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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.

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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.

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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

Inequity and Research Culture

Posted on 29 January 2023 by Athene Donald

Research culture remains a topic that is of concern to many, because it can be so very far from ideal. You don’t have to be from a minority background – of whatever kind – to find yourself in an environment that doesn’t bring out the best in you. Can anything be done because, if it can, it is likely to help all those who are ‘othered’ by their personal characteristics even more? A recent report from the University of Oxford identifies many areas where processes about the whole research system could be improved for people who fit into the category of ‘marginalised researchers’, which covers women and racialised minorities, people with disabilities and those identifying as LGBTQ+. As the report says

‘A growing body of evidence underscores that academia is not a meritocracy. In academia, as in the rest of society, systemic barriers remain to limit the success of researchers in many marginalised groups.’

As I do with many such reports, I started off by reading the recommendations. I found these, at first sight, rather disappointing. Not that there was anything wrong with them, but they seemed to be treading along familiar paths and it didn’t strike me they were likely to lead to much change. Equally, this had been my initial reaction, and this still holds, to the 2021 BEIS People and Culture Strategy document, about which I wrote

‘full of laudable sentiments though the strategy is, it appears to lack any clear indication of the path from where we are now to where BEIS aspirations would take us.’

Eighteen months on from the publication of that BEIS strategy, I’m not convinced there has been much progress.

However, when I read the full Oxford report, I felt rather differently about what it had to say. Not because I feel the recommendations are particularly novel or ones which will immediately change the landscape, but because the way they are put into context is very powerful. It identifies exactly how the current system introduces inequity for different parts of the researcher population, ranging from the less confident (who may find an interview intimidating and lead them to underperform) to those with a disability, who may have problems accessing or completing forms.

There are certain of their recommendations which really should be easily put into practice, for instance by funders. In particular, I would highlight the timing of closing dates for grant applications, so they do not fall immediately after the main holidays. It should be obvious that a closing date of early January is likely to impact more severely on those with caring responsibilities than those without, who may in fact just have had several weeks without the normal teaching or committee loads so making grant-writing easier not harder. Funding calls which are only open for a few weeks are also likely to be detrimental to carers, but these are far from uncommon.

The issue of confidence I allude to above is a more tricky one. Firstly, because having the confidence to give a convincing conference presentation is a relevant skill for success, and may feel as pressured as an interview. Consequently, I believe such skill is not entirely divorced from the ability to conduct a successful project. Nevertheless, I am sure all readers will have encountered the brash or arrogant candidate. If they come across as patronising to their audience it may cause uncertainty about how well they would do in running a group or giving an undergraduate lecture. I well recall one man, smartly turned out in a pinstripe suit that would not have been out of place in a bank (yes, I know, I should not be prejudiced against someone because of the clothes they wear), who – as part of an interview process for a lectureship position – gave a seminar that was positively intimidating in the way the audience was addressed. It was full of chutzpah. I was less convinced it was full of content, but others on the interview panel seemed not to spot this. I argued that an undergraduate faced with such a style of lecturing would not have received it well. That seemed to me a significant part of the reason for requiring a candidate to give a seminar. Again others (almost certainly all male, although it is so long ago I cannot swear to that) did not seem to be as put off as I was.

That level of ‘confidence’ I believe is dangerous. Someone can come across as persuasive and on top of things, when actually it’s simply a smokescreen of performance. Any successful leader should understand their audience and never give off an air of intimidation. At least that’s my view. Shyer people may stutter a little, in a presentation or an interview, but not giving glib answers to questions may indicate deep thinking and knowledge and not ineptitude. It is my belief we are, collectively, too easily swayed by style of delivery rather than actual content. It is totally appropriate that such an issue should be highlighted, as the report does.

Other types of bias may be well-known, but nevertheless still prevalent. The statistics about ethnic minorities is particularly dispiriting. The report cites Wellcome data which shows that the success rate for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic applicants is 6 percentage points lower than that for white applicants (8% compared with 14%), with precisely zero awards made to UK-based applicants reporting their ethnicity as Black or Black British in 2019/20. The fact that there are hardly any black professors in the sciences across the UK is obviously directly related to this. What the report makes clear is how many different parts of the system disadvantage such people, from lack of mentors and sponsors, to internal sift systems as well as grant-giving panels which fail to overcome their biases. A black woman who speaks up may be classed with the standard trope of ‘angry black woman’ when behaving in exactly the same way as a white man, who is simply seen as confident and assertive.

The report spells out the dismal situation many researchers face, identifying the different key stages where problems occur. I found it salutary reading to look far beyond those areas of disadvantage I am familiar with from my work regarding women. Not that I think we have by any means overcome those hurdles more familiar to me, but it is important to recognize that different groups face disadvantage from many different parts of the system and that all of these need to be identified and addressed.

Posted in disability, Equality, ethnicity, marginalised researchers, research funding, Science Culture | Comments Off on Inequity and Research Culture

What I Read In January

Posted on 29 January 2023 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2022-12-31 at 15.28.51 Penelope Fitzgerald: The Bookshop It is 1959, and widowed Florence Green opens a bookshop in the sleepy Suffolk town of Hardborough. Discovering a strain of quiet obstinacy she doesn’t know she has, she ignores or attempts to sidestep the  polite yet determinedly ruthless opposition of a town with minefields of unwritten social rules and hierarchies that will not be gainsaid. I left this in a state of righteous indignation on Mrs Green’s part, for all that she appears to have brought much of her woes upon herself.

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-01-07 at 17.19.31Neil Gaiman (ed). Unnatural Creatures Having run out of original Neil Gaiman books to read (though one or two might have escaped my notice) imagine my pleasure at running across this anthology of tales curated by the man himself. It’s hard to pick favourites from a diversity of authors that includes Anthony Boucher and Saki, Nalo Hopkinson and Gahan Wilson, but I feel bound to reserve that honour for Gaiman’s own story The Sunbird, which he says was inspired by E. Nesbit but written in the style of R. A. Lafferty. If the tales have anything in common it is that if the tales themselves do not always have the air of fairy-tale whimsy, it lurks not too far beneath. Delightful.

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-01-14 at 20.30.41Peter Frankopan: The New Silk Roads It must be awfully frustrating, being a modern historian like Peter Frankopan. No sooner than you publish a revised version of your 2015 best-seller The Silk Roads, than the world changes again. For this snapshot of the world in 2019 seems already out of date. His analysis of geopolitics centres on the ‘spine’ of Eurasia (between the eastern Mediteranean and China) and contrasts the ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives of China with the chaos of the Trump administration. But that was then. Trump has now been replaced with Biden, and the world has been reshaped once more by COVID. The New Silk Roads reads like a three-year-old feature in The Economist. Nothing wrong with that, but I expected more from a book that promises a glimpse into the future to say more than it was unpredictable and volatile. Because I knew that already.

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-01-21 at 12.51.35Carl Chinn: Peaky Blinders The Real Story You will  both probably be familiar with Peaky Blinders, a stylish and violent televisual emission dealing with the fictional Birmingham bookmaker and gangster Tommy Shelby and his family in the years after the First World War. Shelby leads a gang called the Peaky Blinders, called after their habit of seeing razors into the brims of their peaked caps for use as weapons. Social historian Carl Chinn, descendant of Brummie backstreet bookies himself, shows that almost everything in the TV series is a myth. The peaky blinders were assorted Birmingham toughs who terrorised the poorer districts of Brum in the 1890s (by 1918 they were all but extinct); nobody sewed razors into peaked caps; and the real story is one of social deprivation, squalor and general thuggery, told here as one long litany of barely digested gobbets of court reports from contemporary newspapers.

 

 

Screenshot 2023-01-28 at 16.13.19Gary Gibson: Stealing Light I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned space opera, and, having read everything that Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds have had to offer, was casting around for something new but in that similar post-gothic vein. Glasgow-based Gary Gibson is a new author for me and on the strength of Stealing Light I’ll be in the market for more. The author has clearly thrown everything into the sensawunda electric kitchen sink — apocalyptic weapons, incomprehensibly ancient alien civilisations, amazing technology, a majestic plot, exotic sex, lashings of violence, and a feisty but flawed heroine who never gives up. Wonderful stuff. If you like that sort of thing. Which I do.

Posted in cal chinn, gary gibson, neil gaiman, peaky blinders, Penelope Fitzgerald, Peter frankopan, Science-fiction, space opera, stealing light, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In January