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What I Read In March

Posted on 10 March 2022 by Henry Gee

Ehsan Masood: GDP The astute reader will note that this is very similar to Masood’s book The Great Invention, which I read in January. And the astute reader would be correct: the latter book was published in 2016, whereas the new edition takes us up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the content is the same, although there is a completely new chapter on a strain of Marxist macroeconomics in Harvard that Masood unearthed when on a writing fellowship in the United States. For much of the rest I refer you to my earlier effusion. There is one thing, however, that I forgot to discuss. That was the effort by Robert Costanza and colleagues to put a value on all those things the Earth provides us for free, in a now notorious paper, concerning the publication of which I was not entirely unadjacent, during my day job (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company: if that counts as a disclaimer, I’ll throw in another – the author is a colleague at the same outfit). It seems to me – and this is not entirely my view, as the book makes clear – that one can no longer measure the world’s economy in terms of a metric that measures production and consumption; is expressed as a percentage (and therefore accrues in a compound way); and does so in a world whose resources are demonstrably finite. It’s time, Masood argues, that we found some other means of measuring economic health. That time must be now. There are signs that the global economy has been essentially static for the past twenty years. The reasons given are changes in the mechanics of supply chains, and increased protectionism. But I think there might be a deeper reason: that we’ve essentially run out of resources. People have been warning about this since the 1960s (as Masood amply documents). Seems not many people are listening.

Bob Shaw: Nightwalk The name of Belfast-born Bob Shaw (1931-1996) is little known outside SF circles. This is a shame, but also ensures that each story or novel one uncovers will be an unexplored delight. I picked up this one as a paperback in a secondhand store (the cover here is for the Kindle edition). He is best known, if known at all, for his haunting short story The Light Of Other Days. Perhaps because he suffered from poor eyesight, light and vision are recurring themes in his fiction, and this is brutally so in Nightwalk. Sam Tallon is a spy from Earth who has been sent to the remote planet of Emm Luther to discover the coordinates of a new planet that the Lutherians had come across. Searching for new planets is a risky business. Each new planet is valuable, and planets with established populations will go to war over each discovery. Tallon is caught by agents of the Lutherian secret service, who put out his eyes, and exile him to a version of Devil’s Island – a tropical prison camp surrounded from the mainland by a swamp full of dangers, natural and man-made – from which nobody has ever escaped. But he does. With the help of a fellow inmate and a complaisant prison doctor, Tallon invents a pair of spectacles that allows him to see through the eyes of nearby people, even animals — most notably his faithful seeing-eye dog Seymour (the pun is deliberate). With this McGuffin he manages to … hey, I’m telling you the plot. This cracking adventure story comes from the late 1960s, an era when SF novels were short and sharp, marked by economical writing and pacy plot. Ah, for the light of other days.

Max Adams: In The Land Of Giants Were I an historian my speciality would be Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. This is perhaps the most obscure period in our history. No contemporary written record survives from the land we now call England between the sudden collapse of Roman Britain around 410 and the arrival of St Augustine in 597, by which time Britain was a patchwork of petty kingdoms and retained hardly a trace of having been a prosperous Roman province for four centuries. It’s not for nothing that it’s called the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages weren’t as dark as all that. Many clues lie hidden in the landscape, if you know where to look. Archaeologist Max Adams is one of those who’s been doing the looking. I first came across Adams in his book The King In The North, about the life and times of the subsequently sainted King Oswald of Northumbria. This was especially resonant as I read it while on holiday in Northumbria and could visit some of the places mentioned, such as Hadrian’s Wall, Hexham Abbey, and Bamburgh Castle. But that’s all about the 7th and 8th centuries, when Northumbria emerged from barbarian darkness to become a significant cultural centre. Think the Lindisfarne Gospels and St Cuthbert preaching to the puffins on the Farne Islands; the altogether more worldly St Wilfred, and, most of all, Bede, that son of Jarrow whose Eccelesiastical History of the English People remains a rip-roaring read to this day. That all came to a crashing end with the sack of Lindisfarne by the Vikings in 793. But I digress. More pertinent perhaps is The First Kingdom,  in which Adams looks directly at the 5th and 6th centuries — more on that below. In The Land of Giants — cuts across all the others. It is written in the form of a series of travelogues, in which Adams recounts marathon cross-country walks, the occasional motorbike ride, and one memorable boat trip, in which he visits many significant Dark-Age locations in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. These are often revealed only by tiny clues. A curious bend in the road that betrays an ancient field system; the profile of a hill on the skyline; half-buried headstones in ancient graveyards; stones in crumbling churches scavenged from even earlier buildings. What struck me most about the book is Adams’ capacity for endurance. Plainly a seasoned walker, he treks up to twenty-five miles in a single day, often battered by atrocious weather (some things in Britain never change) reading the clues that only the landscape can tell to the trained eye. He reminds me of Jack Corstorphine, the often weatherbeaten landscape archaeologist in my own SF trilogy The Sigil, who disappears into the countryside for weeks on end in search of clues to the vanished past (and I should stress than no resemblance is intended, as I discovered Max Adams long after I wrote the story). I left the book with a sense of envy for that freedom – and for that stamina.

Tom Higham: The World Before Us Back in the 1980s when I was doing my PhD on how to tell the difference between Ice-Age cows (Bos) and Ice-age bison, and if I had a pound for every time I heard the joke ‘what’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison?’, I’d have £874, there was a big problem about dating. That is, it was very hard to put a reliable date on any finds that were more antique than about 47,000 years — the effective limit of radiocarbon dating. If you had volcanic rocks, sure, there was potassium-argon dating, because volcanic rocks contain radioactive potassium that decays reliably into argon, so you could get a fix on the date of the eruption that produced the layers of ash deposited on top of (or underneath) a fossil. And if you had stalactites and stalagmites in a cave, you could measure the decay of radioactive uranium, in the hard chalky substance from which these structures are made, into other elements such as thorium or lead, and so get an idea of when the stalactite or stalagmite formed that capped (or underlay) the deposit in which your fossil was discovered. But if your bones came from an open-air site far from volcanoes, or caves, and were too old for radiocarbon dating to be of much use, you were in a pickle. This was certainly true of many of the cows and bison in Britain, in the Ice Age. Not pickled, that is, but not dateable. Then there was the question of how different all those cows and bison were, really? After all, cows and bison are sufficiently close relatives that they can interbreed. If only we could get their genes down and have a look at them. If that wasn’t enough, I was limited to bones that were complete enough to be identifiable. Not a problem for cows and bison — museums up and down the UK are filled from rafters to basement with boxes marked  ‘Bos or Bison?’, so I had plenty to work on and not once did I have to go out into the field to find any more. It’s a problem, though, for much rarer creatures in which some people incomprehensibly take an interest, such as the remains of early humans.  (Actually, I did once go out into a field. It was near Clacton. Such is the romance of British Ice-Age palaeontology). But the same museums are also stuffed from rafters to basement with plastic bags full of tiny chips of bone, retrieved from digs, that could have come from anything, awaiting the invention of techniques that could reveal their secrets. At the end of the 1980s I left research and in due course of time I became Bone-Botherer-in-Chief at the Submerged Log Company. During that time I have witnessed a revolution in the science underpinning palaeontology and archaeology. Clearly, I was holding research down by staying. Over the past thirty years our ideas of the period between around 200,000 and 50,000 years ago — crucial to our knowledge of human evolution — has been not so much overturned as transformed and immeasurably enriched by new scientific developments. A key player has been Tom Higham, who, with colleagues at Oxford and around the world, has made carbon dating much more reliable, and has pioneered a method called ZooMS (Zooarchaeology with Mass Spectrometry), in which the identity of otherwise tiny fragments of bone can be established by extracting and sequencing the constituent amino-acids of any collagen they contain. Collagen is the raw material for carbon dating. Now it’s possible to read off the species whence a bone fragment came, as well as its age. The same is true for the genetic material, DNA. The sequencing of ancient DNA  was pioneered by the remarkable Svante Pääbo whose book Neanderthal Man tells all. Higham’s The World Before Us is much the same. It’s an engaging personal tale of discovery, enriched by from-the-horse’s-mouth descriptions of the science and its importance. I should declare an interest here, as I play walk-on parts in both books, and indeed Pääbo features strongly in Higham’s account, especially concerning the revelations from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. It was here that the remains of a hitherto unknown yet extinct relative of humans was discovered. The Denisovans, close kin to the Neanderthals, lived in the region until around 50,000 years or so, but their DNA lives on, especially in people from Island Southeast Asia — just as the DNA of Neanderthals lives on in everyone without a purely African ancestry, signs of interbreeding in the long past. Denisovans are known almost exclusively from tiny fragments, but we know an amazing amount about them thanks to the DNA and collagen that these fragments contain. This would have been impossible without the science pioneered by Higham, Pääbo and their associates. I enjoyed The World Before Us hugely, and will treasure it as a personal account of an amazing period in archaeological science, but perhaps I am biased as I have a close interest in the science and know some of the protagonists personally. I wonder whether a less clued-up reader might find some of the more technical parts hard going, although I for one appreciated Higham’s description of Bayesian statistics, something that hitherto I have found as hard to grasp as a hot buttered ferret skittering down a drainpipe.

Max Adams: The First Kingdom I read this late last year but it inexplicably didn’t make my top ten. My excuse is that I read so many books last year that I must have overlooked it. I knew I was going to re-read it, so here it is now. It’s about that most obscure period in the history of Britain, the fifth and sixth centuries. The Romans left Britain rather abruptly in 410. They came back in 597 in the form of Augustine’s mission to the King of Kent. In between the country turned  from an orderly, prosperous province of Rome where people spoke Brythonic (a close relative of Welsh) and Late Spoken Latin, to a patchwork of fiefdoms where people spoke what King Alfred later called Englisc. The almost total lack of contemporary written evidence has made the transition between the two obscure. In this brilliant book Max Adams explains what we do know (and it’s more than we think) and constructs a plausible hypothesis to resolve the many contradictions and fill the large gaps in the tale. We know that the economy collapsed – no Roman coins are found in Britain that date to later than 410 – along with the standard of living, and the population. In many parts of Britain, people went back to the kind of locally based, subsistence existence they had enjoyed (if that’s the word) before the Romans came. Local Roman commanders and opportunists among the population sequestered what wealth there was – it became privatised. Adams doesn’t say so, but it reminded me of the rise of the oligarchs after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And at some point, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived. The simple story of battle, fire and plunder familiar from Bede (who wrote much later), and that dyspeptic British chronicler Gildas (who was contemporary, writing around the year 500, but whose horizons did not stretch beyond Wales) is not borne out by the archaeology. Some Germanic people were probably already settled on the east coast while Britain was nominally Roman. Others were undoubtedly piratical and established pirate bases in creeks and estuaries, in Essex and Suffolk. More came, but the transition from Brythonic Christianity to Germanic heathenism might have been a process of acculturation as well as migration. For example, Cerdic, the culture hero said to be the founder of what became Wessex, and therefore England, is a suspiciously Brythonic name. And Adams makes the point that the presence of Japanese cars in Britain today doesn’t mean that Britain has been invaded by Japan. Neither does the fact that many people in Holland speak excellent English imply that the English have invaded the Netherlands. There was also a marked division between the north and west, and the east and south. In the former, the domain of St Columba and St Patrick, Celtic Christianity survived, and people lived a more Roman existence than perhaps they ever did while the Romans were still around. Trade by sea brought goods from the fading Empire – wine, olive oil, fine tableware – at least until the climatic downturn and plague associated with the reign of Justinian in the mid sixth century. Eastern England and lowland Scotland, in contrast, became, if not Saxon, then Saxonised. Max Adams traces how the country developed from a quilt of tiny territories, sometimes traceable to this day from the landscape, and ancient parish boundaries, to larger realms defined by established custom. Slowly, surpluses built up that allowed the persistence of a warrior class that lived on the render of the classes below. The great change happened when the country became largely Christianised. Rather than building pocket empires by the sword, which vanished as soon as they died, kings ruled by divine grace conferred by clerics, in exchange for lands given to the church in perpetuity. This created continuity. It allowed churches to accumulate capital, invest in the landscape and in activities such as literature, and, from the dark ages, England emerged as a country of lore and literature once more.

Posted in Bob Shaw, Ehsan Masood, Max Adams, Research, Svante Paabo, Tom Higham, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In March

Accrual of Disadvantage

Posted on 8 March 2022 by Athene Donald

Another year, another International Women’s Day. Sometimes I get frustrated that so much action happens on this one day of the year, and isn’t distributed uniformly throughout, so that the discussions, the highlighting, the signposting – all those necessary actions – percolate the full twelve months. Of course there is much going on, but often below the radar of many academics, so that only those who are already thinking about these matters participate. There is no point in only preaching to the converted. Perhaps having this one day to celebrate the amazing women in our midst does indeed make sense, even if they should be celebrated as often as the men.

Change does happen and will happen. The more companies recognize that board diversity leads to better financial outcomes, the more they will be willing to throw away their old prejudices requiring all board members to look like the Chair and open up their executive suites. Diversity also helps the generation of disruptive science and technology but, as a 2020 PNAS article by Hofstra et al put it

‘demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions.’

The authors called this the ‘diversity paradox’. Being innovative doesn’t mean academic progress if you don’t fit in.

Wherever you look in academic science there are still inequalities baked in. Be it in how CVs are read according to your name (see here and here), or how long papers take in Review and what their success rates are (as evidenced by a study from the Royal Society of Chemistry); from how lecturers are assessed by their classes to how often academics’ work is cited (see here for a specific example in neuroscience, but there have been other studies too). The Matilda effect – a term coined by Margaret Rossiter back in 1993 – is alive and well, whereby women’s work may be inaccurately attributed to a male.  Awarded grants are typically smaller for women; they rarely lead the largest grants, both as shown in data from UKRI. HEI’s have significant gender and ethnicity pay gaps, as can be found by looking at each university’s published results (my own university’s is published here). At every stage disadvantage can build up. The evidence base is accumulating. Albeit a particular study may look at only a single (sub-) discipline, yet it is hard to believe the trends do not apply across the board. Organisations talk a lot about this, yet the biases persist.

Of course, some of the actions and actors are not down to the HE Institutions themselves, but individuals and, as is so often said, they may be (still) entirely unconscious of the bias they exhibit. I know I am never consciously aware of the names (let alone genders) of the authors of papers I read or cite – unless I know the authors. You can see the biases creep in there. I am no more free of them than anyone else, but I do at least try to think about these things. I am, however, sure that I cite a paper because it is relevant, not because it’s written by someone with particular characteristics. That this is not so, with men apparently systematically citing men more than women I find bizarre. But, as the authors of the study about neuroscience I cite above hypothesise, this may all be connected to the way our social networks operate. Men may ignore women at conferences, and so never realise they should talk to them about their science, which would perhaps interest them greatly if they did. On the other hand, they may of course be more interested in acting as predators at these same conferences, for which there is only too much evidence, but that’s another story for another day.

In science research, as in just about every other sphere, the playing field has a significant tilt to it which we are only slowly beginning to rebalance. Work to do – but not just on IWD, but on every day of the year!

 

Posted in citations, CVs, Equality, Matilda effect, student assessments, Unconscious bias, Women in science | Comments Off on Accrual of Disadvantage

Februareads

Posted on 28 February 2022 by Henry Gee

Kyle Harper: Plagues Upon The Earth. Kyle Harper is an historian, specialising in the history of disease. He is specifically interested in the pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire – events that might have changed the course of history. While thinking about that he reasoned that the entirety of human history, not just the Roman Empire, might have been shaped by contagion. Considered as apes, humans, as it turns out, are uncommonly prone to pestilence. Chimpanzees, for example, are strangers to bodily hygiene (they even like to snack on their own poo) and yet have fewer kinds of germs than humans. Harper’s history is divided into several eras. First came our prehistoric past, when we were mostly plagued by worms. After that came agriculture — an unmitigated disaster for human health – in which humans began to live in close proximity to their domestic animals, one another, and the excrement of all. Diseases sprang up that exploited the fecal-oral route, and the possibilities of vector-borne transmission. The Iron Age saw a greater concentration of people in cities, adding respiratory diseases to the mix. Oh yes, and cholera. The Iron Age ended with the Columbian Interchange between Africa, Eurasia and the Americas, with dreadful consequences for all concerned. After that, modernity lurched into view with a greater realisation of the importance of hygiene, followed by the germ theory. For the first time, cities were places where people could safely be born, rather than sinks of mortality that required constant immigration to keep their populations from collapse. Today, people are more likely to die from accidents or genetic disorders than the infectious diseases that exerted such a grievous toll. Depending on who’s counting, there are around 200 viral, bacterial, protist, fungal or parasitic diseases that affect infect humans, including (in no particular order, as they say in all the game shows) malaria (lots of this), bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, typhoid, typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, chikungunya, whooping cough. filariasis, schistosomiasis, AIDS, influenza, amoebic dysentery (other causes of life-threatening diarrhea are available),  SARS, MERS, Lyme disease, leishmaniasis, syphilis, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, bubonic plague (did I mention bubonic plague?), measles, leprosy, West Nile Virus, Zika, Ebola, Giardia, guinea worm, threadworm, roundworm, tapeworm, scarlet fever, lice (both sorts), ticks, mites, fleas … the list goes on and on. There used to be more, but diseases come and go. Nobody knows, for example, the agent of the sweating sickness that afflicted people in England in Tudor times. Therefore, every age has its characteristic diseases. One disease of modernity Harper uncharacteristically omits is Legionnaire’s disease, a symptom of that acme of modern life – air conditioning. Harper hadn’t meant to write this book during the COVID pandemic. That he has done underlines the importance of this book, which one can only feel guilty about for finding racily readable, given the subject. Humans, for all our control of the natural world (and perhaps because of it) are ever at the mercy of diseases.

Rob Dunn: A Natural History of the Future. This doesn’t really do what it says on the tin, or, at least, what I expected, which was a prognostication on what life on Earth might be like when we humans are gone (an event which I think will happen sooner rather than later, but, hey, nobody cares what I think). What it does instead is show that despite our imagined mastery of the world in which we live, or, if you are Paul McCartney, the world in which we live in, life has a way of challenging us and adapting to the circumstances offered to it. Human beings are evolving – and so are the animals and plants unfortunate enough to be sharing it with us. To be sure, many of the latter are disappearing, but a few are adapting to our presence. Just as it is the human lot to be burdened by an uncommonly large number of diseases (see above), an enormous number of animals and plants depend on us for their existence — even exploit it. Did you know that there is a species of mosquito adapted to life in the London Underground? I still remember my first ever tutorial at University. It was with an ecologist. I remember little about the tutorial except that the tutor had, on his wall, a poster of fish eating ever-smaller versions of themselves, with the caption THE FIRST RULE OF ECOLOGY: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH. The modern human world mightn’t look much like a savannah or a rainforest. But the laws of evolution and ecology apply in cities and parks just the same.

William Gibson: The Peripheral. And now for something completely different.  In a mildly dystopian near-future rural America — think of The Dukes of Hazzard with 3-D printers —  Burton Fisher is an ex-combat vet who makes money playing in immersive multiplayer games on behalf of rich sponsors. One day he subcontracts his role to his little sister Flynne (she’s Daisy Duke: please do at least try to keep up) who witnesses, in the game, a brutal and somewhat bizarre murder. It turns out, however, that it’s not a game. The murder really was (or would be) committed, in a slightly-further-in-the-future version of London, post-apocalypse (an event known as ‘The Jackpot’). Pre- and Post-apocalypse worlds join up through a fortuitous wormhole opened by super-rich ‘continuum enthusiasts’ to try and find the identity of the murderer and why it might have been committed. The Peripheral is a fun farrago of cyberpunk tropes from the inventor of the genre. It suffers a bit, early on, from sacrifice of expository writing to sheer style. When wearing mirrorshades, it seems, it not always easy to see where you are going.

Posted in A Natural History of the Future, cyberpunk, Kyle Harper, plagues upon the Earth, Rob Dunn, the peripheral, william gibson | Comments Off on Februareads

A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

Posted on 27 February 2022 by Athene Donald

Finally, the response to the Augar Review, for which we have been waiting for the rather splendid number of 1001 days, has been released. I will not accuse the Government of choosing a good day to bury bad news, because its publication on Thursday had been trailed for several days in advance. Nevertheless, it has received much less air-time than might have been expected (indeed hoped for) had it appeared on a day without a horrendous Russian invasion of Ukraine occurring. The implications of the published response, for students, universities and further education colleges, are substantial and far from universally positive.

Writing (albeit in a personal capacity) as someone who is the head of a Cambridge College which has always prided itself on its focus on widening participation, I read the details with unease. Cambridge is constantly being challenged to do more about reaching out to the socially and financially disadvantaged from all over the country and not just the prosperous south-east. What will this response do to help us in our work? As many commentators (see e.g. here and here) have pointed out, the changes being proposed – to reduce the level of income at which graduates start to pay their loans back and to extend the period over which payments are made from thirty to forty years – will hit hardest those with the lowest earnings (disproportionately women) rather than those who go on to highly paid careers, for instance in the City. There were plenty of analyses and models published by a variety of bodies in advance, which pointed out such moves would be regressive. These have been ignored, as has the proposal of maintenance grants for those from families with the lowest incomes, a crucial issue that simply wasn’t mentioned, let alone addressed, in the response.

It would seem that the Treasury’s view of finance (which I will paraphrase as ‘we need to get more of the student loan off our books’) has trumped the Levelling Up agenda. Only a couple of weeks after the Levelling Up White Paper was published, the actions implied by the Augar response go directly against its direction of travel. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations said, in introducing the White Paper

‘For decades, too many communities have been overlooked and undervalued. As some areas have flourished, others have been left in a cycle of decline. The UK has been like a jet firing on only one engine. Levelling Up and this White Paper is about ending this historic injustice and calling time on the postcode lottery.’

Those areas which are suffering from this ‘historic injustice’ will be those with a lower number of graduates (which is likely to contribute to lower local productivity and poorer local economic indices) and with struggling schools; struggling in terms of budgets and teacher skills as well as the numbers of students from disadvantaged families, however one wants to measure them, via indices of multiple deprivation, free school meals, children in the care system….. Levelling up should mean ensuring that all who have the aptitude to go to university are able – and that includes having the financial means – to do so, and that appropriate training and career paths are open to those for whom university is not the right place.

There may have been a brief moment of hope after the White Paper (albeit there seemed to be no new money associated with it), which the Augar response has probably dashed. A regressive policy, which is going to saddle those with least social and economic capital behind them with the highest total repayments during their entire working life, is not going to encourage those students to take on that debt, even if they simultaneously know that a university education is what they desire and what would most benefit them. Even if the university system, and colleges such as mine, wish to admit those who would thrive with that education and go on to deliver benefits to their community and the economy overall, they are likely in many cases to be deterred by the lifetime financial implications. It should be noted that universities too (and hence the College) are also being hit, in this case by a freezing of the fee level we receive.

One of the key features of the original Augar Review was to look at the whole education system, Further Education Colleges as well as Universities, to attempt to make a coherent whole. That aspiration, like quite a number of the other recommendations including maintenance grants for the least financially secure, is not dealt with. The current system pits the two strands of education substantially against each other in unhelpful ways, and traversing the further education landscape is a complex, unwieldy path for employers and students alike, with inadequate funding in most instances. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement would look like a good solution to some of these issues, providing an entitlement to students for loans

‘for post-18 education to use over their lifetime. It will be available for both modular and full-time study at higher technical and degree levels (levels 4 to 6), regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities.’

These plans are now out for consultation. However, the issue of the lifetime cost of these loans, if the same as in the latest revisions for loans already available for university courses, may remain a real turn-off to potential beneficiaries, whatever the good intentions behind this new move.

I feel dismayed by the regressive nature of the plans, the lack of support for the most disadvantaged, the damage this will potentially do to the work of institutions such as mine which are serious about widening participation, and the lack of any joined-up thinking between this latest document and any serious commitment to levelling up, the White Paper notwithstanding. There are so many ways in which plans could have been introduced which genuinely benefitted those whose start in life was tough. Instead, the new system seems set to put more, rather than less, burden on these students. Simultaneously, those who probably (but not invariably) already had a financially secure background and who progress to the highest paid jobs, will fare better under the new scheme of things. Universities, meanwhile, will be expected to make the same amount of money go further.

 

Posted in Augar Review, careers, education, Further Education, Levelling Up, lifetime loan entitlement | Comments Off on A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

Posted on 15 February 2022 by Athene Donald

How are you doing? I don’t mean either mentally or physically, but are you keeping up with the Jones’? Are you doing as well as you should for the stage of career you’re at, and how do you know? The reality is, in academia we’re not very good at helping each other understand how we’re faring. Certainly, in Cambridge over my career, it has seemed that silence is the norm on this front.

I am reminded of this while preparing for an interview about what my life was like ‘mid-career’. Of course, that term is indeterminate: my mid-career might be someone else’s later or earlier depending on a whole range of individual circumstances. After all, if you’re like Carol Robinson and take a seven year career break to have three children immediately after your PhD, you would be starting your first postdoc considerably later than the average. (I’ve just been reminded of her unusual yet spectacularly successful career trajectory, having been listening to my own interview with her from a few years back.) It isn’t simply a question of age, that is irrelevant, it is also about experience and maturity, so that those seven years are likely to have made a big difference in ways other than simply publication output.

Thinking back to the stage I think of as ‘mid-career’, that bit between my first permanent position and becoming a professor, I remember a survey being done of the (still relatively few) women academics across the University on behalf of the University. It was never published, too damning I think, and of course I don’t still have a copy 25 or so years on, but I do remember the surprise with which the interviewer reacted to being told time and time again, by women, that they found the lack of feedback on their progress disconcerting or worse. Unlike the business context in which the interviewer worked (I guess they came from a consultancy), such feedback just didn’t occur in the normal run of things. Perhaps if they’d interviewed men they’d have heard the same anxiety expressed.

I well remember struggling with the concept of what was ‘good enough’, be it in terms of research outputs, looking after my students, attendance at conferences or teaching and ‘service’. It was an eye-opener to be told, during one of my infrequent appraisals that, as a rule of thumb, I shouldn’t expect to referee more papers than I myself submitted. That it was OK to decline some requests. Naively – is this a gendered thing, or merely down to personality? – I had felt a sense of obligation to accept all papers or grants to referee as long as I felt competent. (Actually, ‘competent’ itself raises all sorts of issues derived from impostor syndrome, but that’s another story.) I always suspected – because no one told me otherwise – that I wasn’t up to the mark in my service, not doing my ‘bit’. I’m sure this was exacerbated because I felt I was cutting corners while I tried to bring up two small children.

It was only when the department introduced a workload model, possibly on the back of its Athena Swan application, that I realised that my service load was far higher than most people’s – but by then I was a senior professor and I suspect already deputy head of department at the time. It was a bit late for me, although a sense of guilt about whether I was doing enough was still never far away from my thoughts. I am glad that people can get some sense of their contribution through such models, albeit how a department weights teaching versus serving on a university committee, or turning up for open days versus organising lab classes, will always be debatable. There is unlikely ever to be a standard ‘scoring’ system for such a model.

However, it is the question of ‘good enough’ in terms of issues related, not just to service but to research, that is likely to eat at people most early in their careers (possibly later too). It is good that the tyranny of journal impact factors appears to be receding, but that doesn’t stop people – namely promotion and appointment committees – silently valuing a Nature or PNAS paper higher than one appearing in other journals, however relevant and appropriate such a journal might be for a particular piece of work. When I was mid-career I felt the appropriateness of a journal was far more important than having to go through the hassle of arguing with an editor/referee multiple times, but that is a luxury the ECRs of today probably do not feel they have. There are plenty of other metrics that an early-mid career academic may fret about. How many grants, from where and worth how much, are ‘enough’? Who is the judge? Is my sub-discipline sufficiently comparable to Dr Bloggs down the corridor that the fact that they have two minor grants from (insert funder of choice) trumps my one large grant from (insert another funder)? I would guess that, male or female, most of us have worried about ‘enough’ in this sense.

The trouble with academia, as has been said over and over again, is that it is inherently competitive. We are unfortunately only too likely always to be looking over our shoulders at those coming up behind us, as well as our peers, to try to work out how we’re doing. I know how much I would have benefitted from someone telling me that I was well within the bounds of ‘acceptable’ and, given I had two small children if I wanted not to gad all around the world presenting my research at international conferences, that was fine. If my grant applications failed this round, just keep going and try again. A single (or even multiple) failure was not terminal, particularly if elsewhere the students I acquired, through whatever route, were producing good stuff. But no, such messages were rarely given to me in the normal run of things or even at appraisals.

I’m sure people are now better prepared to carry out such conversations than those who appraised me ever were, in that training about how to do this is likely to be provided by the institution, and mentors may more routinely be allocated to new staff and postdocs. I don’t think I ever fared quite as badly as the colleague who went to his appraisal with a list of issues on their mind to raise and came out saying their appraiser had indeed agreed this was a list to worry about, without offering a single word of constructive advice.

On the other hand, I was very taken aback by the reaction I got from my own appraiser (possibly the same professor) when I raised the fact that my scientific credibility had been publicly and totally inappropriately trashed at a departmental meeting. I felt, both that others at the meeting should have pointed out the unreasonableness of the criticism laid against me, and that the person who’d been out of line should have apologised thereafter. It was perhaps, as has been said more recently in another context, only the ‘normal cut and thrust’ of (departmental) politics, regretted thereafter. Instead, I was told I was the one who should have apologised. I never worked out for what and it seemed strange advice.

I hope early-mid-career researchers now do get much better advice and mentorship regarding their progress and standing. We don’t all need to be superstars, but everyone wants to know they’re not lagging unreasonably behind, in that other, much feared word, failing . More feedback and support can only benefit us, at any stage in our career. Why should academia be quite so niggardly in providing this? Maybe the world has moved on from my day, and everyone, whatever their gender or skin colour, gets this support automatically and professionally. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that.

 

Posted in appraisal, mentors, Science Culture, support | Comments Off on In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

In which I see the light

Posted on 14 February 2022 by Jennifer Rohn
Viburnum

Viburnum x bodnantense, a winter-flowering shrub

I’m happy, and I don’t know why.

Usually I dread this time of year, the period between demobbing the Christmas tree and the daffodil-studded benevolence of mid-March. It stretches on endlessly, the dreary coldness, the frosts interspersed with rain that pools on pavements and hardly ever coalesces into snow, and above all the afternoon darkness, which on overcast days might as well be twilight.

Last year, my diary reminds me that I was resorting to ordering from flower catalogues to take the edge off – huddled in a chair with candles lit on a mid-winter evening, daydreaming about dahlias whose future blooms felt almost mythical. During this period, probably in late January, I was walking Joshua to school when I registered a deep, hyacinth-like spring scent. Looking up, I discovered a shrub I had never noticed before, spilling over the garden fence of one of the grand Georgian listed houses, its woody branches lush with pink bunches.

What seasonal misfiring could have coaxed such delicate flowers out into a world encased in a hard frost? This singular oddness made it easy to identify online: Viburnum x bodnantense, which blooms from November until March on purpose, not as an accidental aberration of climate change. (Apparently bees and other pollinators can over-winter in gardens, at least in this climate.) Of course I had to order one for my own garden in the hopes that it might cheer me up during midwinters to come, but that just added something more to the long list of things I was waiting for.

Well, that ‘mental health viburnum’ has been flowering for weeks out back this year, but for some reason, I don’t need it. I have been happy, more or less non-stop, since I hoovered up the brittle fir needles from the carpet on New Year’s Day.

It’s so out-of-character to have dodged the winter blues that I’ve been trying to work out why.  The weather is probably part of it – it’s been remarkably fair these past few months. I had a dig around the Met Office pages but couldn’t easily find the sunshine data I wanted. Fortunately Richard’s weather station, its shiny cups spinning tidily on the summerhouse roof like some steampunk NASA apparatus, could at least tell me about the rainfall. Sure enough, this January and February have been drier than any year since he started collecting data in 2018. It’s been so dry, in fact, that I’ve stopped checking the forecast before heading off to London, and have yet to be caught without an umbrella. What little rain we’ve had has tended to be overnight.

A graph of rainfall

But this is just quantitative data, dead numbers on a chart. They cannot conjure up the astonishing beauty of the mornings we’ve had. From the bedroom window, the dawn sky glows a million different shades, each morning subtly different from the last. Venus is tangled in the great sycamore tree lurking over the nearby park, as bright as an incoming aircraft against peachy or coral or golden streaks of cloud. To the left, there are a few minutes each day when the ships on the Thames far below glow like molten lava, until their moment in the sun is gone and they reclaim their drab grey.

Faraway ships on the Thames, set fire by sunrise

Atop Windmill Hill where I walk after dropping the boy at school, the sky changes further, so unique and lovely that my phone has filled up with portraits of the same horse chestnut trees over and over: the silhouettes never change, but each image is infinitesimally different in the colour and texture of its backdrop. I do my normal brisk circuit, puffing at the crest of the climb, crunching frost under my feet, sucking icy air into my lungs, greeting the same dog walkers, taking in the same maritime views of the flat silver ribbon of estuary below, yet it never once feels tired or overly familiar. I understand now that this formerly dreaded period is not a rigid stasis, but a subtly developing season-scape that you only notice if you are amidst it every day. Green shoots push up from the muddy earth, tree buds start to swell, the tenor of the songbirds eases and lifts, dog cherries bloom in the otherwise barren hedgerows.

photos of trees

The same trees, from different angles and days, January and February 2022

And there is light – acres and acres of light, so bright that it dazzles and spangles, colluding with the frigid air to make a tiny joyful headache deep behind the eyes.

I consider my pre-pandemic routine at this time of year. I would leave the house just after 6 AM, in darkness, work all day in a lab and office with no windows, slip out of the hospital around 5 or 6 PM into darkness again. The only time I could ever see the sun was on the weekends – when it was more often than not raining. Last year I didn’t have these routines, because of lockdown, but hadn’t started my morning walk routine, and in January, it was raining almost constantly. So maybe that is the simple answer: I’ve been starved of light.

Now Spring is nearly here: our garden blooms with hellebore, snowdrops, and the first crocuses and daffodils. It’s good to see them, but they slipped in without me realising they weren’t there. Because somehow, I’m not waiting for anything anymore.

Crocus

Joshua presents his first crocus of the year

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Nostalgia, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which I see the light

Let’s Hope We Can All Stick to Science

Posted on 8 February 2022 by Athene Donald

There was a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that the UK would commit to Association for Horizon Europe. We knew the details had to be worked out, but we assumed the commitment was as good as a signature. Not so. Somehow science has got tangled up with completely different issues and association appears to be being held as hostage in the negotiations. It isn’t just the UK that is entangled, but also Switzerland. It isn’t the first time that Switzerland has lost access to a Horizon programme. This also happened back in 2014 when there was a period of total exclusion from Horizon 2020 followed by a partial re-entry until full association was agreed in 2016. Now Switzerland is back in the same wilderness as the UK.

The story of what happened to Switzerland previously has always been an indicator of what fate might face the UK. The negotiations dragging on just cause more and more concern: all the collaborations that might have been happily forged are placed – possibly permanently – on ice; the Europeans who might have brought their talents to the UK will be thinking even harder about how wise such a move might be; the early career researchers for whom the ERC Starter Grants have provided such an important leg-up at the start of their career have lost that route to early funding independence. The UK science base (and equivalently Switzerland) is already losing scientific ground and it may get much worse.

George Freeman, as Science Minister, has suggested we need a Plan B, ready to come into operation in April in case Association fails. The implication is that, since the cash is on the table, UK scientists won’t care whether it comes from within the UK or beyond its borders. I feel this is missing the point, certainly about the ERC, for the following reasons:

  • EU citizens have come to work in universities here in the past, knowing they would be as able to obtain funding from the ERC as if they stayed in their home countries. They came, because they saw other advantages in being in the UK. Now, those who might have been thinking of moving will feel (never mind visa costs etc) much less reason to come. Those who are already here will be less willing to stay, as a prestigious source of funds will be denied to them. Just last week the THE wrote about an expected ‘exodus’ of EU researchers if we fail to associate. Last summer they wrote about EU researchers ‘losing interest’ in UK jobs.
  • I use that word ‘prestigious’ advisedly. There is no doubt that holding an ERC grant is held in more esteem than any sort of UKRI grant. The reason for this is obvious. The competition is fierce and the refereeing highly international by experts from around the world. In my experience, a promotions panel looks much more favourably on an applicant with an ERC grant than on a standard UK-based responsive mode grant.
  • International referees are, moreover, willing to spend days in Brussels (or at least, they were pre-pandemic) doing a thorough job. It is a big commitment, yet one researchers from way outside the EU are willing to take on. I’ve watched them in action, back in the days I was an ERC Scientific Council member. Do they come to the UK for UKRI panels? Are they even asked to referee proposals pre-panel? The answer is, not much.

Ultimately, we may have to have a Plan B. Of course, that has always been the danger and the money has been committed. However, there has been plenty of time to think this one through, since long before the Brexit agreement was signed, and the reality is that it is far from trivial to think how to construct and operate a large-scale new scheme that would deliver anything comparable. I find it unconvincing to imply such a thing could be up and running in a couple of months. UKRI itself is under the current scrutiny of the Grant Review and might feel now was not the moment to take on another huge responsibility.

So, let’s Stick to Science, say a large number of individuals and bodies. Initiated by the wider European community and launched today, this online campaign urges individuals and organisations to sign up to

‘request that the European Council, Parliament, Commission, as well as European Union (EU) Member States, and the governments of the UK and Switzerland, recognise that advancement in R&I is best achieved when all actors in science and innovation work together across geographic boundaries.’

They – and all who sign – are

‘calling for open and barrier-free collaboration among Europe’s research and innovation (R&I) actors, who all share the same values. The initiative is an active response to the delayed  progression of association agreements with Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK), which are being held up by political barriers that have nothing to do with science.’

That last sentence is key. As a former ERC Scientific Council member, I was pleased to be invited to be one of the first signatories. This isn’t just a campaign that matters to the UK and Switzerland; it is one that has impact across Europe and affects researchers in every country. Beyond the ERC itself, collaborations funded under different EU instruments of Horizon Europe (and its predecessors) are hugely important in solving the pressing problems of today. Excluding any country weakens what can be achieved, since the key scientist may be ineligible to be involved.

I hope many of the readers of this blog will consider signing up (here), to demonstrate the belief they share in the importance of international science and its relevance to achieving important societal ends.

Posted in ERC, Horizon Europe, Science Funding, Switzerland | Comments Off on Let’s Hope We Can All Stick to Science

Januaread

Posted on 31 January 2022 by Henry Gee

This year’s pile of books got off to a promising start, and the ones I’ve read this month will set a high standard for the year. So, here they are, in order of reading.

J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Carl Hostetter) – The Nature of Middle-earth. The postmortem publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work now far exceeds this output in life (he died in 1972). This is partly due to the fact that Tolkien never threw anything away, but mostly due to the tireless efforts of his son and literary executor Christopher, whose monumental efforts of literary excavation included the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, a collection of drafts, notes and other unpublished marginalia connected with his father’s vast and ever-growing legendarium. Christopher died in 2020, and the seemingly endless task has moved to leading Tolkienist Carl Hostetter, whose Nature of Middle-earth can be seen as Volume 13. In the late 1950s, after The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien (sensu J. R. R.) decided to revise fundamental aspects of his invented Universe. By that time the stories that became to be known as The Silmarillion had been revised at least three times and existed in a fairly advanced state. But still he did not rest. He decided to recast essential aspects of the life histories of humans and elves, which would have had important ramifications for the stories at the heart of the legendarium as it then existed. He also decided to re-make the invented world to accord with what we now know of the Universe. So, rather than having the Sun and Moon remade from the final fruits of the Two Trees of Valinor (as they had been hitherto), they would have existed from the beginning as astronomical objects. To my mind this would have been a great shame, and The Silmarillion as published by Tolkien (sensu Christopher) in 1977 adheres to the older (and, by now, canonical) scheme. The Nature of Middle-earth only includes preliminary notes for the reshaping, a lot of which come only as hints or digressions in extensive notes on the etymology of various words in the elvish languages. Language was always the primary driver for Tolkien’s creativity – he was, first, last, and always, a professional philologist, and created languages in the way that other people write music. Some of the material for The Nature of Middle-earth is republished from scholarly articles on Tolkien’s invented languages, which is in itself a terrific resource as some of these will be hard to obtain for most people. It is not clear, however, whether Tolkien actually undertook the necessary revisions. That is, whether he re-wrote parts of The Silmarillion to take them into account. Perhaps there is more Tolkien gold yet to be mined. As for The Nature of Middle-earth, it has to be said it could never be anything other than a hard read, and will appeal only to Tolkien obsessives. I count myself as one, so I found it repaid the effort. Fans who come from, say, the Peter Jackson movies, will be either disappointed or, frankly, baffled. There are some fragments of Tolkien’s beautiful writing in here, but as someone once said in another context, one has to kiss an awful lot of toads before one meets one’s handsome prince.

J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Christoper Tolkien) – The Silmarillion. Having ploughed through the often stony ground of The Nature of Middle-earth my appetite was whetted for revisit to The Silmarillion, which, in its 1977 form as edited by Tolkien (sensu Christopher) can be seen as an abstract of J. R. R.’s invented mythology, in the same way that Darwin regarded The Origin of Species as the abstract for a longer work. In a sentence, The Silmarillion is the story of the Elder Days, the canvas against which The Lord of the Rings is set, and in which some of its characters, such as Galadriel, Elrond, Sauron and Gandalf, played more or less tangential parts. Having read all of the alternatives, reworkings, recastings and various published drafts since published in The History of Middle-earth, I have to say that the work of Tolkien fils in producing a coherent text from his father’s stories is nothing short of a masterpiece. And whatever you might say about Tolkien père, he was a truly wonderful writer. His prose is rich, yet spare: perfectly balanced, with not a word out of place. Just what you’d expect from a philologist who knew the meaning and history of each and every word he used, and that words have power.

Richard Osman – The Man Who Died Twice. This continues where Osman’s first novel, the Thursday Night Murder Club, left off. If you haven’t read that (and why haven’t you?) it doesn’t really matter. The Thursday Night Murder Club is a group of four seemingly ill-matched pensioners living in an upmarket retirement village set somewhere in the Home Counties. They meet each Thursday to solve murders. And sometimes the murders come to them. For what is basically a sitcom involving a cast largely made of septuagenarians, the body count is high, and the action sometimes gruesome. It’s also pin-sharp, heart-warming, and laugh-out-loud funny. And, yes, Richard Osman is That Man on the Telly.

 

 

 

 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God: An Anatomy. The God of the Bible is a musclebound, physical, jealous street-fighting brawler. He has feet, and hands, and legs, and arms, and a head, and viscera, and dangly bits. This physicality is hard to see, as it has been progressively airbrushed out in successive reworkings of the canonical texts that eventually became the Bible, largely as a result of Christianity which, with its constant worrying about the nature of the Holy Trinity has to pour the corporeal essence of God into Christ, leaving God as no more than some indefinable essence or pneuma, the smile of an ever disappearing Cheshire Cat. The author digs into the original Hebrew of the Bible texts and interprets them as products of the politically turbulent times in which they were written – the closing centuries of the last millennium BCE, when the tiny Yahweh-worshipping kingdoms of Israel and Judah were progressively despoiled, reorganised, destroyed, reorganised again and finally destroyed by waves of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenic Greeks and Romans. She also traces Yahweh back to his roots among a wider Levantine pantheon, as a storm god and son of the High God El, and who eventually took over El’s consort for his own — and shows how Yahweh fits in to the patterns of religion and worship characteristic of the region back to the earliest times. It should be a deeply scholarly work — and it is — but it’s also racy and engaging, and will give pause for thought to anyone who takes the King James Bible literally. Yes, the Bible should be interpreted literally. But in its original Hebrew, which I know from experience, is a very slippery fish, the translation of which will depend a great deal on the moral stance of the translator. If this doesn’t make my Top Ten at the end of the year I should be most surprised.

Ehsan Masood: The Greatest Invention – the economic health of a nation is measured using a simple formula called Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which summarises how much producers produce, and consumers consume, and in economic and political circles it’s seen as a Good Thing that GDP is always going up. Indeed, when GDP goes down for more than a certain length of time, there is an economic recession, which is seen as a Bad Thing. The flaw in this argument is that on a finite planet, GDP cannot keep going up without limit. In this small but engaging book, Ehsan Masood suggests that GDP was one of those temporary measures that seems to have become ingrained in the psyche of political economics — invented to measure the recovery of European nations after the trauma of World War II. But GDP doesn’t measure many things that are increasingly seen as essential to life, such as volunteering, or work-life balance. Should be not be more contented with less? In answer to this, Masood discusses two alternative measures in particular. One is Gross National Happiness, a metric peculiar to the Himalayan state of Bhutan. Another is the Human Development Index (HDI) which has achieved a measure of traction. But — for the moment — GDP reigns supreme. But for how much longer?

Posted in Carl Hostetter, Christopher Tolkien, Ehsan Masood, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God An Anatomy, J R R Tolkien, Richard Osman, The Great Invention, The Man Who Died Twice, The Nature Of Middle Earth, the silmarillion, The Thursday Night Murder Club, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Januaread

Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

Posted on 30 January 2022 by Athene Donald

We await the Levelling Up White Paper. It is not easy to read the tealeaves of this turbulent political time to work out when the delay is likely to be terminated, although the last rumour I heard has it down for Wednesday. It has been on the cards for publication for some months, although not as long as the response to the Augar Review. In both these documents one may expect the word skills to be much in evidence. It is a term that, rather like levelling up itself, does not lend itself to a simple definition, but can mean different things to different people in different contexts. That can be handy for politicians of any complexion.

Skills – and adult upskilling – both matter if levelling up is to be achieved. As Thomas Aubrey wrote in a recent blog for the Bennett Institute

‘Many studies indicate that the main driver of productivity growth is the ability of an education system to improve human capital to make the most of new technology.’

Multiple studies and reports have examined variations in attainment levels between different parts of the country. If the above statement is correct, then any variations – and there are plenty – will have knock on effects for the local economy.  To give a specific example of such education variation, based on data for 2019/20 looking at the percentage of under 19s who have obtained a Level 2 qualification (i.e.5 GCSEs at grade 4 or above, or A*- C in old money), it has been shown that nine out of ten of the best performing local authorities lie within the Greater London area. However, the tenth, indeed the highest in ranking of all, is Rutland, no distance at all from Nottingham, which across all the local authorities has the worst overall score. Rutland, with a score of 93.5%, is a full 25% above Nottingham (67.7%).

Those students who don’t get a Level 2 qualification are inevitably going to be disadvantaged in the job market, and are likely to be unable to take advantage of higher-level skills, whatever they might be. This area is where the response to Augar should be coming into its own, along with the Lifetime Skills Guarantee for post 18 education, intended to facilitate access to higher technical qualifications as much as degrees. Thus the lifetime ‘skills’ will cover a wide potential range, and who will be doing the teaching where, will likewise be very varied. The present mishmash of qualifications from apprenticeships to BTECs and T Levels – aimed at 16-19 year olds primarily – are enough to baffle anyone (employer or putative employee). While so much is up in the air, cohort after cohort of students is being disadvantaged. In regions where job prospects are low, or at least skilled and well-paid jobs are in short supply, the motivation to apply oneself to get decent skills may be hard to find, the more so if children have only ever seen their parents struggle and they cannot imagine a better life and better prospects. The connection between levelling up and skills is obvious, although the trap of an area being caught in a low skills equilibrium is pervasive and persistent.

Amidst all this, there is no doubt that increasingly many jobs require a sufficiency of numerical and statistical fluency, as well as the ability to read graphs and use spreadsheets. More so than ever before. Whether going into retail or building trades, or more professional settings such as environmental science or law, these skills have never been needed so much. For those students who do get their Level 2 qualification and proceed to Level 3 (A Levels or the vocational qualifications), they may well drop maths and think they never need it again, only to find later on that their lack of numeracy and mathematical confidence catches up with them. The Royal Society, jointly with the British Academy, has just put out a commentary spelling out the importance of pursuing some maths at Level 3, even when that is not one of the subjects (e.g. A Level) taken. Core Maths is designed to fill this gap.

Back in 2011, I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee and hosting a speech given by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, when he said

‘I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18’

a sentiment with which the audience at the Royal Society was totally in agreement. A year later, I was representing the Royal Society at an event about quantitative skills at the British Academy, at which the importance of statistics for social scientists and humanities’ scholars was stressed – and also brought home at a personal level by the then Science Minister David Willetts, who encountered the mysteries of regression analysis during his PPE course at Oxford without having the tools to handle them. More and more jobs require this literacy – and this most certainly includes politicians. Core Maths is meant to be the answer to the problem, but it has not necessarily penetrated as far as it should into the education system. The commentary the Royal Society has just published is explicitly encouraging universities to expect Core Maths qualifications for admission to a much wider range of courses, far beyond those for which Maths would be a natural subject to take at A Level.

It will be seen that levelling up and numeracy are definitely related when skills are discussed. Levelling up, like skills, means different things to different people, but most certainly it should mean an improvement in local economic conditions where things are currently bad, so that inequality is reduced across the country and those living insecure financial lives have better opportunities.  Furthermore, to revert to the Aubrey quote I gave before, if more money is being committed to research and innovation (as in the latest Spending Review) it requires that there are workers in companies able to get hold of that innovation and turn it into profit and productivity, even if they have not been involved in the innovation itself. If there are insufficient such workers – insufficient absorptive capacity – then the full advantage of developments cannot be taken. This too will have a strong regional component, building on educational disadvantage.

In this category of workers I am not talking primarily about university graduates in technical areas, vital though they are, I am talking about those with intermediate skills who will do much of the practical improvements, putting ideas into practice and making sure the logistics work.  Within universities, the Talent Policy Commission has been looking at the crucial role technicians play, often insufficiently recognized, in higher education. Their full report will be published this coming week, but an earlier report from last autumn specifically looked at the role technicians play in knowledge exchange activities. Similar analysis applies within companies; intermediate technical skills are too often overlooked by those considering training needs and employment and the pipeline of talent not taken into account where it needs to be, a point clearly made in a report by Paul Lewis in 2019 for the Gatsby Foundation 9 (Technicians and Innovation).

Joining these different strands – more money in the innovation system, more absorptive capacity with a more highly skilled workforce, including in what may now fall under core maths – are all crucial strands in levelling up. If inequality is to be reduced across the UK, then ensuring that educational outcomes are comparable in Rutland and Nottingham, in Barnet and Blackpool, is one key step on which to build. There is a long way to go in making the current systems integrated and coherent.

Posted in A levels, Core Maths, education, michael gove, qualifications, technicians | Comments Off on Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

FAIR data in practice

Posted on 26 January 2022 by Frank Norman

Introducing the next Open Research London event, which will be about FAIR data. 

It’s easy to agree that making research data FAIR is A Good Thing. Of course research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But is it imperative that all research data should be FAIR? If not, how do we identify those subsets that do need to be FAIR? What exactly do we need to do at a micro level to ensure that our data is FAIR?

Realising the aim of FAIR data in practice is challenging – it can take time and resources – and the benefits to the researcher of making their data FAIR are not always apparent. It’s important therefore to minimise any barriers to making data FAIR.  Research institutions should put systems in place to make FAIR data easy to manage and should explain clearly to researchers what they need to do.

Top-down

Since the FAIR data concept was launched in 2016 there has been a great deal written and talked about it but mostly that has been pretty high-level. We are seeing more practical guidelines emerge but I believe we still need more concrete explanations for both institutions and researchers.

The EOSC Expert Group developed an overarching FAIR Action Plan, published in 2018, but stressed that there was also a need for individual countries to put in place national action plans for FAIR. The plan was called Turning FAIR into Reality and it talks about the need to create policies, build a FAIR ecosystem, develop researcher skills, provide repositories and craft incentives. It also emphasises the need for PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) and standards, and the importance of machine-actionable data management plans. Skills development was identified as a major gap to be filled.

Some of the presentations at the launch event have useful summaries if you want to learn more about the plan.

To me it all feels a bit high-level still. The plan doesn’t quite bridge the gap from the high-level ideals of FAIR data down to quotidian research practice.

Creating infrastructure

The FAIRsFAIR project (Fostering Fair Data Practices in Europe) is endeavouring to create “an overall ​knowledge infrastructure on academic quality data management, procedures, standards, metrics and related matters”, based on the FAIR principles.

It aims to supply “practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles throughout the research data life cycle”. I do like the sounds of this.  Its emphasis is on “fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR.”

The project started in March 2019 and is due to complete this year.  Recently they released a  training handbook, coordinated by Claudia Engelhardt.

Institutions, publishers, repositories

The Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) is the first research institution to dedicate itself to Open Science. Its director, Guy Rouleau, was interviewed about MNI’s approach to open science in Genome Biology in 2017. MNI provides  some practical guidelines on FAIR data for its researchers.

A recent article by JB Poline (from MNI and McGill University) and others in Neuroinformatics considers how organisations can work towards making new neuroscience data FAIR, and calls for increased international collaborative standardisation of neuroscience data to foster integration and efficient reuse of research objects.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues from PLOS recently published the results of a survey of researchers, quizzing them on their needs and priorities for research data sharing. Their article in Data Science Journal highlights the role of publishers and repositories and the importance of linking research data and publications.

Sharing data in a repository is key requirement for data to be FAIR. Repositories such as Dryad can help to spread awareness and best practice.  Dryad has a page listing Good Data Practices.

Researchers

Some researchers support FAIR data for ethical reasons. Philippa Matthews wrote in the Journal of Global Health in 2019 about the need for FAIR data in order to help overcome the health problems caused by Hepatitis B virus.

Questions.

As a service provider in a research institution, I have these questions about FAIR:

  • what do I need to put in place to support researchers?
  • what should I be telling researchers they need to do?
  • what skills do I need to ensure researchers have?
  • do I really understand what each of the components of F-A-I-R means?

The event

Open Research London is holding a free virtual event called FAIR data in practice on Tuesday 1 February 2022, 3-4.30pm GMT.

The event will be chaired by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions at Public Library of Science (PLOS) and hosted online by the Francis Crick Institute.

There will be four short talks followed by a Q&A and discussion.

The speakers are:

  • Jen Gibson (Executive Director, Dryad)
  • Philippa Matthews (Group Leader at Francis Crick Institute)
  • Jean-Baptiste Poline (Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University)
  • Claudia Engelhardt (Göttingen State and University Library)

They will be joined in the discussion panel by James McRae (Head of Metabolomics platform at Francis Crick Institute)

The event is free but please register at Eventbrite.

 

 

 

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