http://www.ses.ac.uk/event/research-crosses-borders/
What was I doing at this event? (Apart from it being free - shhh!) My PhD is funded by the Joint UK-India Clean Energy Centre (JUICE), a consortium looking into the issues around integrating solar and energy storage in microgrids and national grids, in India and the UK. (http://www.eenews.net/special_reports/greater_expectations/stories/1060026477 that kind of thing.) So that may mean some data-sharing across borders - I hope it does, anyway. That was in a way the take-home message from the conference - there are many barriers to sharing data, but the benefits of doing so would be enormous. (I mean, just look at the field of crystallography.) What are those barriers? - Jealous researchers possessively guarding their own data seam so they can keep mining it for publications - so how do we respect that and persuade them to share without disincentivising the hard work of collecting data? (I do like the idea of counting a dataset as a publication, and uses of it as citations. Kind of like UK Data Service?) - Simple embarrassment at sharing computer code. Most scientists who write code are self-taught. My code is certainly always atrociously structured. But it works, damn it! - Privacy issues - anonymised subjects may be unidentifiable from one dataset but identified by putting together several (Juan Gomez-Romero, ICL/Granada, on sharing of personal data in the EU) - and related to that, how do you persuade a subject to give potentially self-incriminating information? Maybe he's selling counterfeit drugs that are causing a lot of harm, but if you report him, that's the entire village's 'healthcare' gone (Heather Hamill, Oxford, on an ethnographic approach to studying trust in medical transactions in Ghana and Tanzania) - Obtaining consent - maybe the refugee whose painting you collected from the detention centre's stores has already been deported (Mary Bosworth, Oxford), maybe the cultural background of your subject makes it impossible for them to understand what an academic paper is, and then there's always the paradox inherent in saying "Trigger warning: trigger warning" - we may laugh about sensitive snowflake millenials, but actually it's pretty serious when your subject is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide (Julia Viebach, Oxford/Marburg) - Funding the data collection and sharing sustainably but without restricting access too far, nor selling out to corporate interests - and indeed deciding when corporate interests are sufficiently aligned with societal interests to make an exception (Simon Hodson, CODATA) - The uncomfortable truths that data tell - about certain governments and regimes - such as one with an interest in appearing to be halting the spread of the Gobi desert, as per its five-year plan... (Troy Sternberg, Oxford) - things like that make me wonder if I can ever trust numbers again! The scope of the research presented was pretty impressive! But as Heather Hamill reminded us, we must be realistic about the impacts of research. Otherwise it's all too easy to slip into delusional heroism. After the event I had the pleasure of chatting to Eva Hoffman (UCL) over drinks. She has recently completed her PhD on capacity-building to train computer scientists in Afghanistan - how awesome is that! I had only really heard negative things about the region in modern times - and yes, the Taliban had really messed things up - but apparently the mayhem had stopped long enough for some computer science lessons. Next stop for Eva: Rwanda! I still dream of the day when all the conflicts on the African continent peter out and they start on a solar-powered (computer-)industrial revolution. Is that crazy? (Fun fact: back when China was still a basket case, some Brits went over and did basically what Eva's been doing, but with analytical chemistry. My dad wouldn't be where he is today without their help.)
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Susan's BlogIn which I scribble words about energy, the environment, climate change, and other science things. Views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the CDT staff or sponsors. Archives
August 2019
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