee, even during the time she held a Leverhulme Fellowship. Even Newnham College only seems to have given her a short spell as a Fellow. But she worked away (the Engineering department do seem to have provided space and facilities) looking at the interplay between metal structure and failure. Come the 2nd World War, a number of lecturers departed to serve and she took on some of their teaching duties.

The war provided her with a fascinating case study arising from the disastrous failure of so-called Liberty Ships. These were ships built hurriedly during the war, with a change in design for the hull from riveting metal plates to welding them. Several of these ships failed catastrophically, some when not even in rough seas, as this photograph of a docked SS Schenectady shows.

Liberty ship(This photo comes from one of my early favourite books on materials science, The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon, which I read when still at school. This image stuck in my mind all these years.). She was invited to be a technical metallurgical expert for the British Admiralty Ship Welding Committee. An easy target to blame for the ships’ failures was to assume the welders were at fault. These were frequently women, so-called Wendy-the- welders in contrast to Rosie-the-Riveters, given the men were mainly serving in the forces. So, blame the women for doing a bad job! But, as Tipper – as she was by then – demonstrated, the fault lay not in the women but in the steel which, in the cold waters where the failures were occurring, had undergone a ductile-brittle transition. In welded ships, with their much larger continuous sheets of metal, small cracks were easily able to spread, whereas in the riveted design with a smaller size of each plate, the cracks got stopped much sooner, before they led to critical, uncontrolled advance and fracture across the whole ship.

This Tipper was able to elucidate, with detailed underpinning metallurgical understanding. You can find much more about this in a 2015 article ‘Revisiting (Some of) the Lasting Impacts of the Liberty Ships via a Metallurgical Analysis of Rivets from the SS “John W. Brown”’ published in the Journal of Materials, which provides a detailed technical explanation of why the problem arose. In the same journal issue there is another article, containing much more information about Tipper’s life, from which much of this post is derived. Although my own PhD was concerned with brittle failure in metals, and I learned about many of the underpinning ideas, her name was not one I was familiar with, as opposed to those such as Taylor and Orowan (men) whose names continue to be associated with the issue of brittle-ductile transitions in metals.

Ultimately the Engineering Department in Cambridge did appoint Tipper to a Readership (the old name for what is now known as an Associate Professor and, back then, a high rank to rise to when most people remained as lecturer as the ‘career grade’), the first and, for a long time, the only woman on their books as a member of the academic staff. For 11 years, until her retirement in 1960, she was able to enjoy appropriate professional recognition.

It seems appropriate that we celebrate her life today on her birthday – and in close proximity to February 11th, the International Day of Girls and Women in Science.

Posted in Constance Tipper, GI Taylor, Liberty Ship, metallurgy, Wendy-the-welder, Women in science | Comments Off on Celebrating a Pioneering Engineer

The Very Hungry Pupperino

Posted on 2 February 2023 by Henry Gee

UntitledOn Monday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a sofa.

On Tuesday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a set of six mahogany dining chairs.

On Wednesday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a small semi-detached ex-Local-Authority house in Cromer, Norfolk.

On Thursday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate the award-winning Georgian market town of Holt, Norfolk.

On Friday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate 4,000 Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

On Saturday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate the Chernobyl nuclear power station and acquired remarkable superpowers.

On Sunday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate Vladimir Putin, and there was Much Rejoicing.

On Monday, the Very Hungry Pupperino visited the vet who made her sick it all up again. After that she felt much better.

(Picture by Denise Reynolds at Glaven Veterinary Practice, Holt. With apologies to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

Posted in Apparitions, Blog Norfolk!, Silliness, The Very Hungry Caterpillar | Comments Off on The Very Hungry Pupperino

In which my lab is a garden

Posted on 29 January 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

purple crocuses

It’s a grey afternoon, the light already fading. R. and I have just done a circuit of the back garden – ‘inspecting the troops’, we call it.

The entire space is dishevelled, as it always is this time of year: the brown skeletal remains of last year’s growth tangled in with the green perennials, most of which are in dire need of a prune. The lawn is more mud than grass, and everywhere the bulbs are pushing upwards. Hellebore already blooms in the train-wreck of our unweeded herb garden, along with the snowdrops, rosemary, winter jasmine and the first crocuses. There are even a few of last autumn’s roses unfurling, having powered through several weeks of hard frost to put on their last-gasp performance. Magnolia trees display furry pods that you can’t resist stroking, and the bird cherry in the back hedgerow – always the first to kick off – is studded with hundreds of tiny white buds. Wild onions – the bane of R.’s existence – seem to reproduce in real time, spewing out ten clumps for every one he yanks up. I’m sure our well-meaning predecessors (largely sensible in most of their other horticultural choices) had no idea what a cursed epidemic they were unleashing.

Our overwintering shallots, garlic and broad beans are doing well, but our greenhouse needs a good clear-out, to prepare for the dozens of seedlings that are already germinating indoors in heated propagators under industrial LED light panels. After last year’s aphid infestation, it probably needs a good fumigation too.

Earlier today after J’s rugby practice, we skulked into the local park and dug up a few lush cow parsley crowns, taproots squirming with fat earthworms, from the weedy verge, which I transplanted along the back garden wall. Our hedgerow has turned into a little woodland, and I think every woodland needs cow parsley on its sunny edges. If try hard enough, I can almost smell the shimmering springtime haze of a field of cow parsley in bloom.

As if on cue, R. has just put a cocktail into my hand made from rum and pulverised blackberries picked last August and stored in the chest freezer since. A little bit of summer in an ice-cold glass.

Things are going well at work – which sometimes resembles an untidy garden of its own, old and new all entwined, everything coming and going. We published a paper in the first week of January, have another with minor revisions which should soon see the light of day, a second one close to submission, and several more taking shape. I’ve nearly finished the second of two major grant applications already submitted this year. Meanwhile, three grants are pending with outcomes expected soon. I’m advertising for a PhD student, just in time for one of my existing ones to take his viva. A postdoc has joined to start a project, while another has just moved to a new position abroad. All the various strands of what are euphemistically known as “output”, but are really human beings and their amazing achievements, bits of the cycle shooting here, blooming there, or blowing away like feathery seeds to take root somewhere else. And me in the middle, a smudge of mud on my forehead, reading glasses shoved onto the top of my head, wielding a spade and secateurs, half proud, half bemused as it all takes shape.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which my lab is a garden