Knowledge Transfer – Page 5

How To Teach Me Statistics

July 2, 2014 Jilly5 Comments

A few weeks ago I was swearing at my computer and had to go buy a Twix bar from the canteen to calm myself. There was some frantic chocolate scoffing that afternoon.

The source of my irritation? Statistics. I am not a great wielder of statistical power, but I am very interested in their dark arts. This leads to the common situation where I know I’m doing something wrong, such as using stepwise regressions to build a model, the fact I use frequentist over Bayesian probabilities, and even my over reliance on P Values to communicate scientific results, but I just don’t know how to do it better.

I’m expecting there are three reactions to that sentence. The first is “I don’t have a clue what any of that means”. Don’t worry, my grasp of it is very shaky, and it’s not something I’ve ever been taught. It’s something I’ve discovered through hanging out with statisticians.

The second is “Man, I have that exact same problem, but every time I try and learn how to do it, I can’t figure it out.” My friends we are in the same boat. I do not feel I have enough statistical training to tackle these problems.

And lastly the third kind of person is reading that and thinking “Well obviously the answer is *string of gibberish*”

I have had good stats teachers, but they are sadly few and far between, and there are a lot of poor stats teachers who get in there in the mean time and deeply confuse me. I have a lot of good friends who try to teach me and I end up glazing over. What I mean to say is that the following is not personal – and it’s as much a criticism of myself as those who have tried to teach me . . .

Loads of statistically savvy people are willing to teach, they just don’t seem to get it through to me. So seeing as I’m supposed to be quite good at this education malarky, here’s my guide to teaching me statistics.

Make Sure We’re Speaking a Common Language

Yes, we really have to start with the basics here. Statistical language is incomprehensible to me. And that’s because we’re all taught differently.

As an example, I refer to response variables as ‘y’ and explanatory variables as ‘x’. A good friend of mine refers to explanatory variables as ‘y’ and response variables as ‘a’ or ‘b’. This causes huge confusion whenever we ask one another stats questions off the cuff.

And the common language refers to more than just making sure I understand what your big formulas are saying. This is what the homepage of R looks like. R is a sophisticated and free statistical tool that we should all be using. I’ve seen more intuitive GeoCities layouts. This is written by and for coders and I have to explain how to extract a zip file to some of my colleagues.

Why are you writing your R manual or your page about your fancy new statistical technique? Are you trying to share it with others who think like you? Fine, carry on. Are you trying to improve the statistical techniques used by frustrated, busy scientists who haven’t had more than a few week stats CPD a year?

Use your words.

Now the R Book is a good start for people wanting to learn R but I still wish it was written by Andy Field, who’s Discovering Statistics book is still my favourite bible, even though I don’t use SPSS anymore. If you’ve read both, you’ll see the difference in style is extreme, and I think it’s because, as a social scientist, Field has a better grasp of how people think. (Although speaking of GeoCities sites . . . I still love the book!)

Edited to Add: I lie! Andy Field has written an R textbook, which I have just bought! Thanks to Comparatively Psyched for the heads up!

Teach Me Something I Can Use

This may seem counterintuitive to what I said further up, but if you’re trying to teach me, say, an alternative method to a stepwise regression, don’t just give me a dataset and tell me the code to run.

Tell me how to arrange my dataset in the way its needed. Ask me questions about my data – get me thinking about the complexities of the experiment I designed. And then tell me the code to run. Don’t forget to walk me through the output. For example, the documentation for the lars package in R explains how I can run a least angle regression on a sample dataset. Great. I can copy and paste that code ad libitum. Can I get it to work on my data? Even though to the best of my knowledge I’ve arranged it in the same way? Nope.

Get me to work through the whole process and you show me where your new method fits into my life.

What’s the Application?

I recently sat through a stats seminar where someone was showing off a new method. In the same presentation they briefly glossed over ternary plots as a way of showing off new data.

Applied scientists work in a world that judges us on the number of papers we produce and the impacts our papers have. That is literally how we get our baseline funding.

I don’t disagree that there are lots of problems with publishing but you’re asking me to relearn how I think about statistics, and then to communicate all this in a real-world paper with real-world data (that doesn’t always play nicely). If you’re asking somebody to use an amazing new technique, you’re asking them to get that past reviewers (who more often than not will not know your new stats).

If you have a great technique but it won’t actually give me a conclusion that I can use to improve animal welfare, then it’s not going to help me. And related to this . . .

What does it Mean?

The truth of the matter is that the statistical tests we commonly use are ‘plug and play’. We get into the habit of checking the things we want to look at noting the laundry list of caveats in a footnote.

Walk me through an example of what my results mean. If you’ve got me using my own data, tell me if this result confirms or denies my hypothesis, show me why, give me some indication of the next step.

I’m amazed at how many people don’t do this when trying to explain stats to me. You’re interested in the method, I get that. I’m fascinated by recording aggression in groups, but there’s a time and a place to discuss this, or just to tell you what aggression means.

Don’t Assume I’m Stupid

I see this all the time when statisticians are trying to teach something to scientists. They spend a very long time on the basics because our fundamentals are so scattered. This is not the most helpful approach. The other method I often see, when I say I don’t understand or even hesitate, the statistician repeats what they’ve said, more slowly and slightly louder.

We’re not stupid. Try teaching us a complex problem in an environment we’re familiar with (i.e. with our own data) and you’ll be surprised how many fundamental skills we’ll pick up because of it. To use a simple analogy, if you wanted to teach me how to maintain a car, wouldn’t you be be better off showing me how to take an engine apart rather than build one from scratch?

Don’t spend half our time explaining the problem to me – I get that there is a problem with the statistics I already use, it’s why I’ve sought you out. Is a finer understanding of the theory really going to help me use this test in future?

Finally – Why Are You Teaching Me?

This blog post sounds very whiny. Trust me, I know.

I know I should have learned all this earlier in my career. I know I should use R every day until I’m fluent. I know I shouldn’t using all these out of date stats. But the sad truth is that I haven’t, I don’t and I can’t.

I want to change, and I need the great community of statisticians to help me. So if you’re a statistician who wants to help me and people like me, this is how I’d suggest doing it.

Good luck!

In Defence of Cats

June 11, 2014 Jilly9 Comments

During Badger Fortnight an amazing blog post by climber Craig Armstrong came to my attention – detailing the climbing exploits of him and his cat Millie.

I particularly love the comments that express amazement or defend the cats’ loyalty.

As you might have guessed by reading this blog, I’m a big fan of animals, but if you forced me to choose, I’d describe myself as a cat person.

Legend (or family lore at the least) tells that when I was a baby, our two cats were fascinated by the new arrival. They would sit on either side of the changing mat, and sneak into the cot whenever they could manage it. My mum clearly wasn’t a subscriber to the old myth that cats suffocate babies. (Unless she was and she was hoping they might . . . she’ll undoubtedly comment on this so check below for her thoughts).

John Bradshaw’s ‘Cat Sense’, one of my favourite popular science books, talks about how cats have always polarised people. More recently, I’ve been arguing with our MOOC cameraman about how cats are awesome (he disagrees – let us know in the MOOC forums if you note a distinct dog bias in our glamour shots). Lastly, even a climbing cat couldn’t convince my sister, climber extrordinaire, that cats are just as awesome as dogs, if not more so.

Buckle your seatbelt, kitten, we’re having a Caturday.

When I first started composing this post it devolved into a long series of memories about this little lady, Posie. Adopted from an SSPCA shelter when I was five she’s the kind of cat who might have stepped out of a Homeward Bound film (except her homeward journey took her four years to travel six miles, but never mind). She would walk with us to the shops, and was one of the most affectionate little animals I’ve ever met. Hers is a story I’ll save for a Fluffy Friday.

Posie snoring, possibly drooling on my knee.

Instead let’s talk about the cat-human bond. I talk about dogs a lot and in fact they’re one of my favourite examples to use when I’m explaining why humans and animals have long histories. Despite this, dogs are pretty understudied in animal welfare and cats receive even less attention. So this post will be a very potted summary of what we know of the human-cat bond.

A 9,500 year old grave in Cyprus contains a man buried with a cat (Vigne et al, 2004), and there’s archaeological evidence in China dating around 5,300 years ago of cats living with humans, eating leftovers and eating the rodents around our grain (Hu et al 2014). Much like dogs, but considerably later, cats started exploiting humans by making use of our environment. Particularly when we started farming and lots of little rodents started preying on our grains.

Like dogs, cats true wild ancestor no longer exists. Instead, the cats which could tolerate humans became our domesticated cats, those who couldn’t stayed far from humans, and became something else. But cats are a few thousand years behind dogs in this domesticated tree. While dogs were a product of the hunter gather, cats are a product of the farmer.

One of the little titbits in John Bradshaw’s book absolutely fascinated me. A tenth century Welsh statue says

“The price of a cat is fourpence. Her qualities are to see, to hear, to kill mice, to have her claws whole, and to nurse and not devour her kittens. If she be deficient in any one of these qualities, one third of her price must be returned”

Good mothers, good mousers. This cat would fetch the same price as an untrained house-dog a sheep or a goat. Kittens were a penny, the same as a piglet or a lamb, and a young cat was two pence. And female cats were much more highly prized than toms (a strange quirk that I still buy into, I’ve always liked female cats more, for no real reason).

The good mother clause is interesting because cats are not, by nature, all good mothers. My old cat, Posie, had two litters of kittens. Her first litter she decided to have on my bed, in full view of the world, on a bedspread with a cat and kittens on it. I don’t think I was older than seven, and I remember being very touched that she chose to have her little little of black fluffballs in my bedroom. Looking back on it now, I still can’t decide if this was a demonstration of absolute trust and security, or simply a demonstration of her not quite having the right instincts during her pregnancy.

While she would feed them all, she was not particularly defensive of them. When they started to crawl, my mum and I experimented by taking one from her nest and taking it to the far side of the kitchen. Posie eventually came to get it after we called on her, evidently not greatly perturbed by the kitten’s plaintive mews.

Her second litter was born while we were temporarily living in a flat. We had only been in the flat for a few months and she seemed to need somewhere quieter to have her kittens. I opened my wardrobe not long before we were due to move back home and promptly informed my mother Posie had had kittens again, which was no small consternation considering it was a pet-free flat.

Being small and petite, Posie would drag her large fluffy kittens along the floor rather than pick them up. The only thing that ever seemed to arouse her mothering instincts was when they would get stuck under the bathroom sink and cry. Even years after she was spayed, the sounds of a crying kitten on the television would have her searching under the bathroom sink.

Related cats will happily share litters, and in a good environment, they’ll stay with their mothers for a long time. Girls are particularly social, staying with sisters for a long time. If this is reminding you of any other big cat structure there’s a reason – house cats and lions are the only felines which will typically naturally live in groups. Kittens which are socialised very early with humans, between 2 and 9 weeks, appear to give their owners more social support (Casey & Bradshaw, 2008).

So what is it about cats that makes them decide to pride-up with humans, in the same way dogs pack-up with us? I firmly believe that dog people are threatened by the cat’s ability to control. We understand that dogs get their way by being cute and adorable, but cats seem to be able to train us.

McComb et al (2009) did one of my favourite studies because it confirmed something I had long recognised in Posie’s relationship with me. She had a specific purr which incorporated a quiet, high pitched chirrup, a rolling r and a little uplift at the end. We used to call it ‘purring with excitement’ and it was given in anticipation of food, when she thought food might be included in Tesco shopping bags, when she was about to be let out of the door and when she was desperate for a cuddle (the ‘prrroing’ noise would escape as she leapt up onto the sofa or bed, soon giving way to a deep, rhythmic purring as she reached her goal).

McComb et al investigated how these solicitation purrs sounded to cat owners and non-cat owners. All identified these solicitation purrs as being more urgent and less pleasant than the same cat’s relaxed purr. But cat-owners were significantly better dentifying the same cat’s solicitation purr and relaxed purr than non-owners, suggesting that owners learn this. McComb et all went on to investigate the auditory properties of these solicitation purrs and the peak of the cry lies at around 300-600Hz, the same as a human baby’s hungry wail.

Yep, cats vocalise at the same pitch as our babies, a sound that we are incapable of habituating to, thanks to that pesky evolution.

Cats play their affection for us coolly. While we can use infant human attachment tests to measure a dog’s obsession with its owner, cats which are isolated from their owner do not respond to their owner’s voice with body language or vocalisation, but by a tiny ear swivel in the direction of their owner’s voice (Saito & Shinozuka, 2013). I haven’t found any evidence of people using separation tests in cats (let me know if you know of a study) but there is evidence of cats showing separation related behaviours when left alone, such as excessive grooming, vocalisation and defecation (Schwartz, 2002).

Dogs share a lot of traits with us, trained in ways we understand instinctively, motivated by affection and praise like we are, but cats have a different kind of intelligence, less comparable to ours.

Teach a dog and a cat to pull a string for a food reward. They both quickly take to pulling the string. Give them two strings and show them that food exists at the end of one string. Dogs are reasonably able to deduce that they want to pull the string attached to the food. Cats, not so much. Pull string, get food. Cats don’t understand they need to link the food to the string, whereas dogs seem to be able to grasp this at a rudimentary level. Finally, if you cross the strings, cats are still playing their little string games and the dog geniuses are entirely confused. Causal understanding is not a cat’s strong point (Whitt et al, 2009). Dogs and babies can do object permanance tests, cats struggle (and some cats don’t even bother).

So, emotionally manipulative, intelligence alien to our own, and only barely able to tolerate other cats and humans if given the right amount of socialisation as kittens. Why do we love them?

What I love about a cat is its ability to be selective in its affection. I like to feel important in a pet’s life. My mum’s new cat, adopted from a friend who could no longer look after her, greets me with raised tail and chirrups when I walk up the road with an overnight bag. She sniffs my face and then promptly investigates all the bags and treasures I have brought. While I’ve known her for four years now, her affection for me has only recently developed. Earning the trust of a cat I see infrequently feels more rewarding for me than the instant love of a dog I’ve just met.

In my opinion its this small personality difference that distinguishes dog and cat people. Dog people are more extraverted, socialising easily and freely. Introverts value that socialness no less, but like it a different, more concentrated source.

Bradshaw finishes his book with a surprising statement that doesn’t come naturally from most animal welfare scientisits. He suggests that we start breeding for a truly domesticated cat, teaching people how to train their cats, and stop neutering the excellent housecats we have indiscriminately. He points to his 1999 paper which found that an area with a high population of neutered cats was producing moggie kittens that didn’t have particularly sociable genes.

Bradshaw argues that if we want the domestic cat to survive as a pet, we must use our knowledge of animal welfare to produce an animal more suited for its new environment. He suggests that we can avoid making the mistakes we made with dogs and take a scientific approach to producing the animal we want, affectionate, relaxed, and with little hunting motivation.

I find that an interesting idea, and it has certainly affected my thinking about any future cats I will own.

Badger Fortnight – The Cull

May 21, 2014 Jilly3 Comments

This week on Badger Fortnight we turn our attention to the rogue of the tale, the humble badger.

Did you ever read the Redwall books as a child? If the story of Bovine TB was told Redwall style, I imagine the badger would be a travelling bard, handy with a bow, flirting with the bovine ladies at the bar, upsetting the status quo and just generally causing a fuss.

Badgers biggest problem in this story is that they are a host for Bovine TB. When they catch TB and it becomes an active infection the disease develops and they become weak and emaciated but rarely actually die from the disease. They can transmit this infection back to cattle out in the fields, again through aerosol droplets.

Badgers are group living animals which are highly territorial. They live underground in setts which are protected by law in the UK. For this reason, Defra’s randomised culling trials needed special permission. You cannot simply go and shoot badgers in the UK.

The culling trial was supposed to be the humane solution to the problem of the spread of bovine TB. As you may have seen in some other posts of mine, I have no welfare problems with humane culling (although I may not like it from an ethical standpoint).

In this post I’m going to briefly go over the final Defra reports on the culling trial and discuss why I would consider it to be an abject failure.

Humaneness of the Badger Cull

The Humaneness Monitoring protocol for the cull (Version 0.4) states that:

“Killing techniques that are instantaneous without imposing any stress on the animal are universally accepted as being the ideal and having a low welfare cost. Welfare costs are assessed in two dimensions: duration and intensity of suffering.”

I’m fairly content with this definition. If the process doesn’t stress the animal and the death is fast, I consider that to be a ‘good’ death. The protocol itself states how they recorded the whether or not the cull was humane. They investigated:

Time from being shot to death
How many badgers escaped after being shot at?
What do badgers do after being shot at?
Where on the badger are the wounds located?
How injured are the shot badgers?
Is there a relationship between time till death and type of injury?
Is there a difference in the wound type between shootings observed by researchers and unobserved shootings?

This protocol also features the cutest little wound plot you ever did see.

Taken from the Humaneness Report Protocol, 2014, Version 0.4

These are the objectives the independent panel used to decide whether or not the badger cull was considered humane. But of course the cull had another objective too.

Population Control

The cull’s purpose was of course to control the badger population in the region. The Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency 2014 Report into the efficacy of the cull (Version 1) describes how the AHVLA judged the success of the cull on a population control level.

Their aim, stated at the very start, was to reduce the badger population in the Gloucestershire area and Somerset area by at least 70%. Pretty early in this report you’ll notice the words ‘cage trapping’ being used. And if you’ll scroll up just a few paragraphs you’ll notice the humaneness protocol mentioned nothing about cage trapping.

Yes, the cull, in the end, did allow for cage trapping followed by shooting. Does being confined in a small area, unfamiliar to you, for up to a day, before a human approaches and shoots you sound like a stress free death? There’s a reason ‘like an animal in a trap’ is a saying.

Moving swiftly on . . . the AHVLA sampled the number of badgers in the area using hair traps – by placing little pieces of barbed wire near setts and badger runs they collected badger hair and DNA sampled that hair to build up a profile of how many badgers were in the area. They then compared the DNA of culled badgers to their profile.

They also investigated sett disturbance by monitoring the setts and placing, in a slightly Nancy Drew esque fashion, sticks outside the setts and noting which ones were disturbed. This method was not very reliable and they stopped using it because it was estimating that the cull had taken out over 100% of the badgers in the area, even though the observers were clearly seeing badger activity.

So they stuck with DNA sampling.

Now as you may have heard, it’s important for the cull to take out at least 70% of the badgers or the disturbance in the population will simply lead to badgers redistributing within the air and increased disease transmission. The cull had to take out a large proportion of the badgers to be successful.

Now read on . . .

Cull Success – Numbers

The AHVLA report estimates that in the Gloucestershire area, the highest estimate of the number of badgers culled was 65.3%. And it could have been as low as 28%. In Somerset they removed a maximum of 50.9% of the population and as few as 37% of the population.

All of those numbers are less than the target of 70%, even the maximum estimates.

In Gloucestershire, more setts were active after the culling than before (suggesting that the cull had resulted in increased badger movement, increasing the perceived disease transmission risk). Although this didn’t happen in Somerset.

The AHVLA report concludes with the following verdict:

“From the results presented above we conclude that industry-lead controlled shooting of badgers during the entire culling period (including the initial six week period and the extensions) did not remove at least 70% of the population inside either pilot area. In both areas significantly fewer than 70% were removed by controlled shooting. The combined approach of controlled shooting and cage trapping also did not remove at least 70% of the population inside either pilot area; substantially fewer than 70% were removed in both areas. Populations of badgers were highly likely to persist within both pilot areas following culling.”

Verdict: Fail.

Cull Success – Welfare

The Humaneness Report (2014) found that only 36.1% of the carcasses they post mortemed had the first entry wound in the target location. When the contract shooters were observed this jumped to 42.9% and when they were unobserved it was 31.5%

As you can see from this figure, a proportion of badgers were found some metres away from where they were shot, clearly suggesting functioning behaviours and implying suffering and pain after being shot.

Taken from the Defra report into humaneness.

The Independent Panel Report’s Conclusion

Professor Munro’s Independent Panel Report (2014) takes both these reports into account when it delivers this damning conclusion:

“We concluded, from the data provided, that controlled shooting alone (or in combination with cage trapping) did not deliver the level of culling set by government. Shooting accuracy varied amongst Contractors and resulted in a number of badgers taking longer than 5 min to die,others being hit but not retrieved, and some possibly being missed altogether. In the context of the pilot culls, we consider that the total number of these events should be less than five per cent of the badgers at which shots were taken. We are confident that this was not achieved.”

In summary, the cull failed to eradicate enough badgers to be worthwhile and it failed to do this in a method that we would consider humane.

The report also makes this mention of the problems surrounding the humaneness of the cullings:

“Further concern about the accuracy of shooting stems from the following observations:

a. Seven badgers required at least two shots, with one Observed shooting recording six shots fired at a single badger.

b. A further seven badgers (in Category C) may have been missed completely. In one of these cases two shots were fired at two badgers, with both shots being considered misses on the basis of thermal imaging observations and subsequent analysis of thermal imaging recordings.”

So on the two criteria by which the culls were launched, they failed. They are not an option for controlling bovine tuberculosis.

So what happens now?

Tune in next week . . .

Badger Fortnight: TB

May 14, 2014 Jilly1 Comment

For the next couple of weeks I am dedicating Fluffy Sciences to the noble badger. Why, you ask? Well because the other day I ended up reading Defra’s independent panel report on the UK badger cull and the whole thing made me grumpy.

As someone who works both in animal welfare and in the agricultural industry, with a soft spot in my heart for cattle, I have heard a lot about Bovine TB and badgers in the past few years. I’m going to spend the next few posts telling that story, and where better to start but with Bovine TB itself? After all, without this insidious disease, badgers would be fondly remembered from the Animals of Farthing Wood, or the noble lords in Redwall. Instead they’re synonymous with James May and the word ‘cull’. An interesting turn of events.

So. Bovine TB, the villain in our tale. What are you?

When you’re reading or watching some trashy historical drama and the heroine coughs into her handkerchief, staining it gently with blood, you know she’s not long for this world. Satine, I’m looking at you. That disease is Tuberculosis, or consumption, if you’re still feeling gothic.

It’s a famous disease in science because of Robert Koch, who formulated the well known Koch Postulates, a set of rules to identify the causative pathogen of disease. While still very much remembered, they have been supplanted with other rules better capable of identifying things like parasites and even non-active infections.

The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.

Koch identified the agent of TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and he received a Nobel Prize for his troubles. Interestingly enough, he received his prize even though for years he’d been convinced that Bovine TB and human TB were not similar, and it was his results that forced him to reevaluate this position.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and this disease which, at one point, was causing 25% of the deaths in the world was now on the run. Almost all Brits have a peculiar little scar on their left upper arm, the BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin) scar. I have had some Americans quiz me about it and it turns out Americans never had a mass BCG immunisation. You guys missed out on some quality arm punching in school.

If you’ll think back to your school days, you’ll remember a thirteen year old you suspiciously watching a nurse inject you just under the skin on your arm. A few days later they inspect the mark and then decree whether or not you will receive the BCG vaccination.

It’s often said that if you react to the skin test it means you are already immune to TB, but this isn’t quite true. It means that your body reacted to the TB (in a healthy person this means they got a red blister bigger than 15mm in diameter) which may be because you have a previous vaccination or because your body already has an active TB infection.

Regardless, those who escaped the skin blister get called back for the vaccine. The injection goes between the skin (large ulcerated BCG marks are often an indication of an accidental subcutaneous BCG). As vaccinations go, its quite painful (I remember it being more uncomfortable than three successive rabies vaccinations) and not helped by the traditional teenage sport of punching people in the vaccination spot.

Large keloid scars can form, although latterdays these scars are not so prominent due to improved techniques. I did try to take a picture of mine for you but mine is tiny and barely shows up. The mass BCG vaccination program has recently been suspended in the UK as the disease is now considered very rare. Only at-risk groups are vaccinated now.

Despite the fact that antibiotic resistant TB is on the rise (and that this is frightening) in the UK we manage the disease in humans fairly well. Other countries, such as India, haven’t been as successful as we have in using the BCG vaccinations – and it seems to be that the disease is harder to manage in equatorial regions, for reasons I’ll not speculate about here.

However Bovine TB is caused by the very similar pathogen Mycobacterium bovis, which can cause TB in humans if they drink the unpasteurised milk of an infected animal, or if they inhale aerosol droplets (e.g. cough, spits and sneezes) of a cow.

Being someone who has been coughed, spat and sneezed on by various cows, I’m not particularly worried about this myself, even though Bovine TB can cross the species barrier, TB itself rarely becomes an active infection in the person who has it.

So why do we worry about it in cows? Well we have a strange double standard here. When we test cows, we use a skin test very similar to the one we use in humans. And, like in some humans, there is a reaction to this skin test.

And those cows which react to the skin test must be culled. You’ll remember that only a few paragraphs higher up I mentioned that a reaction doesn’t mean immunity, it just means the animal is reactive. It doesn’t mean there is an active infection, it just means the animal is reactive. Yet we cull those animals specifically to prevent the spread of the disease.

You can sell the meat of the culled animal if you want, because cooking meat kills the Mycobacterium, but you cannot tolerate a TB cow on your farm.

And this isn’t considering false negatives and false positives in the test, as no diagnostic test is perfect.

The fear is that Bovine TB will either infect or reactivate a latent TB infection in people. Because of this fear we cull any cows infected with TB. Defra have also produced what they optimistically call a leaflet (at 21 pages) of ‘What happens if TB is identified in your herd’ which remind me of those Simpsons leaflets ‘So You’ve Ruined Your Life’.

The moment a cow reacts to the skin test the herd is classed as suspect and moving cattle out of and into the herd is restricted. Any reacting animals must be isolated from non-reacting animals and culled. The milk is to be dumped.

The reactor cows are tested post mortem, but even if your reactors show no clinical signs of TB, your herd status is still Officially TB Free Suspended. You will need a clear test (or two clear tests if TB was found in your reacting cows) for your Official TB Free status to be reinstated.

If you have a TB farm you also have restrictions on where you can spread your slurry and on what you can do if your cows die on farm.

It is, in short, a huge hassle, resulting in cow deaths and loss of farm profits, as well as posing a health risk to humans.

It is with these facts that the government turned its attention to badgers, and that, dear readers, we will discuss next week.

Do You Want to See a Magic Trick?

May 7, 2014 Jilly4 Comments

Do you want to see a magic trick?

As part of our Animal Welfare Indicators project I’m creating an online learning object which describes an experiment testing whether or not goats know an object is there when they can’t see it.

Now don’t go doubting the intelligence of goats just yet, this question is pretty multifaceted. It begins with human babies and the game of Peekaboo. If you’ve ever entertained a small baby, you might have fallen back on hiding behind your hands and enjoying the delighted giggles of this apparent magic trick.

There is some debate in the scientific community over whether babies are really fooled by this trick, or whether they don’t have an understanding of object permanence until they’re about two years old.

At some point babies develop the ability to understand that objects still exist even when they’re out of sight. Take a baby’s favourite toy and hide it behind a screen, the baby will look behind the screen. The fact that an object must exist outside of our perception of it can lead to some fun set ups. Check out this video to watch a magician performing a simple magic trick in front of some dogs. The dogs, fully expecting the object to reappear where it logically should, clearly act confused and start searching other logical places (such as beneath the hands, behind them, etc.)

The magic act Penn and Teller explain the anatomy of a trick that uses sleight of hand in this, slightly grainy video. The steps they include are: Palm – Switch – Ditch – Steal – Load – Simulation – Misdirection.

But none of these steps work if you can’t understand that an object should exist where you don’t know.

A psychologist named Piaget came up with a little experiment to test whether object permanance has developed in children – you can try it yourself with the nearest available baby or pet (please ask permission of the bill payer).

For this set up you will need an object and for an animal it will need to be something they’ll be motivated to look for. I suggest a treat (but preferably one which doesn’t smell too strongly).

Show your subject the object and then place it inside a cup or other container (or behind a makeshift screen, like a half open DVD case). Now for the magic trick. Place this container or screen, with the treat still hidden within, behind another screen (such as an open book propped up on the floor).

Watch what happens next. The theory goes that if your baby or pet understands that objects exist even when they cannot be observed, it will look for the treat behind the open book. This leap of logic means the subject must understand the object still exists when its inside the first container, and that when the first container is hidden, the hidden object persists even then.

Or you could hire a magician and get them to confuse the hell out of your pets and babies. Because that’s hilarious.

Clone-O-Matic

April 23, 2014 Jilly1 Comment

I imagine it won’t come as a surprise to most of you when I reveal I am a fan of science fiction. I love the future in all its forms, dystopian, utopian, post-apocalyptic . . . and the future got a little bit closer with some recent news.

In the UK. Channel 4 recently ran a documentary on Sooam Biotech’s competition to clone a British dog. Spoilers! The Guardian reported that the winner was a dachshund and gave a little summary of all the picky little ethical issues surrounding dog-cloning.

Dear readers, I have watched this documentary for you. If it’s still up you can find it here. This is how much I love you, my readers, I watch Channel 4 documentaries for you. Although I was also making some tea and checking emails at the same time, this is the hobby after all.

It’s . . . it’s interesting. The people in the documentary love their dogs, I would characterise them as ‘novelty seekers’, and there’s definitely an element of natural science ignorance on show.

Now I’ll never penalise someone for general ignorance, there’s plenty in the world I don’t know. I think it’s perfectly acceptable for people to love their pets – in fact the winner, Rebecca Smith, talks about how her dog helped her to recover from bulimia. Seems pretty relevant after last week’s post (which you guys seemed to love by the way – thanks!). And finally, as a sci-fi fan, I’m attracted to the idea of cloning as a sort of intellectual exercise, what will this dog be like, etc., but I still have a great deal of ethical discomfort surrounding this.

The Roslin researcher featured on the show tells the Korean scientists he doesn’t think it will work because genetics are not the be all and end all of behaviour. The show then invokes the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’ which explaining that the Korean scientists have brought two dogs with them, one of whom is a clone and is affectionately referred to as the ‘evil’ one because she’s so spoiled.

My darling readers, if I ever catch any of you using the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’ the force of my rage will manifest in my instant apparition to your side and a swift scolding of the like you haven’t had since you last tracked mud in over your dad’s clean floors.

It’s an outdated phrase which means nothing, puts you into a binary mindset that the outcome of the complexity of biological life is dictated by one trait. If you find yourself in a situation where you wish to express the concept of underlying biology and psychology having different effects on behavioural outcomes, I give you permission to use a much better phrase instead: Genetic and Environmental Interactions. It even boils down to a cool little equation: GxE Interactions. Please use this phrase. Please banish Nature Vs Nurture from your minds. It’s one of my biggest bugbears.

What Iove about GxE is that it innately implies that both the genetics and the environment come together to produce the behaviour of interest, but it does miss a very important part of the overall picture, one which we scientists are only beginning to understand ourselves. There are elements of your genetic material which can be changed by your environment and you can pass these changes along to the next generation. Epigenetics is a relatively recent scientific field but explains a lot about how evolution can move so quickly. I’m currently working on a project that involves some background reading on epigenetics so I’ll try and do a post on it in the next few weeks, but for the purposes of today, it’s enough to recognise that even though these two dogs started with the exact same genetic material, even smoking more around one of them will start to change certain elements of that code.

So it’s no wonder there is an ‘evil’ clone of these little dogs the Korean scientists are toting around. They’re not the same animals. Identical twins are different people, after all, and they share masses of genetic and environmental information.

So again we come back to the ethical iffiniess around this whole show. They’ve cloned a dog for a woman who clearly relies upon the first animal for support, and the show doesn’t specify whether they’ve really explained the variation inherent in cloning to her. But at the end Rebecca did seem completely smitten by her little puppy. The problems inherent with spoiling a pet not withstanding, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of love there.

But what about the utopia part of this post? Well the EU has recently launched their Code EFABAR, a voluntary code of good practice for responsible animal breeding. This is great news and I hope all breeders seriously take into consideration what this code represents and what traits they’re breeding for. Responsible breeding takes the animal’s health and welfare, along with food chain sustainability and transparency into account. I’d hope all this seems deeply obvious to my readers and I look forward to seeing people sign up to this code (and perhaps the code’s being extended to domestic breeding too?)

So with all that being said, I think I’m going to go search for ‘Sci-Fi’ on Amazon Prime and see what I can rustle up. Live long and prosper, my friends.

The Black Dog

April 16, 2014 Jilly10 Comments

In the last twelve months one of my little sisters has struggled with depression. I think she’s coping remarkably well with it and I’m really very proud of her. Recently she got some bad news and in one of my weekly ‘putting the world to rights’ calls with my mother, I said that if she looked like this might set her back we should encourage her to get a cat.

Mum laughed and agreed, and then the next day phoned me frantically to exclaim: you should blog about that!

So here is the blog about pets and depression!

I have good reason to suspect a pet would help my sister, as well as other people with certain kinds of depression. And it’s not just because of this Eddie Izzard sketch.

There are two many theories regarding why we keep pets, and I’ve spoken about them before. They boil down to this: either pets take advantage of us, or pets give us some advantage in life. Much of what I’m going to talk about today falls under this second theory, but remember – it could just be a way our little social parasites have evolved to keep us sweet.

Pets Matter to People

One of the most interesting (and sadly unpublished) pieces of research I’ve ever done was investigating how online pet obituaries represent owners feelings about a pet passing away. Pets are very dear to their owners. People often say they love their pet ‘like a child’.

Interestingly, when people have been asked to rate how the loss of a pet makes them feel, they’ll say it’s analogous to losing touch with an adult child (Gage & Holcomb, 1991). Therefore the loss of a pet is a stressful event – just what I want for my blue sister, right? The inevitable loss of an animal.

What I find really interesting about that comparison is that it talks about children, but doesn’t directly compare the loss of a pet to the loss of a child. Part of me wonders if there’s not a little bit of cultural bias in there. You’re not allowed to say that losing a pet is as bad as losing a child (and personally I can’t imagine that it is), but that language seems to put it as close to the worst possible feeling as is socially acceptable.

Pets Are Good For People

If I was to put on a white lab coat and force you to do a mental arithmetic test, you’d get stressed out. This is a pretty common psychological stressor. If I made you do it in front of a friend, you might even get more stressed out, your heart rate would rise. However, if I made you do arithmetic at home, you’d feel calmer.

What’s really interesting about all this is if I made you do arithmetic at home in front of your best friend, and then made you do arithmetic in front of your dog, and lastly all by yourself, you would be even calmer with your dog than by yourself. (Allen et al, 1991). Animals have this amazing ability to calm us down.

Blood pressure (and heart rate) go up with mental stress. Allen (who seems to have enjoyed making people do mental arithmetic in their home, I can only imagine she creeps up on neighbours with multiple choice tests) tested the presence of a dog against ACE inhibitors, drugs designed to lower blood pressure, and in the presence of mental stress, the dog helped people to cope better than the drug (Allen et al 2001).

This doesn’t mean dogs are natural anti-depressants. Karen Allen (unfortunately, not this one) uses a great phrase to describe how we view dogs: nonevaluative social support.

Which is a scientific way of saying ‘dogs are awesome because they don’t judge me when I’m eating Nutella out of a jar’. As an aside, I’ve heard some people complain that cats are more likely to judge than dogs, but I’ll point out cats have this weird fascination with accompanying you to the toilet, and like to make eye contact with anyone in the vicinity while they themselves are defecating, and so I’ve never felt too judged by any of my cats.

Don’t go to down the road of thinking that pets, or dogs, can ‘cure’ depression. But what they can do is alleviate stressful states (Wilson, 1991).

Pets and the Vulnerable

I have this belief that a child should have a pet. It’s probably one of my strongest child-rearing beliefs (apart from the whole ‘feed them, love them, clothe them’ idea). But I also believe that the elderly should have pets too.

My stepmother recently passed a significant birthday (I hasten to point out she’s not elderly). Her and my dad’s beautiful dog Rosa is entering old age however. At the significant birthday we talked about retirement and I pointed out that after Rosa passed, they’d have to get a new dog at retirement. I couldn’t imagine them filling their days without a dog, for all there will be a long period of grieving after Rosa’s death.

My dad tells a story about his family. He, his sister and his mother conspire to get their dad a new dog after the old one dies. My Grandpa insists he doesn’t want a dog, can’t stand the thought of another dog, that their old dog was the only one for him. Newly retired, he sits in his living room and sulks.

My dad, my aunt and my grandmother go to a breeder who has some highland terrier puppies. They select a tiny white ball of fluff and take him home. They open the door to the living room and send the puppy through, waiting in the hallway for the reaction.

The puppy’s name was Angus, and he is the first dog I remember. He was my grandpa’s companion through my grandmother’s death, and helped me and grandpa chase flies with the hoover.

My Grandpa and his terrier Angus on the shores of Loch Lomond

This is the essence of non-evaluative social support. When there are bad times, or particular stresses, they somehow help us cope. Elderly people require more social support, this manifests in reports of feeling lonely, of multiple visits to the doctors, etc. However elderly people with pets report visiting the doctor less often (Siegel, 1990, Knight and Edwards, 2008). And given the physiological changes that Allen recorded, I’m happy to assign this difference to the act of owning pets (as opposed to pet owners being less likely to visit the doctor because of some internal difference), but it should be pointed out that there are lifestyle benefits to pet owning.

But one of my absolute favourite papers about the benefits of pets to vulnerable people (yes, I have a favourite), is one by Kaminski et al (2002) [someone hosts a pdf here].

What’s more vulnerable than a hospitalised child? It’s a horrible thought. We have all sorts of therapies to help children adjust to being in hospital, and these include pet therapy. In this simple little study, the authors asked kids to rate their emotions before and after a play therapy session and before and after a pet therapy session. Pet therapy had a bigger effect on their positive interactions than play therapy did. Pets made sick kids feel good, and it wasn’t even their pet.

We Know The Effect, What’s the Reason?

This is the kind of scientific question I love – we see a nice measurable effect, but the why of the question is something intangible. It’s not a ‘real’, ‘quantifiable’ thing, and I think this is why I love animal personality. I love the difficulty of wrestling with non-linear qualities and multidimensional space. No one tell my old maths teacher.

Archer (1997) [a pdf here] wonders ‘why’ people love their pets. I love the part of this paper that talks about how often people show such an attachment to their pets that they do something ‘odd’, such as make the pet the best man at a wedding, fight for legal custody, etc. He talks about the commonly held idea that people own pets to make up for a deficiency in their human relations. If you can’t make real friends you go out and become a cat lady. (Here I’ll point out I’m currently considering getting a cat of my own). Ultimately Archer dismisses this, in part because in Western society we are very influenced by a particular line of thought which gives humans “ dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26), and in part because many studies show that pet-owning correlates with a lot of personality traits we consider desirable in our society.

In the end Archer is a proponent of the social parasite theory and says these advantages are not enough to provide an advantage to human survival. I’m not sure I agree, but that’s a topic of another post. The point is that whatever the mechanism, people feel a very strong attachment, undeniably love, to an entity which does not judge or present them with the kind of social contract that we engage in with other humans.

Back to the Sister . . .

I think my sister is doing fine. I hope she continues to do well. Do I think that cat would ‘fix’ her? No, not at all. But I do appreciate the phrase ‘unconditional love’. This next statement I have no reference for, but I think you’ll see it for what it is . . .

In films, tv shows and stories, there’s often a moment where somebody with little else to value in their life has their precious pet taken from them. We’ve named a trope for this effect: ‘kick the dog’. Who didn’t cry the first time they watched Kes? We know this feeling of love for our pets so well that when someone hurts a pet, we know it is immediate short-hand for ‘this person is so evil they have removed the last remnant of support from a person’s life’.

I don’t recommend dogs to combat the black dog in general, but I do think there’s something to be said to coming home to a pair of brown eyes.

Edited to add:

I thought I’d link to some depression resources for anyone in need of support. And I want to point out I sought my little sister’s permission to share her story. If you are feeling depressed, I really hope you find the support you need. xxx

NHS Depression Support Groups

Samaritans

AACAP Depression Resource

Hyperbole and a Half – Not a resource but a truly insightful look into what it feels like to be depressed.

Of Denmark, Zoos and Lions

March 31, 2014 Jilly1 Comment

Lately I’ve had a song from the TV series ‘Nashville’ stuck in my head – titled I Just Can’t Get it Right.

Copenhagen Zoo was back in the news last week for another culling. The Guardian and the Independent report on the story.

What’s happened this time?

Copenhagen Zoo is receiving a new male lion.

That seems cool, so why are they back in the news? Are they feeding more giraffes to the lions?

Um. No. They’ve euthanised two older lions and two younger lions to make room for him.

You’re kidding.

Well the zoo have helpfully said they’re not going to have live dissections of these lions, because they don’t always publicly dissect animals.

Seriously though, the Guardian reports that the zoo’s scientific director received death threats after the Marius story went viral. I wonder how hard the journalists had to search for the next story, and how the scientific director is feeling this week.

There is a solid, scientific motive behind this culling, and it’s much the same as it was last time around. The zoo highly prizes natural behaviours.

In the wild, lions live in harem structures called prides. We’ve all seen the Lion King. Typically one or two related males will guard a group of females (the females tend to be related to one another, mothers, daughters, sisters). When the cubs are born the pride takes care of them. When the male cubs mature they’re chased from the pride.

Two brothers might then wander the Savannah until they find a pride with an old male lion guarding it. With all the strength and vigour of youth they oust the old lion and set up their own pride. The quickest way to do this is for them to kill all the cubs and bring the lionesses back into oestrus. This means the lionesses waste no time on producing cubs that related to the male protecting their pride. And so the circle of life continues.

Copenhagen Zoo euthanised their two old lions and their two cubs because this would mimic what happens in the wild.

I spoke about Copenhagen Zoo during the Marius scandal and I mentioned that I don’t entirely agree with this ‘natural behaviour’ approach. Let me explain again:

Natural behaviours are a good thing – one of the Five Freedoms relates to the Freedom to Perform Natural Behaviours.

But natural behaviours do not show an ethical standpoint. Aggression is natural. Dying is natural. Stress is natural. When using this freedom to assess the welfare of captive animals, we mean that the animal’s behavioural repertoire, all the behaviours it is capable of performing, should not be artificially restricted. For example, keeping a pig in a farrowing crate that prevents her from turning over is severely restricting her natural mothering behaviours.

This new male who is coming to Copenhagen Zoo does not have to fight the two old males for his pride. In the wild, he can’t simply come in and have the humans do all the work for him. Vice versa, the two old males who have been euthanised have not had the chance to fight for their survival. They did not have the opportunity to display their aggression to newcomer males.

It’s obvious why the zoo did not allow these natural behaviours to occur. A fight between three male lions would have caused great suffering to the animals. The aggression and the fight would have induced pain and stress and resulted, most likely, in a slow death for the losing animals. The zoo has accepted it has a duty of care over the animals, and so will not allow the fight to occur.

The zoo inherently compromises its natural behaviour ethos by selecting what animals live and die.

The moment you take responsibility for the life and death of an animal, you have a duty to make sure it has a good life and dies well.

Now I want to emphasise that I do not have a problem with animal euthanasia. It’s a ‘good’ death. I use animal products every day, therefore I cannot be opposed to the ending of a healthy animal’s life for human benefit. I have a problem with how the zoo chooses to justify this euthanasia. I think the zoo is trying to wear two hats at once, and it’s not an attractive look.

If the zoo’s primary focus is conservation, it should act as a rehabilitation centre. The public are not allowed in. You don’t overstock on animals which are not going to contribute to the conservation effort. You don’t stock many high profile, popular species like lions and giraffes. You have pens which are designed wholly for natural behaviours, not for viewing purposes.

If the zoo is a business which seeks to educate and inspire people about animals, it must accept that the very practice of keeping animals for this purpose innately compromises natural behaviours. The animals are not being kept for their good but for ours, and therefore we owe them a very good life indeed.

The zoo would probably respond that it is both of these scenarios. That is would be impossible to work in conservation without the money-making business side of the enterprise. I don’t really agree.

Many of the pictures used on this blog are ones I’ve taken at Edinburgh Zoo. I use that zoo for teaching. I use that zoo for entertainment. I think it’s a good zoo. But it is still a zoo and I still accept, every time I cross those gates, that my demand to use these animals compromises their welfare.

It’s a relatively small compromise. Probably better than the welfare compromise I ask of the chickens I eat. But it still exists.

Cull the surplus, it’s better than a slow death. But don’t try to fool yourself into thinking its for any other reason than because they’re no longer satisfying a human need.

Grooming

March 24, 2014 JillyLeave a comment

Last week the drains in my flat were badly blocked. On Friday night I came home to the plumber triumphantly climbing out from underneath the bathtub, looking distinctly harrowed and proclaiming that he’d spent two hours sandwiched between my bath and the toilet, fixing the problem. I adore my plumber. Having a shower in my own flat, without the water lapping at my ankles, was a truly glorious feeling.

It got me thinking about personal grooming and fastidiousness, particularly in our domestic pets:

Head-directed self grooming, thank you Tumblr!

Eckstein and Hart, in 2000, decided to investigate exactly how cats clean themselves. It’s probably more remarkable that for such an adorable behaviour, they were one of the first to sit down and categorise it. When they weren’t sleeping, cats spent 8% of their day grooming. Which means they spent approximately an hour each day grooming. My long showers, in comparison, take less than half the time, and there’s a lot more of me to wash. And they spend a lot of time grooming their head and face.

This head-focussed grooming can lead to momentary lapses of concentration like this:

For much of my life I had a beautiful little Tuxedo cat named Posie. Posie was a delicate flower in the wasteland and would groom herself obsessively, with all her paws neatly tucked beneath her body, one white pawed leg raised to anoint the back of her ears. She rarely got distracted mid session and would sometimes seem preoccupied with grooming the little black smudge on an otherwise white paw. In fact she liked grooming so much that it became a problem when she developed arthritis. Her redirected grooming to her stomach resulted in a bald patch which always grew worse in winter.

Posie couldn't abide wet paws — Posie couldn’t abide wet paws

By contrast, mum’s new cat, a little black and white girl, has only the vaguest notion that she should groom herself. She sits with legs splayed, hind leg pointing in the air, a slightly confused expression on her face as she gets distracted by somebody walking across the room. She even explored a cow pat once, though she came home quickly after and was appreciative of being bathed:

Post cowpat exploration, quite content with her cuddles

Over half of cats which live together will frequently groom one another (Voith and Borchelt, 1986). Mutual grooming, or allogrooming, as I prefer to call it, is a behaviour which builds social bonds. Why is this? Well imagine yourself a cat, being groomed by another cat. You may be held down by the groomer, you’re in close contact with the groomer’s teeth and claws, all the pointy bits that could hurt you. And yet the groomer is expending energy on your behalf. You would groom yourself if you weren’t being groomed. It’s a nice thing to do for someone.

Grooming is also a behaviour which reassures cats. Cats which spend time in stressful situations, such as a high density cat shelter, will spent more time grooming themselves than usual (Ng Yi Hui, 2011). This can lead to bald patches, like what happened to Posie, even in otherwise happy cats. Excessive grooming in any animal is a concerning sign.

Last week I was staring at a datasheet, trying to understand why a farm had gone missing between two questions in a survey. I was reclining back in my office chair and I had pulled my ponytail high up above my head. A colleague walked past and tugged on it, asking if I was stressed. We know intuitively that when we play with our own hair, we’re probably stressed by something. I have my own distinctive stereotypy when I’m feeling under pressure. I continually run my hand through my hair until I’ve pulled out all the knots, and then I pull it all around one side and brush the ends against my hand. And yet in the playground, I’m sure we’ve all seen lines of little girls braiding one another’s hair. Do boys have their own version of this allogrooming? But I’m getting off topic . . .

So that’s cats – let’s turn to their natural enemy: the dog. Any pet owner knows that dogs are not quite so fastidious as their feline friends. Instead they would much rather anoint themselves with fox poo (or badger poo – always preferable in my dogs’ experience, for the extra muskiness component), and they never understand why we don’t want to rub our shoulder blades all over such a wonderful smell.

Dogs often show us a particular kind of allogrooming, affiliative licking, particularly directed to the mouth which for dogs is a sign of “I love you and respect you” and for us is more a token of disgust. There’s some evidence to suggest that stroking dogs produces a physiological change in us (Charnetski et al 2004) , but interestingly, dogs’ heart rates also drop while they’re being stroked (McGreevy et al 2012), possibly showing a reduction in stress. Mutual grooming works both ways it seems.

Grooming serves a multitude of functions. For cats, it keeps them from smelling too much, from giving themselves away to their prey. Dogs take the opposite tact, hiding their smell behind something stronger and marking their own smell on their territory. And for group living animals, grooming one another is a sign of relaxation, peace and comfort with one another. I’m not sure if this is what cats are thinking when they’re so determined to come in the shower with you, but as someone who has her shower back, all I can say is that a little self-grooming is blissful.

More Science Communication from VoYS

March 20, 2014 JillyLeave a comment

Voice of Young Science, who were instrumental in prompting me to start Fluffy Sciences, ran another one of their excellent Science Communication workshops next week.

Check out Chemist By Choice’s write up of the event. If you’re a young scientist I really recommend you keep up with VoYS and their Standing Up For Science Media workshops. Very useful stuff!