Reciprocal Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure.

Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, this weekend I’m mainly preoccupied with rethinking my commuting options. When in 2004 we moved to our current house, a 25 min walk from the station, I used to cycle for that leg of my journey to and from work. I lasted six months. The problem was the house is high above the station.  That hill was an easy descent on the way in but a killer of a climb, even with a relatively light bike and 21 gears, on the way home.

I am now wiser, but also older. And heavier. And less fit. So I am wondering if an e-bike might allow me to get a bit more exercise without risking total collapse on that slow climb home from the station. I’m also trying to convince myself that if I got a folding bike, I could get even more exercise by cycling the last leg of my commute from Victoria Station to the Imperial College campus at South Kensington.

To that end I started looking at eBike options and soon became bewildered. There are so many! I’m not even sure what to look for. Is portability more important than rideability? How much battery power do I need? How many gears?

Hive mind: got any recommendations for a folding E-bike that isn’t a Brompton?

— Stephen Curry (@Stephen_Curry) July 29, 2022

To cut through the morass of different options I took to Twitter to ask for advice and got a wealth of suggestions from friends and colleagues. The advantage of this approach is that the information comes from trusted sources, most of whom have first-hand experience of the bicycles they recommended.

Even so, there’s a lot of information to process. I put together a spreadsheet of ‘indicators‘ to get a better grip on the key quantitative differences between models.

That helped to sort out some of the decision-making: on price, for example (I can’t yet justify £3k for a Brompton, whatever the legendary design); on gears (I’m looking for more rather than fewer); and on weight (lighter, obviously).

But the choice is still not obvious. As Brompton-owner Andrew McKinley pointed out, ‘I think folding bikes fall into the “you want three things? Pick two” trap. Cheap, easy to fold, sturdy? Pick two…’. He’s not wrong.

And then there are all the qualitative questions to be answered. How portable is the folded bike? How smoothly does the electric power kick in? Do I want a front or rear wheel motor? Is the battery removable – and is that an important feature?

I think what I might be looking for is a narrative CV for eBikes, in which owners can describe there experience of these features. Of course, such judgments are subjective – and tensioned against the numbers. But that is the nature of evaluation of complex systems, research and researchers included. It’s about trying to gather the most relevant information as efficiently as you can and living with the fact that the process can never be perfect.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone who responded to my query on Twitter. I’ll be glad to hear any additional eBike assessments.

Continuing the theme of gently exercising the writing muscle by composing posts made mostly of pictures, I present here the round-up of what I think are the best photographs that I took in the past year.

2021 has been a tad leaner than last year on the photography front because the longeurs of lockdown took a firmer hold, mentally and physically. Being confined to working from home for much of the year and having scant opportunity to travel beyond these shores might have dulled the appetite and reduced the variation the world has to offer, but looking back I find my eye isn’t quite so jaded as I feared.

There’s a small selection below but the full album of 65 photographs can be found on flickr.