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Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

Posted on 30 January 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 A levels, Core Maths, education, michael gove, qualifications, technicians | Comments Off on Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

FAIR data in practice

Posted on 26 January 2022 by Frank Norman

Introducing the next Open Research London event, which will be about FAIR data. 

It’s easy to agree that making research data FAIR is A Good Thing. Of course research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But is it imperative that all research data should be FAIR? If not, how do we identify those subsets that do need to be FAIR? What exactly do we need to do at a micro level to ensure that our data is FAIR?

Realising the aim of FAIR data in practice is challenging – it can take time and resources – and the benefits to the researcher of making their data FAIR are not always apparent. It’s important therefore to minimise any barriers to making data FAIR.  Research institutions should put systems in place to make FAIR data easy to manage and should explain clearly to researchers what they need to do.

Top-down

Since the FAIR data concept was launched in 2016 there has been a great deal written and talked about it but mostly that has been pretty high-level. We are seeing more practical guidelines emerge but I believe we still need more concrete explanations for both institutions and researchers.

The EOSC Expert Group developed an overarching FAIR Action Plan, published in 2018, but stressed that there was also a need for individual countries to put in place national action plans for FAIR. The plan was called Turning FAIR into Reality and it talks about the need to create policies, build a FAIR ecosystem, develop researcher skills, provide repositories and craft incentives. It also emphasises the need for PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) and standards, and the importance of machine-actionable data management plans. Skills development was identified as a major gap to be filled.

Some of the presentations at the launch event have useful summaries if you want to learn more about the plan.

To me it all feels a bit high-level still. The plan doesn’t quite bridge the gap from the high-level ideals of FAIR data down to quotidian research practice.

Creating infrastructure

The FAIRsFAIR project (Fostering Fair Data Practices in Europe) is endeavouring to create “an overall ​knowledge infrastructure on academic quality data management, procedures, standards, metrics and related matters”, based on the FAIR principles.

It aims to supply “practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles throughout the research data life cycle”. I do like the sounds of this.  Its emphasis is on “fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR.”

The project started in March 2019 and is due to complete this year.  Recently they released a  training handbook, coordinated by Claudia Engelhardt.

Institutions, publishers, repositories

The Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) is the first research institution to dedicate itself to Open Science. Its director, Guy Rouleau, was interviewed about MNI’s approach to open science in Genome Biology in 2017. MNI provides  some practical guidelines on FAIR data for its researchers.

A recent article by JB Poline (from MNI and McGill University) and others in Neuroinformatics considers how organisations can work towards making new neuroscience data FAIR, and calls for increased international collaborative standardisation of neuroscience data to foster integration and efficient reuse of research objects.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues from PLOS recently published the results of a survey of researchers, quizzing them on their needs and priorities for research data sharing. Their article in Data Science Journal highlights the role of publishers and repositories and the importance of linking research data and publications.

Sharing data in a repository is key requirement for data to be FAIR. Repositories such as Dryad can help to spread awareness and best practice.  Dryad has a page listing Good Data Practices.

Researchers

Some researchers support FAIR data for ethical reasons. Philippa Matthews wrote in the Journal of Global Health in 2019 about the need for FAIR data in order to help overcome the health problems caused by Hepatitis B virus.

Questions.

As a service provider in a research institution, I have these questions about FAIR:

  • what do I need to put in place to support researchers?
  • what should I be telling researchers they need to do?
  • what skills do I need to ensure researchers have?
  • do I really understand what each of the components of F-A-I-R means?

The event

Open Research London is holding a free virtual event called FAIR data in practice on Tuesday 1 February 2022, 3-4.30pm GMT.

The event will be chaired by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions at Public Library of Science (PLOS) and hosted online by the Francis Crick Institute.

There will be four short talks followed by a Q&A and discussion.

The speakers are:

  • Jen Gibson (Executive Director, Dryad)
  • Philippa Matthews (Group Leader at Francis Crick Institute)
  • Jean-Baptiste Poline (Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University)
  • Claudia Engelhardt (Göttingen State and University Library)

They will be joined in the discussion panel by James McRae (Head of Metabolomics platform at Francis Crick Institute)

The event is free but please register at Eventbrite.

 

 

 

Posted in Research data | Comments Off on FAIR data in practice

In which I imagine a dystopian future

Posted on 23 January 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

Book cover: Vital Signals

Despite my dedication to promoting the Lab Lit genre, I’ve always been an avid science fiction fan too. I admire how a good dystopian tale can transport you into a terrifying alternative future so convincingly that when you emerge from the spell, the relief of having escaped this fate (so far) can linger for days.

I felt a little bit like that after seeing the film “Don’t Look Up” (spoilers follow). It had its flaws, but the agonising run-up to the loss of our beautiful world – and then its terrifying execution – were so well portrayed that, weeks later, I’m still wandering around on my morning walks giving quiet thanks for the sky, the trees, the birds, and everything else we humans haven’t quite managed to ruin.

(As an aside, “Don’t Look Up” also had some nice lab lit qualities at the beginning. We see the world-weary astronomy PhD student clock into her telescope session, headphones on and utterly blasé – until she discovers the new comet. Then she claps her hands together and gasps with joy like a child. I think all scientists have been there.)

I’ve got a lot to learn about mastering the art of dystopian fiction, but I had the chance to practice when I was invited to take part in the anthology Vital Signals, from NewCon Press. Out on 25 February and available for preorder now, the collection offers visions of our potential future and draws attention to how science and technology might alter us as a species. There are lots of great authors in the collection and it’s been beautifully produced and edited.

I contributed to the “Disease” section of the anthology with a new story called “The Needs of The Few” (my early geeky childhood TV viewing showing through there). This short fiction imagines one possible extreme consequence of antibiotic stewardship, which is our current policy of not over-using the antibiotics that still work because we are running out of alternatives. The global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis, predicted by Alexander Fleming back in the 1940s, is still a serious issue to this day and growing worse. The crisis was caused by flagrant abuse of these miracle drugs over many generations – taking antibiotics for non-bacterial illnesses, not finishing the full course of an antibiotic prescription, dosing livestock wholesale to prevent infection. Each inappropriate dose selects bacteria that are naturally resistant to the drug, and allows them to thrive and take over until inevitably, the drugs we have no longer work. Add to this the stalled pipeline of antibiotic discovery and the sheer difficulty of devising new ones, and you can see why stewardship is deemed necessary. This tenant means that all antibiotics, and especially any newly discovered ones, must be used sparingly and only when absolutely essential.

Stewardship is a sensible policy in principle, but its rigorous interpretation already denies people antibiotics who genuinely need them. I’m thinking in particular of people who suffer from chronic urinary tract infections that don’t register on the old-fashioned diagnostic tests, either because they are low-grade or because the tests themselves can be very insensitive. Many such people with genuine symptoms of infection are sent home from clinical consultations without a prescription, and continue to suffer, some so terribly that they cannot work, cannot leave their houses, cannot sustain a relationship – or, in some tragic extreme cases, cannot face living any longer. In this unfortunate situation, a disease with suboptimal diagnostics has collided with the idealogical force of a stewardship policy that is, in my view, too rigorously enforced.

But what, I wondered, would happen if the need for rigid stewardship suddenly became species-imperative? What if a deadly bacterial pandemic swept the world (I wrote this story before COVID19 came on the scene), and only one newly-discovered antibiotic could cure it? And what if you were a scientist who had dedicated her life to curing diseases, and had the means to break the law to help people with infections that weren’t “important enough” enough to risk treatment?

If you want to find out more, do pick up a copy.

Posted in Lablit, Science-fiction, Writing | Comments Off on In which I imagine a dystopian future

Strong Women, Wise Words

Posted on 23 January 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 economics, luck, Minouche Shafik, Rama Govindarajan, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Strong Women, Wise Words

Unconscious Bias 2.0

Posted on 15 January 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 appointment committees, CV, Equality, promotion, publishing, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Unconscious Bias 2.0

Girls on film

Posted on 13 January 2022 by rpg

You will remember, in the Before Times, how Professor Robert Kelly’s interview with the BBC was photobombed by his children (and how ninja-ly his wife, Jung-a Kim, rounded them up).

Even then I thought how very humanizing was this little cameo, and that it would be great if we could see more of this sort of candid behaviour.

Fast forward a couple of years and we’ve all been there of course. With working from home sweeping across the world, those of us lucky enough to be able to do so have had our fill of dodgy internet connections, ‘You’re on mute’s, animals being inappropriate and offspring-ish interruptions—both sides of the Zoom/Teams/Chime (delete as applicable) window.

And the reaction to such ‘interruptions’, in my experience, has been uniformly of the ‘don’t worry’/‘we’ll be here when you get back/‘awww’ variety. I’ve even seriously considered coaching Joshua to come in and be cute while I’m on a pitch. Every little helps, right?

So why do people still worry about it? School’s closed or your childminder has COVID or whatever it is, there’s no need to feel bad for having to dash off to rescue a toddler or the fact that your child has had the temerity to come into your home’ office’ and poke their little face into your webcam. 

We honestly don’t mind.

In fact, I love it. 

For those of us who are working mostly from home it reminds us that our colleagues, many of whom we may have hardly met over the last two years, are still the people they were, far deeper and interesting and real than you’ll ever see on screen.

It reminds us that we are in the middle of a world-changing event, that we’re doing the best that we can, and that we all could do with caring a little more for each other. 

So, please, don’t feel you have to apologize for being human when your home life interrupts your work.

We get it. We accept it.

But those endless pictures of cats on keyboards? You can stop that nonsense right now.

Posted in children, chime, Ill-considered rants, Office life, People, teams, webcam, you, Zoom | Comments Off on Girls on film

Opinions

Posted on 13 January 2022 by Henry Gee

Never a truer word was spoke than when Abraham Lincoln said that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. At least, I think it was Abraham Lincoln. Anyway, the same fellow who said that 95% of what you read on the internet is wrong.

But I digress.

I was mildly bemused to see this review on Amazon of my latest book A (Very) Short &c &c  (if you’ve not heard of this, you are invited to discover more here).

This should be a salutary corrective to this praise seen on Twitter:

I don’t think you need to understand Spanish to see that the reader liked my book a lot. This is especially pleasing in that I do not know the sender. I thanked the person and reminded the world that the book will soon be available in Spanish.

Funny old world!

Posted in a very short history of life on earth, Books, language, Una muy breve historia de la vida en la Tierra, Writing | Comments Off on Opinions

Cynical and Irritable

Posted on 9 January 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 committees, pandemic, resilience, Science Culture | Comments Off on Cynical and Irritable

In which I break through

Posted on 7 January 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

Sometimes the things you fear the most aren’t as bad as the fear itself.

About two years ago, I gave my first media interview on what was then generally referred to as “the Wuhan coronavirus”. It was still three days before a case would be confirmed in the UK, so most people were thinking of it as a Chinese problem, remote and unthreatening, even the occasional punchline of British gallows humour. I’d already turned down a few approaches from Sky News when the press office twisted my arm, saying it couldn’t find anyone willing to speak out. We didn’t have any coronavirus experts on staff (that’s all changed now, of course, after diverse scientists from multiple disciplines rolled up their sleeves to expand their research questions), but they’d used me in the past for other infectious disease news items and were keen to get the university front and centre in what was shaping up to be a very large story. As I had a PhD in virology and a broad background, it seemed harmless enough as a one-off favour.

Jenny on TV

First coronavirus media appearance – before I invested in better AV equipment!

But within a week, I’d given a dozen interviews and was rejecting scores more – they flooded in by email, text, landline, FaceBook and Twitter, until I eventually switched off my phone in despair. It would stop eventually, right? Soon, however it became clear that, unlike all the other topics on which I’d commented, the answer was no.

Fast forward to today, hundreds of interviews later, and I look back on it all from this unusual perspective: the meta-COVID perspective. Whenever I prepare for an interview, I do a lot of research, filling up a few plain A4 sheets with scribbles that I try to memorise before going on air. Every once in a while I stumble over these sheets in the scrap paper pile, or find Joshua drawing on one. They are ephemeral time capsules about a quickly moving target, and I marvel at how obsolete the information is. All those pressing questions, long since answered, even though at the time they seemed so raw and perilous. Will the epidemic reach Britain? Will the epidemic, now arrived, get out of control in Britain? Will many people die? Will coronavirus come back in the winter? Will we need to go into a second lockdown? Will any of the vaccine candidates work? Will the vaccines we’ve bought be enough to end the pandemic in 2021? Will omicron send us back to square one, or herald the beginning of the end? I now wish I’d saved all these notes in chronological order, just so I could remember what we knew when. But of course you never realise you are living through history until you are looking back.

Despite my highly detailed knowledge about the twists and turns in the pandemic story, it was all still rather abstract back in December. But this was soon to change. A few days after my last stint in the lab before the Christmas holidays, I was congratulating myself on having avoided omicron, even though it was already cresting over the capitol during my last few commutes on the crowded, largely mask-less Underground. I was quite worried about it, in a way that hadn’t really gripped me before. In this particular snapshot in history, all we knew was that omicron spread like the clappers, but its severity was still an open question. We did know that even people with a booster vaccine dose, like me, could still be re-infected, but we still didn’t know whether it would protect against severe disease. So I traveled around for over two weeks in this knowledge limbo, trading in my cloth mask for an FFP2 and hoping for the best.

A few days before Christmas, I developed a scratchy throat and eventually some congestion, sneezing and fatigue. None of my symptoms were on the allowable list for a PCR test, but I knew from my media research that omicron had a different spectrum and was more or less indistinguishable from the common cold. (One of my time capsules sheets from that period states “one in two cold-like illness in London is actually omicron”). Still, the lateral flow tests, based on a nasal swab, kept coming up negative. By Day 4 of my “cold”, I’d seen a lot of social media chatter about omicron coming up more easily, or earlier, when a throat swab was taken. As the first LFD kits had been combined tonsil/nasal swab-based before the nasal-only ones were phased in, I knew the correct way to sample the tonsils, so I tried it out in the spirit of scientific research, alongside a test swabbing the approved way (nostrils only). The throat sample came positive straight away, an alarming red line that coalesced as soon as the fluid flowed over the test area, while the nasal swab came back negative. A PCR test taken later that day confirmed the positive result.

Two years after those first Wuhan reports, I was SARS-CoV-2 positive. I wasn’t talking about the news: I was the news – especially when my tweet about throat vs. nasal swabbing went viral. (I’m relieved to see that this anecdotal report, one of thousands, is now backed up by actual data.)

How did I feel about joining the COVID club at last? The oddest thing was the overwhelming sense of relief. Although it was always possible that my illness could take a turn for the worst, my time capsules started recording reassuring data about omicron’s severity, first from Ground Zero in South Africa, and then in the UK. Risk of hospitalisation was slashed. The T-cells were mobilising even thought the antibodies were failing. The virus itself was intrinsically less able to replicate in the lungs, preferring the loftier expanse of the bronchi and the nasal passages, where it was better at transmission but less able to cause bodily havoc. I felt terrible, but my cough didn’t get worse; my oxygen saturation levels remained at 96 or above. I was one of millions of people in the UK (up to one in ten in London alone, says Wednesday’s time capsule) with prior immunity coming to the realisation that this particular variant of SARS-CoV-2 was manifesting as a bad cold. I was going to make it. I’m still concerned about how the already struggling National Health Service will survive the coming weeks and months of onslaught, and about potential longer-term effects of infection, but – at least for the moment – I don’t need to worry about catching COVID again myself.

Is this really the beginning of the end for the pandemic? Many people think it is. Others aren’t so sure. With so much of the world unvaccinated, new variants still have the space to breed and ferment. In line with my usual meta-COVID stance, I’m waiting for more data before I form an opinion worth sharing. But my own little COVID story feels like it’s reached a happy ending of sorts – at least for now.

Posted in Epidemics, media | Comments Off on In which I break through

Scientists Who Stand Up to be Counted

Posted on 3 January 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 abuse, Communicating Science, David Spiegelhalter, Devi Sridhar, pandemic, Sander van der Linden, Science Culture | Comments Off on Scientists Who Stand Up to be Counted