Full STEAM ahead

I was back in the UK recently for my sister’s very long-delayed wedding celebrations[1], so I tacked a few days of holiday on to the relevant weekend and went to visit some friends. I spent one day in Bristol with my university friend, Charlie, who has appeared in these pages before, where we had a bit of a rambling day trip around some nearby sights.

We started off with a quick visit to Malmesbury, which is a very picture-postcard Wiltshire town. We wandered around a bit and went into the abbey, which, unexpectedly, was playing host to a load of screaming kiddies, as part of a community event. So, the usual abbatial calm was not terribly in evidence. The current building, the parish church, is a small remnant of the medieval abbey that was far grander, but, you know, the Reformation and all that. There was a good model of what the medieval abbey would have looked like inside the church, though, and we also looked briefly round the ruins of the cloisters to get some sense of what was going on. Otherwise, we walked around a bit and just enjoyed the nice weather and the architecture. Unfortunately, we were visiting on a Monday, so the Athelstan Museum, the town’s other major attraction from our point of view, was shut. Charlie assures me it’s worth a visit, though[2].

Malmesbury, including the abbey and some random scenery

After that, we carried on eastwards down the M4 and took a trip to STEAM [sic], the museum of the Great Western Railway, on the outskirts of Swindon. Now, Charlie is a big fan of trains – he’s an engineer whose work is concerned with steam pipes, after all – and I’m a moderate fan, but I was slightly apprehensive that, if it was just a big shed full of trains, I might get a little bored. Happily, this did not occur. Whilst STEAM is indeed a big shed[3], and contains several trains, it also has lots of exhibits about life on the railways, the development of the system, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff necessary to build and run trains. Which I mostly found more interesting than the trains themselves, though getting the opportunity to get up close to locomotives is always worthwhile. There is, unsurprisingly, an awful lot of miscellaneous railway memorabilia that really adds to the insight the exhibition cases and information panels give you. The information panels are also very well-pitched: just the right level of information so you feel you’re learning something, without making you feel as if you’re in a state of information overload. Overall, I very much enjoyed the visit and thought it was worth the tenner to get in.

There is, somewhere, a way to link this to the Fork Handles sketch, but it eludes me.

If you think health and safety is purely a modern phenomenon.

TRAIN!

Because, obviously, there had to be a section of the museum on Brunel.

They’ve even got his paper knife.

TRAIN!

You’re a signalman. There’s an air raid. Fortunately, you have your own air raid box….

TRAIN!

TRAIN!

A machine I very much wish still existed

STEAM

We lunched late nearby and pondered what to do with our afternoon. We did consider going in to Swindon itself, but decided it wasn’t really worth it, and instead went to Lydiard Park, a large estate and house on the outskirts of Swindon, owned now by the local council, just to see what was there. After some fun with cash-only parking meters, we spent some time wandering round what turned out to be a pleasant little park. Annoyingly, we couldn’t get in to the church, and the main view was spoiled by an industrial estate, but the grounds are nice, with some easy walks and play areas for children[4]. The house itself is a conference centre, so there’s nothing to see there. Nothing of major note, I suppose, but it’s a nice place if you just want to get out for an hour.

Lydiard Park

After this, we turned around and headed back towards Bristol, but decided to stop off in Castle Combe, possibly the prettiest village in England. At least, the village claims to be so, based on an award it won in the 60s, and it certainly ends up featuring in a lot of films and TV shows as a chocolate-box period backdrop. And it’s fair to say that it is very nice. It’s very small – one street, pretty much – but the architecture is lovely. You can get a sense of the place by the fact that nearly every house is ‘The Old’ something or other. Many of the services adumbrated by the house names are now gone, and the village preserved as a tourist magnet. So it’s very nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there[5]. The church is pretty, though, and there’s a good little potted history of the town inside – much like Malmesbury, it used to be a lot more important, based mostly on the medieval wool industry.

Castle Combe

And that pretty much sums up our day trip around the Bristol area. I had a fun day out, and I think I’d have to say STEAM was the highlight for me. It really was a very well thought-out museum.

[1] Which were fun. It helped that it was unseasonably warm and sunny, but I think it would have been enjoyable even if it had been chucking it down.

[2] It is perhaps worth recording here that, a bit like Winchester, Malmesbury was historically a lot more important than it is now, and was one of Alfred the Great’s burhs, hence its rather unexpected claim to fame as the burial place of Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson and the first person to really be able to claim to be King of England (a claim he very much made).

[3] On the site of GWR’s former headquarters – Swindon was the company’s centre of operations for 150 years.

[4] It was notable that we were pretty much the only people without children and/or a dog.

[5] Not least because I imagine the houses all cost a bazillion pounds.

ERROR: Type Mismatch

Yes, I have used a FORTRAN compile error as a post title. I can even get quiz questions on the make command these days too. Don’t worry, I hate me as well.

Academia seems to me to be a bit fundamentally broken. In that what makes you a good academic and what makes you a successful academic are not exactly the same thing. Let’s talk first about what you have to do to be a good academic. I reckon this breaks down into five interlinked, but somewhat discrete functions:

• Research
• Writing proposals
• Teaching
• Admin
• Management

These are mostly fairly self-explanatory. Evidently, a good academic is an effective researcher and good at writing successful grant applications in order to have money to do the research. You should also be good at teaching undergraduates and postgraduates about your subject[1], because otherwise you’re kind of just producing knowledge in a vacuum and not really doing much to bring up your eventual successors. An academic that can’t teach is a bit of a Louis XV – après moi, la déluge – which can’t be good for the discipline as a whole. Good academics also have to be on top of their admin – evidently, the first three functions all generate plenty of administrative work, but there’s also department- and university-level admin not directly related to doing anything ‘productive’ as it were. Putting in holiday requests, to give a very minor example. Finally, good academics also need to be successful managers: if you’re in charge of a research group, you have managerial responsibilities towards your postgraduate research students, postdocs, research assistants, other junior academics and any admin staff attached to your group[2]. In other words, a good academic has to be good at quite a few different things; things that aren’t often regarded as complementary skill sets. But that’s not necessarily a problem.

The problem is that permanent academic positions – i.e. what everyone is competing for – are not hired for on the basis of these five functions[3]. The most important criterion is usually your research record: have you published enough articles in decent peer-reviewed journals? Your track record on obtaining research grants is usually important too, and you’ll probably need to at least be able to show some evidence of teaching experience, but it’s definitely a subaltern concern. Your administrative or managerial abilities will not be taken into account in the slightest, unless you’re so useless you fail to fill the application in correctly. What this means is that successful academics tend to be very research-focused individuals, with teaching seen as a poor cousin to the real deal of research[4], and admin and management as tiresome obstacles that shouldn’t be your problem[5]. And, as I foreshadowed above, the sort of person who’s single-mindedly dedicated to pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and magnifying their own glory therein[6] is not likely to be someone who’s terribly good at dealing with the mundane concerns of junior staff or bureaucratic protocol. But they are very likely to find themselves in a high-level academic position where actual research is a relatively small part of the job, and organising and managing things and people is a much larger part. All their training and selection focuses on the research side of things and, as they’re clearly clever people, the second part is sort-of assumed – admin’s not as difficult as actual rocket science after all, right?

One can’t help wondering if this is why the research-student-and-junior-academic community is replete with stories of awful supervisors, uncaring bosses and general managerial incompetence. A related problem is that, if an academic is successful and has a permanent position, it’s usually very difficult to get rid of them or inflict any meaningful sanctions on them. So, although they’re patently bad at what is an important part of their job[7], they can still be successful academics because the entire academic system – jobs, incentives, promotions – just doesn’t take it into account.

Now, I’m not saying that all senior academics are like this, but it’s a common-enough problem that it seems as if, maybe, we should consider fixing what is very clearly a broken system[8]. I’m not making this up, am I?

That ended up being a bit rantier than I originally meant. Don’t worry – this isn’t a reflection on my current situation or directed at anyone in particular; just the result of observations over the last five years or so. But one really feels academia as it currently exists is in urgent need of some serious reform. Or all the junior academics will bugger off to the private sector and the universities will be left looking a bit incompetent.

[1] This covers everything from outreach to school kids, to undergraduate lectures, to supervising a PhD student.

[2] Obviously, this only magnifies if you’re in charge of an entire department or faculty.

[3] Neither are non-permanent academic positions, but these tend to be more specialised posts that don’t require competence across all five functions anyway. For instance, my current job is essentially purely research-based – I have very little to currently do with regards to the other four functions.

[4] In my experience, it’s very rare that anyone in a permanent academic position actually wants to do their teaching. It’s usually seen as an annoying-if-necessary burden.

[5] The best example of this is Mustrum Ridcully in Discworld. His policy on paperwork is to ignore it until someone shouts at him at least twice to do it. Anything else clearly wasn’t that important in the first place. Ridcully is a fictional wizard; his attitude to admin is, however, scarily close to reality for a lot of senior academics.

[6] This is perhaps slightly unkind, but it’s undeniable that a lot of academic success at higher levels is down to relentless self-promotion.

[7] And, as a result of which, more junior academics are often left hanging or overworked or just thoroughly disgruntled.

[8] And that’s without even considering the failings of the peer-reviewed publishing model, the general insecurity of life as a junior academic, and the fact that the increasingly eroding benefits of academic life are not being replaced by at least being paid more.

Viva la France!

I attended my first French PhD viva recently. I say ‘viva’, because that would be the British equivalent[1], but it’s extremely different. The French call it a ‘soutenance’ or a ‘défense’ – so a ‘support’ or ‘defence’ – for a start, and the whole system is just very dissimilar to what I’m used to. So first, I’ll explain the British system. When you’re finishing up the writing of your thesis, you and your supervisor will schedule a date for your viva. This will usually be a couple of months after you’ve submitted the completed thesis, to give your examiners time to read and consider the bloody thing. In the viva itself, you and the two examiners are metaphorically locked in a small room for a minimum of three hours[2], where they will question you on any aspects of your thesis they feel need investigation. You will have one internal examiner – i.e., someone from your university and, usually, your department, but not your supervisor – and one external examiner, who will be a specialist in whatever field your PhD is in and could be from anywhere. The internal examiner will probably have some passing knowledge of the field, but is mainly there to make sure the administrative procedures for your university are properly carried out; the external examiner will be the one asking you annoyingly difficult questions. Good vivas turn into discussions around your thesis; bad ones turn into hostile question-and-answer sessions. The point of the whole exercise is to satisfy the examiners that a) you actually wrote the thesis and did enough of the work in it to qualify for a PhD and b) that you understand what you did. Obviously, if a) is true, b) almost always is. But you could manage b) without a), because you’ve read some books and your collaborators or supervisor did all the work, which would mean you wouldn’t get the PhD, because it has to be your work.

After the viva’s done, the examiners will deliberate briefly, return a verdict and then there will be a load of admin hoops to jump through before you can actually graduate. The important thing is, you can actually fail a viva. It’s fairly rare, but it is possible. It’s a meaningful exam. You might also get told to do a substantial amount of extra work, or resubmit and re-viva. A pass is by no means guaranteed, though it’s very embarrassing for everyone involved, especially your supervisor, if you do fail, because they shouldn’t have allowed you to submit until you were ready. Though, if the supervisor-student relationship breaks down, and you submit off your own back, it can be easier to see how a less-good result might come about.

In France, almost all of these points are different. The timing is the same – you submit your completed thesis and the defence happens a couple of months down the line – but everything about the actual exam is changed. You still have two examiners, but they’re part of a larger jury, which seems to usually number about six, and will include your supervisor(s) and what seems to pretty much be some other random academics who either have relevant knowledge or just get on with the supervisor, and are there to lend moral support or do a bit of additional examination without actually officially being examiners. And there’s also an audience of whoever wants to turn up. During the actual defence, you give a 45-minute presentation on what you did in your thesis[3], then there’s around 60-90 minutes of questions from the jury. These are done one member at a time, starting with the official examiners. Obviously, when it comes to your supervisor and any of their mates they’ve dredged up, they’ll just say ‘congrats, good job, no questions’, which feels a bit silly. It’s nice, but I don’t see what they’re contributing to the process, really. And the person-by-person nature means the whole thing is just an extended question-and-answer session; there’s not much room for discussion. The whole thing takes about two hours, there’s an opportunity for audience questions, a brief bit of deliberation, and the verdict is announced.

Except the verdict is (almost) always, ‘Congratulations, Doctor, you’ve passed!’. Because a French defence only goes ahead if a pass is certain. If the examiners have serious problems with the thesis, then the actual defence won’t get organised. I believe you can be technically failed on a bad defence, but, in practice, it’s a formality that you just have to get through. If your supervisor and the examiners have agreed the defence can go ahead, then you’ve already passed; if it doesn’t happen, you’ll be quietly told you need to do some more work and you can try again later. Everyone saves face and there’s no public embarrassment. In other words, a French thesis defence is essentially a bit of performative academia, a scripted drama with a definite happy ending. It’s not, unlike a British viva, a meaningful exam[4]. On the other hand, the French system is more difficult in some ways, because you have to prepare and give a 45-minute talk in front of a lot of people, rather than just talking to two people in a free-flowing manner. I’m not trying to say the British or French system is inherently better[5], but I do think it interesting that they’ve ended up in such different places. I believe the French system is fairly similar to the rest of continental Europe, so it’s very much the British (surprise) who are the odd ones out. You might have thought PhD examinations would be fairly standard, but, turns out, they’re really not….

[1] For readers less stuck in the academic world than me, the viva is the oral exam you have to pass at the end of your PhD, once you’ve written the thesis, to be awarded the degree.

[2] It can be much longer, but it has to be at least three hours.

[3] You can be asked to give a short presentation in a British viva, but it’s up to the examiners and is by no means standard.

[4] I’m not saying it’s not meaningful at all – it clearly is very meaningful as a mark of the end of the PhD and as a symbolic step to go through – but it’s not actually an exam because you can’t fail.

[5] Though I do feel the British system is more academically rigorous. The French system feels a little bit more open to nepotism and rubber-stamping, which doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Follow The Money

In what was probably something of a foolhardy move, I recently decided to change my bank in France. I know – why on earth would I want to do more admin in a country already straitjacketed in red tape?[1] But, do it I did. How hard could it be?

The first thing to say is that, France, much like the UK, made it considerably easier to switch current accounts a few years ago. When you open a new account, you can request assistance under this ‘mobilité bancaire’, which means that your old bank and new bank, between them, automatically sort out all those pesky things such as switching over your direct debits and so on, without you having to contact them all individually. Having discovered this, I was emboldened to proceed.

Then things got a little more complicated. First off, your savings products and any other accounts you might have are not switched over: you’ve got to deal with those yourself. Fair enough, really, but it’s worth bearing in mind. I only had one savings account, not a big deal to close it and open a new one with my new bank. Then my old bank rang me up and said I had to come in in person to sign several bits of paper[3], return my card and chequebook, and actually close the account. So I booked in a meeting for last thing on a Friday to do that. What I thought might be easy was turning out not to be.

I went to the meeting at my old bank and closed the account – it only took about 20 minutes. However, for reasons of their own, my old bank weren’t actually going to close the account for three weeks. Only then would the balance be transferred to my new account. The way things worked out also meant that month’s salary went into the old account – I’d updated my details on the work system, but it was too late for that month’s payroll[4] – the old account to which I no longer had any access, online or by card. I’d arranged for my old bank to do a transfer to the new account of most of the balance at the meeting, the rest to follow when the account actually closed; it being left in the account to cover any direct debits that didn’t switch over in time. This being on a Friday afternoon, though, and us being in France, meant that the transfer wasn’t actually credited until the following Wednesday. Which left me with about 30 euros accessible for several days. This was over the beginning of the month too, when several bills would fall due. If they switched over to the new account, there would be no funds to cover them.

So, I spent several days being quite worried. Not helped by my UK bank blocking my UK credit card when I used it for several foreign purchases from their point of view. So, for a day or so, I was almost entirely without easy access to any of my money, which was quite stressful.

Eventually, the funds did turn up in my new account on the Wednesday morning, at which I was very relieved. Fortunately, my unblocked UK card had seen me through the necessary purchases of the Tuesday, and the direct debits that had switched over all fell just after the transfer had been credited, but it was a very close-run thing. I suppose I’d been a little naive to expect that the French banking system would actually attempt to move any money over a weekend, but I’m still really surprised that a non-international transfer took more than a working day to process. I’ll be more careful next time, that’s for sure.

[1] If you’re interested, the reason was threefold: I was fed up of paying transaction fees when I needed to buy something in a different currency, I found my previous bank particularly administratively opaque[2], and my girlfriend had alerted me to the fact that my previous bank was rather heavily implicated in carbon-intensive and morally dubious investments.

[2] It may turn out that all banks in France are like this.

[3] Remember: we’re still in France. It was foolish of me to assume there wouldn’t be any bits of paper to sign.

[4] Which raises the interesting problem of what would have happened if my old bank had closed the account immediately. Where would my salary have gone?

Falling On Ice

I dabbled in winter sports recently, for the first time in my life. My girlfriend, who again took the photos, and I went to Chamrousse ski resort, just outside Grenoble, and I tried ski de fond for the first time. Or, as it’s better known in English, cross-country skiing. I’d considered trying out downhill skiing, but, given my complete lack of experience on snow, we thought something a bit flatter might be a better starting point. I’m also about as stable on ice as Bambi, so flatness was very much something I appreciated.

The general idea with cross-country skiing, as explained by my knowledgeable girlfriend and from my own experience, is that you have a marked path with relatively gentle, short uphill and downhill sections[1]. Your skis themselves are much lighter, shorter and narrower than in downhill skiing, because you’re more skating over the surface of the snow[2], rather than needing to be stable on it. The paths have, along one or both sides, two grooves cut into the snow to act as the ski equivalent of training wheels on a bike, so, if you’re scared and clueless, like me, you’ve got a relatively safe channel to learn in. There are two techniques: ‘classic’ and ‘skating’. The former is the one for novices; once you know what you’re doing a bit, you can try to upgrade to skating, which is more complicated, but more effective. With the classic technique, while you’re on the flat, the motion you’re aiming for is something like walking, but you’re also sliding along with each step. When you have to go up or downhill, though, things become a bit more complicated. Your skis are so small and light that you have pretty much no grip, which I found incredibly disorientating and also a bit terrifying. As soon as your skis are anything like parallel to a slope, you will start moving, at which point, if you’re me, you flail around and fall over[3]. Going uphill isn’t too bad – you have to point your feet and skis outwards so they’re semi-perpendicular to the slope and sort of waddle up it until things flatten out and you can get back to skiing[4].

Going downhill, though, is a different matter. As I said, if your skis are parallel to the slope, you will start sliding downhill and accelerating very fast. You can put yourself completely perpendicular to the slope and slowly inch your way down, but it’s very slow. Ideally, if you’re good, like my girlfriend, you point your feet and skis inwards and use that non-parallelity to the slope to control your speed a bit. The difficulty here is not letting your skis cross over, at which point you will fall over as you get all tangled up. If you’re in the training grooves, though, you can’t actually do this, because your skis will just follow the grooves. Which is a problem if you’re going quite fast and the grooves aren’t straight, because your skis catch and you fall over. Or if, like me, you’re just a bit unsteady at speed, wobble around a bit and then finally fall over. I fell over a lot. Probably about 25 times. At least my girlfriend managed to show me how to fall safely, which I got the hang of, so it hurt less towards the end. But, the 10 km or so of skiing that I managed was a pretty bruising experience for me. Very literally. Sitting down was sore for a few days, let’s say.

However, I’ve got to say that, when I wasn’t falling down or scared of being about to fall down or just generally terrified about things, I did have quite a lot of fun. It helps to have a very patient girlfriend who’s showing you the ropes and looking out for you, but I genuinely quite enjoyed calmly sliding my way through the snow whilst surrounded by some wonderful scenery. It’s all quite laid back, much more so than downhill skiing, from what I’m told, and even though it was a busy Saturday, it didn’t feel that busy. Meanwhile, my girlfriend calmly managed to master all the nuances of the classic technique and is keen to move on to skating next time, because she’s really good at all this. I think I’m going to stay classic for a while, though – there’s a lot more work for me to do on my co-ordination, technique and balance before I try anything more complicated!

[1] Compared to downhill skiing, anyway! They can still be pretty intimidating to a complete novice, such as me. Which they were.

[2] If you know what you’re doing, anyway.

[3] I have an unfortunate habit of standing up straight in these situations, which just encourages me to fall over backwards. You’ve got to keep your knees bent and weight forward, and my automatic reaction is to do precisely the opposite. This was not helpful.

[4] You do also have a small amount of grip with the skis if they’re going backwards. So gentle upwards slopes you can walk up as if they were flat, pretty much. But anything a bit steeper will see you just sliding backwards.