Come on America, let’s talk about Fear.

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

guns and flowers

I don’t own a gun. I don’t own a gun not because I am *against* guns per se, but guns scare me. Research has indicated that if you carry a gun for protection you are more likely to be shot. Especially if you don’t know how to use it. That would be me. I have shot a gun – many of my friends own guns – but I don’t *really* know how to use one. I am also not prepared to kill someone. If you have a gun for self defense I think you have to (mentally) be prepared to shoot someone. I don’t think I could do that.

I have fired a gun, I have shot clay pigeons (which is great fun) – I even got to yell ‘pull’. I have shot a pistol at a soda-pop bottle. I have friends who lived on a farm and had trouble with Coyotes. They owned a gun and actually tried to buy guns (semi-automatics) so that they could easily kill the offending Coyotes (who killed their chickens and other livestock) with out much pain and suffering on the Coyote’s part. They keep their guns locked in a cabinet. I have friends who hunt, like people in Britain licensed to have hunting rifles, hunters use guns to enjoy a nice fresh duck or deer now and then.

The recent shooting tragedy in America has broken our hearts – mine included. So pointless. So sad. With some restriction – it feels like – these things could be prevented. It is about fear. Fear for our children. Fear for ourselves. Fear of random acts of violence that kill swathes of innocent people. I am afraid of guns. I get this fear. I don’t want our nations children to be whacked by some guy with a gun. I doubt hardly anyone does want this. Including people that own guns. This is worth remembering.

My cousin owns a gun. She has been personally attacked in the past. As a result she has learned how to use a gun, obtained a license for said weapon and carries it for self-defense. Why? Because she is afraid and wants to protect her family. It is about fear.

Gun control in America is about the hardest topic you can think of to discuss in the USA. The debate is almost tribal. I don’t understand guns for protection, I can’t figure out why you would want one for self defense. But that is how I see the world. It is not how someone who buys a gun for self-defense sees the world.

But it all boils down to fear, I think. The 2nd amendment of the US constitution gives its citizens the right to bear arms. Gun advocates use this in defense of carrying/owning guns. I don’t think this is a very good argument. The constitution also says slaves are 5/8th of a human, that has now (thankfully) been over-turned. No tyrants have been over-thrown by the US citizens through armed conflict. Discounting the Civil War – which is a whole other messy can of worms and not really relevant – US citizens haven’t risen up in arms against Washington and I don’t think that is going to happen anytime soon.

What I think this debate should be about is fear. Why do we, when we fear for ourselves, think I should get a gun? Whatever gun laws you do enact, it won’t make a huge amount of difference to criminals. That is why they call them criminals. Given the recent school shootings in the last 20 or so years, we as Americans need to talk about fear and about what we are going to do to prevent it. We need to address the question of why conflict resolution through gun ownership has become so prevalent in our society. We need to talk about gun control, we need to talk about solutions. We need to listen to each other. We need to listen to WHY people own guns self-defense. What do they fear? We need to ask WHY people hate guns and fear guns. What do they fear? We need a constructive open dialog about fear and weapons and to think about how to prevent tragedies like Columbine and Sandy Hook. Without blame. I mean really without blame.

Because, in the end, as a great man once said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Posted in Sandy Hook Elementary | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

On self-promotion, funding and energy ant!

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

In any UK-funded science grant application you have to write a bit about yourself and how great you are. Most people I know find this bit really hard; a few really don’t – I know some people who seem to like this bit. You have to write about much wonderful research you have done in the past, how many times each of your highly-exceptional research products were cited, how many A* papers you have (whatever that means) and what you are going to do to reach out to the future generations to tell them about your science. You cannot just write a mere resume but rather you have to sell yourself.

It’s a bit like being on the X-factor or Big Brother, I suspect. Most of us aren’t Susan Boyle, you can’t just sing but you have to be all-singing, all-dancing, all-desirable. But you have to do it. Often you have to fit in a research ‘challenge’ area as well, defined by research council focus-groups. These are ever-changing as well and can make or break a research field.

A good example of this was alternative fuel research back in the 70s. In the 70’s coupled with a lovely bought of inflation in the US, OPEC decided to raise the price of oil by 70%. This had enormous consequences, I remember being a kid when this happened and gasoline being rationed in the US – long lines at the pumps. One of the advantageous results though was that the government dumped a bunch of money into alternative fuel research and even put money into a mascot for educating children about ‘saving energy’ – Energy Ant!

energy ant

As a little girl, Energy Ant taught me to be careful with electricity and not turn the heat up too high – I still have issues with that insect because of this, but this another story.

Then the funding was dropped. Why? Because the price of oil dropped again. Like it or not, gasoline is about the most efficient means of producing cheap energy. You get a lot of bang for your buck – and of course a bunch of stuff we don’t really want like global warming. No more funding for alternate energy research means that scientists, for the most part, stopped doing the research. Funding was also cut for nuclear waste research close to the same time because of the Three Mile Island incident – the one where the core melted and no one got hurt (really). Bye, bye alternate energy research USA.

Where are we now? Well there has been another oil crisis and gasoline prices are pretty damn high and there are not many good global (emphasis on the word global) alternatives. Even though many countries are trying their best to use more renewables, overall oil consumption is still rising. I could be wrong, but I suspect we would be much further ahead if the US government had kept up its funding for the last 40 years.

And here en lies the problem. Only a test of time really tells if research is going to be useful. That test of time is longer than most any government assessment period. There is an absence of long-term planning for science research. It may be because of the current recession and it may be just be the way the modern world works. The world is moving faster and faster, in terms of new technology and in sheer abundance of technological and scientific outputs. There are vastly more scientific journals than there were 100 years ago and vastly more folks doing scientific research (and competing for a small mini-pot of research money). Because there is SO MUCH out there, as a scientist you must promote your work. It isn’t good enough to sit in your office and just hope someone will read it, you have to try and get people to read you work. Not because you think it is the best thing ever necessarily, but part of science is that you want people to read and use your work to further their own or even prove your precious hypothesis wrong. This is what it is all about. This is how science (ideally) should work and only time will tell if that work is useful 50, 60, 70 years from now.

I was at a conference last week where instead of calling research ‘basic science’ or ‘applied science’ it was referred to as ‘pre-applied science’ and ‘applied science’. I like this. It shows the need for both. Science research can appear wasteful but then car engines are only about 25% efficient.

Posted in science funding, US government | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Remembering veterans in my family

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

Today is the day we remember those who died in wars. Wars for our freedoms, pointless wars, wars against tyranny, wars of invasion. There is no way around the fact that wars are awful, but regardless if you feel a war is justified or not – it always involves suffering.

My Grandfather was a First World War Vet.

Leigh Jack McLain

That is him on the right with my Great-gradfather and two of his other brothers. As opposed to most Great War Veterans, for my grandfather WWI was an easy war, he was drafted when he was 18 in college in 1918 and never left the US but only slept in a barracks and drilled alot.

Tecumseh Barracks

I never knew my grandfather, so I never had a chance to ask him about his role in the military but from his pictures from that era – it looks like he spent the time larking around, drinking with his buddies and picking up dames. Kind of like what I thought war would be like when I was a kid – a childlike unrealstic view of how it looked kind of fun with no understanding or thought about death and suffering.

My father on the other hand, was a veteran of the Second World War.

Howard McLain

That is my father in late 1945, after he came home from Europe. Private 1st Class in the US infantry. I was only vaguely aware as a child my daddy was a war veteran, with my only hints being him (annoyingly) singing Reveille to wake me up in the morning and wearing his old army jacket to work in the yard. When I got a bit older I used to try and ask him about the war. His usual response was ‘I didn’t do much’ or ‘it was scary’. It was pretty clear he didn’t want to talk about it. I used to call him every year on this day, he thought I was crazy and would remind me he was only in the war for a short time.

After he died, I found his letters home. They are calm and gentle and talk a lot about girls, food and the state of his rifle – like any 19 year old kid, I suppose. Even though he was mostly evasive about the matter, he did tell me some things – snapshot images of frightfully disturbing things. Things about being shot at. Things about concentration camps. He also told me about how happy/relieved he was when the atomic bomb was dropped, how much he loved the English country-side and the beautiful German women. My mother used to try to get him to travel to Europe in the 60s – he refused, he’d already been there – he didn’t want to go back.

I will never know the truth of what my daddy experienced and perhaps I don’t need to, I was his daughter and the last person he was ever likely to tell the details. But what I do know is that days like these are for us all to take a minute and think about all those who suffered and are suffering from wars and know that in fact it is never ever easy.

Posted in remembrance day | Tagged | 2 Comments

AC Grayling’s college: Cult of personality or value for money?

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

This same article is posted at Guardian Higher Education – here– apologies for the dual post, it’s my fault – I got my wires crossed with The Guardian!

So I am taking it off this post – as I think that is the right thing to do… sorry!

Posted in AC Grayling, New College of Humanities | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Most people don’t worry this much…

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

is what one of my collaborators told me this week.

She was talking about my science, not about my over-arching propensity to worry about everything (although I have that too). I am running a series of experiments, mostly focused on checking and double-checking my results at the moment. I am within a mere inch of writing a paper (hopefully it will be a big un!) and I want to make damn well sure I have tested my hypothesis to the limit of what I can do, in order to (realistically) support my conclusions.

As with much science, we don’t have a definitive no-way-anyone-would-argue-with-us-ever result. These kind of obvious results are few and far between in real science. We have measured something, with a variety of experimental techniques, have thrown in a few computational techniques too for good measure and everything INDICATES we see something. INDICATES. We get consistent results from each techniques which all lead to a particular conclusion. In this case our work concerns the process of protein folding (the particulars of how proteins ‘coil up’ or fold into their functional forms remains largely unknown) but it could describe many bits of science, really.

And this is as good is it is going to get for the moment, we have a lot of data that indicates something. Science builds up a picture of the natural world – one experiment, one theory and one hypothesis at a time. It is fundamentally about having a theory which fits all of the observables (things we measure or calculate) and that is it. Science is essentially, as the skeptics would point out, about evidence. Building up real measureable evidence for your hypothesis, conclusions, ideas about what the data means is the stuff of science.

So why do I worry? I worry I have missed something, but I think this is normal. I am a quadruple checker, by the way, so I do my best to eliminate at least the really obvious stuff. Then I get other people to check it, this is also why I like peer-review because then another set of people (who ostensibly don’t know me) check it as well. I used to worry (as a PhD student) I might be wrong (shock, horror!). Until I learned that eing wrong is perfectly OK. Months or even years after we publish our results, someone might come up with some new data that proves me wrong, of even right. It is all part of the process nothing ventured nothing gained.

What I have been struck by recently is the myriad reports on scientific fraud. Actual fraud, not I accidentally missed something, but rather I am not getting the results I need so why not create them. Alok Jha wrote a wonderful piece about this in the Guardian this week about fraud in psychology provocatively entitled False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research. If you look at the actual numbers he reports they are mostly, thankfully, relatively low. For instance a PLoS survey said 1.97% admitted to falsifying data (but those are only the ones that admitted it).

Fraudster stories are newsworthy because they are, well,shocking. But scientists are human and humans do sometimes make stuff up for a news story (remember the Gay Girl in Damascus Fraud?) or in a Scientist’s case a Nature paper. Why would anyone expect a big group of humans were all perfect? Scientists aren’t above the plane of normal human statistics.

What I worry about, with regard to fraudsters, is that these scientific fraud stories will be interpreted as ‘see scientists just make stuff up’ – where largely this is not the case in science – rather than the more realistic ‘sometimes people just make stuff up’ (like Johann Hari) which I think is a bit more to the point.

Posted in Academic dishonesty, Philosophy of Science, scientific publishing | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Sometimes things are just OK

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

Everything is OK

Last weekend I was part of an Occam’s outpost (with Jenny Rohn and Stephen Curry) who spoke at the Winchester Science Festival – well done to James Thomas (@jimbobthomas) for organizing it and thank you for inviting me. It was my first science festival gig (hopefully not my last). I had sort of an amorphous subject I assigned to myself (with James’ help) about the structure of science and what scientists look like. One of my subtitles was ‘are there any ladies in the house?’ but I in reality it didn’t really fit with my talk because before maybe the 1930’s the answer to that was NO (or more realistically not many).

I had many questions about women in science which I think I didn’t answer so well. In fact for most of them I think I said ‘you should read Athene Donald’s blog she knows more about this than I do’. Which she does, but I need to bone up on my facts. For me, I have worked in male dominated fields all my life so I thought I didn’t really notice it anymore until I started looking a bit more carefully. Now I notice. The biggest thing I think I have gained by looking around I am a bit more attuned (hopefully) to my own unconscious bias. I am trying to be more conscious of it.

I am also good at complaining, sometimes a little too good at it. In fact, I will admit, sometimes I like a good whinge. Complaining is good sometimes. If something ain’t right it’s not so good to just keep your mouth shut, because then things fester or get worse. Sometimes you have to stand up for your rights.

But sometimes things are just OK.

It probably goes without saying that my department is predominately male. At least we PIs are predominately male, but this is usual, despite all of the efforts to change this in the UK, there is not an equal distribution. But what my department does have is a fair number of women who have been unilaterally supportive to me as a fellow scientist and newbie (I have only been there about 9 months). What I also have is a few kick-ass mentors (both male and female) who have been helping me maneuver through an unknown landscape but they aren’t heavy-handed and I feel entirely comfortable seeking them out when I feel the need for some advise.

This does happen!

And its a beautiful sunny day, my group is working hard and getting good results, I’ve started a new grant and just had a paper near-as-dammit accepted and I today I am thinking, you know what?…

Everything is just OK

Posted in women in science | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Enough with the criticism already

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

Ever wonder why scientists are odd? For the record, I don’t think scientists are really odd, any more than any group of people can be called ‘odd’, as Micheal Crichton said ‘in my experience scientists are very human people.’ Leaving aside Crichton’s issue with redundancy ( are there any other kind of people than human ones? ), he felt the need to justify that scientists are really people. Which we are.

During my short time here in the Blogosphere and in the Twitter universe, I have seen a variety of subtle and unsubtle opinions about what scientists are. Ranging from ‘cool’ to ‘elitist’, ‘entitled’ to ‘bereft-of-any-sort-of-social-skills’, as a scientist, this is all odd to me. I don’t know if I really *feel* like a scientist (whatever that means) – though on paper I am one, I have a PhD, I run a scientific research group, I work at an HEI (Higher Education Institution). I, maybe surprisingly to the late Dr. Crichton, am pretty painfully aware I am a human.

I do think the winds have changed in the last few years, its definitely more hip to be a scientist than it was when I was getting my PhD (even though that wasn’t so long ago). A few years ago if I went to a party and people asked what I did, and I didn’t lie, the usual response was ‘oh, huh‘ accompanied by a pretty brisk walk away. About a year ago, I tagged-along with a friend of mine to a party in London. Upon the confession I was a scientist, I (mostly) heard ‘how cool’ or ‘it must be so great to have a job you are passionate about’. It’s nice to be ‘cool’ for the duration of a random party. But this full swing of the pendulum from wow you are really dull to you are passionate and cool in a mere few years is, to me, odd. The implication is that science is the coolest job ever – and that you must be passionate, rather than the slightly more realistic just good at it in school.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike my job – I think it’s a ‘cool’ job but I am not sure it is the coolest job ever. It is also not without its pitfalls. Like any job, not all of it is honey and roses, in fact there a whole large bits of it I dislike or find rather boring.

Science entails a lot of failure and sitting in front of your computer (or pencil and paper) and grinding through details. Many famous scientists have said this:
Einstein “Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work…”
which he stole from Edison “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

But they said this after they were famous. Perhaps they did before too, to be fair, but no one cared because they weren’t famous. This is inspirational stuff, but when I am sitting at my desk looking at my latest grant rejection letter, it’s not easy to take solace in Einstein’s words. I am not Einstein and am not over-turning hundreds of years of classical physics and I doubt, sincerely, I am going to.

The truth is, as a working scientist you get rejected (and fail in the lab), and you get rejected more of the time than you succeed. Not only do you get rejected, but you are told often why you are rejected. This is, really (and I mean this), a good thing. When rejected for a grant for instance, often the criticisms are telling you what the reviewers want to see and how you can improve. In fact, I just had a paper accepted (barring revisions) this week (yea!) but there are a whole heap of revisions. In fact most of these suggestions have been extremely useful, in the end it has improved the discussion of our work. The criticism isn’t personal, it’s science – when I referee other people’s papers I do the same thing. That is the business side.

On the other side, damn does it get old sometimes. Especially when you get 2 or 3 rejections in a week, so I have to remind myself that I have a good job, which I like and that it is ‘cool’ and that

I will have a good attitude

You just have to steel yourself to it somehow, but this it not always so easy. You have to steel yourself because it really isn’t personal and not only that in the same week you probably have to start a new grant where you spend the first 2 pages telling the reviewers how wonderful you are. All of this assessment is (usually) ultimately a good thing (really), but sometimes I just want to say:

Enough with the criticism already!

Posted in science communication, science writing | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Science it’s a *&%$ thing.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

I really like film Legally Blonde. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about an sorority queen (think masses of pink) who chases her boyfriend to Harvard Law school. The movie starts off with a stereotypical girly girl, Elle, (very stereotypical of what people like to *think* sorority girls are like) whose boyfriend dumps her when he goes to Harvard. Elle, determined to get him back, studies really hard for a few weeks to take the Law Entrance Exam to get into law school to track him down.

My favourite line in the film is when said ex-boyfriend sees Elle at the registration desk in the Harvard Law School and says:

YOU?!? got into Harvard Law?

Elle replies: What, like it’s hard?

The film proceeds with Elle discovering she actually is really good at law school and that she doesn’t need that ex after all. It’s such a great stereotype-busting movie. Someone you *think* is this silly stereotype turns out to be an amazingly able tough character. Importantly, Elle studied to get into law school, she didn’t just appear there like magic.
This is a good message: you can be smart and able – NO MATTER WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE OR HOW YOU DRESS. In a world where sometimes we are still inundated with the stereotype that there are pretty girls (who are dumb) and smart girls (who are not pretty) this is a good, almost subversive, message for a Hollywood film.

Today – the EU launched Science: It’s a girl thing as a website today.

The front page of the website is horrifying. Its in pink (with lipstick for the i) with lots of pink everywhere and lets us know Why you’ll *love* science.

If that wasn’t bad enough there is a teaser video (yes they really called it that)

They could have shown a variety of women actually doing science, even beautiful actresses for all I care, but no, they showed a bunch of women prancing around in short skirts and stilettos giggling lots. Well OK, they did show one girl doing maths (of some description) on her Plexiglas see-through marking board (while pouting), but that was about it for science imagery. This video is really a happy romp through all of the *vacuous sex sells* stereotypes and has nothing whatsoever to do with science. In fact the only person shown to be really doing any science (if you want to call it that) was the male scientist at the beginning who looks up from his microscope to see the ladies comin’ to the lab. So girls when they do science don’t boringly stare into microscopes, they prance around toss their hair and do research on makeup, not the normal stuff of science.

Science needs female role models, absolutely, but the teaser videos had none of that. There are some other good videos on that website where actual scientists (who are women) are interviewed. Why the creators didn’t just splice bits of these together for their *teaser* video we will never know.

The message we need to be making to girls who like STEM subjects is the message that Legally Blonde makes. NO MATTER WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE OR HOW YOU DRESS YOU CAN LIKE SCIENCE TOO (or anything you want to like for that matter). The message I think we need to give teens and girls and even boys for that matter is:

Be who you are, like what you want and damn the stereotypes!

Showing everyone boys and girls alike that science takes all kinds is a much better message than pouting and prancing.

Posted in women in science | Tagged , | 15 Comments

Why we need Neutrons for science

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

So you may not know it, but one of the world’s premier scientific research facilities is in Oxfordshire.

Its not the University of Oxford I am referring to, but the ISIS neutron and muon source at Rutherford Appleton Lab outside of Didcot. This facility (along with the Diamond Light Source (X-rays) and others) is grouped under something called ‘Large Facilities’, funded by the UK government under the auspices of STFC – Science and Technology Facilities Council.

ISIS beam hall
ISIS beam hall

As the name suggests, ISIS produces neutrons (and muons). It isn’t a nuclear reactor, it provides neutrons for research. Neutrons can be used (like X-rays) to probe the structure and motions of things on an atomic level. You can see atoms move and how they are placed. How cool is that? Atoms. We can see atoms with neutrons (something that is impossible with any kind of microscope).

Neutrons are also used to look at stress and strain in materials. This may not sound so sexy but don’t you think you want to know if that airplane wing has hairline fractures? About the only way you can ‘see’ this is neutrons. Neutrons are also used to investigate the structure of piezoelectric materials. Again, this may not sound sexy, but piezoelectric materials are what make your iPhone work.

I use neutrons to look at biological stuff. It is a major part of my research, I look at water (molecules!) around things like cell membranes and drugs trying to answer questions like ‘how does water get inside cells?’ I think the EPSRC calls it ‘The Physics of Life’. Is this sexy science? I obviously think so. Is this biological science? I would certainly say yes it is. It may not be what is ‘classically’ thought of as biology, but what is not more fundamental to life than what happens between atoms in your body?

Some people don’t think it is that my research has anything whatsoever to do with biology. They think it’s physics. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but does it really matter?

Yes it does. It shouldn’t, but it does. Why? Because people sometimes get the impression these Large Facilities like ISIS are just physicists playthings and that they only serve a very small community. They don’t, there is a huge variety of science goes on at ISIS from biology and medicine to chemistry and physics to archeometry (showing that ancient objects are indeed ancient and not fake!). Large facilities such as ISIS benefit not only basic science but research that directly effects most people’s lives – planes, iphones and water’s role in life.

So who cares what people think about your research? I do and we all should. Why? Because the impression that ISIS is just for physicists impacts funding decisions. It takes money to run Large Facilities. If you don’t spend the money these facilities shut down and this has potential impact for many, not just a few random physicists. Importantly, for all the bean counters out there, ISIS delivers good science. This isn’t just antecdotal. In the world where you must produce high impact science and A* papers for the govenrment to fund you, ISIS ticks all the boxes. It is good value for money.

ISIS has a number of allocated ‘beam days’. What that means is we in the (international!) scientific community write peer-reviewed proposals which if successful are awarded beam time. The experimental days allocated is dependent upon how many days ISIS runs. Historically ISIS has run around 120 to 40 days per year – this is equivalent to 600+ experiments.

With current spending cuts, ISIS is in danger of delivering less days. Loosing just 30 running days for ISIS is equivalent roughly to about 200 (or maybe more) lost experiments. On the surface this may seem like a ‘small price to pay’ in these days of austerity – where we all have pay freezes, more expensive booze and higher gas bills – but it is not a small price it is rather an enormous price and it’s economically silly.

It costs relatively little money to run for say 120 days versus 90 days, in fact its tiny in terms of big budgets. It’s roughly about 1.5 million more pounds. This sounds like alot, but it isn’t. The operating costs for running ISIS (and Diamond) is much more expensive than this and these basic operating costs have to be met. Coughing up the extra cash to run for 30 more days is miniscule. Trying to save costs by running less days is kind of equivalent to eating at a 4* Michelin restaurant and not getting the starter becuase you want to save a little money even though you still order the Dom Perinon. Cutting the ISIS budget in this way is political (the Government wants to look like it is saving money) rather than economical.

If less days just meant we all had to cut our experiments short by a day, I might could live with that, but this isn’t really how science works. An experiment is like a baby not like a loaf of bread (you can half a loaf a bread but not a baby) so everyone doesn’t get less time but rather full experiments are still run (and should be) but the consequence is that lots of good and essential science gets cut out in total. Importantly, this could have enormous impact on early career and unfunded researchers as well as scientific research in the long term future.

The ISIS proposal system allows people that aren’t currently funded to STILL DO EXPERIMENTS. I have a dog in this fight. I am funded by the EPSRC now. This funding is, in part, a result of me being able to still perform research at ISIS when I wasn’t funded. Cutting days will effect this. Moreover, if there is less over all time as researchers you will stick to ‘safe’ experiments, things that you are pretty sure you can publish. Blue skies research, which is the foundation of all future research, is cut leaving a more limited research base in 20 years time.

It is a small price to pay to fund ISIS to full capacity. A few more £s for substantially more research. ISIS is important to so many disciplines it seems to me it is a cost effective way for a Government who says ‘do more with less’ and wants academics to share facilities and equipment to just give up the cash for the full allotment of ISIS beam days so that this can happen.

Posted in ISIS neutron and Muon Souce, science funding, STFC | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Is it hip to be square?

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

One of my all-time favourite novels is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.

It’s not what you think.

Its about Circus Freaks. Circus Freaks were the original ‘Geeks’.

I am not sure when the word transformed into a derogatory term for kids that liked science and maths in High Schools across the US (and I guess secondary schools in the UK, but my husband said he never heard the word until much after he had left school – he’s British) but it was definitely a label en force when I was a high school student in the 80s.

‘Geek’s weren’t alone – there were other divisions too. Freaks, Geeks, Jocks and Frocks – were the major labels.
The rough breakdown was:

Freaks did drugs
Geeks did maths
Jocks did sports (or cheerleading)
Frocks were in the marching band

I am not going to tell you which category was assigned to me by my peers. Probably like most kids; I could have realistically fit into several categories; but that wasn’t really allowed. Jocks were ‘stupid’. Frocks were kind of dumb. Freaks were stoned. ‘Geeks’ were brainy and going to MIT, but never had a hope in hell of a social life or any sort of romatic relationship.

I not sure how many of my classmates bought into this way of thinking – I had friends in all of these categories – but, nevertheless, it was still a label. For people that didn’t know you, these categorisations completely affected your social life as an adolescent. ‘Geek’ was a bad word back then; it certainly wasn’t something most kids wanted to be.

Geek has very recently become near as dammit synomous with ‘skeptic’ and ‘scientist’ (or ‘science lover’). Mark Henderson just published a ‘Geek Manifesto’ there was a ‘Geek Calendar’ two years ago (to raise money for a good cause, Libel Reform). It is, I think, an effort to reclaim the word to make it ‘cool’ (or as Huey Lewis said ‘It’s hip to be square’) or at least make it be ‘ok’ to be a ‘geek’; but I worry.

I worry because its easy to talk about how cool it is to be a ‘geek’ when you are 35 – 40, when those high school labels no longer apply, but I am not sure how beneficial it is for kids at secondary school, where labels are often much more important. Adolescence is a damn hard time and labelling schemes among adolescence can be devistating and difficult. I understand that some people would argue they are trying to ‘take back the word’ but I am not sure this is a good word to have; its original definition it means Circus Freak.

I worry because I think it’s divisive. The term ‘geek’ (or any label) creates an ‘us against them’ mentality. In this case ‘geeks’ are cool where implicit in this phrase is the counter ‘and you are not’. It seems more beneficial, and indeed more positive, to convince people that they can think in an evidence-based way too. There is, after all, nothing special about it – it’s just a different way to think about things. I worry this label creates a mentality of ‘geeks (aka ‘smart’ people) understand this while ‘others’ cannnot; or more simply ‘Geeks are cool, you are not.’

Evidence-based thinking, being excited about science and maths, isn’t just the purveyance of a ‘geek’ it is something anyone can do and should be allowed to do without being swallowed in a label.

I used to go annually to the Tennessee Valley Fair, when I was a kid and like any good US state fair it had a Midway with (scary) rides and ‘freaks’. As a 7-year old I found myself, entirely by accident, amidst the ‘geek’ tents where you could see bearded ladies, goats with 3 legs and deformed humans of all variety. It really upset me; I remember thinking but they are people too, why do we have to put them on display and call them ‘geeks’?

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