Oct 16 2011

Science is Vital – careers edition

I thought I would provide some comments on the Science Is Vital report “Careering Out of Control: A crisis in the UK science profession?“.

The report focuses on the career structure for academics with particular reference to postdoctoral workers. Postdoctoral workers are usually funded out of grant applications made by principle investigators (PIs) who are typically university lecturers. The postdoc will have a 2-3 year contract which lasts the length of the project proposed in the grant application. Lecturers typically work in groups which will make some attempt to find another temporary position for a good postdoc, however this is a tricky process which requires grant applications to be won to order. Therefore the postdoctoral position is insecure and can go on for many years until the postdoc becomes too expensive to employ.

I write this as someone who did a PhD in Physical Chemistry at Durham University, a postdoc at the Cavendish Laboratory, followed by an assistant director of research position (like a research fellowship, with the ability to make grant applications) and finally, in academia, a lectureship at UMIST in the Department of Physics. Since 2004 I have worked as a scientist for a large home and personal care company in north west England – the opinions here are my own and do not represent the views of any of my employers, past or present. As such it is a different viewpoint from the core Science Is Vital team but it is personal and based on relatively brief experience of one type of non-university employer over a relatively short period of time.

First I’d like to highlight what I think is good about the report, and indeed the Science Is Vital campaign. The report highlights what is a long-standing and serious problem in the university sector, and it does so on the basis of substantial data set. It makes some proposals to address these shortcomings. More widely I believe that “Science Is Vital” to the UK as a nation, for both its economic and social well-being. I see a UK whose citizens and businesses know more of science and engage more with science as a more successful UK.

The report proposes  a couple of mechanisms for easing the way for postdoctoral workers around creating more permanent posts and opening up grant applications. Although neither of these are unreasonable ideas there are downsides with both. Recruiting and managing permanent staff requires a different approach to making short-term appointments: if you get it wrong you are lumbered with someone and when you take them on you have to be prepared to keep them for the duration. This means that in an organisation with limited income (i.e. any organisation) you will regularly undergo recruitment freezes and you will only recruit if you believe the person you are interviewing is absolutely the right person, if they aren’t you don’t recruit. “Permanence” does help provide a career structure but it isn’t everything, people expect to progress in their careers (typically with a focus on cash) but a company will be looking to get more for more pay – more responsibility for line management, more responsibility for budget and so forth.

As an aside, the academic sector seems to support two populations in position longevity: 2-3 years and life. As a guide I believe my career with my current employer has a half-life of 5 years.

As for the second mechanism: the grant application system is already creaking at the seams with abysmal success rates and controversial measures which block people who have had multiple applications fail from re-applying for a period, so opening it up to a further cohort of potential applicants without increasing the size of the pot would be troublesome.

For me the central problem in the university system is that the numbers of lecturers (teachers), principle investigators, PhD students, postdoctoral workers and available grant funding in the university system are implicitly coupled but I’ve never seen any indication that impacts of changes across these areas are planned i.e. if you decide to increase undergraduate numbers then there is a knock-on effect on applications to funding bodies because you employ more lecturers/principle investigators who will apply for grants. The removal of the distinction between polytechnic and university was another great shift which opened up grants to a wider audience but without necessarily increasing the size of the grant funding pot. I think it’s fair to say that beyond the level of PhD an overwhelming majority of people in the system are looking for a permanent position in the university sector, and there simply aren’t the places to support this.

Perhaps the great unrecognised area is that the key impact of research in the university sector is not the science done but the people that do the science. Scientific papers in the open literature are useful but from a commercial point of view they are less valuable then, for example, a patent or a person who can create proprietary knowledge for a company. PhD students are explicitly being trained to be scientists, they pay fees for that training – the fact they end up producing useful scientific results is in some senses a side-effect. Postdoctoral workers, on the other hand, are being paid to carry out research – they become more valuable as employees by doing this particularly if along with new scientific skills they pick up other skills such as planning a programme of work, organising experiments with intricate dependencies, mentoring and managing other people,  communicating results, writing, procuring equipment and so forth.

As I said at the beginning: I believe in “Science Is Vital” – it is a worthwhile cause that I am pleased to seeing being pushed forward. I want this program to succeed and I’d like to support it from my viewpoint outside the university sector.

Oct 12 2011

It’s probably a boy!

Today we have been for the 20 week “anatomy scan”, once again Mrs SomeBeans was invited to fill her bladder before attending the clinic for an ultrasound scan (pictures to be found at the end of this post), a scheme whereby good timekeeping is important.

Strangely we found the images less easy to interpret than those in the dating scan, much more internal structure of the brain, the heart and so forth is visible but the overview is less clear. I don’t know whether it was simply the bedside manner of the sonographer but this scan seemed much more business-like than the last one.

This time I took care to check out the model number of the ultrasound scanner, it was a GE Voluson E8. Alongside the ordinary scans shown below, we also saw Doppler shift scans: an overlay in blue and red which shows the flow of blood through the heart.

Finally, the sonographer suggested that it’s probably a boy. I feel this places on me a great responsibility to act as a role-model!

Scan1

Scan2

Scan3

Oct 06 2011

Ada Lovelace Day

The 7th October is Ada Lovelace Day, Finding Ada has encouraged me to write a timely post about women in science, technology engineering or mathematics (STEM), specifically it says:

Create content about a woman in STEM that you admire

Ada Lovelace lived 1815-1852, and is sometimes credited as the world’s first programmer for the notes she wrote on Charles Babbages’ analytical engine – a mechanical computing device which was never constructed. She is commemorated in the Ada programming language, developed for the US Department of Defence with reliability in mind.

To be honest I’ve never found scientific inspiration in long dead “heroic” individual scientists. Lately I’ve been reading rather more of the history of science; institutionally the position of women in science until at least the middle of the 20th century was pretty dire: the Royal Society, proud of its internationalism, religious and political intolerance did not admit its first female members until 1945. The first women were admitted to study at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the later half of the 19th century and they did not gain equal formal status with men until the middle of the 20th century. It’s always somewhat bemusing to hear criticisms of other country’s poor record on female education when we weren’t doing so well within living memory.

Merian-Maria-Sibylla-Tolhoren-Sun

Shell illustrations by Merian Maria Sibylla

This is not to say there are no women in the history of science, just that they fitted into the social accepted roles of their times. For example, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, the wife of Antoine Lavoisier was clearly heavily and expertly involved in the conduct of his scientific experiments in the late 18th century. William’s sister, Caroline Herschel spent many evenings observing the heavens with him (and by herself), discovering several comets and being formally recognised for her work in her later years with medals from the Royal Astronomical Society (1828) and the king of Prussia (1846). In the late 17th century naturalist and artist Maria Sybilla Merian published several books based around her observations, particularly on the metamorphosis of butterflies, and drawings of flowers and insects both in Europe. Later in her life she spent two years in Surinam where she made a study of South American flora and fauna. I’m rather impressed with Merian, travelling and living in South America in the 17th century was pretty challenging stuff regardless of gender.

Sadly I had not got into the habit of posting on my book reading when I read a biography of Marie Curie: with Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, she is outstanding even ignoring the challenges of doing science as a woman at the beginning of the 20th century.

Practically speaking I have been taught science along with many other subjects by women; Ms Pitman who taught me physics (and was sarcastic about the PE teachers), and Mrs Haas who taught me biology. This is not to ignore those whose names I can’t recall, my recall of anything dating back 25 years or so is vague these days! Looking back it seems women made their first impact in science in communication and teaching, see for example Mary Somerville and Émilie du Châtelet.

For me my education, my wonder, was as much to do with my family as my teachers.

Ultimately the woman in STEM who has most influenced me is my mum. She learnt to program on an Elliot 503 in the early sixties: 400 square feet of computer with substantially less processor power than the most lowly of today’s devices. She was later to work for the UK Atomic Energy Authority where she worked on PACE analogue computers, and mechanical calculators. All this is somewhat vague on my part because it is only now I have started to pay an interest in the day to day work she did before I was born.

Forty-one years ago my mum gave up her career when she became pregnant with me and even a few years later, when my brother and I had both started at school, a local employer refused to give her a job application form on the grounds that she was a mother.

As The Inelegant Gardener and I await our first child things are very different.

Oct 01 2011

British Wars–presented in fancy Javascript timeline format

Working my way through various bits of scientific history it becomes clear that what is going on outside the lab can have a profound impact on the protagonists. For the early years of the Royal Society the English Civil War and the Restoration had a big impact on the Fellows; the general feeling was “never again” and there was a search for stability and order. Later, in the 18th century, the American War of Independence and the subsequent wars arising from the French Revolution had an impact on The Lunar Men, impacting as it did on trade and their own radical politics. Lavoisier was to find the French Revolution terminal. In the 20th century, scientists were to play a large role in the Second World War; in codebreaking, radar and in building the atomic bomb. This followed a lesser role in the First World War, developing chemical weapons.

As someone whose formal education in history ended at the age of fourteen I thought I should get a feel for the wars going on around the people closer to my interests; this also seemed to be a good opportunity to play with whizzy Javascript timeline technology courtesy of Simile. It turns out the tricky bit is getting Javascript to run inside WordPress, I cheated a little by simply installing the Simile timeline plugin which fixed things in a way I don’t pretend to understand.

The timeline below is derived from a page in wikipedia entitled British Wars, I wanted to go back to the beginning of the 17th century so I supplemented that list with the linked “List of wars involving England”; Great Britain did not exist prior to the Acts of Union in 1707. You can slide the timeline backwards and forth by dragging it with the mouse.

 

 

 

 

Javascript timeline broken on upgrade to WordPress 3.5, you can see it here now.

I’ve colour coded the wars geographically as follows civil war: blue, Africa: brown, European:green, Americas:red, India:olive, SE Asia:black, New Zealand:purple and Middle East:orange, I have done this slightly erratically. During the 19th century we appear to have engaged in an awful lot of colonial conflicts around the world.

Developing this timeline I have experienced some of the shortcomings of the timeline presentation, I started off with the Cast of Characters in Lisa Jardine’s “Ingenious Pursuits”, entering their birth and death dates, but quickly found I had a rather ugly pile of people whose lives centred around 1680 with outliers before and after that time. Once I started on “British Wars” a second drawback becomes apparent: what is important and what isn’t? In a sense I gave up this decision to the compilers of the Wikipedia page, blindly adding all they had put in. This means the Cod Wars appears alongside the First World War implying some sort of equivalence. They also rate “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland as a war which I struggle to admit.

As a second exercise I tried working out how “important” a war was through numbers of military casualties, for this exercise the full list of British Wars is a bit long so again I left the deciding what was important to someone else, in this case a BBC History timeline, this finds a more manageable 10 major wars over the last 400 years or so. In fact it turns out that the Crimean and Boer Wars had relatively few military causalities, so I have omitted them. Below you can see the number of causalities for each war, expressed as a fraction of the population at that time. The casualty figures come from a combination of Wikipedia and Necrometrics, the population figures from the Historical Atlas.

WarCasualties

This plot lumps together a whole sequence of conflicts from the first plot into “Napoleonic Wars”. I’ve always known that World War I was known as the war to end all wars, that the casualty figures were horrific, but hadn’t appreciated that the Napoleonic Wars were similar in scale compared to the size of the population. Similarly the English Civil War scores highly for casualties but even so is under-represented in this plot since I decided to use the military casualty figures rather than total deaths relating to the war i.e. including civilians and those who died of disease or famine.

This is a rather parochial view but it has got the sequence of wars Britain has undertaken into some sort of chronology for me.

Sep 25 2011

“Too much, too young”

Ed Miliband has decided to open the Labour conference with a policy! A policy to reduce the cap on tuition fees from £6000 to £9000, you can read all about it here, in the Observer. I wrote on my feelings on tuition fees back here.Miliband’s is a somewhat surprising move; Liberal Democrats battered by this issue, will be bemused to discover that all that ire could have been deflected by the simple expedient of only doubling the tuition fee cap, rather than tripling it. The BBC has helpfully been starting their reporting of this issue with the words “Labour, who introduced tuition fees and then tripled the cap…”.

The policy is to be paid for by not cutting corporation tax on banks, as it will be for all other companies, and by increasing the interest on the student loans for those earning more than Miliband believes his supporters will earn.

The policy odd for a couple of reasons:

  • Is this seriously the most important policy area to address? I’d have thought ideas on “going for growth” would be far more important. Or maybe undoing one of those many “attacks” on vulnerable groups.
  • It really doesn’t represent a change in principle to the policy being implemented now, just a fiddling with the cap.
  • It’s quite transparently another attempt at a political kick at the Liberal Democrats.

My personal opinion on “going for growth” is that there is relatively little government can do to boost growth in the medium term, it can spend in the short term to produce a transient increase but with a deficit as high as ours then is this really a good idea? If we could reliably produce growth by policy, then don’t you think we might be a tiny bit better at predicting growth given known policy? As it stands predicts of GDP growth by pretty much anyone are about as good as could be expected by a monkey throwing sticks at a board.

To me the big problem for Labour is the quote later in the article:

 

He [Ed Miliband] insisted he would stick to his central message that the coalition is cutting too far and too fast, without providing more detail of where Labour would withhold funding.

An observer would be entirely justified in thinking that Labour’s policy is for no cuts, and tax-raising solely on banks and the unfeasible wealthy, both ultimately rather small sources of income even if you jack up rates to very high levels. Given this, and the “revelations” that the Labour top team fought like ferrets in a sack over deficit reduction before leaving power it is unsurprising that they have little economic credibility.