The Ghost of Oneself on the Web

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Athene Donald

Comedians complain about it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t too. They complain because U-tube, iPlayer etc mean that their jokes can’t be repeatedly recycled the way they were in the good old days. Once they’ve told one that’s actually funny it will lurk in the aether (or do I mean Cloud), pulled out by chance Googlers or determined followers time and time again; its novelty value will be gone. Another performance, another place, another year and a constant supply of new material is required.

Now I’m not one for telling jokes of the comedic kind. My style of humour tends towards the self-deprecating aside when I give talks but nevertheless, just as for the comedian, a lot of work goes into those talks. For all, as I said in a recent post, I don’t think one should recycle whole talks over and over, that is not to say that one will never reuse any material, mixing things up to suit the audience. However, if the organisation you are speaking to puts your slides up on the web (or worse, posts a video) as they seem increasingly keen to do, then it can become only too plain just how much recycling may have occurred.

I’ll illustrate why this concerns me using as an example the ocassion of a talk I gave recently at the University of Kent in their Open Lecture series. It was a general talk – my title was ‘Citizens, Science and Citizen Science’ – rather than something specific about my research.  As an aside I’ll point out that things got off to a very shaky start as my computer threw a tantrum on the train down, at which point I realised that my over-confidence in technology meant I hadn’t got a copy on a memory stick by way of a back-up. Mercifully that story has a happy ending, as the laptop finally got itself out of the non-responsive loop it had entered just in time, shortly before I reached Canterbury station. The experience should have taught me a lesson which I shouldn’t have needed teaching anyhow – but more on this below.

Before my talk I was invited to meet up with some of the Athena Swan departmental and university leads and members of the HR team for an informal discussion about gender issues. I was greeted by Twitter acquaintance Cindy Vallance, who had clearly been doing her homework about me. She had found on the web a previous talk I had given on Athena Swan issues (and no I’m not going to tell you where she had found it) and had printed out the slides to provide useful background material for the attendees at the discussion. This brought home to me the dangers of allowing one’s Powerpoint slides to be put up in perpetuity; at the time of the original talk the request to be allowed to do so for internal consumption in the university concerned had seemed harmless enough. Now I know that in principle even if I recycle just some of the material it may be rather obvious. This has been very much on my mind as I prepared a talk on Athena Swan for Swansea University which I’m giving tomorrow. They have anyhow asked for the slides in advance to circulate to attendees, but at least that only means a defined set of keen individuals not that the world at large will have access to them.

However, this experience meant when after the Kent formal lecture I was asked if I could supply my slides, I was more circumspect. Yes, I said, but only to be handed out to those who specifically ask for them, not simply to be made freely available on the web. I work hard at my talks and in that particular one I had a goodly selection of quotes taken from across the centuries. I worry that my attempts at apposite quotations or words of wisdom will just become stale and obvious if they are there for everyone to see, but maybe I’m just being mean by not wanting to make them available to all and sundry.

So the long term availability of one’s carefully crafted talks is part of the spectral legacy my title refers to. But there is another aspect that concerns me, although I have considerably less control over this. This refers to inaccurate reporting and out of date information continuing to circulate so that ‘facts’ become established that are anything but.  Statements that were once true can become annoyingly outdated yet still be taken at face value. For instance, it is some years since I stopped being Deputy Head of my department in Cambridge, but that tag still crops up in descriptions of me. I can keep my own web pages up to date, but others are unlikely to do so and references won’t be checked for current accuracy. Worse, there is a problem (which I wrote about a while back) in the way the media can twist and alter facts. I discussed this as the problem of Chinese Whispers when an originally correct statement gets sloppily reworked by a journalist. Anyone can suffer from this fate, no doubt celebrities to an extent no average scientist could begin to imagine. Nevertheless, as the errors and misinformation get propagated from an original source to multiple others, it is impossible to eradicate the misleading statements and general inaccuracy.

This very problem cropped up in the context of an event I was involved with last week at The Other Club, a ‘pop-up’ temporary club for professional women existing near Carnaby Street in London.  (There is an interesting Churchillian connection there, bearing in mind where I’ll be living this time next year.) Paired up with the wonderful Uta Frith, whom I’ve written about before, we each gave vignettes about our research and then jointly discussed issues connected with women in science. We had a great time, it was standing room only (the organisers were I think surprised by the popularity of a science evening) and the debate was lively. But I noticed that the advertising write up about me on the web had the offending sentence about how I research ‘unconventional areas of physics such as revolutionary treatments for Alzheimer’s‘, exactly the commentary I worried about in the earlier Chinese Whispers blogpost because it is so wrong. This mis-description lives on several years later, because the description in the Guardian is still there to be Googled. Clearly I should have requested a correction at the time and, had I had any idea that this would continue to be quoted, I most certainly would have done. But, naively, I had imagined the misleading statement would quietly vanish, as it once would have done when only available through print media.  Since I was talking to an audience containing journalists I did point out, in precisely this context, the dangers of carelessly misquoting earlier text.

As I say, the evening was great fun – something Mary Beard said too when she wrote about her own appearance at The Other Club – but I was reminded, again, that I should not be complacent about technology. I turned up with my laptop, a PC, only to be greeted with anxious sighs: they only had connections for Macs (this was not a formal lecture theatre after all, just a room over a shop). Luckily Uta had both a Mac and a memory stick, so disaster was averted. Yet again, despite my recent experiences at Kent, I had managed not to bring any back-up. I should, like a naughty schoolchild, write out 100 times lines to the effect that  that ‘I should always travel with a copy on a memory stick of any talk I am going to give‘ to drum it into my thick head and then maybe I won’t continue to skate on thin ice with my presentations.

Everything I write about here refers to mere trivial annoyances. I don’t like the fact that facts about my life may be inaccurate or out of date and I am nervous about my talks being too easily available making repetition of parts of them embarrassing. However, this is not at all the same thing as people being subjected to vitriolic personal attacks, rape threats, challenges to their scientific competence or other kinds of cyber-bullying. There is too much of this viciousness out there on the web. But that is a different and much heavier story.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Why are Scientists off the Radar?

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Athene Donald

There are those who believe that one should never have “women-only” lists of anything and that even the venerable BBC programme Woman’s Hour should be banned because there isn’t a Man’s Hour on Radio 4. This viewpoint has it that all such actions are inherently sexist.

I understand this position although I personally don’t subscribe to it. It seems to me that so often lists of the top 100 people in business, technology or whatever basically mean men and that equally good women often get overlooked by the list-makers. Just as I see prizes for women as having their place in our world as a way of reminding people that we can be hugely successful and should rightfully be celebrated, so I see lists of the top women in one field or another simply as a way of flagging up the many contributions made by this slightly-greater-than-50 per cent of the population.

Recently this argument has been revived in the wake of the BBC’s 100 Women project, which culminated in a day of discussions in October around the current status and role of women. I, however, had a different beef with those preparing the list of “female trail-blazers”. Along with a number of others, spearheaded by my colleague Val Gibson, professor in high energy physics at the Univer­sity of Cambridge, I was a signatory to a letter about the project to The Times. Our complaint was that there wasn’t a single practising scien­tist on the list. The BBC tried to claim (responding not only privately to us but also publishing its own rebuttal in The Times) that the list did feature “eminent contributors from scientific and technological fields such as Claire Bertschinger, director of tropical nurs­ing studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Russian-Finnish-Indian engineer Irina Chakraborty and the technology entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox”.

Without wanting to denigrate these people, who no doubt do wonderful work, the reality is that none of them is a practising scientist. The worry is that the BBC does not recognise what this means and anyhow confuses science and technology. One can even question whether a mere three representatives (even if they were representative) is an appropriate balance in a list of 100. This question is part of a cultural bias that remains endemic. The 100 women selected are skewed towards activists and journalists. Those who created the list no doubt chose the people with whom they feel most comfortable or with whom they network regularly.

The same problem was identified by science writer Martin Robbins in a recent Guardian article about the BBC’s Question Time. As he pointed out, the programme has featured regu­lar appearances by other non-political profes­sions, but with barely a scientist in sight; for instance, the proportion of comedians to scientists is 14:1 over the period he considered. Likewise, The Independent on Sunday’s most recent Pink List of influential lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people contains many journalists and writers, but only one scientist. Somehow scientists simply don’t feature on the radar of the people who dream up these lists and so consequently vanish from the public’s daily diet of reading.

This is a problem on many fronts. In the case of the 100 Women list, I felt it was disap­pointing if those chosen, however splendid, were taken as representative of suitable careers for girls. It seems an uphill struggle to remind people – teachers, parents and journalists – that science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects are entirely suitable for schoolgirls to consider, leading to a wide range of interesting career options. But the other examples given above demonstrate that over­looking scientists is not about gender: this is an issue about the mainstream media more generally taking the easy way out and always choosing to focus on areas with which their own journalists appear to be familiar.

This, I fear, is a direct result of our education system and cultural values. Chancellor George Osborne and Vince Cable, the business secretary, know that science and technology are key to the UK’s economic recovery and future growth. They frequently make comments to this effect, as in the discus­sion of the “eight great technologies” they like to highlight. However, I do wonder, when discussing the need for research on energy, whether Osborne could distinguish a watt from a volt, or whether he appreciates (in the field of regenerative medicine, another of the “Great eight”) the distinction between pluri­potent and multipotent stem cells; perhaps a good Etonian Classics education helps him with that particular distinction. The Royal Society, among many other organisations, has previously stated that it feels our education system narrows student choices too much. We are at the mercy of too many people making too many easy choices that effectively write science out of many people’s lives.

Note added 1700 on November 7th. This piece first appeared in the THE on November 7th 2013 under the title ‘Evidence of Absence‘ but the title was subsequently changed. Consequently, to be consistent, I have changed the title of this post also to the revised version Why are scientists off the radar?

 

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Recycling Talks

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Athene Donald

You know that sinking feeling. You have a talk, at a conference or another university, coming up in fewer days (possibly even hours) than you feel comfortable with and the temptation is great to dig into the files and simply reuse a previous one perhaps with a modified title. Is this a good idea? In a certain sense yes, you will indeed have a talk that is (one hopes) coherent and thought through. In another sense I would argue it is unwise. Recycled talks, particularly if recycled time and time again, go stale; furthermore they rarely entirely fit different audiences equally well.

As a young postdoc and research fellow newly returned from the US and finding my feet on the UK academic scene, I didn’t appreciate this point. Armed back then with a heavy bundle of overhead transparencies (if you remember these) plus a few interspersed 35mm slides (again practically museum pieces), I travelled the country giving identically the same talk time and time again. I am sure in part this was a confidence issue. I had put a lot of effort into writing this talk, thinking through the logical flow and making sure the talk was of an appropriate length. I had it word perfect, didn’t fall over unpronounceable words or forget my lines in any other way (in other words I had ‘practiced, practiced, practiced‘). If I were to deviate from this tried and tested version I suspected it might all go horribly wrong. So I didn’t. Instead I got bored. I got to the point of losing all interest in my own research because I had heard those same words too often inside my head. The quality of the talk, although so well prepared, was insufficient to make up for the tedium I internally felt. How could I excite an audience when I was myself so unexcited? So I stopped. Rewrote the same material in subtly different ways and learned the lesson that a multiply-given talk is unlikely to be an exciting one.

These days, the world of Powerpoint (alternatively, substitute here whatever non-Microsoft package you favour) makes modifying slides and indeed whole talks an easy task. Instead of having to rewrite or redraw each transparency from scratch when you merely want to change one line, it is so easy to cut and paste diagrams and text from one slide into another. A quick refresh of an old talk so it doesn’t feel stale is now a trivial task. For an old hand like me it is therefore reasonably straightforward (although always time-consuming) to mix and match material from several previous talks to construct a new one. I have several different categories of talks, notably my own (or rather my group’s) science; diversity/Athena Swan/careers and my ‘life story’; and more general ones such as formed the basis for the Sidgwick Lecture I gave a couple of years ago. Additionally, one’s  audience may range from school children to specialists in the field and each audience requires a different angle to be taken. Plenty of scope then to move slides around, make them more or less complex or to find new general images and up to date quotes to spice up the message. Each talk is therefore tailored to the audience (I hope) and suitably reworked to fit my brief and to keep me on my toes.

I think the problem may be more acute for those early career researchers who, like me back with my pile of transparencies so many years ago, have their own results to talk about with no one’s else’s data to insert and interweave. That makes it much harder to chop and change in order to rejuvenate the talk. Nevertheless, I would still recommend trying to find a means of changing things around so that you cannot operate solely on automatic pilot. In general I think it should be possible to find new data from the literature either to reinforce your own findings or to set your own work in a broader context. Or simply to change the order in which different sets of data are presented (subject to logical flow of course) or – if, like me, microscopy is your bent – to  find different images to illustrate a point. And, bearing in mind that audiences differ in their experience and interests, it may also be possible to shift the emphasis between different techniques or the amount of background and literature material that is included. I suppose all I am really saying is that by forcing oneself to look in detail at the talk before each presentation, rather than think ‘have talk, will travel‘, even if all the tweaks are entirely minor, it will still feel fresh and clear in one’s mind.

There is no doubt that preparing a talk is – and should be – always time-consuming. It can feel a drain on limited resources of time and energy as the date approaches.  But the satisfaction one gets from a talk well delivered, a good buzz and a stimulating, possibly even challenging set of questions from the audience can make it all feel worthwhile, however exhausting.

Posted in Communicating Science, Research | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Retrospective Impact

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Athene Donald

Recently I participated in a so-called ‘speed dating’ event for schoolgirls, organised under the auspices of Inspiring the Future: Inspiring Women campaign which this event was launching. Spearheaded by Miriam Gonzalez (aka Nick Clegg’s wife, who is an international lawyer in her day job), she had invited a further 9 of us to join her as the ‘mentors’ to the girls in the speed dating event. The way it worked was that we each sat with a table of 8-10 girls, 15-16 years old, who rapid-fired questions at us for about 10 minutes before we moved on to the next table. These girls were bright and sparky and the questions were no-nonsense and searching including how we had got to where we were, the obstacles (if any) we had faced, what made us choose our particular paths and what advice we would give them. I was the only scientist amongst the lot, Bettany Hughes was the other academic, plus Barbara Stocking recently appointed President of Murray Edwards College in Cambridge; Fiona Bruce was probably the best recognized face of all. Strange company I keep these days, was one of my reactions; sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind myself I’m really an academic physicist.

Each group had its own character: I think I talked to five in all, but it became a bit of a fast-moving (not to mention exhausting) blur.  Some conversations worked better than others: the fact that I was a scientist may have deterred some from relating to me, whereas on other tables there were several girls who expected to progress to A levels in the sciences. The group that stood out for me was the one which asked me if I had always known what I wanted to do. The answer is of course ‘no’ and when I pointed out that most successful people hadn’t got to where they were in a straight, inevitable and unerring line the group visibly relaxed and said that was very encouraging to know. It is a message I think that can’t be said often enough. Whereas it is reasonable to encourage those setting out to have dreams and ambitions, we shouldn’t convey the message that if you don’t have clear goals you are already a failure and your life will be rubbish. On the contrary many visible success stories, in all walks of life and way beyond academia, have fallen into what they are ultimately respected for doing by a series of accidents or a bit of good fortune.

Goodness knows what the young women who participated in the event will take away from it. They were girls from fairly underprivileged schools (as far as I can judge from the percentage of free school meals we were told each had as a proxy for any other form of characterisation) and at the very least maybe they will feel encouraged to pursue their dreams and to aim high. None of us, the mentors, will ever know if we said anything helpful to them or not. That is of course a prevalent issue. You never know what the impact of your words can be.  Sometimes they can come back to haunt you many years later. Sometimes (as a previous post shows you) people will remember you in ways that are completely unexpected. But, when talking to those just setting out, perhaps the responsibility is all the greater.

For those of us in academia, feeling frustrated by the REF’s last gasps, David Willett’s latest comments about us not spending enough time on teaching, or having just received some insanely vitriolic comments from the referee of your latest paper, it is too easy to let this frustration show. If at the time you are talking to this year’s new intake of graduate students the frustration may spill over into comments with more of an edge than is desirable. I have never forgotten the time, many years ago, I talked to a journalist when I had just had a row with someone in the department. All my discretion vanished and the stories I told had more than an edge. Luckily only a fraction of that showed through in the actual published article but that was more than enough to be regrettable. In that particular case the whole story was so inaccurate that the central player (not me) in the piece demanded its removal online so there is only a lingering ghost of the offending quote from me still traceable but it has taught me to be more careful.

Such an occasion, involving a journalist, is one that is reasonably well-defined and is of the kind that should immediately raise an amber warning light. Occasions when you are just engaging in conversation with random people are harder to maintain constant vigilance over – after all, you really don’t want to have to be constantly vigilant. Yet, the reality is things we say may stay with people and, when it comes to students, we should be aware of this. So often with interviews, with scientists or anyone else, there will be a quote along the lines of ‘my teacher/parent/priest/lecturer/great aunt told me I should….’ but I wonder how many of those people will actually have intended their words at whatever that particular point was to be taken so to heart.

As it happens, by a not very fortunate coincidence of timing, the day after the speed dating event I found myself talking to another bunch of school children. This event was part of the Speakers for Schools charity’s push to get speakers into schools, this being a sister charity to Inspiring the Future and spear headed by the BBC’s Robert Peston. Standing up, talking to a group of 15 year olds about what life in science is like, one is concentrating on the message one wants to convey. It is a moment to offer pearls of wisdom that maybe you do hope will remain with them, comments along the lines of research is about not knowing the answer to the experiment you are about to do and that science opens up many different career directions.

However, what some of my recent experiences have shown is that you simply don’t know when you will happen to say something that will strike a chord with the listener (or raise a hackle) and so the words have a lasting impact that was not anticipated but which may have many unintended consequences. These may range from the trivial (so that 20 years later they are thrown back at you over the dinner table), to the more significant when you set a child off on a career direction – or equally deter them from taking up something that up till that point had seemed a possible future for them. We, as practicing scientists, should not forget this.

Posted in Communicating Science, Education | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Levelling the European Playing Field

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Athene Donald

One of the good things about (certain) committees is that one learns so much. That may not be everyone’s experience but over the years I personally have found many committees – though most certainly not all – very educational. I learnt a lot of the biology that I hadn’t had any occasion to use personally in my own research through chairing BBSRC Committees. I appreciate that is possibly a comment that retrospectively will not inspire confidence in my chairing abilities. Nevertheless, I do feel joining the right sort of committees, allowing one to expand one’s horizons can only be a good thing. This week it was the turn of the ERC’s Working Group on Gender Balance *(a sub-group of the Scientific Council) that I found illuminating as, I hope, others around the table equally did too.

We are a group all committed to trying to create a funding environment that is as level as we can make it for both men and women. As yet things within the ERC would appear not to have reached this happy position despite everyone’s best efforts, as I wrote about before. The statistics show that overall women applicants have lower success rates than men in practically all parts of the disciplinary landscape. What is going wrong (which it must be unless you actually believe women on average are more stupid than men)? What can be done to improve the situation?

A study is currently being carried out on behalf of the ERC to look at some aspects of this question. During the discussion this week it became clear how many of the things each of us ‘knew’ might in fact only apply in limited circumstances. For instance, I have always thought that the issue of the style of CV writing was quite often a gendered issue, along the lines of women being less assertive – or immodest if you prefer. This is the reason my own University runs CV mentoring to help women not only ensure they are applying for promotion at the right time, but also that they are giving themselves the best chance to do so by the way they present themselves in their CV’s.

However it turns out this problem is of broader importance. I learned that this assertive style of writing is commoner in the Anglo-US world than elsewhere. When it comes to judging track records based on CV’s, it seems that some parts of Europe may fare better than others. Another working group, although one on which I don’t serve, looks at widening participation issues but it is no secret that the UK fares considerably better than many of the newer EU members. For instance, as I’ve written before (based  on 2012 figures so they may not still be quite the same) the University of Cambridge, with 95 grants, hosts rather more than the whole of Ireland, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic combined. Some countries may have no awards at all under a particular call. Although it is clear some of these have less well-developed infrastructures than countries such as the UK or Germany, are their applicants also being affected by a more modest tradition of writing their CVs? It’s an interesting question that I hadn’t come across before.

When it comes to maternity leave, the ERC rules state that the effective elapsed time since the award of the first PhD can be reduced by 18 months for each child, rendering an applicant eligible for a Starter or a Consolidator grant for a longer chronological time. (Paternity leave is accounted for only by the amount of time actually spent on leave.)  This can seem quite generous since in many countries this far exceeds the statutory time that can be spent on leave and so would seem to be taking into account some of the additional limitations to one’s working life that are often introduced by small children. However, what happens if – as I would expect would be a not terribly uncommon working pattern in the UK, for instance – a woman takes 6 months maternity leave and then comes back part-time for some years. She still gets the ‘credit’ of 18 months, but her part-time working life is not factored in at all. But, someone asked, who would work like that and why? In their culture this seemed to be an unimaginable mode of working and yet I know people who work less than 100% for many years because that is the pattern that makes sense for them. So this is an example of something that may look like generosity in one part of Europe but appear to be less than satisfactory in another. I hope this is something that can be looked at in more detail in the future although any allowance scheme would need to ensure it didn’t merely become a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork proof.

A final point about maternity leave is something that echoes issues in Cambridge.  Should one declare a period of maternity leave or not? Just as I have heard it expressed in the past that women applying for promotion locally have been (badly in my view) advised to suppress the fact that they had had time out for a child –thereby rendering any apparent gap in the production of papers or the award of grants mysterious and suspect – so it seems from the evidence currently being gathered through inter views etc, that some ERC applicants feel that there is a question mark over whether they will be disadvantaged by mentioning the fact they have become parents. This is troubling and the ERC will need to do all it can to promote the message that there is no ‘stigma’ attached to having a family. Here I suspect Scandinavian attitudes are probably very different on this point to those in other parts of the EU, but it is important that all hear the same reassuring message.

The ERC Gender Balance Working Group undoubtedly has an important task ahead to do all it can to make sure that neither country of origin nor gender are inherent disadvantages to applicants wanting to obtain funding. Work remains to be done (and of course there are other issues too, including ensuring the panels themselves always operate to the highest standards), but there is clearly the appetite to get things as right as possible.

*24-10-13 The link to the Gender Balance Working Group has just been added to the ERC’s Organisation pages, along with those for other working groups, and has now been inserted on this post.

Posted in Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments