Office workers of the world unite!

I recently had a go at someone (@suebecks) on Twitter for posting a link to an article favourable to open offices and hotdesking in the workplace. Although this person was just highlighting a new trend, this trend needs to be stopped.

Flying over MY office cubicle.

In the name of full disclosure I work in a university open office in a 3 x 3 meter personal cubicle. The floor contains some closed offices, some open cubicles and mostly open desks used by graduate students and post docs. My grad student can literally lean sideways and see what I am doing on my computer. The office lay out was forced upon us by management with a beautiful new building (not being facetious, it really is gorgeous to look at). I tried to have an open mind when I moved in almost two years ago, but it simply does not work. It is noisy, distracting and I cannot have private and confidential conversations on the phone or in my office. The latter point is especially important as I need to talk to students, and talk about student problems on a regular basis. The new design has also placed locked doors between staff (faculty in the US) and our students in order to prevent public access to our floors.

The article in question takes this diabolical trend towards open offices another step farther by proposing hotdesking within open offices. Why is this diabolical? The answer has to do with human nature. Humans are social animals and as such, we always form hierarchies and need to assert our individuality and place within the group by claiming space and status. Primate social hierarchies are as much part of our nature as two legs and two arms and opposable thumbs. These hierarchical instincts simply cannot be suppressed without consequences. Indeed, they may not be suppressible at all as I can think of no successful examples of a social or political system of perfect equality and communal property ever working in all of human history. In fact the best analogy for the complete removal of all personal space from the work place is the way old style communism does away with private property where the individual is no longer valued in favour of the collective. History has proven that in such a system, only the privileged party rulers have power and that the masses are inevitably abused.

Part of the propaganda used to justify hotdesking in open offices is the lie that more creative work results from groups than from individuals. Creativity always springs from individuals who dare to question the accepted premises of the group. Destroying a sense of individuality can only promote derivative group thinking by suppressing the individual and making it harder to question the group. Short sighted senior managers might feel more secure with such a group think attitude but those with vision should see the long term risk to productivity. Part of me suspects that the real motive behind these moves towards stripping workers of ownership in the work place is to make mid-level office workers feel less valued so as to keep them living in fear. What better way to communicate that you are expendable than to make sure you have no physical presence in the office? This way workers can be intimidated into working more while fear keeps them demanding less. It is a long term cost cutting exercise to relegate mid-level workers to the factory floor, and factory floor wages. Open offices and hotdesking are simply tools of tyranny and oppression at the business level. So stand up for freedom, and fight the un-American trend toward the communist take-over of our business work spaces!

Cheers from Bolonia!

One of the perks of living and working in foreign country is that you occasionally get to do something that would get you fired and thrown into prison in your native land. I recently participated in such a felonious act while teaching a field course in Spain. One night, I did a Rioja wine tasting for the students after dinner. Before anyone starts to condemn me, this was perfectly legal as the students were all over 18 (legal drinking age in the UK and in Spain) and officially off the university clock during the tasting.

One important aspect of our outstanding  ten day field course is that the students have to travel to and live in Bolonia Spain for the duration.  In an effort to keep the students busy and away from the drinking opportunities, we try to have some after dinner activities that are either cultural or just plain fun. This year we did a quiz night, salsa dancing lessons, a very silly game that I have no idea what to call from one of our graduate student demonstrators, and I did a Rioja tasting.  In past years Sherry tastings were done so I was breaking from tradition. Unfortunately, I lacked the personal funds to get the really good Riojas but did manage a set of three different reds (the one white available at the local shop was so cheap it scared me). I covered the very basics from why one smells the cork, how to visually judge the age, showed them the effects of aging in oak, to some of the specific terminology around Rioja wines. Of course the harsher tasting red wines were lost on the sugar loving pallet of many of these students. However, some of them were very interested and asked good questions during and after which is how I usually judge my teaching performances.  At the end, I certainly did not feel any harm was done and that on the contrary most learned something and were delayed from their nightly cheap pitchers of Sangria for half an hour.

It was not until the next morning when it occurred to me just how much trouble I would have been in if I did this with a freshman class of 18 year olds in the states. I can imagine the headline; “University professor gives 18 year olds alcohol with lesson on how to drink on university field trip”.  Obviously I would NEVER do this state side, but it does highlight the big cultural differences between the US and Europe with alcohol. I didn’t realize what it meant that the US was founded by puritans until living in Switzerland. In Lausanne, the break room recycle box was full of wine bottles and even hard liqueur could be bought from the student cafeteria. Alcohol, especially wine, was at every social and official function. Europe must be one of the hardest places for an alcoholic to live given the way alcohol so permeates every aspect of social life. In England it is different in that the English have a real binge drinking problem. Where the Swiss and French drink because that is just what you do over meals and snacks, the English go out and get clobbered to have stories to tell about it should they survive. Our 18 - 19 year old students on the field course were all hardened veterans well trained in Southampton’s night clubs and bars before they arrive to very cheap Sangrias at the hostals where we stay. There would be no way to police a ban on drinking. A ban would only make it impossible to know when they got out of hand because they would just hide away in their rooms or on the beach. Throw in the fact that they are technically adults and we basically have no other way to control the level of binge drinking except by scheduling late dinners, early breakfast roll call, and tests in such a way as to minimize excess drinking. We consciously do this and it actually works to a great extent. The rest of the time we hold our breath and hope they look after each other which they usually do.

Cultural context seems to be the overriding lesson here when it comes to alcohol. What is right in one time and place can be wrong in another and vice versa. From the US perspective public lashing for drinking (in Saudi Arabia) seems extreme: from Europe, the US sometimes looks just as extreme.  Living in another culture really does cause one to re-evaluate ones preconceptions and definition of right and wrong in various situations. This deeper perspective on morality is one the great advantages of getting out your own culture for a time.

Webmaster and Commander (part 2)

As promised, installment two of my website adventure. To start the process of setting up my own website I first had to overcome the fear of screwing up. I knew I was going to make amateur mistakes and end up spending more money than necessary. It’s the same thing for any new hobby, so I decided to accept that fact and just do it.

First, I wanted a good domain name. I decided on some variant of Joel Parcouer (explained on the contact page of my website). I looked at GoDaddy.com then 123.com. The latter was cheaper so I whipped out my credit card, spent about £10 and bought the domain joelparcouer.com for several years. Now that I had the address I now needed some place to put my website. I poked around with Google’s web hosting and the templates there, but they seemed to be proprietary and I really wanted complete control so I decided against Google. After searching around and reading reviews and such I decided to go with Bluehost. Here I suspect they saw me coming. I misinterpreted the fee structure (yearly for three years or for three years) and bought it with the extra security costing a whopping £160 for three years. Yikes! It is a learning process and this might be a good deal for all I know. I honestly have no idea how much it should cost.

The first thing I did on Bluehost was to assign my domain name to the account. It was so easy I have forgotten how I did it. I do remember that they led me through it by my nose. The next thing Bluehost wanted me to do was to manage 100 free email accounts as if that was some great perk. It may be for businesses, but not for me. The last thing I want to do is to manage spam filters for an email system I do not need, so I skipped setting that up and went onto the control panel. I might reconsider the email account if Google becomes genuinely evil someday. The Bluehost control panel contains many files and programs that I have never heard of. I have some experience playing around with HTML and was able to find the error files that are displayed when things go wrong.  I then deduced the folder where the website needs to go by trial and error with a dummy HTML index file (index.html is the first file a browser open).

 I obviously lack the experience to code a quality site from scratch so I Googled free webpage templates. The free part was important as I had already blown my budget of £100. WordPress kept coming up so I tried that only to discover blog templates and more proprietary structure and code. The one thing I hate are programs like Frontpage that try to lock you into their program forever by making the code so complicated that you can never tweak it with any other program. I have always suspected that software engineers deliberately make computer languages and code just complicated enough to prevent common people writing their own programs and websites, thus protecting programmer jobs.  So moving on down the Google search list I came across a website by Andreas Vicklund. This guy is a genius. His templates are so simple and clear that even I could look at the HTML code and see how the HTML pages work. I even figured out big pieces of the CSS style sheet that came with it. The best part is that he posts a set of completely free high quality templates that you can use for anything as long as you leave the “designed by line” at the bottom of the page with his link. I chose the winter variant. Compare that to my version and you will begin to see how you can take a basic template and make it your own. You just copy and paste substituting your own text and  images and then tweak parts to come up with your own site. I even replaced his stylised mountains with my own picture of the Alps that I took from my balcony while living in Switzerland. To do this I had to modify the CSS style sheet. This really is not as scary as it sounds once you realize that a CSS sheet is just a set of instructions for named elements shared between HTML files in your website.

I have mentioned HTML code a few times. For those who don’t know, HTML provides your web browser with instructions on what and how to present the stuff you see on a webpage. It is probably the simplest form of computer programming that anyone can do.  You can pretty much become a functional programmer with HTML by reading one of the “For Dummies” books. To see a websites code most browsers have a function called view source. To actually play with an HTML file you need to open it with a text editor. My favourites are Crimson Editor for Windows and TextWrangler for my Mac. I always save a version of any HTML file before messing with it so that I can go back when I screw it up. The editing procedure was to change the code, save the file, then open it (or refresh) with my browser to see what happened. I thus figured out how to do things by trial and error and Googling. I easily found HTML examples on the web by googling HTML and the tag name. The process was no more intellectually demanding than working a puzzle or computer game. I used the free program Seamonkey on both Windows and my Mac to get some of the fancier things in. This free web design program is about as simple and clean as they come. It’s a WYSYG editor. The only problem is that it sometimes puts in extra spacing and some odd redundant code; including stuff like <small></small> with nothing in between.  I ended up proof reading and editing out these redundant statements in the text editor.

After about a month of working on this in my spare and free time, I finally got enough together to post a new website. Loading it was trivial with one of the programs on the Bluehost control panel. Now the problem is that I see so much more that I want to do to improve it. All I need is the time.

Cracks appear in another aging paradigm. Dietary restriction is dependent on genetic background.

First the free radical theory, then sirtuins, and now the ability of dietary restriction to extend lifespan is being thrown into question.  Are there any universal biochemical aging pathways left?  A recent paper in Ageing Research Reviews (sorry, its  Elsevier .  .  .  .) gives the results of a meta-analysis of the evidence for genetic effects on aging under DR. What Swindell found  is that the lifespan extending effects of dietary restriction (DR) depend on genetic back ground and DR may not even work in wild type populations. I have been hearing rumblings behind the scenes that DR was in trouble and now the story might be coming out.  The new study is written such that the contradictory data sets are not emphasised, but here is a quote from the discussion:

“An implication of these findings is that connections between DR and basic aging mechanisms may lack a universal character, and that greater attention to species-and genotype-specific effects will be valuable for developing a nuanced model of how DR impacts aging and longevity.”

 In the last decade pretty much everything researchers in aging took for granted has been discredited. The bottom line is that research into aging is going through a period of overturning most of what we thought we knew making it the most exciting time to be a researcher in this field for the last several decades. If anyone is trying to tell you aging is almost solved, they are most likely selling snake oil. If you are curious what I think is going on then see my review in Myrmecology News (or here).

Webmaster and Commander (part 1)

Today I switched my professional website from our university system to my own domain on a private hosting service (www.joelparcoeur.com). This was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There are many reasons for why I made this move, none of which are related to the quality of our own university web designers.

There are several strong reasons for taking over management of my own website. Joan Strassmann pointed out many of these in a recent blog that tipped me over the edge to actually going through with it. First and foremost, my web presence is too important to place into someone else’s hands who does not have my interests as their number one priority. My website is vital for recruiting graduate students and post docs and serves as the most easily accessible reference for anyone reviewing my papers and grant applications. It also provides a face to the media, a resource for students and acts as a vital platform to help my graduate students and post docs gain employment. I will go so far as to say that academics without a web presence are pretty much the 21^st  century definition of deadwood. One might think that a university would be able to set up and maintain a better website than doing your own, but after some thought, I have come to the conclusion that this is impossible. The fact that institutions, and not the individual academic, pays the web designers means that we academics are always left with a suboptimal web presence unless we take matters into our own hands. This is not to disparage any university as the collective will always act in the collective interest.

The university website is set up to showcase the university and the centre’s within it. The result is emphasis on connections within the university. It is designed in such a way as to show case institutional activities and achievements. When individuals are featured it is usually for a short time and only a carefully selected few are allowed the spotlight. This would fine if I was always the one in the spot light whenever anyone visited the university website, but that is not possible. The way our university describes active research projects provides an excellent example of this conflict of perspective. At our university website, a visitor will get exactly the same description of a research project (from the same page the collaborators all link to) regardless of which collaborator’s website they are coming from. This makes sense from a management and university based perspective. However, from my perspective, I want to describe the project from the point of view of my contribution, targeting my peers, and those who I expect to be visiting my site. Thus, the university wants continuity and efficiency with single project descriptions, where as individuals need to emphasize their unique contributions and perspective. The individual ideal leads to replication of material in various forms and makes it difficult for media or other bodies to scrape the university websites for institutional information.  Individuals will always come out second in this conflict in point of view because our web designers serve the university first  for  the simple reason that the university signs the pay checks.

One other practical problem is the amount of effort it takes to update the information on an institutional webpage. The official website always requires one to go through an official IT person who then posts it in the proper format. In theory, it should be easy but anyone who has ever done this knows that it is a game of postman with the IT person between the website and yourself. You cannot make a change, see how it looks, then make another change, see what happens, then change your mind and go back on something etc. These sorts of iterations, coupled with inevitable misunderstandings, drive the poor IT person (and yourself) crazy with frustration and acrimony. What ends up happening is that updating becomes such an unpleasant and time consuming chore that the official site can languish unchanged for years.

Perhaps most importantly, the institutional perspective almost always side lines the large majority of junior personal. The provisioning of websites tends to be prioritized or delegated from top to bottom with post doc, graduate students and technicians frequently left up to lab leaders to take care of. These pages are especially important for international researchers where the internet may be the only easily accessed public source of information for recruitment purposes. We are given a space to post these pages, but internal links are always directed to the university version of our official pages first. The links to the personally managed pages are almost always buried by hiding them in the research or contact sections of the official page. 

The other reason for owning your webpage is for the sake of continuity. On at least one occasion a university reconfigured our IT system and moved all of our personal web spaces, breaking the links to our webpages by changing the URLs. This undid the Google ranking and broke the links in my publications.  In addition, academics are notoriously mobile and moving your web address means all of the links from other people and sites and those in your published work will end up dead unless your institutions is willing to maintain pages indefinitely. Fortunately for me, my former post doc institution (UNIL) does. I am now convinced that it is most prudent to build a website with one permanent domain name that you can own for your entire career.

Finally, a large part of my motivation for my setting up my own website was to learn how to setup a webpage and to manage a web domain. As an ignorant amateur at html, I stumbled through the process with much trial and error, but I think ended up with a pretty nice webpage (mostly to discovering the amazing world of free templates, thank you Andreas Viklund). That adventure will be covered in part 2.

Where are the Dorian Gray’s?

I recently watched a movie adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray and realized that there are no examples of human mutants who do not age in the manner of Dorian Gray. There are examples of old people doing well into their 100’s and rare young children with the bodies of 70 year olds who do the opposite, but I am unaware of any records of any 75 year olds who could pass for 20. Why is that?

First, for those who have not read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, the important point here is that the main character does not age while retaining the body of 20 year old until his final demise in his 70's. Evolution seems to have no trouble pulling off this trick in some animals like sea urchins and seed harvester ants. This is called negligible senescence. The lack of specific cases in humans suggests that there are no single mutations or even pathways that are master controls of aging. If such a simple mechanism existed, then by chance someone should have been born with a modified version of this pathway and would have never aged.  I cannot imagine that such a person could have passed unnoticed in history.

People do not technically begin to age until around thirty when our age specific mortality rate begins to double about every eight and a half years. In the figure, the flat line between twenty and thirty means that one’s probability of dying is constant over time. Around thirty, something happens and we begin to age in the sense that our probability of dying increases exponentially with time (the straight increasing part of the curve). Dorian Gray, and animals with negligible senescence, simply continue with the constant flat level trajectory indefinitely. This transition around thirty is the area that evolution must act on to evolve longer life spans. All of the genes that worsen or improve health after this point are just random noise because they work after most offspring have been born and therefore do not affect fitness. The key to unlocking aging then would seem to be asking what is the difference between a 25 year old and 35 year old as opposed to worrying about why some people live to 100 and others don’t. Given the complete lack of any humans mutating to a permanent flat mortality rate all at once, and that there are many examples of evolution of longer life span, there must be human variants out there who transition a little later into their 30’s before crashing into the next problem causing exponential mortality increase. Perhaps by identifying people who seem to prolong youth slightly into their 30’s, we can pick off the first step by understanding their physiological trick, then look for the next set of people who seem to look young for their age and so on.  .  .  .

British Marks and American Grades

There are rumblings that Britain may be very soon debating the relative merits of changing their university degree classification system to a more internationally recognized version of an American style GPA. This will be a huge challenge. Moving between the marking/grading systems (Brits say marks, Americans grades) was one of the most difficult cultural problems that I encountered when I started teaching in Great Britain There are two areas where the accepted way of doing things is reversed;  1) the reversal of categorical classification and numerical scoring for individual classes and final degree, and 2)  the calculation, or non-calculation of exit velocity (weighting end of program grades more heavily). In addition, there is no clear linear way to map the A to F 0-4.00 GPA system to Britain’s 1^st 2.1, 2. 3^rd  0-100 system.

The most obvious difference between the US GPA system and the British degree classification is that a British student gets a classification on their final diploma, whereas the US system provides a GPA as a general overall mark. The greatest weakness of the British system is an inability to distinguish within classifications. In Russell Group universities about 18% graduate with a first and 57% graduate with 2.1. This means that almost 57% of British graduates from the top 20 universities are lumped together with no way to distinguish them without picking through their transcripts. I should point out that degree classification is critical for a Brtish student’s future because most employers use these as a rule of thumb:  first means outstanding, hire them before the other guy does, 2.1 means good enough to interview, 2.2 means only interview if you have to, and third means you’ll be lucky if they show up for work most of the time. Hence there is a great deal of pressure to get these correct because it really does matter.  In the US, an employer would ask for a GPA or perhaps class rank. These two US measures provide a much finer distinction between students and are based on results collected over more years (4 year degree in the US versus using only 2 years out of a 3 year degree in Britain). They are therefore a generally more accurate measure of performance over the entire student’s degree program.

Another important difference is that the British system attempts to classify the student as they are at graduation, whereas the US system gives an average measure of student performance over their entire time at university. In Britain, the final 0-100 scores are weighted to correct for exit velocity (weighting the last years more than the first years of the degree) before averaging to find the degree classification. One common weighting scheme is not to count to the first year, include second year marks and then count third year marks twice (weighting 0:1:2) to determine a percentage score which is converted into the degree classification.  Borderline cases are then dealt with in some standard or even subjective manner. Thus the British degree classification indicates the students’ level of performance at the time of graduation.  In contrast, a US GPA measures the overall performance throughout the students’ time in university. In the British system, the responsibility of correcting for exit velocity is the university’s call whereas in the US it is the employers’ job to look at the transcript and correct how they see fit for trends in grades. Thus, a US GPA is a nothing more than a raw and wholly unuseful number from the point of view of the current British system. On the other hand, this makes perfect sense for American universities with a broader curriculum. Here the trend for classes in one's major might, or might not, be the one an employer is most interested in. Who is responsible for correcting for exit velocity may be the single greatest obstacle to defining a universal worldwide consistent GPA or degree classification system. Either British academics will have to relinquish correcting for exit velocity (good luck with that) or the US will have to agree to similar weighting schemes. Not only would one side’s academics and students have to adjust to one way or the other, but the employers would also have to be re-educated on this issue.

Finally, the most confusing practical issue is the non-linear way percentage scores in Britain map onto percentage scores in the US system.  In the British system 70 and above is considered first class (a solid to high A in the US system). Furthermore, anything above 90 is almost unheard of and 100 for an essay exam answer simply never happens. The next level down is a 2.1 classification (B+ to A-in the US) that is between 60 and 70 in Britain. This is considered a well done job. The next level is a 2.2 from 50 to 60 which is a decent enough job (mid C to B) and a third from 40 to 50 (D- to C). Below 40 is a fail. 

Even trying to use a simple percentage or 0-100 scale instead of the 0-4pt GPA scale would not provide any more progress towards an international metric without great cultural change and re-education of academics and employers. The best one might hope to achieve is to provide a 0 - 100 mark for British degrees in British units to distinguish within the large groups of 1^st and 2.1 students. Class rank might seem to work but it is clear that there are differences among years and trends in performance over years that rankings would not reflect.

It will be an interesting year if some British universities do follow through to begin work on such a move.

A New Hope: the end of philosophy and rise of education as the unifying subject of academia.

I recently heard a talk by a former philosophy student who is now training nurses. He argues that educational training in a university should address who the student wants to become, and that this goal must be integrated into learning professional ethics. The perspective and the ensuing discussion about ethics and values and focusing on what becoming means revealed to me why I have found education such an interesting field of study. Education has replaced philosophy as the primary unifying cross-disciplinary academic subject. I used to hold the ancient view that all other subjects at a university were somehow subtopics of philosophy. This might have been true in the past but now philosophy appears to have reasoned itself out of practical relevance, if not existence. Philosophy is now an inward looking if not inward practicing discipline just like all of the STEM subjects and most of the humanities. Now education is only the field whose thought invades and deliberately tries to shape every other department on campus.

At our university I am beginning to see more people in our education group asking how we teach ethics and professional values while facing important issues of how to help a student develop fully into the person he or she would like to become. The first step is attacking the problem of criticality and what it means to get a student to think critically and independently.  There are now real hints that at least at our university, the field of education may be on the cusp of a shift away from the current obsession with quantifiable assessment and the churning out purely practical products with transferable skills. Education researchers are now thinking about the ethical and quality of life goals of our students. Furthermore, education researchers see the value of doing this on a universal level looking for the commonalities and differences across disciplines. Education researchers are now the only truly fully engaged interdisciplinary academics. Ironically, one of my most influential teachers once wrote that to teach teaching is a meaningless statement without linking it to a specific discipline. But I am now convinced that the teaching field is the best hope for recovering what has been lost in our obsession with merely giving students the material and practical skills they need to do practical work for our society.  The real lovers of knowledge are the ones who care enough to think about how to teach students to be not just good at what they do, but to be good human beings, good citizens and ultimately good leaders.

Amazing ATP Synthase Animations

There are some really nice ATP synthase animations at http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/research/atp-synthase. Click on the animation links for more. This enzyme complex is sometimes used by Intelligent Designers as an example of something to complex to have evolved. What is nice about this animation is that the rotating parts are clearly evident fitting in well with it evolving from a flagella or swimming apparatus in bacteria.

Two organizations with the right idea.

Tonight I am attending the Annual Kerkut Trust dinner. This charity was set up by Gerald Kerkut to fund physiology graduate students at my university. The value of these cannot be understated. There is no place else consistently offering such no strings attached money for exciting new projects and students. The foundation is extremely generous and almost always responds positively to request for extra funds and especially travel money.  They don’t ask you to lie about potential future economic impact, only that the science be solid and new. The application is short and to the point. The result is an invaluable resource for genuinely novel and new biomedical research projects that would never get off the ground otherwise. This has to be the most underappreciated charity at my university given the magnitude of the effect I have seen it have on the faculties that it helps.

Coincident with my dinner is an announcement in Science Magazine that the NSF is proposing a new initiative, Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures (CREATIV).It is a program to promote what Science calls out-of-the-box research. What is new and exciting is that it is all about taking risks and working between disciplinary boundaries and actually exploring the unknown rather than just being the next step sort of science. The key requirement is that it must be transformative. Such a program would never even get a hearing today in Britain with the conservative government hell bent on only funding practical and safe translational research. It is nice to see that the US still has its revolutionary spirit.

Ode to A4 with thanks to Stephen Fry

Two of the best things in Britain are Stephen Fry and A4 paper. One of my favourite books by Fry has inspired me to honour both with an ode. The book, “An Ode LessTravelled” is a very accessible and fun way to learn about poetry in a clear and entertaining way. I now find myself walking around chanting ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum and trying to hear the meter of words and sentences. This is not easy for someone as musically challenged as myself. One of the unfortunate results of reading his book is that he asks you write lots of poems along the way. I confess that I have not done every exercise but I have put together a Sapphic ode, anglicised like his examples by Pope. For those who want a clearer description of A4 and it’s useful properties see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size).

An Ode to A4

(dedicated to Stephen Fry)

The longer page allows more lines,

with extra words and lots more white

to free from letter size confines.

                          More room to write.

To make a perfect ratio

fold halfway down and when you’re through,

dividing width by height will show;

                          square root of two.

From home made cards to poster size,

your image scales with every fold.

A4 requires no compromise.

                       Your message sold.

Why two pads for different tasks?

Too long legal, too fat letter,

One size is not too much ask.

                        A4's better!

The Paradigm Shift Continues.

Sohal and Orr have seen the light! Two more giants of the old free radical theory have moved on from the death of the old free radical theory of aging.  In an in press review in FRBM, these two leaders in free radical research argue that structural based oxidative stress and the idea of accumulated damage is not the primary cause of aging, and that the effect of redox balance on signalling is likely more important. They then stake a claim to a new version of a free radical model by labelling it “the Redox Stress Hypothesis”. This review is a much more sober conservative take preserving a central role for reactive oxygen species model compared to Blagosklonny’s call to revolution back in 2008. What is clear is that the old idea that free radicals cause aging by direct accumulation of damage is being over thrown and several reasonable contenders are arising from the ashes.

Genuine Kuhnian paradigm shifts in Science are rare. It is really fun to be able to watch this one as it has been slowly evolving for the past five or so years. It seems so intuitive to think that the damage correlated with aging is the cause rather than the effect of growing old, but the opposite is being proven true. There are still many diehards out there who have not got the message. The next interesting validation of Kuhn will be to see how many of those don’t change their minds. According to Kuhn, a significant number will never be able to let the old paradigm go. At least not until their own redox signalling pathways become hopelessly unbalanced. For the laypersons who made it this far, the take home message is to not waste your money on antioxidant supplements to prevent aging.

Some aging research progress

There have been a couple of interesting ageing papers recently. One showing how caloric restriction works through a mechanism involving hydrogen peroxide and another on flushing out old cells in mice. Some people think I am little extreme in my views about the free radical theory of aging being dead, but I am right here. We do not just burn up or wear out and both of these studies shed light on how this works. We age because we cannot maintain the fine balance to perfectly control our repair and maintenance processes indefinitely. The beauty of the connection of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to caloric restriction is that H2O2 is also a signalling molecule that can affect phosphorylation pathways. This helps to connect all of the known aging metabolic pathways to the balance of highly reactive forms of oxygen that can act as monitors of metabolic activity and stress. The difference between this emerging theory and the old free radical theory is that it is the balance, and not the direct damage from these reactive and unstable signalling molecules that is important. Unfortunately, the authors and the reviewers are both still hung up on the old free radical theory and seem to be missing the point by describing the process in terms of H2O2 resistance. Caloric restriction increases the expression of an enzyme that re-activates a peroxiredoxin (an enzyme that changes H2O2 to water) reducing the amount of H2O2.  The unasked question is why would lower glucose levels require a greater ability to scavenge free radicals?  The whole system is tied into a feedback loop so H2O2 levels would seem to remain elevated in the presence of normal or excessive levels of glucose. I fear that this paper is just going to add yet more fuel to the dying fire of the old free radical theory.

The other paper is also very interesting from a systems biology point of view. What they essentially did was to improve the mechanisms for removing dying cells. They made a mouse with a “kill this cell now” gene controlled by a promoter linked to a gene that tells sick and dying cells to eventually die. In these genetically modified mice, one can trigger the  ”kill this cell gene”  with a drug so that sick and dying cells are more quickly removed. The result is an improvement in overall maintenance and less age related problems for the animal as a whole. Interestingly, this shows that dying cells are not necessarily important for signalling repair mechanisms or the animals would have been less healthy.  The other good thing is that these authors noted that they only tested on one genetic background. Aging effects are notoriously dependent on all levels of environmental effects from the genetic to physiological and even social. The H2O2 study above was done with yeast which are strange in the way they age (not multicellular) and needs to be explored in much more detail in animals and across genetic backgrounds as well. So some progress, but no sign of immortality in our immediate futures.

Science Media Madness.

The media and science are natural born enemies; the one sells opinions while the other replaces opinions with facts. Journalist prowl the university press releases, stalking us like big cats, striking at the most unexpected times. When a journalist call does come, the first feeling is one of abject terror. Some of my fellow researchers are in the midst of one of these most dreaded aspects of doing science, the media frenzy.

What is going on now is probably the most benign type of media folly. Some of my colleagues won a grant to do a study on the effects of nanoparticles in diesel fuel on honeybees. It might or might not give us groundbreaking data on a number of important health and agricultural problems. The key word here is might. If they new the answer, then they would not bother wasting taxpayers money on the project. It is typical case of the media setting their own agenda by fixating on the unproven minutia. This is a minor side project as the Guy involved recently secured a large proportion of the nations research spending on climate change for the university. When the interview requests came in, I heard the conversations in our open office as the PI coached his post doc on how to give very simple clear statements that did not over sell, nor could be taken out of context. This is critical training because the press has lost it’s way and is no longer concerned with truth or anything higher like it’s special role in democratic states. All the major outlets seem to care about anymore is making money by stirring up controversy and problems. Reporters are out to get us to say something stupid and to miss-represent whatever we say in a way to get the most eyeballs on their advertizements. There are some good science writers that I have worked with like Amanda Schaeffer and John Whitfield, but most reporters already know the story they are going to write and just want to drag a scientists into it to give the story some appearance of credibility.

One of the biggest problems with science and the media is the resulting over sell by journalists. Preliminary studies and grants become breakthroughs and the science is usually not presented well enough for a poorly educated public to interpret. From our school in the past few years we have had watercress curing breast cancer based on a trial run of ten women, and curry as the magic food to slow Alzheimer’s based on one of the thousands of chemicals in tasty curry showing some promise in a fruit fly model. In both cases the lab groups involved seemed startled at the media reaction and really had no choice but to try and ride the wave of over-hype while maintaining their integrity.  I have not noticed any up tick in the number of watercress curries in our lunch areas.

There is one extreme form of media mistake that I think is border-line fraud. That is the deliberate misrepresentation of science for personal gain. In my field, every month I see some idiot out there saying that the science of aging is on the verge of breakthroughs that will significantly increase lifespan by some absurd number of years. This could not be further from the truth. Aging research is in a state of confusion today as the most popular theory, the free radical theory, has collapsed. There is absolutely no chemical or drug out there now that has been shown to slow the aging process in humans, period. Life spans are increasing because of breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer and not because of anything to do with modifying the general process of aging. The problem with these claims is that whenever someone says that we are the verge of immortality or curing Alzheimer’s, people actually believe it and expect it to happen soon. They want to know where these promised benefits are and then misappropriate funding to translational research (making practical drugs and treatments from basic discoveries) where there is very little if anything to translate. The most grievous case in my opinion was the first discovery of life on Mars. I immediately looked up nano-bacteria and my heart sank when I realized that NASA probably had it wrong, and most likely over-selling the story without technically telling any lies. The pretty pictures of the “bacteria fossils” were explained by inorganic processes within a year. This goes to show how far one can fall in science when truth is sacrificed for financial and political gain. Since then this same group claims to have more solid evidence but who can take them seriously after hijacking the Pope's and presidents' agendas for something so quickly disproved? I still sometimes see those tatter clippings of the so-called Martian bacteria posted on the walls in biology departments. Once put up an expression of the joy and wonder of why we do science, now with corners curling over trying to hide their shame.

Back to School Special: How to Study at University

This is something I post every year on Blackboard for my first year students in the Autumn. I sometimes think I worry about them too much. Obviously the marking scheme is British but the general advice holds for both sides of the pond.

1) Use your classmates.

 “Watch one, do one, teach one” is an old medical school adage about learning medical procedures. This correlates well with the 3^rd, 2^nd and 1^st degree classification criteria in your student handbook which is the basis for assessment. The highest level of understanding of a subject is the ability to teach it to another which requires mastery beyond what is actually covered in lecture (reading around the subject). This is your goal and what you must accomplish if you want a 1^st class degree. To teach one you need students, and the best way to find your students is to form study groups (aim for 4 to 8 students). This way you learn the material in the deepest way by explaining it to your peers. When you are confused, they can help you. When they are confused you get the invaluable practice and experience teaching them. Both sides benefit from the each exchange. Sometimes the better students wrongly feel taken advantage of, but teaching the slower students gives the top students a much better understanding of the subject than they can get by any other method.

Helping the other students will not hurt your mark by “raising the curve”. Your fellow students are not your competition!! We might raise all of the scores to adjust a curve if we feel that the assessment was too hard, but I know no one who lowers the curve to fit prescribed guidelines. Remember that every lecturer’s dream is to have an entire class of firsts. We use external examiners from other UK universities to ensure fairness and to keep our scale on par with other UK institutions. If your entire class performs at the first level then we will congratulate you and parade your results in front of our external examiner while bragging about what wonderful instructors we are!

2) Taking and using notes

Some of you are just now learning that attending lectures and scribbling a few comments on the handouts is not sufficient. You need to record information that is communicated verbally, add comments that will help you to recall or understand concepts, and most importantly write down questions about areas that are not clear. Always look at your neighbours notes during lecture, this is one time where copying is encouraged.

Keep a module specific binder for your handouts and notes. The best students tend to write a summary of each lecture after class. Keep notes from outside reading in this binder along with the module handbook and all lab practical notes and information. This forces you to organize the material and organize your work and study.

Follow up on your questions by looking up the answers in outside sources. Use the textbook, books on reserve, the library, and the internet. Internet sources especially need to be evaluated for credibility, but do not assume ANY single source is definitive. Different textbooks might say different things based on when they were published (the invertebrate phylogeny for example) or who wrote them. Don’t forget that you will inevitably learn other things while looking up the answers to your specific questions (reading around the subject) making this time count double. If you can not find the answer yourself then do not hesitate to contact the lecturer and by all means ask your study group to see if you found the right answer.

3) Studying for a factual recall test

Sometimes there is no other way than memorizing a vast number of facts and terminology. The big three techniques are:

            Flash cards: Write the terms on one side an index card and definitions on the other then test yourself or use them with your study group.  Sometimes just making the flash cards is enough.

            Drawing diagrams from memory: Redraw a figure from lecture or the textbook from memory labelling structures, developmental stages or whatever then open the book and see how you did. Another variant is to get a big piece of butcher paper and write out all of the information for the module on one single poster sized diagram. This can help you see the bigger picture for some modules and is a good study group exercise.

            Mnemonic phrases: To remember the order Kingdom, Phylum, class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, it can help to come up with a phrase where the first letter stands for each classification. For example King Phillip Came Over From Germany Seeking Valour" There are some more memorable ones on Wikipedia under Mnemonics, but some are kind of, well, a bit too “creative” to print here. You can do this for any ordered series that has to be remembered.

4) Essay questions

Outline, outline, outline. Your essay should have an introduction, three to four main points, and then a conclusion. You can always organize anything into at least three groupings i.e. past, present, future, or break it down how the topic was handled in the lecture. Write out the outline first, and then write your essay. Don’t erase or scribble out your outline because the marker will appreciate seeing it and think that you are smarter for it.

Practice writing essays on past exam questions, likely questions, or ideally the candidate questions that might be given before the exam. Use your study groups for feedback on your essays and look at what your fellow students are doing. Frequently tutors and tutorial groups practice this skill.

Make sure to cover what you think are the main points and then add something from outside of lectures to prove that you have read around the subject. The markers are usually ticking off points from a model answer. You can not get a first unless you get most of the important points and provide a relevant discussion of a point not directly covered in the module.

DO NOT TAKE A CHANCE ON GUESSING WHAT QUESTIONS WILL NOT APPEAR ON THE EXAM!!!!

Students here frequently get into trouble when they do not think they have enough time to revise and decide to gamble by revising for only two (or one!) out of three possible exam questions. If you guess wrong.   .   .  you have no one to blame but yourself.

Be clear and concise, especially if you do not know all of the answer. The less you know about the answer the shorter your answer should be. We frequently see exam scripts full of meaningless or unorganized confused sentences from students who think that they can cover their ignorance with words.  In these cases, it is easier to give up and mark the student down than to pick through the garbage looking for anything vaguely coherent. Obfuscation is more likely to cover up the parts that you know than trick us into thinking you know more. The wisest move when you are stuck is to clearly state what you know and stop. You should take the opposite strategy on multiple choice and short answer exams and make the best possible guess.

5) Test anxiety

Some people panic about exams and do poorly because of the stress. The trick is to panic NOW and use that fear to motivate you to study. Use the fear to prepare, then lose the fear during the exam. My advice is to take a break and think about anything else but the subject in the few hours before the exam. As you walk into the room consciously try to forget everything you know about the subject. This way you feel refreshed when the exam starts. Once the exam starts read through the whole exam quickly while picking off the easy questions as warm up and to build your confidence. After the first pass, go back and work through the exam saving the really hard questions for last. If you run into multiple choice or short answer questions that you have no clue about, then guess and move on. You can go back later for these, but don’t agonize too much over the unknowns, just play the odds with these to get the best score possible.

5) Take care of yourself!!!

Your general health and diet has a great impact on your performance! I may sound like your mother, but if you want to perform at your best then get enough sleep, eat right, and don’t drink on school nights. Massive amounts of coffee and all nighters can be fun and even useful for study group nights, but not the night before the exam! If you do get sick or have any personal issues that might distract you or impact on your exam performance then talk to your tutor and see if you can take a make up exam. This school is EXTREMELY accommodating in hardship cases compared to any place I have ever been. The catch is that you must go through your tutor and get things documented properly.  Finally, don’t feel like you have to study ALL of the time. University study and life is intense, so socializing, road trips, and even blowing off a lecture occasionally might be necessary to maintain your sanity. Just make sure that you have the material covered and find the right work hard/play hard balance for you.