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."
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