Tag: communication

What has been interesting today is watching this video by the charity Practical Action.  The charity shows us that we can have simple solutions for complex socio-environmental problems.  What we do in Cabot seems quite complex at times, trying to find complex solutions to complex problems.  We have had visitors come to Cabot and show us their simple solutions, e.g. Kevin McGuigan who saved millions of lives by demonstrating how water can be sanitised in plastic bottles left in the sun, with the sun’s UV doing all the hard work.  A very cheap, easy and effective solution to the global problem of water security.  Cabot needs to think more about these simple solutions as well as the more complex ones.

 

This week has been very exciting.  I recorded our very first podcast at Burst Radio with Dr Steve Simpson who talked about how climate change is affecting the oceans.  This will be available for download in September.

A popular talk was given this week entitled ‘Climate, economic growth and preferences for geoengineering’ by Malcolm Fairbrother.  You can view the slides here.

Neville Gabie, our Artist in Residence, filmed and interviewed me about a ‘thing’ which made me work in the environmental sector.  My ‘thing’ was a book from 1991 entitled The Green Activity Book.  It was my favourite book as a kid, probably because it had loads of stickers in it! I always remember putting my favourite sticker at the head of my bed – it read ‘Save energy, stay in bed’!  It gave me a good excuse to try and lie in in the mornings, although my mum was having none of it!  Reflecting back on the book, it made me realise how little has been achieved in 21 years.  For starters, I seriously thought back then that there would be flying cars and hoverboards like in Back to the Future.  A snowboard is as close as I’ve come to that! When looking at the content of this book – which told me about saving energy, being careful with waste, recycling, looking after nature, and telling me all about renewables such as solar, geothermal and wind and tidal power, the message has not changed.  The technology doesn’t seem to have changed much either and that concerns me.  We need to get our arses in gear and stop talking and start doing!

Yay! The new Cabot homepage is now up and running.  Check out our new look here.

 

We have added a couple of mingling dates to our diary.

One on 3 October for our Faculty of Social Science and Law to mingle with Cabot members across the University of Bristol.

The second mingle will be held for all Cabot members, new and old, on 10 October.

Mingles are open to all University of Bristol staff and postgraduates.

We are recording our first podcast next week and will be interviewing Cabot Fellow Dr Steve Simpson on sustainable fisheries.  If you have any questions for Steve, please email cabot-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk or tweet your question to @cabotinstitute.

What has been interesting to me this week is a real shift in people’s perceptions of environmental risk, global environment change and resilience.  It is like the world has finally woken up.  Only this week climate sceptics have changed their minds and now believe climate change is man-made.  Also we are definitely facing 2 degrees of warming and reversing it is now looking highly unlikely.  By analysing current events held on the subject of climate change, it is clear that they are no longer asking what can we do to prevent it?  Climate change is happening and it is too late.  What everyone wants to know now is, how can we adapt to climate change and how can we be resilient to the global environmental and social changes which will result from at least 2 degrees of warming.

This year we have some exciting speakers talking about resilience, so I know at least the Cabot community will be prepared!  The Cabot events are:

 Jonathan Bamber in Glaciology, has had a paper published in Science entitled ‘Aerial Photographs Reveal Late–20th-Century Dynamic Ice Loss in Northwestern Greenland’.  Read more about his findings.

Our Cabot Fellow, Dr Steve Simpson, joined an expert panel to brief the world’s media on sustaining fish populations at the Coral Reef Symposium in Australia.  He said that recent research has shown that fish larvae have highly developed senses, included smell and hearing, and can actively swim back to their home reefs.  But that means the reef habitat and adult fish populations need to be intact for them to find their way home.  That’s exactly what Marine Protection Areas can provide, with spillover benefits for neighbouring reefs.  Steve said “This research is the strongest support for management strategies that adopt marine protected areas as a fundamental tool for sustaining fish populations”.  

This morning started with the ring of bells to communicate the start of the Olympic Games.  Communications have also been the focus of our work this week.  We now have the new website templates which I will populate over the Summer so we can re-launch the website in the new academic year.  We will have lots of new features including more video content, better layout and ease of use and we can’t wait to share it with you all.

This week we also met with representatives from across the faculties to help us with our new magazine which we hope to publish in the Autumn.  We have lots of good ideas and interesting material to put in.  We are working on content at the moment and will be pulling together case studies of work that has taken place within Cabot over the last year.

We also have a new webcam and microphone, courtesy of JISC, for doing more Skype calling and videoconferencing.  We are keen to embrace technology to cut down on national and international travel for meetings.  It is also useful to use online applications for phone calls so that we can share slides, documents and other information with our colleagues, which better enhances the way we work.

It was also interesting to meet Dan Schnurr of Blom this week, who has a mutual interest in mapping and remote sensing. 

This week we have been holding our Cabot Summer School on risk and uncertainty in natural hazards.  The week has gone very well and I have received some very positive comments from attendees.  We had some fantastic speakers including Herbert Huppert, Jonty Rougier, Steve Sparks, Willy Aspinall, Li Chen, Tamsin Edwards, Philippa Bayley and Thorsten Wagener.  Cabot would like to say a great big thank you to all of you for making the Cabot Summer School such a success.  We’re very much looking forward to next year.

This week, Cabot member Rich Pancost secured Paul F. Hoffman of Snowball Earth fame as the next Science Faculty Colloquium speaker in September.

I saw the new templates for our website today.  Its all looking good and I’m quite excited about the implementation of its new look.  By the end of the summer I hope to have it all up and running.

We would like to congratulate Cabot member Professor Mark Eisler and his team who evaluated the effectiveness of a low-cost decision support tool as a diagnostic aid by observing whether its introduction to veterinary and animal health officers undertaking primary animal health care in Uganda could lead to changes in clinical practice.  Improved diagnosis is necessary for the effective management of endemic cattle diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.

We would also like to congratulate Gareth Jones, Stephen Harris and Emma Stone who received £559,705 from NERC for a project on ‘Experimental approaches to determine the impacts of light pollution: field studies on bats and insects’.

Wow! What weather we have been having!  Incredibly hot, sticky and humid down south in Bristol – I’ve been feeling like I’m in an urban rainforest – and freaky hail, lightning and rainfall up north, causing landslides, flooding and serious damage.  Are these signs of environmental change and is it a warning of risks that will be commonplace in the UK in the future?  A very Cabot-y question!  Check out the news coverage.

This week I have been updating the Cabot website and have uploaded a video from the AXA Research Day and all the presentations from theday.  The content highlights the success of the Cabot Institute in bringing together people who work in different disciplines but cover the same ground, in this case volcanoes.  There is still more video content to come including coverage of the whole days presentations and conversation.

We have been struck by the hideousness of the #sciencegirlthing issue bouncing around Twitter last week.  For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the video which created a huge negative international response from male and female scientists alike.  We are proud to say that our very own climate modeller Tamsin Edwards will be turning into a real model along with Cabot engineer Ellie Cosgrave who are organising a real female scientist calendar in backlash to the video.  Stay tuned to the blog to find out who else is going to be in it…

And finally, Cabot Institute Artist in Residence, Neville Gabie has launched his very own blog to track the items and stories acquired for his new project – Common Room.  Neville is attempting to collect an item from every Cabot community member and display it in a public archive.  Each item will have a story attached to explain how the item is the gravitational centre of why we research what we research here at Cabot.  It’s going to be an absolutely fascinating project and we expect big things from Neville, so keep checking back on his blog and if you want to learn more or have something you want to share, do get in touch with Neville.  Read more here.