Naughty and Nice

A small Christmas blog on the ethics of being overheard . . . he’s making a list, he’s checking it twice . . .

Amazon have put all five seasons of Person of Interest on Prime. Person of Interest is an amazing exploration of what it might cost humanity to create artificial intelligence, and its beautifully prescient given Amazon’s recent Alexa data breach where a user was able to access another user’s recordings.

In my book (which if you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift, do check it out) I talk about how we might end up studying personality through artificial intelligence, and the ethics of how we might consider this data use.

I’m delighted with my Christmas present of Person of Interest. I cry the whole way through this show. It is amazing. But I also have an Alexa sitting in my house, and a Google phone. Occasionally my phone flashes its screen, saying “I didn’t recognise your voice”, much like Athena’s ears prick when she’s snoozing and hears me get to my feet. Do I need to listen for you right now?

On the other hand, in 2018 I’ve also had to balance the issue of not having ethics committee permission to share sensitive data and the challenges that has caused for making my research open and reproducible. I am proud particularly of this repository which will be elaborated on in a publication next year – how we can be reproducible when we’re dealing with data that should be confidential. But yes, privacy is a challenge.

And it’s a very strange conversation to have in December. He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake . . .

Recently, I was asked how old I was when I understood about Santa. It actually ties in to my first experience with religion. I was raised without any religion whatsoever, and when I got to school I was introduced to this whole new concept. That my own mind and actions were not my own private space, that someone or something might be watching. I made a deal with this ‘God’ (who I pictured as Danny Devito in a toga, I do not know why). If I was very good, he would reward me with a hotdog on Friday at lunch time. As one of the Mac kids, I was always at the middle of the lunch queue and the hot dogs were always gone. So I was very, very good for a whole week. I did the praying. I was kind. And on Friday  . . . there was no hot dog.

The only other experience I had with religion was one of my grandfathers who had cryptically said “Any God who doesn’t want me isn’t a God I want to believe in”, and at the age of 5 I sanguinely accepted this logic, and decided the lack of hot dog meant God had no interest in my soul. That Christmas I tried this logic again, and created my perfect toy (a My Little Pony toy of my favourite character – except there would be movable bits). Santa did not come through.

We teach morality to children with the idea of oversight. Perhaps not entirely, but ‘being watched’ is a large component of how we learn our own moral frameworks. The Good Place has made an excellent TV show exploring the concept of being constantly observed (and measured). It’s probably not a coincidence that we’re interested in these stories right now. But it’s also not a coincidence that I got thinking about this after realising I knew more than I wanted to about my new neighbours.

Ultimately I think data collection and analysis is an organic process, and it’s very hard to draw a line over ‘good data collection and analysis’ and ‘bad data collection and analysis’. Amazon absolutely should not be sending clips of audio to a random stranger. But should I hear random snippets from my neighbours’ lives? How often should we accept being ‘overheard’ as a price of being digital neighbours?

I don’t have an answer for this – or even a reason to blog about it on Christmas eve. I just think it’s a very interesting question.

Gie Us a Grant?

I’ve just submitted a little grant proposal! (Everyone go ‘woo!’)

One of the things I talked about in the grant proposal was my outreach activities. I like to think of my science as quite transparent. But I am definitely less good at talking about the grant writing part of science.

Why is this? Well firstly, grant writing involves asking for money, and that’s not a terribly pleasant activity for many of us. In addition, there are often privacy concerns. Funders might not want to disclose how much money they award versus how much they were asked for. Projects of a sensitive nature (which this one might be) also require careful thought before a science blogger starts talking about the 100 grand bid they just put in.

Still, most research funding comes from public money, so all parties have a responsibility to talk about finances, and how we spend that money responsibly.

For my part, this grant is asking for some of my time, some travel costs, and some research costs. Altogether, this amounts to less than £50,000. To me this is a small sum for a research project, and I’m interested to see if there’s any feedback on the costings, either from the grant, or from you guys.

Money in academia is a hot topic right now – so I want to do my part for making this more understandable. If this gets funded, and the funders agree, I’d love to do a full breakdown of how I came to that total. And then you guys would be able to judge for yourselves whether it was money well spent . . .

Ch-Ch-Changes

There are more changes afoot at FluffySciences! Because after six very happy years with SRUC it’s time for me to move on …

 

Yes today was, technically, my last working day at SRUC. On Monday I start a new role as a research fellow in veterinary education at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies.

I’m really excited to be starting this new role. It’s a group I know well and whose work I’ve often admired, so it’s a delight to be working with them more closely. And it’s a subject I’ve been interested in for some time. But of course it’s sad to be leaving SRUC and my lovely colleagues. While we’ll still work together it’s a strange thing to be leaving a group who I’ve been working with for longer than I was in high school!

You hear a lot of horror stories as a PhD student about unsupportive and unhelpful groups. I feel like I owe it to everyone to talk about the other side of the coin. When you’re lucky enough to work with a supportive group they can help you achieve so much. They listened to me ramble about definitions of animal personality for years and their feedback was always honest and constructive. They gave me opportunities to work on MOOCs and learning objects and so many interesting little bits and pieces of research. And of course they took me to amazing conferences all around the world and bought me beer and cups of tea and cakes whenever we were all out together.

So it has been a pleasure and a privilege, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next chapter of my research career brings. FluffySciences will continue, probably with a little bit of a shift in focus, but it will remain a blog obsessed with proving that even the soft, fluffy sciences like educational science are thorough and evidence based. Keep an eye out for my application to the Higher Education Academy Fellowships, I’ll be working through Edinburgh’s programme to get there and I’ll mirror all the self-reflective work as examples on here. And of course the book will still be under development.

Goodbye, SRUC, I will always be grateful.