Monthly Archives: July 2009

Science’s exquisite corpse and other interesting science communication developments

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The ‘exquisite corpse’ is a game that surrealists started playing in the earlyish part of the 20th century, according to the wikipedia essay here. I first came across the game in a poetry context. I was part of an online poetry organization and someone suggested (as I recall) that we start an exquisite corpse project on our website. Nothing much of came of it but I’ve always found the phrase quite intriguing. The idea is that a group of people play with words or images individually then put the pieces together to construct a final work.

Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog has been featuring an art/science exquisite corpse project by Tim Jones. Billed as an experiment in science engagement, Jones and his colleagues (at the Imperial College) have created videos of two  members of the public, a science communicator, and a scientist talking about a drawing they’ve each created that expresses what they each think is important abou science.  What you’ll see are the interviews, the pictures that the people drew, and an exquisite corpse of science, if you go here.

Tim Jones has now invited more people to participate for the biggest art/science project in history (maybe) to create a bigger exquisite corpse of science. If you’re interested go here to Tim Jones’s site or you can read about it here at 2020 Science.

I came across a way for scientists to publish workflows and experiment plans  at myExperiment.

BBC4 has been conducting an experiment of their own, visualising radio. In this case, it’s a science show that’s cast over the internet. They’ve blogged about the project here.

All of this makes me think back to the interview that Kay O’Halloran (July 3, 6, and 7, 2009 postings) gave me on multimodal discourse analysis and Andrew Maynard’s bubble charts (June 24 and 29, 2009). It’s exciting to explore these new and rediscovered techniques and to think about how we perceive the information being conveyed to us.

One last bit, there’s been an announcement from Lord Drayson, UK’s Science and Innovation Minister and Chair of Ministerial Group on Nanotechnologies that the government is seeking advice for a national nanotechnology strategy. From the announcement on Nanowerks News,

Industry, academia and consumer groups were invited to use a new website to help develop the strategy, building on and consolidating the existing research and consultations that have already taken place. The website will gather views on core issues including research, regulation, innovation and commercialisation, measurement and standards and information as well as on the anticipated impact of nanotechnologies on a wide range of sectors. The aim of the strategy is to describe the actions necessary to ensure that the UK obtains maximum economic, environmental and societal benefit from nanotechnologies while keeping the risks properly managed.

The rest of the announcement is  here and the project website is here.  (NOTE: Consumer groups will have their own website although members of the public are welcome the new website is really intended for academia, industry, and NGOs.)

Happy weekend!

Business research and development and Canada’s innovation gap (the last of this 4 part informal series)

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This is definitely the last in this informal series on Canadian innovation with an occasional foray in the nanotechnology scene. I have commented more frequently in my postings on government funding of R&D (research and development) but Canadian business should also be included in the equation.

Canadian businesses don’t tend to invest as much in R&D as their counterparts in other countries. From the Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage report issued in 2007 by the Industry Canada,

Businesses in Canada need to do more to improve their productivity. Canada’s private-sector R&D as a proportion of GDP is below levels in Japan, the US, Germany, and France. Similarly, the number of patents produced in Canada is low compared with many other OECD countries. Canadian firms also invest less in new machinery and equipment, which embody the latest innovations, than do many of their competitors.

Whether you agree with current patenting laws and trends or not, it is a standard measurement for innovation. Konrad Yakabuski’s article in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, which kicked off this series, notes this Canadian business R&B investing,

Between 1981 and 2000, Canadian companies’ expenditures on R&D grew by almost 10 per cent annually. But since 2001, they have been flat in real, after-inflation terms and have declined by fully one-fifth when expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Yakabuski’s article goes on to paint a bleaker picture of Canadian business investment in R&D.

There are many reasons for these problems as noted in the Industry Canada 2007 report. However there’s one reason that I didn’t see mentioned and it may be due to geography.

I live in British Columbia (Canada) and the Vancouver area has a very active technology community where I worked for some years as a technical writer. My observation (it’s not unique but I note it because I haven’t seen any analyses which mention it) is this: the business plan for most of these companies (over 90% and I think I’m being conservative) is simple.

  1. Get an idea for a technology.
  2. Start up a company.
  3. Get some R&D funding from the government.
  4. Get some interest from the media.
  5. Sell the product and grow the company to a few million dollars in revenue.
  6. Now, sell the company to another larger business (usually from the US) and retire.

The local branch of PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a BC TechMap (the version I saw was produced in either 2004 or 2005) that depicts visually the number of technology companies started in BC and the assimilations and mergers over the years. There were hundreds of companies and it was extraordinary to see that most had been acquired. (I think the map starts in the 1980s and the 2004/5 version gave viewers information valid to 2003.) To summarize brutally, the business plan is to sell the business not grow it or invest in it for longevity. I suspect that where BC and nanotechnology are concerned that the same business plan will apply.

Tomorrow, science’s exquisite corpse.

Finland, nanotechnology and innovation

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I wasn’t planning it but this has turned into a series about Finland, innovation, and the Canadian approach to innovation. Today should be the final installment (ooops, it changed again) with this one focusing on nanotechnology.

In February 2009, a study, prepared for Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, showed that nanotechnology companies had tripled in number between 2004 and 2008. From their media release on Nanowerk News,

In 2008, private investments in nanotechnology were for the first time greater than public investments. The industry received public funding worth 38 million euros, industry investments were 56.6 million euros and venture capital funding 9.5 million euros. …

“The internationalisation of nanotechnology companies requires ongoing improvement of the funding opportunities. According to the study, exporting products to international markets requires dozens of million euros within the next two years. Both public and private funding are required,” says Markku Lämsä, the FinNano Programme Manager at Tekes. The nanotechnology industry’s shift from research to commercialization is giving a boost to Finnish industry during the current economic downturn.

This whole approach contrasts somewhat strongly with what we appear to be doing here in Canada. We talk about innovation instead we fund infrastructure projects (see the Don’t leave Canada behind blog for confirmation..particularly items like the funding for Arctic research stations which I linked to  in yesterday’s posting). On the nanotechnology front, the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance shut its doors either late last year or early this year, Nanotech BC has not been able to secure the funding it needs, and the National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) has lost its individual brand and been swept back under the National Research Council (NRC) brand. As for a nanotechnology policy or initiative, Canada seems to be one of the few countries in the world that simply doesn’t have one.  As for the business end of things, I will write about that tomorrow.

Finland, Canada, innovation, and risk taking

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In Konrad Yakabuski’s article (I started commenting on it yesterday), Canada’s innovation gap, Finland is held up as an example of where innovation has fueled economic success. In yesterday’s posting I included quotes from the article which outline some historical reasons why the Finnish have embraced innovation. Now it’s Canada’s turn.

Yakabuski mentions Harold Adams Innis (an influential professor of political economy at the University of Toronto) and his work,

The staples theory was originally developed in the 1920s by historian Harold Innis to explain Canada’s development as a provider of valuable raw resources – initially fish and fur – to the British Empire. …

Though the staples theory seemed outdated as Nortel rose to prominence and Ontario’s auto sector grew to overtake Michigan’s, it has been revived recently by economists to explain the slide back into resource dependence. Raw or lightly processed resources declined steadily as a share of Canada’s exports between 1960 and 2000, falling by half from 90 per cent to about 45 per cent. But since the beginning of this decade, their share of exports has risen dramatically to 65 per cent in 2008, according to new research by Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford.

Not everyone buys this picture of Canada’s role as a “drawer of water and hewer of wood.” Preston Manning, former politician and leader of the Reform Party of Canada (which later merged into the Progressive Conservative Party) doesn’t. In his May 27, 2009 speech, Stimulating an Ailing Economy: The Crucial Role of Science, Technology and Innovation, at the Public Policy Forum’s Science Day in Canada he suggests that Canada’s founding was more than just a vision of uniting British North American Colonies into a single country.

From Manning’s speech,

But what few of us fully appreciate is that there was also a science-based dimension to that story and vision. A generation earlier the leaders and people of those same British North American colonies launched a scientific endeavour which was to contribute as much to the building of Canada as the BNA Act and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was called the Geological Survey of Canada and began with a £1500 grant from the legislature of the United Colony of Canada to carry out a geological survey of its territory.

…

Why do I make reference to the historical role of the Geological Survey of Canada (which still exists today) in the formation of Canada? Because it reminds us that the Fathers of Confederation recognized that scientific investigation, and the technologies, innovations, and economic activities which flowed from it, had a vital role to play in the realization of the national vision. And if that was true in their day and generation, when many aspects of scientific investigation and technology were in their infancy, surely it is even more true today in an age when the scientific method has become the principal approach to problem solving and where science based technologies have become the principal drivers of the modern knowledge based economy.

Given the current emphasis on funding scientific and technological infrastructure over research and development (see Rob Annan’s postings on Don’t leave Canada behind for many examples including this one on Arctic research stations) I think we’re not taking risks, which is an essential element of innovation.

Finland is not an economic miracle right now, nor is Nokia. According to a June 30, 2009 statement from Finland’s Minister of Economy, the country is moving towards an 11% unemployment rate and as much as a 7% contraction in its economy. Nokia which has had economic woes since last fall, announced (April 16, 2009) that its earnings plummeted 90% year to year. Buying the Nortel division (mentioned in Yakabuski’s article) is a gutsy move and contrasts strongly with how Canadian business is dealing with the current economic uncertainties.

Good Nano Guide and the UK’s NHECD project complementary? plus the Finnish, the Canadians, nanotechnology and innovation

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About a week and a half ago, I came across an announcement about a new nanoparticle toxicity project that’s being undertaken in the UK. The Nano health-environment commented database (NHECD) has had Euro 1.45 million allocated by the EU. From the announcement on the Azonano website,

The ultimate objective of NHECD is to develop an open access, robust and sustainable system that can meet the challenge of automatically maintaining a rich and up-to-date scientific research repository. This repository would enable a comprehensive analysis of published data on health and environment effects following exposure to nanoparticles, according to the project partners. The repository would also be harmonised to be compatible with existing databases at the metadata level.

It strikes me that this database project, which is in its very early stages, could be a very complementary to some of the work being done on the Good Nano Guide wiki (still in beta) which is being supported by the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON). I commented on my experience with the Good Nano Guide in my  Friday, July 10, 2009 posting.

Rob Annan on the Don’t leave Canada behind researcher forum posted a provocative commentary about Canada’s innovation gap on July 7, 2009 last week. The commentary was occasioned by an article in the Globe & Mail’s Report on Business (ROB) by Konrad Yakabuski here. The ROB (not to be confused with Annan) article, makes an excellent point about the importance of instability for stimulating innovation. From the ROB article,

The expression “necessity is the mother of invention” comes to mind. Though Finland’s history is full of rude awakenings, as it alternately succumbed to Swedish and Russian invaders in previous centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was its biggest economic setback. The breakup of Finland’s biggest trading partner sparked a near depression in the nation of 5.3 million. Economic output shrank 13 per cent over three years and unemployment rose to 20 per cent from 3 per cent.

The crisis prompted much collective soul-searching, enabling the government to rally Finns behind the idea that the country’s revival lay in innovation. Government spending on R&D grew rapidly, even as overall public expenditures were slashed.

No company epitomized the transformation of the Finnish economy more than Nokia. The company (which takes its name from the river where its founders built a pulp mill in 1865) nearly went bankrupt in 1991. Its conglomerate strategy – making everything from telephone cables to car tires to TV sets, and selling them to consumers in the Nordic and Soviet-bloc countries – no longer proved viable. Backed by massive government research funding, Nokia dropped its other businesses to focus exclusively on making wireless communications devices, just as the global cellphone industry was poised to explode.

Today, Finland spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D, compared with less than 2 per cent in Canada. In 2008, Nokia alone invested €6-billion ($9.8-billion) in R&D, or 12 per cent of its sales, including €2.3-billion in research and development spending at NSN, the unit that is buying Nortel’s key LTE assets and technology.

For a little more information about Canada’s R & D spending, you can check out my June 9, 2009 blog posting here. There’s more to the Finnish miracle (I did a little digging) which I will post about tomorrow. I’ll also be including some specifics about the nanotechnology situation both in Finland and in Canada.

Nano haiku and the Good Nano Guide

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So hard to imagine
Tiny atoms one by one
Make new properties
Thank you to the folks at NISE (Nanoscale Informal Science Education) Network and, of course, Robin Marks. NISE Network has added a few items to their site that I think are really great. They have an image collection which includes copyright free and scientifically vetted images well worth checking out in their Viz Lab.  Here’s a sample image of a silicon nanomembrane from the collection,
Shelley Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Shelley Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison

NISE is also offering a nano play, Attack of the Nanoscientist, courtesy of the Science Museum of Minnesota. They have the script and instructions for anyone interested in mounting the play.
The Good Nano Guide (a wiki administered by ICON [International Council on Nanotechnology] at Rice University) which Victor Jones mentioned a few weeks ago in his comments here has been cited  in a commentary on regulating nanotechnology in Nature magazine. The commentary is behind a paywall but you can find an earlier version of the article on Andrrew Maynard’s (he’s one of the authors) 2020 Science blog here.
I finally took a few minutes to check the Good Nano Guide and find it quite interesting. They offer a glossary of terms and a search engine that I used for the term ‘titanium dioxide’ amongst other features. The search engine brought up the standards for using titanium dioxide. It includes current standards and standards being developed by every organization you can imagine (IEEE, BSI, ISO, ASTM, etc.) so it seems quite comprehensive.  I do not find the glossary definitions to be helpful to me (but I’m an amateur and this project is oriented to the science community). I checked out the term nanoparticle and variants and the definitions seem vague.
Finally and because it’s Friday, I couldn’t resist this
tidbit on Nanowerk News about nanotechnology used for cleansing the colon. It originated on Tim Harper’s TNT blog here in one of his June 30, 2009 postings. Harper is associated (I think he’s the principal/CEO/president) with Cientifica, a nanotechnology business consultancy.

Nanoparticles in sunscreens and other places

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Whodathunkit? Sunscreens with titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles are safer and more effective than the sunscreens without them. Thanks to Andrew Maynard at 2020 Science there’s an overview of the results, the study, and, most importantly, the source for the study’s report. Maynard (chief science advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies) also offers a few comments about environmental and health concerns and the need for more research into the use of nanoparticles in cosmetic/beauty products.

The EWG (Environmental Working Group) is, according to Maynard, not usually friendly to industry and they had this to say about their own predisposition prior to reviewing the data (from EWG),

When we began our sunscreen investigation at the Environmental Working Group, our researchers thought we would ultimately recommend against micronized and nano-sized zinc oxide and titanium dioxide sunscreens. After all, no one has taken a more expansive and critical look than EWG at the use of nanoparticles in cosmetics and sunscreens, including the lack of definitive safety data and consumer information on these common new ingredients, and few substances more dramatically highlight gaps in our system of public health protections than the raw materials used in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology. But many months and nearly 400 peer-reviewed studies later, we find ourselves drawing a different conclusion, and recommending some sunscreens that may contain nano-sized ingredients.

There is a proviso to their evaluation and it’s standard science talk. The conclusion is based on the current evidence, which means that someone might or might not discover a problem tomorrow.

I commented about an article on sunscreens, which covered some material about nanoparticle concerns, in a fashion magazine here.

Meanwhile, the concern over silver nanoparticles continues. The Australian branch of Friends of the Earth (FOE) has issued a report urging caution. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation article by Anna Saleh

Associate Professor Tom Faunce, an expert in the medical and regulatory aspects of nanotechnology at the Australian National University in Canberra says because nano-silver is very useful in medicine, he does not support the call for a total moratorium on nano-silver.

But he thinks there does need to be some restraint on its use.

“There is accumulating evidence now that if nano-silver use is left unrestrained and it enters the waterways in large amounts, this will be dangerous to the environment,” says Faunce.

I am relieved to hear about the nanoparticles in sunscreens and not surprised about the caution regarding silver nanoparticles. After scanning the internet for information about nanotechnology over the last 2.5 years or so, there are two major areas of concern (from my neophyte’s perspective), silver nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (the ones that resemble asbestos fibres).

Regardless of the EWG’s conclusions, I’m pretty sure there are people out there who will reject the findings because they don’t like the idea of nanoparticles in anything, anywhere, anytime.

Tomorrow a little nano haiku courtesy of NISE network.

The other side of the multimodal discourse coin

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Bill Thompson has an article, Giving life a shape, on BBC News which touches tangentially on approaching the world in a multimodal fashion. He takes a kind of digital approach i.e.when he uses the word technology he actually means digital technology and his examples come from social networking, Second Life, social gaming and other activities mediated through the Internet and computers. From the article,

… because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.

They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.

Different modalities (audio files, graphics files, animation (Second Life), and others are referred to indirectly in the course of Thompson’s article, which is why I’ve picked up on it. In  light of the Kay O’Halloran interviews (on this website blog July 3, 6, and 7, 2009) Thompson’s description of how “artists help find us new ways to think about things” reveals the other side of the multimodal discourse coin.

While O’Halloran and her colleagues develop a framework for analyzing and understanding multimodal discourse, it’s artists (I define that word broadly) who enact and explore that discourse through their work.

One quibble, I think Thompson’s definition could be broadened so that technology  includes nanotechnology, biotechnology, synthetic biology and other emerging technologies. Now back to Thompson and a comment that works no matter how you define technology,

One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.

Metaphors came up in the O’Halloran interview (July 6, 2009 posting) too and I got this in the comments (from inkbat),

I was struck by the point on metaphor. When you come right down to it, isn’t it sad that so many of our concepts are the result of some designer or advertiser or whoever deciding to create some kind of shortcut for us .. which would work if it was just in the one instance but then it takes on a life of its own and suddenly we no longer think of the heart AS IF it is a pump but as though it IS a pump. Or the brain as a computer. …

Unfortunately as inkbat points out, we forget we’ve created a metaphor and we treat it ‘as if it were so’ to results that can be disastrous. Still, I think that creating metaphors and then having to ‘break’ or ‘see through’ them ultimately discarding the old metaphor and developing a new one is part of the human condition.

Back to my nanotech ways tomorrow.

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 3 of 3

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Thanks to Kay O’Halloran for kindly giving me this interview and here’s the last part which also includes a bibliography.

3. I notice that you have a project examining PowerPoint in the classroom and in corporate settings which you are conducting for the Australian Research Council. Could you explain a little bit about the project?

The project ‘Towards a Social Theory of Semiotic Technology: Exploring PowerPoint’s Design and its Use Higher Education and Corporate Settings awarded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) (Discovery Grant No. DP09889939) is a collaborative project between Chief Investigator Professor Theo van Leeuwen (Dean for Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney), Dr Emilia Djonov (Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Technology, Sydney) and myself. The following description of the project is drawn from our research proposal.

PowerPoint has become the dominant technology for designing and delivering presentations, particularly in education and business settings where success often depends on skills in the use of the application. Powerpoint is the subject of much debate and it creates strong reactions, both positive and negative. It’s either praised for increasing presenters’ confidence and eloquence (e.g. Gold 2002) or it’s condemned for limiting users’ ability to present complex ideas through an over-simplification of information presented in bullet points, linear slide-by-slide formats and illegible graphics (e.g. Tufte 2003).

From the multimodal perspective, Powerpoint is a semiotic technology which has a range of options (i.e. grammar) from which presenters make selections with regards to the linguistic text, images, animations and sounds. There are default themes which the presenter may choose as well. These choices integrate in multimodal presentations which are recontextualised by the speaker during the presentation. Most studies of Powerpoint adopt a different approach, however, by either exploring lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of PowerPoint to support learning, or alternatively they are experimental studies which investigate the effects of PowerPoint versus transparency-supported lectures on learning.

Our project adopts a multimodal approach to (a) conceptualise the grammar of Powerpoint through the study of its systems of meaning; (b) analyse and compare the choices which are made in higher education and corporate settings; and (c) investigate how these choices are contextualised in presentations. In this way, we will explore how the design of PowerPoint supports or hinders the achievement of the various goals of the presenters. At the moment, there are no studies which investigate differences in the use of Powerpoint across educational and corporate settings, and furthermore, there is no evidence for arguments that PowerPoint cannot support the representation of knowledge in technical disciplines such as engineering (Tufte, 2003) or the rich narrative and interpretative skills required for social science disciplines (Adams, 2006), nor is there evidence that PowerPoint has introduced corporate rhetoric into educational practices (Turkle, 2004). In addition, the study will provide guidelines for evaluating and improving the design and use of PowerPoint and other similar presentation software.

Bibliography

Adams, C. (2006). PowerPoint, habits of mind, and classroom culture. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(4), 389 – 411.

Gold, R. (2002). Reading PowerPoint. In N. J. Allen (Ed.), Working with words and images: New steps in an old dance. (pp. 256-270). Westport, Connecticut: Ablex.

Tufte, E. R. (2003). The cognitive style of PowerPoint (2nd edition). Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press.

Turkle, S. (2004). The fellowship of the microchip: global technologies as evocative objects. In M. Suárez-Orozco & D.B. Qin-Hilliard (Eds.), Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium (pp. 97-113). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 2 of 3

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Before going on to the second part of her interview, here’s a little more about Kay O’Halloran. She has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Murdoch University (Australia), a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a Dip. Ed. and B.Ed. (First Class Honours) from the University of Western Australia.

The Multimodal Analysis Lab of which she is the Director brings together researchers from engineering, the performing arts, medicine, computer science, arts and social sciences, architecture, and science working together in an interdisciplinary environment. (This is the first instance where I’ve seen the word interdisciplinary and can wholeheartedly agree with its use. As I have found, interdisciplinary can mean that an organic chemist is having to collaborate with an inorganic chemist or an historian is working with an anthropologist. I understand that there are leaps between, for example, history and anthropology but by comparison with engineering and the performing arts, the leap just isn’t that big.)

There’s more on Kay O’Halloran’s page here and more on the Multimodal Analysis Lab here.

2. Could you describe the research  questions, agendas and directions that are most compelling to you at this  time?

Multimodal research involves new questions and problems such as:

– What are the functionalities of the resources (e.g. language versus image)?

– How do choices combine to make meaning in artefacts and events?

– What types of reconstruals take place within and across semiotic artefacts and events and what type of metaphors consequently arise?

– How is digital meaning expanding our meaning-making potential?

The most compelling agendas and directions in multimodal research include developing new approaches to annotating, analysing, modeling, and interpreting semiotic patterns using digital media technologies, particularly in dynamic contexts (e.g. videos, film, website browsing, online learning materials). The development of new practices for multimodal analysis (e.g. multimodal corpus approaches) means we can investigate social cultural patterns and trends and the nature of knowledge and contemporary life in the age of digital media, together with its limitations. Surely new media offers us the potential for new research paradigms and making new types of meanings which will lead us to new ways of thinking about the world. Also, multimodal approaches offer the promise of new paradigms for educational research where classroom and pedagogical practices and disciplinary knowledge can be investigated in their entirety. Multimodal research opens up a new exciting world, one which is being eagerly embraced by academic researchers and postgraduate students as the way forward (in my experience at least).