If you know what I mean when I say “naughty step” you have probably come across Dr Tanya Byron, a fellow psychologist who rose to prominence on television with Little angels and House of tiny tearaways. She has recently been named as the head of a government review called “The Byron Review: Children and new technology” which is out for consultation now (responses in by November 30th).

The call for evidence states: “The Byron Review is an independent review of the risks to children from
exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet and in
video games.”

Not having kids, I’ve not come across Dr Byron in much detail but I am at least relieved she is a “proper” psychologist and not just a suit with an opinion. That said, I am a bit worried about the focus of the review, which appears to be conflating video games with the internet. Video games are controllable environments written by programmers; they can set exactly how much violence, bad language, or scariness appears at any given time. That game can then be rated and regulated using the same age system that governs films and music.

By contrast, on the internet anything goes. So in theory, as soon as a video game has a multiplayer element that uses the internet (or indeed any other form of communication such as LAN, wireless networks, or short range radio like Bluetooth), what happens is out of the control of the designers. Yes, if you buy your 9-year old son a copy of Manhunt (rated 18) then he is going to hammer some people’s skulls in with a ball-peen. Naughty you.

But what if you buy him The Sims 2, ostensibly an electronic doll’s house, and he goes online? Well he’s not going to be bashing anyone’s skulls in but he may well be exposed to bullying, abuse, or sexually suggestive messages from other users.

All of that has got nothing to do with the intentions of the game designers, and everything to do with the fact that a.) there are some bad people in the world and b.) any form of communication can be used for ill.

I’m also a bit concerned that the wording of the call for evidence suggests a bit of a foregone conclusion that playing games IS harmful, and they’re just looking for evidence that supports that position. Sadly this area (like violence and TV) is plagued by “correlation=causation” assumptions. Obviously you’d be hard-pressed to randomise children to have a games console or be banned from playing them, but that’s the only level of evidence I’d accept in a drug trial so it should be what we’re aiming at in this field.

The consultation is open for comments from all stakeholders; if you’ve ever played a video game you count, so get on over to the website and let them know that conflating the web and video games is like conflating the telephone system and Sudoku.

So there I was, stuck in stationery traffic this morning, when out of the blue I get this sharp stabbing pain in the base of my neck. I believe I may have said something witty and sophisticated like “Aaaggrrhhowww!!!” before the car behind me started tootling its horn as the traffic moved off again. The pain radiated down my spine and across my shoulders, sending the muscles of my neck into spasm and persuading my head that, really, it just wanted to stay in one fixed position. This wasn’t great for looking at oncoming traffic, but I was nearly at work and I managed to get in on time.

I had a 6-month review meeting with my boss in which I grunted and jerked a bit whenever I moved my neck, but managed to get through it. Fortunately he had recently had physio at a little local place up the road and I went to book an appointment where the nice lady stuck her fingers in between my veterbrae and said “hmmm” a lot. That just about got me loose enough to hobble back to the car and drive (in a looking-straight-ahead way) home again where a quick trip to the pharmacy finds me strapped into a soft neck collar, covered in rather smelly ibruleve, and doped up to the eyeballs on codeine.

A few observations spring to mind in relation to my job; doing research on people with much more severe movement disorders like motor neurone disease, Parkinson’s, or MS.

1.) I make a terrible patient. I moan, I have no tolerance for pain, and I want to have a little sign on the back of my car saying “sorry I’m driving like a moron, I can’t move my head”.

2.) Doing simple tasks like making a cup of tea (bending to the fridge getting the milk) or doing the washing (getting down on hands and knees) is really pretty painful and dreadfully slow. Most of all though, it’s frustrating.

3.) I have feelings that conflict between “aahhh I’m dying” and “don’t be a wimp”. I imagine my fiancee will take the latter stance when she gets home later.

4.) I don’t want to go outside with my collar on because I know if I saw someone wearing one the first thing I’d be thinking was “ah ha, I bet he’s involved in a whiplash lawsuit and he has to keep that on in case the private detectives are videoing him”.

5.) My cat fails to understand why she can’t jump on me for some attention and is mewing pathetically.

6.) Pain makes you very grumpy.

7.) Health insurance isn’t a bad idea at all once you’re past 25.

During my childhood living in the US in the early 90’s, I developed a fascination with bumper stickers. This arose partly out of being longsighted and spending a lot of time in cars, and partly because I didn’t yet have a GameBoy. In stark contrast to the UK, where cars were fairly dull boxy things which revealed little about their owner, in the US you could usually tell the owner’s religion, college affiliation, favourite sports team and pets owned by looking at the back of their car.

Looking back on it now, there are several categories of bumper sticker. There’s the ones that you’re proud of (e.g. “My kid went to Harvard”), the silly ones (“If the van’s a rockin’ don’t come a knockin’”) and then there’s my least favourite: the holier than thou ones. “Save the whales”, “A dog is for life not just for christmas”, etc. Now it should be clear to all and sundry that attaching these little messages to your car is not really going to change public opinion, the intention is to transmit a positive message about you, the driver, “I’m a nice guy”, to all that read it.

A similar thing seems to be happening with email signatures. Mine consists of my contact details, and that’s it. More recently though, I’ve noticed email signatures getting more and more filled up with what I call “bumper sticker” messages, which say one thing but are meant to convey another.

For instance, there’s the whole issue of e-dislaimers, you know the ones that read “The contents of this email are confidential and protected by ninjas with crossbows. If you are not the intended recipient please remove your own brain and send it to the BBC forthwith” or some such legalistic drivel. To me this sends a clear message: “I work in a bureaucracy with its head up its collective arse. Some pencil pusher genuinely believes that by adding a couple of mealy-mouthed lines to the end of every email, they will never be embarrassed by colleagues accidentally sending around naughty emails, leaks of confidential information to the media, or spurious personal communications during the working day. Clearly, nobody I work for has a clue how the real, or virtual world works.”

Then there are the environmentally friendly ones: “Do you really need to print out this email?”. Hang on a sec; WTF said I was going to print it out? Do you really think the message you just sent me was so important that I’m going to print it out and frame it? Whenever I see messages like that my immediate response is “Do you really need to be telling me this?”.

Finally, there are the people adding quotes from memorable historical figures. This is not Usenet people, this is my primary communications method. And just because you put MLK’s “I have a dream” speech into your .sig file it doesn’t mean you’re all groovy and zen. It means you’re trying too hard to impress.

Feel free to drop me a line about this subject, but note that I am out of the office until October 16th as I will be on a paragliding holiday in Tibet with the Dalai Llama, helping blind children to learn English.

Thank you.

If someone asks you to “think outside the box” do you want to take said box, wrap it around their head, and then push them down some stairs? If so you may need to channel your hatred of buzzwords into something more positive; buzzword bingo!

Simply write down all the current cliches being bandied around at meetings (particularly any to do with strategy), then make a card of them for future meetings. Mine currently contains such gems as “intrapeneurship”, “upskilling”, “platform”, and “intellectual masturbation”.

Having spent the past couple of weeks hanging around with higher education strategists I thought I’d also help provide some essential translations.

Innovation: Making new stuff. Note that innovation doesn’t mean “having a good idea”. The world is full of good ideas. There is a glut in fact. Innovation is about having a good idea, building it, and then making sure it works properly.

Knowledge transfer: Someone from an evil corporation takes you out to lunch, steals your ideas, you get nothing.

Stakeholder: Any one of the select number of individuals who has ever heard of you, gives a crap about what you do, or knows what your stupid acronym stands for.

Evidence base: A set of numerical lies you can point at to argue for more funding.

The “x” agenda: The skills agenda. The diversity agenda. The knowledge agenda. Agenda is a word you can tack on to the end of just about anything to make it seem like a global effort, not just you and half a dozen quangos. “I like ham” = one crazy person. “The Ham Agenda” = Vast global conspiracy of plotters bringing about a porcine snack utopia. See?

Partnership: When someone lets you put their logo on your website or powerpoint slides.

Diversity: If your organisation needs to have a policy that recognises that people are all different, suggest they open up a dialogue about stating the obvious.

Consensus: Where you only invite people who agree with you to the meeting.

Lifelong learning: Mature students. Hell, they pay fees, we’ll take anyone who does that.

Best practice: “There’s no point reinventing the wheel”. Unless that wheel is rubbish. Then, you should reinvent it.

Accountability: When instead of claiming for a first class train ticket, you just claim enough mileage to cover the cost of it. Everybody’s happy.

Transparency: When you ensure that nothing sinister, sneaky, controversial, or in any way interesting is every committed to paper, ever.

Holistic approach: Fancy words for the entrance to a cave.

Work life balance: Bunking off work.

Entrepeneurship: Watching The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den.

Buy-in / Engagement: The holy grail of participative democracy, when 100% of your stakeholders show up to meetings, respond to surveys, fill out their suvey forms, holds spontaneous public celebrations in your honour, and finally provides you with what you’ve always wanted: Validation! Oh, bask in its glory!

It has been agreed for some time that doing a PhD is not an end in itself, and that transferable skills or as important, if not more so, in continuing life as a researcher in academia or science. Part of the structure underlying recent years’ activity in strengthening the transferable skills of PhD students has been the Joint Skills Statement, a sort of takeaway menu of skills that cut across all disciplines. Training programs at universities around the UK have been designed, funded, and executed in response to the call for skills which the Joint Skills Statement says should exist in PhD students.

So what of Postdocs? Whilst we are all keenly aware that if we want to get on in academia (or industry) we need to develop skills such as management, writing grants, publishing, administering finances, forming collaborations, and taking charge of our own career development. But in the asbsence of an equivalent to the Joint Skills Statement, institutions and funders are without guidance.

An equivalent of the JSS for postdocs should certainly go over and above what is expected of PhD level; no lectures on using 24-point fonts in Powerpoint!!! It should also be clear on what we expect postdocs to be. Only a small proportion will go on to become PI’s, but that doesn’t mean they won’t still be required to manage a team of students (or other postdocs), to manage a lab budget, to provide performance reviews to line staff, etc. Without training, we can only default to one setting: our own experiences, some of which will be good, some adequate, and more than a few terrible. Is this a great model for transmitting best practice?

Firstly we need to decide what we want a researcher to look like, then consider the skills that go into that and separate those that can be learnt “on the job” to those that would benefit from direct teaching or experiential courses. Then we need to consider delivery (are postdocs only going to take more senior academic staff seriously?), funding (that Robert’s money counts for us too you know!) and coordination (has somebody at your institution got responsibility and accountability for the skills development of researchers?). We then need to share best practice about stuff that works well and iterate upon our initial work.

Now the good news is that this isn’t all happening in a vacuum, and in fact UK GRAD have just had their contract renewed by the government which includes a widened remit to cater for early career researchers like us too. Now they can do a lot of the stuff I’ve outlined above but it’s crucial that we have a voice in what is developed for us.

Time to get thinking.

Issue 2 of GRADBritain came out today. It’s the UK’s only magazine written by and for postgraduate researchers and is the perfect alternative to staring at the rain out your grimy lab window!

This issue’s highlights include:

• How many trees for a PhD?
• Animal research
• Dr Flo
• Geoffrey Thickett
• The subtle art of networking
• To sprog or not to sprog?

Enjoy!

Paul

I was alerted to this post by a patient advocate I know via PatientsLikeMe. The short version is that some of the articles have clearly been paid for to be open-access ($900 USD), but when you look at a recent copy of the journal you are prompted to enter a user-name and password as if you were paying for the article like normal, and in fact the buttons to pay for it remain there.

It’s a similar case for a journal run by the American Chemical Society.

Is this part of a wider problem? Petermr’s blog would certainly suggest so. He’s very involved in the open-access movement and is even starting to grade the different publishers on their clarity and accessibility.

This is particularly relevant for me at the moment as I just got something published in a Blackwell journal and was considering paying a £1,300 fee to make it open access. In actual fact I think I can archive the pre-review version for free with my institutional archive, which is handy as I don’t exactly have £1,300 stuffed into my desk drawers in £20 bills…

Anyway. The current state of affairs seems to be this: publishers are worried about OA and have cobbled together business models that support generating revenue in other ways that the typical subscriber model. However, they don’t appear to have put much thought in to the publishing model.

Neuropsychologists aren’t generally required to use physics all that frequently, much less tinker around inside people’s brains (they don’t let us use sharp things you see). So yesterday when I decided to overclock my PC, I went a little bit OTT. This month’s PC Gamer had an article on how even a relatively tame nerd such as myself could go about eking a few extra megaherz from their slightly outdated processor, thus saving a few hundred squids. Several reasons. First off, I tend to work with lots and lots of applications open. This isn’t too much of a problem, but I figured an improvement would be nice. Second, I play a fair few games, and increasingly these seem badly coded and reliant on endless patches, so even my fairly good machine chugs along sometimes. Thirdly, I have heard so many horrific, toe-curling stories about the awfulness of Windows Vista that I’m sure I’m going to upgrade my components later this year instead of buy a new PC. So, time to get my hands dirty.

It’s actually quite straightforward, all you do is go into the BIOS on startup, slowly twiddle the relevant setting up a few points at a time, then see if the computer boots. If it does, find some benchmarking software to see if it’s really faster (I used the performance test in Company of Heroes) Being a scientist, I made extensive notes on what settings I’d entered, how long the machine took to boot up, and the performance ratings.

The downside to speeding things up, is that they generate more heat. Lots of PC components these days have built in temperature sensors that conk out when they get too warm, so put too much strain on any one component and the system will freeze. The two main things to play with are front side bus (FSB, basically affects CPU speed and RAM) and RAM speed. Now because you’re tweaking the RAM speed indirectly via the FSB, you might as well bring the RAM speed right down to avoid problems.

So, everything all ready, I began to tweak. I cranked it up 5%. No boot. Hmm. Cranked it up by 10% just in case, no boot. Then I dropped the RAM speed down and did it again, this time with success! I managed to get everything running about 10% faster, which translated into booting up 20 seconds faster and running the game about 17% faster. It was still a bit bumpy though, so I nipped down to PC world to see what I could do about all the heat in the casing. First thing I did was get one of those cans of compressed air and cleaned up all the rather mucky components of my case from intake fans down to the CPU heatsink. Then I popped another extraction fan in the back, put copper heatsinks on my RAM, and then left the cover off to let it cool down quicker. All this done I managed to get the processor running about 15% faster, and I learnt a fair bit about how my PC is fixed together, ready for the Vista-free upgrade later this year so I can play some fine-looking distractions like Crysis and Bioshock.

Geek on.

Fortunately, the use of the word “metrosexual” seems to have abated. As has “at the end of the day” and “to be honest”. Truly someone out there deserves a nobel prize, because at one stage I was no longer able to survive in the world without my trusty noise-cancelling headphones to blot out these verbal tics. I can’t help but notice it’s coincided with David Beckham leaving the country.

I digress. On a recent trip to the states I got a free Clinque washbag with the purchase of some booze, and it included little travel sized shaving gel, aftershave, facewash, and an eye cream. Having endured many hours at the cosmetics counter with my mum during childhood, I’ve always been rather cynical about the whole thing. A slightly orange air-hostess who’s been hit with a makeup shotgun, making vague allusions to pores, proteins, and alpha-ceramide, whatever that is. So, putting a dab of the oily goop on the normally purple bits under my eyes, I was expecting absolutely nothing to happen. So imagine my surprise when throughout the day, I didn’t look quite so knackered! Now the downside is that if you rub your eyes this goop kind of accumulates a bit like PVA glue and you have to get it all off otherwise you look like you’re melting.

But it got me thinking… If I was going to flog this, I’d actually go out there and do a study with it. “Cream X reduces perceived level of hangover by 12%” or something. And then I’d write it up somewhere and publish it. No alpha-ceramide or Pro-V needed! So why aren’t the cosmetics companies doing this? Go head-to-head between competitors and let effectiveness determine price, not stupid made up words. After all, the star ratings given in magazines are presumably either a.) methodologically rather unreliable or b.) paid for by whoever gets the highest score (either directly or indirectly).

Is it that they don’t want to? Is it that once the spangly pseudoscience is brushed off, these things would be a commodity item and you wouldn’t be able to inflate the prices? Well at least where men are concerned, it doesn’t appear that the spangles are working all that well.

Just got an email today about something I hadn’t heard of before, the Winston Churchill Fellowships. Set up by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust these allow people to travel the world in order to “acquire knowledge and experience abroad”. They cover air fare, daily living, insurance, and travel, and must last for at least 4 weeks. With 1,500 applicants each year and 100 fellowships awarded, your odds aren’t bad at all.

If you’re interested you can view the categories here. I’m thinking of applying for one to go tour the postdoc associations of the United States for evidence of good practice….