Mar 13 2010

On being a fellow of Pembroke college

For a period in my life I knew that if I ever ended up in the news the item would have started “Cambridge don, Dr Ian Hopkinson…” because I was a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Oxford and Cambridge universities in the UK, are structured somewhat differently from other universities. In addition to the normal university departments that you would find in any university there are the colleges. The colleges have their own independent, and in many cases, very long existence. They are responsible for the housing and pastoral care of students (and academics), as well as teaching involving small groups. In some subjects they employ full-time lecturers but this is not generally the case in the natural sciences. Each college has a mixture of fellows and students from all subjects, in some ways the parallel is with members of a club. Other universities have apparent equivalents in their Halls of Residence and ‘colleges’ although these things are actually quite different in character.

Clearly Pembroke is the best of the colleges by any rational evaluation! Whilst I was in Cambridge it celebrated its 650th anniversary, although little if any of the original physical structure remains. The college features a chapel designed by Christopher Wren, behind some panels in one of the parlours are the scribblings and sketches by the workmen involved in the building. The ceiling of the Old Library is a fabulous, intricate 17th century plaster construction, I spent many long college meetings admiring it. Alfred Waterhouse was involved in some substantial re-building of the college in the late 19th century demolishing, with dynamite, the pre-existing medieval main hall in the process.

The list of alumni is rich with comedians (Peter Cook, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Eric Idle, Bill Oddie) and writers (Clive James, Ted Hughes), a little light on scientists although it does feature George Gabriel Stokes, Ray Dolby (inventor of the Dolby noise-reduction system) and John Sulston (Nobel Prize winner). Historically, there’s William Pitt the Younger, and Nicholas Ridley (martyred by the old enemy in Oxford). The wiki page gives a summary of the history, and an extended list of alumni.

Pembroke college was somewhat different from anything I had experienced previously and it introduced me to a whole range of social gaffes. From my initial purchase of my MA gown, where I hastily thrust my arms down the sown-up sleeves rather than out through the exit slits; to confusing the Master of Pembroke, Sir Roger Tomkys, former High Commissioner to Kenya with my pointless statement that I had bought my cutlery from Argos (he thought I meant the Greek island); to turning up one summer evening in very crumpled linen for dinner only to discover that it was a celebratory meal for the Drapers’ Company and I was under-dressed by at least an order of magnitude. Fortunately, as a fellow, I was allowed to walk on the grass, the public aren’t. There are no signs to this effect, because senior fellows thought they looked untidy.

As a fellow I received little in the way of cash, I was employed by the university as an Assistant Director of Research* and paid by the college to do a few hours small group teaching each week. Pembroke mainly paid me in food, drink and company. A fairly elderly medieval scholar was the college wine buyer and did an excellent job. Dinners were particularly fine after college meetings, starting in the parlour, for pre-dinner drinks, five courses with a different wine with each course after which we returned to the parlour for port and so forth, Bath Oliver biscuits (Oliver was a former fellow) and fruit eaten with silver knives and forks.  Most junior fellows seconded to serve in the parlour.  For a long period I never drank port that was younger than I was and I got a taste for Sauternes which I can no longer support. Mrs SomeBeans has never forgiven them for the goat’s cheese profiteroles.

As part of my job as fellow I was engaged in admissions interviews: one nervous fellow (me) interviewed fifteen nervous potential students for the Natural Sciences course. I remember having wet feet for most the morning, since I’d cycled in to college in a downpour. All but a couple of the students were predicted at least four A grades at A level, ultimately we were to take one or possibly two of the group I interviewed.

The colleges go to some length to make the admission system fair in relation to the background of the student, but to be honest the problem starts well before application. A vignette: my flatmate at Bristol University went to Harrow he was one of very few in his year *not* to apply to Oxford or Cambridge (Oxbridge), to the displeasure of the masters. I, from my respectable state comprehensive, was one of a handful to apply to Oxbridge. For my school, entry to Oxbridge was not a key performance indicator, it didn’t really have the knowledge or background to support applicants.

In a way the debate on access to Oxbridge misses the point: it takes outstanding students, has excellent resources in terms of cash and people and it produces excellent output. What can you learn from this setup? As a measure of pre-university performance it’s not great, we depend on written record and a few brief interviews. A real challenge would have been to take average students and see what we could do with them.

The best thing about college was my fellow fellows: they were bright, passionate about their work, always keen to talk about it. We met for lunch: classicists, modern linguists, historians, computer scientists, chemists, physicists, biologists, naturalists, engineers, English scholars talking about our work, the world and the etymology of the swearing of the American students over for summer schools. And in the usual college way we could wine and dine in our departmental colleagues colleges where the circle widened. It’s an oddity of most modern universities that the scope for meeting colleagues from different departments is actually rather limited. The college system in Cambridge satisfies that need in some style.

Footnotes
Top image from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pembroke_College_Cambridge.JPG
*The Assistant Director of Research is no where near as grand as it sounds, it is a position that lies between postdoctoral research assistant and lecturer and is filled in Cambridge by people who will be unrequited in their desire for a permanent position.

Mar 12 2010

The Presidents of the Royal Society (reprise)

In my previous post I described how I downloaded and played with the data on the fellows of the Royal Society, including a plot of the presidents of the society and their terms of office. I was a bit unhappy with this plot, I felt like it could be a bit more interactive. So I’ve been busy. The plot below shows you who was in office when you wave your mouse over it, and highlights their term. On the face of it this looks like I’ve done very little, but it took me six hours of playing with Protovis (a Javascript visualization library) top achieve this! You can do lots of very neat things with Protovis, and having done it one visualisation it should be easier to do the next one.



Mar 08 2010

The Royal Society and the data monkey

This year finds the Royal Society celebrating its 350th anniversary. The Royal Society is Britain’s national academy of science, one of the first of such societies to be founded in Europe. My brief investigations suggest that only the Italian Accademia dei Linceis and the German Academy of Sciences are older, and then only by a relatively small margin. The goals of the Royal Society were to report on the experiments of its members and communicate with like-minded fellows across Europe.

The Gentleman Administrator is planning some historical blogging on the Royal Society this year, starting with this post on the founding of the society and the role that Charles II played in it. On the face of it this post is about the history of the Royal Society, but in truth it says more about me as a data monkey than it does about the Royal Society. I shall explain.

The Royal Society supply a list of previous members as a pair of PDF format files, these contain each fellow of the Royal Society with their election date, their membership type and, for some, the dates of their birth and death. The PDF is formatted in a standard way suggesting to me that it could be read by a computer and the data therein analysed. I suspect there is an easier way to do this: ask the Royal Society whether they can supply the data in a form more amenable to analysis such as a spreadsheet or a database. But where’s the fun in that?

As an experimental physicist, getting data in various formats into computer programs for further analysis is what I do. This arises when I want to apply an analysis to data beyond that which the manufacturer of the appropriate instrument supplies in their own software, when I get data from custom-built equipment, when I trawl up data from other sources. I received a polite “cease and desist” message at work after I successfully worked out how to extract the text of internal reports from the reports database, they shouldn’t have said it couldn’t be done! I will save you the gory details of exactly how I’ve gone about extracting the data from the Royal Society lists, suffice to say I enjoyed it.

First up, we can identify the Presidents of the Royal Society, and their terms of office from the PDF files – this information is in the name entry for each of them. We can look this data up too). I’ve plotted these below in a manner reminiscent of the displays of the earth’s magnetic field reversal, each coloured stripe represents a presidency, and the colours alternate for clarity. The width of the stripe shows you how long each was president:

In the earlier years of the Royal Society’s history the Presidential term varied quite considerably: Sir Isaac Newton served for 24 years (1703-1727), and Sir Joseph Banks for 42 years (1778-1820). Since 1870 the period of the office seems to have been fixed at 5 years.

Next, we can work out the size of the fellowship in any particular year, basically we go through each fellow in the membership list and see when they were elected to the society and when they died: between these two years they were members. These data are plotted below:

We can see that membership in the early years of the 19th century started to rise significantly but then after 1850 it started to fall again.

This fits in with historical records, in the earlier years of the 19th century some younger fellows pointed out that the Royal Society was starting to turn into a fancy dining club and that most of the fellows had published very little, in particular Charles Babbage published Reflections on the decline of Science in England, and on some of its causes. Wheels ground slowly but finally, in 1846, a committee was set up to consider the charter of Society and how to curb its ever growing membership. I’ve not found the date on which the committee reported but subsequent to this date, admission to the society was much more strictly controlled. Election to the Royal Society is still a mark of a scientist a little above the ordinary.

The data on birth and death dates starts getting sparse after about 1950, presumably since many of the fellows are still alive and were reluctant to reveal their ages. Doing analysis like this starts to reveal the odd glitch in the data. For example,Christfried Kirch appears to have died two years before being elected. At the moment I’m not handling uncertainty in dates very well, and I learnt that the letters “fl” before a date range indicate that and individual “flourished” in that period, which is nice.

If anyone is interested in further data in this area, then please let me know in the comments below. I intend adding further data to the set (i.e. hunting down birth and death dates) and if there is an analysis you think might be useful then I’m willing to give it a try. I’ve uploaded the basic data to Google Docs.

Footnote
The illustration at the top of this piece is from the frontspiece of William Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, published in 1722.

Mar 04 2010

And the winner is…

I thought I’d write about Nobel Prizes and rewards in science. Long ago I had an illuminating discussion about the subject with someone in publishing, I believe it was the night we were ineptly making Tequila Sunrises and drinking the mistakes so some of the recollections are a bit hazy. The core of the argument was around prestige and cash, my position was that the scientific prestige of the Nobel Prize could not be matched with any cash reward and that it was the Nobel Prize that I’d go for, over the cash, any time. My publishing friend had serious trouble understanding this position.

Despite this I’m ambivalent about the Nobel Prizes, it’s a nice annual event that brings science a little up the news agenda and its always interesting to spot the Nobel Prize winners in your department (to be honest this isn’t much of a game for most people, whilst I was at the Department of Physics in Cambridge there were two Nobel Prize winners in physics still attending: Brian Josephson and Neville Mott). Reading down the list of Nobel laureates in Physics, about two thirds are household names for any physicist whilst the remaining third are only recognised in their own sub-fields. One per year globally is an awfully thin sprinkling for any meaningful recognition of talent.

There are anomalies: Rosalind Franklin potentially missed out on a share in the 1962 award for the Nobel Prize in Physiology for “… discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”, this is the award to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for the discovery of DNA. She had died at the age of 37, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Jocelyn Bell Burnell was not awarded for her part in the discovery of pulsars. In fact wikipedia has a whole page of Nobel Prize controversies. Any award of this type must ultimately be subjective, and given the further constrains of the prize rules, a degree of controversy is inevitable.

Perhaps more pernicious is the idea that discoveries are made by three people or fewer. Isaac Newton said “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”: scientific discoveries make use of the discoveries that have come before, and these days discoveries may be made by the collaboration of very large groups of people.

I’ve never had the feeling, as a scientist, of flocking around an individual, rather more of flocking around an idea that has been developed by a number of individuals. You never find scientists in groups asking “What would Einstein do?”. You rarely find scientists making references to “the school of X”, where X is some famous scientist. There are no gurus in science.

Practically speaking I believe that my contribution to science in future years will be considered exceedingly minor; epsilon as numerical analysts would call it: the smallest thing you can have without being zero. For me the reward in science has always been the thrill of personal discovery, a sudden realisation that you have learnt just a little more about the way things work, something that no one else knows.  The desire that other people recognise that only comes later, and in the first instance the thrill is in showing the neat thing you have found (not your role in the discovery).

In truth I’d do science for no payment, and I think it’s true to say most scientists would say the same. Before my employer gets excited by this revelation, I should point out that I charge for attendance at meetings and the amount of money you pay me to interact with various poorly designed IT systems is no where near enough! Similarly, as an academic, I required payment to write grant applications, attend examiners meetings and so forth.

And to end with my favourite Tom Lehrer Nobel Prize quote: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Mar 03 2010

A letter to the Institute of Physics

Dear Sir/Madam

As a member of the Institute of Physics I would like to register my extreme displeasure and unhappiness at the IOP submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee regarding the leaking of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (reproduced here) . In my view this submission will damage the scientific reputation of the Institute amongst scientists and other learned societies. This submission will prejudice my future confidence in any policy statements that the IOP makes.

My specific complaints of the submission are as follows:
1. Item 2 mis-represents the current scientific practice of sharing of data and methodologies. Currently methodologies are generally shared by publication in scientific journals not by the explicit sharing of computer source code. Raw experimental data from third parties is not routinely shared. To imply that the researchers at CRU are acting out of step with current practice is false. 
2. Item 4 specifically casts doubt on the historical temperature reconstructions based on proxy measures whilst not acknowledging that such reconstructions have been repeated by a range of research groups using a range of methodologies, as described in the IPCC 2007 report.
3. Item 5 accuses the researchers at CRU of “suppression” of the divergence between proxy records and the more recent thermometer based record. This is ridiculous, the CRU has published on this very divergence in Nature.
4. Item 6 makes no recognition of the un-usual circumstances that CRU found themselves in, subjected to a large number of Freedom of Information requests, culminating in the publication of a substantial fraction of their private e-mail correspondence.
The subject of climate science and it’s relationship to anthropogenic climate change is an area subject to political interference, in my view the IOP’s submission is a political attack on the CRU at East Anglia University dressed in a flimsy scientific cover.
I expect the Institute to fully withdraw this submission to the Science & Technology Committee. I feel that the subsequent explanatory statement by the IOP is insufficient in addressing the shortcomings of the original submission. It also takes no cognisance of the fact the IOP position will be taken publicly to be the sum of all it’s published statements, and indeed that this submission will be preferred, over all others, as a presentation of the IOP’s policy by those who wish to deny the position on climate science that the IOP claims to hold.
I will be cancelling my direct debit mandate to the IOP now, I may decide to continue with my membership when it comes up for renewal.

yours sincerely,
Dr Ian Hopkinson

8/3/10: update, corrected some typos