In case you missed it, Richard Wintle has contributed to Alom’s project, arguing that
critical thinking skills are more important now than they have ever been in human history
and that these skills are part of what actually defines ‘Science’, if somewhat broadly.
Richard, despite his protestations of inadequacy, blogs at the Science Advisory Board and also has a personal blog, in which he talks about motor cars and cameras. That’s when he’s not riffing off Jenny, naturally.
I won’t hear a word against USyd Admin.
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Richard Grant
26 May 2008 SciBlog 2008
Cath wants to know more about me. She asked:
My answers:
and 
I’m not bothered about passing on the meme, but I’ll ask five questions if anyone wants me to.
One of the cardinal rules for students is that you don’t fiddle with stuff you don’t understand. All right, so maybe fiddling with stuff we don’t understand is part of the working definition of a scientist, but I’m talking about more mundane things like FPLC pumps and computers. Technology.
Chances are, if something doesn’t work, you, as a student, are not going to be able to make it work again. And if it does work, taking the cover off to see what makes make it tick is not going to win you any friends. I’m thinking of the student who, every time a certain Mac wanted to think for a few seconds, couldn’t bear to wait and would hit three keys (I still get a twitch when I hear that bong). I’m thinking of the people who don’t filter their gungy protein solutions, or who leave half molar sodium chloride in the pumps, or who walk into the lab with a sheepish look and a screwdriver…
In exceptional circumstances people have grown up doing things like taking their grandmother’s washing machine apart and fixing it, or installing ‘O’ over a flakey SSH connection, and these people soon gain a reputation. Which is, actually, pretty hard to get rid of. These are the ‘fixers’. These are the people who recognize the sheepish look, who have learned how to bite their tongue — or at least sub-vocalize “what have you done now?” — who have seriously wondered how long a body could remain in the -20 room before someone would see it.
The sort of people who go to a new job pretending to know nothing about computers (yet, strangely, their system is always bang up to date, they never seem to complain when central IT screws up, and they have stuff on their screen that looks like it’s from the Matrix). Who, when you’re having problems with your computer either go pale or say, rather too smugly perhaps, “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Windows”.
There are a few of us. We know the Secret. You know who you are. We recognize each other instantly: and if you get there first I won’t let on, unless you’re doing it wrong. We can fix AKTAs, and columns, and computers. We have a detailed working knowledge of the human body and where it can go wrong. We know where the tool drawer in the lab is.
Perhaps most importantly we know our own limits. And one of mine happens to be the ability to repair metal fatigue in the pool pump drive shaft.
Bugger
I get all my pharma industry news from Derek, as well as the occasional reminder of how hardcore chemists can be.
But today he made me laugh, and then shake my head, by linking to some comments on an inspirational book.
I can’t do it justice. They start like
Steve Stefano is a living, breathing example that dreams and desires do come true. It is his ‘Never-say-never’ attitude with a punch of positive enthusiasm, a pinch of passion, and a spoonful of compassion that makes Steve’s approach to life–and leadership–so irresistible. I wanted to read all about it!
and just keep getting better. You can’t make this stuff up.
Bright was the day but my heart was grey when I sallied forth again to do battle with Medicare Burwood.
Twice had I queued in the carpeted purgatory on the top floor of Westfield, and twice had I been thrown back by the gatekeepers of the Sacred Plastic. This time, however, I was armed with a phone number and a name of someone at head office, who promised to wield the Flaming Pen of Bureaucratic Smackdown if I was given any more shit.
I told the damsel at the desk that I had lived in the UK immediately prior to coming to Australia and I needed a new RHCA card. I gave her my passport. I said I’d changed visa class, and it was purely electronic and therefore there was no stamp in my passport, but look—here’s the email. And she got up to get her manager and I said “Bring her out here, and call this number, and speak to this person.”
And the manager did come out, and saith “Look, it says NZ Citizen”. And I said yes, I am the spouse of an NZ Citizen, but I’m not one. And she saith “Look, it says NZ Citizen”. And I said “(Family Relationship)”. And she saith “Look, it says NZ Citizen” and I didst refrain from inflicting violence but told her to just call the number, and they’d sort it.
“Call the number,” saith the Manager to her minion, “and talk to Michelle.”
“No!” I said. “Call the number and talk to Jalisa. As it says on the piece of paper.”
And the damsel did call, and she saith into the telephone, “Hello Michelle, can I talk to Jalisa, please?” and I resisted the urge to punch the air and shout “Score!”.
Five minutes later the Manager had slunk back to her lair, the fair damsel was all smiles, and I had my receipt. “It’s confusing,” she said, “because it says NZ Citizen.”
“(Family Relationship),” said I, but very quietly.
In a move that surprised me as much as anyone, my entry last year on Networking made it into the OpenLab anthology, at the expense of the far superior Stardust. You’ll be happy to hear that I didn’t abuse my Deputy Editorial privilege and overrule the judges’ decision, but I do have another plan up my sleeve for that particular entry…
Anyway. Last year I talked about the growing plethora (_can you have a ‘growing plethora’?_—Ed.) of networking sites, and wondered if any of them—and by implication scientific networking itself—were working. And if not, was it worth trying to make it work?
A bunch of you folks have been away at ScienceOnline’09 (and what it is it with the word ‘unconference’? Surely a conference with no agenda fixed in advance is still a conference? Just a badly-organized one…) and have come back full of beans and happy as happy things. Which is neat, but… well, you’ll see. I’ve already noted that Jonathan Gitlin thinks that _science social networking sites are hopeless and useless_—a conclusion he’d reached before he went to ScienceOnline’09. And it appears that the conference has not changed his mind, in fact it seems to have strengthened his conclusion:
As it turns out, the moderators, Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh, had about as little time for these platforms as I did, and we weren’t alone. I was frankly horrified at one of their slides, which was filled with the URLs to social networking sites aimed at scientists—I thought there were a just few out there, but they’re numbering in the hundreds!
And yet just about all of them suffer from the same problem: not enough users and nothing to make them inherently better than the established players in the market, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Nature Networks.
Let’s ignore the back-patting that is likely to come of being ranked alongside Facebook and Linkedin, by an Ars Technica writer no less, and think, for a moment, why this might be so.
Jonathan says that the other sites don’t have enough users, and don’t have a unique selling point. But you’d have thought (well, I would, but what do I know?) that such problems would be easy enough to overcome, especially if you’ve got VC money to pour into the marketing tank. Various suggestions were made in the comments, and David Crotty wrote an exceedingly long post about what’s preventing uptake of these tools.
Part of it is that tracking multiple, simultaneous conversations across different platforms (Twitter, Facebook, blogs &c.) is not straightforward, although that might be amenable to a technological solution, but I think the real problem is deeper, more fundamental. Martin said,
I forgot that virtual networking is much more important if you don’t live in Central Europe or on the United States East Coast. I can be in London, Munich or Paris within two hours and without spending too much money, but that is obviously different when you live in Sydney or Cape Town.
and while I think he’s right to an extent, I really don’t think that virtual networking is ever going to take off in that way (until the oil runs out/air travel becomes too expensive—and even then we might simply find different circles to move in).
I was talking, at the weekend, to a medic friend who has to give a talk at a conference next week. He hates giving talks and I offered to do it for him. I reckoned I could bullshit my way out of any awkward questions (hey, it’s only medicine after all), and then he said that he was only going because he had to give that talk. There weren’t any other sessions he wanted to attend.
And then it struck me. Humans (including scientists) are social creatures. The main point of conferences (with the possible exception of Gordon Conferences) is not to exchange information. The main point of conferences is to socialize. To get to know people—and not in the measured, manicured, mannered way that scientific social networking sites facilitate. We want to catch people unguarded, after a few beers, away from their home turf: we want to find out what we’re really like.
We can’t do that virtually. Nature Network, as fun (and useful, maybe) as it is, is no substitute for meeting people in real life. How many of us, having met only virtually, were completely stoked to finally meet each other in London?
You can’t have a virtual martini. We are made to interact in the flesh, and any attempt to take that away—any social networking site that doesn’t have its roots in a real-life experience (or at least the potential of such)—is, ultimately, doomed to failure.
When I’ve told people here that I’m moving back to the UK, some of them have said words to the effect,
“In the middle of a recession? Are you mad?”
to which the answer is,
“Quite probably; yes.”
One of the things you notice after living here for a while is that Australians are terribly, terribly insular and parochial. Things that happen in the big, wide world do not matter to them unless Australians are involved. Now this is true for just about any other country in the word: we’re all familiar with the
Earthquake in Limpopo: Briton scratched
(Oh, and thousands of foreigners died)
type of news report.
But this is also the lucky country, and bad things do not happen here. The ‘G’ in ‘GFC’ passes most Australians by. When I point out that the crisis will hit Australia too, even if not just yet, I’m usually ignored if not laughed at. So like a good prophet of doom I’m not at all pleased to see that the Financial Times notes that Canberra is reckoning on spending a shedload of taxpayer cash on bailing out private companies.
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, on Wednesday promised to address any potential funding shortfall, after a recent estimate from Merrill Lynch, the US investment bank, that foreign banks accounted for more than half of the A$285bn in syndicated loans issued to Australian companies since 2006. International banks are expected to cut the size of their loan portfolios in Australia in response to tough credit conditions.
Rather depressing.
But all the above is just an excuse, really, for me to post this picture
from yesterday’s Telegraph (not to be confused with the Telegraph).
Only in Australia.
(Tip ‘o the Guinness to Mad Dog)
Here’s a tip for anyone considering moving to Australia:
don’t get sick
Been there, done that. But I’ve got an extra incentive not to be sick in the time I’ve got left here (fifty days. No, I’m not counting).
Here’s the deal. I came to Australia on a temporary short term business visa (‘class 457’). After a bit of farting around I figured out that I was covered under the ‘Reciprocal Health Care Arrangement’. Which essentially means I get a card I can wave at the paramedics to prove they can treat me before stealing my wallet. I also took out private medical insurance, because if you don’t, you pay for just about everything (which at $90 per chest X-ray gets bloody expensive when you have pneumonia). Kate and the Pawns, being NZ citizens, automatically got covered.
And time passed, and the 457 expired, and because things were a little unsettled I went onto a NZ spouse visa, a class 4611 (and dear God I’m glad I never have to go through that again). And my Medicare card expired with it. So just before Christmas I trooped into the Burwood Medicare office and said ho! I need a new card, good yeoman. Herewith my passport and my visa grant notice.
‘No,’ they saith, ‘for thou must bringeth in the actual email wot you got from Immigration.’
But look, I replied. It says ‘Visa granted’.
‘We need to see the email.’
You fornicating muppets I thought to myself, and went away again.
I went back this afternoon with a print-out of the email, and spoke to someone who promptly disappeared to see her supervisor. When she got back we talked a little more, and she disappeared again.
Time passed.
More time passed.
Eventually she came back and said I couldn’t have a card, unless I was applying for permanent residence.
Eh? But I’m a UK national. I’m covered by the RHCA.
Yes, because you have an electronic travel authority. But then you have to leave after three months.
Noo… because look, it’s a five year visa.
Yes, but that’s not eligible for cover unless you’re applying for permanent residence.
But I was covered while I was on the 457?
That’s expired. Look.
Yes, I know it’s expired. That’s why I’m on a 461.
But that’s not eligible for Medicare coverage.
gnnngngngngnngggg
OK, I said, let’s attack this logically. (Hah). My wife and children are NZ citizens and they have a Medicare card.
They were applying for permanent residence, then.
No! We’d just got in the country.
You’ve been here a couple of weeks?
No! Nearly three years! On the 457 that’s expired!
They’re applying for permanent residence.
cries no.
Oh, they shouldn’t have got that then.
Listen, we got into the country, three years ago, and within the week came in here to get the Medicare card.
They shouldn’t have been given one. Unless they were applying for—
Permanent residence. Yes, I know. But it was this very office!
They were wrong.
Look, can I speak to your supervisor?
Sure. She’s just left.
—
Brilliant. The manager knows there’s a difficult case so she leaves the office for ten minutes. Very professional. I stalked out, muttering very dark words, and seriously considering getting a taxi direct to the airport.
When I’d calmed down enough to talk, Kate did some digging and ended up calling Medicare, or DIMIA, or some related bunch of utter twonks. Apparently, I’m officially a ‘grey area’. I don’t get a RHCA card, or even a NZ spouse card, but allegedly I am covered—as long as I have my passport on me (which has in it an expired 457 and no 461 because it’s purely electronic).
Probably.
I am not brimming with confidence at this point. Furthermore, someone is lying to me, and I am not best pleased.
And Burwood Medicare offices? You suck.
Although I’m not at the thing that’s going on in North Carolina, I do have my spies.
And my spies say the
Consensus seems to be that, outside of Nature Networks, science social networking sites are hopeless and useless
Buy me a coffee: 
