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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.

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Tags: collaboration, complex adaptive system, connectivity, Ghastly Future, interdisciplinary, interview, Robyn Williams, science communication, The Science Show
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, climate change, conservation, corruption, decline, deforestation, ecology, economics, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, food, governance, human overpopulation, impact, investment, journalism, management, media, pollution, research, science, science communication, science writing, sustainability, threatened species

To share, or not to share, is no longer the question

7 01 2018

sharing data An edited version of a snippet from my upcoming book, The Effective Scientist (due out in March 2018).

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I tend to assume tacitly that my collaborators are indeed entirely fine with the idea of having their hard-won data spread across the internet, and that anyone can access and use them. In reality, many are probably not comfortable with that concept at all, and that the very notion of ‘sharing’ data with anyone but your closest and most-trusted colleagues is the stuff of nightmares.

I too was once far too concerned about the privacy of the data for which I had literally sweated and bled, for I feared that some nefarious and amoral scientist would steal, analyse, and publish them before I had the chance, thus usurping my unique contributions to the body of human knowledge. Perhaps I was just paranoid, although I still encounter such attitudes today. While data theft can occur, in reality it is unlikely that anyone would bother trying to out-do you in this regard, mainly for the simple reason that in most cases, data availability is not the limiting factor for scientific advancement. Another reason why this should not worry you is that far too few of us have the time to publish all of our own data, let alone someone else’s. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: collaboration, data, data sharing, Digital Object Identifier, DOI, online repository, sharing
Categories : science, scientific publishing

Write English well? Help get published someone who doesn’t

27 01 2015

I’ve written before about how sometimes I can feel a little exasperated by what seems to be a constant barrage of bad English from some of my co-authors. No, I’m not focussing solely on students, or even native English speakers for that matter. In fact, one of the best (English) science writers with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working is a Spaniard (he also happens to write particularly well in Castellano). He was also fairly high up on the command-of-English ladder when he started out as my PhD student. So. There.

In other words, just because you grew up speaking the Queen’s doesn’t automatically guarantee that you’ll bust a phrase as easily as Shakespeare, Tolkien, Gould or Flannery; in fact, it might put you at a decided disadvantage compared to your English-as-a-second- (-third-, -fourth-, -fifth- …) language peers because they avoided learning all those terrible habits you picked up as you grunted your way through adolescence. Being forced to learn the grammar of another language often tends to make you grasp that of your mother tongue a little better.

So regardless of your background, if you’ve managed to beat the odds and know in your heart that you are in fact a good writer of science in English (you know who you are), I think you have a moral duty to help out those who still struggle with it. I’m not referring necessarily to the inevitable corrections you’ll make to your co-authors’ prose when drafting manuscripts¹. I am instead talking about going out of your way to help someone who really, really needs it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: co-author, collaboration, English, language, science writing, student, writing
Categories : bad grammar, conference, conservation, ecological literacy, research, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

How to make the most of a conference

5 09 2013

Having just attended two major international conferences back-to-back (ICCB 2013 in Baltimore, USA and INTECOL 2013 in London, UK), I thought it might be a good idea to proffer some advice for those who are relatively new to the conference carousel. Having attended some larger number raised to the power of another conferences since I started this science gig, I think I’ve figured out a few definitely do-s, and positively don’t-s.

Some might argue that the scientific conference is a thing of the past. Now with super-fast internet, Twitter, open-access, Skype and video conference calls, why would we need to travel half way around the planet to sit day after day in some stuffy room to listen to some boring snippets of half-finished research? Why indeed would I get jet-lagged, spend a sizeable chunk of my research grant and emit a bucket-load of carbon just to listen to some boring old farts tell me the same thing they’ve been doing for the last 20 years?

If that were all conferences were about, I would never attend another for the rest of my career. Thankfully, that’s not why we go.

Yes, it’s easy to go online these days and see what your colleagues are up to (and if they don’t have a good online profile, they almost don’t exist these days). It’s also easier and easier to download important papers from almost anyone and in almost any journal. So clearly conferences are not primarily about finding out what research is being done; in fact, I argue that that’s not their role at all.

The most important aspect of a conference are the social events. Yes, the social events.

That might sound like a joke, but I’m dreadfully serious. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Academic conference, collaboration, conference, ICCB, INTECOL, INTECOL 2013, meeting, network, networking, presentation, Professional conference, Twitter
Categories : conference, conservation

Getting conservation stakeholders involved

14 04 2011

Here’s another guest post from another switched-on Queensland student, Duan Biggs. Duan, originally from Namibia and South Africa, is doing his PhD at the ARC Centre for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. His PhD is investigating the resilience of nature-based tourism to climate change. I’ve met Duan a few times, and I’m impressed by his piercing views on conservation science and its implementation. Duan has already posted here on ConservationBytes.com (‘Make your conservation PhD relevant‘) and now adds his latest post discussing a paper he’s just had published in Conservation Letters. Thanks, Duan.

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Achieving conservation outcomes almost always means working with stakeholders. ConservationBytes readers who have participated in multi-stakeholder conservation processes will know how difficult they are. Even more so when parties come from very different backgrounds and cultures. Farmers feel they just cannot comprehend what scientists are saying… ecologists silently curse [CJAB’s note: well, not always silently] because government officials ‘just don’t get it’ and so forth. So often, conservation projects are impeded, or even brought to a grinding halt because the very different perspectives that stakeholders bring to the table and the inability to see eye to eye. This has left many a fervent conservationist and scientist feeling like the associated cartoon.

However, our new paper entitled The implementation crisis in conservation planning – could ‘mental models’ help? just out in Conservation Letters suggests ways of dealing with this almighty challenge.

Effective conservation requires conservation scientists to partner successfully with managers, extractive users and other stakeholder groups. Often, key stakeholders come from very different backgrounds and cultures, and hence have a diversity of values that result in a range of perspectives on issues. These differences are frequently a source of failure in conservation projects.

Read the rest of this entry »