There's life in the old pond yet

After a couple of months covered in ice, the pond sprang back into life last week. As well as some old familiars, the boatmen for example, the lack of larger bugs meant I was aware of some of the smaller (about 1mm) creatures on the surface of the pond. I think the photos here are copepods -- small crustaceans -- at the limit of what my camera can do.
The mustachioed animal on the right is probably Diaptomus castor, whilst the smaller fellow below may be Canthocampus staphylinus. If you think you know better let me know! Both are described as common in pools over the winter, and they move in a series of little jumps, which means that just as I focus the camera to take a picture they disappear from the view-finder.

 There ought to be a nice dimensional analysis argument to determine how light you have to be (and what size shoes you wear) before you can jump from the water surface. Too heavy and your foot would go through the surface. Presumably the surface is either solid or like a trampoline to these little fellas. Isn't surface tension wonderful!





Other denizens are more familiar. I think the bug on the right is a very young dragonfly larva, it was really small, about 2-3mm. Given the squat body and the dragonflies that laid eggs last autumn my guess would be that it is Libellula depressa, the broad bodied chaser, but that is only a guess.

The bug below is a lesser water boatman, Corixa; a very small specimen again but looking fine.

Note added later: I take back my first thought about the possible dragonfly larva -- no idea what it is!!

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I have been asked to give the after-dinner speech at this year's BAMC in Birmingham (11th - 13th April). I suspect that this is proof that (a) I am growing old; and (b) at least some people think I have retained a sense of humour. I've been thinking about what can be said that is amusing and topical and short. To paraphrase the Player in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:

GLENDINNING: ... well, I can do you maths and humour without the politics, and I can do you maths and politics without the humour, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you humour and politics without the maths. Maths is compulsory, it's all maths.
BAMC: Is that what the people want?
GLENDINNING: It's what I do.

Does anyone know any good and topical jokes? Fiona says there's nothing funny about politics at the moment.

I could only think of one picture of after-dinner speaking, and since I've done TS Eliot and Tom Stoppard already in this very erudite blog, why not use Leonardo for divine inspiration? There is a connection between R&G and Prufrock -- easy to guess?!

 
Here's the full Stoppard quote (from the actors who will perform in front of Claudius and Gertrude, the head player explains what they can do):

PLAYER: They're hardly divisible, sir – well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory – they're all blood, you see.
GUIL: Is that what the people want?
PLAYER: It's what we do. 

IRM, Town Hall Meeting, 28 January 2011

A draft of the International Review of Mathematics was made available last week, though I can't link to it until the final version is published. It contains many sound observations and suggestions, particularly

• the state of mathematics in the UK is good, with excellence distributed over the whole country;
• there is a danger that the increased concentration of funding to larger instiutions could damage excellence outside these centres;
• communication between EPSRC and the grassroots mathematics community is poor; and
• the representation of women in mathematics is lamentable, and needs to be addressed far more vigorously.

At the EPSRC Town Hall meeting at the Senate House in London on 28th January (shown in this wonderful drawing by Raymond Myerscough Walker), the chair of the international panel, Margaret Wright, presented the findings and answered questions. I was worried that having talked of the unity of mathematics, they then divided it by addressing Mathematical Science, Applications and Industrial Maths as though they were separate, and Margaret agreed to dispell that impression, particularly in the evidential trail. The lack of detailed assessments of landscape documents in some areas was also addressed; apparently this is due to lack of expertise within the panel, and at the very least this should be stated explicitly.

The mood turned a little less positive when David Delpy (Chief Exec of EPSRC) responded. He seemed to suggest that EPSRC was unlikely to pay any attention to the regional distribution of excellence and will continue to encourage centralization (since this is stated policy it is not a surprise, but his insistence that this was for academic reasons was a bit galling and I made a rather clumsy and irritated intervention and had to be helped out by Malcolm MacCallum of the Heilbronn Institute). He also made very dismissive comments about the mathematics learned societies -- emphasizing that they are plural!

Oh well, some of these things (representation of women for example) should be taken up by the community anyway, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for action on the support of excellence across the discipline and wherever it may be.

The implications for funding are still confused.

The future of the Universities: Professor Trelawney predicts...

Prof Trelawney's 3 Predictions for the New Year:

1. (See Statement of the bleedin' obvious #148, blogged in December 2010) Universities will stop awarding degree classifications and move to grade point averages. This makes it possible not to fail someone who has paid a university £27k, but achieves 12% in their final exams without recourse to excessive grade inflation.

2. Some smaller universities will move to two year degrees (making them cheaper to fee-paying students and free to students eligible for two years of free tuition due to family circumstances).

3. There will be greater distiction between learning (flexibility, critical thinking) and training (need to know) between some (old?) universities and other (post-1992?) universities. This will allow the latter to exploit some grants for higher rather than further education.

All predictions are based on expectations of reactions to funding implications, but could there be a hidden agenda? Any comments?

I must get away from the HP source!

Repeatability in Mathematical Biology

The next View from the Pennines comes out in Mathematics Today at the beginning of next month. It illustrates the dangers of changing your mind when writing to a deadline! The theme is repeatability in mathematical biology, and in particular the way in which the biological journals prevent authors from fully specifying mathematical models (only new terms can be published, `old' systems and parameter values are simply referenced. This creates a chinese whispers trail when trying to recreate the models used, and in the two cases I have tried to follow up, the actual system was NOT the system as specified through the references and I needed to contact the authors to get a full description.

So far so interesting (at least to me!), my problem came when I decided, 48 hours before the final deadline for Maths Today, that I did not want to name the culprits, as the problem is instiutional inside the biological community rather than particular to those two groups, and of course I only pursued the problem because their work was so fascinating (and I want to be able to keep corresponding with them!). However, that did rather blow a hole in the article, turning it into an opinion piece rather than a fully argued article. Such is the problem of journalism.

Anyway, here's an excerpt...

[I]t is perfectly reasonable to redefine what is meant by repeatability in biology. The clockwork of physics is not expected and so one might simply demand some sort of repeatability-on-average (cf. chaos in the deterministic world). Alternatively, and this seems to be more and more the case in systems biology, one can move away from the living world (experiments in vivo) and work in culture (in vitrio) or even through numerical simulations (in silica) where cleaner results are more likely to be obtained. But however well biological mechanisms and chemical pathways are understood in isolation, their behaviour, and even their function, may be different in the more holistic and unpredictable environment of real life (as is, of course, understood by the biologists).

Given this obvious tension in biology it would not be surprising if the biological community was more rigorous about repeatability than most science. I am not in a position to comment on the experimental aspects of biology, except to note that in any discipline which is reliant on significant competitive funding there must be pressure to maintain any advantage by being economical with the details of new experimental techniques. However, there does seem to be an institutionalized undervaluation of repeatability in mathematical modelling. I call this institutional because it appears to be driven by the insistence of journals that models and equations should not be written down if they are already published elsewhere. This leads at best to the necessity for`supplementary material' available from the publisher (with all the access limitations for researchers in less well supported institutions or countries) or, a painful game of Chinese whispers through back-numbers of journals (again, creating all sorts of access problems). Because these models are relegated to supporting materials it also means that the value assigned to accurate reporting is diminished and creates a real issue about how biologists using mathematical models can be educated to supply sufficient detail of their models. There is a related issue around `black box' computational modelling, though I have not looked at this in any detail. The obvious danger is that everyone will agree about results using a given `black box', but that the results will be misleading or downright wrong!

Hermione Granger on the EPSRC Delivery Plan

On 21 December 2010 the EPSRC published its Delivery Plan for the next four years, available from the EPSRC website. Headline figures include

• a decrease in research grant support from the current £433M pa (new projects) to £409M in 2011/12 a decrease (not taking inflation into account) of 5.5%, with further cuts to a total of 14% by 2014/15;
• support for new fellowships will decrease immediately by 13.7%;
• modest rises in support of studentships and knowledge transfer;
• overall reduction of spending of 6% by 2014/15.

Whilst the bottom line is in keeping with expectations and the recognized value of science research, the numbers mask a major philosophical shift in the role of research councils. The three core goals are delivering impact, creating leaders and sharing capability; and whilst these are all laudable goals the first 'strategic decision' is to

[d]eliver a programme of transformational change. We will move from being a funder to a sponsor of research, where our investments act as a national resource focused on outcomes for the UK good and where we more proactively partner with the researchers we support.

This is echoed in statements further on in their document with statements such as

[EPSRC will, i]n concert with our partners in business, academia and government, co-define more explicitly the landscape of research we wish to support.

The fact that the science research budget has been to some extent protected is positive, but there is a real danger that, whatever the rhetoric, short term potential outcomes are going to drive the research agenda of the UK. Concerns about the Haldane Principle, due to be 'clarified' in the next few months, are more valid as a result of this document.

After Dolores Umbridge's first speech on educational matters to Hogwarts' students leaves Harry and Ron confused, it is left to Hermione Granger, the smartest witch in her generation, to explain what is going on (and Emma Watson does a wonderful job of expressing both frustration at the boys' stupidity and outrage at the Ministry's actions in one short sentence):

It means that the Ministry is interfering in Hogwarts.

 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, film version)

Of course, this was always the case. The issue is not whether it interferes, but how and with what impact. And with what level of consideration of consequences other than that of meeting the obvious short-term and partly self-imposed fiscal goals?

Statement of the bleedin' obvious #148 (Category: Universities)

On Thursday MPs will vote on student fees and potentially shift the main burden of funding for university teaching from the state to the students. This will cement the students' position as consumers rather than learners as well as increasing the financial burden on individual students. An immediate consequence is that it will be much harder to fail a student (what does it mean to fail someone who has paid between £6,000 and £27,000 for your services?) and there will be inevitable grade inflation (students will want to go to institutions which are realistic about achievement levels).

In my view there is one way out of the grade inflation problem: abolish degree classifications. A degree becomes a transcript with a final grade point average. This would mean that if someone wanted to graduate with a GPA of 10% there would be nothing to prevent it, and that the current over-emphasis on which side of a multiple of ten a score sits on, which could be prone to a legal challenge if (for example) a lecturer were absent at a conference for a lecture and had a more junior colleague covering, would also be avoided.

Keep things simple!