Escaping Academia

2012-01-26T22:21:00.001-08:00

Hello.

In case anyone stumbles across this blog, I'd like you to know I'm now in Journalism School and writing a new blog, which you can find here: hayleydunning.com

I escaped academia! Well, OK, I'm doing another Masters, but it's not leading to a life of university halls...

Audio slideshow

2012-01-18T20:47:00.001-08:00

The Forest Rules

2011-06-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

Jack Horner pauses again, his face frozen in a characteristic scowling smile. I wonder if he does it for effect, or if, like me, it takes him a little while to process and comprehend the voices of children.

Kristina, Liz and Katherine are enchanted, and I have to admit I'm getting there too. He's been their hero since childhood, a palaeontologist truly deserving of the title "maverick", as he describes slicing up his own museum's fossils in order to eliminate unnecessary dinosaurs other researchers have been so eager to assign as separate species. You would be surprised how many of your favourite dinosaurs he has proven are just juveniles of other species. Like we tell the kids at the Forest, if you saw a tadpole next to a frog for the first time would you ever know they're the same species?

Someone asks him where he studied. Another pause and the hint of a sigh.

"I studied at Montana State University for seven years," (muffled sounds of awe) "I flunked every class I ever took. I have severe dyslexia."

Silence. Brains taking it in. So that's why all the pauses.

Still, he manages to be an absolutely enthralling speaker, and by the time he got onto Chickenosaurus I was the caricature of a child on the edge of their seat, hands gripping the sides, leaning in, breathing softly. Birds evolved form dinosaurs, raptor-types. As fledgling embryos, chickens, and all other birds, begin with some typically dino characteristics, such as teeth and a long tail. At some point during their development, specific genes switch on to curtail these features; the tail bones are fused, the fingers are docked into wings, and a chick is born. What Horner proposes, and is already beginning, is to find those genes and switch them off, effectively reversing sections of evolution to bring back creatures with features not seen in 65 million years. Another researcher has already had success culturing teeth inside a chicken beak, and spurned on by this, Horner and his colleagues hope to hatch a full chickenosaurus in the very near future.

So it would seem the Jurassic Forest has taken over my life. I should be writing my thesis, but I consider days not working at the Forest as more of "days off". It's subtler than that too, it's like the Forest is a part of my "new life", as I prepare fully for the move to Vancouver. I don't do the things I used to do. I haven't written anything sciencey for a while, I haven't updated this blog very regularly. I haven't even visited the BBC Focus forum for a while, and I love Focus and the folks there. I have the opportunity to write a review of a book my office mate wrote about rough diamonds, and I haven't even attempted it yet. Why would I not want these things to be a part of my new life too?

Then again, maybe it's because my job means I have to get up before 8 most days, and frankly I'm not used to that.

Tales from the Jurassic Forest

2011-05-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

I'm standing next to a young family by the display where three Utahraptors are trying to hunt a big Apatosaurus. I turn to the young boy and ask him if he thinks those little guys could really take down that big guy.

He looks at me from under one small raised eyebrow. "They're just statues"!

Fair enough, but I happen to think they're pretty impressive statues. I decided to get myself a summer job to keep me sane while finishing writing my thesis (although, to be honest, I've not written a word of my thesis for a worrying number of weeks), and ended up at the Jurassic Forest - an old-growth woodland north of Edmonton filled with 40 animatronic dinosaurs. It's a unique park for Canada, only opened last summer, and is provides impressive educational fun, especially as many of the dinosaur species have been found in Alberta. And they are more than just statues: they move, they roar, they scare.

Here's one little guy: Styracosaurus. The day I had my camera it rained a lot, so better pictures of the big guys to come later!

The job so far has been a lot of fun. I've leanred a lot about the dinosaurs, but also about the forest. Part of the job, and part of the experience for visitors, is the forest itself, which was virtually untouched in the making of the park. A natural route was found through the trees, and with the consultation of a specialist all sensitive plants were avoided and left in peace. No trees were cut down, although this has had one unexpected donwside: today was an exceptionally windy day and at least a dozen old, brittle trees actually came down. I saw one fall; a big crack and down came a tree that was probably decades old, approaching a century. I don't think I've ever seen a tree fall, let alone such a tall, aged one. The wind also tends to make the dinosaurs crazy, electronics and mechanics malfunctioning all over the place.

The weather kept me busy today, but during the weekdays I often take school groups on tours (with varying degrees of success, dependant on age group and how aware the teachers are that I am not there to keep the children from being unruly) and on weekends I wander the trails generally being friendly. I like it in the evening, when there are less people and more wildlife. I've seen frogs, squirrels, a moose, woodpeckers, Canadian geese, a sandpiper, hares and a porcupine nest, although none of the critters themselves yet. And mosquitoes. The wind has kept them down this week, but the ponds and swamps are chock full of larvae, all ready to eat me alive. But I'm happy and proud to finally be able to recognise birds, frogs, trees and flowers of all kinds.

Aside from the day-to-day, we occasionally have speakers come to the Forest. A couple of weeks ago we had Phil Currie, the University of Alberta dinosaur expert who I've interviewed a couple of times for The Gateway (although he didn't recognise me). He gave a talk about the dinosaurs of Alberta, which was very interesting, but more entertaining were the audience members. I was sat at the back behind a bedraggled mother trying desperately to pin down two young boys. I thought then that perhaps she saw the talk was going on and bought tickets on the off-chance it would entertain them. But I was soon proved wrong when the question period began. The older boy, who must have only been four or five, stuck his hand up and asked how the coelacampha survived. All of us frowned, what was he talking about? After a while Phil gave up and said that perhaps that was a dinosaur he hadn't heard of, to which the kid replied "Nooo, it's a fish!" Then it all clicked, he'd said coelacanth. This was a fish believed to have gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, until one was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938. It seems they had been lurking in deep waters for millions of years, evading our grasp. How the little guy knew about the coelacanth was a mystery to all of us.

Later, as they stood in line waiting to get a book signed by Dr Currie, his mother confessed to me she knew more about dinosaurs than she ever wanted to, and frankly she would be glad when he could read for himself!!

Phil Currie and our ride-on Ankylosaurus

Steam-rolling along

2011-03-16T21:21:00.001-07:00

I've been extremely busy lately, which is to say I took on too much to do this semester. But I'd rather be busy and a little stressed than doing nothing and depressed.

So I keep gathering a list of stuff I should post about, but the longer the list gets, the less I feel I have the appropriate time to sit down and bash them out.

Here are the big things.

I got into the UBC graduate school of journalism.
The science writing class I'm taking with New Scientist writer Bob Holmes is awesome, and Bob has already said we should have a chat about where to go next in my career, mentioning New Scientist internships (which would probably be the coolest thing ever, but will have to be next summer).
I'm giving a talk at local critical thinking event Logicon about science journalism which should be awesome enough in itself, but lately it's been getting some astounding publicity, so my talk had better be good!

The semester will finally come to an end in a couple of weeks, and I'm hoping to let a lot of this sink in, and to try and keep up journaling. My boyfriend just asked me if I ever kept a journal, and, well, I've tried a few, but never seem to able to keep them up. But, if I want to be a writer I should practice prolifically.

But, for now, before another busy day tomorrow, I wanted to post my most recent non-fiction writing class essay, which I got back today. I got an A+, I finally cracked it.

_______________________________________

Directions

Depart.

At the end of the road turn left. Pass Budmouth Technology College on the left. Beware of teenagers crossing the road in droves - remember hiding at your friend’s house at lunchtimes, to avoid that boy and that girl. Feel the pressure of growing up like anyone else, and assume it’s normal. Say goodbye to the sea at night, excited to leave your hometown.

At the roundabout, take the third exit. Enter Bristol city centre. Heavy traffic ahead – expect delays. Stress about exams, stress about friends and boyfriends, stress about course choices. Go straight on. Go out of your mind at exam time, fail to stop for sleep, leave the lights on all night and run down the battery. Can’t tell dreams from waking life anymore; fail to follow the instructions in an exam, cry in front of the teacher, panic about the future.

Follow the detour North and park in Reykjavik harbour. For one year live in bliss, happiness, adventure and enjoyment. Learn the rules of a different road, the only one, which loops around the island and always takes you back to the city you love. Know that life can be good, but know that this can’t last. At planned end of diversion, re-enter Bristol city centre and join rush hour traffic. City pollution high – forget how easy it was to fill your lungs on last year’s route and struggle for breath.

Exit the highway with a first class degree and growing uncertainty. Recalculate route?

! Remember to drive on the right !

Pass Helsinki and follow the road round to Kasityolaiskatu and your boyfriend’s apartment. Confined space. Weather conditions worsening, put fog lights on. Driving range limited – spend six months standing on the streets in the morning darkness handing out free papers to the solemn population. Round the market square and park next to the mall. Sit on the steps of Kop Kolmio and hold back the tears, sucking them back up into your frozen brain. Wrestle with the language, fight with your boyfriend, grapple with employment. Ask locals for directions – end up more lost.

Take the road to the shore, then take the ferry ahead. Spend two months at the shipyard cleaning the largest passenger ship in the world as it gets pieced together, growing to sixteen decks of filthy cabins. Battle the bully boss who doesn’t pay foreigners properly. Ignore the dirty mess builders leave in the toilets, ignore the dirty grins of Eastern Europeans, try to ignore the shocked faces when they learn you’re from rich and powerful Britain.

Drive to the shore in winter when the water is frozen over – the sea is now full of obstacles. Know that you are dangerously adrift, but trust the directions – you will be back on the road soon.

New directions plotted, via hometown. School zone ahead. Slow down. Remember that, contrary to many people in your situation, you had a happy childhood. Try to drag those feelings back over your tired body – feels more like fingernails scraping. Remember that, unlike people not in your situation, good memories only make you feel worse, now that you’re no longer living them.

! Remember to drive on the right !

Cross the ocean and exit the highway. Bear right, pass the West Edmonton Mall on the left and pass the first couple of weeks. A new route is proposed. Go all the way around the roundabout – stay in the right lane. At -40⁰C petrol and motor oil start to freeze. Car splutters and stutters in the morning, ice encroaching on the windshield. Drive through a snowstorm without snow shovel, without space blanket, without emergency first aid.

Speed camera ahead. Get irate at boyfriend. Threaten him with violence, threaten him with marriage. He’s 9612 kilometres from your location, but manage to push him away. You’ve gone too far. If possible, please make a U-turn.

Traffic light ahead. Caught speeding through red light – hand yourself in to the authorities. Test positive for depression. Take the next pill.

Toll road. Try to make up all the sleep lost on past journeys by stretching your time in bed, apathetic. Fear the outside, avoid your lab mates, face research with panic, and exposure with despair. Decide to inform your instructor of your violation.

Merge onto the motorway. Keep in mind your red-light run-through that could so easily have been a crash. Accelerate slowly, cautiously, heading for a new destination: decide to take the alternative route you thought you had passed. Take some wrong turns. Find friends and mentors that help you figure out why you keep going awry.

Tired drivers are dangerous drivers: pull over and take a break. Can’t sleep at night but sleep into the afternoon. Doctor prescribes sleeping pills. Take the next pill. After ten months, fall asleep at the wheel and make an emergency stop. Tell the doctor you want to change pills, not take more. Take the next pill.

Avoid congestion charge zone. Avoid thesis work, avoid self-righteous lab mates, avoid supervisor around campus, only do the things that keep you going, that get you up in the morning. Know that you will eventually have to travel via thesis, but take the scenic route.

You have not yet reached your destination. At the end of the road turn West, towards a different ocean.

Dinosaur news

2011-02-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

The problem with depression is not being miserable as such, but that emotions are never constant.

I can spend an hour, a day, a few days in energy and motivation and a state of excitement. But it's never constant. It's a real shame when feeling good is tainted by the impeding downturn.

The point of this is that I haven't written for a while because I've done a lot of very exciting things, but whenever I have any time to sit down and write about them I'm sapped of all energy and joy. Luckily, this evening I'm sustaining myself with the thrill of anticipation - next week is 'reading week' - essentially a week off.

I'll start with journalism updates since they're always the most fun. Also, I haven't seen my supervisor since December and done very little thesis work, although I am giving a talk a the Arctic Workshop in a couple of weeks, which is scary but exciting...

I am extremely pleased with how my Iceland feature turned out in New Trail:

http://www.newtrail.ualberta.ca/Winter2011/Features/Features%20Current/IcelandCometh.aspx

(If you clock on the image of the magazine cover on the left you can view the article in the mag, where it looks just beautiful).

I never got it back for edits and they actually changed very little of it, which I take as a huge compliment, although I always find writing about Iceland fairly easy !

For The Gateway it has become a bit of a running joke that this semester I have been writing almost exclusively dinosaur (or fossil) news. Here's a sampling:

University reveals fossilized fish skull at Paleontology Museum

New species of flying reptile found

Antarctic expedition unearths rare fossils

Dino lab volunteers get their hands dirty cleaning fossils

However, by far my favourite article I wrote was this one:

Dinosaurs may have survived longer than previously thought

Not only was it the most revolutionary and important thing I covered, I feel it's my best work so far. Finally, I felt I had the chance to do with science journalism what I've really want to do. Part of the reason I think I managed to do it with this subject is because I have a relatively deeper understanding of this particular topic (that is, relative and absolute dating techniques). I managed to get in some things most science articles don't cover: simple error on a number ("yields a date of only 63.9 – 65.7 million years ago" rather than just stating the 700,000 year average that most articles have), uncertainty in an emerging method ("Heaman acknowledged that because it is so new, it will no doubt be met with some uncertainty") the need for further research, that one result is not conclusive ("Our first strategy will be to go back to this site and look at a couple of other dinosaur bones") and how the community will greet the result ("The result of at least one individual outliving the traditional extinction of the dinosaurs will fuel research, as other scientists seek to use the technique to support or oppose the new idea").

After I interviewed the guy he told me that he was next being interviewed by the local CBC news in his lab, and invited me to hang around. I accepted with gusto. It turned out to be extremely interesting, not only did I get to hear more about the technique, I met some interesting characters. The CBC interviewer and her cameraman were shown in by a guy who works as a science communicator for the university. This was one fascinating guy. He had worked making documentaries for Discovery and National Geographic for a number of years, and now wrote a lot of the University's sci and tech Express News, the first press releases. These thigns alone were captivating enough, but as we stood in the background watching the CBC woman hopelessly try to understand what Heaman was saying, we shared opinions about the nature of science journalism and how much of a shame it was this story and a million other worthy ones like it would just be 2-minute snippets packaged up and simplified for a 'popular' audience.

To top it all off, I got this email from Heaman after the story came out:

Hi Hayley, I had a chance to look at the article you prepared for Gateway last night and just wanted to commend you for a great job. This is the most accurate report on our study so far. Larry.

Perfect.

My writing class has been hit and miss. I got my grade back for the last essay I posted here and although it was still 'good', my teacher's comments made me shrink and cringe. She said I belittled the journalist too much, and it made the whole piece too... trite. And she's right. Why did I submit a piece portraying a journalist as dumb and irritating to journalism programs?

The next essay went similarly badly, as my teacher pointed out my whimsy-addiction. Whimsy, fairytale, these are my soft place to fall, my comfort zone. She said to me that she usually doesn't push people to come out of their comfort zone, and won't penalise them for not doing so, but thinks that my writing would be so much better if I managed to write a piece perfectly straight. I took this as a sort of compliment - she thinks I can do it and wants to see me do it. I got an extension on the next essay, to remove the whimsy, and we have already started the last essay, which I am very pleased with. I'll post the final draft in a couple of weeks.

I'm also taking a couple of new classes. I'm taking a class that's anything and everything to do with the Arctic, taught by the very charismatic John England. He is a wonderful fellow that loves Arctic explorers and pauses lectures for tangents on his heroes, philosophies of the Arctic or ideals of learning - that it should be about knowledge rather than facts.

This Tuesday I also started an 8-week evening class titled 'Writing about science'. Although I wasn't sure exactly what this meant, I paid up my $300 a few months ago anyway and waited. It turns out it is exactly what I wanted - basically a science journalism course - taught by Bob Holmes, who writes for New Scientist! Just had one class so far, but I think it's going to be fantastic.

Sections are getting shorter. Attention running low. There must be other things. I have some scribbled notes in my notebook. This is one of the problems with depression - I have these thoughts, then as I walk to university or drift to sleep I start expanding them, thinking about what to research to make them clearer, maybe how I can write them up into larger pieces.... but they all get lost in the dregs of the days.
Here are a few of the scribblings... wonder if they ever turn into anything:
- Why is (are) science (scientists) always seen as the antithesis of "warm and fuzzy" - e.g. homeopathy, where science can prove it's bunkum, but people think it's still good because it's 'holistic' and given by 'caring professionals'.
- Couldn't we just have night-time lights that 'glow', rather than traditional lights that need a constant energy input?

Back in the snow

2011-01-14T15:50:00.000-08:00

Well here I am back in Canada, in the -30 degrees and the thigh-deep snow. Yes, it's a cold winter, but it's true that last year was Canada's hottest on record.

I had a truly excellent holiday period visiting Finland and jolly old England. I reconnected with a lot of old friends and lived in little slots of comfortable old lives. And although I was sad to leave I feel energised for this new semester - I'm taking a wonderful class on the Arctic (pretty much anything and everything to do with it), continuing my non-fiction writing class, taking a class specifically in science writing later on and going to a conference in Montreal in March. And then I have more fun work to do with the CFI, and hanging out with friends and my boyfriend will be around for at least 3 months... yes, a lot to keep me busy, which is for the best.

Anyway, although I haven't been posting over the hols I've been mulling over quite a few things.

Does God care about global warming?

A short musing - it seems odd to me somehow that all those fundamentalist Christians are often the most consumerist, truck-driving capitalists. Surely it should be a Christian virtue to care about the Earth? I expressed this to the CFI at a meeting, and got a worrying response from Brent - that things like that don't matter to people who believe we're living in the End Times. That the global climate going a bit crazy is just proof of the coming Armageddon apparently... worrying.

Short memories

I watched a documentary about the Boxing Day tsunami, and the part that made me think was when people were describing how they had no idea what was going on when the sea suddenly went out really far. Around the world today, that situation would probably not happen - there would be enough people that remembered what it means that people would run away instead of standing and staring. But how long would this effect last? There are numerous examples in the past of collective 'forgetting' leading to fresh disasters. How many people live in the path of Vesuvius today, despite it being one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history? For all our mass media, I think we still have pretty short memories.

Is climate change the death of science journalism?

Reading Unscientific America and listening to a special of the (fabulous, locally produced) Skeptically Speaking, I've learned a lot about the history of science journalism. I seems that it has enjoyed the greatest popularity when the science is positive: when we were reaching for the moon or sequencing the human genome. The blame on the decline of science reporting is often placed in the public's lack of interest, but it seems to me that the constant barrage of depressing news about global warming has a hand in it. I'm not saying there shouldn't be reporting on climate change, but perhaps there should be more of a balance with other topics, positive topics.

This thought was furthered when I began reading the latest instalment of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an excellent annual collection of articles picked each ear by a guest editor. This year the editor is Freeman Dyson, who begrudgingly admits he had to give over two thirds of the volume to Nature writing, since that's 'what's fashionable now'. To me then, it seems that falling back on environmental topics has a degree of laziness - if it's not something truly new and revolutionary then it's just drumming into the public something they're already sick of, and ignoring plenty of other more fascinating, more ground-breaking research discoveries.

The key to beauty?

While reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing on the plane over to the UK I got absorbed in many interesting articles. There was a section dedicated to neurology, and how it's displacing many of the previous theories for the things we do and experience; an article about a guy dedicating himself to researching the causes of strange conditions, things people believe are just 'craziness'. He set about proving that many of them have deep neurological causes, helping us better understand the way our brains work.

But as I read over a fact I'd heard before I started to think. When we see, most of the time there's simply too much information to process all at once, so a lot of what we image is just 'filled in' by our brain, based on what we've seen before. As we banked around London and I stared out at the winking lights, I wondered if that was what made things 'beautiful' - when they contain so much detail we can't fill in that we just have to look and look at them. Why we stare so long at intricate paintings or flowing waterfalls. There's just too much strange and wonderful information. Whimsical, or am I on to something?

The Arctic is a book of untold stories

Finally, my good friend Jess pointed me to an article the local Arctic specialist journalist Ed Struzik had written when he accompanied her and her supervisor John England on their field research this past summer. She expressed surprise at some parts of the article, how Struzik talked about England, and how she was put out he talked about the gruelling food when she insisted they made him pancakes every morning! I guess it added to the bleak picture of Arctic research, but I think pancakes in the northern desert would have made a funnier anecdote !

Depression and atheism - a link? (I think not)

2010-12-09T22:23:00.000-08:00

(If you don't feel like staring at your screen long enough to read this whole entry, at least read the end, just for me).

Hm, things have been a little hectic lately. I had to mark a lot of labs and then major projects, 21 of them, spelling and grammar mistakes and all. I'm sure they annoy me more since I started the writing class, and the amount of students that spelt colour without the U... This is Canada people, not the USA. On top of that, the three days I spent on the electron microprobe a couple of weeks ago was revealed as wasted, and needed a resit to be crammed into this week too (not to mention some serious money woes I did not see coming).

Normally, I might be able to take this all with with a certain amount of grace considering it's nearly Christmas and all. The problem is, I finally decided to change my medication. After a long discussion with my doctor, who was much more attentive than other recent doctors, she decided to change it to a medication that is basically the shiny new version of my old one. It was reasoned then that I would get no effects of withdrawal and be able to switch directly from one to the other (despite being on a relatively high dose). However, this doesn't seem to have been the case. My sleep has gotten more erratic and my mood his spiralled out of control. It's terrifying. I thought I was doing well with my life, but being essentially 'off' the medication at the moment (it takes 2-6 weeks for any antidepressant to start working) has given me a glimpse of the monster that lies beneath. I've had terrible stress and anxiety and today it took a literal toll on me. I was wide awake at 2am last night so I decided to take a sleeping pill. Then I slept 11 hours straight and woke up with the room spinning. And I have been dizzy all day... so going in to uni and doing the pile of work, or any work, was off the table today. I was a little scared to feel this way and be on my own, so my good friend Jess came round and sat with me to make sure I didn't pass out and hit my head or something. I feel almost better now, a little woozy in the head maybe, but better. But really it was just refreshing not to do anything of use. I think the dizziness was a result of a combination of the withdrawal, the new medication and the sleeping pill, but a large chunk was also probably my body saying "Hey, take it easy, I can't do all this yet."

Anyway, in happier news I have been involving myself fully in the Humanist/Atheist world, meeting up with the CFI Exec, discussing ideas and attending events. One of the most fascinating was a broadcast debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, on the topic "be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world". There was a lot of talking, but there were several main points repeated in various forms (more so by Blair, it must be said). He didn't argue that religion provides morality, but more that religion is the inspiration for so many to do good things (citing the large amount of charity work). While I can see his point to some extent, I don't believe charitable work would disappear with religion. I think that it is a common misconception that only churches provide community and a group feeling of goodwill. I certainly get that and more from the CFI. It's just that it's not that common, and many don't know there is that other 'option'... yet... Hitchens also raised the important issue that a lot of religious 'charitable' work has done more harm than good, although this is true with more of the traditional missionary-type charity work that involved oppressing women's roles in societies (which many agree is the single best way to empower impoverished countries).

Blair's other main point was that getting rid of religion does not get rid of fanaticism. He cited Stalin here, referring earlier to both Hitler and Pol Pot, which unfortunately serves only to turn people off of his arguments, since these are often misused examples of 'atheists doing bad'. The difference between this and say, the Crusades, is that these people did not commit evil because of their atheism. Anyway, this point of Blair's had several branches, one of which I thought was his best thinking point. Hitchens conceded that religion is unlikely to be wiped off the face off the Earth any time soon, and Blair said that well, in that case, isn't it logical to try and work with religion, and to get major religions to work with each other, instead of focusing on 'getting rid' of them? This is a very sensible conclusion in my view. However, getting major religions to work together is, in my mind, pretty much a pipe dream considering how small areas of the world (like Northern Ireland and Gaza) have been fighting for generations over religion. So, again following logic, decreasing the power and spread of religion seems the only logical answer...

Other than just practical discussions, Hitchens tried to take the debate to the realms of philosophy too, and argued that religion is essentially servitude, and that religion is not good for a global community when religions are always trying to 'recruit'. Blair argued in response that religion gives a purpose and a deeper meaning to the mission of life. I've known I am an atheist for a long time, and yet I have never felt devoid of purpose or an awe of what life is and what I can do with it.

Hence why I've never been the self-harming-suicidal kind of depressive. I still think life is incredibly 'sacred' (Is there a better word for it without the religious connotation?). I describe myself more as a 'depressed optimist'.

In an effort to expand my journalism experiences beyond sci and tech news I also attended a very interesting talk at the University by George Galloway, an ex-MP from Britain who never seems to be described without the prefix "controversial". He is pro-Palestine, and I went to the talk to really test myself. I know nothing about politics. See, this is why I don't always feel contempt and outrage when people "don't care" about global warming, if their reasons are lack of interest in knowing the facts. Basically, I am guilty of this about politics (and economics, but that has more to do with despising maths). Both are important, but why should I come down hard on people that care more about politics than global warming when I am so single-track too? But, I am trying to change.

Galloway's talk, of course, was going to be very biased, and I went in knowing that I was getting one side of the (Israel-Palestine) story. But it was still a fascinating experience. I wondered how much I was hearing was real 'fact' and how much was slanted spin - certainly some of the things his said raised my left eyebrow. The crowd however was extremely enthusiastic, and it was like nothing I had attended before, spontaneous applause, boos, and shouts of "for shame!" when something deplorable the opposition had done was spoken of. I'm not how sure the article turned out, really, but I just reported what happened, and the main points of the talk. You can read it here.

Finally, yesterday marked the last day of classes and the last of my writing class for the year when I handed in my latest essay (luckily, the class is a full-year one, so there is more to come in 2011). For the latest essay (themed 'The Event') I took a different tack than my previous ones. To explain it, I think I'll just post up my 'Author's Statement' which we have to make to accompany each essay.

For all my writing so far I’ve stayed in my comfort zone as Hayley “The Storyteller”, but for this piece I wanted to express more of Hayley “The Scientist” and Hayley “The Journalist”. I decided to play a bit with the idea of “the event” by exploring the contrast between the scientific world, where nothing is an instantaneous event, and the journalistic world, which imagines everything as a sensational discovery. How can these disciplines meet in the middle?

I set up the piece from the viewpoint of “The Scientist,” but it is an internal battle too, so I am also “The Journalist.” Although the whimsical naivety of “The Journalist” is somewhat exaggerated, it’s a way to poke a little fun at myself for sometimes seeing the world through extremely rosy spectacles. Plus, I love squirrels.

_________________

The Scientific Process

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I never really understood that metaphor until I met the journalist. But I could almost see her squirrel tail making a fuzzy frame for her sparkly eyes. She must have been close to me in age, but still had that wistful bubbliness that makes most cynical adults harbour violent intentions. She whipped out a notebook, a voice recorder and her giddiest smile, ready to be informed about the wonders of my research.

“Wow, so you’re a volcanologist? That’s awesome! You study volcanic ash, right? What did you find out?”

“I found two samples of volcanic ash located a few hundred miles apart with the same chemical signature. Within error. With current technology. Which means they’re probably from the same eruption. Which means they were likely deposited at the same time. Which means the sediments they lie in are assumedly the same age. Which means the climate those sediments point to could have an assigned age. Once we date the volcanic ash.”

The circular reasoning and otherwise uncertainty of my “discovery” didn’t seem to faze her. She nodded, scribbled and looked back up at me like a squirrel at a nut. She asked me where I found the ash, and when I told her I went to Alaska to dig it up her tail bustled so much it nearly pushed her off the edge of her chair.

“I had to go to Alaska to find the ash,” I said, “but I spent a lot of time digging trenches. Fieldwork is 98% searching and digging in the rain and 2% finding what you want and sampling it.”

Once again my lack of enthusiasm failed to dull her animal spark. I explained to her how important that area of Alaska is; how it is thought to be the route the first humans took into North America at the end of the last ice age. How the eruption I’m studying could have been around that very same time. The static created by her bristling fur crackled around the room and it must have given me a jolt. I was starting to get into it, remembering what great questions my research could solve. But that’s the kind of stuff you put on funding proposals. It’s not what you actually do.

“The path to this result has been paved with road kill. So many lines of inquiry have been dead ends. The machines in the lab often break down. I once dropped one ceramic dish on another, which smashed them both. The other day a sample even slipped down the drain,” I told her. “We had to take the plumbing apart to get it back.”

“That’s not all,” I said. “Polishing samples for hours on end on the grinding wheel I often rub the skin off my thumbs, and the chemicals we use to separate our samples are carcinogenic over time.”

The journalist now looked as if she couldn’t understand why I do science, her tail drooping, so I decided to cheer her up by exploring the research’s tenuous link to climate change. Journalists love that. I told her that by knowing the age and timing of past climate changes, it helps us work out what might happen with our own rapid global shift. Once again, this was the sort of thing that just goes on funding proposals, and that gave me an idea to challenge a viewpoint I’d always found irritating. Some people seem to think that climate change research is a money-making conspiracy; that we cooked up the whole thing to get grant money.

“Alberta Ingenuity didn’t think my research was ingenious enough, so I had to become a teaching assistant at the university to pay for my living. Teaching doesn’t take up too much time, but marking every lab and every exam each undergraduate turns in does. And even then most of them put no effort into their answers and complain about their grades, after I have become cross-eyed and cack-handed from marking.”

The journalist shifted uncomfortably on her deflated tail, clearly wanting to move on to talk about what impact my research would have, but I had to take one more opportunity to explain that this was not some headline discovery that I stumbled upon as one test-tube of blue liquid turned red.

“I spend days on end working on the electron microprobe. It’s a several thousand dollar machine. I look at hundreds of shards of volcanic ash, painstakingly picking a point on every one for the machine to analyse for the chemistry. I sometimes see ash in my sleep; the shards make such beautiful and terrifying shapes. In the future, someone will work out a way to make the whole process automated. They will be amazed I ever had the patience.”

Satisfied I’d gotten across to her the monotony of scientific experimentation, I let her go back to the climate change issue.

“Yellowstone is actually a massive volcano, right? So, and, I’ve heard that, if that erupts it would wreck the climate, right?”

Ah, she’d misinterpreted the way my research connects volcanic ash and climate. She’d gone for the obvious. Lucky for her, I knew something about Yellowstone anyway; although by now I had the feeling she would believe anything I told her.

“A Yellowstone eruption would be devastating and a quick analysis shows it erupts every 600,000 years, with the last eruption over 640,000 years ago. But the 600,000 cycle is only an average of three eruptions in the past 2.1 million years. Saying Yellowstone is overdue is like saying a baby is overdue because it’s one minute past the expected time.”

“But if it did erupt though, wouldn’t it be terrible? I mean that Icelandic volcano Ayyafya-Eyjafk-”

“Eyjafjallajökull.”

“Yeah, that one,” she giggled. “It basically shut down Europe, right?”

Fine, I thought, rolling my eyes, I’ll give her what she wants.

“It would be 1000 times more powerful than the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Ash would circle the Earth, blotting out the sun and drastically lowering the global temperature. Crops would fail. Animals would die. And that’s without mentioning the thousands of people that would be killed in the immediate area of the eruption.”

Her mouth was open, her pen was scribing a rut in the page and I let the silence run. Once she’d stopped writing, the silence continued. She looked at her page. Away at a tree outside the window. Back at her book, flipping pages trying to find something else to ask me. On the path below the window a squirrel froze in its tracks, as a student trailed her feet and yawned in front of it, unaware of the little creature’s peril. I grinned.

“If Yellowstone did erupt though, it would make a pretty good ash marker layer. Just as the ash I found in Alaska may mark the arrival of humans to North America, an ash layer from Yellowstone may very well mark their departure.”

I could almost see her little rodent heart skipping in her chest. Don’t let anyone tell you scientists aren’t eloquent! We give speeches to each other all the time and we don’t like old men sleeping in the back of our halls either. The journalist looked at her voice recorder and noted down the time. That quote was going to be in the article.

I felt concerned for the journalist then, and decided to stop playing with her. It was obvious she was interested in what I was doing and she had told me she wanted to be a science journalist, but she was following all those classic journalist school rules. Amazing discovery. Sensationalism. Over-simplifying the science, presuming the public to be idiots.

“Don’t imagine my research ends there. There are many volcanic ash layers in Alaska, in Canada, and in the world. Each one is an instantaneous event. Each one marks a time when certain conditions existed on the Earth, when different creatures lived, when other peoples ruled. All this work will take many more researchers many more years, collecting samples, separating them, polishing them, probing them and pondering them. In all that time what I’ve concluded will likely be overturned by someone with better, faster and more accurate methods. Science is not an event: it is the gradual accretion and refining of knowledge.”

__________________

NOTE!! I am thinking of submitting this piece alongside some Gateway pieces for my Journalism School application. A good idea???

Festival of Ideas

2010-11-25T22:26:00.000-08:00

Last week was a good week to be at the university, since they hosted the biennial 'Festival of Ideas', which is essentially like a week of TED talks. This year's theme was 'Truth and Lies: Trust Me' so it was right up my street. (Incidentally I would have posted this up earlier but have actually been working on the good old probe again this week, a task just mind-numbing enough to make me trawl failblog instead of doing real things with my evenings).

"Australia has seen the effects of climate change"

The first talk I went to was by Tim Flannery, author of 'The Weather Makers", chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, and Australian of the Year in 2007. The talk was titled something unassuming like "Climate change: current state of science and what we can do about it", which had me worried it may be a boring run-of-the-mill climate change talk. But he talked a lot about the controversies: the UEA leaked emails (talking a lot, of course, about how they were cleared of any wrongdoing) and the Copenhagen Summit (linking it naturally to the unique timing of the leaked emails). All of this, he concluded, made it seem as if the Copenhagen meeting was a failure. But he was keen to point out to us that even the simple Copenhagen Accord was a great step towards getting major CO2 emitting countries to commit to cutting their output. Still, he says, we are a long way from making those agreements accountable. Many countries will be over their Kyoto targets, but will they pay up for it? Unlikely.

More likely to succeed are single country-enforced things. When asked whether he thought cap-and-trade or a straight carbon tax would be better, he said it depended on the country, where its economy and development were at.

The final interesting point was that he talked a lot about how the Green Party in Australia is now part of their coalition government, and how this came about from a lot of grass-roots action. People wondered, as Canada and Australia seem to have similar cultures and personae, why has a similar thing not happened in Canada? Flannery reasoned that in Australia the effects of climate change are painfully evident: 10-year droughts, wildfires and the bleaching and destruction of the great barrier reef.

"Hi, my name's Julie and I'm a Catholic computer programmer"

This was the rather surprising introduction to a question on probably my favourite night of the Festival: an astrobiology debate titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?" The debate featured a University of Alberta professor and the head of the Vatican Observatory. For most of the evening they gave a presentation, explaining everything you need to know about the Drake Equation (plus an impressive display of our place in universe from the star theatre the debate was held in). I had always had a basic idea of the variables that made up the Drake Equation, but the presentation gave more detail into some of the possible numbers involved in each factor. For example, stars that are too massive don't burn for long enough to allow the evolution of complex life, and stars with too low mass would need planets to be very close in order to be in the habitable zone, and at that close range the gravity of the star would cause unimaginable tides and a slowing of the planet's rotation so that only one side faces the star. Not much chance then for life to evolve.

The way life began on our own planet is still somewhat a mystery, but one of my favourite likelihoods is that it actually got started many times and was wiped out many times in the beginning, during the time of heavy bombardment, when meteor strikes from the still-forming solar system were abundant. An interesting idea raised in the debate though that made the beginning of life seem astounding again. In order to get enough mobile materials for the 'primordial soup', a lot of erosion of the early Earth surface was required. This seems to have been achieved by the greater power of the oceans, as the newly-formed moon was closer and caused tides up to 1000x higher.

Regardless, the conclusion is that simple life is probably abundant in the universe, but complex, intelligent life needs more of a leap. Thus far then, the evening had been informative, but the debate started a little more in the question period. The first was discussing the theory of panspermia; extraterrestrial material brining life to Earth through space, which wasn't so interesting except the Vatican father explaining how they have a piece of Mars, and a photo of the Pope with the fragment was under the headline "Mars in the hand of the Pope" in the local press.

The next question though asked that if we do discover intelligent aliens, do they need 'salvation', in the way missionaries needed to save the savages? The answer from the father was interesting then. He clarified that if they were intelligent, then they would have the possibility to commit sin. But, he said, they may not necessarily have done. In which case they wouldn't need salvation. But they are still creatures of God. Which is where he ended his answer, which really still leaves the question, if they had never had God, but had 'committed sin', would they all need some missionaries to show them the way? Because that's always been for the best in the best...

The next interesting question involved life's tendency towards complexity, whereas the universe tends towards entropy. Does the hand of a deity push life in the complexity direction? The prof. defined life as the ability to use energy constructively: to metabolise, and that is the process that creates complexity. The father said he didn't believe God is an engineer, but rather a father to the universe, allowing it to grow as it will, and yet knowing how it would turn out. "God doesn't play dice, but he knows the dice are loaded."

"One in three Americans is as fat as the other two"

The last event I went to at the Festival was an evening with David Sedaris. This one I was covering for The Gateway, it was a good way to get a free pass to the show and also expand my news writing beyond just sci and tech. Sedaris is a popular semi-autobiographical writer with a wicked sense of humour. I'd never read any of his stuff, but it was a good job I have quite a dark sense of humour! (It comes with being British, I think). His tales were full of shameless death and depravity, but he had the audience in stitches, as well as being very clever and satirical. Through the CFI I've met a guy called Ryan Bromsgrove who writes opinion pieces for The Gateway and he writes simply fabulous parody and satirical pieces. I feel I'm much better at the straight-up news currently, but I want to branch out into opinions and features for The Gateway next year.

Anyway, for now you can read my David Sedaris piece here.

Slow science

2010-11-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

Probing a few volcanic ashes today, and finding one that was the spitting image of a pirate skull, I was reminded of the post I wrote a while ago about the probing process, and what I do. It struck me that I haven't written anything about my own science in a while.

This is usually the point in such an introduction where I would launch into the details of some recent experimentation or theorisation, but the fact is I haven't done any of that for a while. My supervisor decided last week that I probably came make the deadline for a special journal volume of papers from the Japan conference I went to back in May, so I've just been writing and refining. Yes, the boring parts of research; writing and editing until all the words merge together and you can no longer tell if you've created a masterpiece or a jumbled mess of scientific phrases strung together.

I have been doing a steady bunch of writing though:

The 50th Anniversary of the Uni's Circumpolar Institute (for which I got to interview my friend Jess, who worked at the exhibition)

Conclusions of the latest Arctic Report Card (it's grim!)

What triggered the rise in oxygen that allowed animals to evolve (I was happy it was picked up on the Canadian University Press newswire, but face-palmed when I read their lede talking about it as the origin of life rather than just animals)

Uni's synthetic biology team project (pretty impressive, considering it's only an undergrad competition)

100 year history of The Gateway (piece for the Alumni Assoc. about the 100th anniversary of the student newspaper)

Yes, and now it's time to start applying for journalism programs! I want to write the perfect letter of intent and pick my best articles for the applications, but my motivation and energy have plummeted again after a brief respite of enthusiasm. I've decided to blame the medication - they make me drowsy when I take them and give me the worst dizzying headaches when I don't. I will have to ask my Doc for a change when I next go. At least if I blame the pills I will get a placebo boost when I change them that hopefully gets me through the paper-writing.

I have been having more fun with the CFI crew though - this Saturday we went to a pro-gay rally (or I suppose pro- LGBTQ if we're being correct !). There's this particularly nasty group called the Westboro Baptist Church who have a gob-smacking campaign of hate called 'God Hates Fags' (reading just one of their rants will make your head spin). They have a picket schedule of events they plan to protest at, and on their calendar was The Laramie Project in Edmonton. It's a play about the hate killing in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. So, naturally, folks organised a counter-protest: 'God Loves Fags', which the CFI went along to support.

More than that, though, in the end. The director of CFI Calgary happens to be Nate Phelps, estranged son of the head of the Westboro Baptist Church Fred Phelps. He left the Phelps family home when he turned 18 and never looked back. It's astounding to think of someone growing up in that atmosphere, I wonder how on Earth he even got the idea that what his father preached was wrong and that he had to leave. Some minds are so strong. I was lucky - my parents were never religious and never forced anything upon us, either way, so growing up to be an atheist and skeptic is not so hard to imagine for myself. But I met other people too at the rally like Nate Phelps - a guy who broke out from a fourth-generation Mormon family and a lesbian girl who's badge proudly proclaims her as the 'pink sheep of the family'.

Anyway, the Westboro Baptist Church didn't show up in the end (apparently they have a habit of missing their engagements, and have been turned away at the Canadian border before. As one person mused: "I wonder how many pro- rallys they have inspired?"), but we had a party anyway. Nate and several others gave speeches, including one local supply teacher who was fired from his job at a Catholic school for legally changing his gender. This is apparently against Catholic teachings and would confuse the students. We stood out in the cold enjoying each other's body warmth until our fingers longed for cups of warm liquid, and a few of us retired to a local coffee shop to chat about physics and economics until the night's end.

What is a scientist?

2010-11-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

I've started reading Unscientific America, a very recent book on the state of science in America. I'm only a couple of chapters in but it seems quite interesting. It's position seems to be not that the public are stupid and disinterested, or that the scientists are self-isolating, but really a less extreme mix of both! I predict it will be the sort of essay that will end up saying that scientists should be trained more in communication and outreach, and while I agree to an extent I can never help thinking this argument asks quite a lot of scientists. As well as doing their own job of research, as well as teaching and advising, as well as applying for grants, they have to be media buffs as well?

Anyway, maybe they'll propose a more stringent strategy I can agree with later on, but for now the part that interested me the most was a poll that asked people to name scientific role models. 44% couldn't answer. The rest named the top three as Bill Gates, Al Gore and Einstein. I mean really? Not even Stephen Hawking? Another poll threw up a statistic that only 18% of Americans know a scientist personally.

I voiced this to my other half, and we started a debate on what makes a scientist. He asked me if he was a scientist? We thought about it. He's a geologist now, he works in the field, he writes reports sometimes. But does he make hypotheses, and test them to forward new theories? No. He thought perhaps his bosses might advance theories as they drew up reports on exploration areas. Do they need to publish them in peer-reviewed journals to be scientists? Probably not, otherwise there would be no amateur scientists tinkering away in sheds. But I suppose they don't count under the question "Do you know a scientist personally?"

Officially then, a scientist is someone who hypothesises, experiments, refines and theorises and publishes with the approval of their peers (by which I mean by their methods not their point of view), all for a living. But anyone can be a scientific hobbyist!

In other news, I'm afraid I couldn't keep myself away from the Skeptical movement. In fact, I've done quite the opposite and joined the executive committee to help set up a Centre for Inquiry in Edmonton. We had the first meeting thursday and it was fun the just be a part of the brainstorming stage. I went away with a assistant secretary role and a responsibility for picking topics for round-table discussions, where a subject is chosen for discussion within our group and anyone else who wants to attend - local atheist or skeptic societies or even people from the opposite side of the debate (well, hopefully these too, there's no fun in just agreeing with each other is there?). For the first one I think I'm going to choose a very interesting article a friend sent me: Text of talk by Vatican Observatory director on ‘Science Does Not Need God. Or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution’ It's a refreshingly well reasoned and thought-out treatment of science answering mysteries, and condemns those who fills the gaps with God. Have to come up with a few 'talking points', and will probably find a couple of other potentials too before our next exec meeting.

I've never sat on any execs or councils of any sort before, but to be honest this is the first thing I've cared enough about, rather than it just being 'It would look good on my CV'. The CFI is a particularly interesting kind of society though since it sort of has three heads: Secular, Skeptical, and to a lesser extent, Atheist. However, we decided in time of controversy we decided we'd just quote the central CFI's mission: "The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values."

Finally, I thought I'd share my second essay for my non-fiction writing class. I was much more pleased with this one, it came so naturally. After we've gone through a couple of rounds of workshopping, our groups have to choose one essay to be read out by the author in the next class. I volunteered to read mine since at the moment I feel it's the most inspiration I'll have for one of these things!

___________

Proud Capital

I have sat here for a thousand years, on the rocky apex of the Atlantic, grounded on black lava. The jagged Reykjanes Peninsula shields me to the South, protecting me from the brunt of the long ocean. To the North Mt Esja watches over me, trapping the clouds and providing shelter. That’s not to say the Weather Gods don’t make it hectic here. Snow and hail blow in fierce gales and thrash against my buildings. Those walls are young, but my people are an old and hardy race and their language is ancient.

I am the proud capital of this beautiful country, but I am not so vain to presume you all know who I am. So I’ll be fair to you. My name is Reykjavik or “Smoky Bay” in your young tongue. Iceland is my domain, and two thirds of its brilliant people live under my blanket. Forgive me, I cannot help but enthuse about the virtues of my citizens: they work hard, they are high achievers and they are always curious. But still they are so few, and I welcome the multitudes of foreign friends that descend upon me to help them out.

One such visitor moved into one of my homes, near my centre by the concrete spire of Hallgrimskirkja Cathedral, at the end of a summer. She was a young girl from my southern neighbour England, and though it was still August she noticed a chill in the sea air that was different from the coastal breezes of her hometown. That wind had gathered cold and scent from the length of the Atlantic. My days were still long though, and she enjoyed the ever-light that gives energy and joy to all my young party-folk.

The season soon changed and with it came school for the girl; it seemed she would be staying the whole year to learn from my people. My autumns are short and pass swiftly into winter. I have heard that in other countries great trees turn yellow and naked, but there are not so many leaves to fall from my scant trees. Nevertheless, I cooled with the season as she warmed to my charms. I don’t believe I am being too egotistical when I say she fell in love with me; she adored my uncrowded streets and wide open harbour. Yes, I am a capital city, with all the culture, business and pomp that goes along with that, but I am not so populous. Unlike those noisy capitals like London or Paris I am not flashy, but that means crime is low and my people live in comfort. The girl seemed to like seeing my children bubbling with energy around every corner; they are free to play here. Yes, she loved me alright, even down to my nagging greylag geese and the relentless drone of the propeller planes that graze the roof of her home.

Winter arrived suddenly that year. A great swarm of snow fell all in one night, covering me to a depth that made it quite difficult for my folk to walk around. I was pleased to see that the girl was delighted; this sort of snow seemed rare to her but it was the coming of a familiar friend to me. The bright snow highlighted the days, but it also made my people realize how short those days had become. Sometimes I am sad when winter arrives and they retreat into their homes, their feet less often stepping my streets. I console myself with the thought that trapped inside their buildings my people are creating great works of art, literature and song. Still, they try to make my outside pleasant, and decorations for the winter festivals are strung from my lampposts and shop fronts.

I believed the girl was enjoying my beautiful winter when I saw her turn to leave. Suitcase in hand, she trundled towards the bus station on the way to the international airport in my sister city Keflavik. Where was she going? Was my wind too cold now; was that smile on her face simply stuck there from the autumn? I asked the Gods to throw a little sharp snow at her. She carried on. Upset and angry, I called on them to blow all the wind and snow from the ocean at her. It raged across the runway and no planes flew. The Weather Gods tried their best for me, to keep her from leaving so soon. She hadn’t yet seen my spring! But my pilots are too talented, and she did escape me in the end. My winter continued in further darkness.

She came back, and I felt like a fool for thinking she wouldn’t. I’d forgotten that people have families and friends they like to spend the dark winters with. But I remembered it when I saw my own people sitting down together, sons and dottirs around a table enjoying the traditions of this land. I was sure that while the girl was away she was enjoying the winter traditions of her own land.

Abashed, I asked the Gods to prepare a bright, cool day for her return. There was that smile again, not pasted on but real and rejuvenated. She seemed happy to see me too. My winter lights stayed up until February, and it was a cheerful time for us both. I believe she even captured the heart of a foreign boy, and they strolled along my shore together, breathing in the coastal sunsets. He taught her how to take pictures of me and I must say I looked good in their photographs.

I am not as cold as many people think and my snow soon turned to slush and filled the streets with wet shoes and cold feet. Spring would soon be coming. Yes my friends, my winters are not so long and arduous. A lone tree grew outside the girl’s window, inhabited by a small black bird. As the snow melted below the tree, buds burst beneath the feet of the little bird, and as suddenly as winter had arrived, it was gone. My folk thrust open their doors and embraced my streets again. The girl too sprang out of her house and re-immersed herself in my experiences. She took a boat to watch the whales, took my best singer’s cavernous voice into her ears and heart, and took her last looks at the monuments of mine she loved the most.

She was leaving again, but this time we both knew she wouldn’t be back for a long time. I saw how she lingered and tried to cement the memories of all my wonders deep inside her heart. An extra long soak in the hot tub, with an indulgent swim in the geothermal swimming pool. An evening spent just sitting by the Viking ship by my harbour and watching the calm water leading to Esja. A careful stroll down my main street, visiting every shop for one last souvenir, as if those objects could keep me alive when she was gone.

I knew she loved me now, and I her, so I let her go. A bright day at the beginning of summer, with a calm coolness only I can deliver, carried her to Keflavik and onto a plane. She looked out on the wide landscape of my great country with solemnity.

Come again girl, and I’ll be waiting. At Keflavik I’ll post a sign for you: Velkomin heim. Welcome home.

Warm fuzzies

2010-10-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

Finally! I have a moment to sit and type.

A hectic weekend bred a hectic week, with barely a moment to pause. We went to the Rocky Mountains, to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell palaeontology museum, then to Canmore and a husky kennel tour, and finally up the Icefields Parkway to walk on a glacier and generally marvel at the mountains. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond out control, I had to drive the whole weekend, and I am a horrible driver, left side of the road or right. So I won't dwell on the weekend.

I've had a couple more articles in the student newspaper, both of which I'm reasonably proud of. The first was a piece about dopamine's role in spatial learning. There was an odd thing about it when it got printed though, as you notice there's a picture of 'cocaine' with the article. The researcher I interviewed was pretty ticked off about it, and emailed me saying that while my article was interesting the picture was inappropriate. I passed it on to my editors and relinquished responsibility. I asked the Ed today what happened about it, and she said she basically told the guy to suck it up. News is a strange place! But still, I was pleased with my article, and even more pleased that it got picked up as a feature sci/tech story on the Canadian University Press newswire - a website that collects the best new stories from student papers across Canada.

The next story was just a lot of fun. A very prestigious dinosaur guy (reportedly one of the models for the lead character in Jurassic Park) who is a professor at the U of A won the Province's top award: the Alberta Order of Excellence. So I just had to interview him and do a sort of profile. He was a lot of fun to interview and so entertaining, especially when there was a photographer with me and he started opening drawers of beautiful fossils right there in his office. Brain cases, jawbones with impressive teeth, a tiny complete hand, it was all incredible. As he looked around his office and into our delighted eyes he grinned and said "Here's the boy that never grew up."

This week I also went to a 'Science Communication Career Explorer', which was basically a lunchtime panel with four people variously involved in science communication. There was an outreach person from Alberta Innovates (mostly health-related), the environment reporter from the Edmonton Journal newspaper, the science communicator for the National Institute of Nanotechnology on campus and finally one of the co-founders of 'Science in Seconds', a web-based blog/video/podcast-athon created by U of A grads. I was most intrigued by the Edmonton Journal lady (not least because I remembered her from my original epiphany; she was part of that first workshop a year ago), and went to have a chat with her afterwards. We were discussing balance in the media, and I was trying to figure out when expressing 'both sides' no longer becomes necessary, in the case of extremely likely science (i.e. nobody would now gives both points of view when discussing a heliocentric solar system, and more recently global warming is increasingly gaining this vantage point). During the panel she was talking about the Alberta Oil Sands (it takes up a lot of her reporting time...), and talked about a feature she did about a native community downstream from the Sands. They have been complaining that the water has been falling, and that it contains pollutants that have caused them to become very ill. I asked her how far away we were then from proclaiming the Oil Sands as universally 'bad' and not paying any lip service to the 'official' standpoint that they are harmless. It appears a long way. I can understand from the point of this community, so far the evidence is just anecdotal, but she said it was partly due to the negligence of the official environmental investigators to conduct proper research.

It seems I have a lot more to learn about the Oil Sands. I also have a lot to learn about where I fit into this whole journalism thing. Impartiality and balance is fine to a point, but often it seems so forced. Well, the ultimate goal is writing my own popular science books, and then at least I would have to answer to no-one (except my critics).

In good news, I met with the Alumni people this week in their offices and discussed a couple of articles. One is a look back at the history of the student newspaper, The Gateway, since it will turn 100 in November. There should be a lot of good little stories in there, talking with old writers and editors and looking into the archives. I also got another assignment from them, quite serendipitously. The Alumni Association is running a trip to Iceland next summer, and they needed someone to write a travel piece about the place. So they needed someone who had spent some time in Iceland... luckily, when I was first contacted by them I sent my Iceland blog piece as an example of my writing, so there I was, the perfect candidate! I will write a travel piece for their magazine, 1500 words and some photos, and I'll get paid $400! It was the warmest, fuzziest feeling too, when, as I was leaving, one of the women said "It's nice for me to work with someone who knows how to write, so I'm excited!"

The warm and fuzzies didn't end there either. I finally got back my mark from that first essay for my writing class. I was very nervous, having not done any academic English for a good many years. But I got B+/A-, which the lecturer said was a very good mark for the first essay (the highest in the class was A-), and was closer to an A- but just less due to a few awkward sentences and grammar errors. Fine, those are things I can work on and fix. What filled me with joy was she said my writing itself was good, engaging and with good detail, but to the point. If I at least have some sort of natural talent, then I'm a lot closer to being a professional, I have a little less work to do, which is good news since I started this whole new career relatively 'late'.

Finally, tonight I went to a talk by Ben Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He has also been a paranormal investigator for over 10 years, and gave an engaging talk about how he goes about his investigations. What was novel about his approach was how much he was prepared to engage with paranormal believers, and his mandate was to understand what they are experiencing rather than ridiculing and flat-out debunking. When someone asked him what is the best way to gain converts, his immediate answer was "Not being a dick."

Nobody calls me silly about science

2010-10-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

Did I ever tell you that the Edmonton Sun printed my comment about the shoddy climate change article? Well they did, although with a bit of editing, and I missed it actually in print, which means I can't collect it for my clippings book, oh well.

I read a lot of the online comments on my comment (what an age we live in), but decided not to respond. Most of them didn't make a lot of sense anyway... Well, the Edmonton Sun isn't what I'd usually pick up, let's put it that way.

However, in a recent article I wrote for the student newspaper, I couldn't help but comment on a comment! Nobody calls me silly about science and gets away with it...

It seems my Alumni Assoc. article has now been published, though oddly I didn't hear from the Assoc. itself, and no mention of pay... ahh.... http://www.alumni.ualberta.ca/StayConnected/Etrail/ResearchSpotlight9

My feelings about the stuffiness of news writing and how I'd love to delve deeper have been strengthened by the recent viral spoof-science-article and its follow-up. It's a long follow-up, all well-worth reading, but I especially recommend the section 'Five ways to improve science journalism'. My favourite bits:

"Challenge and analyse. If you can free some of your journalists from the rat race of inane reporting on stuff that everyone else has already covered, then maybe you can use those people to do something more worthwhile, something that adds real value: proper analysis and insight. Let those people cover less, in more depth.

Nurture talent. If you have talented writers, then nurture them and allow them to experiment with the form. If you're lacking a decent and diverse pool of talent, then leverage the community of fantastic science writers working in the blogosphere."

Um, is anybody out there? I want this to be me. Friends, don't rest nagging until this is me!

Finally, a non-science writing finish. I promised I'd post the final draft of my non-fiction writing class essay about a person, so here it is. I like some parts of it, but I know it could be better. Skills will sharpen. Enjoy!

__________

W i l l

Will’s blue eyes bulged.

“Sixty-four!” he exclaimed.

“Yup,” I said, filling in the blanks of the hangman game we were playing, “you got it. It’s my lucky number.”

“But, but,” spluttered Will, “that’s my lucky number!”

I think that’s how we saw our relationship in the beginning: as some kind of magical destiny. More than just coincidence and similar interests, we saw our coming together as an alignment of the planets. Will was the boy-next-door, although we didn’t get to know each other until we were sixteen. His house was full of music, disorder and activity, much like the mind that lay snuggled beneath his fleece of curly brown hair. Hugging him in the clear bright nights of our youth, I could wrap my arms around his skinny waist so that the tips of my fingers cupped my elbows.

Will loved me with all his energy. He wrote letters to me and songs for me. When he had the choice between answering his cell and kissing me, he threw his phone away. He spent time making me feel like the only girl in the world, his angel standing alone in a beam of sunlight. Once, after a heavy night of drinking, I found he’d drawn a picture of me as the heroine of The Flaming Lips’ song “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, assuring the world that I wouldn’t let those evil robots defeat him.

Our formative fairytale didn’t last long though; the pitfalls of teenage dating caught up with us and other relationships bled into our tapestry. Our threads were interwoven with those of new friends and lovers, but Will never changed, and eventually we grew back together. We were grown-ups now, but the sense of celestial destiny hadn’t waned for either of us.

We both moved to Bristol for university and Will’s creative personality thrived there, among friends who encouraged his quirky sense of humour and placed him centre stage. He grew more self-assured with every play, with each comedy slot and whenever surrounded by all of his friends that played music with him for hours. He no longer needed me to make him feel like he was worth something. Together, alone, we were happy but apart we belonged to different worlds.

On my twentieth birthday, I held a barbeque in the happy post-exam haze of June. All my friends came and many of Will’s as well. It happened to be the finale of Big Brother and many of my guests wanted to watch it. I was happy to let people enjoy themselves however they wanted to, and we crammed into the living room of the house I shared with three others. Will and his friends hung around on the stairs just outside, apart from the party. They convinced him that watching Big Brother was a far too plebeian thing to do, and not how a birthday should be celebrated. I know this because he barged into the room and announced this to all of my bemused friends as he switched off the TV. I was mad that he couldn’t see that it was my birthday and I didn’t care what his arty friends thought.

“Will!” I snarled. He faltered. Everyone stared. No-one had ever heard a raised voice between us. Will fled and I turned the TV back on.

We spent that summer in separate towns; he stayed in Bristol working and I went back to our hometown. We arranged a romantic weekend in Oxford where we could wander the river banks and gasp as we opened each new drawer of treasures in the Pitt Rivers museum. Pitt Rivers was a 19^th-Century archaeologist and ethnologist, a kindred spirit to Will, who I always thought would have been perfectly at home in The Lost World or as a turn-of-the-century Indiana Jones. The weekend passed blissfully, and as we made ready to depart back to our respective towns I wept and begged him to come to our hometown with me, just for a day or two. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me he had a lot of commitments in Bristol, but I knew he didn’t have to work and instead his commitments were to his friends there. I was no longer his Queen of the Nile, his Boudicca conquering the world for him.

After the summer it was time for me to go on the exchange year that was part of my degree program. I left for Iceland at the end of August with Will in my heart but with a deep worry about what the distance would do to us. I thought back to when we lived in Bristol and I’d walked to his work place one evening just to check he was still alive, having not heard from him in a week. Will was always losing his cell phone or forgetting to check his email. Communication of that kind wasn’t his strong point, and now we would be oceans apart.

By November, Will professed he missed me too much and flew to Iceland on a whim to spend a couple of days with me. Most people found it romantic, but while I was happy to see him, it didn’t make up for the days on end I wouldn’t hear from him.

Finally, when I returned to England for Christmas, we came apart at the seams. He told me he realized our relationship couldn’t work at that time. I knew it wouldn’t work at any time.

The last time we met was New Year’s Eve, three years later, at the funeral of a friend we’d known at different stages of his life. He’d committed suicide. We wept side-by-side and our hands found each other’s. As we turned, I looked into his oceanic eyes and saw reflected in them the same sorrowful smile I felt on my lips. Young love had passed, adult love had caused us to slide past each other, but in our long lives ahead we knew we’d always be connected.

__________

Insecurities addressed

2010-09-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't written for a while, but I didn't want to be one of those people who just write something because they haven't for a while and actually have nothing to say.

At the start of the week I submitted my first Alumni Association piece. I focused it on the 'accidental' nature of the discovery, and how science often works that way etc. I got an email back from the editor today saying that although the piece was interesting, it wasn't quite the focus they were going for, it would be better to pique readers' interest if the question was “How will the discovery affect me and my health?” So she wondered if I would be happy if we used my original student newspaper article with a couple of pieces of the new article spliced in.

I understood, but I was frustrated and a little disappointed. I didn't want to write more news; I was hoping I'd get to explore something more. Of course I'm happy to have the experience and such, and will work harder to make future articles to their liking, but it also shapes the kind of writing I want to produce one day.

In the email, the editor said 'Just be sure to keep in mind the questions that most appeal to our readers: “How does this research/discovery affect my health, happiness, family, pocketbook, or understanding of the world?”' And this is the crux of most news writing these days: 'So what?' But I wish I could write more about things that are just...interesting, I love things that are not what people think of usually, for example this issue of how many new discoveries in science are made by 'accident'. The things I love learning about most are concepts or ideas I never thought about before, and this is what I love writing about too. I suppose what I'm saying is really I'd like to be a science writer rather than a science journalist per se, but see journalism as a passage to this. And journalism can be fun too, and can provide opportunities for further scope, such as the Lawrence Krauss article... but news can be so stuffy. I should try the features section of the student paper some day... but I doubt they'd be so interested in my science musings either.

Sometimes it's hard to have depression and to start a new direction. Depression makes a person feel worthless, useless, stupid and a let-down to others in every day life as it is let alone with this pressure of trying to succeed in something you've never tried before. Even if the logical part of my mind knows I'm still learning, and that I have to pitch to the right audience and it will take time to get these things right... it doesn't stop the chemically-imbalanced part having a tantrum.

Well, to cheer myself up I've decided to post here the original version of the article I wrote about Dr Lamb for the Alumni Association, since there shouldn't be any copy-write issues.

__________

How did a cancer researcher end up discovering an amino acid that plays a vital role in the body’s immune response, potentially boosting vulnerable people’s disease-fighting power? It seems a world away from investigating how cell growth can get out of control, leading to cancerous tumours, but for Dr. Richard Lamb the discovery was a happy consequence of routine experiments throwing up extraordinary results. Lamb, an associate professor from the department of oncology at the Cross Cancer Institute, explained that although the route of inquiry he took to discover the role of the amino acid arginine in the immune response was a departure from his normal work, it was the logical response to a discovered question. It had to be solved, at least in part, and Lamb’s lab had the power to solve it.

“There’s different types of scientists; there’s scientists that study one question and go to a very deep level to understand it; and then there’s scientists who are more the problem identifiers/solvers, they go from one problem to the next. I’ve done a bit of both [...] but I prefer the identifying a new problem.”

In this case, while testing the removal of amino acids from normal cells, Lamb found a breakdown in the system that attracts infection-fighting macrophages to the site of infection. The question then became which amino acid was causing this effect? Removing arginine from other biochemical systems was known to block signalling processes, so a set of experiments was designed to test the effect of arginine in the immune response. The results were clear; arginine played a major role, although the exact mechanism is still to be determined. But, reaching this conclusion from a series of experiments branching from unsuccessful investigation into another system was remarkable.

Lamb is enthusiastic about the workings of science, and believes the mantra of science funding bodies should be ‘people, not projects’. Real scientific progress is rarely made within the confines of a set proposal, carried through to the letter to the very end, producing the exact result first aimed for. If this were true, his lab would never have discovered the critical role of arginine, which certainly has profound implications for human health. The potential benefits include the treatment of undernourished people, intensive care patients and even arthritis sufferers, if an excess of arginine is found to cause an overreaction of the immune system.

However, Lamb’s lab will leave these deeper issues to other researchers and return to focusing on its original purpose of working out the mechanism by which cell growth is controlled by a complex pathway of chemical signalling. Normal cell growth is limited, but some part of this pathway breaks down in many cases of cancer, causing runaway growth. There are still many problems to be identified and solved.

“The abnormalities that are found in cancer just present opportunity for basic researchers like me to try and delve deeper into understanding what’s happening normally, to then understand what’s going on in cancer.”

No study is completed by one person though, and on the scientific journey from cancer to immunity Lamb took with him many colleagues in labs across Europe and in particular his post-doctoral fellow, Virginie Mieulet. Mieulet has now moved on to her own lab, and will hopefully continue to investigate the importance of arginine. Any further progress to bring the benefits of arginine to the real world will require collaboration between many experts in a range of fields.

__________

For the writing class this week we work-shopped in groups the second drafts of our essays. The guy I was partnering with last week re-wrote his piece absolutely wonderfully; he really did give a personal insight into his 'relationship' with Mohammed and the result was astounding. I wish I had the right to post his story here, it was truly great. My own story... I think it's ok, it will go through one more draft, then I will probably post it. I think it's an ok start, but I have to branch out and improve for the next assignment. I already have ideas for that.

Analysing writings

2010-09-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Krauss article is now published, and I must say it contains more Krauss than I imagined it would. In my original version, all the stuff about the physics symposium was first, as I thought that's what they wanted, about the students and all. But maybe it helped that Simon edited this one, and he was nodding a scribbling and lot while sitting next to me in the talk, so I think he was influenced by Krauss' words too. Which is good, but it made me read the article several times to make sure I felt comfortable having my name on the top of it. I figured out a way to resolve this issue though: I imagine that if the editor had tried to claim it as their own, would that be plagiarism of my work? And then when I compare the article side-by-side with my original draft (yes I am that anal) I always find that almost all of it is mine, but it's surprising how much difference ordering makes to a piece.

I also had another piece in the most recent student newspaper, about how long it takes to become self-motivated to exercise. It takes a long time, is the answer, more than six months. Motivation is a problem for me these days, so I'm using my dedication to science to make me exercise instead! Soon I will have to start my daily squats to record the effect on my knee pain. It's quite an intense routine, building up to 250-300 squats in one session. I figure all I have to do is keep telling myself that if I don't do the exercise I will mess up the researcher's experiment, and I can't pretend I did the exercise when I didn't, because that's falsifying data!

I just returned from my second non-fiction writing class, where we were paired up to critique each other's essay first draft. The essay is about a person who has influenced us or we have strong feelings about. The guy I got paired up with couldn't have had a more different essay than mine. I wrote a very personal essay about my relationship with an ex-boyfriend; he wrote about the history and importance of the prophet Mohammed. Neither of us were English students; I an earth scientist (with a tendency to over-explain rather than abstractly hint) and he a history student (which explained the impersonal tone of his essay). I was my typical twitchy self, nervous to offer advice on anyone else's writing, since I was new to this business. But, as usual I blurted it all out anyway. I found his essay impersonal, how was he influenced directly by Mohammed? He told me he made a concious decision (but didn't know if it was necessarily a good one) to not talk about his moments of doubt, and his experiences. I told him directly I wished he would put those things in, for one it would make the piece more relate-able [I can't believe that's not a word!], and secondly it would be so interesting. His essay so far was more about how Mohammed's history relates to the world around him, but I was so intrigued by the prospect of a Muslim (who had grown up in the States) revealing his intimacy with the religion on the page that I tried to encourage him to open up about it. I hope he does for the next draft, it would make a very compelling piece.

Sloppy journalism

2010-09-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

The day began well; I went and re-interviewed the amino acids/cancer researcher for the Alumni Association, this time in a pub. We agreed it was a lot nicer than the Cross-Cancer Institute where he works, since it's an integrated research facility and cancer hospital; he told me he once saw a dead body wheeled in front of him in the hallways. I said perhaps it helped remember what you're working for. He agreed to a point, but said it's also hard to concentrate on experiments with 'that sort of thing' always around the next corner.

We paused for a moment then continued chatting, about the article, about Alberta, about science. We talked a lot, which is good, since I haven't exactly decided how to shape the article yet. But it doesn't need to be submitted for a couple of weeks, so I have time to work out the particulars.

I drank two pints of 'pop' with the researcher, having only eaten a bowl of cereal, then foolishly decided I could walk all the way to pick up my package in the middle of industrial Edmonton without lunch. A touch of the shakes later and I found myself in McDonalds, reading a discarded copy of today's Edmonton Sun. Then I came across an article that really got on my nerves. It was the antithesis of everything I believe in regarding integrity in science reporting. The guy actually suggested Googling was a valid way to learn about the current state of climate science. I immediately decided to pen a reply, even if just for my own catharsis. The first draft was a bit 'angry', but hopefully I managed to tone it down :D

Anyway, here is the original article.

And here is my letter to the editor:

Peter Worthington’s article ‘Stormy weather for IPCC’ (20^th September 2010), if full of errors and assumptions, many of which could be refuted with basic research.

A recent report has deemed that the IPCC needs stricter controls to protect the integrity of its reports, but this in no way means the underlying science is called into question. This same conclusion was made by three separate independent reports into the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit email leak; which found absolutely no evidence of misconduct, and again, no change to the strength of the underlying science linking human activities to climate change.

As for the ‘huge sums of money’ pulling climate scientists towards a supposed conspiracy, I encourage him to remember that climate change scientists began with the same basic earth science skills as oil exploration scientists, then let us ask who has more to gain? Climate scientists are not in it for the money.

It seems Worthington has made no effort on his part to do any independent research, and instead to simply regurgitate the assumptions of The Spectator. I’m sorry; he did do some of his own research, he Googled climate change. But if Worthington thinks that the blogosphere is the appropriate place to find out the current state of any science, where people are free to post any supposition they like without peer review, then he is seriously misguided.

Even Worthington’s ‘frivolous aside’ about cow farts shows his complete lack of care for the facts. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, but much shorter-lived in the atmosphere. Even so, the rising rates of methane from cows are still due to human development; with more of the world eating burgers every day, more farting cows are required to provide them.

I agree that Dr. Pachauris should step down as the head of the IPCC body, but only because he has not been the best figurehead for integrity, not because there is anything wrong with the science of climate change the body portrays.

Finally, if Worthington thinks that we are too inferior to have impact on the planet, perhaps he should have flipped forward a few pages in his own newspaper and read about the gigantic gyre of plastic clogging the Pacific Ocean.

Yours,

Hayley Dunning

My first 'Big Deal'

2010-09-18T20:41:00.001-07:00

Goodness, has all this happened in one week?? My journalistic endeavours have gone full speed ahead.

My meeting with the woman from the Alumni Association went exceptionally well, not least because she was a great lady, we chatted away, about writings and everything else, and she surprised me by having a profound love for British comedies, she was even obsessed with The Mighty Boosh! But the meeting ended most satisfactorily; she asked me if I would be willing to write one piece for their newsletter every month, for $100-150 a piece! I tried not to sound too enthusiastic, but it was difficult. Not only does this give me great experience and provide me some great cv fodder, but it gives me more writing freedom. News writing can be so stuffy and formulated, and you just have to report. But for this I will write for the 'Researcher Spotlight' and 'Campus Corner' sections, basically exploring fun stuff about campus, and writing about it from a first person perspective and with a little more flare. I can't wait. My first piece we agreed would be to go back and talk to the amino acids researcher I interviewed for the student newspaper, and talk to him more about how he does science, and how the discovery was an 'accident'.

It seems, however, that there's some weird animosity between the student newspaper and the alumni association. The alumni lady said she chose to contact me on a total whim, because she was looking for a way to involve students, and my article stood out immediately from the others in the paper. It can be a little...juvenile sometimes, but it is a student paper. But it is why I tend to stay in the news section, the editors are much more down to Earth and professional. When I later went to the student paper to talk to them about the logistics of using material I collected for their articles, the editor-in-chief was, uh, pretty derisive about the alumni publication. Could be interesting !

Then, a little later on, I was handed a last-minute assignment from the student paper that someone else pulled out of: to cover the graduate physics association's first symposium. Despite it being their first year, they'd managed to attract a prestigious keynote speaker: renowned physicist and author Dr. Lawrence Krauss. I was to interview the organiser of the event, chat to some of the students and cover the talk. When I called up the organiser to arrange an interview with her, she enthusiastically offered me an interview spot with the man himself the next day. "Uh, sure, that would be great!" I squealed as I put the phone down, ran around the apartment excitedly, than began panicking. This guy is a big deal. I mean, a really big deal, especially to someone like me. The guy is an ambassador for science and reason, critical thinking, and fighting scientific ignorance. My interview skills are definitely not up to this.

I was sure I could think of questions to ask him, both to satisfy the newspaper and my own curiosities, but I wasn't sure how I could ask these questions. I always knew interviewing would be my weak point, and I felt I hadn't really had enough practice yet. See, I'm confident with what I write, but I'm terrible at speaking, I'm an awful mutterer and stutterer!

But I sucked it up (and took a sleeping pill to ensure a steady night's sleep), and prepared my questions to the point of writing them down precisely to minimize stutter. The first port of call was Dr. Krauss' book signing, so I could interview the organiser while she had 10 minutes to spare. She was a delightfully enthusiastic girl, telling me that she was motivated to hold the symposium to spread the joy of physics:

“We love physics; we are passionate about what we do. We don’t do it for the money because we don’t make any, we do it for the pleasure, and we would like to share this with everybody else.”

While I was there, I thought I should take the opportunity to get some books signed. I bought 'Fear of Physics', because, frankly, I've always wanted to know more about string theory and whatnot, but physics has always eluded me, so I thought this would be a good place to start. As I got my books signed I thought I'd try some ad-libbing. He asked me what I was studying, I told him Earth science. I forewarned Dr. Krauss that we'd be meeting again; that I'd be interviewing him later. He said he always liked being interviewed by someone with some scientific knowledge. I immediately blurted out that I was trying to break into the world of science journalism, and he was my first 'Big Deal'. He said he'd try and make it easier for the both of us then.

I smiled nervously. It was perhaps a bit foolish to admit how nervous I was, but it was not that bad, coming from my mumbling mouth.

His schedule was tough that day, so he and his entourage were late for the interview time, and he was obviously a little agitated. I promised to be as quick as possible so he could relax before the big talk. I fluttered. He asked for a moment to drink some water and encouraged me to do the same. I tried to calm myself, then I started the interview.

I asked him the 'student newspaper' things; why did he come to the symposium, was he looking forward to the student poster session, what advice did he have for students? Then I got down to business.

I asked him about the possibility of warp drive. Not with the laws of physics the way they are I'm afraid.

I asked him what he thought of Stephen Hawking's recent assertion (on Larry King Live) that science can explain the universe without the need for a creator, and whether he thought more influential figures like him should speak out. He said that it was nothing new, and that the problem is that anything Hawking says is taken as a 'pronouncement from God (if you'll forgive the pun)', but the problem is his statements are one-liners, that have the ability to provoke thought and conversation, but are not fully communicative.

I said, that at a venue like this, when he talks about non-science, for the majority he is probably preaching to the converted, so how does he go about reaching the people sitting on the fence?

He thought about it for a bit. Then he said he hoped to perhaps raise people's awareness, and provide them with the tools to use in their own discussions.

Lastly, I asked the big one, almost purely for me. How does the media improve its science reporting?

Journalists, he said, need to treat science reporting like they treat other reporting. Be diligent, and don't be afraid to do the research, and most importantly, don't be afraid to make pronouncements when they are warranted. For example, no (credible) scientist would refute the truth of evolution, but most newspapers still have trouble speaking about the subject without fearing of upsetting religious sensitivities.

And that was that. I flopped back to the student newspaper offices in a daze and waited for the deputy news editor to join me for the keynote address (a nice guy called Simon). We headed over and I got out my notebook and voice recorder again. The talk was engaging, more about the blurring of scientific truth, and how we should all find our inner scientist to help us fight the forces of ignorance.

Anyway. I'd like to post more about the talk and such, but er, it's late and my cognitive abilities are waning. I'll be sure to post a link to the article when it's published though, although it doesn't contain enough Krauss as I'd like. A missed opportunity by the paper in my opinion. But! Hopefully I'll meet him again, further in my career, when I'm not such a stutterer.

Snippets

2010-09-14T21:05:00.001-07:00

I think I've got a case of 'Fresher's Flu' – their enthusiasm and energy has somehow infected me with a will to 'do things'. There's so much to talk about I'm going to break this down into bite-sized chunks, so you don't get stuffed on science!

*****

I had a fascinating day yesterday.

It began with interviewing a cancer research scientist for a piece for the student newspaper. His work was interesting, but even more I liked the guy himself. At the end of the interview I asked the standard 'Do you have anything you want to add?' and he surprised me by saying he wanted to make a couple of points about science that the public aren't usually aware of. I perked up; this is my kind of thing. He wanted to make it clear that this study came about by 'accident', when the original phenomenon they were trying to study failed to show any significant results under experimentation. Instead, the control in the experiment turned up a result that was much more unexpected and intriguing. In science, he stressed, you have to be prepared to be wrong, accept that you are wrong, and move on to study the results that were 'real'. He also wanted to point out how collaborative the study was, with contributions from six labs across the world over three years. Beavering away in you lab on your own is a real stereotype of science, but that's not how it's done.

The piece should be published tomorrow, let's see how much of that stuff I got past my editor!

After the interview, he shared with me how much he loved doing his job – coming up with hypotheses, designing experiments, puzzling over the results, adapting the method... To him, that's what science was all about. By this time I had told him of my science journalist aspirations, and admitted to him that those things he described, those were the things I wasn't good at. But I still loved science, and was glad to hear all the fascinating things researchers get up to.

Next up, I went to an information session for a program called Let's Talk Science, for university students to communicate their knowledge and enthusiasm to school kids. I signed up to attend a training session, but I'm not sure exactly which of their specific programs I want to help out with yet. I'm not the most confident person for teaching a class by myself!

Lastly, I interviewed another researcher, this time for a piece about the psychology of exercise motivation. I love to hear about these kinds of things sometimes, less of the physics-lab-experiment type science, more relatable, more inspirational. The woman who conducted the research was pleasant, encouraging, and above all, a darn sight easier to interview than most scientists I've come across! While most of them have been open to interview, and personable, they have also had the tendency to ramble, a lot of the time off the point. It's partly my own lack of skills as an interviewer, not being able to control the conversation, as I often notice afterwards when I trawl through the transcript looking for some useful information! It's even more difficult over the phone, but this woman was a dream, answered each question with just the right amount of information, so that I could see the story clearly forming before me.

*****

In other news, I signed up for a study testing a new regime for treating a type of knee pain. I've had this pain on and off for about 10 years, which is a shockingly long time not to do something about it (shocking even to the researcher who screened me for eligibility earlier), but I suppose I just got used to it. Well, this seemed like the perfect solution: I get to help a fellow student out with their research and potentially ease my pain (which sometimes prevents me from sleeping, like everything else just now!). The therapy consists of six weeks of quite intense deep squats, so even if it doesn't cure my knees it'll give me great leg muscles! More about this as it goes along.

*****

Back to the student newspaper briefly, the last piece I had published is probably my favourite so far, I got a couple of compliments, but also it was just my kind of thing. The researcher I interviewed was the most rambling of them all so far, but luckily it was a subject I knew and understood, so it was easy for me to make a story out of it. Anyway, you can read it here.

Even better, I got an email today from someone at the University's alumni office, saying they read the piece with interest, and would I be interested in doing some freelance writing for their 'Researcher Spotlight' section of their monthly e-newsletter? Absolutely! I will meet with her tomorrow and hopefully pick up some more professional writing, and meet some more lovely scientists.

*****

Next, I'm excited to have got a place on a non-fiction writing course at the university that runs every Wednesday evening for the whole year. This will be great for developing my skills. So far with the student newspaper I've been too cautious to experiment with anything but news (also because the opinions and features sections are very student-orientated), but this will hopefully help me to not just be a science journalist, but a science writer.

*****

Finally (I know you're breathing a sigh of relief), an interesting news article came to my attention yesterday. The former UK science minister is calling for scientists to have a better dialogue with the public. At first I read the article with a furrowed brow, until I got to this bit:

"A study done a number of years ago of the then 15 European Union countries found that those nations scoring lowest on scientific understanding were in general the most unequivocally enthusiastic.

'We should not be surprised by this finding. A good education in science should lead people to ask questions about the impact of science,' according to Lord Sainsbury."

Then it started to make sense. It seems to me that science has thus done a pretty good job of making the public aware of ongoing science, but perhaps not about what that science actually means. Lord Salisbury talks about the public weighing up the risks and benefits of a science they see as impacting their lives, and insists they understand the risks but see no benefits to a lot of controversial topics. I'm not convinced this is the case. Risks in science are often based on a lot of 'ifs'; if one possible outcome comes into being, then it could cause many others, but it often depends on a lot of pathways that can't be accurately predicted. What I'm trying to get at is that any scientific finding or recommendation is always accompanied by caveats and uncertainties, and that's the thing the public don't always understand. In my opinion J

*****

I just remembered one last small thing! I went to a seminar about plagiarism today and the guy told an interesting story. A graduate student was caught falsifying data, and was severely punished, with two years' suspension. The student decided this was all wrong, and appealed on the grounds that falsifying data was 'not that serious'. The appeal board decided to increase the reprimand to a full expulsion from the university. Based on her behaviour and attitude, they couldn't be sure she wouldn't do it again; and falsifying data is just about the most serious crime there is in research.

Northern Adventures (and My Medication #2)

2010-09-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist one last trip of the summer.

The graduate student society in my department organised a field trip to the Northwest Territories, to check out one of the largest lead-zinc mines in Canada and the Alexandria Reef Complex, dating back to around 300 million years ago. The mine has been closed since the 1990s, but plenty of ore remains, and now metal prices are up again it's due to be re-opened soon. This means it was a final chance to roam around the old pits and pick it over for leftover goodies.

So we packed up a few hire cars and drove the ten hours north to a campsite near the town of Enterprise (a ramshackle town of only 90 or so colourful characters), just south of Great Slave Lake. The campsite was dreamily placed next to a waterfall on the Hay River, and in between tall pines we set up our tents and a roaring fire as the sky turned to a million stars blurred into the Milky Way.

The next day we set off for the mines. A quick introduction from our leader, a senior grad student, and we were off examining every rock for treasures. It didn't take us long to find some fantastic things, for example this rock chock-full of large calcite crystals:

The lead-zinc ore was concentrated in the host rock by circulation of hydrothermal fluids. Originally, the area was a coral reef, not far north

of the equator. The reef and the surrounding area were built-up of carbonate sediments, think warm, white, tropical beaches. While the rocks are strong, they can be reasonably easily dissolved, so that after some time pockets of emptiness develop, into which the metal-hosting fluids can gather. These leave areas dense with ore, and associated calcite, the remains of the fluid that didn't contain metals. These crystals are a stunning example (hiding under a rock we made a few boys turn over for us).

We also found numerous ore remnants: cubes of galena, veins of pyrite and sphalerite, and unexpectedly heavy rocks, dense with lead. For geologists, it was a giant playground ripe with beautiful samples.

But that's not to say we didn't do some learning too. In fact that was one of the things I enjoyed most about the trip. It seems like I long time since I learned something new just for the joy of it, and there's no better way than by picking up a rock and asking someone about it, and by looking at a long cliff face and reading thousands of years of Earth history.

The next day after the mine, we headed out on a journey through an ancient reef complex, full of bewildering extinct animals, some so perfectly preserved, but still mysterious in their mode of existence.

Here is a beautiful example of preserved corals. This type of coral doesn't exist today, these great reef-builders of the past succumbed to a great extinction event not long after this rock was created. This small example I found in a quarry we spent a happy hour or so digging around in. In fact, over two days we visited several quarries and roadcuts, things that most people just pass by, but are secret slices of history. Walking one simple roadcut for 50 metres took us through phases of the reef, from the edge where broken reef material tumbled down the continental slope, to productive mounds of reef containing primitive sponges, corals, brachiopods: a myriad of life.

Finally, after spotting from the car a bear, a moose, a beaver and a few falcons among the branches, the sky danced with green and finished off the trip in true northern style: with the Aurora Borealis.

******************************

In other news, I finally went to the doctor about my medication. I sat down and mumbled something about the studies I'd seen and what did she think about that? Her answer was along the lines of that you can find some studies that say that, and you can find studies that say the opposite, and improvements of this sort are difficult to measure. And she's seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that people have significantly improved with antidepressants. And the pills definitely do have some biochemical effect. I told her about my restless leg syndrome, possibly as a side effect of the pills, and she noted that I'd not had much of a routine this summer, with all the travelling, and prescribed me sleeping pills.

To be honest, I'm not best satisfied with this response. Anecdotal evidence like that she described doesn't really prove anything, especially as people 'feeling better' could just as easily be the result of the placebo effect. And prescribing me more pills seems to be just avoiding the problem.

OK, it's partially my fault for falling for that aspect of human nature that makes us revere figures like doctors and take their word as true wisdom. But talking it over with the group I realised how differently I should have handled it. Like the restless leg syndrome: my depression generally causes me to sleep excessively, not to feel insomnia like many do. This means that suddenly being awake all night with restless legs is almost certainly due to a biochemical effect of the pills rather than a mental issue. And by prescribing me this certain antidepressant in the first place is really just playing the odds; it turns out that which pill works depends on the make-up of your brain (which they can't know for sure until you die and they can cut the thing open), and the original prescription is just based on which works best for the majority of people.

So, what I really wanted out of this doctor's visit was a different antidepressant. Why didn't I just communicate that properly to my doctor? As my peers pointed out, they are not infallible experts, a lot is just trial-and-error guesswork, and in the end, who knows your body better than you? Ah, I will just try harder next time.

In defense of skepticism

2010-08-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

I started thinking today about the problem of 'wild theories' - outlandish scientific ideas that challenge the status quo. Most of these are swiftly proven to be rot, but people will always caution the scientific community for being dismissive of such theories, in case one turns out to be the next breakthrough Copernicus or Newton. Should scientists give every theory the time of day, no matter how outlandish? I tend to think not, but haven't yet solidified why. What follows is a short explosion of my mind on the subject!

I also posted it on the BBC Focus Magazine forum, to invite debate, so that it may be improved in the future.

_____

Wherever you announce yourself as a skeptic, and denounce all crackpots of wild scientific theories, you will inevitably come under fire from those who point out the genius of so-and-so and such-and-such, who were once denounced as quacks and are now proved unquestionably correct. How can you possibly scoff at any offered theories, they will say, when you may be opressing the greatest intellect since Einstein?

It's my perhaps naive view however, if a theory is truly correct it will win out eventually. I don't mean to say that the truth is destined to be found, but rather that often the reason that theories are dismissed is product of the time they are posed in. Take heliocentrism, the idea that the planets revolve around the Sun, and that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. This story has several opressed heroes, from Copernicus to Galileo. The first person to formally pose a heliocentric model was Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BC), and the reason it orignally failed to take hold was the inability to recognise at the time how large the universe was, and how far away the stars were. Various philosophers and astronomers in the following centuries attempted to revise the theory, but it wasn't until a full mathematical model (allowing prediction of the positions of the planets) posed by Copernicus that it began to gain steam, and contempt. Over the coming centuries heliocentrism was variously accepted by some sectors of the Church and banned by others, as directly opposing Scripture. Even so, at Copernicus' relatively early time, the slow growth of the theory was more due to his own fears about the possibility of criticsim on philosophical, mathematical and religious fronts, preventing him from publishing his work until the year before his death. As with all good science, heliocentrism grew as observations confirming and enhancing it massed, until the theory accurately described all that was observed, ultimately with the understanding that the Sun was only one of an infinite system of suns we call the universe.

Another problem with condemning skepticism comes from those that assume a certain theory can only ever come from their one revered genius. Again I disagree; consider Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. Darwin, like Copernicus, was a perfectionist in his work, and spent decades gathering evidence for his theory, knowing that is was a scientific revelation, a 'wild theory' that was likely to come under intense scrutiny and scorn from his peers. But even if scoffing scientists had prevented Darwin from publishing On the Origin of Species, there was already another evolutionary biologist waiting in the wings: Alfred Russel Wallace, who in 1858 proposed a theory of evolution by natural selection, independent of Darwin. Darwin's version only became famous because he had all the extra evidence behind his evetually published work.

Ideas like evoltuon, plate tectonics and an old Earth now seem obvious to us, the evidence is all around us, and as such I think it's foolish to assume we would still be living in the dark if it wasn't for that one bright spark; if things are so obvious they will inevitably be discovered.

Healthy skepticism of revolutionary ideas is necessary, as I want to demonstrate with a contemporary example. Around 13,000 years ago, North American 'megafauna', such as the wooly mammoth, mastodon, and sabre-toothed tiger, went extinct, along with a primitive culture known at the Clovis people. Various and numerous theories for this event have been proposed, from over-hunting and climate change to super-disease. The most recent theory however, first proposed in 2007, has attracted unprecedented attention. This is especially so in the media, since it involves something much more exciting than a cold snap or some germs: meteorites. When I first read the research paper (appropriately first-authored by one Richard Firestone), the evidence seemed overwhelming and compelling; microdiamonds and iridium indicating impact, carbon spherules from space in great concentrations, and charcoal and soot suggesting widespread fires; even if the speculation about possible impact sites raised my eyebrow.

However, I have heard vehement skepticism from many different parites over the past year, including dinner converation at a recent workshop I attended, and magazine coverage in Skeptical Inquirer. Some of these are specific complaints, such as terrestial and non-catastrophic explanations for the impact indicators, and no real evidence of continental-scale fires. My own supervisor even unearthed a purposeful omission of radiocarbon data the original authors made and only published later, in an obscure journal with spurious explanation as to why the dates were 'messed up'. But the most compelling reason to dismiss the theory as sensationalist is that increasingly, evidence points to the extinction of megafauna being gradual, and not sychronous amoung species. Some large mammal species even survived the 'event' althogether; a catastrophic end is unwarranted.

Why is it important for skeptical scientists to bring the full weight of argument against this theory? Because the public shouldn't be fooled into thinking the most exciting hypothesis is necessarily the right one. The American science TV show Nova devoted a whole hour-long episode to the theory in spring 2008, even funding an expedition to Greenland to collect more 'evidence', with few mentions of the numerous controversies and alternative theories.

Skepticism isn't, as some assume, a power-trip, or a way to make sure only your theory advances above others'. Skepticism is primarily to protect those not versed in scientific methods from being fooled, whether it be by homeopathy promising medical benefits it cannot deliver, or by theories which are flashy, and though may be proven correct in the future, at present ride more on their pizzaz than on their proof.

____

My Medication

2010-08-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

There's an issue in my life that has come up a few times recently, and I feel I should at last tackle it; the issue of properly assessing the drugs I'm taking. It's been going around in my mind since the medication was found to be the root of my intolerable Restless Leg Syndrome, and being accused of performing no better than a placebo, at first in a passing comment by a friend, and then in a magazine article I just read. Usually, as a curious scientist and a control-freak, I would have investiagted any such major voluntary change to the workings of my body immediately, but I suppose two things have prevented me; the first is that if it is a placebo effect, I would rather not read the evidence too carefully so that I could allow it to actually work; and second because I would feel the need to type up my findings here, and so expose my malady!

I'm not often bashful about my medical problems, but this is something I fear would change the idea some people have of me, and cause me to obtain a new and frightful label in their minds, reading everything I do with a new 'schema' of who I am. Please don't let it do that!

So here it is: since spring this year I have been taking Venlafaxine, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI): I have been affecting my brain chemistry in order to try and fight depression. I have known in fact for some years my tendency towards depression, not least because I am my mother's daughter and she has always been subject to terrific moods (plus she told me of a disturbing history of suicide in our female line - but no worries about that from me dear friends). I noticed some aspects of my life pulling me towards the darkness in previous years, but it wasn't until I moved to Finland two years ago that factors conspired to bring about a full collapse (there I was, a bright, ambitious new graduate, who was only able to find a job giving out free newspapers).

But enough about my personal life: let's just say I largely chose the drugs over therapy (although I do attend a biweekly 'support' group for insight), mostly because it is my belief that I do have the capacity to be happy, indeed four years ago I was just starting the happiest year of my so-far short life. All I need is a change my life situation, and I hoped the pills would clear my mind enough to let me make the right decisions. (Again, I don't want anyone to think this idea of science journalism is some starry-eyed dream of mine to escape my depression; I thought that way about moving to Canada for my PhD, and am not foolish enough to be so disappointed again. I don't expect to be magically cured by changing careers.)

At first, I was extremely pleased with the results: the anxiety that had often prevented me from leaving my bedroom, much less the building, was instantly dampened, so that I could engage in 'normal' behaviour (it's not really a fear of the ouside world, more of having to deal with people). I weighed it up and decided it was likely not a placebo effect, since I had no real expectations of what the pills would do for me anyway. I felt happy for a while (well, at least more active). Then, more recently, much of the anxiety has returned, to my great frustration, and that of my poor partner, who, although he admits he doesn't understand it, thankfully supports me anyway. Maybe it was just a placebo after all?

I finally decided to investiage my drugs after painful Restless Legs and admittance of my ailment to my parents, as well as mounting momentum of the idea that the 'new' antidepressants (i.e. SSRIs [e.g. Prozac], as opposed to older Tricyclics [e.g. chlorpromazine]) were no better than placebos, at least for mild-moderate depression sufferers (I am certainly not severe, I tested myself using a standard practitioner's test, and although I'm sure I would assess myself differently than a professional, even my most pessimistic view of my state does not score highly enough, requiring 28 to be deemed 'severe').

A lot of the recent news and magazines articles asserting that antidepressants perform statistically no better than placebos relate back to a study by Irving Kirsch and others, who performed a meta-analyses of drug trials (analysing a larger dataset collected from a number of seperate studies). They concluded that placebos were just as good as the prescribed drugs, making the distinction that when the drugs did perform better, it was because of less patient response to the placebo, not greater response to the drug.

In a quick flurry of Google-research before boaring the plane I'm now on (although it's probably a few days of editing before I post this... if fear of 'exposure' doesn't prevent me from doing so altogether) I read three very different sources of information and opinion about the subject. The first is a much-quoted British Medical Journal article summing-up the findings of the meta-analysis. The second was a New York Times article that thought more skeptically about the result of a similar study published a few years ago. It discussed the short span of many of the original studies, lasting only a matter of weeks, when some antidperessants can take up to six weeks to start showing any effectiveness. These also miss any longer term effects, such as the likelihood of the placebo effect being relatively short-lived, whereas antidepressants are more likely to keep being effective in the long-term. Do some of these same concerns affect the results of the new study? I also wondered myself if any of the original studies or the meta-analysis took into account whether the subject was receiving therapy or not.

The last source I read was a short piece from a medical professional's blog. Keeping away from the science of drug tests and placebos, he focused more on the question of, as a person with depression, what should you do with this information? His answer was simple: whatever is best for you. If you think a placebo will do just as well for you, fine. If you believe the drug is having real, tangible effects on your life, good, keep at it. If you want to try a different antidperessant, you can do that too. I don't entirely agree with his position, especially sine he calls Kirch's research 'his opinion'. Also, suggsesting that selecting between a sugar pill and something equally as effective, but tenfold the cost, is a sensible choice is on shady moral ground (although in this case, the jury for antidepressants is clearly still out, needing that old line of 'more research'). He also says the new family of antidepressants are not as powerful, which is likely true, but blames their lack of use on fierce marketing of newer drugs, rather than on the much worse side effects of the old drugs.

However, it was the only piece I read that allowed me, as a consumer, to re-evaluate my position. My choices are: come off the antidepressants (at the moment not an option, since my dose means quite a sharp and unpleasant withdrawal, which I have encountered on some level when forgetting to take the pills for even one day); carry on as normal (with, at present, no improvement in my mood or ability to concentrate, although I constantly wonder if the me of six months ago would agree with that, after all, I am keeping up this blog at least); or switch pills. In the end, antidepressants are never meant to cure depression, only allow the user to think about their position with a clear mind, which is exactly what I want out of them. I only 'turned myself in' because the inability to function properly was starting to impact my ambition (and my relationship, the final straw).

I'm not sure entirely which option to take yet, but one thing is for sure, next appointment I will ask my doctor what their opinion is on the issue. I hope they engage me: the worst thing would be accepting medication from a professional not versed in the controversies of their own field.

Palaeochronology Building Workshop

2010-08-25T17:22:00.001-07:00

I think I came across too harsh in my last post about Mexico, there are many things I like about the place. It's a lot safer than all the kidnap and mugging statistics suggest (if you stick to the right neighbourhoods), and I never saw a hint of trouble. It was also a romantic place, young couples adorning park benches and statues staring into each other's eyes. It was pleasantly surprising also to find many of those couples were the same sex. Mexico: proving Jesus and freedom of sexuality can co-exist!

***

Anyway, on to the the workshop. A workshop is something different from a conference, where you go to learn and swap ideas about a certain topic. Often, new research and papers are formulated afterwards, as opposed to a conference where finished research is presented for discussion. They're usually smaller, at this session there were only around 27 people, a perfect group for discussions and individual problem solving.

The workshop I attended was for 'palaeochronology building', which in the broad sense is trying to find the most accurate methods to date events in the past. In practice, it involves mostly working with statistical age-depth models. Say I dig up a core of peat 3 metres long, and it has 5 tephra layers in it. I can't radiocarbon date the tephra directly, so I sample the core at various intervals for things to date (twigs, charcoal, seeds, etc.). When I get the dates back, I have to find some way to estimate, from lining up the dates with depth, the ages of the tephra layers between the dates. That involves taking into account the standard errors on the dates given, and any possible changes in the 'sedimentation rate' between the dates: that is the rate at which the peat was deposited, for example when each cm represents 10 years, or a faster rate of 20 years.

In the workshop we were introduced to some of the probability maths involved in making such age-depth models, but to be honest, I've never had a head for that stuff, so I'm happy to trust the mathematical skills of the folks that write the computer programs and learn how to use their tools! Manipulating models, problem solving, writing code... that is more fun for me, and by the end of 5 days of learning, meddling, and chatting, I had figured out how to solve all my tephra-age issues with the most up-to-date methods.

This makes me feel really good. Why? Because, for the first time since I arrived in Canada, I'm the expert at something in my lab. So far, everyone has been telling me what to do, what I've done wrong, how I should do things.... and now, I know how to do things, and why to do things, that no-one else does. Perhaps it sounds petty to want to be superior at something, but it's important to me that I'm doing something original; if I was just learning I might as well be an undergraduate again, but being able to create and work on something myself is real research. I'm looking forward to completing my Master's thesis now: I really feel like it will be worth something.

Megacities

2010-08-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a relatively small south-coast-seaside town in England, and big cities never held much attraction for me. However, I had always wanted to see Tokyo, having the impression of it being the densest and brightest swarm of human population on the planet. Despite preferring small towns, I wanted to experience the other end of the spectrum, and finally got the chance back in May.

Then, I decided to go to a workshop in mid-Mexico (which I’m currently at, more about this later), and realised the opportunity to spend a few days in Mexico City, a place I would never normally consider for a holiday. Mexico City and Tokyo are both megacities, with huge populations and dense living. However, almost as soon as I touched down in Mexico City I couldn’t help comparing the two; they were immediately so different.

Tokyo pleasantly surprised me, so much so that I actually fell in love with the place. The streets were clean. The metro system was intuitive and efficient. The people were polite to a fault and I always felt safe. This probably comes across as a rose-tinted view, and perhaps it is, but I was so enchanted to find a gigantic city that suited me. My Finnish beau and I always joke that I have a very Scandinavian preference for efficiency. Tokyo has a reputation for being busy: there are many photos of the famous Shinjuku crossing, where a mass of black heads and suits rush across the road as the lights change, but in reality it’s a very calm busy. In Tokyo you will rarely be bumped, never hear a crossed word in a crowd, and seldom be interrupted by a beeping horn. Mexico City is a much more selfish busy, raging with noise and chaos: tiring and terrifying. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its quiet moments in parks and gardens, but as a whole the city seems to lurch and roll more.

For me, this is disconcerting, but it’s probably a lot of fun for people who like words like ‘flavour’, ‘vibe’ and ‘colour’. But apart from the living city, the buildings are also different. I don’t mean architecture as such, but rather the impression that Tokyo is more ‘complete’ than Mexico City. While sitting across from one of the numerous building sites at various stages in the centre of Mexico City, I asked my boyfriend if he remembered seeing any construction in Tokyo. Neither of us could. To me, this seems to represent a city satisfied, whereas Mexico City is a place not quite certain of its character, still growing and evolving.

These are of course first impressions, and I’m a firm believer that you can never really know a place until you live there (hence why I’ve already lived in 4 countries), but there they are!

Collapse

2010-08-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

Phew, I finally finished reading Collapse by Jared Diamond! (Dearest AJ, if you're reading this, I'm sorry it took me so long, I confess to finding a chore and read a few other books 'at the same time').

Reading many of the chapters and stories was informative and interesting, learning about the paths past and present cultures have taken, but the bulk of the 'message', Diamond's theory, was left in the last couple of chapters, which took little time to read. I was somewhat worried that by the time I got to 'the point' I would have forgotten about all the details of the societies detailed before, since it had been quite a while since I read about them, but this really wasn't the case.

I understand that Diamond wanted it to be a thoroughly researched piece with numerous in-depth examples of many of his key problem areas, but to me, it seemed like overkill. Even though he was discussing different cultures, past and present, there was a lot of repetition. I believe the reason I read the last couple of theoretical chapters so quickly was because I was glad to finally get into the meat of the argument, and to have only littered examples where necessary to illustrate points. Of course, he did mention the societies of previous chapters in these arguments too, but I still couldn't shake the feeling I'd waded through a waterlogged pitch when I could have easily ran over greener grass to reach the same goal.

Although the level of research is definitely of value, and each study of a single culture is fascinating in its own right, for the purposes of a popular book I feel it would have benefited from more of an 'executive summary' approach. Like Stephen Hawking's 'A Briefer History of Time'.

***

In other news, my first-ever news article has now been published in the student newspaper and online here. At first reading I was a little 'disappointed' (for lack of a better word) about some of the things the editor had changed, but realised these were mostly in the first couple of sentences, and understandable of course. Most of it is still my words ;-)

Ahh, I am an obsessive and an over-analyser, but perhaps that's useful when starting out, to help me learn my mistakes quickly and improve swiftly. Although it doesn't help with the restless leg syndrome.

Lastly, I remembered today my first published piece - published only online, but I was paid for it! It was for the Icelandic tourist board about my year studying there. It was a much freer piece and it was fun to write... I like indulging in lyrical writing sometimes. Never was any good at poetry though. Anyway, you can read that piece here.

Some science and some journalism

2010-07-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy week, both in the lab and out.

I mentioned briefly that I picked up an assignment from the student newspaper this week. Since there's no journalism program at the University of Alberta, the paper is written largely by volunteers like me, and no experience is required. This is lucky for me, a unique opportunity to start learning the journo ways despite my age (I imagine in a university with a journalism program you'd need to 'prove' yourself first). So they gave me an assignment, loaned me a voice recorder and sent me on my way.

The piece was to be about the research finding of a PhD student at the U of A, and there were a couple of articles already printed about it I found online. This was both a pro and a con for me: on the one hand I picked a different angle on the research findings, but it led to a fatal novice interviewer mistake! While I was interviewing the researcher I felt it was going well, she thanked me for asking good questions so I felt my angle was a good one. I listened intently and learned a lot. But later, when I came to write up the article I realised my flaw: I had been too busy getting into the details of my 'angle' that I forgot to ask the basics - the simple facts and figures. This meant that such pertinent details, like the number of research participants, I had to take from the article I read before. And really that was the only one I took, since I can see how you could get into a lot of trouble for reporting details you didn't get from the horse's mouth. Sure, a lot of that happens, which is why a lot of news gets so distorted, but I don't want to get into that!

Still, I wrote the article up until I thought it contained a lot of interesting titbits, and sent it off to the editors for the deadline. Then I sent it to my foreign boyfriend to test if it made sense. He admitted it was a bit hard to read, too 'sciencey'. Ahh, I'm too used to writing scientific documents! Well, now I have to wait and see what the editors say, but I have a sinking feeling it will be something along the lines of 'simplify!' Still, it's an extremely valuable learning experience, both in journalistic practices and what I learned about the subject from the researcher herself. That would be a wonderful thing about being a science journalist, all the frontiers of science I could learn about!

***

While I was in Alaska, I did get a chance to pick up some samples for my own research: one volcanic ash in several locations along with samples for carbon dating around the ash (my focus is on younger materials than Britta, hence I can use carbon dating to great effect). The first step in dating this ash is to make sure I actually picked up the same one in all the locations, so I had to test the chemistry of my samples, which should be similar within acceptable limits.

This involves a surprisingly lengthy process of sieving, dissolving organics, separating the mineral grains using some particularly toxic chemicals and finally mounting what's left in epoxy. All this means I have try to get as much ash as possible in my final sample that I analyse on the electron microprobe (a nice fancy machine that finds the chemistry for me). Sometimes this works better than others, for example this sample doesn't have a very high ash-to-junk ratio:

However, this was from a marine sample someone else sent to me, and you can actually see in it some life I didn't manage to eradicate! Hopefully you can see a couple of honeycomb structures in the above image (the largest is just above-right of the biggest grey grain), and these are tiny forms of marine life (it's a shame the scale wasn't preserved with the image; the structures are around 100 µm in diameter).

The electron microprobe is fitted with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which allows such images to be taken. What I do is sit and look through my samples with this to find good pieces of volcanic ash, that are coherent enough for chemistry to be obtained from. I 'pick' around 25 points per sample - recording the position so that the machine can analyse it later. The reason we do it this way is it takes several minutes for the machine to analyse each point, so if we pick them all out during the day we can leave it to run all the analyses overnight. Sometimes, the ash is more cooperative than others:

In this image all the frothy, ragged shapes you see are volcanic ash shards (around 20-50 µm in diameter). These are pretty difficult to analyse since you can't find a good spot to point the beam at!

Needless to say, this is another one of those gloriously scientific long and boring processes. Still, sometimes the shards can be pretty shapes, you can almost make objects out of them, like cloudspotting. This one, for example, I think looks like a smiling gun:

No? It's been a long week.

SkeptiCamp

2010-07-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

Stumbling through the corridors of the university a week ago, I noticed a poster advertising 'SkeptiCamp'; a day-conference run by the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society and with an open format, where the talks were brought by the participants and organised in the morning.

Since picking up Skeptic magazine just a short while ago a new world has come to light. Skepticism seems to be more than a concept, it's a whole movement, one which I was to learn at the conference is much more active than I imagined.

The first talk I went to was about the dangers or otherwise of radiation from cell phones, power lines, etc. I was interested considering an article in Skeptic rather forcefully denied that cell phones could possibly cause any damage given the relatively minute radiation they produce. The speaker made less strong claims, but instead suggested we should be 'cautious, but not fearful'. Hm. Next up was 'amateur astronomers and UFOs'; a slightly odd prof from the uni telling us a tale of the time he and a student spotted UFOs (in the strictest sense, where UFO is Unidentified Flying Object) in the night sky on the observatory roof. He described seeing four white discs flying in a diamond formation crossing the sky in a little under 3 seconds. Bewildered, he and the student debated for a while, and watched in case they reappeared. Indeed they did, and as they flew overhead, they uttered the same word; "Pigeons!" The tale was to illustrate how easily our senses can be fooled, how our brains fill in the blanks, to the extent of blocking out most of a pigeon! It also illustrated the unwillingness of some to be told how foolish their brain is: the prof ended the tale by recounting another time a pigeon flew over while he was stood with a teenage boy. After explaining to the open-mouthed youth that his flying saucer was nothing more than the belly of a common pigeon, the boy took a step back, pointed a skinny finger at the prof and exclaimed "You're part of the conspiracy!!"

The next two talks were by the same chap, an Earth Science prof I hadn't come across in the department, who taught a couple of undergrad classes. He explained to us that he takes some time in his classes to explain the scientific method, the principle of falsifiability and why 'theory' does NOT mean some half-thought out vague idea. He makes the point that it's very easy to disprove something, as all it takes is one experiment, but to prove anything a great number of experiments must all point to the same conclusion. In the first talk he applied this simply to the creation vs evolution topic, using simple maths to prove that the dimensions of Noah's Ark (actually given in the Bible) could not, by any stretch of the imagination, carry all the animals and food required. Nor could the amount of rain needed to drown Mt Ararat fall in 40 days and nights without destroying the Ark itself (never mind where all that water came from). The point of this was to prove a literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible. Fine, but the point was raised by the audience that those hard-core creationists simply don't listen to reason (apparently a couple of them do take Earth Science classes). Our prof willingly agreed, but said that he hoped at least to reach those still on the fence, those that didn't have enough information previously to decide. A noble cause.

His second talk was about 'crystal powers'. This is one of those topics I know must be bunk, but that's never good enough for a scientist (how many Creationists say they know the Bible is true?), so I thought I'd get some good evidence from a Master. Unfortunately, he concentrated more on ridiculing the various claims and not on proving why crystals don't have 'healing energies'. Although he did give an amusing account of asking various exhibitors at a psychics fair what the crystal quartz does for you. The answers, needless to say, ranged wildly (some more wildly than others, including the assertion that quartz crystals were physical thought forms in Atlantis).

So far the conference had been entertaining, but not so thought-provoking. Maybe I'd picked the wrong talks, maybe I'd picked ones I already knew something about. So next I went for 'Why your perceptions are wrong', a fascinating round-up of the multitude of ways your brain fills in the blanks, such as with the pigeon 'UFO'. Passive thinking runs most of our lives, as we adhere to 'schemas', certain typesets we place every new 'thing' we encounter into, whether that thing be an object (it has four legs and a flat wide top, it must be a table), or a person (they have crazy white hair and a jacket with elbow patches, they must be a prof). Countless experiments reveal how our simple categorized perceptions, even those of ourselves, affect the way we behave and see the world.

The very last talk of the day was about 'Skeptical Activism'. Two speakers advocated the movement of skeptics 'out of the blogs and onto the streets', that the role of skeptics is not just to recognize the ills of pseudoscience and communicate them, but to actively campaign against their use. Examples given of successful campaigns (in one way or another) were the battle between Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association over libel, Boobquake and action over Power Balance (which I'd never heard of, but is apparently the 'power of holograms').

All of this was fascinating, and I was starting to feel quite comfortable in the Skeptic world, but I had one question in my mind. Would being a paid-up member of a Skeptic society, and taking part in the campaigning as the speakers suggested, make me an incredibly bias reporter? Does it create my 'schema', giving people a view of me that's hard to shift, automatically turning people off from what I write? The speakers admit you will always upset someone if you decide to take action, but perhaps it's a bit too risky for someone who's supposed to be 'impartial'. Still, it didn't do Simon Singh much harm, but he is rather more established than me! For now I'll remain interested in the Skeptical World, at a distance.

___

N.B. Apologies to those Englishmen who think that skeptic should be sceptic. Me too, but I am in North America now!

Last note: I picked up my first assignment for the student newspaper this week, will soon be a published journalist, BOOYA! All gotta start somewhere :-)

Fantastic Science Facilities I'd like to visit

2010-07-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

I was watching an old episode of BBC Horizon the other day about the search for extraterrestrial life and was reminded of the Keck Observatory. This is the closest you can get to space; perched on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii's tallest volcano, is an array of some of the best sky-probing equipment on Earth. As if that isn't awe-inspiring enough, when I looked into visiting the centre, I came across this advice:"The summit of Mauna Kea at nearly 14,000-feet altitude, presents unique challenges to visitors. Visits to the summit require a 30 minute acclimatization stop at the 9,200-foot Onizuka Visitor’s Center, warm clothing for the summit, sunscreen for protection from excessive UV radiation, and water. A four-wheel-drive vehicle is required beyond the 9,200 foot level as the air is too thin to adequately cool a vehicle’s brakes upon descent."

So, for those that work there, even reaching the office is an adventure. Then there's the work itself. In it's own words, the vision of the Observatory is: "A world in which all humankind is inspired and united by the pursuit of knowledge of the infinite variety and richness of the Universe." Sometimes scientists can be real poets. Actually, in their core, most scientists are poets, driven on by the very innocent emotion of wonder, and the desire to question.

As you can tell, the childish wonder also fills me sometimes! (This is probably also due to my reading of The Lost World right now, the old sci-fi is always the best in my view, only they can be so romantic about geology and astrophysics). So, I'm slowly compiling a list of Fantastic Science Facilities I'd like to visit - hopefully if I get to be a half-decent science journalist I can summon up the charm to convince someone to send me to them.

The Keck Observatory is at the forefront of research, making ever newer and bigger discoveries about the universe we live in. But not all big science buildings are for research. One place that has fascinated me for many years is the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. This colossal undertaking was pioneered by the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and built by the Norwegian Government, and consists of a giant vault in an old abandoned mine in the remote Arctic capable of holding 2.25 billion seeds. It's mission is simple; "Preserving seed from food plants is an absolutely essential part of the work of preserving the world’s biodiversity, adapting to climate change and global warming and thereby ensuring food for the world’s population for the foreseeable future." Gene banks of the sort exist around the world, but many are vulnerable to natural disaster, war or lack of finance, and all are smaller than this latest project. The Global Seed Vault aims to be the most permanent resource for crop seeds in the world, it's location and building design picked so carefully as to be cold without electricity (thanks to the permafrost) and even to avoid any possible sea level rise due to climate change.

Finally (for now) there's one Fantastic Science Facility I've already visited. Our school ran a trip to CERN in Switzerland when I was 17, and we toured the place, led by a classically eccentric Germanic professor. The problem was that it was a combined Geo/Physics trip that included the day before a wonderful time in the Chamonix Valley; and I was in it for the 'geo'. I had no idea what CERN was, and after all the travel and excitement, no particular enthusiasm to find out either (although I did learn one thing, that protons, neutrons and electrons are made up of even smaller bits, but I'm sure I'd have known that already if I actually took A-level physics). Now the whole world knows what CERN is about, and I'm left cursing my 17-year-old self for not paying attention (even though everyone, including the teachers, fell asleep when they turned down the lights and showed us a physics film).

Ah well, it's on this list, it will be visited!

Entrenched in Alaska Part 3: Escape to Dawson City

2010-07-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

So long, Fairbanks!

After 2.5 weeks of toil and soil, it's off to Dawson City, in The Yukon, where the rest of the research team are. Actually, I have no business being there. In fact, originally the only reason I was going there was to help Britta with the drive from Fairbanks via the 'Top of the World Highway' (which is apparently as grand as it sounds). However, upon hiring a car in Fairbanks, we were informed of a bizarre Canada customs law where Canadian residents are not allowed to hire a car in the States and drive it into Canada. It seems like quite an important law it would have been useful to know beforehand... but since I already had flights booked from Dawson to Edmonton, and the way the flight schedules are, it now meant I got to spend a couple of days in Dawson.

Dawson City is an instant charmer; a gold-rush town that had rich enough country to never go bust, and much of that era is preserved in the original buildings and board-walks, the winding Yukon River, and plenty of dancin' and gamblin'! We were met at the airport by one of the 'Bonediggers' team; a group that works in association with our lab in the Yukon Beringia by collecting bones that melt out of the ice.

Mining is often seen as 'evil', but for our lab placer gold mining in Beringia is the best way to get research done. Nothing exposes new sediments quicker. And while the mining process melts thousands of years old ice, we can collect and catalogue what comes out, advancing our understanding of the past.

Immediately, I noticed how good it felt to be around people. There were 5 people in the ground floor of a guesthouse, 2 from back in Edmonton, and 3 Bonediggers. We had dinner together, and went to a local pub to see 'Dawson Idol' and shoot some pool, all things I felt like I hadn't done in forever. Funny how quickly you can be completely consumed by a new kind of life; I had gotten so used to sleeping in the tent and having Britta fiddling with the camp stove be my alarm clock; to tramping up the silt cliffs and eating lunch out of the car; and to showering all the dirt off in the evening, remembering to actually clean behind my ears and between my toes carefully.

Anyway, the next morning the Bonediggers were kind enough to let me help them catalogue one of around 15 of their bags of bones already collected. My role was modest - painting clear nail varnish over the labels on the bones to keep them in place - but it was fun for me to learn about them and how to identify certain body parts and what animal they came from. Most of them are bison, mammoth, or an extinct horse, with some special finds of fox and one scimitar cat leg bone! There was even a large, intact mammoth tusk which I unfortunately forgot to photograph, but it was beautiful, and said to be worth up to $50,000 on the black market. But all bones in The Yukon thankfully belong to the government. They were also making a time-lapse video of the process which I sneaked into (view it here, I'm the dark-haired girl that comes in about half way through). Mathias and Jana were more than happy to tell me everything, and especially interesting was what they were going to do with the bones after cataloguing. Mathias' project is to crush a part of every well-preserved bone and extract the DNA. The idea is to track the change in DNA over time, so we can say more than simply 'mammoths lived here for 50,000 years', but rather say something about how that mammoth population changed. And how do they date the bones so that they can make these DNA timelines? Why, with tephra of course! And that's why our groups are working so closely together. (You can even see a video of Britta explaining all this here. I highly recommend checking out this Bonedigger's videos every so often for updates of the project).

Another fun evening followed in Dawson at Diamond Tooth Gerties, the most famous gambling and dancing hall, and left me with a small fantasy of running away for a summer and being a 'Gold Rush Girl'. Still, I think a summer of research would be just as good, and I have a wish one day to return as a journalist and meet all those people and the great projects again.

The next day I crossed the Yukon River for a walk, and found a sternwheeler graveyard and plenty of peace and sunshine. Then, it was time to leave the North, back to the lab, and to start analysing some samples! No wonder Britta lives for the summer fieldwork...

What are scientific conferences for?

2010-07-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Scientific conferences, as far as I can tell, are for two main reasons. The first is what all the organisation goes into; the presentation of research done. Plenaries, talks, poster sessions, all sorted into sections, all worked at for weeks in advance by the presenters. But, despite all this work, the most important reason for a scientific conference is just bringing scientists together, allowing ideas to flow, debates to form, and ultimately for new research directions to be found. Technology may be fabulous in allowing us to communicate, but it doesn't compare with the energy that a hive of (usually well-lubricated) minds can produce.

I went to my first conference fresh-faced at 22, having just finished my undergrad MSci, with a poster under my arm. It was a reasonably large conference of volcanologists worldwide and held in my favourite country and second home of Iceland. I was nervous but excited, as I was heading there essentially on my own. But I was soon welcomed by one and all, and thrilled at the chance to attend talks by people who's papers I'd read, and not just that, but talk to them too. The conference had a great atmosphere, friendly and open, but I quickly leanred that not all conferences are like that. Many participants had just come from a smaller kimberlite conference (special volcanic pipes that bear diamonds), and told be the air was a little more frosty there. The exact mechanism of diamond formation is quite contentious, and the business is lucrative enough that the various sides are bitterly fought over. I felt glad that the kind of science I was there for was for the joy of knowledge. Although, to get funded for any science these days there needs to be a 'so what', that usually you have to relate to people's everyday lives. But I think that's a subject for another post...

It was at my most recent conference, however, that gave me the final push to go for journalism. I sat with chin in hands, staring up admiringly at all the speakers, marvelling at all the work they'd done and what it could mean. But that's where it ended. The second part of the conference, the part that I identified as the most important reason to hold one, was the part that I didn't want to participate in. I didn't want to plan new research with my peers, I only wanted to tell the world what amazing things they'd done. Part of realising what you want to do is also realising what you don't want to do. I'm trying not to feel guilty about this, since I know that really I'm not escaping academia, I'm embracing media, which I truly feel is the right choice for me.

Entrenched in Alaska Part 2: Sampling

2010-07-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

So, the trenches are dug, what's next? Time to get down to sampling.

The tephras Britta finds are all beyond the range of radiocarbon dating (up to ~60,000 years ago), and too young for the next isotopic dating range. That's why there's so much work to be done in this time period - different methods of dating have to be found. A popular one is fission-track dating, but for most volcanic ash this old the individual shards are too degraded for it to work too well. So Britta's been trying out something different - paleomagnestism. Many materials, on being laid down or cooled in the case of volcanic rocks, retain a memory of the direction of North. North is not a constant, the poles wander, sometimes all the way to the tropics, and sometimes they switch altogether. Humans have never lived through a switch, and we don't really know what happens to the inhabitants of planet Earth, but so far there's no evidence of mass extinctions associated with them.

Anyway, some materials fare better with fission-track dating than do volcanic ash shards, like lava. Lava can be dated well, and preserves paleomagnetism, so that the wanderings of the poles can be tracked over time when lava is out-poured continuously (e.g. as on Hawaii). If we can match those precise wanderings in our loess bluffs, we can date every tephra within them, simple!

Except of course it's not that simple. Loess is a tricky substance, meaning that in order to pick up these polar movements we have to take a sample every 5 cm. A sample that has to be the right way up. A sample that has to have it's declination from North recorded. A sample that is essentially compacted dust, and where all the particles have to stay in the same relative position until analysed back in the lab. So over the next week we took over 15 metres of these samples, until Britta got tendinitis from hammering and I couldn't distinguish between counting in 5 cm intervals and simple numbering of samples.

And that's not even the worst of it. That 15 m, with some overlaps, totalled over 400 samples. The machine in our university processes 8 samples a day. Per day! At that rate, those samples will never get processed (unless of course Britta really does intend on working on this for the rest of her life).

What's the solution? Well, did you know that as a scientist you have to be a charmer? A manipulator? Whether it's writing a grant proposal or requesting information from a surly scientist, you have to know how to get want you want. Britta is an excellent mentor when learning this fine art; charismatic and skilled in seeking out the right people to provide her with what she needs. For this particular problem, Britta has already scoped out two potential victims whose better-prepared labs she can commandeer to analyse these samples in a fraction of the time. I sure hope one of them works out, or else all those hours are wasted!

After one long day we stopped off, dusty and dirty, in a local pub that wouldn't mind the state of us; Skinny Dicks. Exactly as rude as it sounds, Skinny Dicks was a fun pub, and after the landlady had showed us a few of her more special treasures (including a couple of walking sticks you wouldn't want to lean on) she asked us what we do. Britta confidently said 'I'm a geologist'. I never really considered myself to be a geologist, but I suppose I am. In fact, I started my undergrad degree in geology, then changed to 'environmental geoscience', and had a year abroad in which I studied 'Earth science', and finally here I am in Alberta doing a Masters in 'Earth and atmospheric science'. And whenever anyone asks me, I somehow always feel the need to explain all that, when really, what they would understand the most is 'geologist'. And hey, I study volcanic ash, and what's more geological than volcanoes?

Later that evening, I got chatting to a couple of women in the laundry room at the campsite. They asked me if we were holidaying there. 'No,' I said self-assuredly, 'we're geologists, doing some research up here.'

Sure, I may be changing discipline, but I may as well enjoy it while I can!

Hayley discovers Skeptic magazine

2010-07-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

Journalism isn't a totally new idea for me. It was suggested to me by career advisors in high school, since I'm naturally curious and love writing. But I was put off by a single notion: that if I wrote for a newspaper or magazine, I would be writing for an agenda. I thought I would rather be an author, where I could write what I liked, but came to the reasonable conclusion it would be difficult to make a career out of that right away, so I'd better do something sensible in the mean time. A short lesson later on in school reinforced the idea of biased media, where we were given several national newspapers to look over and decide where their allegiance lay. I looked at every newspaper from then on as trying to sway me, and generally stayed away from them.

This unfortunately means I've so far had a poor exposure to the types and styles of printed science media (while I'd certainly love to have my own volcano science show, for now I'm limiting my dreams to my comfort zone of writing). Walking around a bookstore today however, a magazine caught my eye, with it's cover story 'Climate Skeptics', a pet subject of mine. I picked it up and searched for the article inside. I read the first few sentences: there's talk about defining the difference between climate skeptics and deniers, a very important division I hadn't known was necessary before I befriended a true climate skeptic. Alright, I was interested, what else did the magazine have to offer? I scanned a few other headlines: 'The stigma of being atheist' 'Do cell phones cause cancer?' 'Daniel Loxton's top 10 busted myths'.

OK, so now I was checking the price and my small change collection, but before I took the final plunge, what was I buying into here? I checked the inside of the front cover, which showed a slightly cheesy advert for a conference in Las Vegas. I raised an eyebrow. Then I read the keynote speaker: Richard Dawkins! More speakers: Simon Singh, Penn & Teller, that guy from Mythbusters... and the magazine is SOLD!

I read the first two articles - on how 'boosting your immune system' is an empty phrase and a piece about a therapeutic pseudoscience - over a bad Chinese dinner, and barely noticed the earthquake in my intestines. But while this magazine appeals to me for it's no-nonsense approach to bad science information, I know there is a lot of it out there, and I'm going to have to read the bad to know what's good.

It seems there's a whole world of science media out there, and the research is just beginning!

Entrenched in Alaska Part 1: Digging the trenches

2010-07-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

Since my Masters thesis has very little field research of its own, I've spent most of the past 2.5 weeks being 'Britta's Bitch'; a field assistant to our lab's biggest personality.

In the lab Britta is an irritating figure, impossibly self-righteous and demanding of attention. But in the field she's a brighter, freer being, reveling in the confession that this is what she's in the business for. While my body is sluggish, stumbling across the dirt bluffs, Britta skips and slides up the hills, digging trenches and discovering tephra as she goes.

Tephra is what we're here for. Tephra, for our purposes is volcanic ash, and we're searching for it in the loess (wind-blown sediment) bluffs of 'Beringia'; the area of North America and Russia that wasn't covered by ice during the last Ice Age. The area was too dry for ice to form, but grasslands thrived, supporting a population of megafauna such as the wooly mammoth, steppe bison and sabre-tooth tiger, to name a few. What's volcanic ash got to do with all this? Well, fortunately, ashes tend to have unique chemistries, so that you can match up a tephra found in one location with another found elsewhere. If you can find a way to put a date on that tephra in one place, then you also know how old it is in every other location, in turn helping to date any sediment the tephra lies within. This is an invaluable resource when trying to piece together the environmental history of an area: any proxies of climate are useless if you cannot put them in context.

'Beringia' was a phrase I'd never even heard of before I came to Canada. That's the thing about science, there are so many areas, so many disciplines, techniques, specialities, and they're always expanding. Britta exemplifies a scientist by having the patience and constant interest to keep up with all these advancements and to be excited by them, trying out anything that might help her reach her goal.

In fact, her only flaw seems to be keeping that goal in mind! Most postgraduate projects change and evolve, but Britta seems to be in danger of not answering any of her original questions, or else working on the same problem for her entire academic life (she's already been working on the issue for 7 years, through a Masters and now a PhD). However, she seems happy with this, and that's when I realised another fundamental reason I want to be in journalism and not research: Britta's in it for the race, and I'm in it for the finish line. I revel in conclusions and a job completed. Deadlines suit me. Still, I know that the science itself is never finished when I close a piece, and that half the joy would be revisiting subjects in the future to see what marvellous advances have been made in the mean time.

Those changes may seem marvellous from that perspective, but science is really a long and arduous process, and for now digging trenches is my task. But at least they get dug, and mighty proud I am of them too!

Trench sculpted by Britta, dirt-shovelled by me

Escaping Academia

2010-07-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

I decided to start a blog about my big career change.

I was a PhD student in Earth Science, but one year in I've decided to downgrade to a Masters and pursue a career in science journalism instead. I wanted to write a blog about my transition from academia to media.

Why? Well, to put it simply, I'm still very interested in all that science has to offer the world, but I don't want to do the research myself.

Now, it's difficult, when putting it that way, not to come across like I think science is too hard and I think journalism is the easy way out. While that's certainly not the case, I decided to call this blog 'Escaping Academia' as a tongue-in-cheek summary of my transition.

So, to go a little further in depth, why I want to be a science journalist specifically stems from a hate and a love. The 'hate' is for the way science is sometimes horribly misrepresented in the media, especially in the way science is conducted. In a world where an email between colleagues that mentions a 'trick' is taken to be an admittance of misconduct and akin to espionage in the minds of some, there is requirement for the general public to be better educated in how science works. Scientists are no longer revered as the intellectual elite, and while I believe they shouldn't be put on a pedestal, and that everybody should be inquisitive enough to question everything, my dream is perhaps if people understood the intricacies of research life better they could make more informed decisions on the outcomes.

The 'love' is the fact that I am that rare breed that loves writing essays. Nothing gives me more joy than having a bunch of complex, disseminated information and distilling it into something not only readable and informative, but enjoyable to my audience.

So that's my motivation. I hope this blog will provide some insights into the minds and practices of the scientists around me while I'm still in the academic field, before 'escaping' to the media world. I hope I never forget my roots.