RCN Network Meeting, Boston

On Friday 18 and Sat 19 May, I was in Boston for the first meeting of the Research Co-ordination Network on Sustainable Energy Systems, which funded by NSF and led by Tom Seager. The RCN includes a series of internships for sustainability students in settings outside their home discipline and will use a version of the Imitation Game method in order to explore the extent to which being immersed in a different culture, if only for a few month, allows students to develop meaningful levels of interactional expertise.

Martin Weinel and I were there in order to report on the latest developments at Cardiff and to find out more about what the RCN version of the Imitation Game will look like. This was the main focus of the Friday, where we met the other participants in the Network and described our research interests to each other. In relation to the Imitation Game, we learnt that there are a couple of significant innovations being developed by the RCN, namely that:

1. The RCN version of the Imitation Game will use a Judge plus three other participants: a contributory expert from the target domain (a ‘positive’ control), a student or similar with no immersion in the target domain (a ‘negative’ control) and the student who has had the internship. The hypothesis is that, at the end of the internship, the judge should be able to order the participants and locate the intern’s level on expertise as being between that of the other two participants.
2. The numbers will be relatively small, so statistical analysis of the kind we are doing at IMGAME will be inappropriate. Instead, the success of the internship program will be measured for the individual students in their performance in the Imitation Game. In addition, by aggregating the individual results, the proportion of interns who achieve this intermediate level of interactional expertise can be calculated, giving a measure of success for the programme as a whole.

The official RCN meeting on Friday was then followed on Sat 19 May by a workshop in which Tom Seager, Evan Selinger and others described how they are using role-play games to teach ethics in relation tosustainability. This is of particular interest to Imitation Game project as, like us, they are taking role play games that could (and have?) been played in more traditional pencil-and-paper ways, and turning them into electronic formats that can be adapted for a wide range of classroom contexts. The whole set up was very impressive and provided plenty of food for thought about how we might develop the Imitation Game and (in my other life) how we might teach research methods differently.

IMGAME: Palermo fieldwork

Last week’s fieldwork trip to Palermo was a testing time in more ways than one but overall a definite success.

Network and/or software problems meant we struggled to complete the first day of data collection but sterling work by Marika and Leonardo meant that we managed to run three rounds of ‘Step One’ instead of two and at least give ourselves a chance of making up the lost ground. Big thanks must also go to Martin ‘Albert’ Hall for getting up at 4:30 am to reconstruct the databases in time for us to carry on with ‘Step Two’ as planned. After that, things went much more smoothly: recruitment picked up and we managed to collect all the remaining data as planned. In the end, we even finished slightly ahead of schedule.

Palermo also saw a new variation of the IMGAME method, in which Pretenders at Step Two answered two sets of questions rather than just one. This should give a measure of ‘Pretender noise’ and will allow us to explore the reliability of IMGAME data in a different way. We will, of course, also compare the results from Palermo, in which non-Christians pretended to be Catholics, with the results from Budapest and Cardiff, where we researched the same topics.

As ever, I must end by thanking our Local Organiser Marika for all her hard work. In this case, she had the unenviable task of finding atheists in Italy, dealing with computer problems on the first day and looking after Harry, Martin and me for a whole week. She did all this superbly and will be delighted to know that we fully intend to come back next year!J.

traineeship for science communication student

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESF) are looking for a student interested in summer vacation work at their facility. The advert reads as follows:

We have a project for this summer, spanning about 6-8 weeks during June, July and August. We hope to find a native English speaker with a scientific background and an interest in communication. The project will be to write/edit the text for a new section of our website that will present a collaborative science project.  Organisational and editing skills are more important that web skills. An understanding of writing for the web would be beneficial.

Past trainees thought that working at the ESRF was a great experience, for them it was:
- an opportunity to spend a summer in Grenoble, France
- working at a major European Science Centre (640 employees and 3000 scientific visitors per year)
- working with scientists
- with English as the working language
- the trainee salary was thought sufficient to cover living expenses

Further details about the ESRF can be found at http://www.esrf.eu/

IMGAME: Budapest fieldwork

We arrived back in Cardiff last night after yet another successful IMGAME fieldwork trip. Local Organiser Zoltán Sallay did an excellent job recruiting participants, who almost all turned up, and we managed to complete the data collection phase is record time!

The topic for this set of Imitation Games was religion, with Pretenders given the task of passing as Christians. The results will be directly comparable with recent fieldwork at Cardiff, where secular students were also asked to pass as active Christians. We are still completing the final phase of data collection in Cardiff and will start this in Budapest after Easter. With any luck, we should have results to report at SEESHOP in June.

Lastly, we must single out our tour guide, Martin Weinel, for exceptional work in finding excellent hotels. He surpassed himself this time with the Gellert hotel, which includes entry to the Gellert baths as part of the room price…

IMGAME: Granada Fieldwork

Last week (19-24 Feb) we were in Granada for another week of IMGAME fieldwork. As ever, thanks must go to our Local Organiser, Adolfo Calatrava, and the two student helpers, Ignacio and Carolina, at the University of Granada for making the week very successful and very enjoyable.

The fieldwork topic was sexuality and, in particular, the extent to which straight participants can pass as gay. We used the new designthat was first trialled in Uppsala in which generating questions, pretender answers and then judgements are done as three separate stages rather than within single, real-time Imitation Games. The procedures are getting more efficient and our week’s work in Granada enabled us to collect data in two different conditions:

• In the first condition, pretenders (i.e. straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were allowed to use the internet to research answers. We recruited just over 80 participants to this stage of the research who each answered one of 13 different sets of questions generated on the first day of fieldwork. This data should be directly comparable to that collected in Uppsala, where pretenders were also allowed to use the internet.

• In the second condition, the pretenders (again straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were not allowed to use the internet but had to base their answers on whatever knowledge they had when they arrived. As with the first condition, each of the 80 or so participants answered one set of questions from the same set of 13. This answers, and the judgements they give rise to will be directly comparable to the other condition and will give us an important insight into the effect of using the internet on the outcome of the research.

We have now assembled the questions, non-pretender answers and pretender answers into the 175 unique dialogs and are now in the process of sending these out to judges. We hope to report the results – both the Granada/Uppsala comparison and the with/without internet comparison – at SEESHOP6 in June.

PhD Studentship : Science Communication and the Large Hadron Collider

[From the PCST mailing list]

Applications are invited for a fully-funded three-year studentship in the field of science communication, specifically to study the promotion of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Closing date: 24 February 2012

Select http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6096 for more details about the studentship.

Potential candidates are invited to make initial, informal enquiries to Richard Holliman, <r.m.holliman@open.ac.uk>, to discuss the breadth and scope of your proposal for this studentship.

Final decisions about the focus of the research will be agreed between the successful candidate and the supervisors (Dr. Richard Holliman, Professor Eileen Scanlon and a contact at CERN).


Dr. Richard Holliman
Senior Lecturer in Science Communication
Department of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems
Faculty of Science
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
Tel +44 (0)1908 654646

Select http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/r.m.holliman for more information about my work.

Select http://isotope.open.ac.uk for the Isotope website.


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Job opportunity in science communication

The Orangutan Tropical Peatland Project (OuTrop), an NGO based in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, are currently advertising for a communications manager to join our group. The post would suit a student or researcher with a background in science communication.

More details at: http://www.outrop.com/work-with-us.html

Closing date is 1 Feb 2012