dan Pope

Thanks.

Dan Pope

Weather means more when you have a garden. There”s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans….

Oh, and on a related note: “They take it’s flaws in their stride” should be “They take its flaws in their stride”.

i.e., human grammar checking still required.

I think you are right that there is a big difference here. And asking questions is critical to discovery. But I also think there is some really interesting middle ground where legitimate concerns still lead to action that is potentially harmful. Not sure anyone has a robust framework for how we handle this yet.

However, I am reading a very interesting book called Thinking, fast and slow, by Daniel Kahneman, one for you Andrew if you haven’t already read it. There are many interesting observations for us, but the one that springs to mind in relation to this, is the fact that participants in a study who only saw one side of a particular argument were much more confident in their opinions and judgements, even though they absolutely knew it was only one side and was biased. Those who saw both were much less confident of their judgements.

We construct a coherent story for ourselves out of what we know and want to think, so consistency of information really helps with that coherence. If, as you say, by adding complexity and asking challenging, contradictory questions are we, by the simple fact of doing that, making people more confused, more likely to revert to ‘what they think’ regardless of the facts which subsequently arise and disengage with alternative information which challenges that view? This is hard-wired, not just flabby thinking and is the case with experts as well as lay people. It is consistency of information that counts, not completeness when we make sense of information in order to judge and act.

So FOE’s clear rhetoric – ‘don’t do it’ is appealing, because it plays to people’s innate fear of the new and odd and that all adds up. When scientists say ‘it’s all OK because we know what we are doing’, that may also plays to others of us who feel that the clever people will sort it all out. But scientists asking challenging questions about safety and NGOs shown to be less than clear about their underpinning information makes the whole thing wobbly and unsatisfactory. People simply disengage with both?

This is perhaps the same as the muddying of the water around climate change, it really does make people less clear about what they think, and less able to act, because the coherence of the story is not there.

Anyway, this is a very lay perspective on a very good and clever book, packed with really fascinating observations. Worth a read Helpful post Andrew, thanks.

For more background on the concept of principles rather than a definition, check out the Tox Sci paper linked to above. The aim there was to effectively take “nano” out of the equation, and enable people to focus on materials that presented an emergent and plausible health risk, irrespective of what they were called. If they were to be applied to a regulatory context rather than helping develop research directions, they would need quite a bit more work. But in principle, they remove some of the hiding places for organizations to hunker down in that don’t want to evaluate and respond to the potential impacts of new products.

I like your principles, but looking at it from the perspective of industry, I can foresee some room for interpretation. For example, I could imagine the Nano Salt people for example, arguing that their product doesn’t fall within your principles, and because of clumping isn’t nano anyway and so doesn’t need any new tox. (I have not asked them btw, though have heard presentations saying similar things. I have no idea personally if that is correct, though can understand their reasoning.) What is your view on independent oversight of such areas where companies have chosen to interpret the guidance to assume no potential for harm and so no new tox?

I am assuming, as we are calling for, that a new focus on transparency about such decisions from companies will be the starting point. However, our very broad definition in the EU will cover it anyway from our point of view, whether that is a good thing for innovation or not, I am not sure!

Excellent list of emerging technologies with explanations of their potential impact.
3D Printing is said to potentially revolutinise manufacturing. Driverless vehicles and screenless displays could also make their impact before 2020.

The following page on Wikipedia will also be of interest (although unlike this article relative impact is not evaluated):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies#IT_and_communications

The related topic of the technological singularity may also be of interest. My own viewpoint of accelerative change can be read at

http://www.zoologicalhistory.blogspot.com

Here i look at matters from the broadest perspective possible by starting from the evolution of complex animals. One of my conclusions is that there could be an economic revolution soon during which i expect many of the technologies mentioned in this article to flourish.

Tanny

I think there should be some serious caution in all aspects of biology when mixing genes. I’m not against it at all, but the level of stringency by which the academic (and even industrial) standards are formed may not apply in a garage lab. As a lab assistant, I spend probably about 20% of my time autoclaving, sterilizing, disinfecting, and otherwise, simply to reduce the possibility of releasing recombinant organisms.

This doesn’t just apply to rats or plants or people; all it takes is one slip of a biohacker and one might change the biological landscape irreversibly.

I was thinking even more conceptually when I put the tableau together – what the apple denotes from a pro science and and anti science perspective…

Not easy, actually!

I am a teaching PhD student in the Social Sciences at a Business School in the UK and specialise in innovation in high tech enterprise. I am also doing an MEd concurrently. I have been experimenting with different teaching techniques to try and better engage the undergraduate and post graduate students I am teaching. I had started to realise that the students respond better and with more focus and concentration where methods employing digital media are involved. Today, it has been very useful to learn about our own experiments with Pencasts. I have been employing something similar but not with quite the same repeatability. Experimenting with this will be very interesting. Thank you. Lorraine Morley

KNITTING IN MEETINGS
because falling asleep
IS RUDE.

Capitalized lines are in MUCH larger type than the middle line.

The knitting/crocheting shop I frequent participated in creating objects for the crochet coral project and had samples available to examine – I had fun trying the technique myself.

If you haven’t had chance you might like the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen [ no not the comedian Dave Allen......]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

The Getting Things Done method rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

he has a 2 minute rule that if it takes less than 2 minutes just do the task….

Only issue is when you have a 100 emails x 2 mins = boat loads of time!

the tip of putting the actual request in the email header is a great one
And only one topic per email is another

One thing that does seem to help is setting up filters so they go directly to folders. Searching within a folder takes a lot less time than searching through 10k emails. But I think the same principle of time management someone told me once – only handle a piece of paper once – is the goal re emails. Otherwise you spend more time organizing your emails than actually dealing with them.

Here’s my point: on one hand, I think learning how to use a programmable calculator/graphing calculator in high school was good – because it gently prepared me for using mathematical software packages later. I LOVED my TI-89 in college. I programmed the snake game and I could check my paper/pencil or mental math, too. I don’t recall thinking either calculators was ever a bad investment (but then again, I likely didn’t pay for either – thanks Mom and Dad). I think middle school is a early to make these a *requirement.* I think they can be very beneficial – if they are actually USED. Coming from someone who has now taught engineers – I am amazed at the math some of them cannot do without a calculator!! I have also taught non-engineers, and I find in some students their calculator skills woefully inadequate (mostly stemming from not understanding order of operations). With both engineers and non-engineers alike – there’s a tendency to write down whatever the calculator spits out without taking a second to go “does that answer really make sense??”, but that’s another problem entirely.

On my bad days I’m tempted to remind people of my consultancy rates – but that would just be churlish!

In terms of “free consultant”, your time is valuable, and you are only one person. Perhaps you give non-commercial requests 15 minutes “gratis” and then charge a fee for multiple or lengthy discussions, and ask commercial groups to be fair to you, and pay a consultancy fee. We are talking about your children’s education and more.

Your blogs take time for you to write, and they are invaluable. So thank you for continuing those.

Cordially,
HCG

And I’m still trying to work out what to make of the “free consultant” perception – deeply disconcerting!