Dr Administrator

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Dec 01 2010

Tuition Fees

Since I am repeatedly in the position of discussing tuition fees on twitter, I thought it helpful to put down my thoughts in one place without the 140 character constraint.

I’m in favour of supporting universities, and students, via general taxation because the benefits of university education are public: they benefit all of us. I, along with many others, benefited directly from a free university education 20 years ago. I, along with other people and companies, currently benefit from university trained lawyers, nurses, doctors, engineers and so forth, regardless of my own education. I believe that the higher education system should be reformed to separate teaching and research, and also that we should consider all post-18 training in the context of any reforms to university education i.e. we should not distinguish between plumbers and physicists – they are equally valuable. As I watched water freely flowing from a burst pipe last winter, I strongly believed the former more valuable than the later.

The Liberal Democrats have been very tied up over tuition fees because they signed a pledge to vote against tuition fees, largely it has been asserted that the pledge on fees indicates that it takes priority over all other manifesto pledges. In retrospect it would have been wise not to make such a pledge which could so easily invite such a distinction. In their defence I think it illustrates that LibDem MPs did not anticipate fully finding themselves in Coalition government, unsurprising given the last 60 years of elections. Nick Clegg did attempt to persuade the party to scrap this pledge towards the end of 2009, which would have been a politically wise move. It’s worth noting that the LibDems could fulfil their pledge to the letter if they were in opposition, or in a looser electoral pact, in neither of these cases would they be able to influence the policy of the government so their opposition would be entirely decorative. No doubt many believe that LibDems should have given up Coalition government on this issue, that would have been stupid and pointless.

Politically I believe the appropriate response to not being able to fulfil the pledge is to say that the LibDems are sorry they did not receive a sufficient electoral mandate to enable them to fulfil this pledge and other manifesto pledges in coalition government. I note that more experienced government parties, such as Labour, have found it easy to brazenly ignore their pre-election pledges on tuition fees, twice, without little protest from the Labour dominated National Union of Students.

The discussion on tuition fees is made in a context where, in Liam Byrne’s words “there is no money”, all of the major Westminster parties proposed to address a large deficit mainly by making cuts to government spending, rather than raising taxation. In light of this, and the Browne report, making a bid for even flat central funding in the higher education sector was always going to be an uphill struggle.

I estimated previously that tuition fees could be replaced by an increase of 2p on basic rate tax, or 8p on higher rate tax and the Greens have proposed 4p on corporation tax to fund higher education. Those are tax increases of 10%, 20% and 15% respectively.  Clearly combinations of these three elements would also work. However, it must be recognised that higher education will always be in competition with other claims on the public purse. If you had £7bn to spend would higher education be your first priority? Or would it be schools, benefits, hospitals or tax cuts?

The scheme proposed by the Coalition does shift paying for university education further from general taxation. However, I believe Vince Cable has done a fair job of adding LibDemery to the Browne report, commissioned by Labour. In particular covering part-time education, capping tuition fees, and attempting to make repayment progressive. The principle difference to a pure graduate tax is that a tuition fee is stated, if not paid up front. A large number of people seem keen to imply that tuition fees will be payable up front, which they are not, and simultaneously claim that poorer students will be put off applying – perhaps because they have been repeatedly told fees will be payable up front.

As for what LibDem MPs should do when presented with the relevant parliamentary bill. It’s quite clear that backbench LibDem MPs should abstain, those that vote against are free to do so but should suffer the consequences in terms of party discipline. Government ministers are in a less clear position, the Coalition agreement does allow for them to abstain, however particularly in Vince Cable’s case, where he was heavily involved in developing the proposed legislation and feels happy with the results, it seems to me he must vote in favour – anything else just looks strange. There is a logic for all Liberal Democrat government ministers voting for the tuition fee proposals, this would be the case in a simple, one-party majority government.

In a coalition government, the policy of the component parties is not the same thing as the policy of the government. I tentatively believe the LibDems should retain an ambition to fund higher education from general taxation, I struggle to see how this policy will be implemented in the next 10 years but I do not feel this should rule out LibDems holding it as a policy. I believe, in future, the LibDems should avoid, like the plague, making pledges in the form that they made on tuition fees. They should also apply a disclaimer to their manifesto that they will negotiate to implement what they can from the manifesto but only in majority government will they pledge to deliver all policies.

Nov 29 2010

Book review: Trilobites! by Richard Fortey

Triarthus_lateral
Triarthrus eatoni from Beechers Trilobite bed

This week I’m reporting on “Trilobite! Eye witness to evolution” by Richard Fortey, which I came to via Attenborough’s “First Life” TV programme and advice from @crafthole. As usual this is intended as part notes for my own edification and part review. I read the Kindle version of this book, I’d recommend getting the paper version since the publishers have made no effort to incorporate any of the illustrations from the book into the electronic edition.

Fortey has a rather literary style which makes for rather pleasing reading: the book starts with a walk along the cliffs beyond Boscastle to a location used by Thomas Hardy in “A pair of blue eyes” where the hero comes face to face with a trilobite embedded in the cliffs. The book covers the discovery of trilobite anatomy; evolution, the drifting continents and what makes a palaeontologist tick.

Trilobites were common in the relatively early history of life on earth, during the Cambrian period, about 500 million years ago and became extinct at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago. The book starts with a description of trilobite anatomy – you can see the details on the wikipedia page. The basic fossil remnants are the hard shell of the trilobite, the upper surface shield – the closest living relatives to trilobites are things like woodlice and the horseshoe crab (which Fortey eats in Thailand!). Generally legs and soft parts do not fossilise, so it was some time before these structures were understood.

The first written record of a trilobite was by Dr Lhwyd in a letter to Martin Lister, reported to the Royal Society in 1699. It is a fleeting mention, and he mis-identifies his find as a “skeleton of some flat fish”, noting that they are abundant but his illustration is quite clearly of a trilobite. Dr Lhwyd writes from Wales and much of the early history of the trilobite’s discovery is tied up with Wales, trilobites are characteristic of the Cambrian period, named after Wales.

The image at the top of this post illustrates the discovery of trilobite legs. Most trilobites lost their legs in the fossilisation process, they are flimsy and poorly armoured. However in the case of the Beechers’ trilobite bed special preservation circumstances have fossilised the legs, in this case picked out in ‘fools gold’ or iron pyrite.

I was rather impressed by the chapter on trilobite eyes, as reported in my post on First Life, trilobite eyes are made from calcite – an array of calcite hexagonal prisms in the eye channels light to light receptors. Calcite is birefringent, one of the features of this property is that light only travels along the prisms to the light sensors if it enters them square on. So the relatively large number of calcite prisms in trilobite eyes suggest resolution comes from directional selectivity of the prisms. Some trilobite eyes are more complex than this: the Phacops eye is comprised of fewer prisms but with cunning lenses at the outside faces which work using magnesium concentration gradients to eliminate chromatic aberration – this suggests they channel light to multiple light receptors. Calcite is calcium carbonate, but the calcium can be selectively replaced by magnesium which changes it’s optical properties – in terms of man-made optics this type of thing is feasible but it’s pretty sophisticated. Reading this on the train the temptation to grab fellow commuters and jab my finger at the appropriate paragraph shouting “Have you read this about trilobite eyes, it is flippin’ incredible!!” was almost overwhelming!

Fortey is clearly passionate about his topic, as he says of breaking rocks to find the trilobites therein:

“Hardened criminals used to be required to do the same thing before it was banned as inhumane. I loved it.”

He works as a palaeontologists tasked with identifying trilobites, and if necessary creating new species. I learnt that the Linnean binomial system is slightly more complex than I thought, as well as having a two part name each species is tagged with the name of the person who first described a species this helps the expert in the field trace the original citation for a species. You gain the impression of someone able to identify one trilobite of a myriad potential species from mere fragments, in the manner of those archaeologists who can apparently build a pot, complete with its history, from a tiny shard. As arthropods with tough exoskeletons, trilobites moulted their shells to grow – each animal strewing the landscape with potential fossil fragments: fossil factories, Fortey calls them. He goes into some detail of the inferred life styles of trilobites and their development i.e how juveniles grow into adults. For some of the developmental stuff it would be nice to see the supporting fossils: it sounds ferociously difficult separating juvenile forms from different species of trilobite.

The large variety of trilobites, and their appearance in the early days of fossilising life, makes them a useful tool in the study of how evolution operates. Fortey rebuts the proposal by Stephen Jay Gould in “Wonderful Life” for a Cambrian explosion producing massive diversity of forms, beyond what we see now. Arguing from research by former colleagues that the variation in forms discovered in the Burgess Shale is much smaller than Gould claims. The difference being in the interpretation of how diverse forms are from relatively indistinct fossils. This is perhaps a warning to the casual reader that controversies are easily hidden in the popular science literature.

A second application of trilobites is in the dating of rocks: they are very common, fossilise well and, over a period of time, evolved into many distinctive forms which makes them ideal for the purpose. Finally they can also be used in the reconstruction of ancient continents: identifying common collections of trilobites in disparate parts of the world suggests they were originally found in one place.

As mentioned at the top of page, my Kindle edition of this book was bereft of illustrations but by the power of google, I can give you phacops, famous for it’s fancy eyes, ollenelus – one of the commonest of the early trilobites, calymene blumenbachii pleasingly convex as Fortey says, paradoxides another early species, Ogygiocarella debuchii as discovered by Dr Lhywd.

I found this book most useful as an insight into the mind of a palaeontologist and a taxonomist.

Further reading
An overview of trilobites
A piece by Fortey in American Scientist on trilobites (pdf)

Nov 25 2010

Kindle-ing

kindleAnother in an occasional series of gadget reviews, and more general thoughts on books. This time I look at the Amazon Kindle, my latest gadgety purchase – I have the WiFi only version with added leather carry case. The Kindle is an electronic device onto which books can be downloaded from a range of sources. In a sense the device is a side issue, Kindle software is available for smartphones (I have it on my HTC Desire), and computers. The main action for the Kindle is in the ecosystem: it makes it very easy to spend money on Amazon!

There are quite a few books available in the Kindle Store on Amazon, both free and paid. The paid offerings are a little cheaper than their paper equivalents but not hugely so. In addition PDF files can be read using the device, it will also play MP3 audio files. The Kindle Store also has links out to places where free content can be downloaded. For example, Project Gutenberg holds a wide variety of out of copyright material in a variety of e-book formats.

As long as you’re prepared to compromise a little you’ll not run short of things to read –  I’d like to read the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin series but they are not yet available for download. Only three of the top ten Amazon bestsellers are available in Kindle format at the moment. So far I’ve bought “Trilobite!” by Richard Fortey and “22 days in May” by David Laws. I also have “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” by David Mackay which I got as a free download, and converted to an appropriate format using Calibre e-book Management, this is available as a community conversion of the original HTML files. Books can be transferred to the Kindle by WiFi, or direct cable connection. Buying books is magically easy – press button, wait a minute and you’re done!

Compared to an HTC Desire the Kindle interface feels rather clunky, I kept wanting to change pages by touch! Having said this moving from page to page is ergonomically easy: there are a couple of handy page forward / page backward buttons suited to either handedness. Page changes feel ever so slightly ponderous with a bit of a flash as the page changes. The battery life is very good, the display is e-ink based and so static display takes no power, only switching pages requires power. The display size is about right and it is very nice to read from, when I first opened the device I assumed the picture on the screen was a piece of paper for display purposes. There are a range of options for adjusting text size, spacing and so forth, although I found some glitches with text size control.

The Kindle is ideal for plain text, however for text with diagrams it is a bit hit-and-miss, although the quality of the display is good enough to show quite detailed greyscale images in the case of the Fortey book these have simply not been included by the publisher. The Mackay book includes figures but the placement of the figures in the text has largely been done automatically and is a bit wobbly. I’d really like to try a book with illustrations which have been done properly – any recommendations then please comment.

The benefit of the Kindle with non-fiction is that searching, bookmarking, and highlighting are all relatively straightforward. I have religious objections against making marks in paper books – I think as a result of using the library as a child. It’s also possible to add notes to a book and to see the “favourite” notes of others.

The problem is the Kindle misses the display aspects of book owning and reading; my house is full of books collected over 20 years. They are my extended phenotype; they tell you something about me. If you visit my house you can see my books – you might want to borrow one. The Kindle cuts this away, you can’t see what is on my Kindle, and if even if you could, you couldn’t borrow it. I’ve tried to replicate the bookshelf aspect in my Shelfari account, where you can see what I am reading and what I have read. I’m also missing the pile of books beside my bed. I’m an old-fashioned animal that misses physical objects.

Overall: not at all bad, reading raw text is comfortable, the whole buying new text is frighteningly easy, and a range of formats can be read. I’m looking forward to using the Kindle to avoid my mortal holiday fear – that I might run out of things to read!

Nov 21 2010

A little bit of politics

This is, to put it pretentiously, a meta-politics post rather than a post about particular political tendencies. It arises following a few months of Coalition government and a lot of chat on twitter and elsewhere, it is a personal view.

I joined a political party because I couldn’t be doing with the “plague on all your houses” view of politics. That I joined the Liberal Democrats is perhaps a sign I wasn’t fully committed to the alternative! Commitment to a party is a ticket to complain with confidence, you have a defined ground to defend and a crowd to back you in attacking the opposition. The downside of this is you tend to believe that any other criticism comes from a purely party political standpoint, and you in some ways tied to views that you don’t hold. This does make me somewhat rare: the Liberal Democrats have around 65,000 members, Tories 250,000 and Labour 166,000 (source), so of a voting population of 30,000,000 people less than 2% are members of a political party.

I struggle with mindless opposition, so end up always being mildly pro-government. To me standing on the sidelines and complaining automatically that the government is doing it wrong, whilst not proffering alternative solutions, or even tweaks to proposed solutions, is intellectually barren. I’ve been a party member for 20 years, for most of that time I’ve been an inactivist. Since the election I’ve been much more involved, this is partly due to the internet: online activism is the sort of activism I can cope with but also the fact of being in power brings home what the point is: not just to have policies but to enact them.

The Coalition has also brought to light the various strands of the Liberal Democrats: the old social democrats who left the Labour Party, original Liberals and the Tory equivalent of the social democrats. If you’re interested I’m probably closest to the latter group although I never considered joining the Tories (those Young Conservatives were a bit extreme).

No party really adequately captures an individual’s views – how can it? And further to this, many people find themselves utterly out of tune with the electorate and so destined to be unhappy with whatever government is in power. The benefit of a party out of power (and out of the likelihood of power) is that you can confidently project your desires on them without real fear of contradiction since they are untested in the white-heat of government. The problem with party politics is that it supresses attempts to gain consensus on key, long term issues and it does it’s best to supress free thought amongst parliamentarians.

Funnily enough in many senses the politically committed, by which I mean party members, get on with each other better than they do with the uncommitted. This was visible back in my days as an undergraduate, the members of the political clubs interacted with each other and disagreed quite considerable. Labour and Tory were despicably extreme ;-) but we shared a degree of enthusiasm for the political programme. The politically committed are approximately tied to a point of view, which can be argued with. The uncommitted can drift along in happy opposition to everything.

I have my own personal view of political change, which is that the British are largely non-revolutionary and they vote a government into power not because they offer compelling new ideas but because they believe they will offer broad continuity and that the incumbents have been sufficiently reduced in their eyes by the ordinary attrition of government that it is now time for a change.

Coalition is a novel position for a party to find itself: Britain hasn’t seen coalition since the Second World War. The interesting thing for a Liberal Democrat these days is how to behave in government, particularly in coalition government where the policies of the government differ from those of the party. I think this is worth repeating “In a coalition, the policies of the government are not the same as the policies of the component parties”. The government is still the government and as such there is a low limit to how much rebellion within it’s own ranks it can bear – this is true regardless of whether the government is a single party of a coalition. For the rest of the party things are somewhat easier. Liberal Democrats should argue for the party’s policies – particularly those being enacted by the government. They should be thoughtfully critical where they think the government is going wrong – this is our best opportunity to influence the workings of government across the board.

Nov 16 2010

First Life

Charnia, Image by Leicester Museum

The latest, and perhaps last, David Attenborough TV series is the two episode First Life: about the very earliest life on earth. It ends as the first life emerges from the sea.

David Attenborough is a hero in our household: Mrs SomeBeans and I saw his “Life on Earth” series at an impressionable age; he is our matchmaker, were it not for “Life on Earth” Mrs SomeBeans would not have gone to university to study zoology, which is where she met me – at university, not as a zoology specimen, I hasten to add! The good thing about a David Attenborough nature programme, is that they are rich enough that even someone who had done a degree in zoology will actually learn quite a lot of stuff. Attenborough’s autobiography, Life on Air , is also well worth a read – perhaps the most striking thing is the realisation that someone still alive was involved in creating the TV documentary format.

Returning to “First Life”: the programme starts with Charnia  a fossil identified in Charnwood Forest – close to where Attenborough grew up, it was the first fossil found in Precambrian rocks, dating to at least 580million years ago, which had previously been thought devoid of life. As a time yardstick: the earth is about 4billion years old and the dinosaurs flourished between 230million and 65 million years ago. Charnia looks like a simple frond, it lived in the sea. It is distinct from the later fossils found in the Precambrian and has no modern relatives – in this sense it was a dead-end for life.

Following the Charnwood Forest fossils (examples of which are found around the world) the program turns to two further earlier fossil collections at Mistaken Point in Canada and in the Ediacara Hills in Australia. These data from a slightly later period. The Ediacara fossils were the first such collection of fossils found, whilst those at Mistaken Point are the most diverse. As fossils they are fairly subtle marks in the rocks, the creatures from which they derived were soft-bodied – it’s surprising the range of conclusions the experts come to on such markings: inferring early reproduction and feeding strategies.

The second episode focussed largely on the fossils found in the Burgess Shale, in the Canadian Rockies, I’ve written about them previously. The key point is that the Burgess Shale assemblage dating to about 500million years ago, exhibits an enormous range of forms – more diverse than seen now, many of which have subsequently become extinct. The fossilisation conditions of the Burgess Shale mean that the soft parts, rather than just the hard parts of the animals are preserved. Seeing them on film there are several striking things: the Burgess Shale quarry is tiny, perched half way up a steep scree slope and the fossils are smaller than I had thought most only two or three centimetres long and very subtle – thin film like fossils only visible in the rock from certain angles.

In contrast the fossil trilobites from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco were outright awesome (not a word I use often or lightly). They’re beautifully detailed, and in full 3D including all manner of weird, delicate bristles and appendages Stacks of pictures of the trilobites can be found using the appropriate Google Search. That looks a bit of a dry description, they really are flippin’ fantastic fossils. I’d never realised such fossils existed! The fossil below is from a species which became extinct 400 million years ago – the trilobites became extinct 250 million years ago.

Trilobite: Walliserops Trifurcatus (Image from FossilMall)

Apparently the eyes of the trilobite are made from calcite lenses – unlike any modern animal. This is interesting because calcite is birefringent so the eyes could potentially have given trilobites polarisation sensitive vision. It implies a high degree of control of the crystallisation of the mineral. Along with the trilobites, sizeable sea scorpions (eurypterid) were found – some up to 2.5metres in length (see here) – this is 1950’s b-movie sized arthropod!

First Life is a nice little series about something deeply interesting: how the very first life looked and is nicely executed with location work, expert contributions from real experts and computer graphics visualisations of the living creatures derived from the often badly squashed and indistinct fossils. I wish it had been longer! Thanks to a fellow tweep I have put Richard Fortey’s “Trilobite: Eye Witness to Evolution” on my reading list.