In the garden

What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect it may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms dulled by repetition. Whatever the reason, a quick glance through the log of posts here over the past year reveals a loss of activity – or is it a loss of discipline? I am faintly troubled by the notion but still only in a place to regard it obliquely.

Garden-Animals-2021 - 7

For now, I will take an easy way out by relying more on pictures than words. Here below are some of the birds and animals I photographed in the garden in 2021. Normally, my camera roll of the year would provide a kaleidoscope of travels, my view this twelve month has mostly relied on the local fauna for variation. I am grateful to them.

Garden-Animals-2021 - 26-28

Garden-Animals-2021 - 19

Garden-Animals-2021 - 17

Garden-Animals-2021 - 29

Garden-Animals-2021 - 15-16

Garden-Animals-2021 - 10

Garden-Animals-2021 - 14

Garden-Animals-2021 - 22
Garden-Animals-2021 - 33

The full album (31 photos) can be found on flickr.

 

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For my mother

Black masked, weighed down by grey grief,
We carried you into the church
To be wrung out of our sodden farewells.
But you had already gone.

It was a slow journey to that sombre altar.
In the last years the traces that bound us
Stretched and frayed
As Nature’s cruelty took hold.
We had already said the longest of goodbyes
While your mind darkened and your hands stilled.
There was time enough to remember happier days
Surrounded by grandchildren,
Bustling in a kitchen warmed by the smells of baking.

In that same kitchen you tended to us,
Your children, with the food of love.
Through laughter, anger and tears,
You were our constant consolation.

Your body spent, drained of the devotion
That bathed us all our lives,
You have departed this love-dimmed world.
But your star shines on
In every one of our hearts.

 

Mum

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A Reckoning with Huxley’s Legacy

Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community

This is a guest post by my former colleague, Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi, in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley Building. I am grateful to Red for allowing me to share her perspective.  

Red-Full-Flow

Red making her case in a group discussion

As a former student and member of teaching staff at Imperial College London, I was excited to finally read the Community Report from the College’s History Group, released earlier this month. Despite no longer studying at or working for the College, I consider myself a continuing member of its community, having spent over a decade (including some of my most formative years) learning, teaching and researching there, even spending five years living and working at the College as a subwarden in student halls of residence.

In the last few years of my time at Imperial, I became increasingly involved in ongoing efforts for progressive change for equity, diversity and inclusion, particularly working with Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in the College to increase representation and foster a stronger sense of identity as members of the college community. Efforts such as these are usually uncontentious and considered a reflection of an institution’s commitment to improving the lot of the underrepresented groups who study and work there.

In keeping with these efforts, and following the lead of many international universities in exploring the roots of structural discrimination in their own institutions, Imperial commissioned the work to “report on the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission”. Among the recommendations of the report, which was supported by two independent external Russell group advisors, was the removal of a bust of Thomas Henry Huxley (first Dean of the Royal College of Science, renowned 19th century naturalist and principal defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution) and the renaming of a building which currently bears his name. This recommendation was made because Huxley used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his work that might now be called ‘racist’. Despite being only one of many recommendations put forward by the report, this stirred the most media attention and the strongest criticism of the History Group and the College as a whole. Headlines in online newspapers from across the political spectrum accused the College of giving in to wokery, erasing its history and effectively besmirching the name of one of the UK’s greatest scientists and educators who was even a known slavery abolitionist.

Making sense of the criticisms of recommendations such as this are never easy. Even for those of us who are genuinely trying to engage in our shared history with the intention of learning from the past for progressive future change, it often boils down to an issue of ‘recognition or redistribution’, to quote Nancy Fraser. After all, how can the renaming of a building or removal of a bust of a man (who most students and staff only have a vague notion of anyway) help with the challenges experienced by black and brown students today?

Speaking as a black woman, (and I think my identity matters here) I think that this has everything to do with these challenges. If Imperial does not honestly contend with its history of racism, it makes it easy for Black students and staff to continue to feel excluded, and othered in their own institution. I appreciate and value the work of the History group and take its recommendations seriously for this reason. Providing more opportunities for talented Black students to gain good degrees from a university with a history of racism, without acknowledging the deeply exclusive historic (and ongoing practices) of that university, does not allow us to move forward honestly. Therefore, I believe that between recognition and redistribution, a reckoning is necessary for reparation.

The challenge in the criticisms here can be surmised as two questions. 1) Is it morally correct for the College to continue to honour Thomas Henry Huxley (and by proxy his racist views)? 2) How do we contend with the fact that the bricks and mortar of the building (regardless of what it is called) is part of an intellectual legacy of dehumanising Black people at Imperial that cannot be undone?

I admit that the latter is far more important for both the education of all staff and students and for fostering an understanding of minority staff and students’ struggle in the correct context. We cannot change where the money to build our institution came from or what the product of the research undertaken in it has meant for the lives of countless people deemed scientifically inferior by the likes of Huxley. We can however attempt to highlight the legacy of Huxley’s work and the role Imperial has had to play in creating ‘evidence’ for racialised exploitation under empire, through the lens of those affected.

The first of my two questions is an easier one for me. The purpose of naming a building after someone is to honour that person. It is paying homage to their work, what they contributed and what they stood for. Whether that is ever a good idea is another question, and I think Gary Younge has made a very persuasive case that it isn’t. There is no one person in history who has held perfect morals by modern (and changing) standards of acceptability and so perhaps there is no use in honouring anyone with a statue, bust or by naming a building after them. Racist views however are clearly not something we should want to honour at the College “in the context of its present-day mission” and I think it is an insult to the Black people who continue to work and study in a building named after a person who was so adamant in questioning their capabilities and equality.

We all understand why the Imperial College Business School was renamed from Tanaka, so why is it so different in the context of Huxley? No one accused the College of ‘Cancelling Tanaka’ but isn’t this the same thing? We are not obliged to preserve, in reverence, the names of slavers, oppressors or racists and if we do so in the name of ‘history’, we are doing a deep disservice to those who suffered because of Huxley’s views and the work he produced. What is worse, we are contending that, at one point in time at least, racism and sexism were fine. Just because some views and actions were historically commonplace, it does not mean they were correct and they were certainly never correct in the minds of those who suffered because of them at the time (or continue to suffer because of their legacy). This line of argumentation only serves to continue to normalise sexism and racism by insisting that they were once acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Certainly not to me or to those like me who Huxley deemed inferior.

One of the more interesting and surprising critiques of the report came from Kenan Malik in an Observer article where he likened Facebook’s recent rebranding to the recommendation for renaming the Huxley building. This parallel is unhelpful for many reasons, but particularly because the arguments for maintaining the building’s name and the place of the bust essentially boil down to ‘white supremacy was normal in Victorian England’. In itself this is unimportant for Black staff and students living with Huxley’s legacy at the College today. The interests of intellectual classes of Victorian Britain fall outside of the remit of the History Group. Malik also reasons that Huxley was not as big a racist as say, 18th century slave trader Edward Colston, and that by “damning both equally as racists who do not deserve commemoration is to abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgment”. This argument in particular misinterprets the entire notion of racial equality. Just because Huxley’s work or views did not directly subject black people to violent degradation and exploitation in an utterly dehumanising system for economic gain, does this mean that they were not racist? It is the same argument that those who misunderstand calls for equality make when they equate bigotry and racism, disregarding systemic contributors to the discrimination experienced by Black people every day.

Huxley’s contribution to scientific racism has arguably had a far more profound and longer-lasting impact on racial discrimination than slavery alone. Although Huxley disagreed with the application of his work to Social Darwinism, and was no advocate of eugenics, his belief in the deterministic significance of his system of classification of the “higher and lower races” (which he states in his essay Emancipation: Black and White), were undoubtedly significant contributors to the formalisation and normalisation of scientific racism and its subsequent applications. It would have been much harder to create and maintain systems of racial domination without the validation of scientific racism that men such as Huxley helped create and perpetuate.

Ultimately, I am not only in support of the work undertaken by the History Group but also in agreement with their recommendations. Whether or not Huxley’s name remains attached to the mathematics and computing department building, the College must actually identify, disseminate and educate on Huxley’s legacy through the lens of those harmed by his work and that is the reckoning. Without this, there can be no recognition, and the value of redistributive efforts will not be fully realised. These efforts, which include increasing access to Black students from disadvantaged backgrounds to the opportunities that an education from an institution like Imperial can provide, as well as improving retention and career progression of the existing Black staff in the College, are absolutely essential. We need both to address historic legacies of injustice.

You can’t have a true attempt at reparation of institutional discrimination without doing the uncomfortable work of explaining why it was necessary to start with, who lost out, who was exploited and who continues to be excluded as a result of scientific racism. This means exposing Huxley’s contribution to racist injustice and acknowledging how Imperial benefited from this. It is one knot among many to disentangle in the complex web of historical injustice across British society that we all remain caught up in today. But it is at least one knot less.

Red is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. She can be found on Twitter as @RahmaElmahdi.

  

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The Huxley Question

Writing in The Observer a couple of weeks ago, Kenan Malik cast a sceptical eye over a report published by the history group at Imperial College that had been asked to reflect on “the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission.” Linking the report’s controversial recommendation that that the Huxley Building be renamed because of Thomas Henry Huxley’s views on race to the recent rebranding of the Facebook parent company, Malik wondered if Imperial’s historical self-examination was more of a PR front than a serious attempt to address race inequalities.

Huxley-bust

Thomas Henry Huxley – keep clear?

I have long been an admirer of Malik’s newspapers columns and books. His rigorous and thoughtful analyses of the questions thrown up by identity politics are almost unparalleled in the mainstream media and his superb book, The Quest for a Moral Compass, is one that I turn to regularly when thinking about equality. So, it is uncomfortable to find myself somewhat out of alignment with him on the Huxley question.

But I think I can illuminate the gulf between us and venture to suggest that is may not be as wide as it first appears. I should start by declaring my hand: although I am writing here in a personal capacity, I am presently the Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Imperial College and served as an advisor to the history group alongside a diverse range of colleagues and a couple of historians who are external to the university. I have worked at Imperial College for over twenty-five years, several of which were spent in an office in the Huxley building without giving the great man a great deal of thought.

Malik raises important challenges for Imperial in his article. He cites Nancy Fraser’s warning that too often “cultural recognition displaces socio-economic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle” and goes on to ask “in what way would removing Huxley’s bust and renaming the hall improve the lives of minority students at Imperial College?”

That’s a fair question. The answer comes in part from Fraser herself. Addressing her own warning, she writes: “we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.” In essence, if I have understood correctly, Fraser is arguing that the cultural and practical impacts of inequality must be addressed together and this is the approach that, in my view, Imperial is striving to achieve. Malik has overlooked the fact that the history group report is part of a broader effort at the university to identify and dismantle barriers to race equality. This includes ambitious targets to address the under-representation of Black undergraduate students at Imperial, which is supported by substantial financial investment, and serious commitments to a slew of practical and cultural actions in support for ethnic minority staff and students (e.g. on recruitment, career progression, curriculum development) that have been developed using the Race Equality Charter (REC) framework.

The REC action plan has been worked up through lengthy and wide-ranging discussions with our community and the leadership team. These will now continue as staff, students and alumni enter into a period of dialogue on the recommendations of the history report, which will inform the College’s final decision. Together these strands of work have given the university a clearer view than ever before of the race inequalities that persist at Imperial, but it has also helped to raise awareness of the issues of race and racism right across the organisation. Ultimately, the university should be judged on the success of the actions taken to build a truly inclusive environment for staff and students.

For now, much of the discussion remains centred on Huxley, whose case raises the thorny matter of how figures from the past should be judged by modern standards. Malik rightly highlights Huxley’s scientific standing and his progressivism on many issues: he was a proponent of women’s education and avowedly anti-slavery. He revelled in taunting the white supremacists of his day even if he clearly believed in their racial superiority: “no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. […] The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”

In Malik’s view, the recommendation to rename the Huxley building because such views “fall far short of Imperial’s modern values” is to damn Huxley “primarily as a racist”, “to warp both the past and the present” and to “abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgement.” Respectfully, I would like to challenge that assessment.

To remove a name from a building is not to damn someone. We will remember Huxley; he is an inextricable and ineradicable part of our history. It’s just that his part in our history is more complex and has troubling resonances with members of our minority communities than we had previously appreciated – and I think we must address that. For what it’s worth, I would favour keeping the bust of Huxley within the building but in a glass case as part of a display that discusses his history and a narrative accompanying the renamed building, should that be what the College eventually decides to do.

I agree with Malik on all the difficulties that attend the evaluation of figures from history by today’s standards. But we should not discount the power of their reach into the present. Huxley is a figure I have long admired – I have even described him in a public lecture as one of my scientific heroes. I came across his views on race years ago when I read Adrian Desmond’s magnificent biography, but what strikes me now, after listening to Black colleagues and students talking about how Imperial’s honouring of Huxley impacts their sense of belonging to the university, is how little I was struck by them at the time. My Black colleagues’ views on history are inflected with the power of experience and need to be heard. As one put it pithily in questioning the argument that Huxley’s views on race cannot be judged by 21st Century standards because they were commonplace in Victorian Britain, “it does not mean they were correct (and they were certainly never correct in the minds of those who suffered because of them at the time)”.  For white men like myself and for institutions like Imperial, an honest confrontation with history must entail a letting go of power, a greater responsiveness to the legacies of European racism, and a willingness to tackle its enduring cultural and economic effects.

The aim of the university must be to present a more complete picture of its history to everyone in our community. The controversy over the proposal to rename the building has had the happy effect – thanks in part to Kenan Malik – of raising the matter for discussion in the public domain and drawing attention to aspects of Huxley’s history that have been overlooked. But no one is being cancelled here, however difficult the ongoing process of grappling with the past. Our conversation with history has sprung to new, argumentative life and this is exactly the sort of free and critical enquiry that universities were created for.

Posted in History of Science | 3 Comments

To be or not to be exceptional?

I can’t remember how I came across this video from philosopher Alain de Botton, but I feel seen.

Like many academics, I guess, I have always prized scholarly achievement. And of course, within our systems of research assessment, we are forever talking about notions of excellence and exceptionalism, spurred on by the relentless competition for jobs, grants, and admission to the ‘top’ journals, and by the powerful grip on our imaginations of the idea of the genius or hero scientist.

Increasingly, I have come to question my priorities, not only for my own quality of life, but also for the health of scholarly endeavour in general. Why do we so willingly submit, as de Botton puts it, to “the cruel absurdity of other people’s expectations”?

How might we find our way to a place where doing your job well is good enough? This question is hardly new, but it is one that many of us repeatedly fail to answer and, to me, it feels more urgent than ever.

 

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Books of 2020

I made what I think was a smart move at the beginning of 2020. Instead of waiting until the year’s end and then struggling to recall what I thought of the books I had read, I created a Twitter thread of one-line reviews as I completed each title. Here, finally, is the entire thread:

Books of 2020

Books of 2020 – a twitter thread. Click on the image for the high-res version.

You may find it easier to scroll through the thread on Twitter.

It has without doubt been an exceptional year. The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in mid-March disrupted my working and commuting patterns in a major way, but it didn’t seem to create any extra time for reading. The time freed by the loss of a daily commute of at least two hours was absorbed by the expansion of the working day. I have if anything undershot my usual annual tally. No matter. It’s not a competition.

My habits did change somewhat: almost half of the twenty-one books I read were novels. Normally, I only manage three or four. I also succeeded in reading my highest ever proportion of women authors – 48%. One of these, Hilary Mantel, produced my favourite book of the year, The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment of her visceral and magisterial trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. I have already pegged her earlier novel on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, as one to tackle in 2021.

Otherwise, it is a little harder to discern the highlights. That’s not because of the books themselves. I think that is more of a reflection of the dulling effects of life during lockdown, where days without events blend into one another, the colours of life merging into a dull monotone.

But some do stand out. Oliver Morton’s The Moon: a History of the Future was that rare thing, a book of poetic non-fiction, while my first encounter with Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye was short and sharp and cut to the heart. Brandon Taylor’s first novel, Real Life, is one of the few I’ve ever read to bring life in a laboratory to life, through the tortured isolation of its gay, black protagonist. By contrast, Kathryn Mannix’s hospice stories, With the End in Mind, brought death to life in a way that was blessedly reassuring.

Only one novel disappointed me: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I know it is regarded by many as a classic, but I was left out in the cold by its icy, alien landscapes. Everything else provided many moments of delight and insight, words to map out the world a little more clearly than before. I am grateful to all the authors I read. But for some reason the non-fiction titles figure more sharply in my memory, so I am especially thankful to Adam Rutherford for setting out his anti-racist manifesto (How to Argue with a Racist), to Philip Ball for unpicking the entanglement of physics with Nazism (Serving the Reich), to John Ziman for delineating the boundaries of science (Real Science), to Stuart Ritchie for his accounts of how and why those boundaries are crossed (Science Fictions), to Michael Sandel for examining the underbelly of ‘merit’ (The Tyranny of Merit), and to Margaret Heffernan for charting a more human course through the complex endeavours of organisations (Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together and Wilful Blindness). 

 

Posted in Book Review | 4 Comments

Photographs of 2020

My computer tells me that I took over 2,400 photographs in 2020. Here are my favourites. I’m afraid I have failed to whittle them down to fewer than seventy-five. Click on the first image, taken on a winter walk on the first of January, to go to the album on flickr.

Photos of 2020

2020 was the year of lockdown, but we still managed to get out and about on occasion.

 

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No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding

(Please note that this post was updated on 12th Dec 2020 – see below)

This week DeepMind has announced that, using artificial intelligence (AI), it has solved the 50-year old problem of ‘protein folding’. The announcement was made as the results were released from the 14th and latest competition on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The competition pits teams of computational scientists against one another to see whose method is the best at predicting the structures of protein molecules – and DeepMind’s solution, ‘AlphaFold 2’,  emerged as the clear winner.

201202-DeepMind-blog

Don’t believe everything you read in the media

There followed much breathless reporting in the media that AI can now be used to accurately predict the structures of proteins – the molecular machinery of every living thing. Previously the laborious experimental work of solving protein structures was the domain of protein crystallographers, NMR spectroscopists and cryo-electron microscopists, who worked for months and sometimes years to work out each new structure.

Should the experimentalist now all quit the lab and leave the field to Deep Mind?

No, they shouldn’t, for several reasons.

Firstly, there is no doubt that DeepMind have made a big step forward. Of all the teams competing against one another they are so far ahead of the pack that the other computational modellers may be thinking about giving up. But we are not yet at the point where we can say that protein folding is ‘solved’. For one thing, only two-thirds of DeepMind’s solutions were comparable to the experimentally determined structure of the protein. This is impressive but you have to bear in mind that they didn’t know exactly which two-thirds of their predictions were closest to correct until the comparison with experimental solutions was made.* Would you buy a satnav that was only 67% accurate?

So a dose of realism is required. It is also difficult to see right now, despite DeepMind’s impressive performance, that this will immediately transform biology.

201202-DeepMind-molecules

Impressive predictions – but how do you know they’re correct?

Alphafold 2 will certainly help to advance biology. For example, as already reported, it can generate folded structure predictions that can then be used to solve experimental structures by crystallography (and probably other techniques). So this will help the science of structure determination go a bit faster in some cases.

However, despite some of the claims being made, we are not at the point where this AI tool can be used for drug discovery. For DeepMind’s structure predictions (111 in all), the average or root-mean-squared difference (RMSD) in atomic positions between the prediction and the actual structure is 1.6 Å (0.16 nm). That’s about the size of a bond-length.

That sounds pretty good but it’s not clear from DeepMind’s announcement how that number is calculated. It might be calculated only by comparing the positions of the alpha-Carbon atoms in the protein backbone – a reasonable way to estimate the accuracy of the overall fold of the protein. Or, it might be calculated over all the atomic positions, a much more rigorous test. If it is the latter, then an RMSD of 1.6 Å is an even more impressive result.

But it’s still not nearly good enough for delivering reliable insights into protein chemistry or drug design. To do that, we want to be confident of atomic positions to within a margin of around 0.3 Å. AlphaFold 2’s best prediction has an RMSD for all atoms of 0.9 Å. Many of the predictions contributing to their average of 1.6 Å will have deviations in atomic positions even greater than that. So, despite the claims, we’re not yet ready to use Alphafold 2 to create new drugs.

There are other reasons not to believe that the protein folding problem is ‘solved’. AI methods rely on learning the rules of protein folding from existing protein structures. This means that it may find it more difficult to predict the structures of proteins with folds that are not well represented in the database of solved structures.

Also, as reported in Nature, the method cannot yet reliably tackle predictions of proteins that are components of multi-protein complexes. These are among the most interesting biological entities in living things (e.g. ribosomes, ion channels, polymerases). So there is quite a large territory remaining were AlphaFold 2 cannot take us. The experimentalists, who have been successful in mapping out the structures of complexes of growing complexity, have still a lot of valuable work to do.

While all of the above is supposed to sound a note of caution to counter some of the more hyperbolic claims that have been heard in the media in recent days, I still want to emphasise my admiration for the achievements of the AlphaFold team. They have clearly made a very significant advance.

That advance will be much clearer once their peer-reviewed paper is published (we should not judge science by press releases), and once the tool is openly available to the academic community – or indeed anyone who wants to study protein structure.

Update (02 Dec, 18:43): This post was updated to provide a clearer explanation of the RMSD measures used to compare predicted and experimentally determined protein structures. I am very grateful to Prof Leonid Sazanov who pointed out some necessary corrections and additions on Twitter.

*Update (12 Dec, 15:35): Strictly this is true, but it misses the more important point that the score given to each structure prediction (GDT_TS) broadly correlates with the closeness of its match to the experimental structure. As a result, I have deleted my SatNav crack.

For a deeply informed and very measured assessment of what DeepMind has actually achieved in CASP14, please read this blogpost by Prof. Mohammed AlQuraishi who knows this territory much better than I do. His post is pretty long but you can skip the technical bits explaining how AlphaFold 2 works. He gives a very good account of the nature of DeepMind’s advance; in AlQuraishi’s view, AlphaFold 2 does represent a solution to the protein structure prediction problem, though he is careful to define what he means by a solution. He also acknowledges that there are still some significant improvements to be made to the programme, but regards these as more of an engineering challenge than a scientific one. He agrees that AlphaFold 2 won’t be used any time soon for drug design work. AlQuraishi also gives an excellent overview of the implications of this work for protein folders, structural biologists and biotechnologists in general, and offers some very interesting thoughts on the differences between DeepMind’s approach to research and that of more traditional academic groups.

Posted in Protein Crystallography, Science | 23 Comments

Nature’s new open access option – a few first thoughts

A news article published online in Nature this morning discusses the announcement of new open access options in the Nature family of journals.

Nature-News-OA-24Nov

The details are in the article, but the basic story (written by Holly Else) is that authors wanting to make their work OA can pay an APC of €9,500 or choose a ‘guided’ route, which is about 50% cheaper but splits the price between reviewing and publishing.

I am quoted briefly in the piece but, as is often the way when you are approached by a journalist for comment, there is much more to say that there is room in the article. So, given that I had devoted a chunk of my free time on Saturday morning to answering Holly’s questions, I thought I would post my complete answers here. These will make more sense if you read her article first to understand the new OA options at Nature journals.

1) What do you think of the costs of publishing OA in Nature?

It looks very expensive. In part that is because most academics have no idea of the per article cost of the subscription model, which is also very expensive. Clearly, there are costs associated with being selective but I wonder if the introduction of this pricing structure will make people ask if the selectivity is worth it. In part the selectivity is driven by arbitrarily limiting the number of papers published in each Nature title. So the filtering is done both for quality and the limit imposed on the number of pages or articles published per year. A better scheme would not artificially limit the number of articles and judge solely on quality. I suspect NPG know that they can charge these sorts of sums because they are also selling a brand that unfortunately still has far too much sway when it comes to research assessment.

2)  What do you think of the guided OA approach? 

It’s an interesting innovation and it is good to see this sort of experimentation. But it immediately raises questions. Why would someone pay €9500 for OA if a cheaper route is available? Also – how would reviewers feel about Nature titles essentially selling their free labour to authors (in the case where a review is done but the paper is rejected)? I think this opens up an important question about the way that commercial publishers co-opt academic labour without paying for it.

3) Do you think it offers a way to make article processing charges more affordable for selective journals?

Not really because the charges outlined (even by the guided route) are more expensive than the APC for Nature Communications, which is a selective OA journal (APC set at €4530 from Jan 2021).

4) Do you have any concerns over the way that the reduction in the APC is tied to guided approach?

Some. In addition to those noted above, while prices are transparent, costs are not. The rationale for the split of costs before and after peer review is opaque. The high cost means access to NPG titles may be limited to wealthy labs or universities willing to pay for prestige.

5) How significant is it that Nature is offering open access publishing for the first time?

Very significant. It shows that cOAlition S and the OA movement in general is winning the argument about the value of ensuring that publicly-funded research results should be freely accessible if the world is to derive maximum benefit. We have seen this in 2020 in the rush of subscription publishers to make SARS-Cov-2 research freely available during the pandemic. What works for trying to deal with Covid-19 will also work for other major challenges such as climate change, antibiotic resistance, cancer research etc.

6)  What does this all mean for the future of open science and Plan S?

It marks an important step forward, albeit one loaded with caveats. It keeps the debate about the fitness of the APC model of OA alive and will hopefully stimulate even further exploration of alternative solutions.

 

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Teaching online: how to use an iPad as a whiteboard

Last week I gave my first online tutorials in which I needed to scribble on a whiteboard and show the students their exam scripts from last term, which had been posted to my home. To solve both of these problems, I spent a bit of time figuring out how to share my iPad and iPhone screens within Microsoft Teams running on my Apple MacBook. For anyone wanting to do the same, I thought I’d share what have I found.

Photo of laptop and monitor set-up for teaching online

Lights, laptop, action – getting ready for a tutorial

The solutions turn out to be relatively straightforward; and some will likely work with other video-conferencing programmes, like Zoom, which also permit screen-sharing.

The easiest solution: 100% Teams

First, the simplest solution works just using MS Teams and doesn’t require any additional software. Once you have joined or started the meeting in Teams on your laptop, the trick is then to join the same meeting via the Teams app on your iPad (and/or iPhone).

Then, from your iPad, choose ‘Share’, then ‘Share screen’, and finally click ‘Start Broadcast’. The app will count down from three before the screen sharing starts and should appear on your laptop screen.

At that point, on your iPad you can switch to whatever app you want to use. As a whiteboard, I find the MS PowerPoint app on the iPad pretty handy. You can use the Draw menu (and an Apple Pencil) to access pens and an eraser tool. The advantage of PowerPoint is that you can also prepare material in advance of the tutorial and scribble annotation on that while teaching.

Since you can share the screen from any iPad app in MS Team, you can also turn your iPad or iPhone into a video camera or overhead projector. That’s what I’ve done in the photo above using an adjustable iPhone holder that clips to the desk. A good tip if you are doing this is to have the iPhone camera in photo mode (for the highest resolution). It also a good idea to turn the ‘Autolock’ delay to its maximum value (5 min), since that reduces the likelihood that the screen will go blank. Just remember to touch the screen now and then (e.g. to update the focus point) to keep the iPhone active.

Alternative 1: using Quicktime

If for any reason you don’t want to be signed in to the MS Teams meeting from more than one device, another way to share your iPad (or iPhone) screen is to use Apple’s free QuickTime app. Thanks to @jr_pritchard for pointing me to the Business Insider article that shows you how.

First, plug your iPad into the laptop using a USB cable. Then on the laptop, launch QuickTime and from the File menu, select ‘New Movie Recording’. QuickTime will default to using the webcam built into your MacBook but if you click on the little down arrow next to the red record button, you can choose your iPad as the camera. The QuickTime window on your laptop then shows the feed from your iPad. All you need to get this into MS Teams is share the screen that has the QuickTime window in it.

As with the first method, you can switch the iPad to whatever app you like – to PowerPoint if you want a whiteboard or to the iPad camera if you want to use it an an overhead projector.

Alternative 2: using Reflector 3

Reflector 3 is an app that allows you to use the AirPlay capability built into iPads and iPhones to share their screens with your Apple MacBook. It offers essentially the same functionality that you get with the QuickTime solution described above but offers a little more flexibility (e.g. with screen size and orientation) and doesn’t need a cable. The downside is that the app costs about £17, but you can try it free for 7 days to see if it’s the solution for you.

Alternative 3: using Sidecar

Apple recently introduced a tool called Sidecar (located in the System Preferences), which allows you to covert your iPad into a second monitor. This is handy if, like me, you sometimes travel with your MacBook and iPad as it gives you extra monitor space on the road. You can use the ‘Displays’ tool in the System preferences to set up your preferred screen arrangement. By default, I think Apple puts the iPad screen immediately to the left of your MacBook Screen. For more information on the capabilities and equipment requirements of Sidecar, check out this AppleInsider article.

With Sidecar running, you can then launch PowerPoint from your MacBook and drag the window over onto the iPad screen. From here, you can use the tools in the Draw menu to scribble or erase till your heart’s content. To share this within a Teams meeting running from your laptop, when you choose ‘Share screen’ you need to make sure to pick the screen corresponding to the iPad in the selection offered. You should also be able to select just the PowerPoint window, which I would recommend maximising to fill the iPad screen.

In my experience, although this works and is a free and cable-free option, the responsiveness of PowerPoint was less than in the set-up that allow you to run the PowerPoint app on your iPad. But, different strokes for different folks, as we scribblers are wont to say.

Anyway, hope that was helpful. Best of luck with your online teaching!

Finally, this blogpost started out as a thread on twitter to which many people contributed. Particular thanks to @jr_pritchard, @dasaptaerwin, @ArttuRajantie, @DavidDye9, and @psobolewskiPhD.

Posted in Science | 5 Comments

In defence of the bureaucracy of equality, diversity and inclusion

The UK government’s new policy to reduce bureaucracy in research institutions aims at an easy target. But the bonfire of administration lit by the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, risks burning down the foundations of much-needed efforts to value the many different people on which the health of UK R&D depends

200921-Cummings-at-No10

Should an interest in bureaucracy be a protected characteristic? I think a case can be made. But Dominic Cummings thinks not and that is why his fingerprints are all over the government’s recent policy paper announcing its determination to reduce bureaucracy in research, innovation and higher education.

A direct result of this policy is that universities applying for funding to the National Institute of Health Research no longer need to hold a silver Athena SWAN award affirming their commitment to gender equality. But the policy reaches even further. Universities are entreated not to feel under pressure to participate in any other voluntary schemes that increase bureaucracy and distract unis from their ‘core activities’. The schemes are not named but will include the Race Equality Charter (REC), Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index (which aims to support LGBTQ+ people) and the government’s own Disability Confident campaign. The message seems clear: efforts to promote equality, to value diversity, or to be inclusive are not core. They are a bureaucratic distraction and are no longer welcome.

Except that the message isn’t at all clear, a feature we have come to expect from the Johnson administration of which Cummings is such a central part. This is a surprise given Cummings’ evident prowess as a campaigner. But he has played his own prominent role –  as Mr Magoo – in the confused drama of Britain’s attempts to deal with Covid-19.

Of course, Cummings isn’t against all bureaucracy – just the bad bits that get in the way of delivering desirable outcomes. In an extremely long blogpost from 2014 he recounts story after story of how dysfunctionality within the civil service frustrated his and Michael Gove’s attempts to drive through a policy on Free Schools at the Department of Education in the early years of the Cameron-Clegg coalition of 2010-2015. Cummings is a disruptor, who wants to move fast and break things; his focus is on outcomes. To get things done he wants the power to issue orders that will simply be obeyed, and to fire those who fail to deliver. He looks longingly at the executive agility enjoyed by small start-up companies and super-rich entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

And he has a point. There is a tendency for large organisations to fixate on process rather than outcome, and it takes visionary leadership to overcome that. But for all its extraordinary length and numerous hyperlinks, his analysis lacks sophistication or any evident concern for people. His faith in the capacity of the decentralised processes of markets and science to solve problems has some merit, but ultimately comes across as blinkered. The market failures that led to the banking crisis of 2007 and the imbalance of power between nations and mega-corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon are not discussed. Cummings’ scientific preoccupations are centred on physics and mathematics rather than on biology and sociology, where the diffuse complexity of the systems under study would soon snuff out the over-confidence of his pronouncements.

Tellingly, there is no mention in the piece of attempts to sell his vision for educational reform, which may have been a worthy one, or to win the hearts and minds of civil servants to the cause. Instead there is a litany of complaints about them having the temerity to want to spend time with their families, either by working flexibly or taking a holiday now and then. You get the sense of a man for whom the ends justify the means, and his means come across as pretty mean.

Cummings is right to express frustration at the civil service’s tendency to deal with incompetence by promoting the offender out of department where they have wreaked havoc. Healthy organisations demand that actions have consequences. But his argument has been torpedoed by his own refusal to acknowledge fault for breaking lockdown rules last Spring, an episode that eroded so much public trust in the government’s efforts to deal with the public health crisis. His unrepentance is all of a piece with Cummings’ messianic arrogance: rules are for less important people. He has little conception of how respect of the law can bind organisations and nations in common purpose.

The bigger picture is absent too from his attempts to staff his office. There is a nod in his blogpost to the value of cognitive diversity, but this extends only far enough to include the different professional experiences of his white, male colleagues. Cummings’ recent recruitment of ‘weirdos and misfits’ has been notable only for its success in attracting young men who have flirted with racism and eugenics.

For all his wide reading, Cummings would do well to consult the works of Margaret Heffernan, who writes with far greater insight and human understanding on how to get the best out of people in large organisations.

Which takes me back to the large organisations known as universities. No one who works in one will be unaware of the frustrating bureaucracy that grows out of their complex structures and the multitudinous demands placed upon them – by students, staff, funding agencies, regulators, and government. Increasingly, those demands have rightly included the need to show how our universities are advancing across the battlegrounds of equality, diversity and inclusion.

The goal of refashioning traditionally hierarchical institutions so that they are open to all people of talent is a noble, necessary and extraordinarily difficult one, as the slow pace of change attests. To reach it requires not just vision and leadership, but excavation of every procedural nook and cranny.

In many institutions, like my own, progress towards the goal is benchmarked and incentivised by the array of voluntary frameworks mentioned above: Athena SWAN, the REC, the Stonewall WEI and the Disability Confident scheme. Each requires a long, deep dive into data and processes. Applications for Athena SWAN and REC award are particularly onerous in this regard and have rightly come in for criticism. They are seen as overly bureaucratic tick-box exercises that can distract energy and attention away from the ultimate goals. Cummings is right to remind us to keep our eyes on the prize. The outcome that matters is real change, not the badge earned from a successful application.

My female colleagues in our medical research departments are well aware of the shortcomings of Athena SWAN. Nevertheless, they are seriously disappointed by the loss of the leverage that the link between Athena SWAN and NIHR funding brought to the university’s efforts to advance gender equality.

The drive to reduce bureaucracy would have been better framed as a drive to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Unfortunately, government has given the impression it believes that attention to the culture with universities should be downgraded in favour of a focus on our ‘core’ activities, which it defines as research and education. The insistence on the primacy of these core activities is repeated no fewer than four times in the government’s policy paper. In my view that is a fundamental error. The environment within which academics and support staff operate is critical to the quality of the research and education that they deliver.

It is to be hoped that university leaders will maintain support for EDI work, but in times when financial pressures are only increasing, some institutions may be tempted to drop the subscriptions needed to remain part of charter schemes. The NIHR’s commitment to equality and diversity may have dimmed, but other major UK funders such as the Wellcome Trust and UKRI have signalled their intent to move these issues to the centre of their decision-making on funding. In one of her first public statements as UKRI’s new chief executive, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser has declared her intention “to create a system that values difference”.

Science Minister Amanda Solloway has also sent some encouraging signals. In a speech made just days after the policy paper appeared, she spoke passionately about the importance of diversity and well-being for the future of UK R&D. It would be helpful if she could clarify how her vision is to be enacted alongside the Cummings’ arson attack on bureaucracy.

Ironically, the government’s policy may actually undermine attempts by Advance HE to reduce the bureaucratic burden of Athena SWAN and the REC and to make them more effective tools for change. Advance HE’s dependence on subscriptions might tempt them to leniency in judging weak applications for fear that universities, now told they should “not feel pressured to take part” in such schemes, will then withdraw to pursue equality by their own lights.

Naturally, it is healthy always to review how we might do things better (as has happened, albeit stutteringly*, with Athena SWAN and as is now happening with the REC). Alternative and more effective ways of advancing equality, diversity and inclusion in our universities could certainly be envisaged. But it would be foolish to assume these will not involve bureaucracy or administration. Easy solutions are not available for hard problems. If you want to bring about organisational and cultural change, you cannot avoid the grunt work of rethinking every process, every training programme, every decision, every appointment. Cummings may have a point about bureaucratic bloat, but the values under-pinning his prescriptions are invisible. Beyond vague notions of devolving power – and his supremely unhelpful lessons in rule-breaking – he has little to offer in the way of workable alternatives. That bit is up to us.

*See also this analysis from my OT co-blogger, Athene Donald. 

 

Posted in Equality Diversity & Inclusion, Science & Politics, Scientific Life | Comments Off on In defence of the bureaucracy of equality, diversity and inclusion

Our Beirut Brexit

At 6:18 on the afternoon of Tuesday 4th August a huge store of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut. The blast, one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history, killed nearly 200 people, injured thousands more, and left over a quarter of a million homeless. In the immediate vicinity, the blast wave overturned cars and tore the cladding from buildings; windows were shattered in homes as far as 10 km from the epicentre. Three of the city’s hospitals were destroyed. With an economy already on its knees from the ravages of political corruption and Covid-19, the citizens of Beirut now have to pick up the pieces of lives and livelihoods demolished by a catastrophe that beggars belief.

Beirut-Explosion_Damage-2020

The ruins of the port of Beirut after the explosion on 04 Aug 2020

Four years after the referendum that pronounced Britain’s decision to quit the European Union, the citizens of the United Kingdom are still sifting through the debris of a political detonation that at times seems no less catastrophic. Some will protest at the comparison. Some of the threads of the metaphor might snap under the strain, but enough remain attached to make a connection. I thought after all this time that the UK government would have made some accommodation with reality, that some sense of direction would have emerged, but I find myself still floundering, still knotted with frustration, and still fearful of the future. Brexit has been a political, economic and moral disaster for this country. There has been no healing, no rebuilding. We are a splintered nation wandering shell-shocked amid the wreckage of that fateful day in June 2016.

The comparison came to me a couple of weeks ago as I was listening to four experts on the BBC Radio4’s The Briefing Room examine the progress made in securing the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU. There hasn’t been much, it turns out – the two sides are “still very far apart”. As the four experts grappled with the complex realities of trade in goods and services with the EU and with other nations, of research and development, of fishing rights, of security, of traveling with pets, or of regulation of state aid, labour laws and environmental standards, the problems mounted. These are difficult issues, inevitably interlinked, and the way forward remains unclear. On Twitter, Conservative MP John Redwood dismissed the radio programme’s analysis as yet another sortie for Project Fear and demanded the chance to make “the case for all the wins once we leave.” But when challenged to do so on the social media site, he fell silent. Likewise, in his most recent statement, the UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, makes no mention of the wins that are in the offing. He says the UK is committed to “seeking a relationship which ensures we regain sovereign control of our own laws, borders, and waters”, but does not discuss the complexities of the issues at stake or the compromises that are an inevitable part of any deal. Like Redwood’s tweet, his argument is aimed only his supporter base.

Since then, of course, things have only gotten worse. The introduction to Parliament this week of the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill is, according to legal experts and even one government minister, a calculated breach of international law. While the move prompted the principled resignation of the UK’s top legal civil servant, vociferous objections from MPs and Lords on all sides of the House, and expressions of deep concern in the capitals of Britain’s allies at the government’s bad faith, ministers toured radio and TV studios offering a range of explanations that were consistent only in their obtuseness and their opacity. We were told this was just tidying up loose ends; we were told this was to protect the Good Friday Agreement; we were told this was to protect the integrity of the UK. The prime minister now tells us that the deal he sold to the electorate last December as ‘oven-ready’ to the electorate in December 2019 and for which he demanded and won parliament’s expedited approval in January 2020 ‘never made sense’.

The thing that has never made sense in all of this – from the moment he declared his support for Brexit – is Boris Johnson’s strategy. This strategy may, by a long and unpredictable road, have won him the premiership. But as the Bullingdon PM leads the country to rogue nation status, the sense of crisis – exacerbated by his government’s ineptitude and dissembling during the Covid-19 pandemic – has only deepened. If there is a strategy here, it seems only to be driven by the desire of his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to re-engineer the machinery of government, whatever the cost to our democratic values. Cummings has imported to government the Leave campaign’s spectacular disregard for the truth and the law. His efforts are writ large and small – in the attempt to disable parliament in last Autumns’ unlawful prorogation, in the culling of critical thinkers among Conservative MPs, and in his arrogant indifference for public safety during lockdown.

Each time it happens, public trust is eroded. Johnson and Cummings are not without their supporters, but their course is a deeply divisive one. I honestly can’t tell if there is a higher aim here. I used to be able to see it, even in politicians with whom I profoundly disagreed. But Brexit has shunted the country onto a different track. There is no attempt to win over the country, to win the argument, to create a realistic vision of hope for the future. Far too many of our politicians, inspired by the short-term successes of populists like Johnson-Cummings and Nigel Farage, are unwilling to talk straight to the British people. Worse, as we have seen with Redwood and his fellow travellers, all attempts to deal with the harsh realities of the world are met with yet more fanciful claims of the bounties that lie beyond Brexit.

Such claims still meet with a willing audience in some quarters, particularly among people who have long felt socially and economically disenfranchised in Britain. The machinations of the global economy and the growing power of large corporations have robbed many of the dignity of work. Unemployment may have been at an all-time low prior to the arrival of Covid-19, but too many jobs these days deny workers the chance to earn a fair wage, sufficient to support their families, for their efforts. The palpable frustration at being reduced to the life of a drone in towns that have been emptied of their industries and businesses made the EU, metropolitain elites and migrants easy targets during the referendum, a ploy that has continued at least as far as last December’s election. It is stoked by elements in the press and social media that pay far more attention to incendiary headlines than to reasoned argument.

A social distanced choir sings Rule Britannia at the BBC Proms 2020

Brexit Britain: nostalgia for a world that no longer could or should exist

How much longer can it continue? As some point the winners have to deliver, but there seems little prospect of that. The Covid-19 pandemic has made the task much more challenging economically. But the government’s serial mis-handling of the crisis – the delayed lockdown, the chaotic communications, the disregard for care home residents in the Spring, the failure to have a workable test and trace system in place for the return to schools and universities – and in particular its refusal to own its mistakes speaks to a profound indifference towards the people over which it wields its power.

And this morning we hear that Johnson will seek to opt out of major parts of European human rights laws. The disenfranchised workers of Britain can expect to be further disempowered in Brexit Britain.

At this point most newspaper columnists throw up their hands and sign off with some pithy remark about the ominous state of the nation. I’m tempted to do the same but what I really want is to find a way to a politics that can pull us out of our downward spiral. My difficulty is knowing which way to turn. Who among us is willing to stake out a position of radical integrity? Who among us is prepared to shoulder the grunt work of making the argument beyond the echo chamber of their own political base, of undertaking the hard work of understanding and explaining the problems that Britain faces and what we need to do together to solve them, even when – as is inevitable – we disagree. We each need to play our part, even it is amounts only to letting go of some of our certainties and trying to understand a different point of view.

It has been a desperate and depressing few weeks. We have yet to find an antidote to the poison of Brexit and with each day that passes it becomes clearer that Johnson has no interest in finding one. He is on course for disaster because he is incapable of dealing truthfully with people. When he is gone, we will need political leaders who are willing to talk straight and deal with complexity, who have a visceral understanding of the need to bring people together, and who will make an honest effort to reach those with whom they don’t agree. That is the only way we can rebuild the ruins of our politics.

 

Posted in Communication, International, Science & Politics | 3 Comments