Recently in International Category

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! 

Apologies for not reporting on the final day of the conference before now. I'm going to use the excuses of the excellent conference organised tours, my travelling home and then jetlag!

Friday rounded the conference off with a couple of presentations - success stories from women physicists from South Africa and Vietnam. The chairs of the various workshop strands reported back, and their conclusions and recommendations were all distilled down to a set of resolutions to be presented at the 26th General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in Tsukuba, Japan.

I've copied the resolutions below:

The representatives assembled in Seoul unanimously recommend the following actions to the IUPAP 26th General Assembly in Tsukuba, Japan:

1. Promote through the IUPAP Liaison Committees and physical societies the formation of additional regional or national working groups for women in physics. These working groups would assist worldwide in the efforts to increase the participation of women, while being a resource to attract, retain, and advance women in physics.

2. Publicize site visits as an effective tool for improving the "climate" of physics workplaces, and encourage their implementation to help the workplaces become more supportive of both women and men. For a site visit, an institution or physics department invites a team of physicists to assess the work environment for women and to give advice for improvements in gender equity.

3. Actively encourage organizers of IUPAP-sponsored conferences to provide, associated with the conference programme (a) professional development workshops for attendees and (b) outreach activities aimed at the public and to engage both girls and boys from an early age in the excitement of physics.

4. Charge the IUPAP Working Group on Women in Physics (a) to oversee the administration of a global survey of physicists in 2009, (b) to continue to assess the progress of women in physics, (c) to make useful resources available globally through the internet, (d) to organize the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in 2011, and (e) to report at the 27th IUPAP General Assembly in 2011.

5. Urge IUPAP Liaison Committees and physical societies to take the leadership in their countries to encourage broad participation of their members in the global survey of physicists.

 In total, there were 283 attendees at the conference, from 57 countries. And, from a very unscientific straw poll of the UK delegation, it seems unanimous that everyone really enjoyed their time at the conference. I know that I've been feeling more energised and enthusiastic about my job since getting back (though that enthusiasm is wilting somewhat in the face of the huge pile of emails I've had to sort through).

I'll be keeping this blog going, as there are several things that I spotted over the conference that I'd like to blog about. I've also got shedloads more photos to show off too! So, even though the conference is over, this won't be the last you've heard from me! Or, I've no doubt, the last of my involvement with the whole issue of women in physics. 

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It was my birthday on Wednesday. I mentioned this in passing to a couple of people, then at the conference dinner on Thursday night, lo and behold - a cake appeared and everyone sang happy birthday.

I have to admit it - I cried I was so touched.

And I had a great time wandering around attempting to feed everyone cake.

To the UK delegation - thanks guys! You're brilliant!!

 Yup, that's us - the UK delegation to ICWIP 2008. That's me in the middle with the long hair trying desperately to not drop my slipping notebook on anyone...

This morning kicked off with two fascinating presentations. The first was on teaching physics at tertiary level by Pratibha Jolly of India. The main idea I got out of that talk was that physics can't really be taught, but it can be learned, and that lecturing doesn't give students the physical intuition and understanding that doing simple experiments can. Also, there's strong reason for believing that student who get good marks are doing so by playing the system, rather than understanding the curriculum (to be fair, I did the same myself when I was in school).

The second plenary talk of the day (given by Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann from Brasil) was on super-massive black holes and their effects on galaxy formation. Did you know that if the Earth was to become a black hole it'd have to be squashed to 9mm in diameter?

 (I've got shed-loads of notes to sort out and put some form of sense on from all the talks - but it's been exhilarating, hearing about all sorts of cool physics, and all done by women too!)

I went to a session in strand C after the plenary talks this morning, discussing how to improve the general working environment for women in physics. (My male colleagues will be pleased to hear that it improves things for men too). There were some really interesting surveys presented from India and South Africa, which were very telling about preconceptions about physics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of female entrants into a physics course in India was directly related to the amount of outreach activities that had been done the year before.  

 It was my turn to present after lunch, my poster on how rain field modeling is used for radio communications. I wound up commiserating with a radio astronomer about how difficult it can be to keep radio noise out of one's measurements, and the general state of radio spectrum management today (one of my pet rants).

 I rounded the day off with a personal development workshop on transitioning to a leadership position. I think I was a bit of a disruptive influence, as when I was asked to think of what award I'd like to win, the only ones I could think of were the IgNobels... dearie me...

Still, it was interesting, using different ways of determining where it is I actually want to take my career, and it's definitely given me food for thought.

 Conference banquet tonight, and some of the UK delegation are threatening to find a karaoke bar.... I think I'll join them. It is a very important part of Korean culture after all...

It appears that yesterday's blog post vanished into the ether (probably because my hour of interweb time was nearly up just as I pushed the publish button). Darnit - will have to do a quick recap...

Yesterday morning started with a very decadent (not to mention sweet!) breakfast of doughnuts, as provided by the conference organisers. The conference was officially opened by a selection of important people from the IUPAP (Internationa Union of Pure and Applied Physics), and also included the president of the Korean Physical Society, and the Korean Minister of Gender Equality.

(It caused general amusement when the president of the Korean Physical Society encouraged everyone to bunk off the conference to climb the mountain behind the hotel!)

The keynote speeches that followed were fascinatingm covering such diverse topics as particle accelorators and the search for the Higgs boson, laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensates, microscopy and using light as nanostructure tools and single molecule chemistry. I learned a lot from them, as they were pitched to physicists, but not experts in the field.

Lunch was bi-bim bap, a traditional Korean dish of rice, veg and pork, served in seperate dishes along with hot pepper and sesame paste that you mix together according to your tastes. It was indeed very tasty, though I wussed out of using any of the hot paste.

I spent the afternoon attending the country poster session and strand  D workshops, all about the arcane mysteries of finding and getting funding. The first session of that was a long list of all the funding organisations in various parts of the world, especially those who will fund international collaboration.

 We had a quick break for dinner in one of the hotel's restaurants. I was getting a bit culture clashed, as it was a French restaurant with Korean staff in berets and stripy jumpers, with Irish and English folk music playing on the sound system. The food was excellent though.

The second D strand workshop was held in the evening, and was concerned with writing proposals. Now, I have to confess to some small amount of experience at this, but even so it was good to hear others' experiences, even if the winning formula can be summed up as:

good idea + right funder + following the rules = money (maybe)

 I have been taking plenty of photos - now I just have to figure out how to upload them here. Stay tuned!

We're delighted to have Brian Masara from the South African Institute of Physics visiting IOP this week.  Brian is the SAIP's first executive, and is doing a bit of research into how IOP works, to help him plan how he wants to develop SAIP.  It's really interesting to talk to someone with a different perspective on physics and institute-type issues.  We all envy Brian the chance to build up something valuable from scratch, though we know he is going to have to face a lot of challenges on the way.

The international part of my job seems to be dominating my workload this week.  We're making plans for the General Assembly of IUPAP (the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) which meets in Japan in the middle of October. 

We've already submitted nominations for UK and Irish representatives on IUPAP's 18 odd commissions, and we're holding a meeting of the current representatives here at 76 Portland Place on 16 September to identify any concerns or suggestions for the General Assembly.

 Then as soon as I'm back from Japan I'm off to Mexico to talk about IOP at the Congress of Latin American Physical Societies on 25 October.  This is a really good opportunity to explain our new policy - agreed at the July Council meeting - of offering low-cost digital membership to physicists from developing countries.  Wherever possible we want to organise this in partnership with their national physical societies.  So the Latin American Congress will be an excellent place to start.