Media
The National Digital Forum 2015
Tomorrow (Tuesday 13th October), Kate Hannah and Les Oxley will be presenting at The National Digital Forum 2015 conference:
Kate Hannah
(Te Pūnaha Matatini)
Kate is presenting:
#GLAM #SciComm #HistComm: Talking to each other and making sense.
Les Oxley
(The University of Waikato)
Les is presenting:
Measuring the ANZACs: Crowdsourcing a complete transcription of WWI soldiers through Zooniverse
History of New Zealand Science
In November, we have 3 of our people involved in the Finding New Zealand’s Scientific Heritage. They are:
Kate Hannah
(Te Pūnaha Matatini)
Kate is delivering this paper:
From Rutherford’s Sister (or ‘the two Lucies’) to Nanogirl – Deconstructing narratives of female invisibility and hypervisibility in 150 years of New Zealand science
Dan Hikuroa
(Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga)
Dan is delivering this paper.
Te Whakapapa o Putaiao Kei Aotearoa – The History of Science in New Zealand
Rebecca Priestley
(Victoria University of Wellington)
Rebecca is convening this conference and delivering this paper:
‘A Place Among Immortals’ – Ernest Marsden and His 20th Century Scientific Networks
Dan Hikuroa in the Dominion Post
“Geologist believes natural hazards hidden in Māori mythology” was the headline for a piece written by Olivia Wannan. It featured in the Dominion Post, Saturday September 12 about one of our Associate Investigators Dan Hikuroa.
You can find the piece here
Rebecca Ford
On Friday 28th August, our new Associate Investigator Rebecca Ford took part in the International Sustainability Transitions Conference 2015 (IST15)
Follow the tweets
Research session:
Cultures of transitions:
Using the EC framework to examine socio- technical transitions [143]
Talk: The rise of PV: opportunities and barriers for socio-technical transition.
Rebecca Ford, Janet Stephenson, Michelle Scott, John Williams, Ben Wooliscroft, David Rees, Geoff King.
The talk was about PV uptake in NZ: Privately owned micro-generation is challenging the normal operation of electricity systems. This paper uses the Energy Cultures framework to explore PV uptake as an interplay between existing technologies, policies, markets, practices, norms, and socio-cultural meanings. System dynamics modelling is used to probe interactions between multiple levels within this complex socio-technical transition. We explore feedback loops that may act as change levers, as well as the potential impacts on electricity markets and new models that may be required for future operation.
Jaffe on Marsden Fund
Back in May, after some criticism of the Marsden Fund processes made it into the media, I wrote about Te Pūnaha Matatini investigator Adam Jaffe’s study of the Marsden Fund. Adam presented his preliminary findings at our Launch workshop in February, and today they were released as a Motu working paper.
There is a short media release here, but the upshot is that it shows that receiving a Marsden grant leads to higher productivity and impact, at least in terms of papers published and the citations received. This won’t surprise many, but it is very exciting to see the benefits of Marsden funding quantified for the first time.
In fact I think this is a watershed study. It is the first rigorous evaluation of a New Zealand research funding process ever undertaken and it has thrown up some fascinating insights. It also demonstrates the benefits of the sustained collection and retention of science and innovation data, and the Marsden Fund should be commended for its commitment to doing so.
Unfortunately, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and its predecessors have done a poor job of curating their data since New Zealand moved to a contestable funding system in the early 90s, which means that much of our funding system remains opaque. I understand, however, that the Ministry is working on a plan to put in place systems and practices that will enable these sorts of evaluations to be made in coming decades.
What sort of data do you need? The difficulty in evaluating contestable research funding is that funding agencies go to great lengths to select the best projects and the best applicants. You can’t just compare the performance of those applicants who got funded to those who didn’t, because any difference in performance might just be a sign that your application process is doing its job in selecting performers from non-performers, rather than a signal from the funding.
One way to avoid this selection bias would be to allocate funding randomly, but few funding agencies are willing to do this. And even if we decided that a randomized control trial was a good idea, we’d still have to wait a decade or so to acquire data for the study.
Instead, Adam and his team have made use of the Marsden fund panel scores that are used to rank the projects of applicants in the second round of the Marsden fund. These panel scores can be used to estimate the selection bias in your performance data, enabling you to back out the effect of the funding itself. The Marsden fund has kept the panel scores for both the successful and unsuccessful projects for a number of years, and this has been matched with bibliometric data for applicants to measure subsequent performance.
The most interesting finding from this data is that the expert panels that evaluate Marsden Fund proposals do not seem to have a selection bias! You see a jump in performance for those applicants who were funded, but otherwise the subsequent performance of applicants seems to be independent of their ranking by the panel. Panels are not able to pick winners, but those that they do give the money to go on to win.
As a panelist myself, I seldom felt that we were making meaningful selections at the second round – almost all the proposals we looked at seemed eminently fundable. This inability to pick winners does not necessarily mean that the panels are redundant. I expect that there might still be benefits that accrue from encouraging researchers to plan and develop research plans that can stand up to scrutiny from these panels. It does suggest though that we should be cautious about using success in Marsden as a proxy for research quality, particularly when it comes to career advancement.
Perhaps the best news for researchers is that the study suggests that there would be no diminishing returns if we were to double or treble the size of the Marsden fund. If we could fund all second round applicants, we would be unlikely to see any decrease in the quantity and impact of the research carried out, just a step change in performance across the research sector.
There are some caveats to the study, so it is well worth reading in its entirety (here it is again). For instance, the lift in performance measured could be indirect. If winning a Marsden grant increases your chances of getting funding from other sources, then some of the boost in performance might come from other funding rather than Marsden. If we had good data from MBIE, we might be able to tell …
It is also worth noting that the Marsden Fund is there to do more than generate papers and citations. Ultimately we would like to be able to measure impacts in other ways. The sort of study that might come next would be to look at the subsequent careers of Marsden-funded PhD students. Does working at the cutting edge of science set you up for a successful career?
Declaration: I was a Principal Investigator on two Marsden-funded projects during the period that this study covers (in 2006 and 2008), and I was on the Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry Panel from 2010-2012.
Public Lecture – Professor Ingrid Daubechies
Public Lecture – Professor Alan Hastings
Te Pūnaha Matatini presents
Distinguished Professor Alan Hastings University of California, Davis. Professor Alan is visiting New Zealand and will be giving public lectures around the country.
Driven by human forces, there are great challenges to maintain environmental systems and environmental services. Environmental management depends on predictions of the results of management actions which must also be made in the context of limited resources and in the face of conflicting desires of participants. Beginning with an overview of several challenging issues in environmental management including invasive species, fisheries management, and the provision of other ecosystem services, this public talk will focus on how prediction and management on appropriate time scales depends on relatively simple mathematical descriptions, incorporating relevant ecological and economic details, looking at several particular challenging systems that illustrate the general principles: algal-coral-grazer systems and the maintenance of healthy reefs and control of invasive species.
For more on Professor Alan Hastings, see http://two.ucdavis.edu/~me/
We are very pleased to announce the following public lectures
Christchurch Wednesday 2nd September
Where: Room 031, Level 0, Erskine building, University of Canterbury
When: 6pm
Hosted by the University of Canterbury in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Alex James | Alex.James@canterbury.ac.nz
Dunedin Friday 4th September
Where: Archway 4 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago,
When: 5:30pm
Hosted by the University of Otago in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Auckland Tuesday 8th September
Where: University of Auckland, City campus 303-G23
When: 6pm
Hosted by the Department of Physics, The University of Auckland, in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Shaun on New Zealand’s Economy in Innovation
Here’s Shaun talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about innovation and New Zealand’s economic future. Listen here
Les on the history of economics in New Zealand
Here’s Les talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about the history of economics in New Zealand. Listen here
A prize of one’s own
by Kate Hannah
In 1947 Elizabeth Joan Batham made New Zealand science history when she became the first woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize, medal, or award.[i] When she was named the 1947 recipient of the Hamilton Memorial Prize “for the encouragement of an early career researcher currently based in New Zealand for scientific or technological research in New Zealand”, that prize, named after Augustus Hamilton, the 1909-1910 President of the Society, had been running for 24 years.
The first award established by the Society, in 1911, the Hutton Medal for earth, plant, and animal sciences (named for Captain FW Hutton FRS, 1836-1905, who was the first President, 1904-05) is now awarded annually, rotating through the disciplines, but between 1911- 1995 was awarded every three years. More medals and awards were established over the next 104 years, so that in 2015 we now have 12 annual awards and another 9 awards biennially, triennially, or irregularly.
Back to Betty Batham. She was responsible for the redevelopment of what is now the Portobello Marine Biological Station, University of Otago, which during her tenure (1950-1974) gained “an international reputation, although for many years it was little involved in routine teaching and research activities of the university,”[ii] which seems to be her successor, John Jillet’s careful way of summarising the sexism Batham faced.[iii]
For her efforts, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1962, and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Otago set up a prize in her name in 2004. The deep-sea vessel at Portobello that provides visitors with a virtual benthic (sea-floor) experience is called the DSV Batham.[iv]
Betty Batham in the laboratory, 1962
The next woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize was Lucy Cranwell Smith, awarded the Hector Medal in 1954:
Lucy Cranwell Smith, citation for Hector Medal
The Hector Medal’s citation is currently “for outstanding work in chemical, physical, or mathematical and information sciences … awarded annually in rotation among the disciplines.”[vi] It was previously broader: “for plant sciences, chemical sciences, human sciences, solid earth sciences, mathematical physical and engineering sciences, and animal sciences”.[vii]
Lucy Cranwell Smith, who went on to have a highly successful career in palynology at the University of Arizona, was the first woman to win the Hector Medal. It has been won by 2 other women in the subsequent half century. Dame Patricia Bergquist, the eminent zoologist and anatomist, was awarded the Hector Medal in 1989 for her work on invertebrate anatomy, and was made a Dame in 1994 for her contribution to science. In 2012, Margaret Brimble was the Hector Medal recipient, for “excellence in chemical sciences.”[viii]
The Hector Medal, named for Sir James Hector, is the second oldest of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s medals – it was first awarded in 1912, and since then, has been awarded to 99 men, and 3 women. The oldest award – the Hutton Medal established in 1911 – has been awarded to 41 men and 2 women in its over 100-year history. The Humanities Aronui Medal (2011), Mason Durie Medal (2012), Pickering Medal (2004), Thomson Medal (1985), Cooper Medal (1958), R.J. Scott Medal (1997), Hercus Medal (1997), and the T.K.Sidey Medal (1933) have all never been awarded to a woman.
Dion O’Neale, July 2015
Six of the male Hector Medal winners now have other Royal Society awards or prizes named after them: Leonard Cockayne, the 1912 winner, and Lucy Cranwell Smith’s mentor, for whom the Leonard Cockayne Memorial Lecture Series Award was named; Ernest Rutherford, 1916 winner, the Rutherford Medal. Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) was awarded the Hector Medal in 1932, and since 1997 the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal has been presented for outstanding work in the social sciences; Charles Fleming received the Hector Medal in 1963 – and the Royal Society’s Fleming Award was inaugurated in 1989; Trevor Hatherton, for whom the Hatherton Award is named, won the Hector Medal in 1981; in 1998, Paul Callaghan, in whose name the Callaghan Medal for Science Communication was commissioned, was awarded the Hector Medal.
Women do have a prize of their own, of a sort – or at least one of the 21 prizes and awards is named after a woman. The Dame Joan Metge Medal, commissioned in 2008, celebrates outstanding contributions in the social sciences, and has been won by women 3 out of the 4 times it has been awarded. However, this success rate for women does not reflect the prizes and awards presented by New Zealand’s preeminent science and research organisation accurately. Over the last 104 years, only 10% of all prizes have been awarded to women; with most success coming in the early career award – the Hamilton Memorial Medal, which women have won 11 times since 1923. Of the 19 prizes that are named after a person, just one of them is named after a woman, and 8 of the 21 available prizes and awards have NEVER been awarded to a woman.
Higher percentages of women have won the Dame Joan Metge Medal (75%) and the Pou Aronui Award (28%), and the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal (75%), but these prizes are in the humanities and social sciences, discipline areas generally perceived to have better representation of women – but as the May 2015 update to the Athena SWAN Charter notes:
We commit to addressing unequal gender representation across academic disciplines and professional and support functions. In this we recognise disciplinary differences including:
- the relative underrepresentation of women in senior roles in arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL)[x]
Placed in the context of the relative underrepresentation of women in senior academic roles in humanities and social sciences, that no woman has ever won the Humanities Aronui Medal – for work of outstanding merit in the humanities, or the Mason Durie Medal– “awarded annually to the nation’s preemminent social scientist”[xi] is contextualised within a gap between the perceived relative equity in the humanities and social sciences, and the actual numbers of women in senior roles across those discipline areas.
It’s not hard to see that we have a problem. 8% women prizewinners doesn’t reflect the gender breakdown in society as a whole, but neither does it reflect the breakdown in science. Looking at a couple of individual prizes helps highlight that. Many would not be surprised that the Pickering Medal, technology medal for excellence, has never been awarded to a woman. But neither has the Sir Charles Hercus Medal, for excellence in molecular and cellular sciences, biomedical science or clinical science and public health– fields that many women have made an enormous contribution to.
Things have been getting better – more women are winning more prizes now than ever before. Since 1999 there has been at least 1 female prizewinner per year, a total of 25 prizes to 23 women in 15 years.[xii] Of those, however, 9 have been the Hamilton Memorial Prize (early career) or the Hatherton Award (best paper by a PhD student). That’s still only 16 senior prizes going to 14 women. One swallow does not make a summer, and all that. There’s still those 8 prizes that have never been awarded to a woman, and the T.K Sidey Medal’s been going since 1933. Many outstanding women – some of whom I have named here – have won a singular prize, and then gone on to great careers but, unlike their male counterparts, there’s no prize named for them.
In the UK, WISE – a campaign to promote women in science, technology, and engineering released a summary report in November 2014, “Not for people like me?” under-represented groups in science, technology, and engineering; this coincided with the Nielsen Report on Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment as part of The Nation of Curious Minds/Science and Society Project.
The WISE report states:
Girls … need to resolve the conflict between self-identity and STEM identity in order to see STEM as offering careers ‘for people like me’[xiii]
The Nielsen Report summarises public attitudes towards science and technology with the creation of 5 personas[xiv], representations of different segments of society:
Nielsen Report On Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, October 2014
You’ll note that while 3 of these personas are female, both segments of society with the most negative attitude towards science and technology are classified as female; in fact Nielsen go on to say:
In order to lift public engagement with science and technology we suggest that MBIE target the Optimistic Oliver and Penelope Public segments…we believe the Anxious Annie and especially the Negative Nellie group will be more difficult targets to convince[xv]
From those people we, as a scientific community, choose to honour and recognise with medals and awards, through the names given to those prizes, to the names selected to categorise segments of society when discussing public engagement with science, we seem to be saying to young women and girls “not for people like you.”
[i] What is now called the Royal Society of New Zealand was established as the New Zealand Institute in 1867, and renamed the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1933. For the purposes of clarity, this paper will refer to the Royal Society of New Zealand for both.
[ii] Jillet, John. ‘Batham, Elizabeth Joan,’ from The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 4 June 2013
http://www.teara.govt.nz/mi/biographies/5b13/batham-elizabeth-joan
[iii]http://www.nzmaritimeindex.org.nz//izperson.php?personid=999992497&SourceID=&person=E.B.J.&rid=0&refid=&hit=6
[iv] Betty Batham, in the laboratory, 1962 http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/36056/in-the-laboratory-1962
[v] Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1868-1961, vo. 82, 1954-1955, National Library of New Zealand. http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_82/rsnz_82_03_005740.html
[vi]Hector Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/
[vii] Background to the Hector Medal, Royal Society of New Zealand, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/background/
[viii] Margaret Brimble, Hector Medal citation, 2012, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/recipients/
[ix] O’Neale, Dion. RSNZ Awards Visualisation http://bl.ocks.org/droneale/c3c4ea9f48b67722833d
[x] The Athena SWAN Charter, http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/about-athena-swan/
[xi] Mason Durie Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/mason-durie-medal/
[xii] In 2012, Professor Margaret Brimble won three prizes – the Hector, MacDiarmid, and Rutherford Medals.
[xiii] MacDonald, Averil. “Not for people like me?” Under-represented groups in science, technology and engineering, WISE, November 2014, p. 6 https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/not_for_people_like_me.pdf
[xiv] Report on Public Attitudes towards Science and Technology, Nielsen, MBIE, November 2014, p. 11 http://www.msi.govt.nz/assets/MSI/Update-me/Science-in-society-project/report-on-public-attitudes-towards-science-and-technology.pdf
[xv] ibid, p. 13