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What I Read In April

Posted on 10 April 2022 by Henry Gee

Björn Natthiko Lindeblad: I May Be Wrong ‘Oh, your poor brain’, says Mrs Gee, when she sees the stack of things I really must read; the list of tasks I give myself. Then she passed me this book. Now, you’ll rarely hardly ever never catch me reading anything from the ‘Self Help’ shelves, let alone the ‘Mind, Body & Spirit’ section, and after this I needn’t bother. This small book has given me all I need. The author was a successful young businessman until he realised, as some greyhounds will, that the hare they are chasing will forever be out of reach, and even when they reach it, it’ll actually only be a stuffed toy. So he gave it all up and became a Buddhist monk, living in a jungle in Thailand. After seventeen years he had another epiphany, left the order, and, after a period of depression, reinvented himself as a teacher of meditation and a motivational speaker. While reading this I discovered that I really needn’t pay any attention to those nagging thoughts telling me what I am doing wrong; that I should trust my own instincts more; to enjoy the moment; and to face life with equanimity. We can do nothing about the past, so there is no point in regret or bearing grudges. And, as that famous Buddhist Robert Burns once said, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, so it’s no point worrying if the plans you’ve made go rogue. The present moment is the only moment that’s real, so we should live in it, and appreciate it as it happens. When asked by a journalist what one thing he’d learned from a life of contemplation, the author said ‘I no longer believe my every thought’. In other words, I May Be Wrong. I think there is something in here for science, which, as you all both know, is what I spend a lot of time thinking about. Science is not about the accumulation of facts, but the quantification of doubt. Any scientific discovery is only ever provisional, so there’s no point hanging on too tightly to your pet theory, or being angry when another scientist shows that your line of inquiry might, in fact, be mistaken. Some scientists might feel better about life if they started off being humbler about the evidence. I think I have already begun to adopt some of Lindeblad’s tips, albeit without knowing it. I have done my best to avoid management. The quest for status is, to me, like chasing a hare that turns out to be fake. Who needs it? Who wants it? And what is actually the point of all those meetings? By avoiding all that clutter I have been able to enjoy my job more than, I suspect, most people enjoy theirs. Lindeblad loves to tell stories, and one comes from that great Buddhist teacher, Winnie-the-Pooh. While walking through the Hundred Aker Wood, Pooh and Piglet agree that their friend Rabbit is awfully clever. He has Brain. Maybe that’s why, says Pooh, he never understands anything. Perhaps, after all, there is another self-help book I should read – The Tao of Pooh.

Jeremy DeSilva: First Steps I paused at the top of the stairs and bent down to pet the dog, who usually liked to sleep there. But I misjudged my balance, slipped down several steps, and came to a halt when my left foot slammed into the return wall. The resulting broken ankle left me almost completely helpless. It was only thanks to the ministrations of the vast panjandrum that is the National Health Service that I could get better. That, and the more proximate care of the unflagging Mrs Gee, who enjoyed the experience so much that she decided to retrain as a nurse (specialising in patients with learning disabilities — go figure). Even the dog said she was sorry. While in hospital I reflected that my next book would be called Bugger Bipedalism, and would look at why it is that we humans, almost uniquely among mammals, are habitual bipeds, when the habit is obviously, transparently and ridiculously maladaptive. Jeremy De Silva saved me the trouble, and shows that my bedridden state was not unique. The painful and expensive burden of fractures to bones from hip to toe; slipped discs; torn cruciate ligaments (and the many other ailments of knees); hernias; prolapses; plantar fasciitis; sciatica; death in childbirth, and many other ills are a direct consequence of our having rotated a structure that was meant to be horizontal through ninety degrees. The rewards, though, have been just about worth the effort. A short walk every day won’t help you lose weight, because human walking is an extraordinarily energy-efficient means of getting around. It might, however, reduce your risk of getting breast cancer, Alzheimer’s or heart disease and is known to alleviate low mood. Our top half, relieved from the burden of walking, can do more things — notably, to be able to control breathing sufficiently well that our ancestors could invent spoken language. And the utter helplessness of one who breaks a leg may have prompted the evolution of a compassionate side to human nature. The fossil record of human walking is thin, but just big enough to show that some of our bipedal, pre-human cousins recovered from otherwise debilitating fractures, rather than being left on the savannah to be eaten by a passing leopard. The ministrations of Mrs Gee have a long history and might have been what made us human.

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth The Monterey Pine is endangered. A goldilocks species that’s picky about where it lives, it clings forlornly to a few clifftops in California. As if to add insult to injury, it is deserted by the iconic Monarch butterflies, which seem to prefer the introduced Australian blue gum trees next door. Strenuous efforts are being made to conserve this picturesque pine. But hold – what’s this? – the Monterey pine, like the blue gum, has also been introduced, though in the opposite direction, to the Antipodes. It likes the climate of New Zealand so well that it thrives there, to the extent that it’s become a key part of the local timber industry. This scenario – one of many described in a book that critics whose coin is words such as ‘catastrophe’, ‘extinction’, ’emergency’ and ‘disaster’ can only describe as ‘provocative’ – shows that there are two sides to extinction. For sure, the impact of human beings on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems is serious; the effects, undeniable. But this is not the much-touted ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ (at least, not yet), and among the less well-publicised effects of human disturbance is the creation – by introduction, geographic separation and hybridisation – of a whole host of new species, at an unprecedented rate. When human beings are gone, they will leave more species in their wake than they inherited. Just not the same ones. This is somewhat embarrassing for conservationists, whose attitude is that the world should be kept in just the way they found it, as if the world they inherited was primeval and changeless but for the arrival of humans (a highly invasive species native to Africa and the result of the hybridisation of at least three different species). Introduced and invasive species are seen as ‘bad’, ‘unnatural’, and fit for extirpation. Such a view is to privilege one moment in time above all others, when the world is in fact always changing, and there is nothing special about any moment above any other. The modish view of conservationists, which, to my mind, is crystallised in the erection of the ‘Anthropocene’, a term that means the geological period in which we all now live, defined by the effects of humans on the environment; a term that reflects a colossal, somewhat patronising and narcissistic hubris, when the remains of human activity in tens of millions of years might be barely detectable, if at all, and leaving aside the practical issue of whether one can create a geological period when one is still living in it. But evolution is ceaselessly active, and human beings are as much a part of nature as the Monterey pine. Species have always come and gone, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and at the same time have crossed continents and hopped between islands. The task for conservationists is, perhaps, to have some humility before the evidence, and, like King Canute was forced to do in the end, go with the flow. Species at risk of extinction should be saved. Of course they should. But perhaps they could be saved not by fruitlessly maintaining them where they happen to be found, but by moving them to places they might find more congenial, particularly in times of rapidly changing climate. The Monterey pine is a case in point. It was saved not by removing invasive species from its last holdouts in California, but by moving it somewhere else. The endangered species becomes — paradoxically — a successful invader.

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe: A Short History of Humanity. You’ll both be aware that I’ve been reading quite a few horses’-mouth accounts of the latest work in understanding human evolution. See for example my review of Jeremy DeSilva’s First Steps above, and my reviews of Tom Higham’s The World Before Us from March, and Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon The Earth from February. Here’s another, from Johannes Krause, who, like Svante Pääbo (author of Neanderthal Man) works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Krause’s story follows a similar course – a laboratory’s discoveries of the nature of human evolution, that modern humans contain fragments of DNA from other species, and so on — but concentrates on the past 10,000 years or so, and mainly deals with Europe. Immigration, it seems, has always been Europe’s story (a theme given a modern context by Krause’s coauthor Trappe, a political journalist who has also followed Krause’s work). There have, in essence, been three major waves of immigration into Europe over the past 10,000 years. The first, of hunter-gatherers, was replaced by a wave of farmers from Anatolia some 8,000 years ago, and this was mingled with a further wave, of equestrian pastoralists around 5,000 years ago. There is more to this, of course, and apart from a few outliers (a corner of Sardinia remains almost pure Anatolia), the people that call themselves European (and that includes Britons) is a mongrel breed, products of these three major waves of immigration, forever intermingled.

Graeme Hall: All Dogs Great and Small My dogs’ favourite TV show is Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, in which genial, tweed-waistcoat-and-cravat-wearing Yorkshireman Graeme Hall sorts out the problematic behaviour of dogs up and down the land. An abiding theme is that the problems are usually just as much those of the owners as those of the dogs. People fail to realise the acute sensitivity that dogs have to a person’s body language, and although they might not be able to understand the details of human conversations, dogs are very aware of tone of voice. Dogs, you see, have co-evolved with humans for 40,000 years. The two species are, to an extent, symbiotic, and resolving the problematic behaviour of a dog usually requires some re-training of the owner. When watching the show I have wondered (even if my dogs might not have done) how Graeme (we feel we’re on first-name terms with him, chez Gee) got to be where he is today. This book tells all. For more than 20 years Graeme was a senior executive in a food company, until his interest in dogs and dog training took over. The book follows the lives of dogs from milk-sossage to old age, backing up his assertions with the latest scientific evidence, and is as friendly yet as plain-speaking as you’d expect from the Land of the White Rose. And there are lots of rather droll anecdotes. It probably helps if you like dogs — even better if dogs share your home, as one house in three in Britain does — but in any case is a heart-warming read.

C. J. Cherryh: Hellburner The accomplished and award-winning Hard-SF writer C.J. Cherryh (the second ‘h’ is silent, as in ‘in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, Hurricanes ‘Ardly Happen’) writes novels in a believable future history in which humanity has begun to colonise nearby star systems. I read one of these, Downbelow Station, a long time ago, but remember rather little about it.  The action of Hellburner is set in the 24th Century when the Earth is at war with the Union, a group of humans long used to colonising outer space. By ‘believable’, action and adventure are repeatedly waylaid by the  frustrations of political intrigue, and the very real — and well-portrayed — misunderstandings and prejudices that might result from culture clashes between a complex society based on a planetary surface and a much simpler one based entirely in space. The plot centres on a program by Earth to fly Hellburners — human-piloted spacecraft that fly at sizeable fractions of the speed of light, and the challenges that this will pose for a human crew. Automation is shunned, as this is the strategy likely adopted by the Union, so Earth-based AI stratagems will be second-guessed by the enemy.  Such problems are repeatedly discussed in great detail: one is as likely to find oneself in a congressional hearing as a space battle. The title promised me the latter — but I got was the former, and it’s a hard read. As someone once said on viewing Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation is a poor substitute for Han Solo. To be fair, Hellburner is a sequel to another novel, Heavy Time, and meant to be read as such — but Wikipedia is great at supplying plot summaries, so I didn’t feel left out. The language has a density which, frankly, takes no prisoners. Here is an example:

Carrier was outputting now, making EM noise in a wavefront an enemy would eventually intercept in increasing Doppler effect, and to confuse their longscan they were going to pull a pulse, half up to FTL and abort the bubble, on a heading for the intercept zone — that was the scary part. That was the time, all sims aside, that the theoretical high v became real, .332 light, true hellride, with herself for the com-node that integrated the whole picture.

I can appreciate the artistry that went into this, but it made my head ache. Oh, and for some reason, some of the spacers speak a kind of Franglais. Et pourquoi pas?

A. E. Moorat: Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter This is one of those burlesques in the subgenre in which historical or well-known but fictional figures are pitted against olives the forces of darkness (qv. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, and Albert Einstein, Defender against Nameless Horrors from Other Dimensions). The story is very much the true story of the early part of the reign of Queen Victoria, from her accession, through her marriage to Prince Albert, up to and including the births of her first two children. In other words, very much the same arc as a recent televisual emission in which Jenna Coleman played the young Queen. But that’s not the whole story. Behind the throne is a secret organisation, the Protektorate, sworn to defend Victoria from hideous forces that will rise up from the Pit, usurp the crown, and take over the greatest empire in the world. The story is remarkably good; the action, incredibly gory; and – without spoiling the plot — Victoria is no slouch at decapitating a zombie or two. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Jenna Coleman was once an all-action companion to Dr Who.

Larry Niven: Neutron Star The ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction arguably began in the 1930s with John W. Campbell‘s editorship of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 until the ‘New Wave’ of SF of the 1960s introduced such affectations as literary sensibility and social conscience. Golden-Age SF stories tended to be ‘hard’ SF (that is, with a strong science component) and concentrated on pace and plot rather than character or literary pretension. If so, Larry Niven’s story Neutron Star (published in Worlds of If in October, 1966) was among the Golden Age’s last gasps. Or, rather, a last hurrah, for the story won awards and is rightly hailed as a classic. In the story, the protagonist Beowulf Shaeffer, ever-impecunious space-pilot-for-hire, is paid by the financially shrewd, technically advanced but pathologically risk-averse Puppeteers to take one of their spaceships on a hyperbolic orbit that will take it within a mile of a neutron star. The story describes the intense tidal forces that such a mission would experience — and all this just a year before neutron stars were actually discovered. The other stories in this collection share the same imagined universe, and several feature Beowulf Shaeffer, the Puppeteers and other aliens including the recklessly warlike Kzint and the strange, plant-like Outsiders. All the stories are painted in the bright primary colours of pulp SF, and yet each is a meticulously crafted example of the storyteller’s art, ending in a satisfying plot twist. After Hellburner, Neutron Star was nothing short of refreshing. Ah, the Good Old Days, when men were real men, women were real women, and small blue creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small blue creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Martin Cruz Smith: Wolves East Dogs Arkady Renko, dogged Moscow detective (introduced in Smith’s 1981 novel Gorky Park), tries in vain to wrest any kind of order from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the ‘New Russia’, which is every bit as corrupt as the old. Here he investigates the case of millionaire Pasha Ivanov, who has — apparently — thrown himself to his death from his penthouse apartment. This seems out of character for the cheerful, outgoing Ivanov, whose apartment walls are decorated with pictures of himself with notable figures of the day. ‘He embraced Yeltsin and Clinton and the senior Bush. He beamed at Putin, who, as usual, seemed to suck on a sour tooth’. But Ivanov has been acting out of character of late. And the floor of his walk-in closet is covered in — of all things — salt. Renko’s trail leads nowhere. And more than nowhere, for he finds himself chasing leads in the radioactive exclusion zone around the wreck of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a region inhabited by a bored militia, desperate scientists, shady scavengers and the peasants who refused to leave after one of the reactors blew up in 1986. Renko finds a kind of respite here, perhaps because he has no formal jurisdiction in Ukraine, even enjoying the rustic hospitality of the peasant farmers. ‘Arkady found the pickles crisp and sour, with perhaps a hint of strontium’. The plot is, eventually resolved, although perhaps rather too quickly and neatly after a series of entirely coincidences. But a satisfying read nonetheless. Especially at the moment.

Jim Al-Khalili: The Joy of Science When Winnie-the-Pooh was Stuck in a Tight Place, his friends helped him pass the time by reading him Improving Books. I’d imagine that The Joy of Science might have been on this list. In a volume that is both Small and Tiny, celebrity physicist Jim Al-Khalili, presenter or Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, presents eight bite-sized lessons in how thinking more scientifically will improve your life. It’s certainly helpful to have clear explanations of such things as Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, why it is that Otherwise Perfectly Sensible People believe that 5G Masts cause COVID while still being able to put One Foot In Front Of The Other without Falling Over, notwithstanding inasmuch as which What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings, but there is not, to be fair, very much Joy. Alice, having noted that there are vanishingly few pictures and absolutely no conversation, would have strayed and disappeared down some conspiracy-theoretic rabbit hole. It’s all so very Earnest, you see, and some might say Patronising, though it tries oh so very hard not to be. As Mozart remarked on the Improving qualities of opera in the magic lantern version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, these gods and heroes are so worthy you’d think they shit marble. And who’d really rather not have a chat with their hairdresser than Hercules?

Posted in a e moorat, abraham lincoln vampire hunter, amadeus, anthropocene, arkady renko, beowulf shaeffer, bipedalism, Björn Natthiko Lindeblad, c j cherryh, chernobyl, chris d thomas, conservation, dogs, dogs behaving very badly, dr who, franglais, golden age of SF, gorky park, graeme hall, hellburner, human evolution, immigration, jenna coleman, Jeremy DeSilva, jim Al Khalili, Johannes Krause, John W Campbell, larry niven, martin cruz smith, peter shaffer, puppeteers, Science Is Vital, star wars, The Life Scientific, the phantom menace, the tao of pooh, Thomas Trappe, whaqt christopher robin does in the mornings, White Rose, Winnie the Pooh, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In April

First Person Plural

Posted on 7 April 2022 by Henry Gee

This first person singular — that’s ‘I’, meaning ‘me’ — has increasing difficulties with the first person plural — that’s ‘we’, meaning ‘us’. Every day I come across phrases, usually freighted with some agonised self-flagellating subtext, or so I assume, that say something like (and I paraphrase here)

We are causing the destruction of the endangered crimp-eyed chuzzbanger

and I ask myself – who is this ‘we’ referred to in the third fifth foregoing?

Does this ‘we’ include me, personally, the reader? If not, all I can say is, well, people, you should do better. For goodness’ sake go forth and improve the status of the crimp-eyed chuzzbanger, and don’t complain to me about it.

If, however, I suspect, the ‘we’ is meant to include me, personally, then I ask myself a more serious question — how is it that the author of these sentiments is so convinced of their rightness such that any view I might have in the matter — someone the author might not know, or have met — is automatically set at naught, having no value, and overridden? Notwithstanding inasmuch as which the case of the crimp-eyed chuzzbanger might merit urgent action, has anyone actually asked me whether I might have an opinion on the matter?

Therefore I ask myself whether the second person singular as presently constituted is too blunt an instrument, or, to use a modish cliche, Not Fit For Porpoises Purpose. For it encompasses many different things, such as (and possibly not exhaustively)

  • a well-defined group of people that includes the author of the statement and a small group of people in a team that includes the author and known to them. We, this team of conservationists, that’s me and Carol and Bob and Ted and Alice, is going to do something about the crimp-eyed chuzzbanger.
  • a more-or-less well-defined group of people that includes the author but explicitly not anyone who happens to read or hear that statement. We, a team of conservationists, is going to do something about the crimp-eyed chuzzbanger, but you can stay at home.
  • a less well-defined group of people that includes the author of the statement and anyone the author might never have met or know personally, such as readers of a book or the audience of a broadcast. We, humanity in general, need to do something about the crimp-eyed chuzzbanger, irrespective of the views of any individual.

The English language is clearly deficient in these shades of meaning. We should do something about it.

Posted in crimp-eyed chuzzbanger, Silliness, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on First Person Plural

The Human Face of the Carbon Queen

Posted on 3 April 2022 by Athene Donald

In my Twitter feed, there has been much publicity about the recent biography of US physicist and electrical engineer Millie Dresselhaus, Carbon Queen, by Maia Weinstock. Dresselhaus’ lifetime of research spanned over five decades, studying many different forms of carbon, from graphite to graphene via nanotubes. I never met Dresselhaus to my knowledge, though I find it hard to believe we didn’t attend one of the huge APS meetings at the same time, but I believe I once met Weinstock at a meeting held at the Royal Society (although that may be an inaccurate memory). The book is an interesting read, and very easy to get stuck into. But more than the style, there are the stories about the life this remarkable woman led at a time when women were considerably thinner on the ground in Physics/Electrical Engineering than they are now. For instance, she spent a year at Harvard taking science classes, because Radcliffe – where she was enrolled from 1952 – couldn’t provide any teaching in the sciences. Of this time, she said (all her quotes are taken from the book):

‘I felt a little odd because women were still very, very much in the minority, and in some classes I was the only one.’

Furthermore, women

‘had to take their exams together in the same room [i.e separately from the men] because their presence in a coed examination setting was thought too distracting for the men.’

Her PhD supervisor (at the University of Chicago) felt that women had no place in science and told Dresselhaus so, indicating he believed giving women fellowships or other recognition was simply a ‘waste of resources’. That attitude was probably not that unusual at the time, or indeed for many years thereafter, with Weinstock quoting a 1976 article on women in engineering (in Cosmopolitan) that claimed a department head had  said

‘a lot of the technical education we’re giving women today is going to be wasted. They’ll get married, have children, and their period of productivity won’t last more than a few years.’

Dresselhaus got married – to a fellow researcher in the same broad discipline, with whom she collaborated extensively  – and had four children. Her career spanned more than fifty years of research at the top of her field. Despite that prediction about women in general, she barely stopped working even when she gave birth, taking only a few days off in total around her four children.

In due course, Dresselhaus joined the MIT faculty, becoming a tenured professor in Electrical Engineering in 1968, the first woman to be appointed full professor in any of the engineering departments. (That fact doesn’t surprise me: when I interviewed, and was subsequently offered, a faculty position in Cornell’s Materials Science and Engineering Department in 1982, I would have become the first woman faculty in Engineering there had I gone. In the end, of course, I didn’t go back to Cornell, where I had held two postdoc positions, and I don’t know who did become that first woman there.) About her appointment she made a curious quote:

‘I had very low expectations for myself. It wasn’t until I became a full professor in the prestigious MIT electrical engineering department that I began to take my career seriously.’

Was this a case of impostor syndrome, or simply a lack of role models to lead her to think that she too, as a woman, could make a go of a career? (Clearly role models would have been in short supply, although future Nobel Prize winner Rosalyn Yalow had briefly taught her at college and given her much encouragement to persist, despite the difficulties for women at the time.)  It isn’t obvious to me which interpretation is right, but make a go of it she did, publishing numerous trail-blazing papers and winning honours and other accolades throughout her life.

In 1999 MIT produced a seminal and ground-breaking report: A Study of the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (I’ve written about this report before, at the time its follow-up was published in 2011). This report was prompted by the findings of molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, who explored gender differences in the allocation of various resources, as well as women’s personal experiences. When I read this report in 1999, I realised how much the situation described echoed my own experiences, although I had not internalised that there were systemic biases at play, as opposed to (or, at least, in addition to) my own failings. The abstract to the report explicitly stated

‘many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments. Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT.’

That second sentence is very important in my eyes. Life does not necessarily get easier as you progress, although the issues a woman faces may alter over time and undoubtedly some women do have an easier time, not least, because they are less likely to suffer from sexual harassment, as someone spelled out to me recently. It is clear from the book that Dresselhaus’s reaction to the report, at the time, was similar to mine; she wasn’t involved in the study itself, since she was in the Faculty of Engineering. It made her realise that the problems she encountered were not simply of her making. An MIT alumna described her reaction:

‘I saw her change her opinions as she began to recall incidents…that she’d previously managed to ignore. I think that sort of blindness had served a useful purpose for her in the first part of that career.’

It stimulated her to recognize that she had a role to play in supporting the women around her, and that she did for the rest of her life. Weinstock’s book makes clear just how much she did to encourage, mentor and sponsor younger women whose paths crossed hers, whether or not there was any formal connection. Not only with a wonderful reputation in research and teaching, she mentored many women on to success, as well as acting as an incredibly visible role model.  She seems to have run her research group rather like an extended family, with many social occasions to help her students along.

Those generations of women who came after her in Physics/Engineering owe her a huge debt, because she was so visible, so determined and so helpful. If you want to know more, I recommend this book.

 

Posted in Maia Weinstock, Millie Dresselhaus, MIT, Nancy Hopkins, Research, Women in science | Comments Off on The Human Face of the Carbon Queen

Commutatis Maledictis

Posted on 25 March 2022 by Henry Gee

London!

London!

(It’s only a model).

London!

On second thoughts, let’s not visit London. It is a Silly Place.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which it’s almost precisely approximately exactly two whole years since I have been to the London Orifice (I’m with the Submerged Log Company), I still get anxiety dreams about commuting. These dreams are protean and likewise variable, but these days take the form of my confusion at being confronted with an entirely changed and different London tube map. Old lines have been extended in severally all directions.

Old stations have new names.

There are lots of new stations.

One of these was called ‘Nope’.

When I am – in my dreams – at these stations – there are few clues as to which direction the trains are headed, and indeed if any are headed towards termini with which I have some familiarity such as King’s Crustacean(1).  Other passengers are eager to help but are so far ahead in their metropolitan sophistication that I am none the wiser.

Well, imagine my horror at discovering only yesterday that there exists a new line called the Elizabeth Line of whose existence I had been entirely ignorant. On later inspection I discover that it used to be called Cross Rail. Cross? I was furious. What next? The Onedin Line? The Mason-Dixon Line? The Wallace Line?

I think I’ll stay at home.

(1) King’s Crustacean gets its name from the presence, in the 18th century, of large seawater aquaria that were used to store fresh crabs and lobsters, imported from Cromer, for the table of King George III. It replaced an aquarium at Charing Crustacean, and was superseded by New Crustacean.

Posted in Commutatis Maledictis, commuting, Crossrail, Elizabeth Line, London, mason dixon line, onedin line, Silliness, wallace line | Comments Off on Commutatis Maledictis

World Poetry Day

Posted on 22 March 2022 by Henry Gee

Yes, I know, I know, World Poetry Day was a few days ago now, and as you read this it’s probably World Broccoli Day or World Make-Friends-With-A-Unicycling-Girrafe Day, but at the age of 59 and 11/12ths I’m a bit slow on the old unicycle release of calcium from intracellular stores uptake and it took me a while to retrieve this poem I wrote some years ago on the occasion of the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson. So here it is. With apologies to Hilaire Belloc.

Ahem.

Clears throat.

THE BOSON

The Boson is so very small

You cannot make it out at all

Though scientists have money on

Its presence in the Tevatron.

Notwithstanding the concern

Of colleagues working hard at CERN

Who hope the Boson might emerge

Triumphant, from a mighty splurge

of hadrons which, when they collide

Release their secrets, locked inside.

Why all this fuss, I say? Alas!

Without it, and we’d have no mass

We’d float away, like thistledown,

Drifting high above the ground.

The ground itself would fly away

And nothing much would deign to stay

Attracted to its bounden mate.

We’d be in such a sorry state!

But hold! We cannot be so free.

There is still much uncertainty,

For scientists tell us we must wait

For sigmas to accumulate.

Oh let us never, ever doubt

What nobody is sure about.

 

It’s OK, I’m going now.

 

Posted in boson, Higgs, hilaire belloc, Silliness, unicycling girrafes, world poetry day, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on World Poetry Day

Indications of Direction of Travel at UKRI

Posted on 21 March 2022 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recent publication from UKRI, their strategy document for the next five years. In UKRI’s relatively brief history, this is the first such document it has produced, because it is only now that they have any certainty over their funding for more than a few months: the Spending Review provides them with assurance for three years. The publication is a high-level document and will need to be complemented by a delivery plan. I always get worried when I read documents that state ‘we will [do something fundamentally important]..…’ without clarity over how any of their undoubtedly laudable aims will be translated into practice, but we have to be patient in this case. I am led to believe such a delivery plan will follow in due course, to put flesh on the bones of the aspirations. Thus, in what follows I do absolutely understand the mechanics of making things happen have not been, and in many instances cannot yet be, spelled out, as I raise my questionmarks.

Having known Ottoline Leyser, the current CEO, from before her arrival in Cambridge back in 2010, I know how strongly she believes in diversity and the importance of everyone in a team. In an interview included in the book The Meaning of Success, published (free online) for the University of Cambridge, she said back in 2014:

‘The current system favours the individual agenda, so you wind up with people with big grants and fancy publications, who can be doing very little for the system as a whole.’

She is now in an excellent position to do something about it, by influencing the incentives academia operates under. The incentives which drive processes in every university, too often leading to rewards for those very people with ‘big grants and fancy publications’. Rewards at the expense of those who mentor, do the pastoral legwork, take on the least popular teaching courses and serve on committees, even those which aren’t about allocations of money or space (typically more popular than health and safety, or staff consultative committees), not to mention all those people on the teams who work with the PI with the big grant. We need to see the delivery plan to know how UKRI can start to influence the UK academic culture in the direction she has always wanted.

There are some interesting comments about excellence in the Strategy document, that word whose precise definition is so elusive. Words which tie into the importance of an entire team, not just that bigwig at the top, such as

‘We must escape the constraints of narrow definitions of excellence and excessive focus on the performance of individuals to harness the power of diverse collaborative teams.’

Translating such worthy words into the way a grant-giving panel makes its decisions will be no trivial matter.  How will their standard mental scoresheets be uprooted to encompass a broader definition of excellence? I look forward to seeing what steps are laid out in the delivery plan to achieve this.

There is surprisingly little said in the document about early career researchers and how to resolve the long-standing issues around precarity. I found two mentions of both, with precarity explicitly tied in with the challenges for early career researchers, the first appearance of which says:

‘The career paths people can take through the system are restricted, resulting in precarity, particularly at early career stages, and creating silos between sectors, roles and disciplines.’

These words echo those in last summer’s R&D People and Culture White Paper:

‘we will look to understand and address the impacts of short-term contracts, which particularly impact on the careers and progression of women and those from disadvantaged backgrounds in research.’

Understanding, consultation, are all very well, although I’d have thought there would already be plenty of evidence to inform UKRI. However, what is not spelled out – in either document – is what can be done about the problem. To remove short-term contracts would require a major shake-up on the part of funders such as UKRI, as well as within universities. This is no trivial task, essentially requiring a change to the whole current academic ecosystem (and not just in the UK). When I was first appointed a lecturer at the ripe old age of 32, that was quite old to achieve that status. No more; it would be average-to-young I’d guess. Desirable though such changes to early career trajectories may be, it is not simply going to be a quick tweak and all will be well.

One of the major challenges in this space is the shape of the academic pyramid. As long as a PI trains, say, twenty PhD students over their career (the relevant number will tend to be discipline-dependent), given there is only one of them, unless there is a sudden vast expansion of permanent positions, nineteen of them will not have a position to slot into. Hence many of the nineteen who don’t replace the one at the top when they eventually retire, will feel cheated. Some may always have wanted a career outside academia and be perfectly content. Some may not have anticipated that outcome but also be content when they join a consultancy, a think tank, the civil service, train as a teacher or enter an industrial lab – there are after all plenty of highly desirable and important jobs that don’t involve becoming your boss’s clone. But some will be left struggling through that precarious postdoc experience on a succession of short-term contracts, feeling cheated and increasingly bitter. However, as things stand, that has to be the reality given the structures we have in place. (This has been analysed quite recently in a more scholarly way for US data, but the conclusion is obvious).

Another strand of thinking, more prominent in Ottoline’s words since her appointment and indeed in the People and Culture document than in the recent UKRI Strategy, is the idea of porosity between sectors: that people may move to and fro between different sectors over their lifetimes. The most obvious example (in STEM at least) would be to move between academia and industry, maybe several times during a career. Currently that is a real challenge, since determining the ‘excellence’ of someone who has worked in industry as part of a team and not had the opportunity to publish a stream of first author (or, indeed, last author) papers, for instance, may not be recognized as having an adequately superlative track record by any grant-awarding panel when that person attempts to move back into academia and secure funding.

Even sticking within these quite narrow themes of diversity and excellence, there are many other points I could have made. For instance, UKRI’s diversity statistics do not currently make pretty reading, particularly when it comes to black scientists. What concrete steps are going to be taken to overcome this apparent significant bias against such researchers? If you want to know more about these problems, I’d recommend following @TIGERinSTEM and @profRachelGaN (Rachel Oliver) on Twitter, who are fantastic at keeping this topic in the public eye, and who recently spoke to the Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee about the issues. Then when it comes to bullying, another of Ottoline’s bêtes noires, I’m afraid the Twitter feed of UKRI’s chosen service for reporting outcomes and impact,  ResearchFish has rather blotted the copybook, with the hostile, indeed somewhat threatening tweets they sent out last week:

“We understand that you’re not keen on reporting on your funding through Researchfish but this seems quite harsh and inappropriate. We have shared our concerns with your funder.”

In summary, there are major challenges to address if the desired outcomes laid out in the Strategy are successfully to come to fruition, but even modest steps in any of these directions might lead to a more healthy work environment for many. I look forward to seeing these.

 

 

 

Posted in bullying, diversity, Excellence, porosity, precarity, Science Culture | Comments Off on Indications of Direction of Travel at UKRI

From McDonalds to Mordor

Posted on 10 March 2022 by Henry Gee

When The Lord Of The Rings was published in 1954, some readers suggested that its story echoed that of the Second World War, then still fresh in the minds of many. The onslaught on the ill-prepared Allies by an evil and heavily militarised Enemy; the victory, almost against hope, of the Allies; and the subsequent passing of many things, both evil and good.

The author. J. R. R. Tolkien, was quick to puncture this idea. If the book had its roots in a real war, it would have been the First World War, in which Tolkien had been an active participant (as amply documented by John Garth in his masterful Tolkien and the Great War), not the Second. In addition, Tolkien declared an antipathy to allegory, as opposed to ‘applicability’:

‘ … I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’ [p7 of The Fellowship of the Ring, 2nd Edition, 6th Impression, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971].

With all this in mind, I cannot help but give myself license, as a Tolkienist and one interested in the way the winds blow, to see many parallels between The Lord of the Rings and the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. At risk of cherry-picking, the parallels are clear to see. Applicability, if not Love, is All Around.

Let’s see –

  • The steady rise and rise of a great power in the East, while the powers in the West are in decline, mostly oblivious, and disunited.
  • The corruption of leaders in the West by disinformation from the East – witness the use of ‘seeing stones’ by the Dark Lord Sauron to feed misinformation to potential adversaries such as the wizard Saruman, and Denethor, Steward of Gondor;
  • The appearance of Sauron’s representatives, as seeming fair, but ultimately deceitful;
  • The use by Sauron of large numbers of frankly not-very-good troops, while Sauron himself stays at home in his bunker — whereas many of the Leaders of the West, notably Aragorn, fight in the front line.

I shall not insult your intelligence (any further) by drawing explicit parallels between the events in Middle-earth with those in the real world. I’m sure you can make these connections yourself, and, no doubt, think of more. And there are of course many differences. McDonalds, for example, has not, so far as I know, set up any branches in Mordor.

But what inspired me to think along these lines was a reported statement by Sauron Putin to the effect that he’d rather see Ukraine totally destroyed than be allied with the west, with the subtext that he hankers for the Good Old Days of the Soviet Union. This immediately made me recall the speech by Denethor, the Steward of Gondor corrupted by Sauron, who found himself reluctant to admit that Aragorn, a hitherto unknown (and somewhat unkempt) Ranger from the North, might be the rightful King. ‘I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity’, he declares to Gandalf.

‘What then would you have,’ said Gandalf, ‘if your will could have its way?’

It was Denethor’s response that struck a chord with me:

‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life,’ answered Denethor, ‘and in the days of my longfathers before me: be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.'[ p130 of The Return of the King, 2nd Edition, 16th Impression, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1988].

Not long after this speech Denethor commits suicide by burning himself to death. The applicability of this event to the real world is still in question.

Posted in allegory, applicability, aragorn, Denethor, J R R Tolkien, mcdonalds, mordor, Politicrox, Putin, Sauron, the lord of the rings, Tolkien and the Great War, Ukraine, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on From McDonalds to Mordor

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.

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