A letter to my MP

I have signed the Science is Vital petition. I sent this letter to my MP:

Dear Mr Lazarowicz

The Science is Vital [http://scienceisvital.org.uk/] coalition, along with the Campaign for Science and Engineering [http://www.sciencecampaign.org.uk], are calling upon the Government to set out a supportive strategy, including public investment goals in step with economic growth.

My job at The University of Edinburgh is to nurture the future generations of physicists and I would like to share my professional perspective with you.

If the investment in physics research is cut, the experts will follow the funding abroad and take the next generation of physicists with them. We know this because it has happened before. Many of my contemporaries left the country in the brain drain of the early and mid eighties. Margaret Thatcher’s cuts took a whole generation of physicists away from our institutions and made them unavailable to our young people. The world-class researchers who left in the 1980s have only just started to return – several of them live in your constituency - and they attract the very best students to the UK. These young researchers move to the UK to take advantage of the expertise that is here.

If the UK withdraws funding from the big fundamental science projects, it will lose the current generation AND the next generation for small, short-term ‘savings’ that will quickly result in a loss of expertise and a very big loss of GDP. It is estimated that a cut of £1bn in science investment (approximately 20%) will result in a loss of £10bn to GDP. As Sir Patrick Moore (a supporter of Science is Vital) says: “If we cut funds for science we’ll be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Without investment in science research the UK risks its international reputation, its market share of high-tech manufacturing and services, the ability to respond to urgent and long-term national scientific challenges and the economic recovery will falter.

Please
•    sign EDM 767 – Science is Vital (http://bit.ly/edm767)
•    sign the Science is Vital petition – (http://scienceisvital.org.uk/sign-the-petition)
•    attend a lobby in Parliament on 12 October (15.30, Committee Room 10).

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
Karon McBride
11/10/2010 17:20:33

Too Much Information

Beltane Fire Festival

This morning I went to a Beltane Breakfast. Some of you may wonder if this involved fireworks or dancing round something without my knickers. I'm afraid I am not at liberty to divulge this information but they did do a good line in hot breakfast rolls in the Scottish tradition.

On the event webpage it says "The session includes a presentation, “What is the value of science blogging for public engagement?” delivered by two national and international authors, Ken MacLeod and David Shenk" (the organisers' emphasis, not mine).   I booked it in a fit of enthusiasm on 07 July at, according to the printed ticket, 3:22 am. Quite why my weird personal habits should appear on the ticket is beyond me but I'm glad I went nevertheless.

A member of the audience asked about handling the information overload. With so much out there, how do I go about finding blogs worth reading and how will people find my blog? Will I be wasting my time writing something that no one ever reads?

These questions resonated with me because similar concerns had arisen in a complete different context during a workshop by Paul Denny on Peerwise, an online application which supports students in the creation, sharing, evaluation and discussion of assessment questions. Peerwise has been used with very large groups of students who between them might contribute a couple of thousand multiple choice questions during a semester. It isn't sensible for students to try all of the questions but how can they choose the ones that will be of cognitive benefit to them?

Teaching students how to be discriminating is part of the reason for using applications like PeerWise but in fact many of our students (and academic staff) already have those skills in other contexts. For example, they know how to use ratings systems on Amazon to find music or goods worth buying.

In the PeerWise workshop we had been asked to estimate how long it would take one person to watch all the video loaded up to YouTube today. I don't think any of our guesses were close. On the YouTube website it states that 'every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.' This means 34,560 hours-worth of video per day, which would take about 4 years to watch provided you only took very infrequent, short comfort breaks and didn't sleep at all.

And yet no one panics about missing the good stuff on YouTube. Users have learned to use personal recommendations, rating systems, review websites, tag clouds and 'following' to find the stuff that interests or amuses them.

In conclusion, the academic blogger shouldn't dwell on the thought that their little blog will be swamped in a big ocean of other blogs. David Shenk said in the meeting that all that was important was that each blog reached a small number of the right people. And in that he's quite correct.