I was at the funeral, on Tuesday, of the father of the chap who used to sit behind me in 1st Year Chemistry. It was sad, there were weeping grand-children beside stoic parents and lots of hugs but it was alright because The Principal was, at 86, in the fullness of his years. I said to a mourner of my age that it would soon be the turn of our generation. Not a very clever prophecy but last night I heard that Mary Mulvihill had died; and she's much younger than me.
She is being remembered on the Irish Times as a geneticist and Scholar of Trinity College Dublin, as well as being a journalist, author and a founder member of WITS [Women in Science and Technology]. Far more important than being a geneticist, Mary was a generalist. She was interested in much more than a narrow specialism and so would not have been happy following a career in academia where, as the cliché has it, researchers get to know more and more about less and less. She pushed forward a career as a science journalist years before it was a recognisable job in Ireland. You'd hope when developing a novel career path that after some time pushing the bus uphill over the bumps of inertia and round the obstacles of vested interest you'd eventually get to a plateau or some blessed downhill coasting. I suspect that there was precious little coasting for Ms Mulvihill. I've mentioned her on The Blob as one who could have done a far better job reporting science than somebody's cousin because she wrote the book on Irish scientific ingenuity. That book, Ingenious Ireland, was a far better resource for Irish scientists than Wikipedia as I found when writing about Maude Delap.
The future of Ireland as a technological nation [FITNa] depends on
having people out there who can look boldly over the parapet of their
specialisation and talk to people in trenches opposite. Mary showed
that, through desperately hard graft, you could make a career in STEM
outside of academia and Megacorp. That's a role-model for all those
youngsters, boys as well as a girls, who love science but don't fit the
standard model. Pursuing science as a hobby, at the weekend and after work, is difficult. There are only a few niche areas where you can do original research and get it published. Most journals, for example, require an academic address as surety that you are not an off-the-wall space-cadet - especially if you have ideas that rock spaceship science a bit.
In recent years, Mary started Ingenious Ireland walking tours in Dublin. That was a great idea for developing an income-stream from the deep biographical knowledge that she had accumulated researching the book. A few years ago TCD commissioned her to make a map and a series of podcasts about their great men of science but after the first print-run of the map, it was never reprinted, nor was the concept developed; that's a missed opportunity. I had my own go at getting youngsters interested in TCD's contributions to science by making a scavenger hunt of it rather than a guided tour.
There may be only a few niches where outsiders can make genuine contributions to science but for FITNa we need opportunities where youngsters can be sat down in the real world and be encouraged to ask questions about what they see around them. From Tyndall's answer to the question "Why is the sky blue?" to why does hawthorn but not ash fall out of ditches when the wind blows? Reading Ingenious Ireland to see how scientists think is a good place to start.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query fitna. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query fitna. Sort by date Show all posts
Friday, 12 June 2015
Friday, 1 May 2015
Science by Youth
Yesterday I went to my place of work and, from 0930-1430, did not do a
single billable hour for The Institute. I was working instead for the
Future of Ireland as a Technological Nation FITNa. The Institute was
hosting another round of Young Scientist projects from the five
surrounding counties. It was an elimination round, with the winners going forward to a national event and the winner of that going to America to compete with the world. I've done this before in 2014 and 2013,
and the science is not really getting better, not worse either though. Partly this must be
because we are not giving, as far as I can tell, any cross-the-board feedback. It's
harsh and brutal but necessary to tell kids that they could do better.
It serves nobody if you say that a project is very good when it is
clearly underpowered, improperly analysed and the experimental procedure
is poorly designed. These traits are so wide-spread that it would
probably be helpful to write a generic document for How to Win Prizes at
Science Fairs. This year things were quite a bit better in that there
were fewer experiments where the kids surveyed the opinion of a bunch of their pals about something rather than getting down in the long grass and
measuring the thing itself. It's possible to reveal some useful
things by a focused quizzing of your classmates - but you have to have
an interesting question and you need a lot of questionnaires if it is to
mean anything.
Project #1 was like that, but they were asking their pals about the thing they were measuring: how do we perceive colour. Here the science is in the perception, so the only way you can address it is asking epopel what they perceive. What the lads from Avondale Community College had done was print out 10 3x3cm blocks of red and asked their samplees to put them in order of brightness. Their take off is the work of Prof Jay Neitz in Wash U. in the US, which I'm going to have to follow up on later. At first glance they all looked the same but when pushed I could say this was the darkest and this next and so on. They carried out this procedure for pretty much the whole school and then plotted how far people were off the true order. One guy did the task perfectly, and everyone else did less well. But they hadn't asked Visionboy to do the same test a week later to determine if the whole thing was a fluke. It's like me asking the Masters of Immunology to put the following in order of size. If you ask enough people to do this, someone is bound to get the right answer. Heck a bunch of monkeys pointing with a stick would do as well [i.e. badly]. Clearly that idea has a way to go, but I liked their project very much because I could engage with their spokesman in a serious scientific conversation. It's really difficult to work in isolation, so getting their ideas out there can only improve their science. The dialogue helps you articulate your ideas. The brightest and most engaged young man I've encountered this century went to a regular Irish school and wanted to learn. He had to endure a hail of spit-balls and small stones striking the back of his head pretty much continuously as he sat at the front of class doing schoolwork. But for the fact that he was a dedicated cross-country runner who won prizes at local meets, he would have had his scholarly aspirations and his head flushed down the school toilets by the know-nothings.
But in Avondale, which on the face of it is another regular Irish school, science gets done. I was equally impressed by two lads from the same school who had done an ergonomic study to determine the most efficient way to wrastle a sheep into submission so that you can shear it or doctor its feet. The uncle of one of the pair had sustained a back injury and a broken arm when he was thrown over by a particularly feisty ewe built like a block of flats. There's got to be a better way, they figured: not wanting to get whacked themselves probably, th'wimps. Their deliverable is an explanatory leaflet which will help farmers do this ever-recurring task right rather than the way it's always been done. Everyone wins here: fewer trips to A&E, less stressed ewes, faster processing.
Next to them were a trio of girls who are obsessed by loom-bands which are going the rounds at the moment as a handy way of parting younger teens from their money in exchange for a bunch of colourful rubber bands [Advertisement: http://www.loombands.ie/ ] [critique]. But these girls, from Avondale almost needless to say, heard that a key rubberising ingredient in the product is the carcinogen phthalate. Their study involved sampling loom-bands which were EC certified and those, cheaper, which were not. Remarkably (score 10 for enterprise in their teacher) they had all gone down to WIT and ran their samples through a Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry GCMS instrument to measure the concentration of phthalate in certified and rip-off loom-bands!
Next to them, we were back in the world of agriculture. Young chap from farming stock had recently had half the family herd condemned as positive for tuberculosis. It turned out that, these were 'false-positives' but under the rules of the game a false positive is still condemned. Chap reckons that vets habitually gets the spacing of the two injections wrong and this increases the chance that a false positive will result. You can see how easy this might be as you have to make the injections separately into the neck of a cow tossing its head about in the cattle-crush. Accordingly, he's gone to the shop and made a Steampunk machine from a re-purposed silicon-gun and some sheet metal that does both the necessary injections precisely 7cm apart which is the optimum distance. An unintended benefit of this is that the vet can do each cow with one action rather than two, save a couple of minutes per cow and get back in his jeep quicker for the same amount of money. The prototype weighs a kilo and doesn't fit in a normal pocket but that's what prototypes are about. He has field tested it in a blind experiment in a different county and gotten positive feedback. He's also teamed up with a pal who is a whizz at the graphic design and publicity, so they have the CSO and the VP Sales and Marketing, all they need now is some venture capital. I am in awe. These lads go to school in . . . Avondale.
But it's not all Avondale. The best geek-maths talk I has all day was with a young chap who has proved that the 2048 puzzle that was going viral last year in "NP complete". NP-complete is a class of mathematical problems that can be verified easily - in finite time with a suitable computer - but cannot be easily solved. It is a subset of NP-hard problems. NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial time and I couldn't explain it better than wikipedia, so I won't try. If you haven't seen the 2048 puzzle yet, don't go there, that way madness lies. The niftiest aspect of this project, is that it was solved in exactly the same way as Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. He showed that his representation of the algorithm which solves the 2048 puzzle could be mapped onto another problem that was known to be NP-complete; that is a sufficient proof in modern mathematics. This fellow doesn't go to school in Avondale, it must be lonely in St.Mary's CBS in Portlaoise, but not too lonely because our jury short-listed at least one other prize from that school.
FITNa? Looking up!
Project #1 was like that, but they were asking their pals about the thing they were measuring: how do we perceive colour. Here the science is in the perception, so the only way you can address it is asking epopel what they perceive. What the lads from Avondale Community College had done was print out 10 3x3cm blocks of red and asked their samplees to put them in order of brightness. Their take off is the work of Prof Jay Neitz in Wash U. in the US, which I'm going to have to follow up on later. At first glance they all looked the same but when pushed I could say this was the darkest and this next and so on. They carried out this procedure for pretty much the whole school and then plotted how far people were off the true order. One guy did the task perfectly, and everyone else did less well. But they hadn't asked Visionboy to do the same test a week later to determine if the whole thing was a fluke. It's like me asking the Masters of Immunology to put the following in order of size. If you ask enough people to do this, someone is bound to get the right answer. Heck a bunch of monkeys pointing with a stick would do as well [i.e. badly]. Clearly that idea has a way to go, but I liked their project very much because I could engage with their spokesman in a serious scientific conversation. It's really difficult to work in isolation, so getting their ideas out there can only improve their science. The dialogue helps you articulate your ideas. The brightest and most engaged young man I've encountered this century went to a regular Irish school and wanted to learn. He had to endure a hail of spit-balls and small stones striking the back of his head pretty much continuously as he sat at the front of class doing schoolwork. But for the fact that he was a dedicated cross-country runner who won prizes at local meets, he would have had his scholarly aspirations and his head flushed down the school toilets by the know-nothings.
But in Avondale, which on the face of it is another regular Irish school, science gets done. I was equally impressed by two lads from the same school who had done an ergonomic study to determine the most efficient way to wrastle a sheep into submission so that you can shear it or doctor its feet. The uncle of one of the pair had sustained a back injury and a broken arm when he was thrown over by a particularly feisty ewe built like a block of flats. There's got to be a better way, they figured: not wanting to get whacked themselves probably, th'wimps. Their deliverable is an explanatory leaflet which will help farmers do this ever-recurring task right rather than the way it's always been done. Everyone wins here: fewer trips to A&E, less stressed ewes, faster processing.
Next to them were a trio of girls who are obsessed by loom-bands which are going the rounds at the moment as a handy way of parting younger teens from their money in exchange for a bunch of colourful rubber bands [Advertisement: http://www.loombands.ie/ ] [critique]. But these girls, from Avondale almost needless to say, heard that a key rubberising ingredient in the product is the carcinogen phthalate. Their study involved sampling loom-bands which were EC certified and those, cheaper, which were not. Remarkably (score 10 for enterprise in their teacher) they had all gone down to WIT and ran their samples through a Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry GCMS instrument to measure the concentration of phthalate in certified and rip-off loom-bands!
Next to them, we were back in the world of agriculture. Young chap from farming stock had recently had half the family herd condemned as positive for tuberculosis. It turned out that, these were 'false-positives' but under the rules of the game a false positive is still condemned. Chap reckons that vets habitually gets the spacing of the two injections wrong and this increases the chance that a false positive will result. You can see how easy this might be as you have to make the injections separately into the neck of a cow tossing its head about in the cattle-crush. Accordingly, he's gone to the shop and made a Steampunk machine from a re-purposed silicon-gun and some sheet metal that does both the necessary injections precisely 7cm apart which is the optimum distance. An unintended benefit of this is that the vet can do each cow with one action rather than two, save a couple of minutes per cow and get back in his jeep quicker for the same amount of money. The prototype weighs a kilo and doesn't fit in a normal pocket but that's what prototypes are about. He has field tested it in a blind experiment in a different county and gotten positive feedback. He's also teamed up with a pal who is a whizz at the graphic design and publicity, so they have the CSO and the VP Sales and Marketing, all they need now is some venture capital. I am in awe. These lads go to school in . . . Avondale.
But it's not all Avondale. The best geek-maths talk I has all day was with a young chap who has proved that the 2048 puzzle that was going viral last year in "NP complete". NP-complete is a class of mathematical problems that can be verified easily - in finite time with a suitable computer - but cannot be easily solved. It is a subset of NP-hard problems. NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial time and I couldn't explain it better than wikipedia, so I won't try. If you haven't seen the 2048 puzzle yet, don't go there, that way madness lies. The niftiest aspect of this project, is that it was solved in exactly the same way as Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. He showed that his representation of the algorithm which solves the 2048 puzzle could be mapped onto another problem that was known to be NP-complete; that is a sufficient proof in modern mathematics. This fellow doesn't go to school in Avondale, it must be lonely in St.Mary's CBS in Portlaoise, but not too lonely because our jury short-listed at least one other prize from that school.
FITNa? Looking up!
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
In the lime-light
For the last several years a student from The Institute has been given a prize by Clogrennane Lime which operates just down the road at the edge of the Castlecomer Plateau near the evocatively named Bilboa. Of course it's not just any student who gets the cert&cheque but whoever does the best analytical project in 3rd year and stays on to finish up in 4th year. Today the award was presented by Joe Connolly, Quality Control Manager from the company and graduate of The Institute. He carries a lot of other portfolios as well, Clogrennane being a small, dynamic and growing company. One reason for a modest award ceremony is to bring all our chemistry stream students (and others, too) together to celebrate the success of one of their number. But another is to use that occasion to show-by-example that even an 'unfocused' student can make good with the right support.
Joe left school and dropped out of NUIM after failing an element of his first year assessment. He then spent 2 years in a meat-factory before realising that, good as he was at cutting sheep-carcases, he could cut a better dash back in college. His return to education was diluted by drink and good times and he failed 2nd year and had to repeat it. But he was given the opportunity to do something real by landing, with the help of staff at The Insititute, a work-placement at Clogrennane. Working in the summer and winter vacations, and clearly being an asset at the plant, a self-described waster metamorphosed himself into a first class honours graduate with a job and a shining future. Brilliant! That's a story which is repeated time-and-again in the IT sector. People are given a second chance: if they failed to shine in the artificial world of school-education, if they tried some career and found it was a bad choice. Often these people are a good pair of hands: the people on whom the future of Ireland as a technological nation (FITNA) depends.
Joe Connolly also told us a story about how he had a crucial insight into the problem of increasing the solubility of one of their products while taking a break from several days of intensive experimentation and discussion. Thinking, trying, testing, bust ... thinking, trying, testing, bust. Tea-break, Ah-HA. I can't tell you the details lest that intellectual property gets back to the competition. It was as good a description of true creativity in science as anything told about Poincaré or Hamilton or Barbara McClintock. No Nobel or immortal fame for young Joe, but a clear item on the bottom line for the company; more people employed (including Joe) for longer; better product produced more efficiently; happier customers and a better world. In a life-time of science, I've had a handful of good, original ideas, and none of them have had such an immediate pay-off for society.
Joe left school and dropped out of NUIM after failing an element of his first year assessment. He then spent 2 years in a meat-factory before realising that, good as he was at cutting sheep-carcases, he could cut a better dash back in college. His return to education was diluted by drink and good times and he failed 2nd year and had to repeat it. But he was given the opportunity to do something real by landing, with the help of staff at The Insititute, a work-placement at Clogrennane. Working in the summer and winter vacations, and clearly being an asset at the plant, a self-described waster metamorphosed himself into a first class honours graduate with a job and a shining future. Brilliant! That's a story which is repeated time-and-again in the IT sector. People are given a second chance: if they failed to shine in the artificial world of school-education, if they tried some career and found it was a bad choice. Often these people are a good pair of hands: the people on whom the future of Ireland as a technological nation (FITNA) depends.
Joe Connolly also told us a story about how he had a crucial insight into the problem of increasing the solubility of one of their products while taking a break from several days of intensive experimentation and discussion. Thinking, trying, testing, bust ... thinking, trying, testing, bust. Tea-break, Ah-HA. I can't tell you the details lest that intellectual property gets back to the competition. It was as good a description of true creativity in science as anything told about Poincaré or Hamilton or Barbara McClintock. No Nobel or immortal fame for young Joe, but a clear item on the bottom line for the company; more people employed (including Joe) for longer; better product produced more efficiently; happier customers and a better world. In a life-time of science, I've had a handful of good, original ideas, and none of them have had such an immediate pay-off for society.
Tuesday, 25 October 2016
Here come the widders
Friday was just amazing - I got a free lunch! One of my colleagues at The Institute had arranged to bring a visiting speaker to address our students at noon, which was great good timing for me because I now have maths and stats classes all Friday morning. Noon on Friday also works well because there are parallel classes for 1st Year Biology [to make up the numbers and enthusiasm] and 4th Year Molecular Biology and Immunology [who might know something]. Last week's guest speaker was Michel Dugon from NUIG who is mad about the spiders. I have asserted before that Des Higgins knows more than anybody else about the taxonomy of Irish spiders but I might have to qualify that now.
Dugon is one of those classical evolutionary biologists who is happiest out in the field. I'm an evolutionary biologist too, but I function better in my head than on my knees in the grass like Louis Agassiz. How do you put order on your fascination by the living world so that, just maybe, you can earn a living doing what you love? One avenue is to focus on a small area of the biosphere until you know more about it than anyone else and then convince a highly critical group pf competing professionals that your research proposals are a) interesting and b) possible in a specified time-frame and for a specified amount of money. For maybe 50 years before 2000, that was all that was required because nobody was confident that they knew where the neatest ideas, the niftiest techniques, the very future were going to spring from. Since about 1990 [yes there is some overlap] small minded nobodies have decided that research will only be funded if it has 'utility'. If, in other words, there was a third criterion c) likely to pay back on the tax-payers' investment. This wrecks my head with its stupidity because x) nobody knows where the truly original work will spring from y) if it's very likely to give pay-back in 5 years it's not science, it's development and multi-national Megacorp will be happy to pay for it. The Future of Ireland as a technological nation FITNa depends on the politicians taking a risk; we cannot compete with the long pockets in the US, UK and BRD if we just do same-old same-old.
Dr Dugon is taking a plunge that a recently introduced, and so convenient for sampling, species of poisonous spider may hold the key to innovative treatments for cancer and infectious disease. Same thing really if you buy into the all cancers and many autoimmune diseases are triggered by viruses idea. The interesting interloper is Steatoda nobilis [R about 2x life-size with characteristic 'skull-like' marks on its addomen], aka the false widow. Its common name hinges on its superficial similarity to its relative the black widow Latrodectus spp. spiders which are considerably more toxic than Steatoda. Nevertheless, the false widow will give you a painful bite if you annoy it. S. nobilis is probably native to Madeira and/or the Canaries and was first recorded in England in 1879 where it retained a toehold in places where it was warm enough year-round; i.e. mostly in towns and cities. In the last few years of the last century, perhaps triggered by a succession of mild winters [arrrgh: Global Warming brings on the Killer Spiders . . . not], this small [about 1 cm from leg to opposite leg] arachnid hitched a ride across the Irish Sea and was identified 1997 in Dublin and its suburbs. Since then it has spread to pretty much every county where it has been carefully looked for.
Like the spread of Lyme disease, that makes it kind of interesting as a case study of an expanding ecological niche but that's not going to butter the bread. On the other hand, as basic research is carried out on the mode of action of false widow toxins, there is increasing evidence that this cocktail of compounds can be re-purposed to target cancer cells. The basic research is on the nano-scale because the spiders are so small that they can only produce and store 0.3μl [that's less than a cu.mm] of venom and that takes them 2 weeks of intense biochemical effort. You need minimum 10μl of the stuff to run through the instruments which tell you what's in it. But I can't tell you any more of the details because Dr Dugon, like everyone else in [Irish] science is under pressure from the people who manage the overheads at his university. They want him to row back on the pro bono; and the outreach talks on the radio; and inspiring students with a genuine fascination with the living world . . . and start monetising his ideas. Spilling the intellectual property in public means that it is not patentable. It's really expensive to run a university nowadays: so many technology-transfer managers, so many people in HR, so many reports to file, so many forms to fill in, and innumerable meetings about 5 year plans and the new corporate logo to attend.
But I'll tell ya this. After his talk our lunch was delayed for 20 minutes because he was surrounded by 20+ students who wanted to pet his scorpion, hold his spider and talk to him about his time in Malaysia. That sort of enthusiasm is The Future of Irish science and it needs to be nurtured. If, as current policy seems to desire, every scientist is making money rather than earning it, there will be No Future.
Dugon is one of those classical evolutionary biologists who is happiest out in the field. I'm an evolutionary biologist too, but I function better in my head than on my knees in the grass like Louis Agassiz. How do you put order on your fascination by the living world so that, just maybe, you can earn a living doing what you love? One avenue is to focus on a small area of the biosphere until you know more about it than anyone else and then convince a highly critical group pf competing professionals that your research proposals are a) interesting and b) possible in a specified time-frame and for a specified amount of money. For maybe 50 years before 2000, that was all that was required because nobody was confident that they knew where the neatest ideas, the niftiest techniques, the very future were going to spring from. Since about 1990 [yes there is some overlap] small minded nobodies have decided that research will only be funded if it has 'utility'. If, in other words, there was a third criterion c) likely to pay back on the tax-payers' investment. This wrecks my head with its stupidity because x) nobody knows where the truly original work will spring from y) if it's very likely to give pay-back in 5 years it's not science, it's development and multi-national Megacorp will be happy to pay for it. The Future of Ireland as a technological nation FITNa depends on the politicians taking a risk; we cannot compete with the long pockets in the US, UK and BRD if we just do same-old same-old.
Like the spread of Lyme disease, that makes it kind of interesting as a case study of an expanding ecological niche but that's not going to butter the bread. On the other hand, as basic research is carried out on the mode of action of false widow toxins, there is increasing evidence that this cocktail of compounds can be re-purposed to target cancer cells. The basic research is on the nano-scale because the spiders are so small that they can only produce and store 0.3μl [that's less than a cu.mm] of venom and that takes them 2 weeks of intense biochemical effort. You need minimum 10μl of the stuff to run through the instruments which tell you what's in it. But I can't tell you any more of the details because Dr Dugon, like everyone else in [Irish] science is under pressure from the people who manage the overheads at his university. They want him to row back on the pro bono; and the outreach talks on the radio; and inspiring students with a genuine fascination with the living world . . . and start monetising his ideas. Spilling the intellectual property in public means that it is not patentable. It's really expensive to run a university nowadays: so many technology-transfer managers, so many people in HR, so many reports to file, so many forms to fill in, and innumerable meetings about 5 year plans and the new corporate logo to attend.
But I'll tell ya this. After his talk our lunch was delayed for 20 minutes because he was surrounded by 20+ students who wanted to pet his scorpion, hold his spider and talk to him about his time in Malaysia. That sort of enthusiasm is The Future of Irish science and it needs to be nurtured. If, as current policy seems to desire, every scientist is making money rather than earning it, there will be No Future.
Monday, 18 August 2025
Wimmin in STEM
The Blob was born when I started a new job in The "Not-a-University" Institute. It wasn't in the original programme of works, but I soon decided that my mission was to recruit and maintain more Women in Science. The Future of Ireland as a Technological Nation [FITNa polybloboprev] would be better served by including the 50% of the population who identified as women: different ways of seeing; different ways of interacting with peers; different lived experience . . . might bubble up a greater choice in the solution space. I started to write ~700 word Brief Lives of women [living and dead] in science & tech thinking that one of those tales might inspire one student to come aboard and stick it out and get qualified. There are more than 100 biogs there now.
At the end of July, the rest of the family made a site visit to the Coolock branch of Dublin City where Dau.I the Librarian is currently working. After the tour, I borrowed a Book - getting into the spirit of place, like: Female Innovators Who Changed Our World: How Women Shaped STEM (2022 €20!!) by Emma Shimizu. As it happens, I have a bit of a part-time unpaid gig writing 250 word book reviews for the Coolock Library newletter. So there was just a smidgen of pressure to pick a book that was available on the shelves at Coolock.
Everyone who essays these brief biogs of STEM women comes with baggage if not an explicit agenda. I, for obvious chauvinistic, want-of-imagination, reasons push the Irish connexion. Emma edges towards the dispossessed and non-whites who have played a blinder with life's crappy hand of cards. This makes interesting reading for me because so many of them are never 'eard of 'er. But perhaps that's not the best call for a 15 y.o. girl teetering between science and 'business' or modern dance. That youngster won't have heard of anyone, so may be better influenced by someone who is an 'achievable' role model - a bit more like herself . . . The Blob has loads of white Irish examples! Please please, we don't need to hear the Marie Curie story again (and again), even 15 y.o.s in unacademic catchment areas have heard of Team Curie.
Tuesday, 30 April 2019
unintended consequences
It must be about 25 years ago that I found, in the local library, a planning report for the Swords bypass: a new roadway to expedite traffic between Dublin and Belfast. It was rivetting. Lots of full colour maps showing different land-owner's holdings down to fragments of fields; each annotated with whether they were subject to compulsory purchase. In some cases fields were purchased because they had been exclaved from the farm by the new road and were too small to sell to anyone else. The report included several pages of agonising about a particular badger Meles meles [prev] sett which was to be rolled to oblivion by drainage stone and concrete.
And any new road network's brutal assault across the landscape is not the end of the damage to the local ecology. All those cars tooling up and down to Limerick and Galway have been spitting lead and particulates from their exhaust pipes, wearing out the brake shoes and just leaving additive-laden tyre-rubber on the road surface. As the century turned, some water quality watchdogs said we should worry about this as a source of water pollution. The EPA took up the baton and commissioned Impact Assessment of Highway Drainage on Surface Water Quality 2000-MS-13-M2 Main Report by Bruen, Johnston, Quinn, Desta, Higgins, Bradley & Burns (2006). It is 270 pages of gradients, sumps, gullies, pipe-diameters, kerb heights, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), French drains, Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves, grit-traps and cadmium. Did you know that, in addition to salt NaCl, road salt may contain iron, nickel, lead, zinc, chromium and cyanide? Attempts at remediation of surface run-off can, if poorly designed, hold back contaminants until there is a catastrophic over-flow of toxic crap. Effective drainage can concentrate herbicide, sprayed to control marginal vegetation, and deliver it to a local water-course overwhelming its power of dilution. Those are some of the unintended consequences of piling on a fix for a problem created by people so that they can drive their carbon footprint up the planet's wazoo.
I heard about a rather more feel-good unintended consequence of Motorway infrastructure at the EnvSciCnf two weeks ago. A young scientist, Róisín Normanly from UCD and raised not 10km from Castle Bob, presented her final year research project at that annual National Jamboree for environmental research. It's quite rare to have an undergraduate give a talk at the national forum, and it's competitive: the science must look good to make the cut. What she has done is carry out an audit of the wildlife that can be found in the holding ponds which you see periodically as you zip past on your way to somewhere else. The holding ponds are part of the solution for protecting local watercourses from [toxic] road run-off. Not sooo toxic it seems because Normanly caught 16,000 water beetles and identified them to 62 different species; mostly predatory divers Dytiscidae and crawlers Haliplidae. That's 25% of the total number found in Ireland; 10 of which are red listed. By comparison a series of farm ponds were similarly surveyed. The farm ponds tallied 14 more beetle species but not so many rarities. That's a nice project with a shedload of data, diligently collected, carefully analysed and presented with aplomb. You might think that she was lucky to land such a project - but as attested by my mother and partner and daughters you make you're own luck. Shaking luck up with hard & focussed work, there's a future for Ireland as a scientific nation FITNa!
This is really important because the relentless economies of modern farming [see yest] have reduced the number of farm ponds in recent years, so available fresh-water aquatic habitat is less than it was 100 years ago. The Road Transport Authority RTA by implementing the EU Water Framework Directive WFD has, as an entirely unexpected bonus, given robust support to ecological diversity. A necklace beaded with open water jewels fenced off from casual human access now extends across the country. The structure and size of these motorway ponds seems quite random. There's an eco-engineering PhD in seeing whether pond design could be optimised to get some of those 10 species off the red list and back to pulling their weight as endless forms most beautiful.
And any new road network's brutal assault across the landscape is not the end of the damage to the local ecology. All those cars tooling up and down to Limerick and Galway have been spitting lead and particulates from their exhaust pipes, wearing out the brake shoes and just leaving additive-laden tyre-rubber on the road surface. As the century turned, some water quality watchdogs said we should worry about this as a source of water pollution. The EPA took up the baton and commissioned Impact Assessment of Highway Drainage on Surface Water Quality 2000-MS-13-M2 Main Report by Bruen, Johnston, Quinn, Desta, Higgins, Bradley & Burns (2006). It is 270 pages of gradients, sumps, gullies, pipe-diameters, kerb heights, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), French drains, Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves, grit-traps and cadmium. Did you know that, in addition to salt NaCl, road salt may contain iron, nickel, lead, zinc, chromium and cyanide? Attempts at remediation of surface run-off can, if poorly designed, hold back contaminants until there is a catastrophic over-flow of toxic crap. Effective drainage can concentrate herbicide, sprayed to control marginal vegetation, and deliver it to a local water-course overwhelming its power of dilution. Those are some of the unintended consequences of piling on a fix for a problem created by people so that they can drive their carbon footprint up the planet's wazoo.
I heard about a rather more feel-good unintended consequence of Motorway infrastructure at the EnvSciCnf two weeks ago. A young scientist, Róisín Normanly from UCD and raised not 10km from Castle Bob, presented her final year research project at that annual National Jamboree for environmental research. It's quite rare to have an undergraduate give a talk at the national forum, and it's competitive: the science must look good to make the cut. What she has done is carry out an audit of the wildlife that can be found in the holding ponds which you see periodically as you zip past on your way to somewhere else. The holding ponds are part of the solution for protecting local watercourses from [toxic] road run-off. Not sooo toxic it seems because Normanly caught 16,000 water beetles and identified them to 62 different species; mostly predatory divers Dytiscidae and crawlers Haliplidae. That's 25% of the total number found in Ireland; 10 of which are red listed. By comparison a series of farm ponds were similarly surveyed. The farm ponds tallied 14 more beetle species but not so many rarities. That's a nice project with a shedload of data, diligently collected, carefully analysed and presented with aplomb. You might think that she was lucky to land such a project - but as attested by my mother and partner and daughters you make you're own luck. Shaking luck up with hard & focussed work, there's a future for Ireland as a scientific nation FITNa!
This is really important because the relentless economies of modern farming [see yest] have reduced the number of farm ponds in recent years, so available fresh-water aquatic habitat is less than it was 100 years ago. The Road Transport Authority RTA by implementing the EU Water Framework Directive WFD has, as an entirely unexpected bonus, given robust support to ecological diversity. A necklace beaded with open water jewels fenced off from casual human access now extends across the country. The structure and size of these motorway ponds seems quite random. There's an eco-engineering PhD in seeing whether pond design could be optimised to get some of those 10 species off the red list and back to pulling their weight as endless forms most beautiful.
Hats off!
Monday, 22 January 2018
Kanturk feeds the millions
Every year in January the Royal Dublin Society RDS hosts a Young Scientists competition. For the last several years this has been sponsored by British Telecom as BTYS. Royal? British? really the optics don't look good 100 years after Ireland fought a bloody war of independence. Still-and-all, it's better to have BTYS in the RDS than to have nothing to show-case the ingenuity, tenacity and technical ability of our teenagers. As I say repeatedly to my students at The Institute "You are the Future of Ireland as a Technological Nation" FITNa. It takes a chunk of committed time to even get a project to the Finals. Time on experiments and analysis when their peers were having time on iPhone and ice-cream. I have a bit of an interest or at least an angle on both the winning project and the first runner-up.
The latter first: Feeding 9.6 billion people by 2050. The effects of Pseudomonas fluorescens L321 on enhancing barley crop yield. A project steered through choppy seas to port by Darragh Twomey, Neil O’Leary, Andrew Heffernan from Colaiste Treasa, Kasnturk, Co Cork. Pse.fl. L321? I know its very bones, or at least its DNA sequence. When I started work at The Institute five years ago, three of my colleagues had just finished a trial of PGP (plant growth promoting) bacteria. They had started by isolating bacteria from the root nodules of plants which grew better than their neighbours in a controlled field trial. Three strains of those bacteria were taken forward for lab studies to discover Why? they enhanced the growth of their host plants. Part of the discovery process was to get the genomes of the bacteria sequenced. To this end my colleagues had obtained money to a) grow up the bacteria in a vat, extract the DNA and send it off to be sequenced commercially b) purchase a Linux server to analyse the data and c) employ a recent PhD graduate, now post-doctoral research fellow, to do the analysis. My appearance in January 2013 was providential because I was the only person on campus who'd ever analysed a genome (or two, or three). I was far to busy doing remedial maths and physics to do any genome analysis . . . and it wasn't my contract aNNyway. There was considerable irony in thus assigning people to tasks which were outside their competence [wot, me physics?] in a game of musical chairs in which every chair was a bad fit for the assigned bottom.
Nevertheless I made three key interventions:
The day after I heard about L321 winning a prize I bounced next door to ask my neighbour at work if he knew his (our!) PGP bacteria were helping to feed the starving millions . . . and who did these yahoos from Cork think they were? Well (of course) it turned out that he knew all about it; indeed he'd supplied the initial vial of L321. The lads from Kanturk had their idea about PGP bacteria and couldn't get sufficiently detailed mentoring from the science teacher. So they rocked up to the local branch of Teagasc, the agricultural advisory service . . . who said that PGP was above their pay grade but Teagasc at Oak Park in Carlow knew allll about it. Oak Park is just across town from The Institute and so the snaking network was able to complete the circle of complementary skills. I was vicariously delighted but also miffed: "When were we all going to hear about your contribution to scientific progress? When will you draft the press release?" I asked my colleague. I am continually brought up short at how little we communicate with each other at The Institute; it's like we're too busy teaching science to talk science. That can't be good for the quality, diversity or integration of the teaching.
Anyway. Hats off to the Boys of Kanturk - they put in the hours.
Nevertheless I made three key interventions:
- I waggishly named the bacteria - prosaically coded as L111, L228, and L321 - whose genomes got sequenced The Three Sisters to honour the rivers Suir, Nore and Barrow which flow through the SE of Ireland under the same soubriquet. Indeed the R.Barrow drifts past The Institute about 50m West of where the Linux server and the post-doc were housed.
- I fired up my network and sent the post-doc up to Dublin to participate in a weekly meeting of those-who-analysed-genomes at UCD.
- I printed out some copies of the Quick Guide to Unix which I co-authored 20 years ago.
The day after I heard about L321 winning a prize I bounced next door to ask my neighbour at work if he knew his (our!) PGP bacteria were helping to feed the starving millions . . . and who did these yahoos from Cork think they were? Well (of course) it turned out that he knew all about it; indeed he'd supplied the initial vial of L321. The lads from Kanturk had their idea about PGP bacteria and couldn't get sufficiently detailed mentoring from the science teacher. So they rocked up to the local branch of Teagasc, the agricultural advisory service . . . who said that PGP was above their pay grade but Teagasc at Oak Park in Carlow knew allll about it. Oak Park is just across town from The Institute and so the snaking network was able to complete the circle of complementary skills. I was vicariously delighted but also miffed: "When were we all going to hear about your contribution to scientific progress? When will you draft the press release?" I asked my colleague. I am continually brought up short at how little we communicate with each other at The Institute; it's like we're too busy teaching science to talk science. That can't be good for the quality, diversity or integration of the teaching.
Anyway. Hats off to the Boys of Kanturk - they put in the hours.
Monday, 21 August 2017
The grit that niggles
This is by way l'esprit d'escalier: all those witty and trenchant things you think of as you descend the stairs after the interview. We were invited to a birthday party last weekend. These things are a bit daunting for The Beloved and me, partly because social events happen so rarely that we get out of practice. Birthday Boy is an artist (more conceptual than my father's water colours) with a strong theme of feminism and science about his oeuvre, so you never know whom you might meet at his gigs.
One of the problems with morphing from wrinkly to crumbly is that you get lost in the middle of a sentence and never get it to . . . Part of that is, of course, that conversation is a dialogue and you have to give the other chap some space in the conversation. The Blob is a bit easier that way because a) it's not in real time [it is now 0255hrs as I write] and b) nobody is interrupting.
One of the people I met at the bday seemed to follow what I was saying about databases, servers and the human genome and it turned out that he was Artist in Residence AiR at CONNECT "the world leading Science Foundation Ireland [SFI] Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications". I was intrigued because we have just submitted a grant application to SFI to forment relationships among artists + scientists and + teens in order to promote FITNa. The AiR seemed to be already embedded in that role . . . although I have no idea whether nascent scientists get access to him wearing his AiR hat-of-power. I put forward the idea that Science can be rather magisterial because it is now much more the Age of Science than the Age of Aquarius, The Gods of STEM have brought us cars, mobile-phones, wind-farms and server-farms [just to mention a few of the items of tech kit that had appeared earlier in our dialogue] and it is as if everything worth having is due to science. I suggested that we scientists could have a teeny bit more humility about this because Science is A Way of Knowing [bloboprev] but surely not the only way of generating 'value'. Philosophers, geographers, historians and linguists all add value to the trudge between cradle and grave. Not to mention potters, weavers, painters, poets, singers and sculptors.
Our application was submitted through SFI's Discover programme which promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration. A tiny fraction of the SFI budget [Total = €184m in 2016] goes to that sort of thing. The bulk, I suppose quite properly (There is an Arts Council - [€65m in 2017] after all!), goes to fund those who are hewing at the coal-face of science. The Discover programme could be seen as a crumb that falls from the table: The Gods of Science will allow Art to taste the ambrosia of science. Oh oh the hubris.
But it does not have to be like that. Bringing outsiders in to scrutinise the work of science can be a positive good. I'm not talking about outsiders as peer-reviewers of scientific manuscripts for publication - they are insiders. Outsiders are AiRs - and others - who get to sit in on our lab meetings and a) force us to analyse what we are saying/thinking in order to get the language intelligible. Visiting seminar speakers will often, as a courtesy, have a session with individual post-grads after their talk: a different world-view, a different experience can often expose an unwarranted assumption. Steven Pinker recommends your old college room-mate who is smart but in a different field. If you can't explain your idea to a 15 y.o., or a visiting professor, or an AiR, then it is is probably too woolly to be correct. The mere act of articulating your thoughts, can help you work them through and give insight. But it gets better; once you've gotten over the language barrier, the AiR can act as the grit than niggles . . . and forces the development of a pearl: a truly original creative idea.
One of the problems with morphing from wrinkly to crumbly is that you get lost in the middle of a sentence and never get it to . . . Part of that is, of course, that conversation is a dialogue and you have to give the other chap some space in the conversation. The Blob is a bit easier that way because a) it's not in real time [it is now 0255hrs as I write] and b) nobody is interrupting.
One of the people I met at the bday seemed to follow what I was saying about databases, servers and the human genome and it turned out that he was Artist in Residence AiR at CONNECT "the world leading Science Foundation Ireland [SFI] Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications". I was intrigued because we have just submitted a grant application to SFI to forment relationships among artists + scientists and + teens in order to promote FITNa. The AiR seemed to be already embedded in that role . . . although I have no idea whether nascent scientists get access to him wearing his AiR hat-of-power. I put forward the idea that Science can be rather magisterial because it is now much more the Age of Science than the Age of Aquarius, The Gods of STEM have brought us cars, mobile-phones, wind-farms and server-farms [just to mention a few of the items of tech kit that had appeared earlier in our dialogue] and it is as if everything worth having is due to science. I suggested that we scientists could have a teeny bit more humility about this because Science is A Way of Knowing [bloboprev] but surely not the only way of generating 'value'. Philosophers, geographers, historians and linguists all add value to the trudge between cradle and grave. Not to mention potters, weavers, painters, poets, singers and sculptors.
Our application was submitted through SFI's Discover programme which promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration. A tiny fraction of the SFI budget [Total = €184m in 2016] goes to that sort of thing. The bulk, I suppose quite properly (There is an Arts Council - [€65m in 2017] after all!), goes to fund those who are hewing at the coal-face of science. The Discover programme could be seen as a crumb that falls from the table: The Gods of Science will allow Art to taste the ambrosia of science. Oh oh the hubris.
But it does not have to be like that. Bringing outsiders in to scrutinise the work of science can be a positive good. I'm not talking about outsiders as peer-reviewers of scientific manuscripts for publication - they are insiders. Outsiders are AiRs - and others - who get to sit in on our lab meetings and a) force us to analyse what we are saying/thinking in order to get the language intelligible. Visiting seminar speakers will often, as a courtesy, have a session with individual post-grads after their talk: a different world-view, a different experience can often expose an unwarranted assumption. Steven Pinker recommends your old college room-mate who is smart but in a different field. If you can't explain your idea to a 15 y.o., or a visiting professor, or an AiR, then it is is probably too woolly to be correct. The mere act of articulating your thoughts, can help you work them through and give insight. But it gets better; once you've gotten over the language barrier, the AiR can act as the grit than niggles . . . and forces the development of a pearl: a truly original creative idea.
Thursday, 26 April 2018
SciFest 2018
Out the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . I heard two obscure words, only one of which I was 'familiar' with, uttered by youngsters in school uniforms. That's an antidote to my general experience that I have to haul my very expensive education wind and mind what I say, in the long-word department, with our students. I spend yesterday forenoon at The Institute judging entries for this year's SciFest. This is a venture where teenagers present a scientific research project to be in with the chance of a prize. Actually there are so many prizes (first, second, chemistry, space, mathematics, environmental, under-14 . . . I could go on) that there's almost one for everyone in the audience. My Bloborecords indicate that I've been doing this every year since 2013. And so the words:
Hyperacusis: super-sensitivity to certain everyday sounds. Please note that "hyperacusis and misophonia are completely different conditions" Thee first is noise-induced pain [sensation] and the second is noise-induced rage [reaction]. Getting my head around this is going to be harder work that I can spare right now. I know I did permanent damage to my ears during an absurdly over-amped Paul Brady concert in Newcastle upon Tyne 30 years ago but that is all my ear-'ole problems. I don't hear voices; I don't freak out when I hear people chewing their food; I don't get unduly stressed when someone drops a tray of cutlery behind me. A couple of kids at SciFest 2018 have been working on a solution to a problem which one of them feels acutely. One of them is on the autistic spectrum and suffers hyperacusis. In their blurb they cited the work and ideas of Temple "Think like a cow" Grandin: she has emphasised how she and other autistic people are sound-sensitive. What the kids have done is develop a set of wireless headphones [shown R] that can play appropriate music to white-out distressing sounds. What impressed all the judges was how far the girls had developed their product. Indeed they've secured their first tranche of VC from a local businessman which has helped fund the development of a swish functional website where you can buy their kit, which comes in any colour so long as it's red, packed in a zipped carry case. At The Institute we host Teen Science Days and Teen Enterprise [multiprev] Days, it is rare that I meet acts that could win prizes in both categories.
Coprolalia: that's shit-talking . . . no not metaphorical shit-talking but literal potty-mouth. Coprolalia comes from the same root (Gk κόπρος) as coprolite (fossil turd) which we met in Mary Anning's Dorset + λαλιά = speech. This peculiar word tripped off the tongue of a slight young man who was investigating ways to stave off the worst tics of Tourette's syndrome. Like JBS Haldane, who famously worked himself up into a state of carbon dioxide toxaemia in the cause of science, the young chap had been trying each day a different gadget and counting the number of times he ticced between breakfast and tea-time. Physical exercise - running particularly - seems to be the most reliable remedy. I've mentioned Tourette's syndrome before because the eponym Georges Gilles "fuckit-fuckit-fuckit" de la Tourette was student of Charcot in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Young Chap politely corrected this cliché symptom of the syndrome, saying that only 10% of Touretters dumped the dirty part of their mind when manifesting a phonic tic. As science, the project was weak, because there was only one case (Young Chap) and no controls but I was delighted when we agreed to give him the Communication Prize because he had been so articulate the multiple times he had to explain his project to judges and other interested parties.
Two words, three youngsters, a couple of ideas, some data. I really cannot think of a more fortunate way to spend a morning than talking science with people who are the future of Ireland as a technological nation FITNa. When SciFest ante-d up some bevvies and the fancier sort of biscuits that our caterers have available as well as free sandwiches for lunch it was as if my tea-cup runneth over. It also gave me pause to reflect on the good fortune of being happy in my own skin and not too much beset by troubles in my head.
Hyperacusis: super-sensitivity to certain everyday sounds. Please note that "hyperacusis and misophonia are completely different conditions" Thee first is noise-induced pain [sensation] and the second is noise-induced rage [reaction]. Getting my head around this is going to be harder work that I can spare right now. I know I did permanent damage to my ears during an absurdly over-amped Paul Brady concert in Newcastle upon Tyne 30 years ago but that is all my ear-'ole problems. I don't hear voices; I don't freak out when I hear people chewing their food; I don't get unduly stressed when someone drops a tray of cutlery behind me. A couple of kids at SciFest 2018 have been working on a solution to a problem which one of them feels acutely. One of them is on the autistic spectrum and suffers hyperacusis. In their blurb they cited the work and ideas of Temple "Think like a cow" Grandin: she has emphasised how she and other autistic people are sound-sensitive. What the kids have done is develop a set of wireless headphones [shown R] that can play appropriate music to white-out distressing sounds. What impressed all the judges was how far the girls had developed their product. Indeed they've secured their first tranche of VC from a local businessman which has helped fund the development of a swish functional website where you can buy their kit, which comes in any colour so long as it's red, packed in a zipped carry case. At The Institute we host Teen Science Days and Teen Enterprise [multiprev] Days, it is rare that I meet acts that could win prizes in both categories.Coprolalia: that's shit-talking . . . no not metaphorical shit-talking but literal potty-mouth. Coprolalia comes from the same root (Gk κόπρος) as coprolite (fossil turd) which we met in Mary Anning's Dorset + λαλιά = speech. This peculiar word tripped off the tongue of a slight young man who was investigating ways to stave off the worst tics of Tourette's syndrome. Like JBS Haldane, who famously worked himself up into a state of carbon dioxide toxaemia in the cause of science, the young chap had been trying each day a different gadget and counting the number of times he ticced between breakfast and tea-time. Physical exercise - running particularly - seems to be the most reliable remedy. I've mentioned Tourette's syndrome before because the eponym Georges Gilles "fuckit-fuckit-fuckit" de la Tourette was student of Charcot in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Young Chap politely corrected this cliché symptom of the syndrome, saying that only 10% of Touretters dumped the dirty part of their mind when manifesting a phonic tic. As science, the project was weak, because there was only one case (Young Chap) and no controls but I was delighted when we agreed to give him the Communication Prize because he had been so articulate the multiple times he had to explain his project to judges and other interested parties.
Two words, three youngsters, a couple of ideas, some data. I really cannot think of a more fortunate way to spend a morning than talking science with people who are the future of Ireland as a technological nation FITNa. When SciFest ante-d up some bevvies and the fancier sort of biscuits that our caterers have available as well as free sandwiches for lunch it was as if my tea-cup runneth over. It also gave me pause to reflect on the good fortune of being happy in my own skin and not too much beset by troubles in my head.
Friday, 3 May 2013
Teenstatistics
At The Institute, things have been very quiet this week. It's officially the last week of the teaching year and. although our HoD has been stalwartly insisting that no classes will be cancelled without his express clearance, many class just haven't happened. It's like rag-week all over again when classes were officially carrying on as normal but the students were out getting wasted and/or pushing bedsteads along the roads for charity. I had a last revision session with my 1st Year Human Physiologists, to nail the concept of homeostasis for the half dozen who thought they wanted it.
But it was a mad-busy morning with a free lunch because I volunteered to help judge the teenage entrants to SciFest in the Sunny South-East; teen-boffins from Donegal were reporting their results in Sligo IT. Like the Student Enterprise Awards which The Institute hosted in March, it was great fun, and I wished I'd had more time to talk to ALL 57 entrants rather than the random pick of 7-8 which me an my co-judge Aoife were assigned. She's a graduate student, and in that rich tradition, was doing it for the lunch. I was once a graduate student (yer yer: before the first war), and have never been as hard-up financially or as stoked in every other way. You never lose your nose for free food if you've trained by need rather than desire.
The quality of the presentations was 'mixed'. The thing that gave me most hope for the future of Ireland as a technological nation (FITNa?) was the creativity. Lots of good, weird, mad ideas out there, a couple of which were directly in my line of competence, so I think I was able to give good feedback and encouragement. But the absence of any sensible statistics in the dozen or so projects I was able to get to was, shall we say, disturbing. A subsidiary prizes was on offer for the best use of maths in science and that was a shoo-in because there was only one entry that could fit such a category. Almost all of the other projects treated some sort of biological data. Now here's the thing: biological data is noisy; any underlying trend is buffeted by genetic, meteorological,, temporal and plain accidental contingency. With all these externals, the black and white of your hypothesis slumps into several shades of grey. Real scientists get round this by beefing up their sample size and thinking of a sensible experimental design before turning one anecdote into the first datum. The noise is still there, but its fluctuations look (and are!) less serious on an ocean of data than they are on a plateful.
Maybe the Leaving Cert Biology curriculum doesn't deal with variation? I know, when my boy went through the LC mill 20 years ago, the first page of the text-book was all about the Nitrogen cycle but never thought to mention that although all cows urinate (aqueous solution of urea) some produce more N and some less. That the measurement of such an item might, accordingly, need to be made a few times - on different cows, at different times of day, at different distances from the river . . . But that same textbook shamefully relegated Evolution to the final chapter of the book AND made it 'optional for Pass Level'.
So what to do? This year the kids were edutained by Scientific Sue for an hour after lunch and clearly had a lot of fun. Maybe, next year, we could corral their teachers in a parallel session and share the rudiments of parametric/non-parametric, Student's T, Mann-Whitney U, Pearson R and Chi-Squared. I haven't written Statistics For Dummies but in the last job I did knuckle down and write 6 pages of notes called Statistics For Immunologists. Mebbe that would be a start?
But it was a mad-busy morning with a free lunch because I volunteered to help judge the teenage entrants to SciFest in the Sunny South-East; teen-boffins from Donegal were reporting their results in Sligo IT. Like the Student Enterprise Awards which The Institute hosted in March, it was great fun, and I wished I'd had more time to talk to ALL 57 entrants rather than the random pick of 7-8 which me an my co-judge Aoife were assigned. She's a graduate student, and in that rich tradition, was doing it for the lunch. I was once a graduate student (yer yer: before the first war), and have never been as hard-up financially or as stoked in every other way. You never lose your nose for free food if you've trained by need rather than desire.
The quality of the presentations was 'mixed'. The thing that gave me most hope for the future of Ireland as a technological nation (FITNa?) was the creativity. Lots of good, weird, mad ideas out there, a couple of which were directly in my line of competence, so I think I was able to give good feedback and encouragement. But the absence of any sensible statistics in the dozen or so projects I was able to get to was, shall we say, disturbing. A subsidiary prizes was on offer for the best use of maths in science and that was a shoo-in because there was only one entry that could fit such a category. Almost all of the other projects treated some sort of biological data. Now here's the thing: biological data is noisy; any underlying trend is buffeted by genetic, meteorological,, temporal and plain accidental contingency. With all these externals, the black and white of your hypothesis slumps into several shades of grey. Real scientists get round this by beefing up their sample size and thinking of a sensible experimental design before turning one anecdote into the first datum. The noise is still there, but its fluctuations look (and are!) less serious on an ocean of data than they are on a plateful.
Maybe the Leaving Cert Biology curriculum doesn't deal with variation? I know, when my boy went through the LC mill 20 years ago, the first page of the text-book was all about the Nitrogen cycle but never thought to mention that although all cows urinate (aqueous solution of urea) some produce more N and some less. That the measurement of such an item might, accordingly, need to be made a few times - on different cows, at different times of day, at different distances from the river . . . But that same textbook shamefully relegated Evolution to the final chapter of the book AND made it 'optional for Pass Level'.
So what to do? This year the kids were edutained by Scientific Sue for an hour after lunch and clearly had a lot of fun. Maybe, next year, we could corral their teachers in a parallel session and share the rudiments of parametric/non-parametric, Student's T, Mann-Whitney U, Pearson R and Chi-Squared. I haven't written Statistics For Dummies but in the last job I did knuckle down and write 6 pages of notes called Statistics For Immunologists. Mebbe that would be a start?
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