I'm a Scientist, Get Me A Twitter Account

Research funding, vis-a-vis career progression for young researchers, is fucked. For those who work in SCIENTS, or those of us who work slightly to the side of SCIENTS helping researchers with colouring-in within the lines and using the grown-up scissors, this isn't news. As discussed previously here, universities burn PhD students for fuel, churning out overtrained, indebted graduates with no actual prospect of employment in the research fields they were trained in. Those who somehow hang in there and compete for jobs are left with a contracting competitive research funding environment in which they have next to no hope to sustain themselves, their families or the people who work for them.

This is a strongly written, passionately argued account of how fucked the system is in Australia. The only thing that needs to be added to it is that New Zealand researchers would kill for a success rate as 'low' as Australia's. Halve those figures and you reach the reality of NZ research funding, which is well below the OECD average. In the first round of the Marsden Fund, NZ's only basic research funder (i.e. non-applied, blue-skies, curiosity led, whatever you want to call it - proper fucking science is what I would call it), the preliminary round has an over 80% failure rate. Less than one in five proposals make it through to the second round. Where less than half of THOSE will get funded. And if they are it'll probably be less than they asked for, and won't be enough to do the work properly, and will run out after three years with no prospect of continuation on that particular project. Does that suggest we have too many researchers and too many research institutions for the size of the country? Probably. But we have them, and they represent human capital which the nation has invested in, as well as human beings which we have a responsibility to look after.

Anyway, it is what it is. And what is also what it is, or something, is Mr Minit's Nats making possibly their only clever decision in two terms of office and pouring ACTUAL NEW MONEY into the research sector, in the form of the National Science Challenges. $135M in ACTUAL NEW MONEY over the next two budgets, in particular. Not counting the cash they blew running a much-lauded public consultation process involving patronising TV ads and flash websites (i.e. websites that are flash, not websites that run Flash). Given that the list of National Science Challenges are pretty much (a) what NZ science was working on in the first place (b) what NZ science has always been working on since day dot (c) what NZ science will always be working on until the heat death of the universe, one more cynical than I could argue the entire process was an exercise in pissing money up a wall while ending up precisely where one started from. However, that discounts the hidden value of the process: we asked the public what science they wanted us to do, and they confirmed we were pretty much on the right track already. Apart from the tinfoil hat brigade who demanded we investigate chemtrailing UFOs piloted by fraudulating climate change researchers, fluoridating our water supplies from the air and making us all gay-marry each other under sharia law. But apparently, those were in the minority.

What this is, effectively, is science communication in its rarest, and yet most useful form. Many inside research view (and practice) science communication in the form of telling people stuff: this is what science is and this is what scientists do and you should be interested in it. This is not communication. This is broadcasting. Communication, by definition, is a two-way process. It involves talking AND listening. This is why the NSC consultation process wasn't entirely a waste of fuckloads of money which could have been spent on lab consumables. And this also is why I've enjoyed being involved in @RealScientists so much.

For those under a rock (who aren't geologists) RealScientists is a project initiated by a group of science-minded tweeps to get actual SCIENTS people - lab types, policy types, clinicians, sci-comm-unists et al - communicating directly with people via Twunter. And it's been hugely successful. The most interesting thing though has been the two-way nature of the communication, which is Twitter's great strength, and why I'm not sure it'd work as well (certainly not in the same way) on any other social media platform - although pages like I Fucking Love Science work spectacularly well on Facebook, it's still primarily a broadcasting platform, and doesn't really permit anything other than superficial, once-over-lightly approaches to complex topics. On Twitter, you can dig as deeply into something as time and interest allows. This is not to say that RealScientists won't expand to other platforms - it's very early days - but I'm personally enjoying watching the interactive nature of this particular flavour of science communication.

And making up stupid shit for the intro/outro posts, like this.

[Administrators note - if you are An SCIENTS and you want to join in as a potential curator, flick us an email. For more info, check out RealScientists on WordPress. For even MOAR info, follow the @RealScientists account - or just bookmark the page, even if you're not on Twitter.]

The Doctor is OUT.