Category: Fluffy Friday

Naughty and Nice

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

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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.

Productive Wastage

I’m often accused of being productive, which is not how I think of myself. Instead, I spend time on things I never think will be finished . . .

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I’m often accused of being productive which I find hysterical because I have had to dedicate a whole cupboard to my unfinished crafting projects and my list of ‘started’ papers is longer than my list of actual finished ones, never mind just the published ones.

Some colleagues and I were discussing productivity on Friday and one of my accusers said she’d read that the key to productivity was focussing on the process and not the end product. When I describe my work process I often say that I hate ‘kidding myself’. If I’m not going to do the thing that I’m supposed to do I don’t sit staring at it, instead I do something else. For example, my NSS package happened when I was supposed to be addressing some reviewers’ comments for our assessment paper. And on Friday, when I was supposed to be addressing those comments again, I went home and played Assassin’s Creed because it had had been a bit of a difficult week and the freedom to say “bugger it” is one of academia’s greatest perks. (Never underestimate the power of ‘bugger it’ when talking about productivity). I don’t kid myself about the work I’m doing.

I have never considered my ‘don’t kid yourself’ motto in terms of ‘process’, but it might actually be a more useful way to conceptualise it. I like exploring different processes. I usually have a little chunk of something I’ve tried before – you want to know about ‘play’? Well one Monday afternoon I randomly did a lit review for the beginning of a paper, here it is. You’d like to know how to make an R Package, well one week I wrote a data package for fun. While there is an end product for these things, I don’t necessarily bother with them.

One of the greatest examples of this is NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month takes place in November each year and encourages everyone to write a 50,000 word novel. I love NaNoWrimo and have taken part several times, and finished only once. NaNoWriMo does not care about the final product. A common solution to writer’s block is to have ninja’s jump through the window, which will take at least ten pages to resolve before you have to get back to wherever you were doing. To me, this is the ultimate test of process.

I’ve been idly playing with my own idea for 2018 and I decided to announce the name with this blog post – I’ll be writing “Love in the Time of Elk Cloner” this year, and I probably won’t finish, given that November has a lot of marking for me, but that’s not the point. The point is that I will work on those skills, and exercise my creative muscles, and next time someone needs something a bit left-field written, I’ll be ready.


So, academics and technical folks – this is my recommendation for being productive like me – waste more time on stuff that won’t be finished, especially ridiculous novels with barely thought out premises. If you want to give it a shot, you can start NaNoWriMo with me this year. Follow me over there.

Jill Goes Back to the Chalet School

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It was my birthday recently, and one of my friends gave me an old copy of The Chalet School. It’s one of the best presents I’ve ever been given. I’ve been hunting for the Chalet School books for years, but they’re very difficult to find and seem to be out of print at the moment.

For the uninitiated, the Chalet School series was written by Elinor M Brent-Dyer in the 1920s. It is probably a trope codifier for the ‘boarding school’ genre in English fiction. There are 58 books in the series and I reckon in my childhood I read a good 50 of them. The books serve as morality tales, preaching obedience and diligence to the girls, while recognising that the most fun girls still have character flaws. Jo, one of the great heroes, frequently is described as dishevelled and romantically dreaming of Napoleon’s conquests.

When I was little, I could devour two or three of these books in a week, so I imagine there was a period of about a year when I was obsessed with them. I remember constructing elaborate fantasies in my head about being sent to the Chalet School where I could somehow become Jo, and my two younger sisters would also be sent to the Chalet School and they would cause trouble and I would have to rescue them, while nearby a handsome Doctor would be waiting for me to turn of legal marriageable age. I also remember going through a period of putting brushes in peoples’ beds and being deeply disappointed by my mum’s utter lack of reaction (an excellent example of negative punishment).

I was aware that the Chalet School existed in another time. After all, it takes ten books to get to the second world war which lasts another five books in itself. But reading the book as an adult, there were a few things that jumped out to me. Firstly, I vividly remembered the odd feeling I had when Simone and Jo interacted and I recognise now that I identified their relationship as romantic long before I identified myself as bi. Secondly, the quality of the German in the book is appalling. Thirdly, the imperialistic tone of the book is really quite troubling at times even if you do try to remind yourself it was written in 1925, the same time as The Great Gatsby and Mein Kampf.

But the fourth thing . . . I think we could learn a little about curriculum design from the Chalet School. Re-reading the book, not just as an adult, but as an educator, was fascinating. I was never one to play ‘teacher’ as a kid (my fantasies were more about letting both my little sisters nearly drown in the ice-covered lakes of the Tyrol before deigning to rescue them in the nick of time so I could be lauded by a much older Doctor), so it’s interesting now to note how often the Chalet’s School’s curriculum is referenced. The girls are very much trained to be good wives, with needlework and mending forming a decent chunk of the timetable. They also must be fluent in three languages and possess good numeracy skills (which many of the heroes struggle with).

I’m not advocating a return to home-making skills in our higher curriculum, but in both the #UoELTConf18 and VetEd18 we had discussions about how much higher education should encourage community spirit and social responsibility. There was considerable debate in fact about to what extent it’s the responsibility of universities to do this. Many of my friends and family work in all stages of teaching and I happen to know that (in Scotland at least) there is a focus on community in early years education, so I’m not trying to pass this responsibility on.

In some ways, I wonder if we come at this from the wrong perspective. Perhaps what we’re really asking for is authentic assessment. In my elaborate self-insert fantasies where a handsome doctor was waiting in the wings for me to turn 18, I was being assessed on how good I’d be as a wife. That assessment is unique to each individual pairing, and has unique criteria. I really like Guliker’s et al (2004) framework for thinking about authentic assessment. They suggest that authenticity comes from:

  • Task
    • i.e. a problem which will occur in practice
  • Physical context
    • i.e. in a space that will be equivalent to the space that you’ll be in in practice
  • Social context
    • i.e. reflecting the social structure you will be in in practice
  • Assessment form
    • i.e. the output of the assessment has a relevance or parallel in the real world
  • Assessment criteria
    • i.e. the things you mark are relevant to how that task will be assessed in the real world.

 

If we stay with the Chalet School a little longer, the tall Doctor waiting in the wings will presumably want me to remain calm under pressure around patients (i.e. rescue my drowning hypothermic sisters), in an unsupervised environment (The Austrian mountains), while not pointing out any of my working class roots (jolly good), and provide continued life for my sisters while keeping up appearances the whole time.

I think that when we wring our hands over whether our students demonstrate social responsibility and community spirit, we’re actually bemoaning how our programme design and assessment don’t translate to what the real world values. Unlike the Chalet School, we don’t want to produce good spouses in higher education, but we do want to produce good citizens. And therefore we need to make space in our curriculum and our assessments to reflect that importance.

And if anyone spots any other Chalet School books int he charity shops . . . . do let me know.

Welcome to the new Fluffy Sciences!

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Hello folks and welcome to the new-look (and nicer domain-name) Fluffy Sciences!

At present, the old blog is still happily present within the old domain, so all your links will still work. I’ve spent the last two years working in veterinary education research, and I’ve picked up a new phrase to describe myself ‘discipline based educational researcher’. I like it a lot, and I’ve started using it more and more, so this seems like a nice opportunity to cleanly move between the old Fluffy Sciences and the new.

(And yes, I hope this means a return to more frequent blogging . . .)

 

Adieu

Seven PhDs

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So a few days ago I stumbled across Josh Raclaw’s tweet:

And this is the result:
Continue reading “Seven PhDs” →

Reasons Why Twister Is The Most Pro-Science Blockbuster

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Twister is one of my top five films of all time. If it’s not in yours you need to rethink your priorities. Now it’s not necessarily the most scientifically accurate movie of all time, but I think it’s one the most positive depictions of science, and one of the best depictions of science community I’ve ever seen.

Here are the main points of my thesis:

  • The research group fights about what music they listen to when they drive, with one group favouring showtunes and the other favouring rock.
  • Dustin (Seymour Hopkins‘ character) is the the token “good at emotions” character, always rushing to make sure everyone’s okay
  • There are (repeated) arguments about how to store equipment
  • There is one who is always on the phone fixing problems (Jami Gertz’s character). Every research group has one of these people.
  • Someone in the team has a family member really good at cooking and the whole team adopts them.
  • There’s a lot of bitterness about that one person who went after the money instead of the science.
  • Nobody has a particularly good work-life balance.
  • No one can decide whose responsibility it is to write up the papers.

 

And to conclude, the true reason Twister is the best depiction of science culture ever:

Academics Supporting Academics

How can we support each other in science?

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If you hang out in the academic circles of Twitter or the blogosphere[1] you’ll find many frightening stories about the cutthroat and ruthless nature of the world’s self-appointed thinkers. Bullying in academia has its own Wiki page (don’t be too shocked, academia is also an industry that hosts regular edit-a-thons of Wikipedia), and is frequently the topic of thinkpieces in your favourite left-leaning media (again, don’t be too surprised, we’re also an industry that writes for a living).

Bullying in academia is a problem, and early career researchers are frequently left unsupported. But this is not the only story. I’ve heard tales from my own university that make my skin crawl, but I think it’s equally important to highlight when things work well. I have always been incredibly lucky to work in supportive teams, and I’d like to think I help to support my colleagues, so if you want to change the culture of your academic workplace, here are the things that work for me:

1. Ask for help

SRUC recently hosted Temple Grandin for a series of talks, and I was invited to talk about my research as part of an early career day. I’m not the kind of person who gets nervous about talking, but presenting your research, that you’ve just written a book on, to one of science’s biggest characters is not a normal kind of talk.

I asked for help.

My colleague, Jess Martin, pictured to my left in this Tweet, sat with me as we flicked through my slides. She gave me some brilliant advice on my slides, and then she gave me some tips for coping with nerves during presentations. I think it’s important to point out that these are skills I have, I win competitions (and book deals) on these skills, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need help sometimes. As academics we like to  believe we are experts, that we have irreplaceable skills. If we don’t believe this then everyone is our competition . . .

Here’s the thing, every woman in that photo could do my job better than me if they put their mind to it. We are a strong team, not when we scrabble for funding scraps, but when we sit down together to see where we can learn from one another.

 

2. Acknowledge your colleagues

She won’t thank me but I want to call Jess out specifically here. Jess is one of these people who will always have time to help you if you ask for it. Jess also uses peoples names.

In a meeting, when Jess wants to echo someone’s idea she says “Jill’s point was a good one…”. I’ve started trying to do the same. “I agree with Bob”, “I missed what Alice said, can you say it again?”

I often find myself in meetings where there is a spread of paygrades around the table. You and your fellow early career researchers will not be on the radar until you all start speaking about your achievements. Don’t push your own agenda at the expense of others. When Bob makes a good point, tell people it was Bob’s idea.

 

3. Think about wellbeing

I have another set of colleagues, Kirsty Hughes, Sharon Boyd and Jessie Paterson, who are very engaged with workplace wellbeing. They organise various sessions to get us thinking about things other than work. I’m going to be talking about video games for my team later this month. They’re not mandatory, but they’re there. Just before Christmas my boss was teasing me for me affection for glitter as we made some Christmas cards, and then we pondered our approach to one of my current projects.

Good bosses are very important here, and another place where I’ve always been incredibly fortunate. But even if you don’t have a supportive boss, think about how you and your colleagues interact. Working in Scotland my colleagues and I are big fans of the pub debrief, but there’s plenty to be said for walk-and-talks out in nature, for crafting sessions and opportunities to explore hobbies.

Hobbies teach skills you can bring into the workplace, my photography and videogaming are both things I can use in my role, but that’s not the real gain here. Work shouldn’t make you sick. It’s as simple as that.

 

4. Go home!

Don’t be part of the culture that normalises sleeping under your desk. Go home at a reasonable time. If you are sending an email to a colleague and you see their out of office is on, it’s very easy to delay an email so it gets sent when they’re back, and it takes very little extra effort on your part. Turn off email notifications on your phone, turn off your inbox’s ability to pop up every time a new email hits your inbox. If you have a short question why not visit your colleague’s office, instead of sending an email?

Don’t fall into the trap of saying “this is how it was for me, this is how it’ll be for my students”. I hope the future generation has a better life than ours.

 

5. Reflect on feedback

This is the one I find most challenging. I like to think of myself as amazing at all times, but I’m not. I do things wrong, I lack several skills, I have a long way to go. I found my Higher Education Academy application to be a revelation in this sense. I still struggle to take feedback on board, but I like to think I’m getting there.

Trying to hear feedback as about the work, and not about me, is not easy. On the whole academics are good at things and don’t like failing, but our work is always about failing. You’re never going to answer that question perfectly, you’re never going to be perfect. Let yourself be messy, let yourself fail, give yourself space to grow. How else will you know when you need to go to your colleagues for help, or when it’s time to stop bashing your head off the keyboard and go for a walk?

Self-reflection isn’t easy, but there needs to be a lot more of it in science.

FluffySciences in 2016

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So it’s not quite Friday, but I think it’s time to post the last FluffyFriday of 2016 anyway!

2016 was a big year for me, professionally speaking.
First and foremost, 2016 was the year I wrote my book: Animal Personalities. It’s not 100% finished yet, but the first draft was completely laid out by the end of November. I now have five months with which to edit that into some semblance of sense, but I’ve definitely been enjoying getting my evenings back this December.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I jumped disciplines when I became a Veterinary Education Researcher. As intimidating as this might have been, the last six months have been amazing fun and very fulfilling. The challenges of education research are gripping and I have been loving the opportunity to dig into concepts and methodologies that are new to me in a way that I just didn’t have the time to do when I was splitting my time between MSc coordinating and research.

And most recently, although I’m no longer spending the majority of my time teaching I was encouraged by Edinburgh to apply for my Higher Education Award fellowship. I’ve surprised myself at just how proud I am of this achievement. It’s lovely being able to point to something that says your teaching is recognised, especially given how important its become to me. I also found the process incredibly rewarding, and fully intend to blog a little bit about it in the coming months (if the book doesn’t get in the way).

With all these little things bubbling away in the background it’s not surprising that this poor little blog has been somewhat neglected. 2016 was our poorest performing year with ‘only’ 1600 odd visitors in comparison to 2015’s 2000 visitors and 2014’s nearly 3000 visitors. People stumble onto the blog searching for ‘BCG Scar’ (you folks are looking for Badger Fortnight) and ‘danger of using punishment’ (you folks are looking for the discussion on Positive Punishment). One person also found us searching for ‘general science, dumb.com’. I hope you found what you were looking for, my friend. The most popular post this year was 2013’s Christmas post ‘Why Do We Care About Animal Welfare?’ with ‘I’m a Tetrachromat‘ coming in second. The most popular blog post from this year was ‘Purity, Application and Function: The Real Problem In Science‘ which I’m still quite proud of.

Finally – many people seem to be checking the Book Page for updates this year. I hope that by this time next year there’ll be something there for you to explore.

Have a lovely festive break if you’re having one, and FluffySciences wishes you all the best in 2017.

Ch-Ch-Changes

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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.

Chronicles of Athena – Lockout 2016

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There I was, happily trotting off to the cinema to see ‘Spotlight’, when I heard an almighty yowl behind me.

Edinburgh tenements have a common stairwell, colloquially known as the ‘close’, with an exterior door at the bottom. I was at the bottom of my close, two neighbours had just passed me on the way up, when Athena decided to make her unhappiness known. Oh dear, I thought to myself, while my neighbours gave me an odd look. Athena has always been vocal and does call out to me when she hears me speaking in the close, but I always have a sneaking worry about separation anxiety.

Nothing to be done now, I think, and keep on going. Three and a half hours later I return, and funnily enough I don’t hear Athena calling out to me at the usual spot (where I think she must know the sound of my step on the stair).

No, because Athena is sitting huddled on the doormat outside my flat’s front door. And when she sees me she howls again.

Poor little Athena slipped out right on my heels when I left for the cinema and spent the better part of four hours in the close feeling miserable. We’ve now fed her plenty of treats (and she’s been tweeting about the experience . . . somehow). All is well.

But if Athena had been a different type of cat, one who’d decided to explore further, or was less sure of the close that she’s explored before, who knows what would have happened? Thankfully, she’s microchipped. It’s so important for responsible pet ownership for your animals to be traceable.

If you’re in the UK the RSPCA has a guide here. And for the US, the AVMA has their guide here.

Speak to your vets about keeping your pets traceable, make sure your records are always up to date, and double check your doors on the way out. Or your cat tweeting threats of negligence might just be the least of your worries . . .

 

Sorry Athena – will get right on that bacon for you.