Sunday 9 June 2013

Do not turn your back on journalism

I recently attended a talk for postdocs and early career researchers at the University of Birmingham entitled “The Media: Friend or Foe? Or the job for me…?” The speaker was BBC Midlands Today reporter Joan Cummins.


Joan’s talk “Rough Guide to Journalism” began with a brief story of how she became a journalist. Joan started by volunteering for her local evening newspaper and then for an independent radio station. Her first task was to sit in the corner of the room and “observe”. She did nothing else but that for a while! I am sure everyone in the audience, like me, thought that it must have been really boring. But Joan expressed the contrary. She said it had been fascinating to see how journalists worked. They had to update the information EVERY HOUR and efficiently use the phone to find the stories (remember there was no internet at the time!). That’s when she realised journalism was the job for her. She graduated in communication studies and since then has been working as a reporter for radio and television.

Next, Joan gave us advice on the use of social media. She uses Facebook as a tool to find people who are related to the tasks she has been assigned, or just to look for stories. As for Twitter, she suggested not to trust everything we read and check the information somewhere else. “Be careful what you share on social media”, she said, “It will be found”.

She then explained a bit about the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) code of conduct, a series of guidelines that every journalist has to stick to. And also in her particular case, about the BBC values, stressing that “the public has got to trust the media” and “everyone needs to be treated with respect”.

We also learned how hectic the work of a journalist is. For example, the average news report is about 10 minutes for an interview, which then has to be translated for a general audience to understand. She made emphasis on that point, saying that the KEY in journalism is to be able to translate the information down. She compared herself to a sponge, “I soak stuff up and squirt it back out in an understandable way”. Her suggestion was to make the information as short and tight as possible. But being a journalist also has its perks, “You get to see things and places that the general public do not” and “your interpersonal skills rocket!”


Her final advice for anyone interested in journalism was to “keep an open mind” and to remember that “everyone has a story”.

Someone in the audience asked about opportunities for scientists that would like to become journalists. She suggested a journalism qualification, for example a one-year postgraduate course, because you have to qualify as a journalist first. “You need this qualification because it is very important to KNOW the law”.

As a final note I will quote one of her most striking phrases. I believe it was meant for all of us, whether we are thinking about leaving Academia or continuing to work at the bench: “DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK ON JOURNALISM”.

Sunday 2 June 2013

Meet Polly

Last week I went to the Thinktank to see the exhibition of The Pirates. I had watched the film (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists) but seeing the models and sets was impressive. You can actually step into that miniature magical world. I would like to dedicate this post to one of the characters who I believe will draw everyone’s attention. Her name is Polly.

Pirates are always represented with a parrot on their shoulders. Polly sits on the captain’s shoulder; she is basically his pet. The thing is Polly is not a parrot, but a dodo! I looked for literature on the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) to find out why it became extinct, where it lived, what it looked like, etc. I did not find many papers but the few I managed to read were full of interesting facts I would like to share.

The exact date the dodo became extinct is controversial because the documentation had to rely on stories from explorers and sailors, which were not accurate or not at all true. A study published in 2003 using statistical algorithms predicts the extinction date as 1690. However, other publications refer to 1662 as the date of the last sighting.

Apart from arguments about dates, there’s also disagreement on the possible causes that drove the dodo to extinction. There are different theories. For example, the arrival of the sailors and their animals (mainly rats and pigs) to the island of Mauritius destroying the dodo’s habitat, the sailors’ over-consumption of dodo meat, or even a natural disaster like a tropical cyclone.

The anatomy of the dodo has also been speculated over the years, mainly based on old sketches and descriptions from sailors. There are sketches of thin dodos (the one from Van Neck’s lost journal that was copied by C. Clusius in 1605) and fat dodos (the one painted by the artist A. Van de Venne in 1626).

In 2006, Rijsdijk and Bunnik from The Netherlands discovered lots of dodo bones at the Mare aux Songes in Mauritius. They literally found a treasure because not only were dodo bones dug up, but also material from the time before humans arrived in that area. Great hopes were and are still expected from the information coming out of this big excavation.

For example, a team in France studied the body mass of the dodo by analysing the length of bones like femur and tibiotarsus. Previous teams that used different methods had estimated it to be between 10.6 to 21.1 kg. The new estimate mass is 10.2 kg, comparable to that of a big wild turkey. Seems that dodos were rather thin birds! 

And last year, scientists from the USA, UK and The Netherlands (including Rijsdijk) analysed the material from the excavation and described possible scenarios for the dodo’s extinction. These included death by thirst, death by water intoxication and death by miring (being trapped in peat terrain). The authors considered the last one to be the most likely scenario based on the characteristics of the soil and the fossil deposits. They proposed that a drought might have forced the dodos and other animals to a specific mire rich in water (the Mare aux Songes) where they were eventually trapped. More studies will undoubtedly follow; we might get to know more about the dodo’s diet, anatomy and even the size of their eggs!

Even with all this scientific evidence, nothing stops us from imagining a dodo the way we want. Personally I love the small, fat, cute Polly. It would be great to sit her on my lap and have her sleeping in a basket! How do you imagine your dodo?

References:
All photos were taken at The Pirates exhibition (Thinktank museum)