Big momma is watching you

I clicked onto the Newcastle University website today to find a pair of rather malevolent eyes looking into mine.  I was inclined to close the browser immediately.  Those eyes made me feel distinctly uneasy.  But I was interested to see that they related to some research carried out by Professor Melissa Bateson and Professor Daniel Nettle of the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle, and Ken Nott of the University’s security team.  Bicycles are regularly stolen from racks on the University campus, but by putting pictures of eyes and short anti-theft messages above the racks the researchers found that they could reduce the number of thefts by 62%.  Unfortunately thefts from racks that were not “guarded” by the disembodied eyes went up, suggesting that the thieves had moved elsewhere, presumably to an area where they didn’t feel they were being watched.  What would have happened, I wonder, if all racks had sported these off-putting glares?  Perhaps the bicycle thieves would have overcome their scruples and got out their bolt-cutters anyway.  But the research is interesting, not only for its potential effects on crime, but because it highlights our reactions to eyes, and the wider importance they have for us as human beings.  It surely can’t be coincidence that the panda, with its eyes so clearly emphasised by black markings, is such a popular image for conservation?  Big-eyed creatures such as bush babies are generally regarded as being particularly cute and owls, with their clear, forward-looking gaze, also seem to strike a chord in a way that other birds do not.  Human babies have eyes that are disproportionately large and we know that eye contact between mother and baby seems to be important.  It promotes the attachment without which a baby may not survive.  It seems then that being looked at can be reassuring as well as threatening.  So why is that stare from above the cycle rack so threatening?   Are the thieves perhaps worried that it might be their mum who is watching when they steal that bike?

Poetry, algebra and creativity

Does anyone else still read the Liverpool poets?  The Mersey Sound collection was published by Penguin in 1967, and for years afterwards it seemed as though everyone I knew possessed a copy.  When I took “O” Level English in 1972, Adrian Henri’s “In the Midnight Hour” even turned up as the unseen text.  We were all thrilled by this at my school, as we didn't think people like teachers and examiners had ever heard of such radical writers.  When, in that most intimate sign of commitment, I shelved my book collection side by side with my partner’s, we realised we now possessed two copies of The Mersey Sound.  We were married a year later.  In many respects the book seems stuck in a very specific era, but particular poems from the collection still pop up regularly in my brain.  Today I was thinking of Brian Patten’s “Prose poem towards a definition of itself”.  In particular, the line: “On sighting mathematicians it should unhook algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra” resonates.  Interdisciplinarity hadn’t been invented as a term, and would have seemed novel as an idea, when Patten wrote his poem, but this is a line to prompt that kind of creative thinking.  It also encapsulates a notion that I believe in absolutely: that being bounced out of our normal rut, having our expectations circumvented can be peculiarly inspiring.  I’m always pleased when colleagues ask me to help them prepare presentations.  I’m easily flattered and it gives me a chance to proselytise.  I rail against the ghastly powerpoint presentation, urge them to surprise the audience with a poem when they are expecting algebra, to illustrate a quatrain with quadratic equations. Why?  Because, if they do, theirs will be the presentation that the audience will remember, it will be an island in a sea of indistinguishable bulletpoints.  Persuading academics, or indeed any professionals, to take this dangerous plunge is often difficult.  They would rather be unmemorable than risk looking foolish, particularly in front of their peers.  Sadly, it’s a fear that most of us learn early on.  But sometimes risks really are worth taking.  The Liverpool poets came in for some vicious sniping and criticism from the literary establishment, but few would now deny that they were part of a hugely influential cultural wave being surfed so spectacularly and creatively by The Beatles.  And, unlike most poets, they sold an awful lot of books: two are still sitting on the bookshelves in my house.

Do ecosystem services belong to Green Van Man?

The other day I asked my husband what he thought "ecosystem services" meant.  He's accustomed to me asking him odd questions so wasn't thrown by this.  After some thought, he suggested that it might be an eco-friendly plumbing firm.  He thought they probably drove around in a green van, pumping out blocked drains.  Of course he wasn't surprised to learn that "ecosystem services" is more likely to be found in a scientific journal than in the yellow pages.  He had probably realised he was, once again, acting the guinea pig in a communications experiment.  But I wasn't entirely surprised either, to hear his response.  Every profession uses jargon and it can be a useful shorthand, but it also acts as a barrier to exclude the non-expert.  Ecosystem services is an expression that, I suspect, few people outside academia or policy making circles have come across.  So I tried to explain to my, probably not terribly interested, spouse, what it really means.  This took a long time and I'm not sure I really got the message across.  Ecosystem services covers so many of the vital functions that land provides for human existence: food, water, carbon storage, leisure, biodiversity, just for starters.  Our demands increase all the time.  Explaining this concept takes a lot of words, far more words than the two in that short phrase.   As a science communicator,  I always shy away from using jargon, and if it creeps into my writing I regard that as a failure.   But sometimes jargon does, after a while, stop being exclusive and become mainstream.  As a colleague pointed out to me, "biodiversity" was an unfamiliar term until quite recently.  He remembered a time when most members of the public, and even farmers, would not have known what it meant.  Now every farmer can discuss the biodiversity on his or her land, and it saves a lot of long explanations.  Acronyms may become familiar in a similar way.  I have sat in meetings where every other word was an acronym and felt totally baffled.  When I worked in the health service, patients often complained, with good reason, about feeling excluded by acronyms, and we worked hard to eliminate them from information leaflets and other resources.  Then, one day, someone complained about the acronym "NHS" and that stopped me in my tracks.  Is there anyone in the UK who isn't familiar with this shorthand?  Should we stop using it simply because it is an acronym, or accept that it has become a handy way of referring to this public service?  I think most people would incline to the latter view.   Would it be similarly blinkered to avoid "ecosystem services" forever?  This is a dilemma that I am still struggling with at the moment.  My instinct is to avoid it, but I accept that I may have to revise my opinion over the next few years.  Of course, if I see a couple of plumbers driving round my neighbourhood with "Ecosystem Services Ltd" painted on the side of their bright green van, that's really going to complicate things.

Anecdotes, data and personal stories

I once heard my profession of communications referred to as “the new cultural intermediary”.  It’s a wonderful piece of jargon that I couldn’t possibly use without irony, but it does contain a grain of truth.  As a science communicator I often feel that I am trying to bridge the divide between two distinct cultures when I strive to make research accessible to a wider audience.  Scientists aim to remove the personal element from their work, to make it unbiased.  When they write for publications that will be read by their fellow scientists they like to use the third person: “the experiment was performed thus…” rather than “I did it this way”.  But you will never read a news item that is written in such a style.  It would sound much too flat and unengaging.  Every journalist is looking for an individual’s own account to illustrate their story because it’s the personal that brings communication alive for a reader, listener or viewer.  We want to connect with other human beings and to understand their experience.  I have had many conversations with scientists about this. and I understand very well how presenting research in this way conflicts with their training.  A brilliant comment today on Twitter rang many bells for me: “The plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’”.  I have to agree.  If a friend says that they found homeopathy helpful that doesn’t make me believe that it works.  I’m sure we all have friends who say they have found such therapies helpful, but that still doesn’t convince me.  However, if a rigorous clinical trial ever showed that it did have benefits and I had the job of communicating this, I would want to use some case studies and examples of real people to help me to do that.  I do think that there is a difference.  It’s true that this difference is sometimes lost in news stories and that can make scientists fearful of communicating their own research via the media. I would like to think that this is where we “new cultural intermediaries” can play a useful role, albeit one that sometimes feels like walking a tightrope.  Many scientists also shy away from social media, such as blogging and Twitter.  Some may simply dislike the technology but for others it is the idea of such personal communication that is alien and threatening.   However, social media are being embraced increasingly by the younger generations of researchers in both their private and professional lives.  I hope therefore that this new generation will be less fearful about making their research accessible to a wider audience, by allowing the personal to become more prominent in their communication. 

Products or produce?

I’m just old enough to remember when you had to queue up at different counters in food shops for your bacon, cheese, meat and so on.  Supermarkets were very new idea, and greeted with suspicion by many.  But they were convenient because you could buy everything in one trip and only queue up once, so they soon caught on.  Then, recently, we became a bit suspicious again when we found that not all the food on the supermarket shelves was quite what it seemed.  Whether eating horsemeat is problematic depends very much on one’s personal feelings.  There are committed carnivores in this country who can’t shake off the image of childhood pets when faced with rabbit, while in other parts of the world people tuck into dogmeat with great enjoyment.  So we all draw our personal boundaries in different places but, assuming no harmful pharmaceuticals have contaminated the meat, horse is as wholesome as any other animal protein.  We say we are alarmed by the lack of transparency in the food chain and this does raise all kinds of questions about what goes into the food we buy.  There’s an easy answer if we are genuinely worried by this, of course.  Buy meat and vegetables to make the dish yourself, and you can be pretty confident that you know what has gone into it.  There has not yet been any suggestion that cuts of meat on sale in supermarkets are fillets of horse, and you could always buy from a local butcher, or even a farmer, if you feel concerned.  But increasingly we don't buy produce of this kind, we buy products that the retailers tell us will save us time.  Everyone seems busier these days and who has the time to cook?  But when we still have time to do so many other things, why is cooking an enjoyable meal so very far down the list of priorities?  Things have changed during my lifetime, women generally go out to work now, and I don’t for a moment think that cooking for families is automatically their responsibility.  But perhaps the fact that women have generally done most of the everyday cooking is part of the reason for it being devalued as a skill.   So, increasingly, we let someone else make the food for us and buy it in the supermarket as a ready meal.  Then the next generation doesn’t actually know how to make simple food, and has no choice – it’s buy the ready meal or starve.  That’s great for the retailers, who expand their ranges constantly so that they can sell us more and more products.  Presumably there is more profit to be made in the cheapest range of ready meals than in selling us the ingredients to make our own, so who can blame them?  Selling food and making profits is their function.  But the result is that we can be found eating the ready meal, in front of the television, watching a celebrity chef cooking up a dinner party menu that few will ever actually attempt.  And how shall we spend all that time we have saved?  We could watch some more television – there’s bound to be a documentary coming on about the disasters happening in the food chain.

We watch a distinguished VIP on line (and also see the King of Sweden)

At 16.00 hrs GMT on Monday I logged onto the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture andForestry website for the 200th Commemorative Meeting of the Academy. Via a live weblink I was able to view Stockholm Town Hall, thronged with VIPs in evening dress. Musicians were playing what I assume was the Swedish national anthem to greet the arrival of their Head of State, King Carl XVI Gustaf. It was a glittering occasion, if slightly impenetrable to those of us whose linguistic skills do not extend to Swedish. However, it was clear that new members of the Academy were being received and then there were honours and awards being presented by the Academy President Kerstin Niblaeus to some distinguished scholars, not only from Sweden but from all over the world. However, my colleagues here at Newcastle and I were only really interested in one particular presentation. We waited nearly an hour.  Then, after this tremendous build-up and some musical interludes, Relu Director and Duke of Northumberland Professor of Rural Economy Philip Lowe, was presented with the Bertebos Prize by King Carl XVI Gustaf in recognition of his contribution to rural studies.  The recommendation upon which the prize was awarded says: "Professor Philip Lowe holds the Duke of Northumberland Chair of Rural Economy and is highly reputed in rural studies with significant contributions in sustainable rural development and land use management. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Rural Economy at the University of Newcastle, UK since 1992 and leads its current research programme on Rural Economy and Land Use. This has enabled researchers from different disciplines to investigate the social economic, environmental and technological challenges faced by rural areas and with considerable impact for future knowledge exchange within and beyond the involved stakeholders. He has published widely in the areas of sustainable land use management, advocating reflexive interdisciplinary research. Also, he has made significant contributions in international comparative research, and played an active role in rural policy development at the national and European levels." There was tremendous applause in Stockholm Town Hall, but it was nearly as loud here in my office. Everyone wanted to congratulate Philip on this tremendous achievement. And without the benefit of this modern technology, how could we have known how splendid he looked in a frock coat?

 

( Photo ©The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (KSLA). Photographer: Mats Gerentz)

 

 

How many farmers does it take to change a production system?

In the mornings I have a very specific routine - I'm definitely on autopilot and I know exactly how long I need to wash, dress, breakfast and get to work.  Any change in routine is a struggle, particularly if it involves getting up ridiculously early.  But I was on the 5.56 am train down to London on Monday morning which, in view of the weather, seemed particularly brave.  My luck was in and the train was only 40 minutes late, in spite of the weather.  I was genuinely pleased not to miss any of the two days of results from Defra's Demonstration Test Catchments project.  Although I notice my friends' eyes glazing over when I try to tell them about diffuse pollution I really do find it interesting.  Perhaps the past few years of working for the Relu Programme have taken their toll.  But as with so many issues in life, we tend to think it's not our problem.  Until you look at the food on your plate, that is.  Not all diffuse pollution comes from agriculture but undoubtedly food production plays a major role.  The waste that comes out of the back end of cows, poultry, sheep and pigs has to go somewhere, while most of the crops grown in this country are helped along by fertiliser and pesticides.  Residues end up in waterways with a whole raft of consequences for their ecology, not to mention our drinking water.  Sediment is also a big problem, often being washed into rivers from areas poached by livestock.  But we need food.  It's quite a conundrum, so how do we balance those things out?  Is it possible to go on producing what we need - and actually we need to increase the amount of food we grow in line with population growth - while reducing the effects on soil and water? That's what the Demonstration Test Catchments are trying to address, so the research is quite fundamental to our survival.  I wish there was a magic answer that could solve the problem but of course life isn't like that.  The researchers are, however, looking very systematically at tools and practices that could help.  One of the greatest challenges, however, is to persuade farmers and land managers of the need to change their practices.  We all like to do things the way we do them.  Changing the way we farm, particularly when it seems to have worked well enough for many years can be a challenge.  But the evidence that the Demonstration Test Catchments are producing is overwhelming.  We need to change, and it can be done, even if it does take even more effort than getting me onto the 5.56 am train.  http://ccmhub.net/