Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the UK...

Not that I had any particular plans, but the longer I stay away, the less I remember of the bad bits. However, every time the memories fade, some more news reminds me.

Latest is the planned closure of Jodrell Bank. OK, it's not actually the whole institute, "just" the e-Merlin project hosted there. But by all accounts that's pretty much the same thing. I suspect the distinction is moot for jules' brother who works on the project.

The sad thing is, I can't even pretend to be surprised by this - it's just par for the course.

Can you speak Japanese?

Funny how these things come in a bunch.

I've already posted about these vague proposals JT about revamping the visa requirements for Japan, including language skills testing.

Now a similar sort of idea has popped up again, but there's still no sign that anyone has actually thought it through. Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion, let me say at the outset that of course it is not unreasonable to impose some sort of language requirement on permanent residents and citizenship applications. These people are (in principle) here to stay as members of Japanese society. There already are de facto requirements, if not exactly de jure, in the form of paperwork and a face to face interview (no interpreter allowed!). Exceptions are only made for mass murderers on the Interpol wanted list (eg), and I don't want to stay here that badly.

It's not really clear what is being considered - there is no such thing as a "long term visa" anyway, with most categories limited to 3y. And obviously it would be a complete non-starter to hope that foreign professionals or wannabe English language teachers would take Japanese lessons just on the off chance that they might get offered a short contract here at some point in the future.

So I am still waiting with interest to see what concrete proposals, if any, actually see the light of day.

AGU: the science

OK, enough joking around. I was actually there for work, having received a generous invitation to present at the session on "Climate Sensitivity From Modeling, Current Observations, and Paleoclimate Data."

We've often thought about going to the AGU Fall Meeting, since while we are in Japan it's actually more convenient than the EGU, but never previously got round to it. The organisation is rather different to the EGU, and took a bit of getting used to. For some reason, the poster sessions are not clearly linked to their corresponding oral sessions (the code numbers indicate the section and the time, but eg there is no obvious link between U43A and U51B, despite them being posters and oral session on the same topic). They don't even arrange things in alphabetical order in the book. There is also no Climate section and very little Nonlinear Geophysics (the two most interesting sections in the EGU), but a whole lot of Paleoclimate.

Here are some highlights from my notes. Errors and omissions all mine, of course.

After a couple of paleoclimate talks first thing on Monday morning I ducked into a rather bizarre session entitled "Navigating a Career in the Geosciences: Strategies for Success." It started off with some important successful guy telling us how the rewards would come if we just put in enough hard work and perseverance and were prepared to take our chances. He told us his own life story of how there were not enough jobs in his PhD speciality, so he changed topics. Then he found funding hard to come by in his next field...so he changed again, becoming Director of NCAR. Why didn't we all think of that? The next presentation was a similar pep-talk from another senior professor about how great life was if only one persevered, but the last talk actually did have some useful content based on real research about what distinguishes the more successful from the less. But I'm hardly going to give away the secrets to you lot :-) One of the most important factors seemed to be the Y chromosome, which reliably distinguishes the "outstanding" from the merely "hard working" (Trix and Psenka, 2003). Later on that day, a session on extremes had Tom Knutson sounding rather sceptical about whether or not hurricanes were likely to increase much (and he thought it would take some time to see a signal in the data).

Tuesday morning started with a session on aerosols, not really my thing but I'd spotted both Schwartz and Chylek were presenting, so I turned up to listen. Steve Schwartz presented his sensitivity analysis, but admitted it had received a lot of criticism and he would not "bet the ranch" on it, which probably defused some potential criticisms (in the questions after someone did say that they thought his detrending was a dodgy step). Later on in the week I spoke to him in person, he said he'd just got our comment and hadn't yet planned his reply. Petr Chylek presented a somewhat similar paper from in the same special issue of JGR (guest editor: P Chylek) which I'll probably blog about in more detail later. I got the impression of a bit of a clique separate from mainstream climate science here. Someone in the audience actually asked where they might get the opposing point of view. It wasn't 100% clear what they meant by "opposing", but one good answer might be chapters 9 and 10 of the IPCC AR4 WG1, or indeed the whole book. There was also a session concerning use of the multimodel ensemble (ie the AR4 runs), which I am getting interested in. In fact there were a few sessions with this sort of flavour that during the week.

After 2 consecutive 10h days and fairly late nights, Wednesday morning had nothing much of interest so we had a lie-in (and tested the crappy hotel gym). The afternoon had some stuff on ocean tracers, including some adjustments to the ocean heat content data, and also estimates of ocean mixing based on various other tracers (tritium from bombs, helium from the mantle). This is something I've tried to point out to some climate sensitivity estimation people who claim that we can't say much about the ocean mixing rate (and thus heat uptake, which affects climate sensitivity estimates) because the temperature data are so uncertain. Even if the direct measurements of temperature are uncertain, we have other evidence about the mixing rate, which they studiously choose to ignore!

Thursday morning had some fun stuff on carbon sequestration, including various air capture schemes. I'm not really convinced that these make sense, but I've nothing against their consideration. Rather than harvesting and burying biomass, it might be simpler to just use it for energy in place of the fossil fuels. In the afternoon we had the exciting session on "Tipping points", which started off with a well-attended talk by Jim Hansen. He didn't actually talk about tipping points in much detail but argued for a rapid halt to coal use (unless sequestration-enabled).

Friday morning was our big thrill of the week, with presentations in the session on climate sensitivity. I was due to talk 2nd up, immediately after Jim Hansen, which (as is generally the case in these situations) I presumed would mean a mass exodus throughout my talk. I consoled myself with the thought that at least most would hear the start of it. Anyway, we arrived bright and early, checked that our presentations were set up and bagged good seats. At about 8:02 the convenor stood up, and said that she was very very sorry, but unfortunately Jim Hansen's presentation wasn't ready yet, so we would have to start with the 2nd presentation! Well at least that saved me another 15 minutes of nerves, and since Hansen's presentation was "in the pipeline" people didn't have time to run out for a coffee so I had a packed house. When initially invited, I'd really planned to steal jules' paleo work and talk about that, but then she also got a talking slot in the same session so I had to leave that in her hands and revamped the "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity" stuff instead. I had some fun reading a bit of Steven Goodman's Nature letter ("This technique would be a wonderful contribution to science were it not based on a patently fallacious argument, almost as old as probability itself") against a back-drop of quotes from the recent climate science literature all claiming that uniform priors represent a state of pure ignorance (this of course being the patently fallacious argument Goodman was ridiculing). Lest anyone think I was picking on anyone in particular, I quoted from 3 papers from largely different groups, plus an extract from the Nobel-winning consensus of 2500 climate scientists otherwise known as the IPCC AR4. However I had noticed that Myles Allen was supposed to be talking straight after me, and I was disappointed that he did not attend and defend his beliefs. I guess if I keep on turning up to the major conferences we can't continue to miss each other indefinitely. The rest of the session had a mix of old and new stuff, nothing too revolutionary. We wound down with a session on geoengineering which was fun.

Nameable names that I met for the first time (mostly very briefly) included, in no particular order: Steve Schwartz, Ray Pierrehumbert, Michael Tobis, Michael Mann and of course there were numerous others I've met before. The weather was great and SF is easily the nicest city I've visited in the USA (not that I'm very well travelled over there) so we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. On scientific grounds, I think I prefer the EGU, but maybe that is partly a matter of familiarity.

Debito packs it in

I was saddened to see that Arudou Debito, scourge of racist onsen-owners everywhere, has basically given up on his employer (a university in Hokkaido) and is looking for a new job.

The basic reason for leaving? Being denied a sabbatical, strung along with a line of bullshit as to the reasons why, and eventually getting to the bottom line: he's not worth anything to the old farts running the place. He's just an English teacher, after all.

I know Debito rubs some people up the wrong way but I have plenty of admiration for the effort he has put in to standing up for his, and others', rights. Moreover, he is the archetypal well-integrated immigrant, fluent in Japanese, with a Japanese (now ex-)wife, children, house, and indeed Japanese citizenship (born a US citizen, David Aldwinckle). If he is still hitting this sort of brick wall at his stage (and it's not as if a year of sabbatical is an unreasonable expectation for an academic after 14 years of service), then really I don't need to waste any more time wondering whether I have a long-term future here. I hope he finds something suitable for his talents (and I second the sentiment in his comments that something more explicitly activist-oriented may be more suitable than more teaching with activism as a side-line).

Incidentally, I was at a book launch party for the IPCC AR4 last week, organised by the Tokyo office of CUP. We were treated to the spectacle of a succession of Japanese researchers basically telling us all about what a wonderful contribution Japan had made to this project. Needless to say, there was no mention of yours truly, cited (along with jules) in 3 chapters and Contributing Author for one, all while employed full-time in a Japanese research institute. I realise that's hardly a big deal and I wouldn't have noticed were it not for the inordinate fuss they made over someone who managed to get his name mentioned on a figure or something. But it did bring it home to me just how much easier it was for us, as complete outsiders to the process, to affect (albeit in a minor way) the outcome of the massive international bureaucratic behemoth that is the IPCC, than it is to have any influence in the institute where we are nominally "Senior Researchers".

Jules was also invited to attend this event (by a senior manager at FRCGC who helped organise it) "as a researcher of Hadley". Yes, after 6 years here, we are still just visiting researchers to some. She didn't have the heart to tell him that she'd only ever been to the Hadley Centre about twice.

More doom and gloom

Interesting to see Nature jumping on the no job prospects for PhDs and postdocs bandwagon (via Pharyngula). (Disclaimer - I haven't yet read the Nature article - no access at home - but I'm assuming that it draws the same obvious conclusion from the statistics.) Not so long ago their "jobs editor" Paul Smaglik was having a go at some anonymous blogging post-doc for daring to suggest that anything was less than perfect in their work life. But it is of course blindingly obvious that if every tenured staff member mentors on average even a single PhD student at a time, them the overwhelming majority of these PhDs will not subsequently go on to get tenured positions in academia.

Of course one can legitimately argue that it is fine for the vast majority of PhDs to not get academic jobs (and for a large majority of postdocs to never land a tenured position) - so long as they are aware of the situation and walk into it with eyes open, that's OK. But that hardly justifies the sort of situation where people complain about (and are reported uncritically on) the "shortage" of qualified staff simply because they "only" get 30 applicants per post rather than 75!

More whinging from the CBI

At first glance, I thought this was a sign that the CBI was actually considering putting their money where their mouths are (albeit in a feeble manner), by offering minuscule bursaries to science students. But no, it's cheaper to lobby the Govt for it than to actually dip their hands into their own pockets.

As for "struggling to fill their posts", "struggling to fill their pockets on the backs of underpaid and exploited workers" would be more like it. "Only" 30 applicants per job? My heart bleeds. If their research and development is only viable on the premise of a never-ending supply of lab fodder desperately scrabbling for the scraps on offer then maybe we wouldn't miss them so much. Just how many people do they actually want the Govt to train (at vast expense) for each job on offer?

There's a simple solution in the free market that the CBI claim to believe in: PAY MORE MONEY, MORONS! I don't really mean purely "more money", rather a more general "better conditions" - but of course advocates of Stern think that everything can be reduced to cash :-). Sorry to shout, but it really gets my goat to hear these fat cats, who are sitting pretty at the top of the capitalist pyramid, desperately struggling to stick their snouts in the socialist trough of Govt subsidies with the intention of propping up their businesses with a never-ending supply of compliant and desperate wage slaves.

I rather liked this comment (found via the Adam Smith Institute blog, who I see has linked to my previous post):

You’re a well compensated, shiny-suited male executive spending a week at a conference in Amsterdam. In the evenings you experience a “shortage” of women willing to sleep with you. How do you solve this problem? Do you perhaps write to your MP demanding that the EU offer grants to nubile Ukranian girls to migrate to brothels in western Europe?

Note that the author is an ex-scientist following the abrupt closure of his lab, so may just possibly be even more bitter and twisted than me (note to self: must try harder).

Math class really is tough!

Obviously Barbie was just anticipating the latest research :-)

However, NewScientist is still well behind the times, bleating recently that:

The most urgent problem for UK science is the shortage of enthusiastic new recruits. The proportion of teenagers choosing to study physics at ages 16 and 18 is in free fall. The situation in engineering and maths is little better and in chemistry things are starting to decline too. Just about everyone bar the government accepts that the root cause is a shortage of schoolteachers qualified in these subjects to inspire pupils. There will be no solution until this is officially accepted...

The "shortage of new recruits" is, I assert, merely the free market speaking: achieving a useful level of skill in scientific subjects is hard, and those who are capable of it can get much greater rewards (certainly in financial terms) elsewhere. Note that even with the current supposedly "hard" science A-Levels, some universities have switched to 4 years rather than 3 for their degree courses, at least for people who are considering research.

I find it disturbing that people can seriously propose that all we need is smooth-talking teachers to con pupils into a low-paid and insecure job with stringent intellectual demands, severe competition for jobs and high failure rate, when they would be substantially better off elsewhere. As I've mentioned before, an average estate agent in the UK earns 50% more than a scientist, and if you want to consider careers with perhaps more comparable intellectual demands, an average GP earns about 3 times as much, and has a secure job for life too. I'm not saying that these people aren't worth their salaries, but for anyone who is considering becoming a scientist, and who thinks that they might want to buy a house (say) at some point in their adult lives, bear in mind that this is the sort of financial competition you'll be up against.

Of course I should acknowledge that there are good things about being a scientist, especially for the eccentrics and independently-monied :-) But for normal people, it's a rather poor choice, and I'd rather see people talking openly about the real problems than papering over the cracks. Yet more innocent post-doc fodder is most certainly not what we need.

"Women, and more severely challenged persons"

Spotted in an advert in NewScientist:

"Women are therefore especially encouraged to apply. The Max Planck Society also wishes to employ more severely challenged persons..."

At least they didn't say "... even more severely challenged persons (if such a thing exists)..." :-)

Too Many Couples?

I found this odd article via some blog or other. The anonymous author seems to have a bee in his bonnet about couples getting jobs in academia, and invents a number of of bizarre and implausible excuses to back up his prejudice.

I'll start off by agreeing with one point he makes - it is rather silly for a candidate to keep quiet on the subject up to the point at which a job offer is made, only then to spring the surprise "I need a job for my spouse too". That just wastes everyone's time in the case when a suitable second position is impossible. It may be illegal for interviewers to ask (in some countries: probably not Japan) but that doesn't mean the candidate can't mention it themselves. We have certainly always been upfront about our position: it may have put some people off, but (as I've mentioned before) I think others have seen the obvious benefits of capturing a couple who are likely to settle relatively easily and who are not liable to suddenly get up and leave due to external circumstances To be fair, the author does mention this one point in favour of couples - at least in the particular case where a department has had an excessively high turnover of staff.

On the other hand, given the prejudice the writer shows, maybe candidates feel justified in waiting until they have shown themselves to be the best, before giving the panel a reason to reject them out of hand.

Apparently the biggest reason for not hiring a couple is that he cannot tell whether they will vote together on departmental decisions. If they agree, then their 2 votes carry more weight than one person. Well, they are two people, so that's obvious enough. One could equally argue that if they disagree, then the committee does not benefit from their judgement and they might as well not be there. The author doesn't explain how this is any different from any other random pair of faculty members. I guess in his world view all faculty members are paragons of objective judgement, unless they fall under the spell of a wicked spouse, at which point they lose their critical faculties and do what they are told. Maybe the stupid spouse is told what to do by the clever one - an advantage that other stupid faculty members don't have. Maybe, just maybe, some rational discussion actually results in them agreeing, because the accumulated evidence of their joint experiences supports a particular decision. Rational discussion? Who'd've thunk it?

Better still, another reason for not employing a couple is that they cannot be trusted to keep secrets from each other. I suppose if your authority depends on mushroom management techniques (and although Jamstec has raised this approach to levels I had never imagined possible, it is hardly unheard of in the west), then the concept of staff actually sharing information might well represent a threat.

He emphasises how anyone stupid enough to marry someone in the same field has only brought their troubles on themselves, so they should just put up with whatever they are offered. Well, it's a free market and good candidates can be just as picky as good employers. He might as well have simply advised people to not marry academics at all - which I wouldn't have found grounds to disagree with, what with the low salary and job insecurity etc (#include std.whinge). But that's a general point that goes beyond couples in academia.

He claims that small departments may not be able to function properly with even a single couple, and even a large one won't cope with 3. The number of scientist couples of my acquaintance is very low (I know of a handful by reputation), so I ask if anyone can back up that serious allegation with any specific cases. As far as I can tell, the couples usually make a strong contribution, although whether their relationship actually has a substantial role to play in that is not clear. I would however guess it is usually more of a help than a hindrance, eg in terms of helping effective collaboration and flexibility in coping with workplace pressures.

Maybe I'm reading a bit too much between the lines, but I get the impression of an old middle-class white man who rather likes the old middle-class white man's club that is academia, and who rather wishes that inconvenient things like wives and diversity and lives outside of work didn't interfere with his collegial life. Tough luck, buddy. It's not 1950 any more.

The Apprentice

As it happens, I saw one episode of the recent series while in Belgium, and it seemed to consist of nasty poseurs taking taxis around London, desperately selling gimmicky overpriced tat to unwilling shop managers. If that is business, they can keep it. But this post isn't about the TV program, or even about her. There is of course a climate science connection due to her recently terminated employment at the Met Office. Actually, as jules pointed out, if canoodling with a married colleague in a field is beyond the pale there, then we'll have to cross them off our list of possible future career moves :-) Come to that, if canoodling with a colleague who is married to someone else is beyond the pale at scientific institutes in general, then there are a whole lot of scientists who should be worried right now - such behaviour is probably more the rule than the exception, judging from the tip of the iceberg that I know about.... Interestingly, the only other other probationary sacking that I recall from my time in the UK was also a youngish (for her position) uppity female. While I will not criticise that decision in any way (nor the Apprentice case about which I probably know even less than those who have read the papers carefully), I can't help but think that youngish uppity females are, by their mere existence and irrespective of their behaviour, more likely to upset the clubby middle-aged grey men who run British science, than some upstanding young chap who may have gone a bit off the rails, but, you know, he's one of us really, and we should probably give him a second chance...

Oops. I said I wasn't going to write about that apprentice. The "apprentice" I'm more interested in is right now the one I'm trying to employ. (Of course using the term "apprentice" probably sounds a bit conceited of me - I'm really expecting that the new person will make a substantial contribution in their own right. But it segues nicely...). Since the process is still ongoing I'm certainly not going to say anything specific about the candidates, but we had several strong applications and in fact I'm confident that any of the shortlisted ones could do the job well. I advertised on the met-jobs mailing list which is a fabulous service - obviously it's widely circulated, and it's also free. I also found out that Nature had a special offer to waive its usual $300 fee, so I tried them too. Recently I got an email from them asking me if I wanted to pay for an extension to their advert - they told me that the page had had 102 reads and no applications. Thanks but no thanks! Perhaps they are more appropriate for bio/chemistry stuff. Through the met-jobs list we got about 20 applications from around 10 countries, at least half of which were pretty decent, and invited the top 4 for interviews here. Without having any official set procedure to follow, I asked each of them to give a seminar on their work, then after lunch (with some of the group members) we had a rather informal interview. I can't speak for the visitors, but from our point of view the process seemed to go pretty smoothly and we certainly enjoyed it. Conveniently, the most senior people here were all busy and could not attend, which stopped it turning into a horribly formal and stilted set-piece. Our own interviews here were a pretty nasty experience, which consisted of a short presentation to a stony-faced and silent panel, followed by some questions on the science and then abruptly "you can go now". No opportunity for discussion, or for us to ask any questions, because we are just lowly worms who should be grateful to accept any crumbs that they deign to drop for us. At least that's how it felt. It wouldn't have been out of place on a John Cleese "How not to manage" training video.

New visa plans for Japan?

There are some bizarre proposals doing the rounds for changing the visa system in Japan. The JT writes about them here. The background is that Japan is short of workers, due to the extraordinarily low birthrate over recent decades. There has also been some scandal concerning the "foreign trainee" system, under which foreign labour is brought here ostensibly under the guise of international development, but in reality as little more than slaves on a fraction of the standard minimum wage. So there is some political impetus for change.

From my point of view as a scientist, both of the proposals outlined in the JT are idiotic. In fact, the first (where foreigners will need to take Japanese language exams before even getting a visa) is so absurd that it can only be explained as a thinly-veiled attempt to return to the good old days of "sakoku", when Japan isolated itself from outside influences for 200 years. I think one could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of foreign scientists who would choose to spend several years learning Japanese (while in their home country) just on the off-chance that they might subsequently get an insecure job here.

The best that one could say about the second option (widely-available visas, but with a fixed 3 year limit) is that for many people it is actually not much worse than the present situation. The vast majority of scientific visitors here are basically young post-docs coming for a change of scene, and for them there would be no real change. Indeed a fixed limit might benefit some of them as it would stop them drifting into dead-end jobs with no career prospects. However it would also completely eliminate any prospect of successful senior scientists coming here. Further, it would eliminate all real immigration, since to takes 10 years to get permanent residency rights. Way to solve the population problem guys!

These problems are blindingly obvious and I have to hope that someone within the Japanese Govt will be able to work this much out. So I don't expect any of these proposals to actually come into effect in their current form - perhaps they could augment the existing setup, but surely not replace it.

Japanese system stifles foreign scientific talent | The Japan Times Online

There's a wonderfully cynical and negative article here about the situation for foreign scientists in Japan. I don't by any means think the author is wrong, but he may be generalising a little too broadly based on his own (and presumably his acquaintances') experiences. Typical comment:

However, despite the government's statements to the contrary, many government initiatives actively prevent the integration of foreign scientists into the Japanese research and university environments.

And he goes on to grumble about the revolving door syndrome and exclusion of non-Japanese researchers from the decision-making process or indeed any reasonable career structure.

There's no specific government initiative preventing my integration, at least none that I know about. I'm employed on the same basis as my Japanese colleagues - however, this was achieved by dramatically downgrading their status, career prospects and job security, rather than raising the foreigners to the standards that most Japanese scientists can (at least could, until recently) expect. I've not even got any complaints about the salary, although I am suspicious of the extent to which pay scales are kept secret from us.

What exclusion there is, is generally based around the language barrier (at least, that's what they say). In the view of the management, the benefits of speaking in Japanese when planning and running their projects outweighs the "loss" of my (and almost all other foreigners') input. More on that in a subsequent post, perhaps...obviously it is a decision they are entitled to make. Of course you could also turn it round and say that in my view the benefits of being able to speak (and read and write!) Japanese do not justify the massive investment of time and effort that would be required to achieve sufficient fluency. I might get there slowly...but it's hard to remain motivated. It's not like I need it to do my research or to communicate with people who actually want to communicate with me.

To be honest, I don't know how much the language barrier is a real reason versus being used as a convenient excuse. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that even after this hoop is jumped, there is still no promotion pathway for foreigners. And frankly, given what I've seen of Japanese management, I wouldn't much want to be part of it. For now I can get on with my research relatively unimpeded, and it's not like the rest of the world doesn't have its own problems.

McJobs

So McDonald's is trying to get the OED to change its definition of a McJob.

Apparently, the existing OED definition is

"an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects".

Mirriam-Webster had

"low-paying and dead-end work"

I'm not a huge fan of their food, but agree with McDonald's - it's an unreasonable slur to link their name with overworked underpaid slave labour with no prospects.

After all, we already have a perfectly good word for this: a post-doc.

EGU poster

It's just the same old same old for next week's EGU meeting in Vienna. If I'd managed to get it published anywhere I'd have moved on to something else, but although this seems to have been dragging on pretty much for ever, only a handful of people have actually seen it so far (mostly at last summer's workshop) and it's far from clear how widely accepted it is. So I'll give it one last airing and see if it generates any reaction...

Jules tells me I should mention her poster, and also this one, which was originally submitted as a rather speculative offer to describe some not-yet-done work, and which has basically degenerated into a glorified advert (see also here) for someone to come and do it - anyone want to visit to Japan for a few years?

Please don't find any typos. Or if you do, don't tell me :-)

Sakura

Had to go to Tokyo yesterday and it was a lovely warm sunny day, so I thought I'd make a day of it. After a morning in the big new(ish) Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, I found a nice Thai restaurant (The Siam) that someone had recommended in Ginza (all you can eat lunch buffet, ¥1,150) and then walked up though the Imperial Palace garden, out of the north gate:


and through Kitanomaru garden to the (in)famous Yasukuni Jinja where all Japan's war dead (including, controversially, all those convicted of war crimes) are enshrined:


Perhaps fortunately, I didn't have time for the war museum ("War is a really tragic thing to happen, but it was necessary in order for us to protect the independence of Japan and to prosper together with our Asian neighbors.") but the cherry blossom was in a fine state. The excuse for the trip was a visit to the European Embassy in Japan (OK, technically it's not an embassy, just some sort of delegation). Someone from the EU Commission has decided to set up a network for European researchers in Japan, so they were holding a workshop to ask us researchers what we wanted the network to be for. If you're not a bit bemused by that I suggest you read it again! It was a bit surreal at first and reminded me of an ill-fated job interview of many years back, which went thusly:

Q: Why do you think you have the skills and experience for this job?
A: Why did you invite me for interview?

Luckily, this time (in contrast to the interview) things went uphill from there. There is already a similar network in the USA (ERA-link) and I can see a Japanese version being useful eg in respect of publicising funding and career opportunities, maybe support for recent emigrants. It should be up and running by around the end of the year. It was interesting to meet a range of European researchers too, although TBH the experience of a western scientist in Japan is so stereotyped that it was almost like standing in a hall of mirrors. I guess there's some benefit in just knowing that you aren't alone in the twilight zone :-)

5 more years...

Jules says I should blog the whole sorry saga of the last few months, but I wouldn't want to wash too much dirty laundry in public, so you will have to make do with the heavily edited version.

The bottom line is that we've been offered new 5 year contracts, so in that sense it's all ended up as well as could have been expected. Moreover, we've got promises of staff being "encouraged" to work with us on probabilistic prediction, and enough of a budget not only to hire one more person specifically for that task us but also to pay for things like travel expenses (don't worry, I'll offset it). We've even been promoted, sort of (it's really just a time-served thing, but at least they didn't try to install us on the bottom rung of the ladder in the new system). The fact that we don't yet know what salaries we will be offered in our new jobs - less than a month from now - is a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. There were many times over the past few months when such a positive outcome looked rather unlikely...in fact we were seriously thinking of leaving by the time they started to come through with the goods.

Things were complicated by the fact that our contract renewal happened to coincide with both the renewal of the lab's own 5 year strategy (and therefore the planning of major research projects), and the introduction of the new personnel system (which I've mentioned before). It's still not entirely clear how this is going to work out. In fact at the last meeting we had about it, I took great pleasure in pointing out to the Director that the perpetual contract system here is a significant factor in perpetuating the disfunctional management of the lab, and he didn't disagree. No doubt the disfunctional management will be slated again in the forthcoming 5-yearly review of the lab as it was last time, but this assessment process seems to be completely toothless and I'm sure that its recommendations will be blatantly ignored as they were before. Interestingly, at this same recent meeting (and with roughly 20 staff as witnesses), the Director explicitly assured us that there were no circumstances in which he would be empowered to refuse the contract renewal of any scientist in the top rank (which means one promotion above us). Of course this verbal assurance has no legal value whatsoever - I'll wait until I see it written down before believing it - but it may indicate a willingness to moderate the worst excesses of the system. Even so, 18 years to tenure is still crazy. My experience is that once labs get a taste for introducing new systems, they repeat the process at ever-increasing frequency so we may see everything changed again anyway.

We've also been told that in order to progress to the top grade, we need to become competently fluent in Japanese. That doesn't seem an unreasonable requirement in order to be able to play a full role in the management of the lab, and there would certainly be plenty of Japanese paperwork to deal with. Whether or not we would actually want to get involved at that level is far from certain, but I'd rather have this requirement clearly made in an up-front manner, than have it pulled out of a hat unexpectedly at same future point when it is too late to do anything about it. So long as they don't decide to sack us for being "too Japanese" (don't laugh, this sort of treatment is far from exceptional) I'll be happy to continue my painful struggles to learn more of the language. Anyway, the time scale for this hypothetical future promotion is probably another 10 years and although life is still pleasant enough here that's a long way off.

"The investigation" on Stern

There's a BBC Radio4 programme on Thursday evening (8pm GMT) concerning the Stern Review, from the same team who brought us "Overselling Climate Change". Here's a longer article about it. Should be worth a listen - especially as I've been assured that my contribution ended up on the cutting room floor :-)

Then the following week they will ask why doctors need to earn about three times as much as scientists, not that they put it in exactly those terms. Of course I already know the answer to that one: we're in it for the love of the job and to help humanity, they do it to pay for the golf and skiing habit.

Update

So, I slept through my 5am alarm :-) and listened again instead. A fair chunk of it was the same old stuff that has already been done to death on the blogosphere, but they managed to find some interesting new (to me) points of view and it was well put together, so even those of you who are thoroughly bored by the whole subject should find it worth listening to anyway. Stoat is justifiably proud of his contribution: "for those of you with black and white radios, the red line is beside the orange one."

Tenure denied

Before the vultures start circling, the headline isn't specific to me. Rather, this post is about JAMSTEC's new employment system, which is being introduced from April. It's easy enough to summarise the new tenure system: there isn't any. There isn't any tenure, that is. There's plenty of system, about 70 pages of it in close-written Japanese, with no English translation yet (ever?). The motivation seems to go as follows: there is too much dead weight in the universities with tenured professors who do no work, and anyway science is supposed to be an insecure career (yes, really, this was said). So the solution is that we (within JAMSTEC) will all have contracts of up to 5 years in length, which can be renewed or not at the whim of our bosses.

In practice, it actually seems rather similar to the present system at FRCGC (which was set up as a new institute 10 years ago without too much thought as to how it was actually going to work), although that was de facto and ad hoc, and this is now being formalised and rolled out to all the other labs. In theory there is something roughly touted as "tenure track" which seems to be modelled on the NCAR system. In our version of this there are 4 grades starting from post-doc, the promotion from each is a one shot "up or out" decision and even after reaching the highest level, you still only get renewable contracts and no-one seems to have much of an idea how these will be reviewed (of course as it's a new system, no-one seems to know how any of the decisions will be made - at least, they have not been able to tell us yet). In parallel, there will be some staff who just have fixed 5 year (or less) non-renewable contracts, but (AIUI) people in these positions can apply for a "new job" at the end of their term anyway (which in fact jules and I both did a couple of months ago, as we had reached the end of our initial 5 years), and as a result it doesn't seem that the process for promotion and renewal on the "tenure track" will be materially different from that of applying for a "new job" on the "contract staff" track. It is yet to be decided who will be assigned to each track, and why.

I have tried to tell the powers that be that if they want to turn JAMSTEC into NCAR, it will take a lot more than introducing (or at least ossifying) a shitty employment system. I don't expect anyone to listen, of course - if they had wanted the opinions of the staff, they would presumably have asked us at the outset rather than merely telling us after it had been decided - but the UK generally abandoned its experiment with widespread term-limited contracts some time ago. By the time we left our previous jobs, NERC had adopted a system of one term-limited contract to start with followed by an open-ended one at the first renewal, and I think now some posts may even be open-ended from the start. There is also a big new fellowship scheme for the universities whereby you get to transfer to an open-ended lectureship after ~5 years.

I wonder how long it will take for JAMSTEC to realise the mistake it is making. Actually, as has been mentioned in the comments previously, it is primarily a technology-based organisation with little background in science, so maybe this is a deliberate plan to keep us in our place.

Two-body situations

There's been a brief flurry of posts about dual career scientist couples (well, here and here at least, and see also this thread). One thing that struck me was that it seems to be mostly the female halves of the couples are writing about this issue, not the male ones. So even though our situation isn't particularly exciting or noteworthy, I thought I'd add a few thoughts from my perspective.

Actually, I'm not entirely convinced it is such a unique experience for scientists (or even academics). Dual career couples are pretty much the rule rather than exception these days (except perhaps in Japan) and the need to compromise and negotiate on career and personal goals must be rather similar in all cases. But I suppose scientists are generally expected to move fairly often, and suitable jobs are probably more sparsely located than for say two school teachers, lawyers, doctors or any combination thereof. Therefore, scientists probably come up against this issue more than most.

The foundation of our solution is to work in the same field. Both of us were happy enough to move straight out of our PhD specialities (maths and astrophysics respectively) and do something a bit more useful. Our working hypothesis is that there's a better chance of finding two jobs in the same lab than finding two labs in the same location with wildly different foci. The first situation also gives employers the opportunity to make things happen in a way that the second does not. We've not worked in universities (except me briefly) but rather research council labs in the UK and the equivalent in Japan. It's possible that they tend to be more willing and able to accomodate than university departments, with greater emphasis on long-term employment and less on throughput of short-term postdocs.

Anyway, our experience is that our labs have always been helpful. Immediately after graduating, we weren't sure how things would work out and ended up in a long-distance situation but soon decided it was not for us. When I told my boss I was planning to leave, and why, the department director's immediate reaction was to ask for jules' CV to see if there was any way of getting her to join me rather than vice versa. We didn't take him up on it as I'd already judged that the writing was on the wall for my lab (after several rounds of redundancies it finally closed last year). At the same time, jules's boss was making efforts to find me a post at her place. On a couple of subsequent occasions when one of us has been a bit vulnerable in our positions (to put it euphemistically), the desire of the other's boss to keep their staff member in post has motivated management to solve the problems (which were essentially political, not performance-related in each case).

My impression is that in the UK at least, employers have as much of a problem finding and retaining decent staff as scientists have in finding jobs, so they can see the benefits of capturing 2 people at once and being able to keep them. If you are one in a gazillion indistinguishable post-docs hoping to work as a lab slave for ~18 months before moving elsewhere then I guess you might not have much leverage.

I can think of 3 couples in climate science, all 6 of who are fairly prominent although in each case I think it's fair to say the man has a higher profile (possibly, the females have taken on the bulk of childcare responsibilities, I don't know them personally). I'm sure there are plenty more I don't know about, especially since name-changing is relatively rare these days. Here's an article which mentions one of the pairs, in fact.

One thing that surprised me about the linked posts at the top is the number of times one person seems to have applied for a job and only later started to worry about what to do as a couple. Maybe that's fair enough if you aren't really sure whether you intend to stay together, or if one person's career is somewhat secondary (eg due to childcare responsibilities), but it's not for us. Given the high drop-out rate of scientific careers, I suppose it might be arguable that following a famous spouse around is a decent strategy - at least you'll have someone putting their weight about to get you a job. Anyway, we got married as soon as the question of joint career decisions came up (when I left my first job) and subsequently have not even applied for anything that wouldn't have at least a strong possibility of two jobs. As a result I guess we might not have climbed the greasy pole quite as high and as fast as we could have were we single. On the other hand, I reckon it's been more fun this way. There are advantages in combining two sets of office gossip, being able to attend two different meetings simultaneously (and only having to put up with to half as much bureaucratic guff) while quickly picking up the gist afterwards, and conference travelling is a whole lot more fun. Hence my post title - I wouldn't describe it as a problem!