As some of you probably know, I wrote a letter to the Irish Times where I outlined the problem with the Employment Control Framework, Mark II that became law a few weeks ago.

The case has been debated vigorously on twitter (look for the #ECF11 hashtag) and a number of the candidates for the TCD provost position have written about it.  See here and here.

This morning, the H.E.A. have issued a document that seeks to clarify the stance on the employment of post-docs, staff numbers and so on.

It is an unusual document, for sure.  It seems to contradict the ECF itself.  It implies that the ECF really is only about keeping things in line with where the universities were at the end of last year.  It even says that the number of contract research staff can increase, the H.E.A. won’t be controlling the numbers if they are funded from external sources.  In addition, promotions can go ahead but only to keep things in line with where they were at the end of 2010 - in other words, when people retire, then it might be possible to promote others to that level, thus keeping things the same.  The other bit worry for me was that post-doc quotas would have to move from university to university and this was going to be a nightmare.

I mean, who was going to decide what happened when, say, DCU needed 5 post-doc places because they got some EU money and say, NUIM had 5 free places and TCD had five free places.  How would a decision be made about who was going to be the lender?What would happen if TCD lent 3 places to DCU and then a month later they got their own EU grant and then wanted them back?

The H.E.A. document (which was finished last evening at 4:40…you can even tell who wrote it, if you know where to look) is an interpretation of the ECF and therefore, I am not certain how much weight it carries.  What it does point out is that the legislation is flawed - the interpretation from the H.E.A. is really diametrically opposed to the content of the legislation, as far as I can tell.

The good news is that the H.E.A. have responded.

The bad news is that I am still not convinced that this is the last we have heard of ECF11.

This interpretation will free us up to continue with research, but won’t cost the taxpayer anything,as far as I can see.  We will just have to ask the funders for an extra 20% per post-doc so that we can cover possible pension costs.

I run a research group of somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen people.  They are mostly post-graduate level students, but usually with a couple of post-doctoral researchers included in the group.

The funding for post-docs has come both from national funding sources - H.E.A. PRTLI, Science Foundation Ireland, etc. - and from international sources such as the EU “Marie Curie” programme for researcher mobility.

For the past decade, I have not had to think whether I should have  a larger or smaller research group, what the mix of post-grad and post-doc scientists should be or whether or not this was out of line with anybody’s expectations of me.  I focused on doing the science and delivering on the grants that were awarded to my group (these are always competitive awards, with rarely success rates for the applications usually less than one-in-five, sometimes less than 5% chance of success, such is the level to which they are subscribed).  Just trying to do the science is not an easy job, I can assure you.  However, this is the job I signed up for and so far, thankfully, things have gone fine.  You can see some of the results here - http://bioinf.nuim.ie/

This is a moderately healthy system.  Grants are awarded based on the quality of the applicant, the quality of the application and the amount of available funding.  In 2010, new national funding was almost non-existent, for instance.  In other years it was almost as good as in the UK.

However, the Employment Control Framework (ECF) has really made a mess of it all.

The ECF has now rolled my post-doctoral researchers in with permanent staff members so that they are now “core staff” of the university.  This is despite the fact that they are never going to be made permanent.  They come to Ireland (most have been from outside Ireland), work here for a few years, bring their new ideas from abroad, bring their experience of different systems of working, bring their enthusiasm, bring their software code and so forth and they carry out research that benefits Ireland and then they leave.

Sometimes they participate in teaching our undergrads and they can bring  some very practical skills into the classroom.

However, now that they are being rolled in with the rest of the staff as core staff and now that there is a cap on the numbers of core staff that we can have, all this is going to stop.

Dead.

In addition to this, we are not replacing the retiring staff (while offering staff a lot of incentives to retire) and so when you combine the cap on numbers with the pressing need to retain an ability to deliver lectures, I am now facing a situation where I will be told I cannot take on post-doctoral researchers.

I might not be able to bring in new blood from outside the country (EU Marie Curie grants are explicitly for people from outside Ireland to locate here).

I might not be able to employ our own PhD graduates.

I won’t be able to produce as much research.

I won’t be able to accept grants from the EU or The Wellcome Trust or their ilk, who offer my university a lot of overheads and also enhance the reputation of our university by awarding grants to us.

I won’t be able to guarantee to a collaborator that I will be able to employ staff if we get a joint award.

The ECF is a blunt instrument.  It addresses the issue of reducing the cost of the third level sector, but it is the most cack-handed approach imaginable.

If the government wants the universities to employ fewer staff so that it pays less money, then that is an acceptable thing to want - particularly in a recession.  However, surely the better thing to do is to give the universities their block grant and say “manage that in the best way that you can”.

Bill Cullen is the businessman on “The Apprentice”.  He runs a car sales organisation.  Do you think he would think it was sensible for a bank to loan him money and tell him to reduce costs and then present him with a plan that allowed him to have a sales garage, to have cars but no sales people?

The ECF needs to be abolished and something more sensible replacing it.  The financial cost to the exchequer can be the same, but if it is done properly, then we can save a bit of our scientific reputation, our international standing, our attractiveness as a place to do science, our knowledge and our ability to collaborate internationally.

The following is an extract from a document written by Colm Kearney concerning the Employment Control Framework in Irish academic institutions.  It relates to TCD, but the points are general across the board.

Staff can be compulsorily redeployed within the third level sector. This could be interpreted to mean that
TCD academic and other staff are told they have to take up a position in any university in the country.

Staff who secured competitive funding will not be able to hire research staff unless they can demonstrate to the HEA that the research is clearly aligned to the government “smart economy” initiative as outlined in Government statements such as the 2006 Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation. No clear set of research topics is available on these, and thus each researcher will have to negotiate with the HEA. It is very clear that this will seriously undermine all Arts, Humanities and Social Science research, as well as large elements of Science.

You may be required to seek permission or clarification from the HEA prior to submitting a research grant to ascertain that the grant is aligned with the “smart economy”.
Funds sourced from non-exchequer sources may be required to fill vacated posts prior to being used for the purposes laid out by the researcher. In effect the state may “seize” these grants in order to backfill posts that previously would have been funded by the State.

Only lecturing and research staff can be hired even if a grant is of the size and sophistication that would warrant administrative support.
The HEA reserves the right to determine the “staff-student ratio” for each institution.
The ratio of Professor/Lecturer and Senior Lecturer grades across the entire university system has been frozen at the existing ratio as of 1 January 2011. Therefore, qualified TCD staff will be denied their promotion if a promotion has taken place elsewhere. In effect, there will be no promotion from lecturer to professor grades.

A pension charge of 20% of gross pay will be required from all new hires, in addition to any individual pension contribution. This will greatly increase the required grant and will make Irish grant applications more expensive and thus less likely to be successful.

You may not be able to use retired staff to teach or research, with all their years of experience and knowledge, unless you seek prior approval from the HEA.

All new contracts must be on the basis of fixed-term or temporary contracts. The concept of tenure is therefore in effect abolished for the duration of the ECF.

I’m very interested these days in how the various social media can be used in order to improve learning in universities.

Notice that I wrote “learning” and not teaching.  Learning is different to teaching, learning is what the student does, teaching is what the teacher does.

Ultimately, the student has to learn and the proposition for the past 5 centuries is that students learn as a consequence of teachers teaching.

This might no longer be the case.  In the past five years in general and in the past two years in particular, we have seen students coming to college who are pretty familiar with the social media - initially Bebo, now mostly facebook and to a lesser extent, twitter. Many of the incoming students now do not remember a time when social networks didn’t exist.  They are not just used to the idea that you interact with a website, they insist on interacting with these websites. A website that doesn’t allow interaction - leaving comments, putting up video or text-based content - is a website that is really not going to attract very many students.

A student now lives a life of constant communication by text message, email, tweet, status update and comment.

Until they come into class.  We then insist on phones being switched off.  Students get little chance to comment (my first year class had 440 students this year), add their own content, design their own experience or interact in any way.

Should we be surprised that students are not doing as well as they used to do.

Students have moved on, but the universities have not.  The classes have gotten much, much larger, but the teaching methodology has only changed a small amount.

The great thing is that such revolutions in teaching requirements will - of necessity - result in revolutions in teaching.  Well, they have to result in teaching revolutions, simly because learning is undergoing a revolution, but unfortunately a negative revolution.  Students are simply not doing as well as they used to do with the current systems.

For next year, I am going to make more use of Moodle, FaceBook and also Twitter.  I have already set up a FaceBook group in 2010 for the first year class.  Approximately half the class joined and there was a bit of banter over a period of four or five months - often about classes, often about biology in general and then at exam time the discussions were exam-related.  I think it has been useful.

Twitter can be used to ask questions during class.  I will use the #BI101_nuim hashtag and students can tweet their questions during the class and when we take a break in the class, I can flip the screen over to twitter to see what questions has been asked.

Moodle seems to be the best place for strictly course and exam related material and it works well enough for that.

Ultimately, I would love for students to design their own course material - a wiki would be good.  “Learning by doing” is always a pretty good philosophy and if students could design the material - following the guidance in the lectures  - including links to interesting websites that are relevant for the course and if the community were actively involved in updating, correcting and adding flavour to the wiki, then I believe that would be useful.

The unfortunate thing is that no single website satisfies all the needs - students don’t casually log on to moodle, they only do so in order to get course material.  Facebook doesn’t have good facilities for uploading pdf files or slides etc., though you can use a third-party website and then link to it.

So, that is what we need for the massive student numbers - a single Irish social network for students with facilities for education, discussion and posting photos/information/pdfs/slides/whatever.

It will happen, but tens of thousands of students will go through the universities over the next five years and will be poorly-served by the sheer numbers and the inadequate supports.

In 1994 the Fine Gael / Labour government abolished university tuition fees.  The reason that was given was that this was a barrier to some people going to university.  This was, of course, complete nonsense.

At that time, those from less well off families received grant support that paid their fees and indeed some received additional money on top of that.

Fees only related to the better off in society. Whether you paid fees was dependent on your ability to pay fees.

The result of fee abolition has been a two-fold negative for students from less well off families.  Now that there are no fees, we have more than 25,000 students per year availing of second level private schooling, a situation that was virtually unheard-of before fees were abolished.

The wealthier in society now send their children to private schools, thus ensuring that they have a near monopoly on the higher points courses.

The less well off in society didn’t benefit from the fees being abolished, but in fact they are now worse off because people with money have now diverted their money to second level and effectively shut the door on the poorer students.

Concomittantly, the universities have been starved of funding.  According to Ferdinand von Prondzynski, we now educate the average student for 50% of the funding (allowing for inflation) that we had a decade ago.  The replacement for fees is the “registration fee” of €1,500/2,000 which is a complete nonsense and a real barrier to attending university.

All of this means that without doubt, the quality of education being delivered is nowhere near what it was a few years ago and if this continutes, then there will be some very, very serious repercussions.

Students today have to face a deteriorating staff:student ratio.  The “Employment Control Framework” is adding to the idiocy of the current situation.  Our new government have completely kicked to touch with their new strategy of having ANOTHER review of funding.

Time to make a decision, folks.  Do you want a proper education system or do you want some kind of micro-managed, soviet-style, underfunded failure with demoralised staff who are going to lead the way in the enigration stakes?  Stop the insanity.

I think I will review the two options that face us in our choice for Christmas number 1. We can either buy the X-factor CD, which is Matt in the Hat, singing a song that was written by a mildly successful Scottish band about something banal that hasn’t interested me enough to actually listen to it more than once. Or we can purchase a piece of anti-materialistic, anti-musical, original artwork.

You see, Matt’s song means nothing. Nothing whatsoever. He didn’t write it, he doesn’t feel the sentiments, he is faking it and according to a lot of people with telephones, he fakes it pretty well. He is a puppet that is doing somebody else’s bidding in an effort to make some money.

Unthinking, unimaginative and meaningless.

It is to music what the poem in a hallmark card is to literature.

The other option is the Rubber Bandits singing “Horse Outside“.

First of all, if I am to believe Joe Duffy, this is a group that is clearly deluded and unworthy of serious analysis, right? I mean, Joe had to ask Blind Boy Boatclub if he could talk properly. It cannot be possible that it is a group with a mission? with a brain? I mean, they are clearly the working-class, uneducated, Hoi-Poloi.

And most worryingly, they are from Limerick. I mean, who ever heard of anything intelligent coming from Limerick. Well, apart from Richard Harris, Awesome rugby, Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt and me.

Oh hang on……On second thoughts, it is a very complete act that has written, recorded and promoted several songs. All are original, all are funded by somebody that believes in the idea and none are attached to a cynical TV programme like X-factor.

This isn’t enough of a reason to buy a Rubber Bandit single.

How about we take a look at the song.

The central character in the song is a member of the Limerick underclass. He is clearly involved in the drug scene and leaves you with no illusions about whether he would stab you (it is Limerick after all) in a heartbeat and appears to have a superaggressive repulsion to normal people that simply own cars.

You can’t possibly believe that last sentence.

Of course it is not. The rubber bandits really understand what they are about. They understand satire, analogy and how to scare the living shit out of middle Ireland.

They are more frightening than the sex pistols, the IRA, and property taxes combined.

Joe Duffy made a complete fool of himself in not understanding this. However, sadly, saying that Joe Duffy is a fool is somewhat tautological.

In the course of the song, we are introduced to the fact that the central character is at a wedding competing with three eligible bachelors for the affections of the very attractive bridesmaid. On the surface, it looks like he has little hope. In the celtic tiger era, nothing said more about you than your flashy car. We bought them in the millions. It was all you needed to say that you were in the club, you were hot, you had it all going on. Now, a more humble Ireland is getting back to where it came from. Perhaps material possessions are less solid than we once believed? Perhaps there is something less flashy but more attractive than an Asian import?

And at the end of the video, our anti-hero rides off into the sunset with the beautiful girl. Its not quite hollywood style, but nonetheless it is a powerful statement.

Your material possessions didn’t quite cut it. You didn’t get the girl.

In terms of style, if we compare the Rubber Bandits to Matt Cardle, it is something like comparing a Picasso with a Caravaggio. Why should Picasso paint in a Baroque, Rococo, classical or indeed painterly style? Who said he should? He didn’t. His version of art didn’t try for a perfect reproduction on canvas (or in an etching) of the 3D world. That wasn’t the point. So why should the Rubber Bandits stick to a musical style that is attractive to grannies? They don’t. My granny would have hated it. This is the point. The entire song, the entire act is awesome because it goes somewhere that is new and fresh. They are making great art because they are not faking it.

I cannot say the same thing about Matt Cardle.

Go buy the Rubber Bandits single for Christmas. Buy it between the 17th and the 23rd of December…..like NOW!!!

Right now there there is a severe outbreak of cholera in Haiti. This is unusual, given that Haiti has not had any incidence of Cholera for more than 100 years. Now, while there my be refugia for the cholera bacterium (it is called Vibrio cholerae), it is much more likely that what has happened is that visitors to Haiti have brought the bacterium with them.

In any case, the current outbreak of Cholera has resulted in more than 1,000 deaths and more than 50,000 hospitalisations. This has completely swamped the recovery efforts in Haiti, has crippled the hospitals and has sapped the energies of the UN and other NGOs who are trying to effect change for the better.

Last week there were riots in Haiti. The UN shot two people. The rioters were protesting that the UN had brought the Cholera to Haiti. Specifically, the allegation has been that the UN soldiers from Nepal have brought the disease to Haiti.

It is important to establish the origins of diseases. We can use this information to plug the flow of disease into a particular area and we can use the information to formulate policies about movement of people, animals, plants, etc.

It turns out that a number of research groups are currently working on the origins of the Cholera outbreak in Haiti. The Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the US are doing it and at least one independent US research group are doing it.

The genomes of the strains of V. cholerae can be sequenced and compared with the genomes of other strains from around the world. The bacterium evolves continuously and there might be key mutations that will ally the Haitian strains with the other strains.

I know that the analysis has been done and the paper submitted for publication, so I won’t say anything that might prejudice the publication. However, there are a few things to consider:

• Was it sensible not to vaccinate the people of Haiti against Cholera? The vaccine is oral, so administering it is relatively easy.
• Where would you stop with the vaccinations? Diptheria? Yellow fever? Dengue? TB? It is reasonable?
• Who do you allow into a disaster zone? The people are unlikely to be at their most healthy, the hospitals are mashed and perhaps the newcomers (the helpers) might be as much of a danger to the inhabitants of the disaster area as any other factor.
• How do we make it so that we are not paralysed by the fear that we will do wrong?

Clearly we have to deal with some issues and some guidelines need to be drawn up. More generally, we are increasingly seeing the effects of global travel on the spread of disease. As somebody once said, “We are ready and able to carry any disease to the four corners of the earth at a moments notice”.

A really good research-driven university should have a staff to student ratio of about 10:1.This would mean that staff could divide their time meaningfully between their research interests and their teaching and administration commitments.Currently in the department of biology at NUI Maynooth, the ratio is much, much worse.  It might be as bad as 30:1 (I don’t have access to the figures).  This is almost the same level as a secondary school where all the staff are focussed on the teaching part of the job and where there is no expectation for them to carry out research.In the biology department, all staff are actively involved in research.  Many have large research groups and are actively involved in writing grant proposals, mentoring students and post-docs, writing research papers, collaborating internationally and so forth.We have 436 1st year students. We are dealing with approximately 800 students in total (in order to convert this to ‘full-time equivalents” you would probably be looking at about 600 F.T.E.s.  We have 20 permanent staff, but not all are engaged in full-time teaching.  About 18 are full time lecturing.  This is a ratio that is unheard-of in a developed country.I feel sorry for the current crop of students, but I have never (in my 11 years in this place) seen it so bad.I worry that it will get worse.  We have slashed tutorials, we have nowhere near enough demonstrators for practicals and the only reason that we have as many as we have is because we have set up the unfair system where PhD students (who are full-time students, paying >5,000 Euros P.A. in fees) are having to demonstrate 2 practical sessions each week.  Students in previous years were not asked to do this.  Some volunteered because they needed the money, but it wasn’t compulsory until now.It truly is the madhouse now.

OK, I have to spend a lot of my time thinking about what I eat and how much I eat, simply because I like to eat a lot and I sometimes like to eat badly.

However, right now in Ireland, you cannot help but notice the surge of obese people, particularly young people and particularly young women in their 20s.  It has grown and grown in the past decade and now is at a stage where something really needs to be done to reverse the trend.I was on a train recently that was going from Limerick to Dublin.  That evening there was a gig on in the O2 - Westlife, I think - and on the train were carraige-loads of mostly young girls.  The mean age, by my estimation was probably about 21 years old.

It was frightening to see how many of the girls were obese, some of the them morbidly, almost all of them overweight.

I am not in the business of making this up - almost all the females on the train were overweight.I am not talking about not being able to fit into a size-zero dress, whatever that is, but I am talking about a visible manifestation of overeating and under-exercising.

It opens up a variety of questions.Should we do anything?  After all, it is up to the individual whether they want to overeat and under-exercise and perhaps we are encroaching on personal freedoms by even bringing up the subject.  Are we making people feel uncomfortable?  Do we have a right to do that?All good and relevant questions.

Let’s just say that we decide to intervene, we then have some other questions to address.How should we intervene?  Should we simply put on TV programs that educate people about what science and medicine have been able to ascertain are the optimal weights and dietary/exercise regiemes? Should we introduce a tax on fast-food and a soda tax, thereby making unhealthy food more expensive?  Should we reduce tax on healthy low-fat, low-salt, low-GI foods?  Should we compel shops to keep sweets whose packaging is deliberately aimed at children away from the till?  Right now, this is exactly where these foods are to be found, facilitating impulse buying and also making them available at a place where parents are trying to manage money and are getting a bit flustered, thereby providing small kids with an opportunity to harass the parents into giving them sweets.  Should we have compulsory, ongoing human nutrition courses?  I took a human nutrition course once and it was excellent.

Or should there be more?

Should obese people be asked to pay more for their health insurance?  Smokers are asked to pay more for their personal choices, why not obese people?  We know - like smokers - that obesity carries with it a predisposition to type II diabetes, heart attack, stroke and more.  These cost money.  Why should people that make different - healthier - lifestyle choices, pay for those who choose to take a path that is much more likely to result in increased cost to the state, increased pressure on the hospitals, etc.

Whatever you think, obesity is now epidemic in Ireland.  Young people, especially girls, are becoming more and more obese (and indeed more and more anorexic and worried about their weight, but more about that at some other time).  This is a problem that is being stored up for the future.  It doesn’t help that the government minister for health is incredibly obese.  It doesn’t show leadership in this area and it seems it is a bit un-PC to say it, so it is never said.

The progression of our population towards an obese future is not inevitable.  Education is key.  Exercise will only get us part of the way, proper diets will have more of a positive effect in the first instance.  Chips, burgers, kebabs (nom, nom), high-sugar sauces, fast-burn pastas, potatoes, white rice, sugar, deep-fried everything.  All these foodstuff are contributing to the obesity epidemic.  Many people who eat these foods to excess don’t even know that this is what they are doing.  They don’t make the link between fried chinese food and obesity, beer and obesity, chips and obesity.  They rationalise it, saying that they eat sweet-and-sour chicken, white rice and dumplings only twice or three times a week.  They reason that 6 beers on Friday night, 6 on Saturday night and a few on Monday night watching the soccer is hardly the reason for their expanding waistline - mind you having the full-Irish breakfast the next day to fight off the hangover might have something to do with it too.

Educate yourself, if you are finding that your jeans are getting tighter after every time you wash them.

As an evolutionary biologist, I have developed a sort-of obsession with viewing the entire world in evolutionary terms.  I see religion as a consequence of natural selection, languages evolve, change over time and are related to one another and I see adaptation as an intrinsic feature of humanity.

So, right now we are in a time of rapidly changing environments.  The stability that Ireland saw from about 1994 until 2008 is now in shreds and the population (super-organism) must respond in whatever way it can.

So, how is it likely to respond?

Evolutionary theory tells us that this organism will begin to evolve rather quickly, much more quickly than it was evolving in a time of stability.

The analogy I could use is the analogy with Darwin’s finches.  Darwin got to the Galapagos islands and discovered that, unlike on mainland Ecuador, where there was a single species of dull brown finch, there were at least 13 or 14 different finch types on the islands.

This presented Darwin with a quandary.  Given tectonic plate movement, the islands were relatively new.  Perhaps some millions of years old.  Whereas, the mainland was part of Gondwanaland which was around since God was a child (ahem). How, then, could this happen?  The NEWER land mass had the greater diversity?  Surely there should be much more diversity on the land mass that had been around for longer?

Well, the explanation is known as ‘positive selection’.  When competition for scarce resources started to occur for the small population of finches that must surely have arrived on the island relatively recently, then they mutations that would otherwise not have provided any advantage to a finch would now become very useful indeed.  In Darwin’s words, these small advantageous changes would have been “preserved and added up”.

The net result - competition for meagre resources on the island resulted in diversification at a rapid rate.  The first finches could only make use of one kind of resource, but within a relatively short period of time, all available resources were utilised.

So, changed environments promote evolutionary diversification on geological timescales.  Can the same happen in a short period of time in a different context?

I suspect the answer is that yes, the exact same features will manifest themselves, though the nature of these features are obviously different.

People losing jobs is analogous to resources drying up.  The stable food supply of 2008 (the building industry, apparently) is no more.

NUI Maynooth have never spun-out more companies, than they did in 2009.  The rate of patenting in Ireland has increased massively - up by 18% in 2009, from the previous year (though, worryingly, still much fewer than we should have if we were to hit the EU average).  We are responding to the environmental change, just as evolutionary theory would predict.

But, there is one other thing to think about.

A rabbit cannot evolve into a bird.

It just doesn’t have the capacity - what we might call ‘pre-adaptation’.

A rabbit can evolve so that it has greater speed to escape predators, or it can evolve the ability to resist disease or the ability to use a different food source.

It cannot evolve into a bird though.

There is evidence that we are adapting at a rapid rate, but not at the rate we need to respond.

Look at our broadband service nationally - rubbish.  This is the smart economy.  This is the pathway for rapid evolution. And it doesn’t exist.

The Irish superorganism wants to evolve.  It is making the moves.  It is diversifying.  It is adapting. It wants to fly. But it is stuck on the ground like some kind of myxomatosing rabbit, nibbling nettles.

Scrap Saturday had a skit in the early 1990s and it involved Dermot Morgan parodying Charles Haughey’s disappointment at the fact that his Fianna Fail colleagues lacked intelligence, with the line “How can I soar like an Eagle, when I am surrounded by Turkeys”.

Until we get national high-speed broadband (50 Megs per house), we are stuck on the ground, with limited opportunity to evolve.

Rapid evolution is the only solution.

It’s a good slogan.