Thursday 20 February 2014

Comments - 20/02/14

Joseph Couch: http://zoologylad.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/science-for-with-or-by-policy-markers-the-case-of-the-pontbren-project-seminar-by-dr-sophie-wynne-jones/

Comment:
" A really nice summary of the talk, but hard to follow with so little punctuation. Her talk was very interesting. Have you heard much about the current agroenvironmental schemes? Most of them state that a certain percentage of the land must be grown “environmentally” or the farmer won’t get certain subsidies. Most of the time these schemes don’t take the farmers opinion into account, and so they are forced to plant hedges, woods and crops in areas that simply aren’t suitable for them. Unsurprisingly this rarely works and only serves to make the farmers dislike the policy makers more intensely. I hope you can see, from this talk, how communication, and giving the power back to the farmer can actually grately improve the results and the attitudes of both sides towards each other. I hope Sophie can help get this kind of scheme implemented across the country."

Christian Dobre-Lereanu: http://whydowelovescience.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/daphnia-a-game-changer-in-environmental-genomics/

Comment:
" What do you feel you learnt from this talk? I also found it truly inspiring, but mainly due to the information John gave on Daphnia. I knew the genus existed before didn’t realise it was so incredibly morphologically plastic, and was found so widely. Professor Colbourne’s use of these creatures to create useful policy effecting data was also remarkable. To be able to use all the organism variants to test various aquatic chemical compositions was brilliant. It might really change the way future chemical spills, like that in Maywood, are treated. Was kind of crazy hearing the way they calculated “safe” levels of the chemicals! Hopefully John’s work will make all the water supplies slightly safer for us and ecosystems as a whole."

Clare Birch: http://cbirch66blog.wordpress.com/

Comment:
" Loved the video Clare…not sure the sound quality was up to much on any of the recorders. It was interesting to see all the different Treborth ideas that came up to! How’d the interview go? Just wondering how you think you learnt from this experience? I found the time pressure/management thing the most helpful, though team work was pretty fun as well. Had you met any of your team before? I didn’t know anyone in mine when we started but it’s amazing how well we worked considering.
If you had to run this workshop yourself, what would you do differently? I’d probably get rid of the video making bit and allow more time to research the business…ie. computer session. Might make answering The Dragons questions easier. Then again, the video bit was one of the more fun parts, so maybe just have more of that kind of thing? What do you reckon?"

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