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Switching socials

Posted on 26 September 2024 by Frank Norman

Changing times

When I retired it was an opportunity to make changes in my life. Obviously now I spend less time working (actually no time working), and instead have more time for reading, visiting exhibitions, going for walks/runs, and engaging in other fulfilling but non-remunerative activities. I’m still adjusting the balance but there’s been a big change since my last day of work in July 2022.

In the 21st century this ‘life activity edit’ also entails adjustments to my social media activity. This has been a challenge.

Up to 2022 much of my social media use was work-related, so my Twitter timeline was full of open access, publishing, libraries, scholarly communications and science. I’m still interested in all these things but I’m less committed and have a reduced incentive to engage in a full-throated way. I dip in to discussions and read a little but I don’t feel the need to read everything and keep on top of what’s happening.

Now that I do voluntary work in a music library I want to engage more with the world of music libraries. It’s a much smaller world and I am still new to it so I don’t know people and I have less to say about issues.

These changes prompt me to change my social media approach to reflect the new balance of my interests. However, it is a challenge to build a new network on a different topic and this has been made ten times harder by the disintegration of Twitter and the arrival of multiple alternatives.

The great migration

Since Musk acquired Twitter in late 2022 there has been a stream of people leaving and this has increased each time Musk says something outrageous. There’ve been several articles with titles like Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter and Requiem for Academic Twitter. Often those leaving Twitter switch to a different social media platform and this has stimulated some academics to study the migration phenomenon (eg Tracking the great Twitter migration and Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon). These studies tell you more than you ever wanted to know about social media users, but seem to end up with fairly mundane conclusions – people leave because they’re dissatisfied, they seek out their communities on the new platforms, their posting behaviour is influenced by the differences in configuration and functionalities of the new platforms.

Cory Doctorow is typically insightful in writing about social quitting. He reminds us that the social networks which preceded the Facebook/Twitter generation all went through cycles of boom and bust. Facebook and Twitter have had a much longer boom phase but each of them are now seeing contractions. We shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Others have cautioned that we should be circumspect when choosing a new social media platform. If it is owned by the same people or companies as those responsible for the failing platforms that we are now leaving then they are likely to suffer from the same problems.

Migrate to where?

LinkedIn. The path of least resistance for me would be to quit Twitter and reply on LinkedIn. I’ve been there a while so have a strong network and I do find plenty of interesting posts and conversations to read and take part in. However, it is work-focused and I don’t see my broader interests reflected there.

Mastodon. I did set up an account here a couple of years back and put a small effort into engaging there. I found some people I knew with OA interests and tech interests. I can see benefits of putting more effort in to Mastodon but I don’t think it will be useful for my new interests in music libraries, and it is a smaller network with a narrower range of people. Some people are enthusiastic about Mastodon: Steve Royle recently explained his shift from Twitter to Mastodon, giving tips for how to get started there. Maria Antoniak has also written a helpful guide for Mastodon newbies. Hilda Bastian has written several blogposts about Mastodon, and how usage has grown, though her last one was over a year ago.

PostNews. A Twitter buddy recommended this site so I set up an account. Its focus was on news coverage and its model was a bit different. I didn’t look there often. It has now closed down altogether.

Spoutible. This is quite US-centric and quite political (leftish). Its founder is Christopher Bouzy, a Black tech entrepreneur. I like the appearance and the way it works but I haven’t found people there from the community I know. I’d need to get to know a new group of people and that will take time and much effort.

Trust Cafe. A few years ago I had created an account on WT Social – a site set up by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia renown. I had an initial poke around but rarely visited the site. I see it has now changed name to Trust Cafe, but the old accounts have not yet migrated to the new site. Trust Cafe hasn’t been mentioned much as a Twitter alternative and maybe it is just too small. I’ll explore it a bit more, when I get time.

Threads. This is the site that Zuckerberg launched to rival Twitter. I setup an account there and it imported my network from Instagram, but this was quite a small network. I look at Threads a bit, mainly when I see adverts on Facebook for posts there. There are some interesting stories though nothing I want to engage with. I can’t help the feeling that some of the stories posted may not be 100% factual. Jon Worth says that moving to Threads would be going from the frying pan into the fire.

BlueSky. I found it easier to get started here. The Sky Follower Bridge browser extension proved very useful, matching accounts on Twitter that I followed to equivalent accounts on BlueSky. Unfortunately it mismatched quite a few accounts, so I started following some randoms on BlueSky. Gradually I’ve added more people to my following list, and increased my followers, and BlueSky feels like a good experience now.

Comparisons. Several people have reviewed some of the new social media offerings, mainly looking at Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon. Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel writing in The Atlantic suggested that Threads is ‘Zombie Twitter’. They were writing in the very early days of Threads though. Jennifer Regala, writing on Science Editor, was more enthusiastic about Threads but also liked BlueSky. She found both platforms incldued people from her communities, but slightly preferred BlueSky. She was not keen on Mastodon, writing ‘Anything that complicated should not be considered social media from my perspective.’

David Gewirtz, writing in ZDNet, was a bit disappointed at the low number of active users in both Threads and BlueSky but suggests we need to be patient. He says that BlueSky has the most potential. He has a soft spot for Mastodon and says it is ‘a little more complex and a little less inclusive than Twitter’ but it is solid enough, though slow going.

Excerpt from article by David Gewirtz: Had Twitter not launched first, and Mastodon had first mover advantage, I think Mastodon might have been huge. But since it's a late-to-the-party substitute solution that's a little more complex and a little less inclusive than Twitter, it's probably destined to be a bit of an edge system for the foreseeable future. That's not to say there's nothing to like, because it's nice. But it's not going to take Twitter's place as the voice of the online community overall.I frankly doubt anything will. Twitter may well have been of a time and place, and we may never see its like again.

Screenshot

Institutional accounts

Andy Tattersall has looked at why research organisations might stay on the platform and where they have moved to. There are many factors influencing the decision to stay or move. His spreadsheet (still growing) has details of more than 300 institutions with details of their accounts on different platforms. Strikingly, he says that the majority of these new accounts are inactive, so it seems institutions are hedging their bets – setting up in the new places but staying on Twitter for now.

Ned Potter has forcefully argued that academic organisations should leave Twitter, and provided a five-step plan for doing so. He says

By stopping our use of X we will be upholding our values, adapting 
to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform 
no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more 
impactful communications.

The library where I volunteer currently has a Twitter account – engaging with other music libraries and many choirs and orchestras. I’ve not seen a move away from Twitter among those communities, but it’s something we need to keep in mind.

Curating my network

Creating a network on social media platforms is a gradual, organic process which takes time. I read an interesting post by someone and decide to follow them. I see tweets by people at an event I’m attending and I follow them. Bit by bit I become more connected. When I move to a new platform I start with nothing so I cannot expect to be immediately immersed in interesting posts and conversations. The Sky Bridge extension mentioned above was really useful for me, and perhaps that is one reason that I am finding BlueSky more rewarding. I think regular posting and interacting with other people’s posts are the best ways to become more embedded.

My decision

I’ve read accounts from many others explaining why they have left Twitter; until now I’ve stuck it out. But there’s a limit. Musk’s political comments are increasingly egregious and outrageous and I’ve reached the point when I must make a change.

I plan to focus on BlueSky with a bit of Mastodon too and occasional glimpses at Threads. I’d like to explore Spoutible and Trust Cafe more but realistically I may not have time.

I am not deleting my Twitter account. There’s simply too much conversation still there that I want to read. I intend to refrain from posting on Twitter, but I may find it hard to resist the occasional reply there. I will try out a strategy of politely asking authors of posts I want to engage with whether they are also on BlueSky or Mastodon, or if they have plans to migrate. Otherwise I will screenshot a post and repost on BlueSky.

I hope to see you over there one day soon – I am @franknorman.bsky.social on BlueSky.

Posted in BlueSky, Social networking, twitter | Comments Off

Can scientific productivity be optimized?

Posted on 26 September 2024 by Stephen

This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries.

Actually, I’m not sure it is a truth, and I don’t know if it is universally acknowledged – I haven’t looked closely enough at the evidence – but it is a long standing and widely held assumption. However, research funders struggle to operationalise this assumption and the question of why that is the case is the focus of a stimulating recent paper in PLoS Biology from Kevin Gross and Carl Bergstrom on “Rationalizing risk aversion in science: Why incentives to work hard clash with incentives to take risks”.

Gross and Bergstrom bring an economic perspective to the question that provides an insightful framing for some of the wider issues that it raises. Here’s their abstract (with my emphasis and annotations):

Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet, much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting high-risk, high-return research projects. Why don’t the incentives for scientific discovery adequately impel researchers toward such projects? Here, we adapt an economic contracting model to explore how the unobservability of risk and effort discourages risky research. The model considers a hidden-action problem, in which the scientific community must reward discoveries in a way that encourages effort and risk-taking while simultaneously protecting researchers’ livelihoods against the vicissitudes of scientific chance. Its challenge when doing so is that incentives to motivate effort clash with incentives to motivate risk-taking, because a failed project may be evidence of a risky undertaking but could also be the result of simple sloth (I would add “or incompetence”). As a result, the incentives needed to encourage effort actively discourage risk-taking. Scientists respond by working on safe projects that generate evidence of effort but that don’t move science forward as rapidly as riskier projects would. A social planner who prizes scientific productivity above researchers’ well-being could remedy the problem by rewarding major discoveries richly enough to induce high-risk research, but in doing so would expose scientists to a degree of livelihood risk that ultimately leaves them worse off. Because the scientific community is approximately self-governing and constructs its own reward schedule, the incentives that researchers are willing to impose on themselves are inadequate to motivate the scientific risks that would best expedite scientific progress.

The authors’ analysis relies on a mathematical model which I confess I did not completely understand*, so I’ll spare you the details; (those who are more mathematically challenged will still get a lot from the paper if they confine themselves to the Introduction, the box on Hidden-action models and the Discussion). What I did understand of the model in terms of the codification of risk, reward, scientific value, effort, resources and utility and the explanations of simplifying assumptions seemed reasonable and, notwithstanding the obvious risks of confirmation bias, the two key conclusions that emerged from it resonated with my sense of how research decision-making works:

“[…] scientists seem either unable or unwilling to devise institutions that motivate investigators to embrace the scientific risks that would lead to the most rapid progress. Our analysis here suggests that this state of affairs can be explained at least in part by the interaction between two key structural elements in science: the unobservability of risk and effort on the one hand, and the self-organized nature of science on the other.”

The “unobservability of risk and effort” is more or less self-explanatory and accounts for the reliance on outputs such as publications as markers of achievement, which are to some degree beyond the control of the researcher. Demand for these outputs in the absence of an assessable record of the intelligence and invention brought to any research effort, is what leads many researchers to opt for safer, less-risky projects that are more likely to result in a paper, albeit one that reports a more incremental finding**.

The role of “the self-organized nature of science” needs a little more unpacking for those who haven’t read the whole paper. What Gross and Bergstrom mean here, I think, is that because the highly specialised nature of scientific endeavours relies so heavily on peer reviewers in the assessment of funding proposals, the key decision-makers have a strong internal sense of the risks attending project failure. They are therefore less willing than a hypothetical social planner charged with maximising scientific productivity to subject applicants to a reward regime that more punitively disfavours incrementalist approaches. The authors argue further that such hypothetical social planners cannot emerge in the first place because they would have to depend on researchers to determine how to value outcomes and would effectively morph into conduits for the collective view of the scientific community.

Several thoughts and questions occurred to me in the immediate wake of the paper’s findings. They are not fully formed, so I offer them only in the interest of provoking further discussion.

Any researcher who has been on the receiving end of a paper or grant rejection – which is pretty much every researcher – would be forgiven for asking themselves how much more punishment they deserve at the hands of Gross and Bergstrom’s social planner. Could it be that the current balance of risk and reward achieves the maximal level of scientific productivity that is commensurate with the desire to accord researchers a reasonable work-life balance? Personally, I don’t think I ever achieved any kind of balance during my time as a jobbing academic trying to carve out a career in research. Current efforts to incorporate research culture and the quality of the lived research process as part of assessment exercises spring from long-standing concerns about the risks and stresses imposed on researchers. One cost not discussed in any detail in Gross and Bergstrom’s analysis is the human cost (though I appreciate they deliberately narrowed the parameters of their model to answer a specific technical question and the human cost factors into the appetite for risk).

Also, is it so difficult to uncover hidden effort? Better line management within research performing organisations could track effort, and perhaps even reward it directly if sufficient intramural funds were available. Researchers would also feel less of a sting from failed grant applications if funders were more open about the uncertainties in decision-making processes that ultimately rely on human judgement; feedback that clearly flags applications assessed as of fundable quality but for which funds were not available could provide some measure of career protection for researchers back at their home institution.

Although Gross and Bergstrom dismissed their hypothetical social planner, Daniel Sarewitz has argued powerfully and provocatively for a more managerial approach to the organization of research, in part to tackle what he sees as the perverse inefficiencies arising because science is permitted undue freedoms to self-organize.

Elsewhere, Michael Nielsen and Kannjun Qiu’s long but very worthwhile essay “A Vision for Metascience” casts Gross and Bergstrom’s social planners as risk-taking “metascience entrepreneurs” empowered to achieve “scalable change in the social process of science. Their ideas for incentivising risk include (among many other interesting but as yet untested suggestions) funding by variance, where grant applications are funded not by being high scoring among reviewers but by polarizing opinion; or failure audits, where grant programme managers are fired if the failure rate of their funded projects drops (yes, drops) below 50%.

Conceivably, the UK’s recently established Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) also embodies an alternative form of the social planner. Modelled on similar Advanced Research Project Agencies in the US (e.g. DARPA, ARPA-E, ARPA-H), ARIA is essentially run by programme directors in a range of topic areas who have the authority to select and fund projects they believe will result in the most significant breakthroughs. I’m not aware of any study that has quantified the scientific productivity of the longer-established American agencies in comparison to more traditional mode of research funding, but their anecdotal (?) reputation was sufficient to persuade the UK government to bet on ARIA. I share the view that this a reasonable bet for the UK to take, even if the funding agency has yet to develop robust criteria to demonstrate its own worth.

A last thought on productivity to throw into the mix: a hidden assumption of the Gross-Bergstrom model is that all research funding is awarded competitively. But what would be the impact on productivity of an ecosystem where researchers were provided with a basic or background level of funding, enough for a single postdoc or research technician, guaranteed for 10 years, in recognition of their hard work? As I’ve argued elsewhere (and some time ago), such a regime could boost the productivity of the research funding ecosystem by reducing the wasted effort of submitting grant applications to funding systems that have chronically low success rates. Ghent University’s introduction of a form of universal basic research funding is a tentative, small-scale step in this direction.

There are further, broader questions raised by Gross and Bergstrom’s paper. For example, is an analysis centred on individual economic actors weighing the balance of risk and reward in deciding which research projects to undertake the best way to explore questions of scientific productivity? What does it have to say about the impact of different institutional models, which not include not only the APRA/ARIA approaches mentioned above but also experiments in Focused Research Organisations (FROs), innovative academic-industrial fusions such as Altos Labs, or new types of research institution, such as Arcadia Science or Astera?

Finally, I’m not sure how useful it is to talk about maximising or optimising the productivity of science, given the immense diversity and complexity of its processes, outputs and impacts. That’s not to say that discussions of how to improve scientific productivity should figure out optimisation before any policy decisions can be made. Dare I suggest that more incrementalist approaches to improvement represent a more realistic and promising approach? We need to start somewhere – some already have! – and policy makers, no less than scientists, should be prepared to take risks. We will just have to work out the evaluation methods as we go.

I am grateful to James Wilsdon for a critical reading of a first draft of this blogpost.

Footnotes

*Although reasonably mathematically literate, I would have benefitted from a fuller description of the equations feeding into the model and suspect many other PLoS Biology readers would too. The Box on Hidden-action Models was useful though!

**One of the simplifying assumptions of the model that did trouble me was that studies resulting in “unpublishable outcomes”, presumably null or negative results, were assigned a scientific value of zero. This is not altogether unreasonable given that null results are rarely written up for publication because they are not rewarded. Journals in search of citations to buttress their impact factors strongly prefer positive results and researchers in search of jobs, promotion and funding, are strongly incentivised to publish in ‘top journals’. But in truth null or negative results are not valueless and their absence from the published research record impacts productivity because the lessons learned from such studies are not logged, leading potentially to unnecessary duplication of effort. If we are interested in understanding the productivity of scientific research, we need better measures of the value of null results, not just a deeper understanding of the tensions between risks and incentives.

Posted in science | Comments Off

The Wonder of Life on Earth

Posted on 20 September 2024 by Henry Gee

One of the criticisms of my book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth was that it lacked illustrations of the many creatures mentioned therein. To fill what seems to be a yawning ~~chasm~~ ~~lacuna~~ hole I’m pleased to announce that there will be an illustrated version, aimed at younger readers (9-11 years). It’ll be called The Wonder of Life on Earth. The text is all-new, and it’s currently being illustrated by Raxenne Maniquiz. Click here to get a flavour of her wonderfully rich natural history art. It’s available for preorder, so put it in your Christmas shopping order … for 2026.

Posted in Writing & Reading | Comments Off

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

Posted on 17 September 2024 by Henry Gee

This one kindly sent in by our Correspondent of all things Chthonic, Mr C. D. of Leeds. I think it speaks for itself. What it is saying, though, is less clear.

Posted in Apparitions, Silliness | Comments Off

Reasons to be cheerful

Posted on 16 September 2024 by rpg

It’s one of those typical mid-September days with the sun shining and the temperature promising to push the low-20s by the afternoon. And I’ve got the day off.

We seem to have had a whirlwind summer that was gone before it was over, punctuated by two wondrous weeks in Italy and a weekend in Devon. And just as it was drawing to a close I found myself, for Reasons, booked into the European Society for Cardiology annual congress, which this year was held at the Excel in London, the weekend after the Bank Holiday. For work purposes, of course.

One of our clients has a drug for a certain cardiac condition, and it’s launching next Spring. So a couple of colleagues and myself had to work the Congress, catching up on all the latest data and checking out the competition. It was fun—ESC is my favourite congress, and I haven’t worked in the area for 4 years, so it was like coming home.

The funny thing was that many of the people I met were clients (and clinicians) who I’d last seen in the pre-pandemic days. Several of them told me they’d seen my name on an email, or heard it mentioned in conversation, and were happily surprised at the prospect of working with me again: “Richard? Richard Grant? He’s coming to ESC?”. I even got to talk to one of the big names, who was presenting trial results in a ‘Hotline’ session—he recognized me straight away (in front of a client) and I asked him a question about the study that he said nobody else had thought to ask, and we had a nice chat.

So that was gratifying, too.

I did have to work over the weekend (and stay in a hotel in Canary Wharf because of the trains from here not always being reliable or early enough), which is why I have a couple of random days off.

The work looks like it’s going to take off: in the run-up to launching a new drug there is a surprising amount to do, and especially in this ‘speciality cardiology’ (we’re not allowed to say ‘rare’ anymore, because it’s not) area. And, again for Reasons, I find myself having to build up my small team and be very involved in the day-to-day doing and running of the account, which isn’t quite the level I was hired at but is great fun and people seem to like what I’m doing.

In all, I’ve ended up being quite grateful for what happened in February.

And happily, Rhea has started laying eggs again. She essentially had the entire summer off, and got back on the job just after we got back from Devon and before I went to ESC. She’s our best girl.

Posted in cardiology, careers, clients, hens, job, Me, Rhea | Comments Off

What Can I Do to Help?

Posted on 15 September 2024 by Athene Donald

Men who’ve heard me talk about my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), or more generally about the issues facing women in STEM, not infrequently ask me this question: what can I do to help? I can point them towards the helpful list I first published about nine years ago, and which I frequently use in my talks as the last slide, to leave on the screen during Q+A. But perhaps I should also point them towards the book I’m currently reading, Unrooted by Erin Zimmerman, with its subtitle of Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science. The Canadian scientist is an evolutionary botanist, and a significant part of her book is dedicated to her love of that branch of biology, and her dismay that botany, in its classical form, is fading due to lack of funding and support, while molecular approaches take centre stage.

However, the part of the book I want to stress here is that summed up in the second word of the subtitle: motherhood and all the accompanying challenges for an early career researcher. Zimmerman thought, like many another young scientist, that she wanted and was destined for a career as an academic. However, her experiences of postdoc-ing while pregnant and after returning to work after the birth of her daughter (she was only entitled to four months maternity leave), demonstrated, for her, that the battle to combine the different roles became unmanageable in the face of an unsupportive boss.

That is the key point. He wasn’t overtly hostile, even particularly sexist, he simply failed to understand what she was going through, or how her experiences resulting from what he said and did and, just as importantly, by what he didn’t say or do, impacted her. Her experiences, I fear, are far from uncommon. Yes, there are misogynistic professors out there who are much more explicitly unpleasant, or even harassers and predators. But there are plenty more (and some of them women too), who simply have no imagination or sympathy for their team. All they are focussed on are the results, the papers, and being able to get the next grant. Sadly, our system of academic incentives currently makes such a focus unsurprising. The supervisors’ survival (particularly if they are still on tenure track or its equivalent) depends on these outcomes and not the wellbeing of the researcher.

Zimmerman describes this tension, this slow destruction of her ability to keep going in the face of apparent insensitivity and unawareness of what she’s going through, in miserable detail. It’s something many supervisors would be well advised to read if they want to be able to support their researchers.

“Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation…it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you love the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.”

I am sure those words will resonate with many women who have wanted to combine their love of science with love of their child(ren), but struggled.

Yet the reality is that academia should be quite flexible. Zimmerman’s complaint was in part that her boss simply made things difficult any time she wanted to deviate from what he saw as the ‘normal’ way of working. If she wanted to start early to fit in with when childcare was available, he seems to have rolled his eyes before giving grudging approval. Presenteeism should not be necessary in academic life, although some experiments (particularly with living organisms, which by and large her plants were not) may put certain demands on timings to make sure they stay alive. But otherwise, getting the job done – including reading at home in the evenings, if that’s what works – should be the only thing that matters, not when, or even where, it’s done.

I was clearly lucky in many ways when I combined motherhood and my science. It was a different age (four months maternity leave was generous then) and people – certainly in the Cavendish – hadn’t had to think about these issues before: as I was the first female lecturer there, I was obviously the first person to try to make this combination work. Maybe this made it easier as people collectively seemed to want it to go well. No one checked what hours I worked, as long as I turned up to lecture and run the practical classes at the appropriate times (and my working hours were extremely flexible, due to when childcare was available and how my husband and I shared the rest of the week). I didn’t have to go through the indignities of pumping milk in unsuitable surroundings, as Zimmerman did, since advice on how long to keep a baby on breastmilk alone was very different then, although I kept breastfeeding in part for many more months after I went back to work. I was shattered by these early months, lecturing at 9am when I thought my legs might give way I was so tired, but at no point was I faced with disapproval or even comment.

So, supervisors in general, think a little harder about what the young parents in your team may be going through and work out how to make it easier so that they can deliver what you want. Making their life a misery through inattention, disapproval or worse, will actually make the outcomes less successful for the whole team. A period of irregular working may still be significantly more productive than allowing someone’s drive to ‘wilt’, to use Zimmerman’s word.

“To keep making my way up the ladder with no additional thought given to my happiness or comfort in the workplace was getting frustrating. I felt like after more than a decade in research, I’d earned some basic consideration.”

So, if you want everyone in your team to be both successful in themselves and contribute to the success of your wider team, show a little consideration….I think that’s the next piece of advice I should proffer when I’m asked in the future ‘what can I do to help?’

Posted in ECRs, Erin Zimmerman, maternity leave, motherhood, Research, Science Culture, supervisors, Women in science | Comments Off

In which I slowly kill what I love

Posted on 15 September 2024 by Jennifer Rohn

A recent trip to Exmoor – involving petrol

I sometimes feel like I am living in the last gasp of the “having your cake and eating it too” era. The planet is approaching a climatic tipping point – if not past it already. Widespread war is sparking ever closer, several bushfires punctuating an arid landscape of hatred, seemingly only a matter of time before the dots are joined into all-out conflagration. There is so much loathing, indecency and disinformation online that it’s hard to imagine a time when we were mostly a civilised society, let alone one governed largely by truth and common sense.

And yet. Some of us lucky few, in calmer pockets, still have our interesting jobs, our comfortable houses, our collection of “nice things”, access to forests full of serene greenery, gardens full of songbirds and butterflies, shiny cars and far-flung holidays – pleasant pastimes that nevertheless drive the aforementioned carbon-dioxide-fuelled apocalypse. But we do it anyway. The world is horrible. But it’s also beautiful.

These thoughts come and go as I live my life, a cycle of worry and complacency. There was an article in the Times yesterday about the Profumo Affair – can you imagine any politician these days resigning in scandal because he’d had an extramarital affair or consorted with Russian assets? It seems laughable now. No, he’d just shrug and go on, safe in the knowledge that the furore would die out in a few more news cycles. Maybe that’s no different from me: I am horrified or enraged by some injustice on the other side of the world, but then go outside and hoe my rows of lettuces and enjoy the feeling of autumn sunshine on my face.

Of course, we all try to do our bit. Our family has a 20-strong array of solar panels on our roof, an electric car, a rigorous recycling regimen. We do the little things: we don’t own a clothes dryer, but string up our laundry on the line. We have our milk delivered in reusable glass bottles, grow our own fruit and vegetables, keep laying hens and busy honeybees, make our own alcoholic beverages from garden produce, use metal water bottles and portable coffee mugs and sturdy shopping bags. The school run is on foot; the London commute is by train. But this is nothing when we fly to that conference or beach, or order more stuff that we don’t truly need.

Perhaps because I consume a lot of science fiction, whose forte is laying bare the stark differences between the present and some speculative, inevitably worse-off future, I am hyperaware of how good I have it right now. We are extracting every last pleasure that our way of life allows, heedless of the damage, and yet we still – mostly – can find beauty in which to immerse ourselves. My family and I regularly camp in the woods, swim in rivers and the sea, fish remote trout streams, stay in rural areas and eat in country pubs that haven’t changed much in hundreds of years. The air is usually fresh, the stars bright. Wild animal life is everywhere – lazy circling kites, damsel flies, beetles, long-tailed tits, painted ladies. I imagine my ancestors reading my journals (if such fragile paper survives conflagration) and marvelling at the miraculous bounty we enjoyed – both of the earth, but also the activities we pursued that slowly killed it.

It’s like living perpetually in cognitive dissonance. My human brain is not equipped to embrace the contradiction 24/7 – instead I enjoy the good parts, and try to forget the bad. Most days, I just get by, my life so full that I rarely have time to regret. I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of things, my time here is nearly up, and all of these problems will be passed down to my son alongside our estate and possessions. But it seems too late to change, and any drastic changes I make will not even register against the backdrop of 8 billion others on this planet. In the meantime, it seems only right that I do the best I can: cherish my family, enjoy my garden, try to be kind, chip away at the science whose ultimate goal is to help people.

On the individual human scale, I have to feel that this is enough. But history may not judge me so leniently.

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Objects In The Rear-View Mirror

Posted on 11 September 2024 by Henry Gee

It was so long ago, that sometimes it feels like only yesterday. It was the end of 1987, and there I was, a graduate student in Cambridge, finishing my Ph.D. and minding my own business (see photo below)

Picture of Fitzwilliam College MCR, 1987. I was the President, in the middle at the front. Actually, the REAL President was Spocket the College Cat, seated on my lap. Pic retrieved thanks to Asako Saegusa.

… when I was suddenly hired by the Submerged Log Company on a 3-month contract as a junior news reporter (my first ever published piece is here), but with the main aim of re-starting a column in The Times that the S.L. C. had had in the 1960s. This was all very ancient history — before the internet; before the web; when the best I had at home was a dial-up modem; when the only computer in the workplace was in the Editor’s office; when we had typewriters (electronic) and faxes, and working from home was a virtual impossibility — and I submitted copy to The Times by a flaky pre-internet digital transmission system called MCI Mail.

However, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a historian of science (and, as it happens, a near-contemporary of mine at the Zoology Department in Cambridge) who was writing the history of this venture and sent me some of the evidence. I had long since recycled all the scrapbooks I’d kept from that era (I wish I hadn’t) so it was with a mingled sense of delight, apprehension and vertigo that reviewed the first ever piece I had published in The Times. It was from the Op-Ed page of the issue of 30 January 1988, and you can read it here:

The piece seems prescient: it concerns this paper by James A. Lake of UCLA, whom I later came to know very well after I spent the first three months of 1996 as a Regents Professor there. In the paper, Lake presented a molecular phylogeny that grouped eukaryotes with a subset of prokaryotes he called ‘eocytes’. We now know these as archaea, and over the past few years their status as closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes is now established. Now, I used to have a photograph of me and Lake in evening dress surrounded by people dressed as orcs… but that’s a story for another day.

Posted in Research, Technicrox, Writing & Reading | Comments Off

For the Last Time

Posted on 6 September 2024 by Athene Donald

For the Last Time

I have written in the past about the challenges of doing something for the first time. For early career researchers, this could be anything from giving a conference presentation to travelling to another lab to learn a new skill or joining (and speaking up at) a departmental committee. Anything unfamiliar can feel unnerving, although the more one tries things out the more one learns (even, as I found when I gave a TedX talk, that I never wanted to do it again). Indeed, the more one tries, the more one may begin to believe that you can cope with new challenges even if you make a complete pig’s breakfast that very first time. With luck, you know you can live down any associated embarrassment and come back stronger next time around.

However, as I discussed in an earlier post, retirement from my post as Master of Churchill College is almost upon me, and I am now facing the opposite challenge. It is a weird sensation that every committee in College I turn up to chair, I know it’s for the last time. Whatever decisions are made, it is for someone else to carry out. It is not a very comfortable position to be in. Of course, I could be completely destructive and try to leave a mess behind me, but that really isn’t my style. More to the point, I am left thinking, why did I not do more? Why did I not push through that change that always lurked at the back of my mind, or encourage a junior member to be more forceful in setting out their imaginative ideas? One can always look back and feel that perhaps one was too laid back, too hesitant, too nervous…..You get the picture. Seniority does not necessarily bring supreme confidence (although, of course, it may for some people).

There will be some committees which were less exciting than others, at least for me, (that doesn’t of course mean they weren’t important), that perhaps I won’t be so sorry to see the back of. I am fortunate in that retired Masters remain Fellows at Churchill, so that I will be able to see how things that have been set in train pan out in the months and years ahead. Indeed, it astonishes me that not all colleges do this; how cruel to serve for a significant number of years and then be unceremoniously excluded from the future life of the college. I will, perhaps, be particularly interested to see how the work around sustainability develops, where Churchill has made significant strides, although there’s plenty more to do. We are very proud of the fact that, not only have we installed solar panels on many of our, fortunately flat, roofs, but that we invested in training our maintenance staff, so that they have been able to do the installations themselves.

However, what this amounts to is that overall, doing things for the last time is definitely bittersweet. It is right and proper to move on: the historic habit of Masters serving for life is definitely something that should never be restored. One gets stale, apart from anything else, unable to see new solutions to old problems which a newcomer may spot instantly with their fresh eyes. I’m looking forward – even if with significant trepidation – to whatever comes next. I hope it will raise new challenges to stimulate (and the signs are starting to be positive on this front), new things to do for the first time, not the last. I hope I will still find the issues, quirky or deeply serious, which provoke me to continue with writing this blog, but I look forward to new horizons, situations, even committees to keep my brain agile and my service to the community non-negligible. Time will tell.

Posted in careers, challenges, Churchill College, committees | Comments Off

What I Did In My Summer Holidays

Posted on 2 September 2024 by Henry Gee

My social media feeds have been full of pictures of people on their summer holidays. I haven’t actually been on holiday yet, though several Gees did enjoy a lovely short break in Wales in the spring, and later in the year me and Mrs Gee plan to go somewhere to celebrate our nth wedding anniversary. I don’t feel too deprived given that I live in a holiday resort anyway, and can go to the beach and have a paddle and an ice cream whenever I like.

Back at the ranch I have been putting the finishing touches to my next book, which is to say, I have approved the corrected text, and the next thing will be to get the corrected proofs so I can compile an index. Compiling an index is great. I find it to be one of the most interesting things you can do with your clothes on. What I wish to avoid is having to compile two indexes (one can have too much of a good thing), one each for the UK and US editions, so I hope that they’ll have the same paginations.

While on the subject of different editions, the foreign-rights people at my publisher, who are a bunch of eager terriers, have already sold the rights to editions in six other languages. I have some way to go to eclipse J. K. Rowling who’s published all seven of her Harry Potter books in 85 languages. My previous book has managed to get within the same order of magnitude, with 25 foreign-rights sales (we shan’t mention the pirated edition in Bengali). Most of the time the publisher will send me one or more complimentary copies. Here is my current shelfie:

From left to right you can see the UK, US, Estonian, Indonesian, Italian, Chinese (simplified), Polish, Korean, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, Albanian, German, Greek and Portuguese editions. They’ll soon be joined, I hope, by editions in Swedish, Czech, Slovak, Chinese (traditional) and Azerbaijani. I believe that there are Ukrainian and Russian editions out there, but I doubt that I’ll get to see these in the foreseeable future because of the current unpleasantness. My father is hoping for an edition in Yiddish, while I am holding out for Sindarin. The Foreign Rights director said that they didn’t have many sales representatives in Middle-earth. We discussed the possibility of an edition in the Black Speech of Mordor, but she warned me that this ‘was not a language she would utter here.’

A fun side-effect of foreign translation rights has been that when an edition appears in a territory, and the foreign publisher gets behind it, I get to do interviews for foreign newspapers and broadcasters. The French edition went down well in this regard, as did the Romanian and Portuguese editions, and there was a week earlier this summer when I was Big in Brazil.

Although most people have said they love the book, quite a few have complained that there aren’t many pictures. To remedy this, I’ve written a much shorter version aimed at pre-teens, and it’s currently being illustrated. The illustrations I have seen are lovely, but as is often the way with publishing, this may take a while to come out, but I hope to be able to show you something soon.

In the meantime I’ve been working on something else, but it’s at an early stage and I have promised myself not to say anything about it in case I jinx it.