Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Athene Donald

We await the Levelling Up White Paper. It is not easy to read the tealeaves of this turbulent political time to work out when the delay is likely to be terminated, although the last rumour I heard has it down for Wednesday. It has been on the cards for publication for some months, although not as long as the response to the Augar Review. In both these documents one may expect the word skills to be much in evidence. It is a term that, rather like levelling up itself, does not lend itself to a simple definition, but can mean different things to different people in different contexts. That can be handy for politicians of any complexion.

Skills – and adult upskilling – both matter if levelling up is to be achieved. As Thomas Aubrey wrote in a recent blog for the Bennett Institute

‘Many studies indicate that the main driver of productivity growth is the ability of an education system to improve human capital to make the most of new technology.’

Multiple studies and reports have examined variations in attainment levels between different parts of the country. If the above statement is correct, then any variations – and there are plenty – will have knock on effects for the local economy.  To give a specific example of such education variation, based on data for 2019/20 looking at the percentage of under 19s who have obtained a Level 2 qualification (i.e.5 GCSEs at grade 4 or above, or A*- C in old money), it has been shown that nine out of ten of the best performing local authorities lie within the Greater London area. However, the tenth, indeed the highest in ranking of all, is Rutland, no distance at all from Nottingham, which across all the local authorities has the worst overall score. Rutland, with a score of 93.5%, is a full 25% above Nottingham (67.7%).

Those students who don’t get a Level 2 qualification are inevitably going to be disadvantaged in the job market, and are likely to be unable to take advantage of higher-level skills, whatever they might be. This area is where the response to Augar should be coming into its own, along with the Lifetime Skills Guarantee for post 18 education, intended to facilitate access to higher technical qualifications as much as degrees. Thus the lifetime ‘skills’ will cover a wide potential range, and who will be doing the teaching where, will likewise be very varied. The present mishmash of qualifications from apprenticeships to BTECs and T Levels – aimed at 16-19 year olds primarily – are enough to baffle anyone (employer or putative employee). While so much is up in the air, cohort after cohort of students is being disadvantaged. In regions where job prospects are low, or at least skilled and well-paid jobs are in short supply, the motivation to apply oneself to get decent skills may be hard to find, the more so if children have only ever seen their parents struggle and they cannot imagine a better life and better prospects. The connection between levelling up and skills is obvious, although the trap of an area being caught in a low skills equilibrium is pervasive and persistent.

Amidst all this, there is no doubt that increasingly many jobs require a sufficiency of numerical and statistical fluency, as well as the ability to read graphs and use spreadsheets. More so than ever before. Whether going into retail or building trades, or more professional settings such as environmental science or law, these skills have never been needed so much. For those students who do get their Level 2 qualification and proceed to Level 3 (A Levels or the vocational qualifications), they may well drop maths and think they never need it again, only to find later on that their lack of numeracy and mathematical confidence catches up with them. The Royal Society, jointly with the British Academy, has just put out a commentary spelling out the importance of pursuing some maths at Level 3, even when that is not one of the subjects (e.g. A Level) taken. Core Maths is designed to fill this gap.

Back in 2011, I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee and hosting a speech given by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, when he said

‘I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18’

a sentiment with which the audience at the Royal Society was totally in agreement. A year later, I was representing the Royal Society at an event about quantitative skills at the British Academy, at which the importance of statistics for social scientists and humanities’ scholars was stressed – and also brought home at a personal level by the then Science Minister David Willetts, who encountered the mysteries of regression analysis during his PPE course at Oxford without having the tools to handle them. More and more jobs require this literacy – and this most certainly includes politicians. Core Maths is meant to be the answer to the problem, but it has not necessarily penetrated as far as it should into the education system. The commentary the Royal Society has just published is explicitly encouraging universities to expect Core Maths qualifications for admission to a much wider range of courses, far beyond those for which Maths would be a natural subject to take at A Level.

It will be seen that levelling up and numeracy are definitely related when skills are discussed. Levelling up, like skills, means different things to different people, but most certainly it should mean an improvement in local economic conditions where things are currently bad, so that inequality is reduced across the country and those living insecure financial lives have better opportunities.  Furthermore, to revert to the Aubrey quote I gave before, if more money is being committed to research and innovation (as in the latest Spending Review) it requires that there are workers in companies able to get hold of that innovation and turn it into profit and productivity, even if they have not been involved in the innovation itself. If there are insufficient such workers – insufficient absorptive capacity – then the full advantage of developments cannot be taken. This too will have a strong regional component, building on educational disadvantage.

In this category of workers I am not talking primarily about university graduates in technical areas, vital though they are, I am talking about those with intermediate skills who will do much of the practical improvements, putting ideas into practice and making sure the logistics work.  Within universities, the Talent Policy Commission has been looking at the crucial role technicians play, often insufficiently recognized, in higher education. Their full report will be published this coming week, but an earlier report from last autumn specifically looked at the role technicians play in knowledge exchange activities. Similar analysis applies within companies; intermediate technical skills are too often overlooked by those considering training needs and employment and the pipeline of talent not taken into account where it needs to be, a point clearly made in a report by Paul Lewis in 2019 for the Gatsby Foundation 9 (Technicians and Innovation).

Joining these different strands – more money in the innovation system, more absorptive capacity with a more highly skilled workforce, including in what may now fall under core maths – are all crucial strands in levelling up. If inequality is to be reduced across the UK, then ensuring that educational outcomes are comparable in Rutland and Nottingham, in Barnet and Blackpool, is one key step on which to build. There is a long way to go in making the current systems integrated and coherent.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

Strong Women, Wise Words

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Athene Donald

Today I read two interviews with academic leaders, strong women both working in decidedly male-dominated fields. Their experiences are salutary and their advice worth taking to heart, much of it applying regardless of gender.

Firstly, and more famously at least in the UK, was an interview with Minouche Shafik, the Egyptian-born economist and Director of LSE. Economics is a notoriously male-dominated discipline. I was struck by the comments Diane Coyle made about the subject in her recent book Cogs and Monsters.

‘Economics stands out as one of the least diverse disciplines, even as it wields great practical influence, particularly over government policies that affect everyone in society. The subject’s gender and ethnicity record is unacceptable.’

In my own research into the problems of gender bias in publishing, the most striking evidence I ever came across was from Economics, not from any of the sciences (see also here and here).

Minouche is under no illusions about the burdens on women in modern society. She is quoted as saying in the Guardian interview

‘… the way our whole social contract was predicated on women looking after the young and the old for free – now there are more women going to university than men, globally, not just in the UK, and they are employed, and the cost of them not working is really high, so you want them to work. Yet we haven’t found a way to adjust – a way to look after the young and old without women providing free labour.’

As has been made only too clear, the pandemic has made the situation worse, in academia as elsewhere, with the evidence steadily accumulating, on publications and in just about every other part of our professional lives. My concern is that this will continue to play out for years, the disadvantage of these years never being eradicated on those who’ve had to take the domestic load.

The other point that strongly resonated with me in her interview regards the role of luck versus intrinsic merit in an individual’s life. She says

‘The idea that you are successful because you are smart and hardworking is pernicious and wrong, because it means everyone who is unsuccessful is stupid and lazy’.

Luck impacts on all of us: the good fortune of which family you were born into, when and where to start with. Of course, they always say you make your own luck, but if you are born into war-torn Sarajevo, your circumstances are necessarily going to be rather different from being born into a family that can pack you off to Eton. Merit is not the distinguishing mark between two such children. It behoves us never to forget this. Even two kids born in the same London borough may have utterly different life chances due to their different social capital. Many people have noted this – widening participation is, for instance, part of Churchill College’s bread and butter as they examine admissions – but overcoming these disadvantages is never helped by those academics who somehow believe (as I fear some do) that their successes are purely and solely down to their great intrinsic ability and willingness to work hard.

The second interview was in the THE with Rama Govindarajan, who is dean of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore. She studies monsoons and is an expert in fluid dynamics. Trained as a chemical engineer, she was the only woman in a class of about 54 in chemical engineering in the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. However, she was not going to let a little thing like that stop her.

‘In the olden days, gender bias was more explicit. My school and teachers tried to make me “ladylike” and to focus more on homemaking skills than on other subjects. I learned to rebel against the former and benefit from the latter. Decades ago, I faced discrimination in terms of unfair job and promotion interviews, in being blocked from facilities and opportunities available to men, and once in a while in comments from colleagues. I learned the art of repartee, to fight directly for my rights, and did win some of these battles. It made me braver and more confident.’

Many women will recognize that ‘blocking’ she describes, often intangibly hard to put one’s finger on, just the sense that things hadn’t turned out for you, as a woman, the same way as for the bloke on the next bench, or who was sitting next to you waiting for an interview. That intangible disadvantage is likely to apply whether or not you can (and are willing) to master ladylike behaviour; I’m sure I’ve not managed to tick all those boxes. Bias is subtle now, as opposed to the explicit gender bias Govindarajan encountered early on, but it doesn’t make it any less real.

Govindarajan now has a major academic leadership role, and continues to speak up on these issues.

‘In these [meetings] and elsewhere, I strongly advocate for speaking up and speaking out against sexual harassment and against unfairness. I speak for equality and symmetry of treatment.’

She believes the family is the place to start, stating that daughters-in-law have a particularly hard time in India. I suspect cultural aspects make that more important there than perhaps in the West, but equality should be equality everywhere.

Finally, when asked what she would like to be remembered for, she says it’s for her training of students and postdocs. I’m sure that is something that will strike a chord with many readers. We can’t always know what impact we have had far down the line, when students may have gone off into very different spheres and contact has been lost, but it is always moving when someone – be they still a scientist or not – reminds you of what you’ve done for them. I had just such an instance this weekend, and I’m very grateful to hear that my advice meant this former student ‘felt less alone’. Life continues to be tough for all of us, but reading these interviews should remind all of us that life is rarely easy, whatever one’s background, luck or skill, but good things can transpire. Furthermore, that each of us can make a positive difference to someone less well placed than ourselves and to wider society around us.

 

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Strong Women, Wise Words

Unconscious Bias 2.0

Posted on January 15, 2022 by Athene Donald

‘Unconscious bias’ has become very much part of the conscious process that many organisations try to bring to bear on their decision-making, be it with regard to promotions or appointments. However, what do they mean by it and how do they go about it? Often the advisory notes (or equivalent) don’t go beyond reminding everyone they should think about the issues and be aware they may impact on outcomes if each and every member of the panel doesn’t focus on it. The trouble is, unconscious bias turns up not just in the individuals involved in the decisions, but also in many of the component parts of the paperwork that need to be deconstructed if a panel is to recognize how hidden influences may play a part. I was reminded of this as I was putting together my submission to the recent call for evidence from the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on Diversity in STEM, while simultaneously observing various committees engaged in decision-making.

One of the more comprehensive videos I’ve seen, in that it highlights a number of different but specific traps we may all fall into, is this one the ERC uses to make its panel members aware (I believe it is still current for them; it is certainly still on their Working Group for Gender Issues webpages ). When I first watched it, I realised that ‘affinity bias’ was not a form of unconscious bias I had myself previously taken on board. Finding something in common with an applicant for a job had previously only meant to me that it was easier to get someone talking, not that having a shared mutual interest or background experiences in common might influence my decision. I should have realised; we hear enough about old Etonians ending up with Government jobs, but I had not extended it to someone sharing a common taste in music or something more obscure. The link I give above to affinity bias refers to five sorts of bias. Googling the topic, however, points to sites describing variously three to sixteen different types of bias. There are plenty of pitfalls in recruitment.

However, I want to remind people of the biases that other people will be introducing into the paperwork, which don’t get discussed enough in these situations.  These may turn up in different parts of an application, ranging from the publication list to letters of reference – as well as to other figures of merit which a panel may choose to search out. The danger of letters of reference being gendered is becoming much more widely appreciated, with sites devoted to helping you identify where words may subtly be conveying things other than what you intended. I’ve discussed this topic previously on this blog. This website from Arizona State University highlights the importance of emphasising accomplishments not effort. Hard-working is not exactly praise if applying for an academic position, even though it could hardly be described as inherently negative. Tom Forth, a data scientist, has produced a site where you can even insert your draft letter and see just what kinds of words you’ve introduced – to check if the implications are what you meant.

This topic, as I say, is by now quite well known (although that doesn’t mean it’s always dealt with appropriately). I am increasingly worried by the less obvious concerns. Let me start with double standards (neatly summed up in the Goethe quote I wrote about before

‘Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.’).

It isn’t always obvious unless you’re concentrating really hard. I watched a committee debate whether a senior woman who had many last author placements in author lists was little more than the purse holder, the implication being she should have been first-named author. This seemed bizarre, as the first author place is usually reserved for the PhD student/postdoc who’s done the actual experiments much more than the initiator of experiments. I didn’t hear the same comment raised about any of the men under consideration. Was that bias? I fear it was, but cannot prove it.

What about the fact that women’s papers are less cited? Many committee members will delve into Web of Science or Google Scholar to analyse citations (‘this person has even fewer than me’, was an unhelpful comment I heard recently). Leaving aside the fact that sub(-)disciplines vary hugely in their practices of both publication and citation, there are well-recognized gender differences in citation. A recent study of citations of papers published in elite Medical journals found a very significant difference. As the Nature commentary on the paper said

‘papers with women as primary authors had one-third fewer median citations than did those with men as primary authors, and that papers with women as senior authors received about one-quarter fewer citations than did those with men as senior authors. And papers whose primary and senior authors were both female received just half as many citations as did papers whose primary and senior authors were both male.’

This indicates that checking on citations is not the objective metric evaluators may imagine. (Women are also less likely to cite their own papers than men.)

Then there is the problem women face in even getting their papers published in the first instance. Melinda Duer and I highlighted this as a potential issue a few years back, based on the experience of women we knew and work analysing practice in other non-scientific disciplines (notably economics). The work of the Royal Society of Chemistry analysing their own publications, in part stimulated by our article, demonstrated that at every stage from submission on, women were indeed disadvantaged. As the report put it

‘Biases exist at each step of the publishing profile. Many of these biases appear minor in isolation, yet their combined effect puts women at a significant disadvantage.’

Another nail in the coffin of using publication metrics as a valid quantitative criterion in making decisions. But how many panels actually bear this in mind as they compare Dr Joe Smith and Dr Jo Smith?

I worry that these additional hurdles introduced due to bias creeping into the development of a career are not yet feeding into decision-making committees. And this is just about gender. Studies on how CVs are read have demonstrated just how much the name at the top affects how people read it, and this has been shown to be true for ethnic minority ‘names’ in the same way as for female ‘names’, although there are variations according to the precise apparent heritage (see this paper for instance, or here). How the other sorts of disadvantage impact I describe here on ethnicity will need further study. However, in the UK there is no doubt that ethnic minorities do worse in grant allocation, compounded by intersectionality, as UKRI statistics make plain.

There is still a long way to go in ensuring grant-awarding panels and appointment and promotion committees really do make the best decisions, and that all members are sensitive to a multitude of possible sources of bias. Let us hope these wider aspects filter through as fast as possible if equity is to be achieved.

 

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Unconscious Bias 2.0

Cynical and Irritable

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Athene Donald

‘This is not an era in which good things are taken at face value. We are cynical, irritable and tired, and if there is a bad intention to be read into anything, someone will scratch away at it until they decide that they have found it.’

These evocative sentences seem, to me at least, to sum up so much of our current daily lives. They are written by Guardian journalist Rebecca Nicholson as counterpoint to the author’s praise of the Wordle (see here if you haven’t yet succumbed to this distraction). Like a rare beam of sunshine in these wintry, grey January days, Nicholson sees the Wordle as simple, unalloyed joy. I can agree that a Wordle usually gives a few minutes satisfaction amongst whatever trials or chores one is facing (tax return, for instance, or are you all so virtuous you did yours last summer?), although it is hardly sufficient to overcome pandemic-induced exhaustion. I suspect everyone would agree the endless saga of the pandemic has long since passed its sell by date, but might not choose the Wordle as their procrastination method of choice.

At the start of this plague, I wrote superficially wise words about being kind to oneself, not expecting too much, not immediately planning on learning a new language or otherwise improving oneself, but simply doing as much as one could under what felt like extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Watching fellow committee members get to grips with Zoom was amusing in those early days, producing a wry smile when someone forgot to unmute themselves again. Or, equally, when they had never muted themselves in the first place and an invisible dog let its annoyance heard when the Amazon delivery arrived, we were just able to smile and move on. No more. As Nicholson says we are ‘cynical, irritable and tired’. All of the above all of the time, or so it feels. Remembering to be kind to others, let alone oneself, seems a task in itself.

Committee meetings with people one has never had the opportunity to meet in real life are much, much harder than when you’ve met each other before as well as had a chance for a natter beforehand over coffee. Body language cannot (readily) be read on Zoom, so it’s impossible to see if your pal up in the top left-hand corner shares your irritation when third from the left in the middle row drones on and on. (I don’t trust sending private messages in the chat to remain private; perhaps others get their laughs through that medium.) But, more importantly, as a Chair it is so much harder to read who is getting irritated and is about to explode when they’re only a couple of inches across, or spot who would love to make a comment but doesn’t quite have the confidence (or can’t find the electronic hand in time).  How do you know when consensus is within grasp when you can’t see the whites of members’ eyes? And so on. To chair meetings like this is exceptionally hard work, and the outcomes are not as good as they might be, as often as not.  Circumstances are against everyone in that room, although we all have to live with the consequences. Irritability and cynicism follow from the tiredness that Nicholson identifies.

Unfortunately, the business of the day does not go away. Patience is a virtue that we all need to practice under these circumstances, as well as that kindness to oneself and everyone around. After almost two years, that has become an increasingly tall order. All the more reason for finding the nuggets of gold in the day, be it a Wordle or (as an example in my case) a long-tailed tit – indeed a family of them – finding their way to the bird feeder in front of the window as I eat my breakfast. I have not yet resorted to a gratitude diary to try to record these brief nuggets, but I can see how the act of identifying some pleasant occurrences might improve internal resilience, as yet another day of Zoom and disembodied conversation approaches.

Working from home is no problem for me. I am spoilt by living in a substantial ‘tied cottage’ (viz, the Master’s Lodge) on the College site. Space is not the issue (albeit tidiness is and always has been. No clear desk policy ever worked for me.). Many who thought during the autumn they had just escaped back to the office from their square metre of space perched on a stool in the kitchen, will be demoralised by the return to their confinement and unsatisfactory working conditions (probably non-ergonomic ones too, if they haven’t thought hard about this). I have green grass outside, not an urban roofscape and dirty pavements. In that too I am fortunate. Nevertheless, like most of my readers I suspect, it is tempting to want to shout from the roof tops ‘I’ve had enough!’.

Will we all become hedonists when this is past, wanting to spend long hours in the exciting surroundings of a Costa or a pub where someone else has done the cooking? No doubt we would be amused to read, in years to come, our top ten guesses of how the world will have changed by the end of the pandemic if placed in a sealed envelope now. Like watching a TV programme many years later which predicted the widgets and gizmos of tomorrow (older readers will remember the joys of BBC Tomorrow’s World which used to do this), no doubt our predictions would be found to be wildly astray. However, first, we have to reach the end of the pandemic, or at least the end of this acute phase, whatever the longer-term chronic situation may be.

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Cynical and Irritable

Scientists Who Stand Up to be Counted

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Athene Donald

In the UK the pandemic is rushing towards its second anniversary, changing, but no less dangerous for the life we used to think was ‘normal’, and indeed our very lives. During this time, as a scientist I have had confidence that there are other scientists out there who are doing their best to make sense of the data and doing their utmost to pass on this knowledge to the government and the public. I don’t assume that these people are out there, peddling lies or in the pay of some mega-corporation, but others seem determined to believe such ideas. Consequently, these scientists, who are willing to speak out, have become the target of many – from the political classes to journalists and pundits, right on down to Jo(e) down the pub (almost certainly without a mask or vaccine passport in their pocket).

I am glad to see the Guardian highlighting the sorts of abuse these individuals – and many others who have been providing advice to the Government – are facing from both concerted and individual attacks (see for instance a specific example here). I have the pleasure of knowing David Spiegelhalter (not least as a Fellow of Churchill College), whom I greatly respect. He is an eminent statistician who has spent much of the pandemic trying to put facts out into the public domain. Jointly with his fellow statistician Anthony Masters, he has been writing weekly articles in the Observer about how the data can be interpreted, how it can be misinterpreted, and when it doesn’t exist in a form that is usable. This week they describe how they have been accused of ‘genocide’ and referred to as ‘Nazi collaborators’ and other similar terms of abuse.

David has always taken great pains only to deal with those facts in which he has confidence . During a Zoom talk he gave to the Churchill College Fellowship in the summer of 2020, when he was analysing the early data on deaths and highlighting the extreme dependence of these on age, he would not be drawn on other aspects of the pandemic even to that closed audience. Deaths were things he had hard data on, infections were not, nor variations by country and so on. He would not stray beyond the facts he had to hand, nor speculate about how the pandemic might unfold. David is also a very modest man, who is always willing to hold his hand up when he makes a mistake, but he also has the confidence (and platforms) to challenge those who use the data incorrectly.

Another prominent figure trying to dispense sensible advice based on the data is Devi Sridhar, Professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh and an advisor to Nicola Sturgeon over the handling of the pandemic in Scotland. I’ve not (yet) met her, but am looking forward to hosting a public conversation with her here at Churchill College in May, in person or not only time will tell. This date will be around the time her book about the pandemic is published. Devi too has written about the attacks and lies of which she has been the target. It perhaps should come as no surprise, however dispiriting it is, to realise that as a woman of colour her expertise is regularly dismissed. That she is a professor in an ancient university seems to count for nothing when people decide to spread untruths about her scientific credibility. Jo(e) down the pub knows better than her own university about the worth of her research and can spread misinformation rapidly so that it becomes its own trope. She writes sadly about how clickbait and social media can completely drown out the facts.

Michael Gove, in his infamous remark about this country ‘having had enough of experts’, may have been referring to economists specifically but – if you’ve never met an expert in any discipline – it may be easy enough to think that everyone’s point of view is equally valid. Whereas that may be true when it comes to debating whether you prefer one Strictly contestant over another, or a particular hunk in one of the apparently endless reality TV shows, it hardly applies when dealing with the horrid reality that is a pandemic. The Prime Minister may talk cheerfully about following the science, but not all his actions align with that sensible statement. The media can, in too many instances, propagate misinformation, as Devi despairingly points out in her recent article; too many in the public may swallow it whole, without even realising that’s what they’re doing.

Another Fellow of Churchill College, Sander van der Linden, has been working hard at ways to counter misinformation. Apparently nicknamed as Cambridge’s defence against the dark arts” teacher, his own recent article in the Guardian proposes ways to handle the determined disbeliever in the vaccination programme, trying to counter the misinformation speeding around the web. While many of us may be irritated by those who believe in conspiracy theories, and understand the science well enough to have confidence, just saying ‘you’re wrong’ will not get us far in changing minds.  It is important also to remember, as John Harris has pointed out, there are many people whose lives are so disadvantaged and/or chaotic, that much of the information – positive or negative – floats around them without ever touching. They may have legitimate fears and utterly insufficient routes to access accurate information which they feel confident enough to trust.

Trust sits at the heart of so much of this debate. Who do you trust? The answer apparently is, for too many, social media not established scientists. The position is of course complicated because not all scientists say exactly the same thing. Analysing the data around mortality, as David Spiegelhalter does, is one thing. Predicting how omicron will spread as soon as it touches our shores quite another. Believing herd immunity is the solution, as those scientists who signed the Great Barrington agreement did, another thing again. How the JCVI weigh up evidence around vaccination for children, without factoring the damage (mental as well as physical) that their ill health might cause to their families and hence indirectly themselves, different again. Scientists are used to critical thinking; to weighing up the evidence and to assessing who to trust versus those actors may who have underlying motives not simply related to evidence. It is part of our daily bread and butter.  In some senses this awareness is our privilege. Not everyone is so fortunate. It is to the immense credit of those scientists who try to tackle the misinformation head on, for the good of all regardless of the hostility that is meted out to them. More power to their elbows.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment