My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of discovery.

It's spectacularly accessible. Written in a relaxed and casual tone, it encourages domestic science. I don't mean bakery, I mean the sorts of observations you can do at home without access to a multi-million pound laboratory. The afterword of the book contains dozens of resources for people who want to get involved in science. Dr Rogers eloquently makes the case that you don't need to dedicate yourself full time - it's perfectly acceptable to engage with it on your own terms.

What I liked most about it was that she gets her hands dirty. It would have been easy to write a literature review from the comfort of a safe and dry office. Instead we get a travelogue of all the places she's been - each trek through the forest, every laboratory, and all the foreign festivals are brilliantly recounted. It's a proper adventure from America's tornado alley down to the Vatican Archives.

I find it remarkable how slow some modern science is. As she points out, "there have been only eight transits of Venus since the telescope was invented" - our knowledge rests on the shoulders of giants, but they can be slow, lumbering beasts.

If, like me, you only have a hazy memory of the science you learned at school, this book will top up your knowledge (and vocabulary). It will reignite your passion and curiosity about the world around you - and make you want to buy a round the world ticket to chase solar eclipses!

At its heart is this question - if modern AI is brilliant at extracting semantic meaning from unstructured data, can it do the same with whale song?

Mustill's joy of discovery is wonderful. He's adept at weaving autobiography into science and has a knack for finding the interesting nuggets amongst the tedious nature of natural research. The people he speaks to are adamant about changing the world in a variety of ways. It really did fill me with hope.

It is almost impossible to avoid anthropomorphising the cetaceans in the book. A fact which is acknowledged, but never quite resolved. Philosophically, we cannot quite imagine consciousness and language except through a human lens. We also get a bunch of unexpected moral questions. Do we have the "right" to listen in to whales' conversation? Should we apologise to them for the near genocide we inflicted on them? If they are sentient, are their recordings covered by GDPR?

Of particular delight to me was the use of properly semantic HTML footnotes. Wonderful! Of minor annoyance was the continual use of imperial measurements. Seriously, why?!

The book goes through the basics of biology and computer science, gradually building up towards a crescendo which never quite arrives. That the only downside - it doesn't end with "...and here's the full Human-Whale dictionary." But, it appears, we are tantalizingly close!

Best read in conjunction with The Idiot Gods and Pod.

This is an absolutely fascinating book.

Of great interest to me were the tantalising asides - for example, a formerly enslaved man taught Darwin the art of taxidermy although very little is known about him. The book is full of delightfully distracting details like that. Along with extensive quoting from Darwin, it really helps to contextualise the history of our knowledge of evolution.

Because it is a rather epic work, parts of it are frustratingly short. And, with no footnotes or references, it feels like it has a number of unnecessary dead-ends.

By its nature, the book becomes a little repetitive - it is essentially a collection of essay-length Top-Trump cards, reciting various facts about each animal. Great for dipping in to, but a bit of a slog if read in one sitting.

It is a casual ramble through evolution. Unlike, say, Mary Roach, the author doesn't insert herself into the story. She knows that the facts are interesting enough to stand on their own. The language is pretty accessible - although I daresay the slang will date quickly.

Maybe it's the weirdness of the weather. Maybe it's another way to pour scorn on politicians. Maybe the steady stream of headlines about fires, floods and droughts is finally starting to get to us. Whatever it is, for more and more of us, climate change is shifting from a shadowy fear in the backs of our minds to something we feel we need to get a handle on. Our exploration of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavour. It also began much earlier than we might think. This book takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the 18th and 19th centuries, through the point when concern started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the 'debate' is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places) and a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes.

Wow! This is the ultimate zeitgeist book! I thought this was going to be a plain history of climate change. Instead, it is a righteous polemic against colonialism, sexism, and the corrupting influence of megacorporations. The book neatly takes us through the history of modern energy production - stopping along the way to point out all the various inventions which were funded from the profits of slavery, the historical figures who ignored the women sounding the alarm about greenhouse gases, and the inherent racism in exporting pollution to poorer countries.

It's a fun book to read - full of fascinating anecdotes and little diversions - sort of like an entertaining ramble from a professor. But it carries with it a deadly serious message. We've known for centuries that pollution is a existential threat to our life on this planet. We are conducting a massive geo-engineering experiment with no "control planet" to move to when catastrophe strikes.

We've mostly survived by placing the burden on developing countries - but that's not sustainable, and thoroughly immoral.

Equal parts entertaining, enlightening, and infuriating. It will leave you better informed, and full of zeal to help fix things. The only downside is that it is lacking a detailed look at Nuclear power - the author acknowledges this flaw and does point to some excellent resources.

I thoroughly recommend this book. It casts a new light on everything you were taught in school about the industrial revolution, the development of electricity, and the future of our species.

Thanks to NetGalley for the preview copy. The book is released later this year and can be pre-ordered from the following links:

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. With knowledge accumulated over generations through hands-on trial and error, these experimenters and tinkerers understand the materiality of objects far better than any scientist with a textbook.

You might know Dr Anna Ploszajski from her 'rial talk podcast, or her TED talk, or her various Science Showoff videos. I was lucky enough to catch one of her stand-up sets at EMF a few years ago and have been a fan ever since.

This is a surprisingly personal and autobiographical book - I was expecting a bit more of a dry textbook, but was excited to find out that it was so much more. At times it is frighteningly intimate, all the while relating the academic back to the personal.

The book feels like a multi-part YouTube series. It has lots of fascinating places and local characters, and exciting adventures hitting things and breaking them. It doesn't require too much background knowledge in physics to understand what's going on. Famously, Stephen Hawking was told that every equation in "A Brief History of Time" would halve sales and Dr Ploszajski seems to have taken that advice on board. It could benefit from a few illustrations - I found it a bit hard to visualise exactly how hexagonal sheets of molecules might actually look, for example.

Some of the chapters covered material I was already familiar with, but she always found a new angle to interest me. It's a beautiful book about the structure of "stuff" - but it also so much more than that. Science isn't just white-coated boffins stuck in a lab. It is real people, doing amazing things, doing boring things, doing unusual things - all trying to make sense of our little planet.

It isn't a textbook - it is a manifesto for diving into the world and getting your hands messy.

Brilliant!

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is released in a few weeks and can be pre-ordered using the following links:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

Elizabeth Holmes is my hero. The next time I'm in a room full of Very Big And Important People, and I'm feeling out of my depth, I'll remember the story of the plucky heroine who conned her way into billions of dollars. What an inspiration!

I polished off this book over a weekend, it is gripping and detailed - without getting bogged down in its complex cast of characters. Holmes and her partner Sunny Balwani, convinced the world that they had a killer app for health. The sordid tale of how they lied their way into the medical and financial world is a real page-turner.

Ultimately, some responsibility must fall on all the people working within Theranos who didn't blow the whistle. How many red-flags have to be ignored before you are personally culpable? Also deserving of blame are the men who ignored all due diligence - proof that bullshit baffles brains every time.

I found it disturbing how often old white guys were described as "smitten" by her. It is almost comical to say that she bewitched her audience. I don't think the flaw was in her "feminine wiles" - but rather people's willingness to overlook basic mistakes in the pursuit of riches.

Elizabeth Holmes isn't a witch or a temptress - she's someone who knew exactly how to play the game and (nearly) broke the bank.

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius.

A fascinating look at a defining moment in technological development. Full of intrigue, double-crossing, maths, and science.

It cracks along at a fair pace, sometimes lightly skipping over details. I would gladly have read this if it were twice the length. Not a bad thing for a book to leave you wanting more.

The only weakness is a lack of diagrams and maps. Happily, there is an illustrated edition, which I will check out in due course.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

OMG! Just won the audience vote at the #FameLab final. Thanks guys ☺
#ScienceFTW pic.x.com/bwwqgk7unc

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If you're thinking of entering a local FameLab competition, please do so! This quick blog post explains my experience with the competition and hopefully helps teach you based on the mistakes I made.

What Is FameLab?🔗

FameLab is a communications competition designed to engage and entertain by breaking down science, technology and engineering concepts into three minute presentations. Contestants from around the world take part armed only with their wits and a few props that they can carry onto stage – the result is an unpredictable, enlightening and exciting way to encourage your curiosity and find out about the latest research.

You get up on stage - just you and the props you can carry - and spend 3 minutes educating a pub full of people about a single aspect of science. Fun!

Here's my performance at the first round :

And here's me at the final :

The heats are, typically, 8-10 people with 2-4 winners. Those winners go on to compete in a regional final. The winners from each regional final go on to the national finals (just like Glee!) and from there - the International Final; competing with the best science communicators from around the world!

Preparation

Choose a subject that you know really well. You'll need not only distil it into 3 minutes, but make it understandable for a lay audience. In each round, you'll need to give a different presentation but on the same topic.

The best advice I can give is to rehearse until you're sick of doing it. You need to be able to hit that 3 minute mark. If you go over - and the audience hears a gong - you look a bit silly.

Ideally, you want to aim for around 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That gives you enough time to pause for laughter and, if you do lose your train of thought, you won't run out of time.

Personally, I don't like writing down a script - I find that the way I talk and write are in two very different styles.

I would strongly encourage you to learn what you want to talk about - but then practice saying it as though you're speaking naturally. Nothing sounds worse than someone just reciting from memory.

Props

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Terence Eden, comp. scientist, explaining the fatal flaw in Turing's Enigma was borne of paranoia @OxSciFest #OSF15 pic.x.com/cjlehm9egd

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Props are fun! They give the audience something tangible to focus on. The winner of the final (not me!) had a great range of balloons, bottles, and buckets for his demonstration.

Be careful of being over complicated - you don't necessarily want to be fiddling with something all the time you're on stage.

If you're making a prop - like I did - practice with it. Practice picking it up and putting it down. Make sure it's not going to break!

Should you want to use my ENIGMA Rotor diagram for a prop, here's a high resolution image for you to print out.

Friends

There's usually an audience vote - it's completely fine to stuff the place full of your mates! Everyone benefits from a lively and friendly audience. And, seeing a few familiar faces in the crowd will help with...

Nerves

It's OK to be nervous. Standing up in front of a pub full of people is a nerve-wracking experience. Breath deeply. Focus on what you want to say. Seriously - keep breathing.

You are going to stumble over your lines - the key is not to let it throw you. Worst case scenario, it's all over in 180 seconds.

Alcohol

Some people think that they are quicker-witted after a glass of wine. Others are utterly convinced that a cheeky pint makes them more vivacious and likeable. This is not the case. You make think you're funnier when you're tipsy - but no one else does.

Yes, I know it's hard to be in a pub only drinking fruit juice - but, honestly, you'll perform better without a beer. Once you've done your three minutes, make sure that your friends have lined up a few glasses of your favourite tipple and then proceed to neck them.

Q&A

Be prepared for some tough questioning from the judges. It's not X-Factor style viciousness - but they will pick you up on any scientific mistakes you made.

One bit of feedback I got was particularly good. In my first talk I'd said "you don't really need to know how this works." That was a mistake. The judges correctly pointed out that I could have said "using Prime Numbers" or "a complex mathematical function" - your audience are intelligent.

Audience

Speaking of the audience... Do feel free to interact with them. I love asking my audience questions and getting them to cheer. It helps show the judges just how well you connect with people. And it probably doesn't hurt your chances with the audience vote!

During the interval, and after the show, I chatted to people in the audience. I was enormously gratified to have one 12 year old girl ask me how she could make an ENIGMA machine with her arduino. I also had a young boy ask what programming languages he should be learning now that he had mastered Scratch.

Finally

Just as I was writing this post, I found out that I hadn't made it through to the final. I'm a little sad - but given the strength of the competition, I'm not surprised.

If there is a FameLab near you, please enter the competition. Spend 3 minutes sharing your passion for science with a room full of people - it's an uplifting and exhilarating experience.

During the talk, I completely forget the name of the Rosetta Disc and made several legally doubtful slurs against Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Stick it in your ears -

If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe at In The Abstract.

I've sat in many classrooms - with many different employers - and I keep seeing the same lies being told to students. HR and training teams seem to incessantly buy into the slick and convincing pre-packaged nonsense of "gurus".

I want to make this abundantly clear - there is a difference between facts and opinions. There is a difference between science and superstition. There is a difference between truth and lies.

There are things we can prove, things we can disprove, things which sound convincing, and things which we just feel must be right.

It's important that leaders are convincing speakers, have well thought through plans, and know what they are talking about. Yet too much of modern leadership science seems to be taken up with myths rather than facts. No one can be expected to lead if the foundation of their knowledge is built on a bed of naked falsehoods.

I'd like to tackle some of the more common tropes which find their way into business leadership lessons around the globe. These are easily debunked factoids which sneak their way into classrooms under the pretence of being good science. As I hope to demonstrate, there are merely a series of poorly understood pieces of trivia which have no place in a modern organisation.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I'm sure you've been in a meeting where someone in a very expensive suit has thrown up this image: Occasionally, they'll alter it to put their product in there - what laughs!

Maslow's Hierachy of Needs (MHN) looks, superficially, to be good science. It was created by a respected scientist who properly understood the limitations of the scope of his work, and has been used for over 80 years. Sadly, it has severe deficiencies - which leads to it frequently being misapplied.

• Culture Specific. Maslow was looking at "Western" people. Does every culture place such a high value on individualism? No.
• Age specific. How important is sex to you when you're a teenager? How about when you're in old age? How does the need for security change throughout your lifetime?
• Where is spiritual satisfaction on the list?
• Can you not be a poor, hungry person who is happily solving problems?
• What happens in hostile environments, like war? Do your needs change?
• Several studies have shown that Maslow's ordering is simply incorrect for a large number of people.

In short, it's poor form to overstate the importance in a management context.

So, why is this still being taught in businesses around the world as a suitable tool for managing people?

55% of Communication is through Body Language!

Oh dear! How many times has some "motivational speaker" told you to get up off your arse and jump around like a lunatic because "the majority of communication is non-verbal"?

I'll admit it - I'm one of those people. I get people moving around to help warm them up, to motivate them, to get their heart pumping. But that's because I think it makes people more confident - not because their body language has a such a large impact on their presentation.

Before we get in to the origin of this zombie statistic, let's ask a simple question: How do you quantify such an exact percentage which is true for all forms of communication?

Anyway, the 55% rule comes from Albert Mehrabian - a professor at UCLA. His actual findings look at people* discussing feelings and emotions. He discovered that in ambiguous situations, meaning was derived in the following ratios. 7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken. 38% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said). 55% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in facial expression.

He specifically says

"Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable."

http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html

This isn't to say that facial expressions aren't important - they are - but businesses should not be fooled into thinking that simply improving the body language of their staff will result in better communication.

*The final kicker is that this ratio doesn't apply to all people - just women. Yes, that's right, Mehrabian's experiment was only conducted on women! The women listened to single words recorded on to tape. No men were involved, and no face-to-face communication took place.

Is this really the foundation upon which businesses are basing their beliefs?

We Only Use 10% of Our Brains

I've sat in seminars where some motivational speaker has tried to enthuse the crowd by telling us about our limitless potential. "Did you know," they squeal with glee, "that you only use 10 percent of your brain? You have vast, untapped depth which will allow you to conquer any situation."

The polite response in such situations is to ask the presenter which bits of their brain they would like scooped out.

This 10% "fact" is a complete myth. It's so barely plausible that it's easy enough to demonstrate to small children that it's wrong.

There's no doubt the human brain is a remarkable organ. It contains many facets which we still don't completely understand. With hard work, it's possible to expand our knowledge, and alter our neuroplasticity.

Our brain is always in use - all of it. Not everyone uses it to their full potential, not everyone works as hard as they can, and - if people engaged their brain a little more - this pernicious 10% myth would finally die off.

NLP™

Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. All three of those words sound very scientific. I mean wow!

The first thing to say about NLP™, is that it is a product to be packaged and sold. Hence the ™. It is not scientific term - it is a marketing term.

The second thing to say about NLP™, is that it doesn't work. I don't mean that some people find it unhelpful, I mean that every piece of scientific research into it has conclusively shown that it doesn't work.

So why, in the 21st century are HR departments still wasting vast sums of money on this?

Myers Briggs

I've already blogged about how Myers Briggs is little better than astrology. In short, MBTI was specifically designed to get British women from the 1940s into jobs which are suitable to their temperament. Neither Myers nor Briggs had any psychological or statistical training.

Despite repeated testing, there has never been any evidence that MBTI is accurate or useful.

The fact that this nonsense has stayed around so long is a dark stain on modern business.

...And Yet...

Perhaps you have violently disagreed with my categorisation of your favourite management fad. What I'd like you to understand is that what seems sensible to you seems downright bizarre to other people.

Have a read of these next two examples and tell me if you think that they are sensible ways to manage people.

Blood Type

Should you manage people differently depending on their temperament? Probably; different people have different needs.
Should you attempt to determine your employee's attitude via their blood type?

Wait? What?

It sounds weird - yet it's fairly common practice in Japan.

Take a look at the chart. Doesn't it seem familiar? Much the same traits which are "measured" by MBTI and other associated quackery. There's no science in it, of course, yet individuals are encouraged to marry "compatible" blood types and bosses are actively recruiting people based on their blood type.

Essentially, it's a horoscope with scientific pretensions.

It has all the appearance of a real science - yet there is no genuine research to back it up. Take a look at MBTI, NLP, or any other management technique which sounds like it has a scientific basis. How is it any different from the superstition of blood types?

Handwriting Analysis

I'm sure you remember having to submit a handwritten application for a job. It was probably many years ago - before computers were widespread. Unless, of course, you live in France! In some parts of France, Graphology - the "science" of interpreting handwriting - is alive and well.

I'm not sure what an analysis of my handwriting would show, other than I never hand write anything longer than my signature on official forms...

Curiously, some 50% of French companies use handwriting analysis. What would your reaction be if your HR team insisted that every employee had to submit themselves to such nonsense? That team assignments and pay rises would be based on some witch-doctor's reading of your penmanship

Unthinkable - surely?

Well, it works for me!

"Ah, but it works for me..." is usually the response I get when I bring this up.

Personally, that sounds a lot like an elephant stone to me. You see, I have this stone that I keep in my pocket to keep the elephants away. It's working splendidly - I haven't been attacked by an elephant ever since I started carrying it around.

Aspirin is a great example of this. If you take 100 people with headaches and give them aspirin, 60% of them will report a reduction in pain. After 2 hours, 30% of them will be pain free.

If you perform the same experiment with a placebo - that is a pill with no medicinal properties - after 2 hours 6% of people will report being pain free.

So, 6% of people will swear that a tic-tac cured their headache. Is that a sound basis on which to refuse aspirin next time your head hurts?

There is an excellent and easily readable paper from The Journal of Headache and Pain which explains the placebo effect on headaches.

What Next?

It's easy to point out on a blog that someone is talking rubbish. It's a lot harder to do so in real life. The next time someone tries to impress you with one of these grand sounding systems, you should have the courage to stick your hand up and ask for proof.

Speaking truth to power is rarely popular. But I think it's important that the people who lead us understand that they cannot build on a foundation of lies.

Because, at their heart, that's what these systems are - lies. Clever lies we tell people in order to manipulate them. And that's no way to build trust between management and employees.