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my thoughts on science

STEM: is it the answer?

6/16/2016

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I went to a great conference this week: STEMtech. It was a wonderful showcase of teaching tools and techniques to get kids interested and engaged in science, technology, engineering and maths. We heard industry speakers detailing the skills gap that exists and is predicted to worsen in regards to producing engineers. We heard about how engineers will be key to the economy of the future. We heard that 65% of the jobs that currents students will be doing don’t exist yet. But is STEM the answer?


Firstly, I really enjoyed the conference. I was engaged and enthused to try out some of the things that I had seen. However, my first impression was that this wasn’t STEM, it wasn’t science, technology, engineering and maths. Instead, it was physics, technology, engineering and maths. There was very little chemistry in the whole day and absolutely no biology. Biology and chemistry are key components of many growing industries and parts of problems, and the solutions to those problems, of the future. I’m a biologist and so this irked me slightly. I’m fully aware that zoology isn’t going to make lots of money or greatly grow the economy, but the biotech industries are flying at the moment with potential breakthroughs like CRSPR changing the way we interact with living organisms.


To me the issue, as this may have just been for this conference, is with how and which industries are trying to intervene in our education system. They tend to be big engineering companies, and for them the physical sciences are likely to be more important. For them their bottom line will be improved if more students graduated school and university with the skill sets they require. They want engineers, and they want lots of them and they want them now and tomorrow. But is that what is best for the country and society as a whole?


In one way I would say yes and in another no. The industry people who spoke at the conference spoke about how they wanted graduates who were good at problem solving. This is a huge part of education, students should be taught to use their knowledge and apply it to novel situations and to be able to link seemingly desperate areas of their knowledge together (i.e. bits of chemistry to biology, maths to physics, physics to biology etc.). The ability to mentally break out of the silos of subjects and topics is hugely important but it isn’t something that is unique to working in industry. One of the speakers spoke about how our education system is set up to create professors and not engineers, but these cross disciplinary and problem solving skills apply equally to both groups of people. These are abilities that should be taught to students regardless of the STEM movement or interventions by industry, they are core to producing young people with inquiring minds. I worry that the drive for STEM is actually aimed at creating graduates specifically to go into the work place, all of the talk of the jobs of the future seems at odds with the direct applied skills that are being pushed that seem so focused on the jobs of now. Breakthroughs in science and industry are often from pure research that isn’t searching for direct applied results but that has unintended consequences that change the world, e.g. laser technology. By focusing purely on applied skills there is a risk that such breakthroughs in the future may not happen.


What I have taken from this conference and my view on STEM is that I personally want to keep industry at arms length. The money is wonderful but the drive for graduates to fit their needs risks shaping a curriculum that may in the long run damage our industries. Taking the best aspects of the STEM movement (cross curricular approach, problems solving and team work) are things that would benefit everyone, from engineers to business and industry to universities. Fostering creativity and an ability to see the wider picture is the key, and the STEM call to break down subject silos would help (although you still need to learn the basics of each subject before many of these links can be seen/formed). In addition, engaging the humanities departments and the art departments with any STEM projects would prevent resentment developing inside schools, where some faculties may feel side-lined. Even asking the ethical questions surrounding some STEM projects would be a useful exercise in bringing those who are not scientifically minded into this world.


Plus we need more BIOLOGY in STEM!!!


I hope that rambling rant holds some semblance of reasoning that can be discerned by readers.
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Hard working weavers and lazy journalists

9/4/2014

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One of my friends (Dom Cram) has just had a paper come out in Functional Ecology. It's a really well designed experimental study looking at the effects of dominance and effort on oxidative stress in white-browed sparrow-weavers. His research found that dominant females, who work the hardest to provision young during the breeding season, suffered a large decline in antioxidant protection over the course of the breeding season. Antioxidants are the compounds that health professionals keep going gaga over in various 'super-foods', as they help to reduce free radicals which build up due to the cells natural processes and can damage DNA and thus potentially make individuals vulnerable to ageing and lots of other nasty things. So the study hints that individuals that work hard could be at risk of increased ageing and a variety of other future problems. The abstract and link are pasted at the end of the blog.

Dom has rightly received a fair amount of media attention for this piece of work, and rightly so. This is important, as the public need to know what their taxes are funding and how this work fits into our broader understanding of the world. He was even interviewed on BBC radio:

https://soundcloud.com/dom-cram/dom-bbc-radio-interview-sept2014

This coverage though has been very varied, even within the ams newspaper. The Telegraph, link pasted below, covered it well but for some unknown reason decided to lead with a picture of elephant seals.... even though the work was done on a small desert dwelling bird. They also lead with "Alpha males..", even though the abstract clearly states that males showed a decline but it wasn't related to rank, the main result was for females. Well it was a good attempt. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/11070219/Alpha-males-and-females-at-risk-of-ill-health-and-premature-ageing.html
Picture
Above is the reporting from the Times, and this again is pretty good, even has the correct species pictured (and a lovely comic). But if you read the scanned image below you'll see that some one else at the same news paper decided not only to get the species wrong but to link it massively to humans, a gross overstatement, but then also to Bertrand Russell, Francois Hollande and John Maynard Keynes. This is a prime example of awful reporting and exaggeration from what is a well respected newspaper, this is what lay people read and where the get their information. We need better reporting by people who actually understand science, so that the public is better educated and so able to help the government make better science and environmental policy decisions.
Picture
Here is the abstract:
Cram et al (2014) Oxidative status and social dominance in a wild cooperative breeder. Functional Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12317http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract
  1. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key mediator of life-history trade-offs, yet the social factors that affect patterns of oxidative status amongst individuals in animal societies remain virtually unexplored.
  2. This is important, as rank-related differences in reproductive effort in many social species have the potential to generate, or indeed arise from, differences in oxidative status across dominance classes.
  3. Here, we examine rank-related variation in oxidative status before and after a lengthy breeding season in a wild cooperatively breeding bird with high reproductive skew, in the semi-arid zone of Southern Africa; the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali).
  4. Our findings reveal that prior to breeding, neither sex showed rank-related differences in markers of oxidative damage or antioxidant protection, suggesting that dominants' reproductive monopolies do not arise from superior pre-breeding oxidative status.
  5. After breeding, however, females (who provision young at higher rates than males) suffered elevated oxidative damage, and dominant females (the only birds to lay and incubate eggs, and the primary nestling provisioners) experienced differential declines in antioxidant protection.
  6. While males also showed reduced antioxidant capacity after breeding, this decline was not dependent on rank and not associated with elevated oxidative damage.
  7. Our findings suggest that divisions of labour in animal societies can leave the hardest-working classes differentially exposed to oxidative stress, raising the possibility of hitherto unexplored impacts on health and ageing in social species.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract
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Kardashian controversy 

8/14/2014

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A recent paper has come out in Genome Biology by Neil Hall, the paper investigates what Hall terms the Kardashian index (number of twitter followers/scientific citations). This has gotten a lot of people upset, and potentially rightly so. I've put a link to the Nature web page with an article on the paper. Science communication is a crucial part of modern research and is a great way for young scientists to communicate their work (and potentially increase their citation rate in the process) to the wider scientific community and the public in general. Many disciplines, behavioural ecology included, have journals with low citation rates but are investigating aspects of science that the public find interesting. Genomics, Dr Hall's field, is probably the other way around: with lots of publications in high impact biomedical journals but being a complicated and often difficult field to explain to the lay person. One criticism that has been laid at the paper is that it's sexist, especially with the use of Kim Kardashian's name for the index. I disagree, as the only male celebrities that I can think of who would fit into that category are on TOWIE and MIC and I don't even know their names, so why would someone in the US or Switzerland know who they are? It's good that people are discussing how best to measure scientists impact and this sort of discourse can only benefit science. I disagree with the K-index but can see it has some measure of merit, maybe it needs to include the number of years that the researcher has been publishing for? Possibly a K+ index (twitter followers/(scientific citations/years publishing))?? Food for thought.

Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews


Hall (2014) The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists. Genome Biology, 15:424
In the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one. While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices. To help quantify this, I propose the ‘Kardashian Index’, a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
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banded mongoose book

7/9/2014

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Picture
I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University
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    I am a behavioural ecologist, my main interests revolve around familial conflicts and their resolutions. However, my scientific interests are fairly broad.

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