New Outreach activity

Next week, I'm doing a short talk at a local high school (who have a science specialism) on Food Safety and the role for mathematical modelling (QMRA - Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment).
First outing as a STEM ambassador - so hoping that it will go well.

Mathematical Challenges for Biologists

I attended this event on Tuesday at Reading University. Organised by the UK Centre for Bioscience and BBSRC, it was well attended (~40 people) and discussions centred upon the fact that some candidates starting a Biology degree encounter problems with mathematical concepts that are essential to biology (e.g. calculating how to make up Molar solutions or in the use of logs in calculating pH) i.e. 'toolkit' skills.
Additionally, awareness needed improving that candidates hoping to progress into areas like Systems Biology or Mathematical modelling need even more advanced maths skills.
Actions suggested include communicating better to prospective candidates of the advantages of having AS or A2 Maths and remedial course modules targetting the deficiencies where they exist.

I learnt quite a bit about the areas of maths that e.g. GCSE holders have covered (depending upon grade in Foundation or Higher) which may well be useful when designing outreach activities for STEm activities.

Extremely productive day and hopefully it will improve the Biology degree experience for undergraduates.
(I have a great deal of sympathy as in my day,I did all 3 sciences at A-level and only O-level Maths and had to work hard to catch up and still am via the OU. With the way in which Biology has changed the need for mathematical skills has grown).

Back to 'normal'

Did exam for OU course MS221 last week (sat at small school desk) so that draws a close on that course unit (Think that I did alright but will have to wait until end of Dec for results :-(). All being well I will then have an OU Certificate of Mathematics.
Thinking that next module (in January) will be M208 - Pure maths (Yes my sanity may be questioned...) to be followed by MST209 - Mathematical Modelling. This, assuming I survive it will get me a Diploma in Mathematics.
I hope to then do some further modules to get a Diploma in Statistics with a (long-term) goal of a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics to add to my BSc Biological Sciences and Graduate Diploma in Systems Design.

Kindle

Our group travel about quite a bit. I attend several meetings with material (70-80 pages) that consume piles of dead trees. So I've got a Kindle to try and improve our lot. First impressions are good. Screen is very readable even in direct sunlight. I've tended to use PDF files for work and OU documents and they display well.
On A4 if there's a lot of text or formulae then rotating text by 90 degrees helps. Zooming and panning on PDFs has apparently improved over past Kindles but still a bit clumsy when dealing with say 3-column scientific papers. A way out might be a utility to repaginate such docs as single column PDFs (Does anyone know of such a beast?)
Wifi works quite well. Keyboard isn't designed for a lot of input but is usable. Browser (WebKit based) is Ok but no flash (so no YouTube/Iplayer - but e-paper refresh not really suited to video playback anyway (at the moment)), no support for multiple windows, I've had no joy at getting it to render local (i.e. on Kindle) HTML files and it won't allow you to download PDFs direct from web-sites (so you need to download from PC and then copy to Kindle i.e. almost Sneakernet).
However, these minor things withstanding, it is a useful device.

StemNet

Attended an StemNet Induction meeting at University of East Anglia yesterday. This explained about becoming STEM Ambassadors "The STEM Ambassadors programme has volunteers who offer their time and support to promote Science Technology Engineering Mathematics subjects to young learners.  It is an invaluable and free resource for teachers, helping them deliver the STEM curriculum in fresh and innovative ways."
It is another route to promote understanding of the scientific work done at the Institute and it's value to Society.

Another month, another wiki

My boss (Gary) and I have been creating a contact web-site for the modelling part of BIOTRACER project for when it's funding finishes. Again, we're using mediawiki as it is very good for quick collaborative development.

It is a work in progress, but can be found at bbn.ifrn.bbsrc.ac.uk/btmodeller/.

Dispatch war-rocket AJAX!

(Apologies to/for Flash Gordon film) Adding some AJAX to SUSSLE web-app using Drasticdata's DrasticGrid  to format search results and hope to use mootools (also used by Drasticgrid) to create dynamic query web-forms.
Looks promising...

Institute Strategic Programme Group Talk

Have almost got out of the habit of blogging after pre-election purdah...

I gave a talk yesterday on the countdown 439 project and my experiences at the ISPG meeting.
I volunteered after someone else dropped out. I was worried about it as it was very different to the usual talks which are usually very science programme specific (e.g. the other speaker was talking about sRNA and flagella assembly in Campylobacter) but it seemed to go down well.

Hopefully, I may have encouraged others to do some outreach activities as it is in the BBSRC strategy.

Another visitor & more OU

We have another visiting scientist - Zhao Xiaoyan (Cindy) is from China and working with Pradeep for a month.
I had to get her laptop MAC address so she could get access to our wireless network. I'm getting good at deciphering non-english IPCONFIG reports (Dutch, Catalan and now Chinese :-)).

Delivered the latest OU Maths TMA to my tutor (for MS221) yesterday - probably not as good as I could do but at least it is done and delivered. Need to crack on wth last unit (D) of MST121 and start next unit(B) of MS221 - no rest for the wicked!

Conference

Went to Bioinformatics conference in Cambridge last week. Presented Biotracer poster.
Some quite good talks plus I went to a couple of workshops organised by BBSRC projects (Ondex, Genesys and Stomp). Packed quite a lot into three days. Took OU stuff along as MS221 TMA submission date looming :-(
NB Finally added links to project pages...

National Science and engineering week

Second visit to local school. Spoke to 4 classes (~100 pupils) and discussed Science.
Very impressed by their knowledge and their grasp of the problem that we discussed (Food Security). Seems like my colleagues had a good time as well.
Feeling pretty exhausted though as it was very intense.

School Science talk - Countdown 439

As part of countdown 439 (also part of National Science and Engineering week) I gave a talk on Science, being a scientist and how science relates to Food Security.
I had an hour slot and broke talk into 3 pieces with activities where the class of about 25 pupils participated.
I tried to tackle stereotypes about scientists and explain how I got into science as well.
Seemed to go OK - have got four more classes to talk to tomorrow

Keeping busy...

I'm finishing off a scientific conference poster for some work on the EU biotracer project and preparing some material for schools visits as part of Countdown 439 - two very different audiences. Plus I'm working hard on my OU Maths course...

PhD Student visiting

Xavier, a PhD student is visiting our group for a few months. My boss has a project lined up for him on variability. This will be modelled in NetLogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/) so I'm helping him get up to speed with it (as we've used it for a few projects). It is a very good package for Agent Based Modelling. It is written in Java but the models are written in a flavour of Logo. Finished models can easily be deployed as Java Applets. It delivers a reasonable GUI without the modeller having to do much programming, leaving them free to concentrate on the underlying science and the modelling process.

New Year's post

Back at work in a winter wonderland :-)

Continuing normalising data for a Institute Strategic Programme Grant project SUSSLE.
It is to create a database for modelling spore loads in foods.
Using MySQL again and associated tools Query Browser, Administrator and some PHP.