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What I Read In October

Posted on 29 October 2022 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2022-10-03 at 08.02.15Shon Faye: The Transgender Issue I was alerted to this by Stephen: it was something of an eye-opener. From the amount of newsprint and airtime devote to trans people, you’d think they were engaged in a full-scale invasion. Shon Faye shows that they constitute a near-negligible proportion of the population and are oppressed in every way by a majority that would rather they didn’t exist and will go some considerable way to fulfilling that desire. Marginalised, they, like many other minorities, struggle to find employment and are over-represented in the gig economy and sex work. Demonised by the right-leaning press as woke snowflakes that want to shut down free speech: exhibited by the left-leaning press largely as a problem for feminism, the regular person is entitled to ask what’s really going on — and Shon Faye tells us. (Aside: I was brought up by my mother, a WI stalwart, listening to Woman’s Hour on the radio. She hadn’t listened to it for years, she said, as it had been more concerned these days with gender politics than issues that were, to her, of greater interest. I switched on and was immediately pitched into a furious argument between a radical feminist and a trans person. In the old days, I thought, audiences could be titillated by bear-baiting. I switched off). The fact is that nobody wants to be trans as a kind of woke fashion accessory. People transition because they must. What commentators of all political stripes lack is the lived experience, and this is supplied by Shon Faye, though she is at pains to point out that this is not a memoir, rather a survey of how trans people at all stages of life have to negotiate the world. The Transgender Issue is unapologetically left-wing in tone, which is fair enough, but one does get the impression it is preaching to the choir, when it deserves to be read far outside activist or LGBTQ+ circles. When Faye turns from ideology to pragmatic politics, she is absolutely compelling. A section on prisons, for example, articulates why the UK’s current penal system needs reform. Not for ideological reasons, but because prison doesn’t work as a means either of reducing crime or rehabilitating offenders, most of whom shouldn’t be locked up anyway. It is tempting, as a reviewer, to wish for a book the author hadn’t written. There is a lot — necessarily so — on the often fraught relations between the trans community and others in the LGBTQ+ rainbow, and, yes, with feminists. This might give ammunition to those conservatives who wish to find divisions and exploit them (Faye is well aware of this, and gives examples of unholy alliances between religious conservatives and anti-trans feminists) but very little about how gender ideation in our societies is conditioned by religious tradition, and nothing at all about the participation of trans people in sport — another topic of seemingly obsessive interest by legislators, and, therefore, news media. After reading this book, though, I am convinced that the most fundamental human right must be that a person should have absolute autonomy over their own body. Nobody else — not politicians, not priests, not doctors, not psychiatrists — should be able to gainsay a person’s gender identity. In an ideal world, people should be judged by the content of their character, not the content of their underpants. Full disclosure: I identify as a cis heterosexual white male who supports Norwich City FC and although socially liberal, generally votes conservative. And yet this book derailed my political outlook. In other words, it does what all books attempt but few achieve — it can change peoples’ minds. It might help that I have a son who is trans and who has introduced me to wonderful people in the queer community.  But I am also a member of a historically oppressed and ‘othered’ minority and as such I was struck by this passage:

Moral panics rely on an inherent paradox: that the rights of a small minority of the population wielding little institutional power are in fact a risk to the majority. This is achieved by inciting in the population a mixture of moral disgust and anxiety about contagion.

Sound like anyone you know?

UntitledJoe Haldeman: Peace and War Three novels in one here, what the book clubs would call ‘counts as one choice’. The first, The Forever War, published in 1974, is SF as Vietnam aftershock (based on the author’s own Vietnam experience), and rightly hailed as a genre classic. William Mandella is one of Earth’s brightest and best, conscripted to fight the alien Taurans. But constant accelerations to sizeable fractions of light speed means that when his tour is over, relativity ensures that all his friends and family are dead, and even society has changed to the edge of unintelligibility. The only thing he can do is re-enlist. The sequel, Forever Free (1999), follows Mandella and the veterans as they try and fail to settle down on the subarctic planet of Middle Finger, chafing against the homogeneous and authoritarian mass that the human race has become. It’s a bit of a plod, and overcompensates in the final ten pages when it goes a bit loopy. Forever Peace is connected with the first two only thematically, in that the protagonists are reluctant soldiers trying to bring an end to warfare. It’s set in the mid-21st century in which the United States uses remotely controlled soldiers or ‘soldier boys’ to wage a seemingly never-ending war on a hydra-like profusion of rebel groups in the failed states of the global south. Mix in a vast particle physics experiment that has the potential to suck the cosmos into a black hole, with a conspiracy of Christian fundamentalists and white supremacists who’ll stop at nothing to see this happen, and parts of the novel, written in 1997, seem horribly prescient. It’s an enjoyable read, though the author tends to get bogged down in unnecessary details of the characters’ daily lives, a phenomenon known to SF writers as ‘Squid-On-The-Mantelpiece‘ in which the prospect of imminent apocalypse renders as tedious any attempt to dramatise the everyday.

Untitled Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Folio Society Edition) – Vol 6. This volume is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. The first is an extended essay on the internecine warfare between early Christian sects about the nature of the Incarnation, which, like the earlier arguments about the nature of the Trinity, Gibbon finds as exasperating as we do. So much ink — and blood — spilled over distinctions so fine as to be invisible. Comparing two of the various schismatic sects:

… their intestine divisions are more numerous, and their doctors (as far as I can measure the degrees of nonsense) are more remote from the precincts of reason.

There’s a mess in ‘ere, but no Messiah. And if that wasn’t enough, the Byzantines get themselves embroiled in a furore about whether the adoration of icons counts as idolatry, as if the profusion of saints and martyrs, miracles and relics didn’t already count as some kind of backsliding into polytheism.

In the long night of superstition the Christians had wandered far away from the simplicity of the Gospel: nor was it easy for them to discern the clue, and tread back the mazes of the labyrinth.

The second part is a chronological, one-damned-thing-after-another treatment of the decline of the Byzantine Empire as far as their conquest by the Crusaders, a sixty-monarch, six-hundred-year canter through time compressed into a few pages. Gibbon himself feels it a bit rushed:

In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment: the grave is ever beside the throne; the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on our remembrance.

This telescoped treatment, however, allows Gibbon to reflect on the point of it all, the struggles of the various Michaels and Basils and Leos and Borises and Rishis and Constantines (all of whom are appalling) up the greasy imperial pole:

Was personal happiness the aim and object of their ambition? I shall not descant on the vulgar topics of the misery of kings; but I may surely observe that their condition, of all others, is the most pregnant with fear, and the least susceptible of hope.

Then there is an excursion into the reign of Charlemagne and whether the Frankish Empire was in any sense Holy or Roman. But all this is hors-d’oeuvres to the main dish, an examination of ‘one of the most memorable revolutions which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe’ — the sudden emergence and rapid spread of Islam. This appeared from, almost literally, nowhere, and spread from the Indus to the Atlantic in the space of a century. Its success is partly attributable to its emergence at a time when the Roman and Persian Empires were at their weakest.

The birth of Mohammed was fortunately placed in the most degenerate and disorderly period of the Persians, the Romans, and the barbarians of Europe; the empires of Trajan, or even Constantine or Charlemagne, would have repelled the assaults of the naked Saracens, and the torrent of fanaticism might have been obscurely lost in the sands of Arabia.

Part of Islam’s appeal, though, is its simplicity:

‘I believe in one God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God’, is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honours of the prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtue; and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion.

What a refreshing contrast, Gibbon seems to say, with the sterile complexities of Christian theology:

… the religion of Mohammed might seem less inconsistent with reason than the creed of mystery and superstition which, in the seventh century, disgraced the simplicity of the Gospel.

Screenshot 2022-10-26 at 05.59.53Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja: Spike Passionate, polemical and partisan, this is a first-hand account of the first year or so of the Coronavirus pandemic from one at the eye of the storm. Farrar is the Director of the Wellcome Trust, an expert on the spread of epidemics, and was a member of SAGE, the group of scientists advising the UK government on policy — if only the government cared to listen. Ahuja is a journalist who pulled Farrar’s diary of the plague year into the form of something like a thriller. The large cast of characters and the forest of organisational acronyms can be hard to navigate but there’s a helpful glossary and dramatic personae at the end. This is very much a view from the trenches and does not count as a comprehensive history of the pandemic, for much is omitted. There is almost nothing on, say, the efficacy of wearing masks; the studies showing that the virus does not live on surfaces; and the pernicious effects of the anti-vaccination movement. And although the author does like to take political pot shots, his view is selective. He discusses the former (Labour) Prime Minister Gordon Brown (with whom he is on first-name terms) although his role was peripheral, yet nowhere at all does he mention the (Conservative) then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak and his colleagues at the Treasury whose heroic work kept the economy alive during the lockdown. Although it is regrettably true that the Conservative Party is historically very poor at understanding science, balance should not be a casualty of the author’s understandable frustration. Nevertheless, when the history of the pandemic comes to be written, this will be important source material. Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022 (DISCLAIMER: I also have a dog in that fight).

UntitledNick Davidson: The Greywacke Cast your mind back to the early nineteenth century when two titans of geology — the ambitious, social climbing ex-soldier Roderick Murchison and the mild-mannered cleric Adam Sedgwick sought to map the confusing jumble of rocks that was Wales. Back in the day, everything older than the Old Red Sandstone was a muddle called the Greywacke, and this is the story about how it gave up its secrets. In the end, Murchison’s Silurian trumped Sedgwick’s Cambrian, and the two once close colleagues fell out spectacularly. It was only resolved in the next generation when an even more mild-mannered schoolteacher, Charles Lapworth, came along and discovered the Ordovician that sat between them. This is a classic piece of popular history of science (I am reminded of The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate by Toby Appel, another tale about whow two close friends fell out over scientific minutiae). The author — a documentary filmmaker and outdoorsman  — has done his work with incredible diligence, not only digging into rarely seen archives but tramping the same fells and rills as his protagonists.  An immensely satisfying read. Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022 (DISCLAIMER: I also have a dog in that fight).

Posted in anjana ahuja, edward gibbon, forever free, forever peace, Jeremy farrar, Joe Haldeman, nick davidson, Shon Faye, spike, the Cuvier Geoffroy debate, the decline and fall of the roman empire, the forever war, the greywacke, the transgender issue, toby appel, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In October

Does Life Get Better at Mid-Career?

Posted on 28 October 2022 by Athene Donald

Julie Gould and Nature Careers podcasts have been running an interesting series (Muddle of the Middle) on what it’s like to be a mid-career/middle aged scientist. A time when precarity is likely to be past, but reality of all the different strands impacting on one’s life come into sharp focus. I certainly didn’t find it an easy time, and looking back to the years of my 40’s, I still find it difficult to judge what the primary issues were, because they don’t present themselves as black and white and they were probably a messy tangle of different factors.

At this stage, many parents face the challenges raised by adolescent children simultaneously with ageing parents, all wanting attention, time and love, albeit often in incompatible ways.  Being part of the ‘sandwich generation’ is bound to be difficult, quite apart from the demands of the job. Elder care probably needs to be talked about more than it is. Particularly when parents live a long way away, the stresses can be huge. For women, the menopause may cause significant challenges. In my day, that wasn’t much talked about, except in dark comments about some woman who was regarded as being ‘difficult’. This difficulty was attributed, in my hearing, to it being ‘that time of life’. Unhelpful. For all I know the same was said of me but if so, they had the grace not to say it in front of me.

But it is exactly this issue of how one’s colleagues approach a woman in mid-life that interests me. Having done a straw poll of around 25 women, it seems to me the population is split between those who say things got worse, to those who say it was a great improvement. I have absolutely no idea what determines which camp an individual falls into – is it their department, their discipline, their character, even how they choose to dress, or is it simply a question of luck? – but I know I certainly fell into the former grouping. As I moved up the ladder, I decided I must have become more threatening, moving from someone who could be patronised to someone who wanted their voice and views to be heard and therefore apparently had to be slapped down or ignored, even talked over. Maybe those who were doing this to me had no idea of how they came across. Conversations in more recent years suggests this is likely to be true. Indeed, in one case, it seemed they actually thought my success was in part attributed to their leadership. Hmmm, is all I can say.

Of course, I must add ‘not all men’ (and let’s face it, in my case, there were no women involved as their numbers were so low). Other key individuals were massively helpful, supportive and understanding, but there were a number of years when those around me who set strategic direction and had the power did not want to accept that, as a professor and an FRS, maybe I had a right to be listened to and treated as ‘one of the boys’. I find this a difficult topic to talk about, because I have no desire to identify individuals publicly. Perhaps they may just not have known how to cope with a professional woman, when their interactions with women were largely limited to either girlfriends or mothers. I didn’t fit in to either heading so how were they supposed to deal with me? These days, I would like to think that men are more accustomed to female scientists being quite good at their jobs, as good as the men around them, and therefore they have more practice at being professional with them. However, in the straw poll of mid-career women I conducted, there were undoubtedly a number who identified with the idea that men were non-plussed and awkward when dealing with a woman in a leadership role, or who commented how it appeared they had become a threat as they became more senior, in ways that had not been so at earlier career stages.

On the other hand, there were other women who commented how nice it was to become more senior because they were no longer subjected to the same levels of harassment. What a damning statement about the world in which we live. I am glad to hear they had a better environment as they progressed, but the reality is a number of women will have been completely lost to the system by the toxicity they encountered. If they were lucky, maybe these women suddenly found themselves with power and kudos, and that all the academics around them listened to their wise words. Sadly, it may mean no more than that their situations were better than they had been, and they felt able at least to voice their opinions. I cannot tell.

The trouble is, there remain systemic problems for women. If they are bad enough, an individual may choose to walk away, never realising their dreams or their potential. If they get through the early stages, with or without actual harassment, then they will hit the mid-career problems faced by all researchers and identified in the podcasts, as well as those specifically related to the fact they are a woman. The recent article by Julie Jebsen et al in Nature Chemistry spells out where systemic problems lie in our current system of research funding, together with some recommendations for what can be done about them. It highlights many challenges that readers of this blog are likely to recognize. Funding is just one part of the problem, a very important part, but individual actions by those around remain a potent obstacle. Women in academia have been limping on for far too long, with slow improvements visible on a number of fronts. Yet too many obstacles remain. When I set out, and when I was mid-career, I kept thinking that the next generation and the next, would find themselves in an equitable environment. We are far from there yet.

 

 

Posted in equity, harassment, obstacles, patronising, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Does Life Get Better at Mid-Career?

Camp Catastrophic

Posted on 27 October 2022 by Henry Gee

Back in the early days of the present unpleasantness I was engaged to take part in a literary festival in Hay-on-Wye (no, not that one, a different one). Cognisant that Offspring2 is a keen bibliophile, I thought I could take her along — while I was giving talks and taking part in panels, she could browse the more than thirty bookstores in that remarkable Welsh border town.

But COVID intervened, the festival went online, and Offspring2 didn’t get her promised trip. So, when the Gees acquired a camper van, we pencilled in a trip, and booked a campsite just a few steps away from Hay. Now, this happened a few weeks ago: I’ve only now been able to bring myself to write about the ensuing disaster.

So, Offspring2 and I set off from Cromer, full of joy and anticipation, and listening to the BBC’s hoary old adaptation of The Lord of the Rings on cassette (did I say that the camper is so retro it has a cassette player?)

Well, the clouds gathered just over halfway, on the M42 near Birmingham, when the coolant warning light went on and stayed on, accompanied by a horrible constant buzzing noise. We pulled over and called the AA (no, not that one, a different one). Eventually a tow truck arrived and towed us to a safe place. The driver checked our coolant and topped it up. We decided not to wait for an AA patrolman (this proved to be a mistake) and  pressed on … but it wasn’t long before warning lights flashed; the engine temperature indicator went up and down like the Assyrian Empire; but we were nearly there, so just after dark we pulled in to the campsite. It was called Black Mountain View and was a wonderful place, and would have made for a pleasant holiday under different circumstances. Offspring2 settled down to sleep in the van while I pitched the awning, unfolded the camp bed and snuggled down to sleep. Or, at least, I tried. It was a cold and damp night.

What with the worries about the van (the whole interior smelled of burning rubber) and the damp night we decided to abandon our holiday and try to get home. With the help of the campsite owner (a skilled mechanic) we topped up the coolant again and set off.

Ten miles out, not far from Hereford, we finally broke down. Steam was pouring from the engine. We called the AA again. This time the patrolman had a better idea of the problem – we had probably blown the head gasket. Big, big problem, and the van was no longer safe to drive.

Screenshot 2022-10-27 at 08.59.10There followed a succession of tow trucks that took us from Hereford in easy stages to the Barton Mills service area on the A11, some 68 miles from home. By that time the Sun had set and the Moon had risen — I took this picture from the tow truck of the Moon and Jupiter. But by then, the AA had run out of tow trucks, and they had to get a taxi. We eventually got home 15 hours after our breakdown. I had to leave the keys to the van at the service station. The van was towed home next day; a couple of days later my garage came to take it to their workshop … and that’s where it is now.

If and when the van gets back to us we might have second thoughts about camping, or at least, anywhere far away. However, the night sky in Wales was so lovely that I can imagine my taking the van to dark hilltops for stargazing with my new telescope. So perhaps, even when I am lying in the gutter (and smelling of burning rubber), I can still look up at the stars.

 

Posted in Apparitions, automobile association, camper van, Hay-on-Wye, How The Light Gets In, travel | Comments Off on Camp Catastrophic

Part-time talking

Posted on 26 October 2022 by Stephen

Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can churn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing.

The dance of light at Barcelona airport

Black and white shot of people reflecting off the gleaming surfaces inside Barcelona airport

Whatever. The itch to keep writing is still there, even if it remains distracted by the demands of work. But those are lessening these days because I have shed my teaching responsibilities for the year and moved to a part-time contract working four days a week. I am lucky to be able to do so.

I suspect it may be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. I’m only three weeks into the new regime but am already feeling the benefit of having a long weekend every weekend. Work, including some of my extra-curricular commitments (such as DORA and my involvement in revisiting the Metric Tide) – might still intrude on the weekend, but so far only rarely on Fridays and it now feels more like a conscious, controlled choice. Let’s see if I can stick to the programme.

Anyway, to business. This week I have given three talks on three different but interlinked areas that have consumed my attention over the past decade or more. We are in the midst of open access week and on Monday I was able to participate online in a panel organised by Aberdeen University to discuss the latest moves towards open science. I confess I have not kept as well abreast of developments as I used to – I have still to catch up with all the hoo-haa over eLife’s recent shift in publication practice (though it strikes me immediately as a bold and worthy experiment – but I have a strong sense that the centre of gravity is shifting in this debate: openness is clearly the way to go, even if some of the paths are tangled by the commercial interests of some publishers and unresolved issues of research assessment in the academic community.

Research assessment, or more particularly the reform of research assessment, was the subject of an invitation-only roundtable run by Science Business on Tuesday morning. I think this was in Brussels but I’m not sure; I was an online participant. I’m not at liberty to divulge details but was struck by the divergence of opinion and the imprecision of language. Some talked about the need for ‘objective’ metrics or for ‘concrete’ metrics systems without pausing to analyse how such objectivity or concreteness is achieved in a system that depends critically on individual judgement and social interaction (I have finally got around to reading Ziman). Those of use who wish to see quantitative data about research contributions tensioned and contextualised by qualitative analyses need to make a stronger case.

And finally today I was at the Building Bridges 2022 conference organised by the Academia Europaea, at a session on diversity and inclusion run by the Young Academy of Europe. This was bracketed by intriguing sessions on science policy and on innovation, both social and technological. I hope I gave a good account of the work that we are doing at Imperial to advance EDI (very much unfinished) and was glad to find myself in agreement with my co-panellist, Yvonne Galligan(Professor of Comparative Politics a the Technological University of Dublin), the real expert in this area.

Our discussion was a bit rushed and abbreviated because the previous session on science policy had overrun but once again I noticed a problematic imprecision in the use of language. Throughout the session, chaired by Robert-Jan Smits (an erstwhile director-general of research and innovation at the European Commission), the need to protect and valorise excellence was emphasised. No one is against excellence, right? But no one stopped to define what it means although at one point it was implicitly taken to mean performance in the Nature Index, which is a very narrow and contested measure of research output. I’m increasingly of the view that the term needs to be retired, not least because the scholarly critique of excellence has laid bare its weaknesses, deformities and gender biases. What a pity that the scholarly system, with its fixation on metricised performance, has yet to properly absorb this critique.

Posted in science | Comments Off on Part-time talking

Investing in People

Posted on 24 October 2022 by Athene Donald

We have all got used to the wonders of Zoom (or Teams if you prefer) over the last couple of years. It may have made academic life as we were used to it viable during the pandemic, but it has its downsides, as I discovered this week. Firstly, much though I feel committed to reducing my carbon footprint, there are times when meeting in person makes an enormous difference. Eighteen months ago I wrote about what I felt we, as academics, lost when we could not meet. That was of course while Omicron was still rampaging and in person felt a distant dream for most. For local meetings I am totally in favour of sticking with in person unless Covid intervenes, as it did for me a couple of weeks ago (finally).

And it was due to being laid low by Covid that I did not go to London to present evidence in person to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee last week, but relied on Zoom. Sadly, this went awry. My laptop audio decided to pack up at the crucial moment and I missed the first fifteen minutes or so of the hour-long session. Hence, if you listen to the recording of the evidence, my first words are an apology. Not how I would have wanted to come across, particularly as I was left somewhat disconcerted by the hiccough and, since I was using someone else’s laptop, disorganised with regard to my notes.

This was a sessionfor their enquiry on People and Skills in UK STEM. A topic of great importance, and covering a wide swathe of issues. The session I was in was focussed on skills in the workforce; the following session more on university researchers, including issues of precarity. I don’t want to rehearse all the arguments I made there, including the importance of those who don’t follow a linear trajectory through GCSE, A Levels and hence to university, the need for FE Colleges to be well-funded, and the issues about women being discouraged from entering the STEM disciplines by societal expectations. You can listen to me on Parliament.TV and read my written submission to the enquiry if you want to know more. But I would like to highlight one point I made about the importance of employers investing in their own to upskill them.

Churchill College occupies a large site in Cambridge (45 acres I believe, the largest single site of any of the Cambridge colleges) and houses a large number of students on site. It is therefore incumbent on us to have appropriately large Estates and Maintenance teams. We also have many ‘60’s buildings, concrete and bricks in a brutalist style, with flat roofs. Flat roofs are excellent for installing solar panels on and, in our case much to our advantage, we also have copper parapets which rise slightly above the roofline. All this means, as we work around the College refurbishing the various courts, we are well-placed to install solar panels (plus plenty of a modern standard of insulation) to reduce our dependence on gas (the parapet’s advantage is it largely makes these invisible from the ground, making planning permission easier).

However, installation of solar panels does not come cheap and pay-back time tends to be well over a decade. In the College’s case, though, a decision was taken to upskill members of the maintenance team to be able to carry out the installation themselves and this is what they were able to do over the summer over an extensive area of roof. We are now able to generate 200,000kWh per annum from these installations, and are aiming for 750,000kWh of solar power on site per year by 2026. By using our own team, the pay-back time is cut right back to 4-5 years.  This is obviously great from the point of view of our carbon footprint and energy bills, but the pride our team take in this work is equally great. It demonstrates the importance in investing in employees, offering them the opportunity to upskill. You can read more about this and other in-house work to improve sustainability in our operations here.

Of course, not every employer is in a position to act in an equivalent way, but as a nation we do really badly on this front. A recent IFS report highlighted a 38% reduction in spending on adult education and apprenticeships over the last decade. There is an even greater drop (50%) in spending on classroom-based adult education.  We have a new PM about to take over, so we will have to wait to see if the phrase ‘levelling up’ re-enters the political lexicon, or whether we are now simply talking about ‘growth’, but whatever jargon is attached to this problem, if we are to drive innovation and improve our productivity, we need to make sure that we invest, not just in those heading for high-powered research jobs, but those others who make so much difference to operations at different levels in all kinds of organisations.

The trouble is that skills is a word that encompasses so much (the same might be said of levelling up), and it is a heterogeneous landscape. Robert West from the CBI, with whom I was paired in the evidence session, pointed out that apprenticeships are only one route of acquiring new skills (and very often actually these may be at a degree level or even masters anyhow) and in the Lords enquiry he wanted to stress that the solution cannot simply sit with adjusting the apprenticeship levy scheme. It is clear to me that further education colleges have a key role to play – and more particularly if they were properly resourced – to ensure that those who aren’t suited to the degree (i.e. Level 6) route have alternatives that will still equip them with vital skills.

In England, a 2018 Government report showed that only 4 per cent of 25-year-olds hold a Level 4 or Level 5 qualification as their highest level. Much higher numbers either don’t get beyond Level 3 or go on to achieve a Level 6 qualification, with figures for around 30% for both.  In contrast, in Germany, Level 4 and 5 makes up 20 per cent of all higher education enrolments. These people with intermediate skills are often crucial for technical roles – in universities or in factories or SMEs driving innovative processes – and there is a shortage of such people. This was highlighted in the 2021 Royal Society report on the research and technical workforce in the UK, as also in earlier work for the Gatsby Foundation by Paul Lewis.

I will look forward to seeing the final report from the Lords Committee, and also how investment in education and skills plays out under the new PM.  Meanwhile Churchill College will continue to invest in its workforce, employing apprentices (as we always have) and helping to upskill others in ways that work for them.

 

 

Posted in apprenticeships, careers, education, House of Lords, Science Funding, skills, solar panels | Comments Off on Investing in People

The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

Posted on 17 October 2022 by Henry Gee

You’ll both be aware that I offered a few impressions of the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, the multi-squillion-dollar televisual emission from Amazon Prime. Now that all eight episodes of the first series (or ‘season’, as we are now obliged to call such things) have been aired, I thought I’d note down a few thoughts, more for my own edification than anything else, as it seems that everyone has their own deeply entrenched opinions, and, anyway, nobody cares what I think.

As before THERE ARE SPIDERS SPOILERS, so if you haven’t yet seen all the episodes, you may look away now.

Overall — I found it most satisfying. I have watched almost all episodes twice. I know in my earlier post I said I didn’t care if the story did violence to Tolkien’s original, but that was perhaps disingenuous of me. I do care. Of course I do. The story was consistent with Tolkien’s (admittedly sketchy) narratives of the Second Age of Middle-earth (after the ‘Elder Days’ of the Silmarillion, but thousands of years before the events in The Lord of the Rings), and such liberties as it took actually, in the end, generally enhanced the story rather than detracted from it.

Here’s a brief run-down of the Second Age in Tolkien’s imagined world, inasmuch as it concerns the first TV series. The First Age, or ‘Elder Days’, ended with the defeat of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Sauron, Morgoth’s chief Hench Entity (he is the Dark Lord in The Lord of the Rings), escapes, and there is peace for a long while. The Men (that is, humans) who aided the Elves were given a large island, Elenna, to live on, in the middle of the ocean, where they founded the kingdom of Numenor. Although there was much commerce between Men and Elves, as the Age wore on, Men became suspicious of Elves and jealous of their immortality. The Men left behind in Middle earth – those who did not qualify for entry into Numenor — were a wretched bunch, haunted by their erstwhile service to Morgoth, and generally abandoned. As the age progressed they were aided by visits from Numenor, visits that became increasingly colonial and dominating. Meanwhile, those Elves who did not return to the Blessed Realm of Valinor in the far west founded a kingdom called Lindon on the far northwestern corner of Middle-earth, presided over by Gil-galad, the High King. The Dwarves, meanwhile, opened up their kingdom of Khazad-Dûm in the Misty Mountains. Some of the Elves who took delight in manufacture and smithwork founded a country called Eregion nearby, and there was much commerce between Elves and Dwarves. One result of this interaction was the forging of the Three Rings of Power, artefacts that helped preserve the culture of the Elves against the ageing of the world. Unbeknown to the Elves, they are aided in their effort by a mystery smith called Annatar, who turns out to be none other than Sauron. After that events take a nosedive, but that’s enough to be getting on with for now.

The TV series follows one main story, with another only tangentially related, and a third hardly at all.

The main story (which I discussed more in my earlier post) follows the young Elf Princess Galadriel, very much a warrior, in her obsessive search for Sauron. Gil-galad tries to dissuade her, saying that evil has been vanquished, but privately confesses to Elrond (his herald and speech writer) that evil might still lurk and that an effect of Galadriel’s quest will be to stir up what might have been best left slumbering. His remarks are, indeed, prescient. (Linguistic Note: The Elves speak standard, Received-Pronunciation English). After several adventures Galadriel finds herself castaway on a shipwreck with Halbrand, a Man of the ‘Southlands’ of Middle-earth who is escaping who-knows-what depredations by those Orcs still around after the First Age — for not all were destroyed. They are both rescued by Elendil, a Sea-Captain of Numenor. (Linguistic Note: Halbrand has a Yorkshire accent).

The story thus shifts to Numenor, where we meet the Queen Regent, Miriel; her chancellor, the charismatic Pharazon; and Numenorean society in general. (Linguistic Note: Numenoreans, like Elves, speak standard Received-Pronunciation English). Halbrand would like to remain in Numenor and become a smith, but Galadriel discovers that Halbrand is a scion of a lost kingdom in the Southlands and persuades the Numenoreans to launch an expeditionary force to aid the Southlands and restore him to his kingdom.

In the Southlands, we find a small village of people (with Yorkshire accents). A healer, Bronwyn, a single mother with a teenage son, Theo, is close to Arondir, an Elf who is part of a detachment charged with guarding the Southlands. When Gil-galad determines that peace has returned, the detachment is withdrawn… but not before falling foul of a band of Orcs. The Orcs, which hate sunlight, are tunnelling and undermining the entire area, slowly turning it into a kind of Western-Front hellscape. Which is a shame, as the Southlands look rather pleasant, except for the volcano that broods on the horizon. The Numenoreans land and help the Southlanders defeat the Orcs, or so it seems. Galadriel has a confrontation with the leader of the Orcs, who turns out to be a corrupted Elf, called Adar.  However, the Orcs use a sneaky contraption that floods the magma chamber of the volcano with water, prompting a violent eruption. The Numenoreans and Southlanders have to retreat from a land that is turning, very quickly, into Mordor. The volcano is of course Orodruin, or Mount Doom of The Lord of the Rings. Galadriel and Halbrand make their way to Eregion.

Meanwhile, Gil-galad sends Elrond to Eregion, where he is required to help Celebrimbor in a new project. There is some hurry, apparently, but Celebrimbor doesn’t have the manpower. Elrond goes to nearby Khazad-Dûm to enlist the help of a friend, Prince Durin, heir to the throne. This story — a personal one, of Elrond’s relationship with Durin, is the meat of the second story. (Linguistic Note: The Dwarves speak with Glaswegian accents). Together they discover a new ore called mithril which Elrond says will stop the Elves from fading, but Durin’s father, also Durin, forbids further work mining mithril, and with good reason — the mine workings disturb an ancient menace, slumbering far below the Dwarf mines (this is the balrog from The Lord of the Rings). Elrond is thrown out of Khazad-Dûm with a single nugget of mithril. Back in Eregion, Celebrimbor uses the mithril to forge the Three Rings, with helpful suggestions from Halbrand, which Galadriel finds suspicious. The dwarf storyline is only there to provide the mithril, and warn us of the oncoming Balrog.

The third story concerns the Harfoots, a wandering tribe of proto-hobbits, living somewhere near Greenwood the Great (the later Mirkwood). One of them, a young woman called Elanor Brandyfoot, befriends a stranger (known as the Stranger, with a capital ‘S’) who falls from the sky in a meteorite. The Stranger is very confused but seems to have magical powers. (Linguistic Note: the Harfoots have Irish accents). Their story interacts with the others not at all, except that they notice that parts of their landscape have been burned by lava bombs from distant Orodruin.

The question the Tolkien Twitterverse asked throughout the series was — who is Sauron? I thought it might be the Stranger, and indeed, in Episode 8, the Stranger is approached by three magi who are convinced he is Sauron, only to find that he is, in fact, an Istar, or wizard. (I was reminded of the scene at the beginning of Monty Python’s Life of Brian when the magi come to worship the baby Brian, but realise they have come to the wrong house). It seems clear from some of the things he says to Elanor that he is in fact Gandalf. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Gandalf arrives in Middle-earth respectably by boat, thousands of years later, his task being to inspire the residents of Middle-earth to rise up against Sauron. However, thinking about it, his fiery televisual arrival is satisfying for a number of reasons. First, he is disadvantaged from the beginning — shocked, disoriented and naked, he has to make a start from nothing. Second, the fact that he is befriended by Harfoots explains Gandalf’s later fondness for hobbits (which Tolkien does not explain). Third, that the magi mistake him for Sauron. In Tolkien’s mythology, Gandalf and Sauron belong to the same order of angelic being, and, Tolkien notes, even Sauron was not evil in the beginning.

Is Adar, the corrupted Elf, then, Sauron? No — but his depiction lends a new poignancy to the stories of the origins of Orcs. This is a vexed question I discussed at length (even more length than here) in a book, but Tolkien was very clear that, in one respect, Orcs originated from Elves that were ensnared by Morgoth, twisted and ruined. Adar, then, although he looks like a battered Elf, is one of the first generation of Orcs. His fellow Orcs (his ‘children’, produced by some unknown means) are much more human-looking than many of the Orcs in the (much later) Lord of the Rings, as if Orcs become more degenerate with time.

Sauron turns out to be … Halbrand. In a key scene in the season finale, he wars in thought with Galadriel. He admits that ‘I have been awake since before the breaking of the first silence’: that is, he is a divine being. But he also, it seems, would like to make amends.

When Morgoth was defeated, it was as if a great clenched fist had released its grasp from my neck, and in the stillness of that first sunrise, felt — at last — the light of the One again. And I knew, that if ever I was to be forgiven, that I had to heal everything that I had helped ruin.

[Theological Note: The One is the High God, above the angelic Valar, and the lesser but still angelic Maiar, which include Gandalf and Sauron]. Halbrand/Sauron tempts Galadriel with the thought that she might be his Queen, using lines (‘stronger than the foundations of the Earth’) that we saw Galadriel utter in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (she rejects this). At the end of this confrontation, Halbrand’s eyes turn slit-like, like that of the cat Sauron always was, and the single lidless cat’s eye he would eventually become (blink and you’d miss it). But before that, Sauron at all points seems to be the reasonable one in the argument. He knows that the best lies are 90% truth. At the end of the episode we see him journey to the Mordor that Adar and his Orcs have prepared for him.

[Further Linguistic Note: distinguished Tolkienist John Garth noted on Twitter that Sauron’s Yorkshire accent, might, after being in Mordor, become more like that of the Black Country].

 

 

 

Posted in amazon prime, durin, elrond, galadriel, gandalf, gil-galad, halbrand, john garth, Monty Python's Life of Brian, sauroin, Science-fiction, the lord of the rings, the rings of power, the science of middle earth, tolkien | Comments Off on The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

Posted on 17 October 2022 by Henry Gee

You’ll both be aware that I offered a few impressions of the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, the multi-squillion-dollar televisual emission from Amazon Prime. Now that all eight episodes of the first series (or ‘season’, as we are now obliged to call such things) have been aired, I thought I’d note down a few thoughts, more for my own edification than anything else, as it seems that everyone has their own deeply entrenched opinions, and, anyway, nobody cares what I think.

As before THERE ARE SPIDERS SPOILERS, so if you haven’t yet seen all the episodes, you may look away now.

Overall — I found it most satisfying. I have watched almost all episodes twice. I know in my earlier post I said I didn’t care if the story did violence to Tolkien’s original, but that was perhaps disingenuous of me. I do care. Of course I do. The story was consistent with Tolkien’s (admittedly sketchy) narratives of the Second Age of Middle-earth (after the ‘Elder Days’ of the Silmarillion, but thousands of years before the events in The Lord of the Rings), and such liberties as it took actually, in the end, generally enhanced the story rather than detracted from it.

Here’s a brief run-down of the Second Age in Tolkien’s imagined world, inasmuch as it concerns the first TV series. The First Age, or ‘Elder Days’, ended with the defeat of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Sauron, Morgoth’s chief Hench Entity (he is the Dark Lord in The Lord of the Rings), escapes, and there is peace for a long while. The Men (that is, humans) who aided the Elves were given a large island, Elenna, to live on, in the middle of the ocean, where they founded the kingdom of Numenor. Although there was much commerce between Men and Elves, as the Age wore on, Men became suspicious of Elves and jealous of their immortality. The Men left behind in Middle earth – those who did not qualify for entry into Numenor — were a wretched bunch, haunted by their erstwhile service to Morgoth, and generally abandoned. As the age progressed they were aided by visits from Numenor, visits that became increasingly colonial and dominating. Meanwhile, those Elves who did not return to the Blessed Realm of Valinor in the far west founded a kingdom called Lindon on the far northwestern corner of Middle-earth, presided over by Gil-galad, the High King. The Dwarves, meanwhile, opened up their kingdom of Khazad-Dûm in the Misty Mountains. Some of the Elves who took delight in manufacture and smithwork founded a country called Eregion nearby, and there was much commerce between Elves and Dwarves. One result of this interaction was the forging of the Three Rings of Power, artefacts that helped preserve the culture of the Elves against the ageing of the world. Unbeknown to the Elves, they are aided in their effort by a mystery smith called Annatar, who turns out to be none other than Sauron. After that events take a nosedive, but that’s enough to be getting on with for now.

The TV series follows one main story, with another only tangentially related, and a third hardly at all.

The main story (which I discussed more in my earlier post) follows the young Elf Princess Galadriel, very much a warrior, in her obsessive search for Sauron. Gil-galad tries to dissuade her, saying that evil has been vanquished, but privately confesses to Elrond (his herald and speech writer) that evil might still lurk and that an effect of Galadriel’s quest will be to stir up what might have been best left slumbering. His remarks are, indeed, prescient. (Linguistic Note: The Elves speak standard, Received-Pronunciation English). After several adventures Galadriel finds herself castaway on a shipwreck with Halbrand, a Man of the ‘Southlands’ of Middle-earth who is escaping who-knows-what depredations by those Orcs still around after the First Age — for not all were destroyed. They are both rescued by Elendil, a Sea-Captain of Numenor. (Linguistic Note: Halbrand has a Yorkshire accent).

The story thus shifts to Numenor, where we meet the Queen Regent, Miriel; her chancellor, the charismatic Pharazon; and Numenorean society in general. (Linguistic Note: Numenoreans, like Elves, speak standard Received-Pronunciation English). Halbrand would like to remain in Numenor and become a smith, but Galadriel discovers that Halbrand is a scion of a lost kingdom in the Southlands and persuades the Numenoreans to launch an expeditionary force to aid the Southlands and restore him to his kingdom.

In the Southlands, we find a small village of people (with Yorkshire accents). A healer, Bronwyn, a single mother with a teenage son, Theo, is close to Arondir, an Elf who is part of a detachment charged with guarding the Southlands. When Gil-galad determines that peace has returned, the detachment is withdrawn… but not before falling foul of a band of Orcs. The Orcs, which hate sunlight, are tunnelling and undermining the entire area, slowly turning it into a kind of Western-Front hellscape. Which is a shame, as the Southlands look rather pleasant, except for the volcano that broods on the horizon. The Numenoreans land and help the Southlanders defeat the Orcs, or so it seems. Galadriel has a confrontation with the leader of the Orcs, who turns out to be a corrupted Elf, called Adar.  However, the Orcs use a sneaky contraption that floods the magma chamber of the volcano with water, prompting a violent eruption. The Numenoreans and Southlanders have to retreat from a land that is turning, very quickly, into Mordor. The volcano is of course Orodruin, or Mount Doom of The Lord of the Rings. Galadriel and Halbrand make their way to Eregion.

Meanwhile, Gil-galad sends Elrond to Eregion, where he is required to help Celebrimbor in a new project. There is some hurry, apparently, but Celebrimbor doesn’t have the manpower. Elrond goes to nearby Khazad-Dûm to enlist the help of a friend, Prince Durin, heir to the throne. This story — a personal one, of Elrond’s relationship with Durin, is the meat of the second story. (Linguistic Note: The Dwarves speak with Glaswegian accents). Together they discover a new ore called mithril which Elrond says will stop the Elves from fading, but Durin’s father, also Durin, forbids further work mining mithril, and with good reason — the mine workings disturb an ancient menace, slumbering far below the Dwarf mines (this is the balrog from The Lord of the Rings). Elrond is thrown out of Khazad-Dûm with a single nugget of mithril. Back in Eregion, Celebrimbor uses the mithril to forge the Three Rings, with helpful suggestions from Halbrand, which Galadriel finds suspicious. The dwarf storyline is only there to provide the mithril, and warn us of the oncoming Balrog.

The third story concerns the Harfoots, a wandering tribe of proto-hobbits, living somewhere near Greenwood the Great (the later Mirkwood). One of them, a young woman called Elanor Brandyfoot, befriends a stranger (known as the Stranger, with a capital ‘S’) who falls from the sky in a meteorite. The Stranger is very confused but seems to have magical powers. (Linguistic Note: the Harfoots have Irish accents). Their story interacts with the others not at all, except that they notice that parts of their landscape have been burned by lava bombs from distant Orodruin.

The question the Tolkien Twitterverse asked throughout the series was — who is Sauron? I thought it might be the Stranger, and indeed, in Episode 8, the Stranger is approached by three magi who are convinced he is Sauron, only to find that he is, in fact, an Istar, or wizard. (I was reminded of the scene at the beginning of Monty Python’s Life of Brian when the magi come to worship the baby Brian, but realise they have come to the wrong house). It seems clear from some of the things he says to Elanor that he is in fact Gandalf. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Gandalf arrives in Middle-earth respectably by boat, thousands of years later, his task being to inspire the residents of Middle-earth to rise up against Sauron. However, thinking about it, his fiery televisual arrival is satisfying for a number of reasons. First, he is disadvantaged from the beginning — shocked, disoriented and naked, he has to make a start from nothing. Second, the fact that he is befriended by Harfoots explains Gandalf’s later fondness for hobbits (which Tolkien does not explain). Third, that the magi mistake him for Sauron. In Tolkien’s mythology, Gandalf and Sauron belong to the same order of angelic being, and, Tolkien notes, even Sauron was not evil in the beginning.

Is Adar, the corrupted Elf, then, Sauron? No — but his depiction lends a new poignancy to the stories of the origins of Orcs. This is a vexed question I discussed at length (even more length than here) in a book, but Tolkien was very clear that, in one respect, Orcs originated from Elves that were ensnared by Morgoth, twisted and ruined. Adar, then, although he looks like a battered Elf, is one of the first generation of Orcs. His fellow Orcs (his ‘children’, produced by some unknown means) are much more human-looking than many of the Orcs in the (much later) Lord of the Rings, as if Orcs become more degenerate with time.

Sauron turns out to be … Halbrand. In a key scene in the season finale, he wars in thought with Galadriel. He admits that ‘I have been awake since before the breaking of the first silence’: that is, he is a divine being. But he also, it seems, would like to make amends.

When Morgoth was defeated, it was as if a great clenched fist had released its grasp from my neck, and in the stillness of that first sunrise, felt — at last — the light of the One again. And I knew, that if ever I was to be forgiven, that I had to heal everything that I had helped ruin.

[Theological Note: The One is the High God, above the angelic Valar, and the lesser but still angelic Maiar, which include Gandalf and Sauron]. Halbrand/Sauron tempts Galadriel with the thought that she might be his Queen, using lines (‘stronger than the foundations of the Earth’) that we saw Galadriel utter in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (she rejects this). At the end of this confrontation, Halbrand’s eyes turn slit-like, like that of the cat Sauron always was, and the single lidless cat’s eye he would eventually become (blink and you’d miss it). But before that, Sauron at all points seems to be the reasonable one in the argument. He knows that the best lies are 90% truth. At the end of the episode we see him journey to the Mordor that Adar and his Orcs have prepared for him.

[Further Linguistic Note: distinguished Tolkienist John Garth noted on Twitter that Sauron’s Yorkshire accent, might, after being in Mordor, become more like that of the Black Country].

 

 

 

Posted in amazon prime, durin, elrond, galadriel, gandalf, gil-galad, halbrand, john garth, Monty Python's Life of Brian, sauroin, Science-fiction, the lord of the rings, the rings of power, the science of middle earth, tolkien | Comments Off on The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

Why We Still Need Ada Lovelace Day

Posted on 11 October 2022 by Athene Donald

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science and inspire future generations. It is often said that ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’, and if young children only ever see images of men as scientists, how are they to realise that girls too can participate? This was a point I made to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee when I gave evidence to their enquiry on diversity in STEM earlier this year.

I stressed there that the absence of named women scientists in the national curriculum is a gaping hole, one that will not make it easy for a girl to imagine that she belongs. It is a point that I may well use again when I present evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee enquiry on People and Skills in UK Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics next week, although I await further details about the precise line of questioning they intend to follow.

Needing to know that people like you are able to pursue the dreams you have is clearly important to encourage individuals to stick with their aspirations. In a very different context, I was very struck at the weekend to hear Fleur East (singer-songwriter-presenter), a celebrity contestant on Strictly, commenting on seeing a trailer of the next version of the cartoon the Little Mermaid, starring a character of colour. She said something along the lines of how much it would have mattered to her as a child to have seen such a character. Ok, she wasn’t dreaming of becoming a mermaid, but clearly a starring role in anything might have seemed unachievable if all she saw were white exemplars. (Many cartoons have of course started to redress this balance).

Ada Lovelace Day is a day to stress all the women who have made a difference in the scientific sphere, in whatever guise. They may be teachers or communicators rather than Nobel Prize winners, but their contribution to the overall scientific enterprise needs to be celebrated. Highlighting their actions and lives is one way of reminding school children that, whatever they look like, whatever their background, there is a place for them in science if they want it. Increasingly, if you are a parent you can find books that tell real life or fictional stories about women making their way in STEM: for instance biographies of Marie Curie suitable for a range of ages; Katherine Johnson’s autobiography aimed at early teens (Reaching for the Moon); or books about the fictional Rosie Revere, a girl with passion for inventing things. Lots of good reading matter, if you happen to come from a family with funds and inclination to bring such women to your attention. If you come from a less advantaged or informed background, the National Curriculum should be able to inspire you, so that it is depressing that the gap is not formally plugged to allow children from whatever family circumstances to be still aware of this reality.

Ada Lovelace is perhaps an unlikely icon for all of this, being the daughter of Lord Byron, whose life was tragically short, but she was a remarkable woman who made the most of her unusual upbringing and education (her mother was so frightened that she might follow in her father’s footsteps that she focussed her education on mathematics and not poetry). She was friends with Mary Somerville, but it was her association with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, that has led to her memory being celebrated. In 1843 she translated and extensively annotated an article written by the Italian mathematician and engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, “Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage”, in which she set out the rudiments of a computational algorithm for the first time.

Ada Lovelace Day was initiated in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson but now seems under threat, in large part due to a lack of sponsorship. However, to think that we have reached a point where the problem about women in science is ‘fixed’ would be naïve in the extreme. One only has to think about the comments Katherine Barbalsingh made to the same Commons Select Committee I referred to above, to realise how far from the truth that is. There is still much work to be done to ensure that anyone, regardless of skin colour or chromosome distribution, is able to pursue a career in STEM if that is what they want to do. I do hope that Ada Lovelace Day will be able to continue.

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The Future of Skills and Education?

Posted on 2 October 2022 by Athene Donald

It is only six weeks since I last wrote about skills on this blog. Not, you might think, a very long time for change to happen. And yet much has. A new monarch (probably the least important for the theme of this post), a new PM, a new Chancellor, and a new direction of travel which, currently, is far from finding favour in the markets. It is also the Conference season; we wait to see quite what turmoil the Conservative Conference unleashes, following Labour’s rather successful one. (We will never know what the LibDems would have done, due to their need to cancel.)

All the signs from the Government seem to be worrying when it comes to investment in Jo Public, infrastructure and innovation. There is still no science minister and, interesting though it is that the ONS has significantly uplifted its analysis of investment in R+D (to put more weight on that done by SMEs), so that it is now much closer to HMRC’s calculations, this change in their estimate does not resolve the productivity puzzle. Productivity (output per hour) has been near to flat since the 2008 financial crash, leaving the economy in a very fragile state made worse by the consequences of Brexit and the pandemic.

Economic growth and increased productivity require (amongst other things) skilled workers, with the right skills in the right place. It requires both that school and university leavers have acquired relevant skills and that they know what career trajectories are open to them. It also requires that adults, who trained decades ago, are able to reskill or upskill to be able to take on the jobs that are available to them now, which may be very different from those accessible to them when they left school or college. In order for all these strands to be working, there needs to be investment in appropriate courses and facilities.

Briefly, it looked as if the Lifelong Learning Entitlement might offer hope to make it easier for people to drop in and out of education according to their needs and the requirements of their local job market. However, although this has been much talked about, the Treasury never signed off on it and, with all the present noises about ‘cuts’, it seems quite possible they never will. Yet the need for workers to be able to update their skills has never been more urgent.

Under the last Labour government, a variety of schemes were introduced with the intent of reducing inequality, starting from birth. Sure Start aimed at ensuring that children from disadvantaged families did not immediately fall behind their middle class peers before they’d even started school. The Education Maintenance Allowance, was a payment to poorer students to incentivise them to stay at school post GCSE. Both these schemes still operate in parts of the UK, but not in England, despite evidence being gathered to show that both were cost-effective, although in the long term rather than the short.

The UK is now in a situation where teacher training has been upended by changes in the accreditation process, and there is a 40% shortfall in recruitment of trainee teachers starting this autumn. The situation is much worse for secondary school teachers than for primary. Given that teacher retention of trained teachers is also a massive problem, there will be many schools with significant shortages of teachers in the years ahead. This has long been a problem with Physics, but it would seem it is going to become prevalent across all disciplines. Anecdote tells of language teachers being asked to teach maths, because there are few pupils wanting to study languages coupled with a dearth of maths teachers. A lack of teachers can only mean large class sizes and restriction of subject choice, neither boding well for generations of students and their future careers. Teachers having to teach outside their comfort zone and qualifications are less likely to inspire the young.

For those students who do not acquire good qualifications at Level 2 (GCSE), their future career options are limited. More opportunities for them to improve their qualifications in later years need to be on offer, and this requires investment in the colleges which will provide such courses as well as financial support for the individual, so that they can afford to take up the opportunities that are available to them. The LLE would have provided such support, but it was due to be a loan, and I always wondered how many individuals, perhaps already with families to support, would have felt able to take on the financial liability. A grant would be much more attractive (as well as expensive). But perhaps we will never find out if the LLE could have worked, if the Treasury sits on its approval.

Instead, what we’ve already learned from this government is that the extremely wealthy will get tax cuts, and the cuts the rest of the population are likely to feel seem set to be on welfare and infrastructure. As yet there has been no talk of investment into the crumbling infrastructure of hospitals, schools, FE Colleges and transport; or investment in the people who are needed to run these. The words uttered by numerous politicians that they aspire for the UK to be a global science superpower will be empty rhetoric without the investment to make this possible. Association with the EU over science seems a dream that will never come to fruition, and so-called Plan B, ill-defined though it may have been, looks a potential target for more of these cuts we are hearing about. Science will not thrive under these circumstances. We will lose scientists, engineers and technicians, we will lose innovation opportunities and productivity will not receive the fillip it needs. We are damaging our future as well as our present, by not investing in education and skills at an appropriate level. These are tough times.

Posted in education, Equality, Further Education, investment, Lifelong learning entitlement, Science Funding, science superpower | Comments Off on The Future of Skills and Education?

What I Read In September

Posted on 1 October 2022 by Henry Gee

UntitledEdward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 4 (Folio Society Edition). We arrive at last at the Fifth Century and the agonising collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Assailed by barbarians on all sides (The century kicked off with the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410), the Romans tried to mitigate the damage by allowing some barbarians to settle within the borders of the Empire. Although this worked for a while — with many barbarians adopting the trappings of the Romans —  pressures both external (the Huns in central Asia)  and internal (the worsening of the economy combined with rampant corruption and general mismanagement) led to many barbarians declaring de facto independence within the Empire. One Constantine, supposedly maintaining Britain against piracy from Angles and Saxons, took his legions to Gaul in a bid to capitalise on the worsening chaos, leaving Britain to its fate: the island was instantly plunged into a darkness that lasted almost two centuries, and of a depth that even modern scholars find hard to penetrate (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom, and Thomas Williams’ Lost Realms, below). The Vandals settled in North Africa, the breadbasket of Rome, and from their base at Carthage inflicted piracy on a Mediterranean that had once been mare nostrum. All of a sudden, the Romans were catapulted back to the Punic Wars — but without the spirit or the energy to fight them. As time went on, many of the Empire’s best generals and ministers were in fact barbarians. The Roman general Stilicho had to repel barbarian invasions by cobbling together coalitions of other barbarians, and was himself a Vandal in origin. The Huns were only stopped at the Battle of Chalons in 451 by a coalition of Romans and Visigoths. That army was led by Aetius, whose father had been a Scythian. Many of the Goths were already ruling Gaul and Spain in any case; and the battle didn’t stop Attila the Hun ravaging northern Italy afterwards. The last few Emperors of the West — by then consisting only of parts of Italy and Dalmatia — were puppets of barbarian ministers, only there for ceremonial reasons. The very last, Romulus Augustulus, was gently deposed in 476 by Odoacer, the de facto ruler of Italy. It says something about the weakness of the Empire that Odoacer didn’t even think him worth assassinating. The Empire of the West, therefore, ended not with a bang but a whimper, a circumstance that made its disappearance all the more poignant. The event, nonetheless, is generally regarded as the End of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In Gibbon’s view, the establishment of Christianity was one of the factors that weakened the Empire, with the diversion of thought and energy into religion rather than defence or government. Although he admits that monks preserved culture that might otherwise have been lost

.. posterity must gratefully acknowledge that the monuments of Greek and Roman literature have been preserved and multiplied by their indefatigable pens.

he is scathing about the institution of monasticism itself, noting that ascetics

… obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the Gospel, [and] were inspired by the savage enthusiasm that represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness.

Nowadays we’d call this kind of behaviour ‘virtue signalling’. It worked, too — monks attracted legions of devotees who, if they could not join the throng themselves, showered religious institutions with gifts, the effect being a general corruption in which the monastic life became, in some cases, every bit as luxurious as that of a Roman patrician, but with none of the responsibilities. Gibbon reserves some of his sharpest barbs for the hagiographies of early Christians which, in his opinion, make very poor substitutes for history:

The lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, by [St Jerome], are admirably told; and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.

The knowledge and reason of antiquity were swept aside by faith and credulity. The Age of Faith was fecund with the miraculous. Gibbon dismisses most miracles with the contempt they undoubtedly deserve. There was one, though, that he found affecting. This is the tale of the Seven Youths of Ephesus. As Christians during the persecutions of the emperor Decius, they were walled up in a cave and left to starve. Two hundred years later,  workmen removing stones for building found the men merely sleeping. They awoke to a world that had changed utterly. The Empire was Christian, and the capital had moved from Rome to Constantinople. Gibbon notes the persistence of legends like this, noting that the fable has ‘general merit’.

We imperceptibly advance from youth to age without observing the gradual, but incessant, change in human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.

Cue Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in the court of King Arthur and Woody Allen’s The Sleeper to The Time Machine and every other story of time travel right down to recent films such as Interstellar. The fable about the sleepers of Ephesus resonates down to our own times.

UntitledAnnie Proulx: Barkskins Like many people, I suppose, I first came across Annie Proulx with her redemptive novel The Shipping News. Later on I read Accordion Crimes. The two novels are totally different in scale and scope, yet both united by their unequalled grasp of the effects of history on the residents of North America, and their spare, unsentimental style. Barkskins follows this tradition. At the very end of the 17th century, two down-and-out youths from the slums of Paris are transported to New France — today’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — as indentured labourers. One, René Sel, becomes a woodsman, set with his axe to fell what seems to be the inexhaustible forests of the new continent. His descendants largely belong to the indigenous Micmac people — woodsmen, fishers, trappers, hunters, ever trying to hold on to the threads of their ancient traditions. The other, Charles Duquet, absconds, and eventually founds a mighty dynasty of lumber barons. So begins a walloping great family saga, which could have degenerated into a potboiler, but works because of Proulx’s signature style – pure, terse prose occasionally ornamented by sentences of breathtaking beauty and startling originality. Many of the characters are explored in depth — the Micmac paterfamilias Kuntaw Sel, the timber baroness Lavinia Duke — but most make only fleeting appearances. The real stars are the panoramic landscapes, the trees, the great forests of America, and, later, the world, felled by the human need to conquer and subjugate. If I could find one fault, it is the tendency to dump a lot of historical information into the mouths of her characters as a way of helping you, the reader, catch up with world events. The thing is, you see, Proulx’s best characters struggle when the need to express themselves hits their fundamental inability to carry it through, usually because, in their world — a tough world of physical hard labour to which Proulx’s style is ideally suited — doing counts for a lot more than saying. Think Brokeback Mountain. (Yes, Proulx wrote that, too). Most of her characters work best when they say little. By giving voice to the unlettered and inarticulate she elevates them to a kind of dignity and greatness.

UntitledThomas Williams: Lost Realms This book is something of a heroic failure. I suspect that the author would concur, for that, in essence, is what it is meant to be. If it weren’t hard enough trying to unearth something about the lost history of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries — perhaps the darkest and least documented period in the history of these islands (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom) — the author homes in on those parts of that history that are more obscure still. It is likely that many petty polities rose and fell between the departure of the Roman legions in about 410 and the arrival of Augustine in 597, but evidence for most of them has been irrecoverably lost. Given that the earliest history of  what Williams calls ‘the Big Beasts’ of Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia is hidden in the mists of myth and legend, recovering the stories of the lesser realms of Elmet, Hwicce, Dumnonia, Essex, Rheged, Powys, Sussex and Fortriu would seem like a fool’s errand. The existence as independent entities of some, (Sussex and Essex, for example, along with Lindsey, in north Lincolnshire; and Hwicce, in what is now Gloucestershire and Worcestershire) is attested only after they became subject to the domination of larger neighbours. Powys has achieved a spurious legitimacy through the creation of a ceremonial county whose borders may bear little relationship to the ancient kingdom that existed (possibly) in the valley of the River Dee. Evidence for Elmet (in modern West Yorkshire) is a gossamer-wisp away from oblivion, while Rheged (Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway) might not have actually existed at all. And so on. There are, however, some very revealing details. Such as, for example, the existence of people living in Roman luxury at Tintagel (in Dumnonia), long after the fall of the western Empire, possibly benefiting from the resurgence of the Empire and the re-opening of the Mediterranean and Atlantic trade under Justinian. Yet, hardly a stone’s throw away, in Hwicce, perhaps one of the most Romanised parts of Britain, towns were deserted in short order after the legions left, in favour of hilltop forts — perhaps the last holdouts of a population, desperate and fragmented, trying to hold on to what they had lost, an aim as futile as it was poignant. The author’s style veers from passages of a shade of purple that tends to the ultraviolet, to humour that draws on references that might baffle some people today, let alone in the fifth century. Modern Cirencester, for example

… remains genteel, well-to-do and liberal, in a Waitrose, National Trust, Radio 4 sort of way.

…to the names of native British warlords, which sound less like personal names than crude boasts:

It has also been suggested that ‘Vortigern’ was a title and not a name at all … when set aside other Brittonic names like Brigomaglos (‘mighty prince’) and Maglocunus (‘top dog’), Vortigern seems hardly out of place. (Even Biggus Dickus might feel at home in this sort of company).

No, you look it up. And on the bullying nature of some early English kings:

The so-called Mercian Supremacy was really an exercise in early medieval gangsterism, and the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse.

Ba-boom, and, moreover, tish. So what is the point of it all? The book, I think, invites us to look critically — very critically — at the history we are taught about the foundation of our nation, to show that almost all of it is myth created retrospectively to justify present circumstances, and even the bits everyone thinks are true hardly stand up to much scrutiny. Williams closes with a discourse on how some historians are disowning the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as it has, in some places, acquired connotations of racism, even white supremacy. Such notions rest on outmoded ideas of race, nation and identity, in which it was assumed that (for example) an early medieval body buried in lowland Britain with jewellery similar to that found in northern Germany or Scandinavia must have been that of a Germanic invader, rather than — say — a person of British ancestry who just happened to like that kind of bling. After all, the fact that the streets of Britain now thrum to the engines of Japanese cars doesn’t mean that Britain has been invaded by Japan. When presented with such evidence, it is hard, therefore, not to project on to such mute remains the prejudices we hold today, when what we should be asking is how the people who lived in those remote ages saw themselves. This is hard enough to do now, even of ourselves. As David Berreby shows in his masterpiece Us and Them: Understanding our Tribal Mind, we can change our identities as often as we change our socks, and yet convince ourselves that the persona we wear today has been true for all time. So who can tell what a person who lived in fifth century Britain — a time of dramatic but ill-documented change — thought of themselves? That is something that we can never know. Oh, and one last thing. Whoever Thomas Williams imagines himself to be, he loves Tolkien. So that gets an extra star from me.

UntitledEdward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 5 (Folio Society Edition). The period between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the seventh centuries is dominated by one name – that of Justinian, who ruled for thirty-eight years (527-565), which in Roman terms was practically forever. His domination is reflected in his documentation, for his times were described in minute detail by Procopius the Copious. So minute, in fact, that he documented the salacious private lives of the Emperor and his Empress, Theodora, who had started out in what we’d nowadays call the adult entertainment industry (her party piece involved a live goose and some birdseed). The Romans were as keen on spectator sports as anyone today. Supporters of popular chariot-racing were divided into the mutually hostile ‘green’ and ‘blue’ factions, whose supporters adhered to their teams with the fanaticism of religious mania that often became destructive. Sports hooliganism is nothing new. Gibbon repeatedly pokes fun at the Romans’ love of luxury over learning. The Romans devoted a great deal of ingenuity to wheedling the secrets of silk production out of the Chinese. Gibbon writes:

I am not insensible to the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some pain that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century.

And after a long discussion on the splendour of the Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople:

Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!

At the same time, the centuries-old philosophical schools of Athens withered and died — less by the incursions of barbarians than from the proscriptions of Christianity, which Gibbon takes every opportunity to chastise:

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames.

And here:

The king of the Lombards had been educated in the Arian heresy, but the catholics in their public worship were allowed to pray for his conversion; while the more stubborn barbarians sacrificed a she-goat, or perhaps a captive, to the gods of their fathers.

to which Gibbon adds a characteristically waspish footnote:

Gregory the Roman supposes that they likewise adored this she-goat. I know but of one religion in which the god and the victim are the same.

Elsewhere Gibbon laments the survival of devotional literature that adds nothing very much either to our general knowledge or improvement. He writes of the works of a monk called Antiochus whose ‘one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant’.

Procopius also wrote about (and Gibbon faithfully follows) the stellar career of the heroic general Belisarius, who, although henpecked at home, reconquered Italy, southern Spain and the African littoral for the Empire.

It wasn’t all good news, though. The reign of Justinian was punctuated by natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and most notably an epidemic of plague (c.541-544). Gibbon devotes no more than a few paragraphs to this, but then, neither did Procopius, though nowadays this is the one event, perhaps understandably, that people associate with the reign of Justinian. The plague, and incessant warfare, depopulated many areas, so that, eventually, northern Italy and the Apennine spine of the country were occupied without opposition by the Lombards, whose kingdom fragmented into a series of mutually hostile polities such as the Duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. The Imperial possessions remained, though, in pockets that eventually became the Republic of Venice, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and so on, and this led to the patchwork pattern of Italian politics that lasted until the time of Garibaldi.

The centrepiece of this volume, however, is Gibbon’s essay on Justinian’s revision of Roman law.

The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history; and although I have devoted myself to write the annals of a declining monarchy, I shall embrace the occasion to breathe the pure and invigorating air of the republic.

By Justinian’s time the edifice of Roman law had become so confused and cluttered that wholesale revision was necessary:

In the space of ten centuries the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no fortune could purchase and no capacity could digest.

The commission set up by Justinian pulled as much of extant Roman law together as it could gather and eventually disgorged three great works: the Code, the Pandects and the Institutes. Gibbon is critical of those who said that Justinian’s revision consigned much extant Roman law to the ashes, noting that only a limited amount of a thousand years of precedent would have been available. Laws existed in only a few copies, made by hand; codes that were superseded had very likely been destroyed deliberately; and, after all, this was not the kind of literature people read for entertainment. The result, therefore, of all this effort, could never have been the image of perfection:

Instead of a statue cast in a simple mould by the hand of an artist, the works of Justinian represent a tessellated pavement of antique and costly, but too often of incoherent, fragments.

The final part of this volume discusses the relationship between Rome and Persia. In the First Century, Augustus had recommended that the bounds of the Roman Empire (the Rhine, the Danube, the eastern Mediterranean shore as far inland as the Euphrates, and the Sahara Desert) were natural limits and should not be exceeded. His successors largely held to these limits. Yet for half a millennium or more the Romans existed in a state of armed truce with the Persian Empire, and the various episodes of back-and-forth usually ended up in more or less the same places. Yet the reign of Heraclius (610-641) saw warfare between Rome and Persia erupt on an unprecedented scale. At one point the Persians swept through the entire eastern part of the Empire as far as the Bosphorus, with their allies, the barbarian Avars, advancing to the walls of Constantinople on the other shore. But for the heroism of Heraclius (one of the few Roman Emperors who took to the field in person), and the fact that the Persians lacked a navy to press their advantage, the Roman Empire came within a day of extinction. But Heraclius counterattacked, advancing into Persia as far as modern Azerbaijan. In the end, though, and after much destruction, the ancient borders were re-established. Such imperial friction could have gone on forever, but for some unlikely news from a far country. Gibbon writes that the King of Persia

received an epistle from an obscure citizen of Mecca, inviting him to acknowledge Mohammed as the apostle of God. He rejected the invitation, and tore the epistle.

Hindsight might view such casual dismissal as a mistake.

 

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