Today's 'news' is a mixture of the tragic and bizarre and won't be improved by any commentary from me. So, for something different, here's an excerpt from the transcipt of this evening's Perspective on Radio National:
Next time you meet a scientist, ask them why they do what they do. They will probably tell you something like when they were a child they met Sir Hillary Edmond or loved to try out the wacky experiments of Prof Julius Sumner.
Debbie Richards, Associate Professor, Department of Computing Macquarie University.
Prof Richards was described at the end of the program as a 'science communicator'. Just as well she's not in the history department.
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5 comments:
I once met Sir Hillary Edmond. We were half way up a mountain in Nepal and he asked if I knew an Aussie scientist called Sir Mark Elephant.
Sigh . . .
(That's what you get when you study computing.)
Cheers, Paul
you may in fact have been halfway down...that might have affected the answer...
With all due respect - Associate professor Richards is full of shit! I became a scientist because I believed I could make a difference, and I was sure there was still a bit of undiscovered frontier left waiting for me. I didn't decide for a long time what type of scientist I would be, but there was never any question that a scientist was what I would become. No Julius Sumner, Hillary Edmond, or otherwise. Whether I was running some standard environmental testing procedure, or developing stand alone research, I always felt that what I did made a difference, even if only for the future of the company whom I was testing at the time.
The inspirational figure in my childhood was a figure of ridicule during high school with a nickname of crumpet face, and true name of Tim Angley, he was hardly the type to attract an admiring crowd. As a high school science/chemistry teacher, he was a frustrated researcher at heart - and often working on his "cure for arthritis" at the back of the classroom, with a bunsen burner, test tube and lump of undisclosed chemical. In years to come, his passion and dedicated teaching inspired me in a way that I would have thought laughable during high school. Throughout, he always expressed disappointment that I had no intention to go on and be a chemist, given the natural ability that his lessons elicted - I only hope he has since found out that I later completed a chemistry degree to become remarkably successful in my field.
In the meantime, perhaps Debbie Richards needs to be reminded that the leaders of our field have endured greater hardships, self-inflicted anonymity, and general stuff-ups than is perhaps reflected by the very junior science of computing - but not suprising when the aspirational comtemporary is no less than the man who suckered the rest of the world into buying successive defective versions of windows. real scientists don't do it for the money!!!
Yikes! Take a pill (after you've invented it first, of course). I think you've proved the point. I have a small difficulty with the notion of a 'science communicator' anyway, but they certainly shouldn't be recruited from the computing department, it would seem (my guess is she was 'nominated' anyway).
Hah! Didn't you know that "Science commnicator" is the new pc term for "useless, over-qualified post grad with no tangible usefulness for qualifications on which to draw income". Now, in a day and age where technology, and therefore computer science reign - and seemingly no such thing as a useless computing qualification- how very geeky indeed must this woman be!
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