Week 11: Seminars

Hello everyone.

Well, this week, I will be talking about public speaking. Specifically, a public speaker I admire and why.

After considering scientists, such as Brian Cox or Neil De Grasse Tyson, and science communicators like Bill Nye, I have decided on Stephen Fry.

I have always admired him as a comedian and knowledgeable individual, especially after watching most episodes of Q.I. I enjoy watching him alongside Hugh Laurie in the sketch show, "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and his fantastic characters in "Blackadder". His vocabulary is second to none, and his documentary series on the history of language, "Fry's Planet Word" is superb. Seeing him alongside Brian Blessed talking about swearing, is gold.

But, what really impressed me about this orator, was watching his presentation for his recent book, "More Fool Me". It was an interesting, thoughtful look into his past, with him reading excerpts from his book and telling stories of countries he's visited. It was performed live in front of the audience in the stadium, as well as being streamed live to different countries around the world.

He seemed to ooze confidence, but a short way into the proceedings, it became evident that he was feeling rather nervous. He was sweaty, he seemed awkward, and yet, he really pulled it off. I saw someone that I admired and wanted to be like. When I think about talking in front of an audience, I feel short of breath and my voice goes unusually deep. When he was nervous, he was still able to be entertaining and not lose the message at all.

Another public speech where he was admittedly nervous, was the debate on the importance of the Catholic Church. He was debating alongside Christopher Hitchens, another outspoken atheist. It's a wonderful, emotional speech that shows nothing but brilliance and the type of intelligence that only someone like Stephen Fry can get across. You can find this one here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJ6AV31MxA 

He is a wonderful debater and defender of being gay and has even discussed "gay therapy conversion" with some severely misguided people. His famous answer to the existence of a god is the single greatest answer I've ever heard from anyone. You can find it here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo
The way he conducts himself when asked this question, which can be a tricky one for some atheists, is admirable. 

He is a man with a colourful, imperfect past, as he admits in his book and in his presentation. He has a history of drug abuse, and never seems to deny that. He is a wonderfully spoken man that gets his point across in a brilliant, intelligent, respectful, and most importantly, entertaining manner. 

I'll leave you with a quote. It's a quote that every person needs to embody, in science and the wider world. 

"The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is" - Stephen Fry.

Week 9: Team Analysis

Introduction

This week, I will be going through team analysis. Working in a team has been a different experience for me. This is my first University paper and the other parts so far have been individual work. 

To our advantage, we formed our team early in the semester, so we've always been in contact, talking about our topics and how we were getting on with our work. For the past 3 weeks, we've been working together on the report. It's a much bigger task than the individual position paper, so working in a team has made it much easier.

Early on in the report, we decided to elect a leader and editor. We elected Jade as Leader and me as Editor. We shared our position papers and started allocating tasks.

Leadership

Coordinator

Nathan has taken the role of coordinator. Even though in the beginning we elected Jade as the official Leader of the team, as things changed, Nathan filled this role. Whether it's because of his time in the army or something else, Nathan has found it easy to find strengths in the team and use those to our advantage. He's found it easy to delegate tasks to everyone and generally take charge.

The allowable weakness for this role being manipulative or delegating personal work is not something I have noticed though.

Implementer

Nathan has come under the role of Implementer as well I've found. He is highly motivated and has had the task of completing this report in his focus the whole time. Even around the time of his wisdom teeth removal, he remained task-oriented and checked in with us to see where we were at. He also feeds off the guidance from the rest of the team, giving everyone's ideas merit.

Ryan also fits in with an Implementer role. He has been a strong leader alongside Nathan, both of whom are disciplined and hardworking. Ryan works well with guidance from the rest of the team and is always looking for ideas and input from the rest of us.

Again, the allowable weakness for this role, rigid and doesn't like change, doesn't really fit either, as they have both been happy to adapt to changing format within the report and differing information.

Team Roles

Resource Investigator

I would say that both Nathan and Ryan have taken the role of Resource Investigator. With Nathan's career in the army, he's had connections to resources, such as studies in areas applicable to us. Ryan, with his family's connection, was able to obtain information on certain sections of preventive health in the Ministry. They have both been great communicators, something I have trouble with at times. This has been an invaluable role for us, as having two such extroverted members has made it all work much better.

The allowable weakness for this role is considered to be "easily bored", but this isn't so much of a weakness, as there has been so much work to be getting on with, this has lead to the Resource Investigators communicating their boredom and motivating the rest of the team.

Team Worker

Jade and Bridget are both Team Workers, working alongside each other, as they both covered the same topic for the position paper, elderly well-being. As we are using this topic in our report, it has been both Jade and Bridget working together to mould their information into a workable format.

Ryan is also a Team Worker, being a very social part of the group. He has been aware of others needs, something that I consider valuable when working with other people.

The allowable weakness for this role being "indecisiveness", has been somewhat of a drawback, but, after reviewing the Belbin Team Roles subject, I consider the role of a Team Worker to be a valuable part of a team.

Plant

Bridget is someone who has been happy to go with the flow and see what others are thinking before contributing her ideas. She is then happy to do what needs to be done. She was allocated tasks for some of the harder topics for our Recommendations section and has brought forward some interesting ideas.

Jade is also a Plant. She has had some very creative ideas around a few of the topics we've worked on in our report. They both came up with good ideas for recommendations on hazardous drinking, which has helped immensely.

The allowable weakness for this role is described as "unrealistic", something I have not noticed of either Jade or Bridget yet.

Conclusion

One thing I have learned about myself doing this team analysis is that I seem to have trouble identifying weaknesses in people. Listening to the lectures on Belbin Team Roles, I was quick to assign people to roles in my head, but the allowable weaknesses left me indecisive.

Up until this point, I think our team has worked effectively together. Nathan and Ryan, in their combined roles as Implementers and Coordinators, have proven themselves valuable to our team. Ryan, Bridget, and Jade in their roles as Team Workers have kept everyone happy and working well together. Ryan initiated meeting in person and it was good to meet face to face and get to know the others a little better. Implementers and Plants work well together, swapping ideas and the rest of the team working through these.

My role as Completer Finisher is fitting, as I am the Editor for this report and will prove valuable in the days to come. This role has allowed me to work well with both Nathan and Ryan, in the writing and structuring of the report. 

I can see that too many Team Workers could be a problem, as not a lot of work would get done, but Ryan with his combined roles has proved himself a valuable member of this team. 

Week 8: Suggested Topics

This week for our blogs, we have been given free reign to write about something we have found interesting recently. I am always interested in reading about pseudoscience, science-denial and the fear-mongering that can come with it.

A couple of days ago while eating a bag of potato chips, I noticed a food label on the front of the bag, "GMO-free". This struck me as odd, seeing as how there are no GMO potatoes currently on the market in New Zealand. Our strict laws here in New Zealand don't allow for any GMO crops. These were chips from a New Zealand company called "Proper Crisps". They take pride in being organic and all the relevant buzz-words are there. Gluten, dairy, GMO-free and vegan-friendly, with no added MSG labels were all there.

Monosodium Glutamate was the old bogeyman before people were afraid of gluten. It's the sodium salt of the amino acid, glutamate, and occurs naturally in a lot of foods. People wrongly correlated it with a lot of health problems, such as headaches, after eating too much Chinese food. It's simply a misunderstanding. John Mahoney (2013), ex-head for popularscience.com wrote an interesting article on the history of MSG, which gives food "umami" or "fifth taste".

Gluten is another ingredient that is widely misunderstood and feared. It has lead to a craze of gluten-free diets and people thinking that gluten is actually unhealthy to eat. The truth is, it is only damaging to people with the autoimmune disease, coeliac disease, which affects about 0.5% of the population. Seeing as how gluten is present in wheat, it affects those with wheat allergies as well. Yet, gluten has been blamed for a range of problems, even as far as autism (Darling, 2014).
I think the single craziest food label I have ever seen is "Chemical free". I have seen it on bacon for sale here in New Zealand. Almost everything here in our universe is a chemcial, except for the obvious exception of pure elements or photons and other subatomic particles. Bacon contains quite a list of chemicals, no matter how natural or organic it is.
A lot of food lables are necessary. For reasons of faith, halal, kosher. For reasons of allergies, such as nuts, which can be life-threatening. But, when foods are labelled for silly things that don't need labelling, I'm left wondering where it ends. Do we label all food as being plutonium-free? Or labelling a bag of carrots as meat-free? Labelling something as GMO-free is just giving into fear-mongering and science-denial. GMOs are safe. They have been proven safe and are nothing to be feared (Entine, 2014).

Darling, W. M. (2017). Non-coeliac gluten sensitivity—a look at the evidence behind the headlines. Diabetic Foot, 11(27).

Entine, J. (2014). The debate about GMO safety is over, thanks to a new trillion-meal study. Science and Technology, Forbes. Retrieved from http://www. forbes. com/sites/jonentine/2014/09/17/the-debate-about-gmo-safety-is-over-thanks-to-a-new-trillion-meal-study.

Mahoney, J. (2013). The notorious MSG's unlikely formula for success. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnmahoney/the-notorious-msgs-unlikely-formula-for-success?utm_term=.vwgevKERj#.rf9GLY47x

Week 7: Survey Design

Hello, everyone. This Week, we are writing about our surveys.

Our topic is preventive health, and our survey questions have focused on this. The aspect of preventive health we are focusing on for assignment 2, is the "nanny state". Nanny State here referring to the government being overprotective and interfering with individual choice. It is my opinion that it should be part of the government's responsibility to provide basic health care for all citizens. The aspects that we as a group have researched include compulsory immunisation, taxation/subsidising unhealthy/healthy foods respectively, and social well being of the elderly. These are areas that require attention from the government.

Our survey design has concentrated on these three topics in particular. We have included questions on age and income and whether they think it's the government's responsibility to ensure the health of their population.  I personally am interested to see any correlation, if any, between these. Obviously, with a small sample size, it will be hard to draw any definitive conclusions, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

It seems people have all sorts of different opinions when it comes to health care. Some claim that health care is not a human right, (Barlow, 1999). The World Health Organization Constitution (2015) enshrines "the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being".

We have decided to target the general public for our survey, so we can expect a range of answers. We decided to use an electronic source for our survey, through Survey Monkey. We thought this would keep with modern times and be the easiest, most effective way to distribute our survey to the widest possible audience.

While there is no perfect sample size or best practice when it comes to surveys, (McColl, Jacoby, Thomas, Soutter, Bamford, Steen, & Bond, 2001), we still have to be aware of the small sample size and any bias we may encounter. Biases that may come from the way we've distributed the survey, which is through Facebook, to our friends, some of which may think the same way as us. It's up to us to interpret the data in a responsible and critical way.

We have been advised by our tutors that typically, surveys will aim for roughly 100 answers per question, but we are to aim for 10-15. In science, more is always better, so hopefully we can get plenty of responses.

We will be interpreting the data with Excel, which will allow us to form relevant tables and graphs that we can then use in our report. The use of closed questions, with yes or no answers, alongside questions with agree or disagree answers, will allow us to form a pretty good picture of what our sample thinks.

This has been an interesting experience for me. Our team has worked well together to achieve it. I look forward to seeing the data.

References:

Barlow, P. (1999). Health care is not a human right. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 319(7205), 321.

McColl, E., Jacoby, A., Thomas, L., Soutter, J., Bamford, C., Steen, N., ... & Bond, J. (2001). Design and use of questionnaires: a review of best practice applicable to surveys of health service staff and patients. Health Technology Assessment 5(31). http://10.3310/hta5310

World Health Organisation. (2015). Health and human rights. Retrieved from
www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs323/en/

Week 6: Working in Remote Teams

This week, we are required to write about working in remote teams. We have all submitted our position papers, and now our research turns to the ethics of our topic, preventive health care.

We've had our team established since very early on in the semester, to our advantage I believe. We've been in contact with each other, thanks to Facebook Messenger, always asking questions and running things by each other. We've gotten to know each other quite well by now, as well as you can know someone these days without meeting them.

Susan Cain (2012), has written about the genius of the individual. Research has shown that some of the most creative minds of history have been loners. Sir Isaac Newton & Steve Wozniak, two undoubted geniuses of history.

I share this philosophy. I've always found it hard to talk to people face to face, and collaborate with people in person. I found it especially difficult when I was in a band, it proved easier and more productive for me to come up with things on my own, then present to the band as whole later on.

However, I see working in remote teams as a way of overcoming these problems. We are not working side by side with each other. We're not working in the same room or even the same building. The internet has given us the potential to work together without being together (Cain, 2012). Research has shown that teams in academia, not individuals, produced some of the most influential work. People working remotely, sometimes in different universities (Cain, 2012).

Working in this way requires strict deadlines and a team of people working for the same goals and objectives. We have all established that we all want A grades on this, so we all want the same outcome. We all seem to know our strengths and weaknesses, which I'm sure will all come to the fore when working on this report together.

Cain (2012) brilliantly points out what she calls "contradictory impulses"; "we love and need one another, yet we crave autonomy and privacy". This is what the internet can provide to creative people. Working in a remote team can be possible for even the most shy and private of us. We can all work for the same goals, while still retaining privacy.

In any case, I feel confident working in this team. We're all working toward the same goals and the same grade. We've all agreed to work on this report through Google Docs, which is very handy and easy to access.

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane" - Nikola Tesla.

Cain, S. (2012) The Rise of the New Groupthink. Retrieved from https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?referer=http://t.co/QkQLEnzd

Week 4: Why the debate on vaccination is important

This week, I want to talk about why this topic is so important. Why does the debate matter? Why are vaccines so important to me?

Science clearly says why immunisation is important. There have been thousands of studies done on their safety, effectiveness and even the ingredients. Their importance is shown time and again when the coverage rate for a certain vaccine drops. Mumps outbreak in Auckland earlier this year. Numerous schools closed last year throughout New Zealand. Whenever an infant dies because of some unvaccinated child, the importance of immunisation is revealed.

However, the anti-science crowd somehow think there is a conspiracy. There are no reputable studies to be found to say why you shouldn't vaccinate. There are endless books, YouTube channels, websites funded by natural/alternative medicines to say why the pharmaceutical companies are all out to get them. Doctors are to be feared and mistrusted too, except for the ones that agree with them. Doctors like Mercola, Tenpenny, ex-doctor Wakefield.

The recent propaganda film, Vaxxed has been doing the rounds, with the tour bus following in its destructive wake. Australia has banned the pro-disease activist, Polly Tommey, who called doctors "murderers". Recently in Australia, they have passed a law that means you can't send your child to school unless they're fully immunized, the very topic I'm writing for. Their vaccination rates have increased to safer levels, much to the pro-diseasers' dismay. We may recall a few months back, when the Vaxxed film was screened here in New Zealand and they were met by 2014 New Zealander of the year, Dr Lance O'Sullivan's indignant response. He was invited to the event by a fellow doctor and was disgusted to see these people flouting such science denialism, endangering children's lives with their lies.

Anti-vaccine rhetoric is dangerous and a threat to our safety. We, as science enthusiasts, teachers, students or professionals, need to stand up against this abuse of science and keep arguing.

Week 3: Summarising the debate

Hello everyone. 

This week, I'm going to break down the two sides of the argument. The topic I have chosen, "Children should not be allowed in schools  (or pre-schools) unless they are fully immunised", while contentious, has still proven difficult to find a fair breakdown of the debate. There is a wealth of information and studies showing the safety, effectiveness and need to be vaccinated. But, as mentioned in my earlier blog, the opposition has been more elusive. 

The most recent controversy in the world of vaccine debates has come from a so called documentary film, called Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, (Bigtree, D.M., & Wakefield, A.J. 2016). Wakefield and (some) supporters of the Vaxxed film claim they are not anti-vaccine, but just pro-choice. Most are just full on anti-vaccine. The film's marketing claims "The film they don't want you to see". The film's premise is alleging the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was involved in a cover up that destroyed evidence and hid data that showed a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. It revolves around two retracted studies that showed this link. They claim to have a whistle-blower within the CDC that is coming out and telling the truth. This is a quote (not included in the film) from their CDC insider, Dr. William Thompson (Carey, M. 2017),

I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits.

Is this the information the Vaxxed crew don't want us to know? As Dr Thompson mentions, there are risks involved, because in science and medicine alike, nothing is perfect. Some people may be allergic to certain ingredients for instance. These people that can't be vaccinated are the ones that rely on the rest of the community to be immunised. However, all risks considered, there have been plenty of studies showing there is no link to autism.

The other reference I will use here is from a recent study explaining the importance of herd immunity and maintaining a high coverage rate to protect the population (Hayman, D.T.S., Marshall, J.C., French, N.P., & Carpenter, T.E., 2017). With New Zealand being such a desirable country to live, learn or work, with families emigrating here from all over, we are exposed to people from outside our highly immunised population. Other countries are making the same effort in trying to eradicate these diseases, but it has to be a global effort in such a connected age. 

Hayman, D.T.S, et al. showed that younger children are at a much higher risk of measles, particularly 0-2yrs  and 12-17yrs. The efficacy, or effectiveness, of the MMR vaccine is increased when the children have had both doses, otherwise the likelihood of infection and subsequent outbreak is increased. The study found that this was true for the majority of the cases from 2007-2014. In fact, 82% unvaccinated and 17% were from children vaccinated only once. 

The herd immunity coverage rate is 95%, which means that 95% of the population must be immunised to prevent the spread of Measles. Because of this herd immunity, it means that vaccinating is not a personal choice that only affects the individual, it affects the entire community, all the people that can't be vaccinated due to legitimate medical reasons. 

It's clear to me that making full immunisation a compulsory part of schooling in New Zealand is the logical step to eradicating these infectious, preventable diseases.

References:

Bigtree, D.M. (Producer), & Wakefield, A.J. (Director). (2016). Vaxxed: from cover-up to catastrophe [Documentary]. USA: Cinema Libre Studio

Carey, M. (2017) A look back at the so called "CDC Whistleblower" story and how Vaxxed is misleading Retrieved from https://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2017/02/10/a-look-back-at-the-so-called-cdc-whistleblower-story-and-how-vaxxed-is-misleading/

Hayman, D.T.S., Marshall, J.C., French, N.P., & Carpenter, T.E. (2017). Global importation and population risk factors for measles in New Zealand: a case study for highly immunized populations. Epidemiology and Infection (145) 1875-1885. Retrieved from https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/global-importation-and-population-risk-factors-for-measles-in-new-zealand-a-case-study-for-highly-immunized-populations/AA7A61E06F421945937D0BCB01DD11A8