I came to post something about my recent working experiences, and spotted Alex Connor's post "Culture Shock" which really got me thinking about how, as scientists, we communicate. Not just with each other within our own fields, but also with scientists outside our fields, non-scientists, everybody.
I've just formally accepted the role of project manager (and wielder of big pointy stick of management (tm)) for the Metafor project, which is all about collecting the metadata from climate models. As part of that job, I'm also responsible for the dissemenation of the project, and basically making sure that the people who are likely to use the results from the project are informed about it.
Metafor is closely linked to the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) - an international collaboration which'll provide the model results for the next IPCC's assessment report. So the information we collect not only has to be useful to the climate modellers who run the experiments, but also those scientists in the climate impacts and adaptation areas (who may not know so much about the models) and the policy makers and people who want to know what climate change could mean for their country/town/garden. And we need to get feedback from these people to determine if we've done our jobs right, and the information model we've created is useful enough to last longer than the lifetime of the project.
It's a lot of people to think about. (I was one of them, when I joined the project I knew sod all about climate models. I'm a bit better informed now, but I'm still nowhere near being expert.) And, as you can imagine, dissemmenation is a job as long as a piece of string.
But it's vital. And it involves a lot of communicating.
Communicating is tricky. I spent the first three days of this week in a meeting, listening to domain experts discussing various topics. I've just gone through my many pages of notes, trying to distill them down to a series of actions and issues. And it's astonishing, how many times I've written the same few things down - decisions that were discussed, and decided, and discussed some more. We did have the added wrinkle of international collaboration - partners in the project either don't have English as a first language, or we're seperated by the Atlantic and several time-zones, but these were all people who know this field intimately. Is there any wonder that it gets harder when there isn't a common scientific language to go with a common speaking language?
A couple of weeks ago I went on a UML course, with the specific aim of learning UML as a communication tool. Combine it with a mind mapping software, and you can draw pretty pictures to illustrate concepts quickly and easily. That's a help for communicating, but there's a lot more to it than that.
A week or so ago, I was on another course, which as a tangent had tips and tricks for how to network, do small talk, insert oneself into a conversational group, that sort of thing. That's comunication too, at a very fundamental level. The fact that we had to be taught it just goes to show how it's not something that's natural to a lot of people.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that scientific communication and knowledge transfer is a serious job. Yes, it can be done, and has been with great success many times. But it still requires effort, and, more to the point, recognition. It's too easy for scientists and business people to only talk to others of their own kind. It's really hard to bridge the gap (I know, I've tried) and go cross-disciplinary, or take science and turn it into engineering.
The Knowledge Transfer Challenge is more a challenge than a problem, but that doesn't mean it's not important. And I really don't think we've cracked it yet!
Research and development is on the up in UK industry, well, it certainly was in 2007 according to data released last week by the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills. The R&D scoreboard identifies the top spenders on R&D and shows that the total R&D spend in top 850 companies rose by about 7% in 2007/8.
Of course, 2007 is a foreign country, economically speaking, and the list of top spenders is different there: in addition to the expected names, the pharmaceutical and aerospace companies, also included are a couple of large investment banks. It is a fairly safe bet that when the 2008 figures are reported early next year there will be some changes, but hopefully not too many: research and development is the engine of science-based companies - no R&D, then no new technologies, and no new products.
The Institute responded to the release of the scoreboard with a welcoming press release which made a point about the way data is collected: the scoreboard charts the performance of the largest UK R&D spenders, rather than the total UK spend. While it is true that the big companies are extremely important, smaller science-based businesses also conduct extensive R&D, and it is just as critical, if not more so, for a small company to be on the cutting edge of product innovation and scientific research. The Institute's own R&D calculations which use slightly different government data (the differences between the analyses are somewhat arcane, and each method has its merits, but the Institute's analysis also includes data from smaller business R&D in addition to the big spenders) show an overall downward trend in R&D spending in high-technology businesses, and that it has been going on for a few years now.
This may seem unimportant against the success of the big spenders, but small businesses are crucial parts of the engine of innovation in the UK and are especially important in moving research from physics laboratories to the marketplace, and they need to be supported. And, or course, while they are small businesses now, they just might be the large businesses of the future.
"I would like to thank the catering staff who ensured that everybody was served with food and politeness."
This was one of the more poetic comments received from a guest who attended the IOP's recent Open Evening late last year for which a colleague of mine recently collated the feedback. It was a fine event, with the CEO of the Institute presenting an overview of the services we offer to members and Dr Paul Stevenson giving a very well received talk on the applications of radioactive materials.
My long forgotten education tells me that the comment is an example of zeugma, or syllepsis, to be precise (as one must be in these areas) - one verb carrying two clauses with different meanings and senses. I don't know whether the person who made the comment knew quite how clever and knowledgeable they were being, maybe they did, but I choose to believe that they didn't and instead just said what came naturally to convey their sentiments.
Grammar is much like physics in this way: you use it without really thinking about it. If you throw a ball to someone, you aren't consciously calculating the trajectories, distances and forces required for it to reach its destination; you just throw it where you want to throw it. And the same is true of almost everything you do; the complexity of the physics is not considered - it is taken as read.
The same principle applies to physics in industry. Lots of companies employ physics graduates, many with day jobs actually doing physics research or experiments, but they will be referred to as engineers, or analysts, or technicians, and work in R&D, or electronics, or instrumentation departments. Physics and physicists are not words that are readily used in industry, but of course they should be.
To help make it happen, the IOP works to raise the profile of physics, and has a standing campaign called Physicists.Think. which aims to emphasise the role of physics knowledge, and the value of physics training. If employers specifically advertise for physics graduates, then they will get the workers they need. But, beyond that, it is just possible that by highlighting the jobs that physics graduates already hold, we may also end up with more people choosing to study physics, and so more graduates to employ - and that benefits everybody. It could be that to get what you want, all you have to do is ask. It works the same way with our highly recommended catering team.
The idea of a Last Lecture rests on the idea that a professor will give the lecture as if it was his/her last opportunity to speak to the university community.
Speakers include Randy Pausch, a computer science professor, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple.
Visit this link for the full list: http://oedb.org/library/features/10_inspiring_lectures_and_speeches
In 1959, the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow gave a lecture on the division between what he described as the two cultures: the science-literate, and the, er, literature-literate. He spoke of the disrespect that they have for one another, and most importantly, the lack of communication between them.
The problems have never really gone away, partly because there aren't really just two cultures, but a vast balkanised landscape. Looking at the science side, beyond the physics/chemistry/biology splits, how about science vs. engineering or pure vs. applied physics? Some of these lines are artificial, a product of university structures, but some go a little deeper into the motivations of the people involved - a division of cultures, for example the division between academic research labs and industry.
There is a perception that the UK isn't very good at knowledge transfer between these two groups, essentially transfer of the results of research to those who can turn them into 'useful' products. I was at a conference last week focussed on what was described as the 'Knowledge Transfer Challenge', where they outlined the problems (generalising somewhat: apparently academics have no interest in the applications of their work and business people have no understanding of the long-term nature of scientific research) and asked the question: what can be done to fix them?
But are these problems real? If the UK really wasn't any good at knowledge transfer then we wouldn't have the wealth of modern technologies which have their roots in work done in UK physics departments - everything from fibre optics to GPS to MRI scanners. These were all originally products of reserach conducted in academic physics labs, but would be nowhere close to useful unless the ideas had been successfully transferred across the divide to industrial researchers and engineers.
We have these successes, and many others, despite the cultural differences within science. What is needed is a strong research base, and strong science-based industries -- and we have those. So perhaps the question should be: is there really anything that needs to be fixed?
In other news, the BBC has another article on how young Britons aren't interested in science. Surprise, surprise, there's a gender imbalance too:
The survey also suggested there was a gender divide: young men were far more interested in new inventions and technology, while young women were attracted to subjects such as the Earth, the environment and the human body.
Now this at least I can vouch for in terms of my own experience. I'm in the process of moving from the engineering and technology dominated field of radio propagation to something more akin to climate modelling. And on the way I've noticed that there is a lot more women working in climate change. I went to a day's introductory course on the Met Office Unified Model and was pleasantly surprised to see the course attendees were pretty much 50:50 male:female split. Nothing at all like the radio courses I've been to, where the ratio was more like 10:1 (or worse).
...I'm sorry! I can blame the recent chaos of computers and networks dying - that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Anyway, besides the usual meetings/teleconferences/writing proposals/etc etc etc that make up my working life at the moment, I've got a few bits of interest for you all.
First up, Frances Downey has written an article for The F-Word, all about ICWiP and women in physics.
Secondly, I've decided to take a more active role in the IoP and am putting myself forward to be an ordinary committee member for the IoP's women in physics group.
And thirdly, I've arranged to give my "I went to ICWiP" talk to anyone who'll show up to listen on the 9th December. The way I see it, a lot of the stuff we talked about at the conference is equally applicable to male physicists (or engineers or mathematicians) as well. And it's one of my hot buttons that childcare keeps being referred to as a women's issue, when it's so blatantly a parents' issue.
Got to run - home time!
I was up there on Saturday to man the IOP stall at Arndale Market. The stall was quite curiously located between a nail studio, an afro-hair salon and an Indian head massage place. Despite my initial concerns that not many people might come my way, I'd run out of freebees within ten minutes. Lot's of shoppers were curious to find a physics stall and came up to find out more, sparking many conversations about physics and physics education.
The calm before the storm
Some of the material I was handing out
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