Impact!!!

I thought maybe a Bruce Willis style title was needed. Well, if I’d written “A report on an RCUK workshop I attended concerning possible adjustments to the Pathways to Impact process” its just possible there might not have been so many click-throughs. So. Anyhoo. Some things surprised me and some didn’t…

(1) Pretty much everybody (including me) agreed that the Impact thing is in general a Good Thing, but only if it avoids degenerating into a box ticking mechanical exercise. Unfortunately this is a Big If, as we all know.

(2) Also everybody seemed to agree it should work by carrot and not by stick, and that while it should generally be important to the community as a whole, it doesn’t have to apply equally to every single separate individual. Many but maybe not all of us agreed that this sort of thing works best if pursued by talented individuals who are actually keen on it, and helped by departmentally based tech-transfer specialists.

(3) There were many other detailed concerns and confusions, but I am happy to report that I am left with the impression that STFC is actually doing this much more sanely than the rest.  Our community’s impact statements are generally of a high standard. They are scored by specialists in the office, not by academic referees. They are averaged over groups, and averaged over time. They are graded and known to count in getting your research funding, but only along with many other known criteria. On the other hand, there are  distinct pots of competitive money for impact activity, which provides the carrot. All this is, I think, well understood by our community.

By contrast, I heard from other councils/scientists that impact statements are pass/fail, and are often sent back to be re-done; that people find it hard and unrealistic because each separate project needs its own impact plan; but on on the other hand it was unclear whether it actually made any difference, that people didn’t know the rules, and it wasn’t clear where in the “research cycle” it made sense to plan impact. Nearly all these problems evaporate in the context of the consolidated grant system (likewise the old rolling grant system), and dedicated commercialisation and public engagement schemes. Suddenly I understood why the pages of THES were full of people whingeing about Impact, and why this is never astronomers or particle physicists.

Of course, the scary thing is that BIS/RCUK being the way it is, there is a distinct danger that STFC will be forced into line to be more like everybody else. Gird your loins. You don’t want this.

(4) Maybe the least surprising thing… the air was thick with gobbledegook. I hate to be tribal but … glancing round the room I could tell who had a physical sciences background by the grimaces whenever anybody said we had to “interrogate the challenges” or “discuss the issue around X”, or when it was claimed that the issue was that  “we were seeing a conceptual problem with linearity” and so on.  If you swallow your annoyance and let these kind of phrases swim round your head for a bit, you can usually see what people are getting at. Usually.

(5) Andy Parker, currently Head of the Cavendish, grabbed an opportunity to make a nice wee speechette. Impact is fine – it has to be good gently encouraging scientists to be relevant. But the real problem with UK PLC is that Big Finance does not invest in technology. The City only thinks about money in abstract. I guess UK industry is a bit unadventurous too, but the real problem is the Absence of Angels.

 

Making an impact

As the nervousness about the cuts-that-are-yet-to-come slowly builds, an interesting debate has been developing during the last week. First there was a Nature News article that argued that scientists should engage more fully with the “impact agenda”, but was sceptical about our ability to accurately or meaningfully quantify our impact. Quantification is an important issue : politicians know we have value for the economy, but how many pound notes do you attach to that value ? Then a big surprise, at least to me : two letters to the Times from a an impressive array of captains of industry, saying “for goodness sake don’t cut science”. Not a bunch of whinging academics note – genuine industrial chieftains. This was followed up by more Times letters the next day, and another well argued piece in the Guardian blog.

Of course, as usual, it is important to stress that just because science and technology gets a thumb up, doesn’t mean the government will pay for astronomy. Our problem is that our economic impact, while large, is mostly indirect  – delivering scientifically literate graduates, attracting kids into science, and inspiring the public. Like the rest of physics we can have a huge impact from producing basic advances in physics, like how nuclear reactions work. Understanding gravity came from worrying about the Moon. But these huge advances are slow to have an effect, and are a benefit to the world, not an advantage to UK PLC. Astronomy can produce technological spin off. Andy Fabian’s recent article for A&G, which you can download from Paul Crowther’s website, has some impressive examples. But its never going to quite be like chemistry or engineering.

Right .. slight digression followed by loop back.

Yesterday we had an excellent talk here from Marek Kukula about how to build a career in public engagement. Marek used to be a quasar researcher, but now he is the Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich . Amongst other things he spoke a little of the history of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Why should the State create such a thing ? It was because accurate positions of the stars mattered for navigation. We are talking trade, war, and sailors’ lives. Not just handy spin off gadgets. Right in the core of the business of the state. We’ve lost that.

The last time that card was played was 1945. A few months back I was at a meeting at Heidelberg. Not as usual at MPI, but another astronomical institute in the centre of Heidelberg, the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI). In modern times it has been a centre of astrometry, producing the FK5 catalogue for instance. Historically, it was the equivalent of the RGO, producing star maps for  the state. But it used to be in Berlin. In 1945 as the Russians approached, the Director made an argument to the government that the ARI was of strategic military importance and should not be allowed to fall into Russian hands. So they were moved to Heidelberg. (Markus Demleitner told me this story on the way to dinner one night – I hope I have it roughly right).

I don’t think that gambit will work in Cameron’s world. But is there a replacement ? Killer rocks in space ? Planetary Defense League anyone ?

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ps some of those newspaper links are behind a paywall and some aren’t…

pps  as an old fashioned chap, I still think that “impact” is a noun by the way, and not a verb. Still, as our American friends say, there is no noun that cannot be verbed.