Well, nothing new. But I felt that the documentary corroborates something that I have always said – that these girls don’t get pregnant by accident or lack of information. They simply do it because they have no reason not to.

Their mothers got pregnant in the teens too. Their friends have kids already. It’s a whole ecosystem that leads them to that direction.

It is hard wired in a lot of girls’ brains to want to have kids. Blame hormones, instincts, whatever, but when I was 18 I badly wanted to have a baby.

BUT I had good reasons not to: I wanted to finish university, I wanted to find a guy who could raise my kid with me, I wanted to work, to travel. And I didn’t want that kind of responsibility at that time.

So I postponed the plan of becoming a mother.

But IF I had no plans of going to college, no role models of people in long relationships raising kids together, if my friends had already had babies, and if I was working in a McJob knowing that McJobs would be my life, WHY the hell would I postpone this urge to be a mother? I wouldn’t.

And does it all have to do with science? It has a lot to do with education.

How can someone convince these girls to wait a bit more and study? Is it possible to have an influence that is stronger than the environment they live in?

Shouldn’t policy makers offer them something in exchange for the motherhood experience? What could that be?

If people offer other possibilities, a professional career, a more comfortable life and such, couldn’t it be understood as a negative judgement of their mothers, extended family and friends?

Does it all make any sense for you? In the end, this blog post ended up being more of a rambling. But I wanted to know how people feel about that, and if maybe my ideas are just nonsense.

I come from a time when the only way to have a video presented to the public was to convince a TV executive to broadcast your project (and pray not to be given the 4am time slot) or to invite friends to your house and play whatever you’ve produced on the VCR.

Being from that time, I worked on TV for a few years and then decided to be a print journalist, a term that doesn’t make a lot of sense today as most of my stories are published in websites and never printed.

But being a “words journalist” today makes no sense any more. If I’m writing a story for a website, what prevents me from using pictures, audio or video, when it is for the benefit of the story?

(In fact, nothing prevents me, that’s why I’m planning to change that)

And what is people doing in that direction? I’ve looked at New Scientist, BBC and Reuters websites. Apart from these, who else is using videos on science journalism? Or science communication?

What do you think about these initiatives? Do you click on the videos, or you think it’s just hype and focus on the text and pictures?

Now, the updates:

1 – I’m starting to think that the most important use for twitter is not news, networking, or annoying followers with useless messages. I suspect it was created with one goal in mind: report earthquakes.

2 – Remember when I said that my generation is getting old earlier than we should? Ditto. Yesterday I went to the doctor with a serious pain in my foot, and he suspects it might be gout.

Gout! I’m a woman, 29 years old, I don’t eat processed foods and don’t drink too much. We still have to wait for the result of the blood test, but this is a strong possibility.

I feel old and unhealthy now.

PS: My MSc graduation is today, so if you see someone limping on the stage of the Albert Hall today, yes, that’s me. And my very old sick foot.

There is an article today in the Guardian about that – useful for those who have no clue what it is all about. (and for those who use it, there are lots of nice apps in the end of the story).

I have been twittering for some months now (twitter.com/baxt) – not about science but about the life, the universe and everything.

It can be useful for news, as long as you follow the right people (not as easy as you might think). But it allowed me, for example, to know about an earthquake in Sao Paulo, Brazil, even before it was on the news.

Sometimes I feel my generation will not live as long as the previous ones (for you to understand what generations I’m talking about, I’m 29 years old).

My parents, who are around 53 today, were lean, active and healthy until their mid forties. Far leaner and more active than I am now.

My friends started getting fat and bald, with high blood pressure and dangerous cholesterol levels by the end of their twenties. My parents in law, on the other hand, are close to 70 now, and they started putting on weight much later than us.

My mother had three kids and continued to be thin and strong for years after that. I have to pay attention to what I eat and to my back aches today – and I haven’t had a single kid yet!

In other words, my generation looks (and feels) today the same way our parents look and feel – today!

We are precociously old even before getting old. I don’t even want to think of what will happen when we get really old (I mean, if we do).

This is Baby Thelma , a circus fat lady famous on the fiftes (or forties, I’m not sure). Only 60 years ago people would go to a show and pay the ticket to see her. Today we see people like her on the street all the time.

I once read a best seller book called Freakonomics , which most of you may have already heard of. It uses the economic mindset and economic theories to study and understand non-economic topics, like the trends in naming children, frauds in sumo championships and the behaviour of real state agents.

It was written by an economist and a journalist, who I suppose was the responsible for making the text really fluid and easy to understand. It’s not a life-changing book, but I found it interesting.

Well, that’s how I feel about science. We should approach things scientifically – anything. Instead of just focusing on Physics, Biology, Mathematics and so on.

For example: just the other day I had a huge discussion with a friend about families, and how much should family interfere in people’s lives. I believe that the extreme of too much interference is preferable to the other extreme – no interference at all, you die alone and you will be found when the body begins to smell and the neighbours notice.

She was adamant that there is no reason to think in extremes, although her family history is on the non-interference extreme. My experience, in the contrary, is of being raised by a stereotypical Jewish mother (although we are not Jewish, as long as I know), and I don’t think it’s that bad.

Interestingly, I’ve never met any other son/daughter of similar mothers saying that this is terrible. But those who have distant mothers usually say that having an overprotective mother is the worst, most damaging thing in the world.

And no, I don’t believe in balance. I think all societies tend to exaggerate in a way: too much interference or no interference.

Well, the thing is that I got so mad with all that friend said that I decided to try and analyse the situation scientifically, instead of just focusing on how I feel about that.

I don’t know very well how to do it,but I would really appreciate comments on that. Does anyone share my feelings? Any idea on how to approach the topic scientifically?

PS: Here’s a Slate magazine slideshow about Jewish Mothers.

This talk by Dave Eggers is amazing. It is not about science, but education. More specifically, English education and writing, but the general idea fits any other subject.

[“science is a method, not a subject.” (Cath wrote that as a comment to a post sowhere, and I couldn’t agree more.)I will repeat that as a mantra, from now on. But I digress.]

It all started when a group of writers and people working with the English language in general decided to dedicate a bit of their time to help schoolchildren with their homework, clarify doubts about English and so on.

And they rented a small building for that. But it was a commercial building, so according to the law they had to sell something in there, the landlord told.

That’s where the story goes from “good” to “genius.”

(hm, forget I said that. I don’t want to influence your judgement.)

They decided to open a shop with pirate supplies. “For the working buccaneer”. Parrots food, glass eyeballs, wooden legs and so on. In the back of the shop, computers, desks, books and the usual stuff you would expect (826 Valencia is the name of the place)

The store eventually started doing so well that it now makes money enough to cover the rent and some other expenses. Similar initiatives appeared in the US. A store with articles for superheroes (Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.). A seven-eleven for time travellers (didn’t find the site, but the products are here ) . All with homework going on in the back, together with partnerships with local schools and involvement with the teachers.

And that’s it. I really hope someone opens something like that here in London. Help kids write and build their confidence, learn with them, try new flying capes, buy secret identity kits, fill my cupboard with Barbarian repellent? I would love that.

This is the website of the initiative . It explains the other things going on besides the useless ephemera, like the books the children write,events and so on.

”The Tennessee study tested 82 couples for facial attractiveness and how they felt about their marriages. While women who were better-looking than their spouses reported contentedness, according to Univeristy of Tennessee professor Jim McNulty, men who were more attractive than their mates ‘demonstrated a tendency to offer less emotional and practical support to their wives’.”
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Ok, ok… As if it was not enough of an over simplification, there comes the unavoidable part.
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Yes, you guessed right: the evolutionary explanation!
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”McNulty adds that there is an ‘evolutionary explanation’ for this behavior: ‘Attractive men have available to them more short-term mating opportunities. This may make them less satisfied and less committed to the marital relationship’.”
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Why?
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God, why?
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Why they always have to put some evolution in these silly researches? Why they don’t even consider the possibility of culture and society playing a huge part in the conclusions? They investigate a specific group, from an specific culture, and then say that the conclusions prove “evolutionary pressures”?
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Some weeks ago I read an editorial of New Scientist about how students in an university associated black people to apes (I don’t remember the details, but the original is here)
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And then, guess what? The scientists concluded that the association was ingrained in their minds because of centuries of prejudice and racial stereotypes.
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Fair enough, I agree with that. But maybe if it wasn’t such a controversial topic, they might just have jumped to the conclusion that associating dark-skinned people to apes brought evolutionary advantages to our ancestors? I don’t doubt.
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What I’d like to know is why use evolution to explain everything? Beauty and marriage are highly culturally charged topics, and it’s obvious that social pressures towards marriage, beauty and youth are quite different for men and women.
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It is a lot like people using evolution to explain unfaithfulness of men. As if we were all animals, and not products of society, culture, education and so on, combined with biological factors.
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Sometimes it just feels that some scientists (not all of them) are too lazy to try to learn anything other than what they are working with. So, instead of studying a little bit of sociology, they just go for the easier explanation, using concepts that they have already learnt.
. PS: What happened to the line breaks? I had to put periods all around, otherwise the text would be a huge block, with no paragraphs.

Well, nevermind. A couple of days ago my mind refused to play even one single track, and I dragged myself around all day unable to choose a sandwich or to calculate the price of a soda and a chocolate. Compared to this I prefer to have a several-track-mind, definitely.

And since I’m talking about how the mind works (or refuses to work), there is a video about body hacking that I found some days ago. It’s a talk by Quinn Norton, a journalist from San Francisco who, according to herself, “comes from a family of body artists and decided to take the thing one step further.”

The talk is almost 2 years old, but I couldn’t find her more recent presentation at Etech last week. The video is a bit too long, but I think it’s worth the effort.

She discusses body modification with a purpose, like implanting a magnet in the finger (she did that!) to sense EM fields, if we should be allowed to enhance ourselves freely, if we are already cyborgs, and about a whole world of back room surgical operations made with stuff available on ebay.

Personally, I believe we are close to a world of highly productive enhanced good looking people (the rich) and, on the other side of the gap, the normal people struggling more and more to compete with the first group. I want to think that someday the whole humanity will be made of happy cyborgs, but there is one thing that prevents me.

There is a joke that says that there is no such thing as a ugly women – only poor women! And looking at some examples we can see that a universe of beauty treatments, plastic surgery, special food and personal trainers can really perform miracles.

All this myriad treatments is out of reach of most humanity, so why should I believe that mind-enhancing drugs and other stuff will be available or the masses? (hope I’m wrong)

PS: If you are interested in the topic, there is a nice article about mind enhancing drugs that was published in the Guardian last year.

Lots of people wrote about the books that were important in their childhood, some of them sci-fi. I decided to talk about a series of books that are not about science, but that portrait science in a fantastic way.

These books were incredibly important in my childhood, and I still love the characters (I plan to call my daughter Emilia because of that, but I still have to convince my husband). Sadly, the Sitio do Picapau Amarelo is quite unknown outside Brazil.

The name means “Yellow woodpecker ranch,” but it doesn’t sound as good in English as pi-ca-pa-u-a-ma-re-lo in Portuguese (try to say that out loud).

It’s a series of books about the ranch, populated by two old ladies, two kids, a talking doll, a talking maize (or corncob, which word is better?), fantastic creatures, a talking pig and lots more.

The author, Monteiro Lobato, has just been described by my husband as the Brazilian Tolkien. These are very different styles, but the comparison is not completely out of place, although I think there is something of Lewis Carrol in the universe he created too.

In one of the books Emilia, the doll, decides to reduce humanity size to end the war (the story was written in the forties). Suddenly all humankind is reduced to something like 5 centimetres.

When the main characters are traveling around the world to see what happened, they find that almost all humans believe that the world has become huge, except one group of American scientists who have quickly adapted to the new conditions.

They analyzed the situation and concluded that the reducing of species was a very usual thing in evolution, so there was no reason to believe that the world had expanded. Although intrigued by the suddenness of the shrinking, they quickly find ways of living.

They founded a city inside of a bucket (called “Bucket City,” in English) raised cattle (worms), dressed using cotton fibres and even domesticated bettles and small insects!

That’s is just one of the situations. Other books were about the World of Arithmetics, oil exploration, how the human body works, nature and evolution (when they decide to reform nature and make things more “intelligent”), astronomy, all of this mixed with popular culture from Brazil, like the “Saci,” the “preto velho”, ex-slaves (by that time, slavery was a close experience), etc.

Well, this post is already huge now, so I will write more some other day. Unfortunately it is hard to find material about these books in English, but there is a Wikipedia page with some information.

The images are: Viscount Corncob (original illustration), Narizinho (not related to the reduced humans story I mentioned), Reforming Nature cover, The Saci cover

”In my opinion, the off putting part of the science engagement/communication/whatever is the label “science”.

The gung ho approach that “science is good!” “science is cool!” is annoying. Children and young people are interested in interesting things (pretty obvious, isn’t it?), no matter if they are usually classified as science or not. We should encourage curiosity in general.

Other point is that science should be mixed with other topics, in my opinion (therefore avoiding the “science is good” approach I just mentioned). But unfortunately this is very difficult, given that funding for science communication comes from institutions that want to focus on the “science” and the “sciency” label, many times associated with geeky kids, labs, white coats, scientists-as-weird-people, and so on.

In other words, I think this kind of approach reinforces the idea of science as something detached from the rest of the world, something “special”, different. Some people may think it’s a good thing, but I don’t.

Encourage “curiosity towards the world”, in the broader sense possible, would be the best thing to do.”

In very crude words, that’s it. Any opinions?

So, here is my train of thought:

1 – Read a New Scientist article about autistic people offended by the way they were portraied in a website (Autism Speaks) from a charity.

2 – saw Amanda Baggs video, In My Language . Found it amazing that she could speak those two languages so well. Found it extra-amazing that, being so disabled, she was able to do everything by herself. Maybe she was lying?

3 – Found websites saying that she is a liar (like this ). Not autistic, but desperate for attention.

4 – Concluded that I will never know what is her situation, and it doesn’t matter. Autistic or not, she has serious mental problems. And I hope she finds a way to live with that and be happy.

5 – But I got a little uncomfortable with the whole autistic pride stuff and the idea that if you “treat” someone with these problems and they become less autistic, they lose part of their personality. (correct me if I got it wrong)

6 – Thought of many artists who were depressed or had serious mental illnesses. If they got proper medication and treatment, would they have been the artists they were? Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh, JD Salinger. Syd Barret…

7 – Recalled the case of a friend who took some Ritalin-like medication for some months and said he started to concentrate beautifully in his work and studies. But his creativity just disappeared. “You can’t have it all,” he told me. He gave up the medication and is a creative person again. But what if he had severe attention deficit, and not just a mild case?

8 – It led me to a story I read years ago (Witty Ticcy Ray, from “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks) about a man with severe Tourette Syndrome who became a high functioning but boring person when under medication and decided to take it only 5 days a week, going back to his old self, witty, great drummer and tourette-ic on weekends.

9 – And so what? No idea.

1 – I could be there
2 – I could have insights clever enough to contribute to the debates
3 – I can be like some of those people when I grow up

Just in case you never heard of that, TED is a conference / website / think-tank / whatever (I’m not sure) of talks with really interesting people about interesting things. Simples as that, and fascinating (they talk about technology, science, culture, and everything else).

And I, as a late-adopter of technologies have just start twittering. And not being very sure of whose twitters I should follow, went for the names I already knew.

Now here I am, receiving uptades all day, and sometimes in the middle of the night, from Howard Rheingold and Evan Williams about the parties, the talks and the debates.

(Twitter weirdly makes you feel like you are close from people who, at best, are role models and not friends. But I’m enjoying the new experience just the same.)

If you want to know more:

TED website (material for months of amusement)

Evan Williams twitter (the guy invented the blogger, no less)

Howard Rheingold twitter (a very interesting guy, who does lots of interesting things, and who paints his own shoes)

For you to have a taste of the works of Rheingold mind, that’s the message I received in the middle of the night:
“I first learned to play squash on acid. Forty years later, playing squash in only four dimensions is a breeze.”

Scientists love to refer to “the media”, “the press” and “the journalists” like an ubiquitous beast with a single mind and thousands of bodies, working together for the evil goal of misrepresenting science.

(well, I think referring to “the scienctists” as a single entity is wrong just the same, but I digress)

The point is that now there is a good reason for pointing fingers at the press. All this rush to say that Prozac is gone would be funny (because in some weeks or months someone will have to stand up to say “hm, er, we were wrong”). But it is worrying.

I came accross several headlines today saying that Prozac is no more effective than sugar pills. I can only think about all the people who take the drug. What if doctors decide not to prescribe it anymore? And if some people decide to stop taking the pills suddenly? It’s not a good thing to do.

And so:

1 – How can we explain the suicide scare of some time ago, when newspapers stated that antidepressants increased the chances of suicide? Something doesn’t fit in there.

2 – If it is proved that the “wonder drug” is no more than a placebo, boy, we have an amazing case to study there! 20 years of real effects coming from a placebo. Careful study of the phenomenon could bring answers to all our problems!

For more concrete information from someone who actually read the study that originated all of this, read this post

Update:

I forgot the most important question: WHY are newspapers like the Guardian so eager to bury Prozac, instead of investigating the scientific papers about that? Just to sell more papers?

(I welcome suggestions)

Everything I write here are my impressions about whatever comes to my mind, nothing else. You may agree or not, and I appreciate if you say so. I really enjoyed the discussion that my last post provoked. It provided me some nice links and articles and points of view, and all those comments made me think. I don’t have anymore the exact same opinion I had two days ago, and that’s good.

Just one more thing. I generalize. Lots of times. I have no intention of adding something like “I acknowledge it may not be the case in 100% of the cases” every time I make some statement. Please, understand that I acknowledge that in most of the times, generalizations are just that – generalizations, and not the absolute truth.
I decided to write this post after I saw this video. Clive Thompson spoke in the MIT symposium about science and technology journalism and afterwards he talked about his own blog in this video below.

I think his position about blogging is quite wise.

(I couldn’t embed the video here!!! Can anyone help me on that? For now, you will have to follow the link ...)

PS: I will continue talking about intelligence, insanity, geeks, popular people and Britney Spears soon.

I deserved it, maybe.

The text won’t be deleted because I don’t like deleting stuff. I’ll leave it there, and I think that although I may be mistaken in the general idea, I still maintain some of the things I wrote before: I’m not sure if intelligent, cultured people are valued in the US.

I think we (in the US, Europe, Brazil…) need more smart role models, people who study, who have an interest in things.

And I definitely don’t think the name of the shooter should have been released.

And now I’m going to sleep, but I will go back to this topic. Someday.

Role models are an extremely important topic.

Well, I’ve done a bit of entertainment journalism, been to press conferences, junkets, shootings of films and so on. And what I can say is that most of the times what you can get out of it is anything but PR journalism.

In the end, the piece you write is nothing more than a press release. After all, you meet the actors, beautifully produced, with lots of make up and clothes chosen by an assistant. Then you have 10 minutes to talk to them (if it’s not a press conference – in this case, you will shout one question or two and get them answered if you’re lucky), and sometimes the press officers are just by your side all the time. And all other journalists have exactly the same material, so all of you end up writing the same article, with minor (almost irrelevant) differences.

Boring.

No real people, no real talks, no real journalism.

(of course there are exceptions. The people from Bourne Ultimatum were great – but that’s because they are “grown ups” – experienced and smart actors, directors and producers doing a film for the money and the fun of it, and being really laid back about this. But most actors are not nearly as bright as them, and they really need a safety net – otherwise you will find out how they are in reality)

These experiences made me think. Maybe all this annoying “PR driven journalism” is precisely what makes the audience is so eager for paparazzi pictures of celebrities wasted, drunk or with torn clothes. Because then you can see they are real people! What other reason would explain pictures of the Brangelina couple picking their kids at school – every single day? Can anything be less interesting than someone at the school door, with a child in their hands, with normal, mortal-people’s clothes?

But I digress.

What I wanted to say is that all this excessive PR (and believe me, some PRs are just great and helpful and the thank them for being there. But not all of them) may be in the truth putting people off science. Creating a sanitised and boring science journalism.

We need paparazzi science journalism.

I don’t know exactly what that would be, but I’m really into finding out. Something to make science (and scientists) interesting and alive. Not a bunch of perfectly groomed talking heads saying uncompromising things – so uncompromising that no one cares about.

Perhaps if we didn’t have all this PR-laden entertainment journalism, celebrity press would not be so insanely invasive?

I really believe that sometimes playing too safe is riskier than letting things go.

Scientists are always talking about elegant solutions, the beauty of nature, etc. But where is all this beauty when it comes to conferences or pictures of an event?

Today I was looking the website of a conference about humanities and space science. Exciting stuff, I though, clicking on the pictures of the event.

...well, how off-putting can be images of a Columbus-meets-Mars-Rover type of conference?

Very, I tell you. Boring beige, boring suits, ugly powerpoints. Bad lighting. Uninteresting backgrounds, uncharming rooms. I believe the presentations must have been quite interesting, but being nice to the the eyes is important too, I think.

Don’t you agree that looking good is important for an event? There are lots of people here in Nature Networks organising events. Do you worry with that? Museums worry about the “user (visitor, in the case) experience”, I know.

But shouldn’t conferences worry about the “participant experience” and the pictures that people will see later?

PS: a friend of mine presented a talk about scientific “Literatura de Cordel”, a Brazilian popular style of literature. The talk was really interesting, but the little coloured books were one extra attraction. Everybody picked up one to take a look. And I’m sure the pictures of the talk were nice too.

It’s easy to see why it is called that way. Everybody in the SciCom world seems to have done this course! I have the feeling that every time I approach a site, a magazine or any other place where people work with science communication, there is at least one person from Imperial College.

For me, the course was a great experience. Some people complained that it had too much academic content. I don’t think so, for 2 reasons:

1 – I’m a journalist with a bit of experience, so practising journalism was not exactly what I was after.

2 – I used to say this when I was doing my undergraduate degree: the most important thing is to understand Sociology, Anthropology, how science relates to society, what is a paradigm, what the positivism stands for, and things like that. These are the tools we have to think broadly and in a deep way, making connections and developing new ideas.

Of course practical experience is very important, but sometimes I think it’s overrated. Learning what button to push in a camera, or what recording software works best with skype, well, I can learn that “on the fly” and, more important, technologies change all the time. Everything I’ve learnt about editing videos at the journalism course, years ago, is useless now.

But what I’ve learnt about film narrative and language is still pretty much useful. And being well informed I can adapt this language to other medias that didn’t exist at that time (I’m not so old, but there was no mobile content at that time, for example).

The only problem is that people there dress so well! No matter how hard I tried to look decent, I was always feeling wrinkled, disheveled and messy.

I love the picture below. It is a very old image of my husband (the older and all serious) and his brother going to school. This image was always in my mind when I was at the RS, and I think it describes the situation very well:

I was telling a friend just the other day that in some periods of my life I become an annoying obsessive person. When I came to London, one year ago, I spent the first weeks at friends’ houses while looking for a flat.

I was so obsessed I couldn’t think of anything else. Until I found the one I live today, the tiniest studio in the world. And I became a normal person again.

Today I’m obsessed with a job. It’s boring, I know. But I’ll try to talk about other things as well.

By the way, I will try (not sure how successful this experience will be) to post here stuff about the relation of science and humour, the topic of my MSc dissertation.

It would be interesting to see the opinion of scientists on the topic. Well, that’s it, it can be a blog about science and humour.

Did you notice that I organise my ideas WHILE I’m writing, and not before, as it should be?

Hope it doesn’t turn you off.