Materia (www.material.nl)

This material library contained hundreds of samples of materials constructed from a huge variety of things, ranging from coconut tiles and parchment made of goat and reindeer skin toluminous fabrics embedded with fibre-optics, antibacterial glass and sound-insulating aluminum foam:

My second favourit part of the night was chatting with Tim Grant from Life Cycle Strategies on the Eco Innovators stand (still there as part of the Design Made Trade exhibition), who run life-cycle assessments on the impacts of products and services.  I am really annoyed I can remember the name of this thing:

which monitors the energy consumption of a whole room, for example, and also allows you to turn off all your powerpoints just using one switch.  I hope I win the one they’re giving away on their stand.

More iphone-grade photos of the night here

taken on a Sunday stroll on the Kuitpo Forest Onkeeta Trail

Taken on an autumn walk through Kuitpo Forest about a month ago.  Some googling tells me this is probably Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, which is not native to South Australia, but is often found in introduced conifer plantations (such as Kuitpo).

More fun(gi) in the forest photos here.

Split end of a human hair from Wellcome Images collection

Is it a cadbury flake?  Is it a twig? No, but it pretty much reflects the state of my hair at the moment.  But I did come across something cool- ever wanted to get a scannening electron microscope (SEM) image of things you’ve got lying around the house…maybe some vinyl records or some split ends from your hairbrush?  There’s a company in the states that will let you send in your sample and they’ll scan it and put the images up online for you.  So far they’ve had stuff like crayons, pennys and candy, and I’m trying to think what I’d send through.  I’d love to see what the leaf blades of my new venus fly trap look like.

Day 3 of the conference was all about social meeja.

The first plenary included Casey Whitelaw from Google to explain why you really WOULD use Google Wave. @sangtronic and I got a starring role in that we got there early and had existing google wave accounts which we both hadn’t really figured out what to do with yet, but at least we could demo in real-time how it all worked. Conference of the future has arrived!

At this point I decided to stop taking my notes in boring old word format, and just start typing them into a new wave. I’ve made it public, so if you have a google wave account you should be able to search for it using the #asc2010 tag. If you don’t have an account but would like an invite (google wave is still in a testing mode where you need to be invited) then leave a comment or DM me on twittter (@lisushi). I don’t know how useful this will be as a resource, and I might go in on the weekend to clean up my notes a bit and make it more user friendly, but I figure that I was taking them anyway, so I might as well take them and make them available.

So rather than post everything up here, i’ll leave that as your homework assignment- try and find my notes on wave (if you’re interested) and let me know if it’s useful.

All in all, I really enjoyed the conference, especially the meeting everyone part.  The twitter chatter was great, and the beer drinking and real chatter was even greater.  Thanks to everyone who was there!

ps- I’ll leave you with a nice wordle of all the twitter posts put together by @diffn.

Session 1 on Day 2 Kicked off with Will Steffen speaking on ‘communicating science in a political minefield’.  Lots of convincing evidence that the science is in, warming is happening, etc etc.  So why are we still having this ‘debate’?  Because the issue is beyond one of just science communication.  The implications of climate change are pervasive and profound, a transformation of the way we live- the implications reach way beyond the science.  So what should we do to transform the debate? Will left us with two suggestions:

1-      Continue to communicate  the best climate science we can

2-      Work on rebuilding trust and credibitliy.

The next couple of sessions in the Hot air symposium dealt with communicating issues on climate change to urban vs rural audiences.  The first idea I plan on stealing incorporating into my programs is the idea of using people in the community that are already ‘switched on’.  Peta Ashworth from CSIRO spoke about her Energymark project, using people in the community who are already engaged to lead discussions- so that instead of attracting those sort of people to events/programs- you can get them to attract all their social networks-what a good idea!  It looks like they’re piloting the project in South Australia now so will investigate who’s involved there.

One of the things I found really useful was Leith Boully speaking on the rural engagement panel.  From the conf bio: Letih and her family have an irrigation and dryland farming and grazing property at Dirranbandi in Queensland. She has been involved in natural resource management (particularly water) at local, State and National levels for about 20 years.  Leith thinks that in many cases with farmers (eg in climate change and land management issues), it’s not the science that’s debate- it’s the policy responses.  Reason? Because rural people don’t have a voice, there is not enough community engagement and consultation.  Her advice for communicating science (particularly related to climate change) in rural areas:

• provide reliable info, that is relevant both geographically and temporally
• farmers need to be supported to make the changes that need to happen (ie, “it would be nice to not get bullocked by the media”)
• women are underutilised but influential resource in rural communities.
• identify trusted sources eg BOM.  Who in your organisation is trusted.  Don’t create new forums all the time, use existing channels.
• be relevant, do it on their terms.
• be willing to talk about unintended consequences.  Eg decreasing water use for irrigators can then lead to increased energy use.

The other two useful sessions of the day were the research streams on Tools for democracy and dialogue (which Kristin has blogged nicely about here) and evalutation.

The evaluation session was really useful, even though were were covering the same old (but still difficult and not well answered) questions- why are we doing this?  what are we trying to acheive?  how do we measure success?

Liese Coulter from CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship spoke about the difference between measuring output and measuring impact.  Using the analogy of the tachometer vs the speedometer, your output (webpages, media releases, govt briefings) can tell you about how much noise you’re making, but the impact actually tells you how far you travel the distance.  The Climate Adaptation flagship has very well defined ways they can tell if they are effective (making an impact) : when their output is included in policy document, quoted by others, used as a foundation for planning, made available as expert advice or integrated with other research.

Will Grant introducede the audience to the wonders of Google Trends, and how it can be used as a mapping tool, both by over time and by region, for finding out what kind of science-related information people are searching for (eg try looking at the trends of vaccine or bushfire over the past few years).

Melanie McKenzie finally touched on the cultural value of things like science centres/science comms activities.  There are benefits from participation, eg equipping people to engage in the conversations about science, but there are also intrinsic benefits to these things existing even if there is non-participation, and as a sci-com community, we are really bad at identifying or acknowledging these.  The value the public has of science communcation activities may be very different to the values that we have of our activities, echoing a point made earlier in the day (by I can’t remember who unfortunately) that mainly people want to have decision making abililty, not be ‘educated’ or have their opinions changed.

I agree with this, but wanted to know 1) how do we identify these values 2) how to we measure them?  Melanie replied that we can’t always measure them but at least acknowledge and try to articulate them.  The Arts are really good at this and have always had to do it, and how has science communication gotten away with it for so long! This got the discussion going nicely and a few of the points that stood out most for me were:

• Evaluation should not be reactive but ongoing, it should not just exist for justifying a program
• Using values to act as  a framework for setting priorities- before not always after
• Constant measuring allows constant adaptation- cycle and ongoing, not at the end.

Carol Oliver suggested that we should have a national survey on Australians attitudes to science, and that the ASC should have a role in that.  The session ended up with Rod Lambert reminding us that CPAS will soon be setting up SCERN, which I think is Science Communication Education Research Network, still to get up and running but I’ll post a link to it when I get some info.

There’s some interesting chatter through twitter tagged #asc2010 (thanks to @kristinalford, @cobismith, @willozap,  @geoffcrane, and all the others I’ve missed off here), and the official conference Ning will hopefully be a place to continue discussions after it all winds up on Wednesday evening.  Piccys of the fun and games can be seen on the Conference Flickr stream.

There’s already been a nice summary from Captain Skellet over on a Schooner of Science of the first day of the conference. I’ll add in a few of my thoughts/observations/random things I can assemble from my notes:

Session 1: Senator Kim Carr launching the Inspiring Australia: a national strategy for engaging with the sciences report.  While it does seem to make sense to launch the strategy at this meeting, I literally have not had time to read it yet, and it seems we’re missing a good opportunity to talk about the role we have as individuals in our own organisations and as ASC together in IMPLEMENTING any of the recommendations.  More on the report to come later I think once I’ve digested it.

Session 2: Challenges for science communication, featured the three big funding bodies on the panel- Warwick Anderson from NH&MRC, Margaret Sheil from ARC and Mike Whelan from CSIRO.  There seemed to be a bit of a push from the audience (which I’d agree with) to get the value of researchers participating in science communication/outreach programs rewarded and built into funding frameworks.  Warwick maintained that there IS obligation on NH&MRC funded projects to communicate outcomes- dissemination is built into the code of conduct (see section 4.3). But he did also say that the NH&MRC funds research NOT communication.  It was at this point I (and I’m sure many other people) were thinking ‘arghhh, but communication research outcomes and implications is part of the research process’.  Indeed, there are examples of funding bodies funding specific communication projects for researchers in the UK (or there used to be!  eg STFC Science in Society fellowships, Wellcome Trust People Awards).  None of the Australian funding bodies seemed interested in funding similar schemes.

Whether scientists have an obligation to take advocacy positions on the research they have generated (eg CSIRO scientists on climate change) produced some interesting comments from Mike Whelan.   He maintains that we should be careful of pushing scientists into areas where the science is not always the key issue.  Which I agree with, although there’s no reason that scientists can’t make comments on the science involved, and that they should be prepared to do so. For example, during the 2009 bushfire crisis, there was a lot of science to be done on the ground at the time, but people were also hungry for information (Lyndal from the AusSMC pointed out that they had more media inquiries during that week on that topic than they had in the past month), you do have to find people willing to make comment as things are happening, not waiting months and months for analysis to be made.

The rest of the day covered the future of science reporting (which weirdly only contained journalists from the print media), a session on quackery which didn’t really equip the audience with many useful strategies to actually deal with woo, and a session from Carol Oliver on evaluation which i’ll talk about more in my next post I think.

I then got to go and play in Questacon at the Perception Deception exhibition (which did contain my favourite vid on change blindness).  Now time for food before I attempt to review day 2.

So why start up?  Well, I’m currently at the Australian Science Communicators conference and in every session I can see lots of people beavering away at thier laptops taking notes (me included), so why not just try and make those notes more widely available?

We’ll see how it all goes anyway………