Tuesday 14 September 2010

Festival Time


Today is the first day of the British Science Festival at Aston University. All of the media fellows are here, along with science writers from all of the major papers, and lots of others whose wit, charm and gravitas I am yet to discover :)

It’s also the day on which I’ve experienced my first (closely followed by my second and third) press conference. This is half an hour with the speakers who will be giving a talk later in the Festival. They talk for a bit, then it’s Q&A with the journalists. The best division of time I’ve seen was 5 mins presentation, then 25 mins of Q&A when the journalists get to ask exactly what they want to know, whether this is from premeditated plan for a piece, or an on-the-fly prod-it-and-see-what-happens approach (see, THEY’re allowed to do it..). After the psycholinguistic conference I went to last week where presentations lasted for 15 mins and questions for 5, I’m wondering if the press format would be a worthwhile shift for us academics. It keeps everyone on the ball, you get instant feedback on what is and isn’t interesting/comprehensible/persuasive and everyone’s free to move on after 30 mins. Short, sweet and straight to the point. In the evening, we discuss the day's highlights in various semi-structured options, always near a bar. Another good model for academia.

The wall-to-wall science leaves the Times Higher and me (as Times Higher apprentice) a little peripheral, so I asked the British Science Association if I could write the news for them. Chance to work with another mentor and gives me a little more purpose than just drifting around filling my head with science with nowhere for it to go. So that’s what I did.

I filed a piece on a next-generation MEG scanner in development here at Aston. Impressive stuff. A child-friendly machine with a nice child-sized helmet and a system of electromagnetic coils which will let the child move around during the scan, which is pretty revolutionary for MEG. I remember how hard it was when I was MEG scanned. Ended up getting told off for twitching and then force-fed chocolate to keep me awake. They even want to make this one rocket-shaped for maximum imaging funtimes, though the over-literal autistic kids that they plan to use it with might have something to say about being sent to space..

Off to the final of So You Want to be a Scientist shortly, then a round-up of today’s events and then to the pub for more schmoozing and boozing. It’s true what they say.

I shared a desk with Pallab Ghosh off of Radio 4, and a press conference with lots of familiar names and voices from the media. Also met the Naked Scientists, the founder of BlueSci, and an ex-Times Higher reporter and spouse-of-fellow-psycholinguist (small world). Still haven’t seen Johnny Ball though.

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