Picketing at –7ºC

It was cold this morning.  –7ºC, at least according to my phone (edit:  According to a BBC News story, the lowest recorded temperature, of –11.7ºC, was just down the road in Farnborough) .  That didn't stop a good turnout for the picket in the ongoing strike to protect (what's left of) our pensions.  Here are a fine selection of tweets with pictures of those trying to protect Higher Education for the future:  from @gleet_tweet (me), @AbrahamsJJ, and @deniserkal.

Yesterday, the employers' group UUK agreed to meet the union for talks at ACAS.  That, I hope, indicates that the strike may be called off soon, and we can all get back to work.  

I learnt yesterday (via a tweet from @DrJSims) that in the past, the USS pension fund was considered do be doing so well that the employers took a bunch of money out of it, as the fund was so abundant that it could afford it.  Perhaps it's time to pay that money back?

Striking to save our pension

Today is day one of a strike by members of the UCU trade union, of which I am a member, and therefore a striker. 

I don't think anyone much wants to undertake strike action, and the reasons behind it have to be pretty strong before they take this step.  

The collective group of our employers, Universities UK (UUK), have proposed to stop the defined benefit pension scheme, in which we will work towards a pension which is a guaranteed amount based on our salaries and length of service, and in which all the money paid in by all members is lumped together and used to pay out pensions of those retired.  They propose to change it to one in which we each build up our own individual pension pot, which we then treat like a private personal pension when we retire.   It may not sound utterly outrageous, but all estimates suggest that it will results in significantly decreased pensions for all staff -- particularly younger staff.  What's more, the modelling on which it is based is extreme and unrealistically pessimistic.  In fact, this modelling showed that even in the most extreme worst-case, that all universities were to close immediately, and all the current investments were immediately de-risked into low-yield gilts, then the scheme would still be in surplus with a high probability, but because of the uncertainties in modelling, there is a possibility that the pot would be in deficit, that we should right now slash all future benefits.

Perhaps unusually for a strike, many University Vice-Chancellors are calling for UUK to accept UCU's call to come back to the negotiating table and I can only hope that they do so.  I don't enjoy being on strike, and I'm sorry for the negative effect it has on students.  I also appreciate the support of many students for the action, and hope as much for their sake that it is successful in keeping academia as a (reasonably) attractive place to work.

Nuclear Data Community Pleased, as Punch-Card Format Superseded

Via my fellow nuclear physicist @tmertzi,  I read an interesting article (dating back to 2016) from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.  It's about the worldwide database of nuclear data -- covering things like the expected reaction products when neutrons are captured at different energies by different nuclei -- which is hampered in part by the historic file format used, dating back to the days of punch cards.  Codes still in use expect the now-electronic files to still be in this rigid format, which is too constraining to store data in the form that nuclear scientists would like it, so we are finally moving to a more flexible format called GND (Generalized Nuclear Data).  Those interested can download supporting computer code for the new format here.

One thing that I learned from the article is that the old format traces itself back to the ENDL format, standing for Evaluated Nuclear Data Library.  According to the Livermore article, ENDL was developed by Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment, based not too far from here.  Back then, they were known as AWRE;  Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.  They dropped the "Research" from their name in the 80s.

Congratulations, Dr Barton

Yesterday my PhD student Matthew Barton successfully defended his PhD thesis on the self-consistent application of the time-dependent density-matrix method for nuclear ground state correlations and dynamics.  Good job, Matthew!  

Here is the obligatory image of Matthew, the examiners and supervisors:

L-R: Denis Lacroix (external examiner), Arnau Rios (supervisor), Matthew Barton (candidate), Paul Stevenson (supervisor), Dan Doherty (internal examiner)

RIP Mark E Smith

I've been known to post music on this blog for various reasons, including as tributes to artists who have recently died.  As one of the many fans of The Fall in the UK nuclear physics community, I feel I ought to mark the death The Fall's Mark E Smith last month with a song of theirs.

I was reminded of it the last time I attended the annual Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Conference when it was in Birmingham.  The conference venue was the University of Birmingham's Business School

Incidentally, the external examiner for our physics degrees used to be one Mark E Smith, of the University of Warwick.  As I recall, he is well aware of his namesake. 

Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart 1949-2018

A few days ago I received the latest copy of Nuclear Physics News International, a quarterly magazine about nuclear physics and its applications, produced on behalf of NuPECC ("Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee").

One of the articles in the magazine was "On the Development of Nuclear Physics in Cuba".  It gives, as the name suggests, a description of nuclear physics research in Cuba; an academic activity that started after the 1976 construction of a nuclear power plant in concert with support from the USSR.  The activity included a lot of applications of nuclear and radiation research, such as production of medical isotopes, industrial profiling, dating of samples, environmental monitoring, as well as more pure physics studies.  I had the pleasure of attending one of the conferences organised by the nuclear physics researchers in Cuba some years ago (2005, if I remember correctly), and remember being impressed by the range of applications being worked on by the students.  

The article in Nuclear Physics News International was written by Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, a member of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, and key mover in the Cuban nuclear research programme.  He also happens to be a son of Fidel Castro, erstwhile Cuban leader, which has made him of interest to the news media.  Because of this, I was able to read of his death, alas, which was reported this morning.  He had been suffering from depression, and in the end he killed himself.  It's tragic to hear of a fellow human's suffering, whoever they are, but as a colleague in the international nuclear physics community, it's a reminder to me (as if I needed it) that mental health problems know no borders of nationality, of rich or poor, famous or unknown.  According to the reports (from Granma, the Cuban communist party's newspaper), Dr Castro had been suffering from some time, including spells in hospital.  At least, then, he was getting treatment.  Another reminder; mental health problems can be treated.  

I was put off reading the article in Nuclear Physics News because of the misaligned printing (see picture).  If you want to read it, follow the "latest copy" link in the first line of the blog post.