Tag Archives: imperial college

Imperial College Virtual Medicine Showcased by Linden Labs

For the next 24 hours or so, Linden Labs are providing a link from the main Second Life log-in screen to Imperial College’s virtual medical facility.

Virtual Operating Theatre
Virtual Operating Theatre (with me, Erasmus Magic)

You can link there directly via this SLURL http://slurl.com/secondlife/Medical%20School/48/133/26 .  Over a thousand visitors in the last 24 hours.  All very interesting; so check it out.   I’ll be in-world over the next day (Erasmus Magic), so say hi if you see me.  And make sure you listen to the audio on the music channel, where I’m talking with some  of those involved in the development.

This is where you will arrive - Get a free set of 'scrubs' too!
This is where you will arrive - Get a free set of 'scrubs' too!

Virtual Medicine

In this podcast I meet a team from Imperial College who are leading the field in the application of virtual worlds for medical training. The package was originally broadcast on the radio show Mission Impossible on ICradio.com on 23rd June 2009.

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The Exquisite Corpse of Science

How do different people and groups of people view science?  What do they know about it?  What do they think is important?

To help answer those questions – here’s a  fun ‘Sci-Art’ idea with a serious side.

Exquisite Corpse of Science
Exquisite Corpse of Science

You see, proof that  Big Science is alive and well at Imperial College, my colleagues Arko Olesk, Graham Paterson and I went crazy last month and invested in an A3 sketch pad and a felt-tip pen.

So armed, we’ve been accosting members of the public, scientists, and science communicators, and, looking over their shoulders in the nicest possible way, asking them to DRAW what they think is important about science.

We’ve made audio recordings of what was said whilst drawing and, in a bid to capture all this diversity in an intriguing and memorable way, stitched the pictures together in the manner of the surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse. A little photoshopping nicely finished this testimony to all our efforts.

A 14 yr old's view of science
A 14 yr old’s view of science

Pretty, but what’s been achieved here?

Our thinking was that long questionnaires and government surveys have their place, but they don’t catch those instinctive, spur of the moment thoughts and reactions that show where someone’s really coming from. We wanted to capture the ideas that get  lost in a more calculated response.  OK – we gave our subjects some warning, but we saw real spontaniety too.

The Communicator
The Communicator

On to our subjects and something of the learning……   We are indebted to Imperial’s Head of Physics – Professor Joanna  Haigh, Programmes Developer at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre – Dr Maya Losa Mendiratta, and our ‘public’ – Emma Sears and Gareth (14 yrs), for being temporary artists and great sports in equal measure.

The Scientist
The Scientist

To give you a flavour of what we learned from our statistically unrepresentative ‘spot sample’, take the youngest of our ‘public’ – Gareth.   Given his relatively young age, I was struck by his breadth of knowledge: we have AIDs in Africa, perils of passive smoking, space clutter, hearing damage, nuclear weapons, carbon footprint, materials shortages, and nothing less than the “de-evolution” of the human race.  A follow-up study might probe for depth, but he came over as a walking endorsement of the contextual focus of UK science teaching (although for me the jury’s still out).

Scientist Joanna Haigh chose to illustrate the scientific method, to which end she referenced her specialisation in atmospheric physics, especially topical given the field’s impact on the global warming debate (which all our subjects referenced).

Some of our subjects were quite complimentary about science journalism – others less so.  And we saw a ‘blurring of the lines’ between what a group or public really is.  Some of our scientists also dealt with the media, making them part communicator.  When it comes to keeping up with the sciences distant from her field, Haigh reads the popular press, like New Scientist, rather than specialist journals.

Haigh was also strong on interdisciplinary working, a theme that resonated with science communicator Maya’s comments about scientists needing to avoid stereotyping in one field. Yet that idea can conflict with another view we got that it is the focused scientist who traditionally ‘gets on’.   Behind all this I sensed a yearning for some enabling change in the scientific establishment.

Climate was perhaps THE common scientific theme, with Emma talking about water conservation and desalination.  She also discussed affordable medicine, which resonated with Gareth’s comments on AIDS.   The possibility of extra-terrestrial life (not so much UFOs – despite Gareth’s alien sketch) was another recurring theme.

Anyhow, my intent here is to share the idea, not this particular analysis.  And I’ve also avoided academic discussion of communication models: deficit, PUS/PEST, hierarchical etc.  – which this sort of exercise can inform.

Update 12th July 2009

You can watch the movie of this project here.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause

As any Darwin aficionado will tell you, as this celebratory week draws to a close, there is one biography of Charles Darwin that stands out from the crowd.

James Moore, Olivia Judson, and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College
James Moore, Olivia Judson, and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Olivia Judson and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones)
Olivia Judson and Adrian Desmond at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

James Moore & Olivia Judson at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones)
James Moore & Olivia Judson at Imperial College (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Not only is Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s 1991 ‘Darwin‘ comprehensive at 677 pages before the notes, it’s brick-like iconicity somehow speaks of closure, the last word, to any further debate about Darwin.

On a personal note, not withstanding Janet Browne’s Voyaging and Power of Place, which are both excellent reads, and show that Darwin was not in fact the last word, I have a particular affection for the Desmond and Moore biography.   It’s simply one of the few books of  length that I’ve ever  found the right combination of time and inclination to read right through non-stop; it took about a week one Christmas holiday.  And as with all good biographies of departed figures, that level of immersion leaves one genuinely saddened when the subject dies.

Adrian Desmond talks about Darwin's Sacred Cause (photo Tim Jones)
Adrian Desmond talks about Darwin's Sacred Cause (photo Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

So it was with some interest last Monday, that I walked the whole 100 feet  or so from my department at Imperial College to the Great Hall, to join a public conversation with Olivia Judson interviewing Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  The theme –  the authors’  NEW book, ‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause‘.

James Moore
James Moore (photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

This post isn’t a book review.  As much as I’d like to drop everything else and read it – I haven’t found the time yet!   Thankfully, it looks nothing in length like (as Desmond reminded us at this session) ‘the brick’.

Olivia Judson
Olivia Judson (photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Rather – before it becomes completely old news, I’ll point you to this online lecture podcast from Imperial College that helpfully captures the whole session.

That said, as a brief preview, the focus of the conversation is around Darwin and race, and the argument that man (as opposed to finches and other animals) was the core motivation behind developments in the theory of natural selection and the writing of the Origin of Species.  The Origin itself, we are told, was originally conceived to include extensive discussion on man and race.  The authors further link Darwin’s feelings about race back to a family upbringing and tradition steeped in benevolence and an active opposition to slavery.

Enough said for now – maybe more when I’ve read the book!

RELATED POSTS ON THIS BLOG

The Other Darwin Genius

When Science Fiction Meets Second Life

The registered user population of the virtual world Second Life has, according to owners Linden Lab, grown in the last five years to over 15 million, about 70,000 of whom are ‘in the world’ at any one time. I’ve been a virtual citizen for about six months and, while I’ve denied myself the latest cyber fashions, angel wings, and other personal embellishments, can drive a car and I do know how to fly.

Me at Imperial College in Second Life

If you haven’t visited, its worth checking out. Entry-level access costs nothing; you just download the free software, give yourself a name, and jump into the training area.

It’s pleasant enough just to tour the virtual landscape, take a lecture, watch a play, or visit a library in Second Life. But I got to thinking on my last visit – always dangerous – of the similarities between this world and another virtual world competing for my time – the Morlock sphere in Stephen Baxter‘s book ‘The Time Ships’.

Stephen Baxter's Timeships

Writing in the style of H.G.Wells, Baxter recounts a trip through time to an earth of the far future. The time traveller is the same one we met in H.G.’s original ‘The Time Machine‘; you know – Rod Taylor played him in the movie.

On arrival, our hero finds a race of evolved humans, the Morlocks, who inhabit not the Earth any longer, but the inner surface of a huge spherical shell built at the orbit of venus. The sphere entirely encompasses the sun, collecting all the energy and matter its inhabitants could ever conceivably need. All our familiar resource problems have vamoosed. There is no want.

It’s the same in Second Life, with its boundless expanses of developable landmass and an effectively bottomless – if virtual – resource of materials and energy. The cherry on the cake in both worlds is the way buildings and other useful objects either appear out of nowhere (Second Life) or pop up ready synthesised from the floor material (Morlock sphere).

It is this possibility of zero constraint, albeit delivered in different ways in the two worlds, that I find intriguing, challenging us to engage with (or reject) revolutionary models of how we might one day define ourselves and our lives.

While there is some real-world negative sentiment towards Second Life, of the “get a first life” variety, experience of virtual worlds can alert us to how limited, cumbersome, and parochial some aspects of our real world lives can be. Baxter’s conception frees us from these aspects, blurring the lines between what we now see as real and virtual, and melding the two into a possible future reality. In a world without limit or want, what would become of our values, drives, motivations and pleasures?

Baxter’s world all sounds like science fiction – which it is. But whether his vision, or something totally different, comes to pass is next to the fact that many people have as much difficulty conceiving of the far, far, future as they do of the distant, distant past. It’s one reason some people never get to grips with evolution; they can’t conceive of the time it’s taken for all those small changes to occur. Material spheres the size of planetary orbits sound ridiculous, but if we don’t kill ourselves off first – granted a very real possibility – who is to say what we might do.

Anyhow, if any of that rambling has whetted your appetite to engage in some really far, far, incredibly far, reach speculation of alternative futures, the sort that make the Morlock sphere look like a walk in the park, I can recommend Damien Broderick’s ‘Year Million – Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge’. There is a comprehensive review of it here by Jon Turney.

Or if you’d rather just go for a lie down, that’s good too.

 

Also of interest ?

Are we Surrounded by Dyson Spheres? Io9.com May 2011