Avoiding a ghastly future — The Science Show

1 10 2021

Just thought I’d share the audio of an interview I did with the famous Robyn Williams of ABC Radio National‘s The Science Show.

I’d be surprised if any Australians with even a passing interest in science could claim not to have listened to the Science Show before, and I suspect a fair mob of people overseas would be in the same boat.

It was a real privilege to talk with Robyn about our work on the ghastly future, and as always, the production value is outstanding.

Thank you, Robyn and the ABC.

Listen below, or link to the interview directly.





Collect and analyse your Altmetric data

17 11 2020

Last week I reported that I had finally delved into the world of R Shiny to create an app that calculates relative citation-based ranks for researchers.

I’m almost slightly embarrassed to say that Shiny was so addictive that I ended up making another app.

This new app takes any list of user-supplied digital object identifiers (doi) and fetches their Altmetric data for you.

Why might you be interested in a paper’s Altmetric data? Citations are only one measure of an article’s impact on the research community, whereas Altmetrics tend to indicate the penetration of the article’s findings to a much broader audience.

Altmetric is probably the leading way to gauge the ‘impact’ (attention) an article has commanded across all online sources, including news articles, tweets, Facebook entries, blogs, Wikipedia mentions and others.

And for those of us interested in influencing policy with our work, Altmetrics also collate citations arising from policy documents.

Read the rest of this entry »




The politics of environmental destruction

22 10 2019

C_SE 409521698 Paul Ehrlich Lecture Event - Eventbrite2

You’d think I’d get tired of this, wouldn’t you? Alas, the fight does wear me down, but I must persist.

My good friend and colleague, the legendary Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, as well as his equally legendary wife, Anne, will be joining us in Adelaide for a brief visit during their annual southern migration.

Apart from just catching up over a few good bottles of wine (oh, do those two enjoy fine wines!), we have the immense privilege of having Paul appear at two events while he’s in town.

I’m really only going to be talking about the second of the two events (the first is a Science Meets Parliament gig with me and many others at the South Australia Parliament on 12 November): a grand, public lecture and Q&A session held at Flinders University on Wednesday, 13 November.

Haven’t heard of Paul? Where have you been hiding? If by some miracle you haven’t, here’s a brief bio:

Paul Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus, President of the Center for Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Stanford University and Adjunct Professor, University of Technology, Sydney. He does research in population biology (includes ecology, evolutionary biology, behavior, and human ecology and cultural evolution). Ehrlich has carried out field, laboratory and theoretical research on a wide array of problems ranging from the dynamics and genetics of insect populations, studies of the ecological and evolutionary interactions of plants and herbivores, and the behavioral ecology of birds and reef fishes, to experimental studies of the effects of crowding on human beings and studies of cultural evolution, especially the evolution of norms. He is President of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere and is author and coauthor of more than 1100 scientific papers and articles in the popular press and over 40 books. He is best known to his efforts to alert the public to the many intertwined drivers that are pushing humanity toward a collapse of civilization – especially overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and lack of economic, racial, and gender equity. Ehrlich is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Entomological Society and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.  Among his many other honours are the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Crafoord Prize in Population Biology and the Conservation of Biological Diversity (an explicit replacement for the Nobel Prize); a MacArthur Prize Fellowship; the Volvo Environment Prize; UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize; the Heinz Award for the Environment; the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences; the Blue Planet Prize;  the Eminent Ecologist award of the Ecological Society of America, the Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology. Prof Ehrlich has appeared as a guest on more than 1000 TV and radio programs; he also was a correspondent for NBC News. He has given many hundreds of public lectures in the past 50 years.

I hope your jaw just dropped.

Read the rest of this entry »





My interview with Conservation Careers

10 04 2018

IMage-2

The online job-search engine and careers magazine for conservation professionals — Conservation Careers — recently published an interview with me written by Mark Thomas. Mark said that he didn’t mind if I republished the article here.

As we walk through life we sometimes don’t know where our current path will take us. Will it be meaningful, and what steps could we take? Seeking out and talking to people who have walked far ahead of us in a line of work that we are interested in could help shape the next steps we take, and help us not make the same mistakes that could have cost us precious time.

A phrase that I love is “standing on the shoulders of giants” and this conversation has really inspired me — I hope it will do for you as well.

Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University, and author to over 260 hundred peer-reviewed articles. His research is mainly in the area of global-change ecology, and his blog ConservationBytes critiques the science of conservation and has over 11,000 followers. He has written books, and his most recent one ‘The Effective Scientist’ will be published in March (more on this later).

What got you interested in ecology and conservation?

As a child I grew up in British Columbia, Canada, my father was a fur trapper, and we hunted everything we ate (we ate a lot of black bear). My father had lots of dead things around the house and he prepared the skins for the fur market. It was a very consumptive and decidedly non-conservation upbringing.

Ironically, I learnt early in life that some of the biggest impediments to deforestation through logging was the trapping industry, because when you cut down trees nothing that is furry likes to live there. In their own consumptive ways, the hunters were vocal and acted to protect more species possibly than what some dedicated NGOs were able to.

So, at the time, I never fully appreciated it, but not having much exposure to all things urban and the great wide world, and by spending a lot of time out in the bush, I ended up appreciating the conservation of wild things even within that consumptive mind-set. Read the rest of this entry »





The Effective Scientist

22 03 2018

final coverWhat is an effective scientist?

The more I have tried to answer this question, the more it has eluded me. Before I even venture an attempt, it is necessary to distinguish the more esoteric term ‘effective’ from the more pedestrian term ‘success’. Even ‘success’ can be defined and quantified in many different ways. Is the most successful scientist the one who publishes the most papers, gains the most citations, earns the most grant money, gives the most keynote addresses, lectures the most undergraduate students, supervises the most PhD students, appears on the most television shows, or the one whose results improves the most lives? The unfortunate and wholly unsatisfying answer to each of those components is ‘yes’, but neither is the answer restricted to the superlative of any one of those. What I mean here is that you need to do reasonably well (i.e., relative to your peers, at any rate) in most of these things if you want to be considered ‘successful’. The relative contribution of your performance in these components will vary from person to person, and from discipline to discipline, but most undeniably ‘successful’ scientists do well in many or most of these areas.

That’s the opening paragraph for my new book that has finally been release for sale today in the United Kingdom and Europe (the Australasian release is scheduled for 7 April, and 30 April for North America). Published by Cambridge University Press, The Effective ScientistA Handy Guide to a Successful Academic Career is the culmination of many years of work on all the things an academic scientist today needs to know, but was never taught formally.

Several people have asked me why I decided to write this book, so a little history of its genesis is in order. I suppose my over-arching drive was to create something that I sincerely wish had existed when I was a young scientist just starting out on the academic career path. I was focussed on learning my science, and didn’t necessarily have any formal instruction in all the other varied duties I’d eventually be expected to do well, from how to write papers efficiently, to how to review properly, how to manage my grant money, how to organise and store my data, how to run a lab smoothly, how to get the most out of a conference, how to deal with the media, to how to engage in social media effectively (even though the latter didn’t really exist yet at the time) — all of these so-called ‘extra-curricular’ activities associated with an academic career were things I would eventually just have to learn as I went along. I’m sure you’ll agree, there has to be a better way than just muddling through one’s career picking up haphazard experience. Read the rest of this entry »





Shadow of ignorance veiling society despite more science communication

19 04 2016

imagesI’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but it wasn’t until having some long, deep chats today with staff and students at Simon Fraser University‘s Department of Biological Sciences (with a particular hat-tip to the lovely Nick Dulvy, Isabelle Côté & John Reynolds) that the full idea began to take shape in my brain. It seems my presentation was a two-way street: I think I taught a few people some things, and they taught me something back. Nice.

There’s no question at all that science communication has never before been so widespread and of such high quality. More and more scientists and science students are now blogging, tweeting and generally engaging the world about their science findings. There is also an increasing number of professional science communication associations out there, and a growing population of professional science communicators. It is possibly the best time in history to be involved in the generation and/or communication of scientific results.

Why then is the public appreciation, acceptance and understanding of science declining? It really doesn’t make much sense if you merely consider that there has never been more good science ‘out there’ in the media — both social and traditional. For the source literature itself, there has never before been as many scientific journals, articles and even scientists writing. Read the rest of this entry »





Making science matter

14 10 2013

© XKCD

© XKCD

I’ve been home from my last overseas trip now for nearly two weeks, but despite not feeling caught up, it’s high time I report what I was up to.

Some of you who follow my Twitter feed or who saw a CB post about cartoonist Seppo Leinonen know that I was visiting the University of Helsinki to participate in a three-day short course for PhD students entitled ‘Making Science Matter‘. I was so impressed with how well Mar Cabeza and Tomas Roslin put together the course, that I thought I’d share the format with CB readers (just in case any of you out there can be convinced to design a similar course at your university).

I think it’s important first to discuss the philosophy of the course and what it hoped to provide those early-career researchers.

Most science PhD students will tell you once they’ve completed their degree that they feel completely unprepared to launch themselves into the extra-curricular world of communicating their science beyond the ‘traditional’ (peer-reviewed journals) outlets. Swamped with learning how to write concisely and clearly, getting up to speed with the entire body of theory on which their projects are based, mastering advanced modelling and statistical approaches and learning how to apply efficient computer code, it’s no wonder that many students find precious little time for anything else (including families, good food and proper hygiene).

Once they do land that precious post-doctoral fellowship though, they are immediately expected to interact professionally with the media, embrace social media and give fantastic public lectures to engage the uninformed. Right. Read the rest of this entry »





Supercharge Your Science V.2

24 11 2011

I suspect a lot of ConservationBytes.com readers will be attending the imminent 25th International Congress for Conservation Biology to be held in Auckland from 5-9 December 2011 (it was to be held in Christchurch, but the venue was changed after that city fell down). I’ve now been to 3 previous ICCBs myself, and it should prove to be a good, informative (and fun) meeting.

I’ll be giving a talk or two, as will some of my students and postdocs, but I’m not spruiking those here (but you’re all invited, of course).

The main reason for this short post today is to advertise for Version 2 of our (i.e., Bill Laurance and me) popular ‘Supercharge Your Science‘ workshop. Yes, the organising committee of the ICCB decided it was a good idea to accept our application to repeat our previously successful series of presentations extolling the virtues of positive and controlled media interactions, social media and good writing techniques for ‘supercharging’ the impact of one’s science. You can read more about the content of this workshop here and here.

The description of the workshop (to be held from 19.00 – 21.00 on 6 December in the SkyCity venue) on the ICCB website is: Read the rest of this entry »





Appalling behaviour of even the most influential journalists

4 11 2010

 

 

© J. Dunn

 

I’ve said it a few times in public and in private – one of the main reasons I, as a busy scientist with probably insufficient time to devote to a lay blog (no different to any busy scientist, mind), got into this whole gig in the first place was to fight back against dodgy reporters and shonky ‘journalists’.

For the most part I have to say that I’ve been represented reasonably well in the media – even if most of it is owned by a few highly questionable moguls who espouse wildly partisan views. There have been a few occasions though where I’ve been the victim of simply crap reporting, terribly investigation and downright dirty tactics done by so-called journalists. I’ve talked about this on a few occasions on ConservationBytes.com (see ‘Crap environmental reporting‘, ‘Science turned bad by the media‘ and ‘Poor media coverage promotes environmental apathy and untruths‘).

In a bit of a coincidental turn of events, Bill Laurance sent me an interesting piece published in Nature on this very subject just while Paul Ehrlich and I (most of you know that Paul is in Adelaide at the moment) were talking about ways in which scientists could turn around public opinion from one of suspicion of science, logic and intellectualism, to one applauding the application of objective techniques to solve the world’s worst problems. Paul half-jokingly said “what if there is no solution?” – but I suspect that one such as he has found that constant writing, outreach and excellent research are the only ways to tear down the walls of ignorance, despite all the stupidity of certain elected officials. Two steps forward, one step back.

Bill suggested ConservationBytes would be a good place to reproduce this excellent article by Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds, and I agree. So here it is: Read the rest of this entry »





Supercharge your science: Blogito ergo sum

22 09 2010

Alas, I didn’t make up that wonderful expression (can anyone tell me who did?), but it was a very appropriate title for the presentation I gave today at the Supercharge Your Science workshop held at the JCU Cairns campus. For those of you who have never read any Descartes (I will forgive you – boring as philosophy gets), it comes from his well-known Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am/exist) statement. Someone cleverly adapted it to blogging.

So this post really just focuses on my component of the 5-presentation workshop extravaganza. Bill Laurance gave his two popular Interacting with the media and How to write a paper presentations (podcasted here), Mike Seyfang gave a great look at the current and future applications of social media to science, Jennifer Lappin showed how her organisation, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, really blitzed the world with top-notch media engagement, and I gave my advice on science blogging (why, what, how, do, don’t, where). The full webinar is reproduced below via Slideshare.

Where taking the show on the road and will be giving the workshop again in Townsville on Friday. I dare say too that we’ll be giving it at many other venues in Australia and perhaps overseas over the coming months. The interest seems massive.

Don’t forget to follow and engage using the associated Twitter hashtag #4ss.

CJA Bradshaw





Science turned bad (by the media)

30 11 2009

In keeping with a certain whinge of mine over the last week (see Greenwash, blackwash: two faces of conservation evil), here’s a brilliant pictorial comment from Pile Higher and Deeper on the way reporters try to sex up (i.e., sensationalise) science results. Is it really necessary to dumb it down to such an extent? Surely there must be a few punters that could do without the ooohs! and aaaahs! (or am I just being naïvely hopeful?).

© J. Cham





Poor media coverage promotes environmental apathy and untruths

11 10 2008

I just came across this excellent opinion piece by James Fahn on how climate change is covered by the media.

Poor countries’ media must tackle climate change

Paraphrasing briefly, the article laments the ill-equipped, uninformed and lowly stature of reporters covering climate change issues. The corollary is that simple junk, badly researched stances and plain untruths are rife throughout the media. For many, many examples of such plainly misinformed ‘journalism’ on climate change issues, just visit BraveNewClimate.com for a taste of the worst.

My comments on Fahn’s piece touch on several issues. First, it’s not just the ‘poor’ country that has problems with respect to ill-equipped reporters – the developed world (and Australia could easily be one of the leaders here) has some particulary terrible coverage of climate change impacts. Second, this problem extends to all environmental issues, not just climate change. Indeed, for some of the most important issues facing humanity today (loss of biodiversity and the ecosystem services they provide), should not the best people be put onto the job? Finally, whatever happened to journalism? Isn’t this supposed to be well-researched, cross-examining, hard-hitting and plain investigation into the affairs affecting everyday life? Instead, too many so-called ‘journalists’ are nothing more than blindly parrotting reporters who wouldn’t know what research was if it came up and bit them on the arse.

Addendum 16 October: I’ve added a little poll below directed toward Australian blog readers:

CJA Bradshaw

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