Girls and physics- yayy!!

Girls & physics- yayy!!

My comment on the Guardian article:

It doesn’t surprise me as much as it should that hardly any girls are going into physics. Sad, but girls and boys seem to have become further separated into camps since American TV & culture have overtaken individual national trends over the last 50 years. The 15-year-old girl next door started high school insisting she must do agriculture, but has since discovered make-up, high heels and alcohol and switched to “cheer-leading“/calisthenics as her main interest. Gahhhhh!!! When I started high school in 1964 (yikes!), there was probably some sort of “girls are dumb” talk around whether to study science or not, but at the time, I was socially very unaware. This was in NSW, Australia, where in high school, if you took science and maths, you did it as a whole unit of study, so you couldn’t pick and choose between biology & physics – we also took geology for 4 years. I was a sickly little kid who was also the class “brain” and I had no thoughts about school subjects other than to do the ones I enjoyed: Science, Maths, English, French & Art. I didn’t like History or Geography, so I got out of those as soon as I could. I loved Physics because I had been reading sciencey books and doing my own little real life experiments since I was around 8 and no one had ever discouraged me or made fun of me – so I was lucky being rather isolated/insulated! The only thing that prevented me going on to a career in astrophysics, which I really wanted to do, was the lack of clarity about how there could be a job in it, and the fact that there were no role models presented [I was in a country school with really good teachers but no other professional role models other than the local doctors). I chose to do Medicine at university because I thought I had a good idea what doctors did every day! Although I changed direction several times, I still maintain an interest in the sciences and admire the local Professor of Photonics, who is female, as she has become internationally noted for her drive and intelligence in research, plus she’s a lovely sociable person who looks OK, has a family and does normal things! People should look up Professor Tanya Monro at the University of Adelaide. She’s the foundation professor in the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (fancy physics)- have a look, parents and girls. Unfortunately we can’t prevent the local newspapers from prettying her up in nice clothes and jewellery for official photos, but she’s really quite human!

Interesting that an article on a similar theme of excluding science from “general knowledge” appeared in The Telegraph of all places yesterday:

Knowing about science is not a trivial pursuit

In this link they mention:  ”An artist once told the great physicist Richard Feynman that, as a scientist, he couldn’t appreciate a flower’s beauty: “You take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”… as if science is anti-beauty and anti-the arts! This is exactly the sort of talk that puts girls off doing science right at the precise time when they could get a great start in a lifelong interest and career.

NB. Tanya Monro herself replied about 5 minutes after this blog post appeared. She must have good spotters!

Brain too full to post!

Trying to finish this Masters degree means I have to work hard on restricted topics for long periods of time. So why can’t I write a bit about one of those? Well- I feel guilty devoting any words to anything other than an essay or dissertation! My other blog has also died, even though I could write exactly the same thing in that blog as an essay (http://healthforhumans.blogspot.com).

My dissertation could have been finished by the end of first semester if I had been able to get ethical clearance and worked on the data then, but life ain’t like that in the Land of Research! I had written the background to the project, a “skeleton” article to pop the results into when I got them, plus an ethics committee submission for the university in the first 4 weeks of Semester 1. Now it is nearly Week 9 of Semester 2, with that plus weeks 10, 11 and 12 before uni breaks up for Christmas/summer! I still haven’t been granted access to the de-identified/anonymised data from the state health department- it takes forever until each little level of bureaucracy is satisfied I don’t want to publish the names of the patients and hospitals who have problems on Facebork or whatever! My supervisor and Head of Department have signed so many pieces of paper, they are getting RSI. And I have a wonderful task for them on Tuesday (Monday is a public holiday here)- ANOTHER bit of tree to sign! Must be patient…

I even had a little lecture on how to address an envelope suitably for the health department when I ended up trying to deliver a report to the exec officer for the ethics committee- the security guy said I should put my stuff in their internal mail to make sure it got to the top of her desk when she returned. So I got a security pass from him and toddled up to the first floor. There, an autistic person objected to the name I had put on the front of the reports with “To: X on 10th Floor” or whatever. I had to listen while she told me that my boss at the university should find out how the health department likes addresses to be formal, formatted in a certain way and on a WHITE label, ON an opaque envelope. I had a set of reports in a transparent plastic folder so they didn’t get separated! I could have clobbered her, but figured she really was autistic and had to go through her spiel no matter what anyone said. So I stood and took it.

Now I’m fiddling with the data I managed to get for free and without password from the Australian Medicare database containing info about how many prescriptions are dispensed for every medication in the system, in which state and whether paid for by Medicare itself (Public), Privately or by the Veteran’s Affairs Dept. I was able to download all my necessary numbers from here in January- now I have an extra 6 month’s worth to play with, thanks to everyone stringing me out!

I was so distracted when I was writing my first essay this semester for my last course-work subject, that I almost wrote a whole dissertation on it! The topic was in Indigenous Health (mainly pertaining to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) and we had to choose a disease or illness that was a public health problem in this group. I chose Trachoma (an infectious eye disease, familiar in poor, developing countries like the Sudan and Afghanistan). There was masses of material to digest, especially from the World Health Organisation and UN. In addition, Australia has had decades of government policies about providing various health services which would have fixed the problem in no time flat, but they never implement them fully… You might have heard of a bloke named Fred Hollows- he set up a Foundation to care for vision problems, firstly in Australia and then internationally. His wife Gaby now administers the Fred Hollows Foundation and they mainly work in war-ravaged nations such as Democratic Republic (sic) of Congo, East Timor and Uzbekistan etc. Anyway, fred’s team charged out into the bush and fixed trachoma and other eye problems using surgery and antibiotics in the mid to late 1970s, ie. last century. However, the pussyfooting governments since haven’t followed up and the trachoma and blindness is coming back. Hopefully a new campaign, organised by a doctor who was just a young whippersnapper on Fred’s first expedition, Hugh Taylor, will get in there and hopefully eliminate the disgusting scourge over the next year or two.

The head lecturer even lent me a beautiful book by Hugh Taylor (and signed!) to help with the essay, but I’m afraid I just got even deeper into the subject and ended up having to cut what I’d written by two thirds at the last minute!! Oh dear- what a hash. Hopefully I’ll at least score a pass!

Anyway, I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m not consulting nearly as many references for the second (and last ever) essay which I have chosen to write on “Indigenous Mental Health, ‘Country’, and Land Rights”. It sounds like social studies rather than public health, eh?! ABC TV has some programs which help explain indigenous peoples’ attachment to ‘country’- which I certainly needed explaining to me 2 months ago, but now have a good understanding for a white person.

Now I guess I have made a bit of a post, so I can stop. I might be able to write something about analysing my data on possible connections between several drugs and adverse events in South Australia, once I get the de-identified information from the health department. It’s pretty weird stuff, but I think I could explain the essence of it simply!

SO, there you are- pretty boring, huh!

Future blog ideas

I have a headful of possible topics I’d like to explore, but it’s not a social thing, sorry. Here’s a few that are buzzing loudly:
1. When several (possibly) autoimmune diseases happen in the same person, do they involve the same sorts of immune reaction?
2. Am I an ex-gifted child who has underachieved and ended up in the shit? What can I do about it?

3. Why was Los Angeles built the way it was? Can people seriously live on the piles of rubble with retaining walls and expect not to be affected by the weather, floods and landslides? Who pays? Why do they pay up? Google Earth is good for this one!
4. The puzzle of Iran, it’s nuclear determination, geology, views from the air, Iranians I know, what do they hope to achieve, why do so many desperately want to leave?
5. Astronomy and astrophysics- so interesting, so attractive and what’s happening these days?
6. Persuading ordinary people to live more respectful of the earth. Impossible?
7. Are universities becoming mainly vocational and ticket-providers? Who cares?

Golden hall of learning, or ticket office?

Is there anything you’d like me to get stuck into? Please comment!

Another dream, another toad…

I just awoke from this dream as Evangeline opened the front door, so some of it has been shocked into the subconscious!

The dream started somewhere I can’t remember, but the first bit I can remember is when I was getting into a single bed (rather like my cousin Beth’s bed when we were kids and I stayed with her parents). As I pulled the blankets up to settle down, there was a little twig-like thing on the edge, so I pulled it out and chucked it on the floor. Then some bloke came in to say goodnight (not my Uncle Alan, but a stranger) and was telling me about a slight “pest” problem they’d been having- a few mice and rats in the roof. Then he spotted the “twig” I’d tossed out and pounced on it, saying “Oh no- we must have a bird problem as well… that’s a little, shriveled bird foot!” I wasn’t too alarmed as IRL our cats are always abandoning little birds’ feet about the yard.
So off I went to sleep, unconcerned. The next morning I was in the city with some other people working for some government office. We had to get some lunch and travel to some other site for a meeting, so one of them went off to get some take-away stuff for us to eat on the train. I ordered a hamburger and chips and a soft drink and this guy went off to get everyone’s order. When he came back he had got various hamburgers, chicken, sandwiches and chips, but handed me a barbecue chicken in a bag. I was a bit miffed, but took my bag onto the train and tried to settle down. However, a heap of people got on and crowded us out of our spot near a window- there were several small children, a few older ones and a few extra adults- the little kids just stomped on most of the food- a Macca’s burger went all splatto across the seat, which put me right off!
A while later I got settled elsewhere in the train and opened my chicken bag- BUT-inside covering the whole upper side of the nicely browned chicken was a huge floppy toad, looking quite slimy and stunned! Eeeergghhh!!! I slapped the bag shut as it moved a bit!
I went back to my friends sitting with the kids to show them, but when I got there, one of the toddlers had just got another, smaller, darker toad jump onto his front and everyone was trying to get it off him, while he shrieked! A man who seemed to be the same one as had been saying good night before, said he was the child’s father and that he had been receiving some of these animals in mailed packages for some weeks.
The scene moved then to a stairwell- maybe in a station and I was walking up- as I rounded a corner, a pale green thing wound around a steel brace- it looked rather like a snake! (How Freudian!!!). As it looked rather sluggish as well, I grabbed it behind the head and held on tight, taking it out into a corridor. This turned out to be the corridor of a laboratory building or university. I ran with the “snake” (it seemed to have some rudimentary dinosaur-looking pale green legs at times) into a lab with benches and yelled- “Someone get me a container for this thing!”. Everyone started to scatter and run away- I let go of the now writhing and jerking thing and it hurtled across benches and floor towards the windows. I yelled at everyone to get to the other side of the room and out the door- some hardy types (blokes in lab coats mostly), immediately went to have a closer look at the thing. Somehow I knew it was not particularly harmful or venomous and wasn’t panicked, although I didn’t want it to bite me anyway. A guy came along from another department and said it was the Pale Green Jungle Python from Ethiopia (??!!).
Without much ado, I was back with my colleagues from the train, going to our meeting. We got off the train onto a bus and set off in the rain; (it had been sunny before and overcast). We got off the bus at what seemed like the long boring stretch of Ayliffe’s Road, before it descends past the Shepherd’s Hill Reserve. There seemed to be nothing there except a tall thin Asian man with a briefcase standing beside the road.
Meanwhile it got quite dark, and we’re walking along the road- which now seemed to be in a fairly level suburb with lots of peak hour traffic, rain and traffic lights. As we rounded a corner on foot I noticed that a heap of large gravel was piled up with lots scattered across the lefthand turn lane. Then I looked out into the intersection and noticed that a car seemed to have fallen into a big sinkhole in the road! It was full of people- 8 of them in fact, and had filled with water up to road level! I looked them over and got out my mobile phone to call an ambulance and police- meanwhile one of the passengers stood up (it was a large convertible with top down, in the rain!), and started pressing 000 on her mobile as well. Other passengers didn’t seem able to move or get out so I moved in front of the car to direct traffic/make it stop or whatever, while a colleague attended to the passengers. Suddenly all the street lights and traffic lights went off and it was a bit hairy standing out there in front of the oncoming traffic! However, the cars still had their headlights and I figured my hands would look white in the lights and people would see me waving them about and not hit me!
As we waited for the ambulance and police to turn up, suddenly someone I had seen earlier in the dream in a shocking pink suit, turned up. She had been sent out by some government minister to personally investigate claims that the transport department was letting things go to the dogs, and here she was right on top of a supporting incident! We seemed to know who she was, so we grabbed her and started making her write down our sad tale about the accident, the road condition and the disorganised trains and buses we had been travelling on. Then the front door opened and I was awakened- no more dream!
What the?? Figure this one out!!