Researchers at the OU are making information about living and fossil organisms on Earth more widely accessible, as a result of a project which started in August 2012.

The researchers, led by Dr David Morse, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics, Computing and Technology (MCT), have received £90,000 from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to help biological taxonomists build databases which catalogue millions of species of animal, plants and microorganisms.

“One of the big issues with biological taxonomy is that many of the records are ancient and only exist on paper, so you cannot just type your search query or species name into Google,” said Dr Alistair Willis, of MCT.

“Once this information is available online, it will be possible to monitor biodiversity and understand the relationships between species in a way that was never possible before.”

The project, entitled A Community-driven Curation Process for Taxonomic Databases, aims to improve the quality of scanned documents about living and fossil organisms. This will combine recommending new texts to users with an online process allowing taxonomists to confirm whether some scanned text has been correctly converted to digital form.

The system will be implemented within the Scratchpad virtual research environment, a social networking framework that is widely used by practising biodiversity scientists.

The project follows on from the OU's research on the Automatic Biodiversity Literature Enhancement (ABLE) project and the Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy (VIBRANT) project, both of which had the London Natural History Museum as a partner. The project will end in June 2013.


 

Engineering/Mathematics & Statistics/Computing
Andrew Agyei-Holmes, who is exploring the value of importing western and eastern tractors in his project, Capital Goods in the Agricultural Sector and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania

Science
Anthony Davenport, who is paving the way for smaller, faster computers through the use of graphene in his project, Enhancing the Gap

Pratima Chennuri, who used Fruit Flies to investigate the Role of DNA Damage in Ageing

Marcus Lohr, who presented research into Variable Stars and Stellar Mergers

Leanne Gunn, who developed a new system for forecasting model eruption durations in her project, The Duration of Icelandic Volcanic Eruptions.

Social Sciences
Clare Mumford, who presented on finding a voice in business in her project, Voice and silence in collaborative project work

Other category winners were:
Arts
Alice Smalley, who used GIS to determine where crimes reported in the C19th illustrated Police News actually took place.

Engineering/Mathematics & Statistics/Computing
Andrew Agyei-Holmes, who is exploring the value of importing western and eastern tractors in his project, Capital Goods in the Agricultural Sector and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania

Social Sciences
Clare Mumford, who presented on finding a voice in business in her project, Voice and silence in collaborative project work.

Science
Anthony Davenport, who is paving the way for smaller, faster computers through the use of graphene in his project, Enhancing the Gap.

Other winners were:
Natalie Canning in Social Sciences won the Open University Students Association prize for her research into What factors contribute to children’s empowerment in child initiated social play?

Loes Koorenhof in Life Science for her research Characterising the Neuro-Physiology of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Now in its seventh year the Postgraduate Poster Competition is going from strength to strength, with over 51 students showcasing their research.

As Head Judge, Dr Verina Waights, explained ‘this competition prepares students to share their research ideas with the general public – a must for researchers in the 21st century”.

Find out more:

• Winning posters and all of the posters entered for the competition
   
• Postgraduate research at the OU

Scientists from the OU form part of The European Space Agency (ESA) collaboration to build Euclid, a satellite which will help answer the important question on why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, rather than slowing down due to the gravitational attraction of all the matter in it.

“Scientists have recently come to the startling conclusion that ordinary matter - that is protons, neutrons, electrons and atoms that we understand well - account for only 4 per cent of the known Universe; the remaining 96 per cent is thought to be made up of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter.”

The Euclid spacecraft, a European venture led by ESA, will survey the sky, and a visible imaging instrument known as VIS will measure the shapes of distant galaxies using a digital camera with a large array of detectors called CCDs. The detectors, manufactured by Chelmsford-based e2v technologies PLC, will measure the precise shape of those galaxies. Foreground galaxies warp the space and time around them, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, and the shapes of background galaxies appear subtly distorted by these foreground warps. By measuring these subtle warps, Euclid will enable direct measurements of the amount and nature of dark energy in the Universe.

The harsh radiation environment around the spacecraft arising from the sun, often referred to as ‘space weather’, can adversely affect the CCD detectors, and with funding from the UK Space Agency, The Open University research team will start a five year programme to make detailed measurements of the radiation effects. Working in collaboration with e2v for detector manufacture, the research group will help UK industry achieve the best performance from their detectors. This will enable calibration and correction of the resulting images, so that any elongation measured by Euclid accurately predicts the presence of dark matter.

Euclid has now been adopted as an official ESA mission and solidifies the Euclid Consortium at the forefront of worldwide research into the ‘Dark Universe’. The satellite is due to launch in 2019.

What is the Euclid Mission?
Euclid is an M-class mission and is part of the ESA Cosmic Vision programme 2015-2025. Euclid is a 1.2m space telescope, located at 2nd large Sun-Earth Lagrange point, and will perform two major surveys of the sky over at least 5 years. The wide survey will cover 40 per cent  of the whole sky and is focused on mapping the locations and shapes of billions of galaxies. The Euclid deep field will cover a patch of the sky approximately 100 times the size of the full Moon (or 15,000 times larger than the Hubble Ultra Deep Field), to unprecedented depths. The combination of depth and sky coverage will enable Euclid to detect very rare sources like extremely high redshift quasars, and maybe the first galaxies that ever formed.

Euclid was formally selected in October 2011 for flight, with the Euclid Consortium adopted to help build Euclid on June 20th 2012. ESA will provide to the Euclid mission the spacecraft (built by industry under contract), the launch on a Soyuz rocket from the Kourou base in Guyana, operations for at least 6 years, and mission archives. The EC will provide the scientific instruments for Euclid (VIS & NISP), the data processing and scientific analysis software and archiving as well as scientific leadership for the mission. The EC is comprised of nearly a 1000 scientists from hundreds of institutions in Austria, Denmark, Italy, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and UK, as well as contributions from US laboratories.

What is the Dark Universe?
For nearly 80 years now, astronomers have known about “dark matter”; matter than does not shine or reflect light and can only be detected through its gravitational influence. Scientists still do not know the true physical nature of dark matter, but its existence has been confirmed numerous times over the last few decades. In 1999, astronomers found evidence for an even stranger component to the dark universe, namely “dark energy” that appears to driving the expansion of the Universe faster and faster. This “dark energy” makes up three quarters of the energy budget of the Universe; three times the energy associated with dark matter and over 20 times the energy in normal matter like atoms. There are many ideas of what it could be, but so far there is no compelling explanation for the nature of this mysterious substance in the Universe. Astrophysicists believe that the discovery of its very nature will revolutionize fundamental physics and our knowledge of the physical laws of nature.
 

Find out more: 

• European Space Agency
• Science qualification at the OU

Photo: Euclid spacecraft by: ESA - C. Carreau

Marketing is paving the way for us to destroy ourselves and our environment. We urgently need to change our habits and learn to buy less, not more.

This is the call to action The Open University's Professor of Social Marketing, Gerard Hastings, is making at a conference of social marketing academics taking place at The Open University today Wednesday 9 May.

Professor Hastings, who is  Director of the Institute for Social Marketing based at Stirling University and The Open University,  calls marketers the 'cheerleaders and overseers' of the 'insanity' of unsustainable consumption.

“Marketing provides corporate capitalism with both its motive force and acceptable face. 

"There is much talk about the unsustainability of an economic model based on assumptions of perpetual growth; less about the fact that this depends on us all perpetually consuming more – which we obligingly do. 

"Marketing drives this increasingly unnecessary consumption and encourages our inurement to its catastrophic consequences."

Professor Hastings says he has chosen the topic as a result of "the blindness with which we continue to shop".

“We have no regard for the obvious downsides: materialism, wage-slavery, physical health damage (such as obesity), perpetual disappointment (why would we go on shopping otherwise?), appalling inequalities, fatuous choice (such as £40k of products in large UK supermarkets) - and, of course, global warming.”

He believes individuals and academics can all help bring about change "through shopping less and more fairly, through collective education and through regulating the corporate marketer". 

"Business academics have to research, write and teach more, leading the debate about how to correct these wrongs. We need to do this energetically and fast.”

Taking Responsibility is a one-day conference taking place at The Open University Business School. More than 30 research papers are being presented around the themes of social marketing and socially responsible management.

Find out more

• Conference on Twitter 
• What is social marketing?
• Are you a social marketer?
• Study social marketing 

My post about ‘climate dyspeptics’ has won a bit of attention here and there from the ‘sceptic’ blogosphere. That’s what I hoped for. But it seems that for some readers I may not have laid out clearly enough that my suggestion that we use the term climate dyspeptic in place of climate sceptic was intended as a joke (admittedly a weak one), and part of my point was to push right over the end the idea of constructing clumsy binaries of ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’. If you’ve arrived here for the first time there are a couple of other posts elsewhere on my blog on why I think climate change is a distinctive cultural and political problem. But here I just want to ask for an end to name-calling.

‘Warmists are either stupid or dishonest.’

‘Of course climate deniers are not merely stupid, ignorant… They are also dishonest, manipulative, and arrogant.’

These are two sample quotes picked out in a few seconds of Googling. It’s not good is it? Climate change science and policy has risen in prominence in parallel with social media, where distance and anonymity can erode the kind of good manners almost all of us manage to muster in real public places. Sociologists exploring racism or other kinds of discrimination talk of processes of ‘othering’ that make it possible for one group of people to dehumanise another.

Terms like climate sceptic, denier and contrarian have served to cluster anyone with some good questions about climate change science and policy into a discrete group. This has solidified into an identity. ‘We’re climate deniers you know’ said a professional couple to me during a good-natured and intelligent conversation in a bar. Neither were stupid or dishonest, and I don’t think they would have thought that of me, although we disagreed on some significant points. None of those disagreements were really about science – at root they were all about how we thought about economics, politics, risk and the future. I got the sense that they felt that their thoughts about these sides of the question were not just being ignored but being buried under the edifice of ‘climate science’.

'I’ve worked with researchers from quite a range of disciplines that contribute in one way or another to climate science research. It is hilarious to consider any of them stupid or professionally dishonest'

But isn’t it patently absurd to suggest that anyone is ‘against climate science’. Similarly it is odd to my mind that some social researchers and commentators talk of climate change science ‘beliefs’. Very few people have beliefs as such about numeracy or grammar, and climate science describes researchers’ attempts to make the best sense possible of a complex set of interactions. It is like saying you are against mathematics or English language: it's a nonsense to oppose an area of inquiry. But this research area has sketched out potential hazards that most involved in it suggest hold potentially great significance for society, policy and politics. That’s where things hot up, and the name calling starts.

I’ve worked with researchers from quite a range of disciplines that contribute in one way or another to climate science research. It is hilarious to consider any of them stupid or professionally dishonest. They’ve all chosen to work in academia when their skills set could have provided them with vastly greater salaries. They work (almost all remunerated at fixed pay scales) on questions that interest them. A small number have behaved defensively – even badly  – in the face of some very nasty treatment, much of it in the form of (often anonymous) ad hominems.

I suggest we should let the numerous and varied projects that add up to climate science ‘run in the background’ and ask them to keep coming out and telling us about the new things they’ve found now and again (the IPCC would do this a whole lot more effectively if they spent a good chunk more on communications. I hope the blogosphere will support them in that…). Digital and social media make it easier for that work to be more transparent in process, and indeed for more people who aren’t engaged in science professionally to comment and participate.

But the real action in terms of citizen and political debate should be around how we think about risk and the future. Everyone should feel free to express an opinion around what we should do about the difficult knowledge around climate change without being called one sort of name or another.

(PS: I’m assuming, hoping, the bit about beheading me was metaphoric?)

(PPS: Realise I’ve rather gone on about these themes recently but its now out of my system for a while I hope. I expect to post something about a new book I’ve co-edited in the next couple of weeks

For more posts from Joe Smith, see his Citizen Joe Smith blog.

'There are many climate dyspeptics who are fearful about or irritated by the way climate issues have been presented in the media and with some good cause'

I’m mostly serious in suggesting a new term: climate dyspepsia. An ugly term for sure, but it is useful because it describes not a position but a condition. Certainly this seems to capture the anti-science, crotchety and closed-minded attitude of some sour cherry-picking bloggers and pose-striking journalists. But it also suggests much more widespread feelings of discomfort. It summarises the state people are in when they find all the talk about climate change science, policy or politics difficult to digest. I come over climate dyspeptic myself fairly often – probably because I spend quite a large proportion of my life working on the topic.

There are many climate dyspeptics who are fearful about or irritated by the way climate issues have been presented in the media and with some good cause. The climate research and policy communities need to be more considerate about how people feel about new knowledge about climate change. They also need to be more willing to trust people’s capacity to cope with more open accounts of complex long-term problems. Often this will not be about doing things differently but about naming them differently. There are three things that could be presented in a new way.

First the science of climate change needs to be told as a broad and unfolding process rather than a fixed result. People have a good nose for authenticity and know that over-hasty phrases like ‘the science is finished’ misrepresent the work. And what work it is: climate science includes some of the most ambitious questions that humanity has ever set itself – why is it so rarely experienced as such?

'It is remarkable, but too rarely noted, that almost all of the extraordinarily broad range of policy, business and community responses to climate change carry other benefits'

Second the policy response needs to be framed not as the pursuit of a single final UN agreement that arises out of a great big finished fact, but rather explained as a long term collective risk management process. Everyone who drives a car understands the need for rules about car insurance; everyone in a country with a health system understands the principle of collective risk burden sharing. In fact we tend to do more than tolerate these responses to risk: we treasure them. Climate change policy is no more than an extension of these principles. It is an idea that almost everyone can get behind. Politicians need to inhabit climate policy and not palm off their job on researchers who have a different job to do. Elected politicians have the legitimacy and responsibility to make decisions about the most substantial risks facing their societies and need to step into these big shoes.

Thirdly it is remarkable, but too rarely noted, that almost all of the extraordinarily broad range of policy, business and community responses to climate change carry other benefits. This is the fact that will make the political task achievable. Some of the most compelling developments in design and engineering of our age are at least in part catalysed by knowledge of climate change. Furthermore they are delivering improvements in the quality of everyday life and the long-term profitability and sustainability of business. So here’s a cheering thought: the things that people are actually doing about climate change can overcome the sickly feelings that can be brought on by all the talk of it.

For a follow up post to this one, see here.

Find out more: 

• The Science behind climate change explained
• Environmental studies at the OU 

Launched in 2008 with a five-year, £2 million grant from the Big Lottery Fund for England, iSpot has built a nationwide community of tens of thousands of people who are helping each other to observe and learn more about the natural world around them. There are currently over 17,000 registered users who have submitted more than 95,000 observations of about 5,500 species.

The next phase of the project will see several exciting new developments for users of iSpot, building on the foundations iSpot has established.
These include:

• Rapid-ID: a picture browser for beginners
• Mobile: iSpot in the hand and in the field
• Biodiversity Mentors: Outreach for the whole UK
• Personal: Customization for each user

The many eyes of the iSpot community have proved so keen, that hundreds of rarities have been recorded and two species new to Britain have been discovered.

iSpot’s award winning website has been designed to help remedy the gap in the general public’s identification skills. It is pioneering in its approach to supporting learning across the boundary between the informal and formal, using a combination of social networking, informal access to expertise and accredited learning opportunities. Anyone can upload a photograph of animals, plants, fungi or any living organisms they have seen. The photo is then displayed on the iSpot home page where other users can agree with the identification, attach a comment, or add a revised identification.

Find out more

• iSpot
• Support ISpot and find out about other Open University projects 
• The Garfield Weston Foundation

Dick Skellington looks at how to ensure your Valentine Day flowers are ethically sourced. 

In the developed world, do we think about where these flowers come from and how ethically they are produced? Do we care about the welfare of the workers who produced them, and their ability to sustain a living wage? Do we consider the environmental costs as the heart of much flower cultivation?

As consumers' green concerns have come to the fore, the cut-flower industry has gone to great lengths to persuade us that cut flowers can have low carbon footprints. Much of the data has focused on the benefits of growing flowers in naturally hot countries and then flying them into the UK instead of growing them in cold countries in hothouses, which can be very energy-intensive. This has led to a preference for flowers from Africa, rather than from European hothouses. Campaigners have also highlighted the importance of social justice, and making it easier for African people to make a living.

The flower industry is dominated by only a few countries: 83 per cent of the world's cut flowers come from Holland, Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya, and 73 per cent of the cut-flower production is imported by the US, the UK, Germany, Holland and  France. It is important the developed world prioritises the carbon footprint of products from the developing world, and cut flowers are no exception. 

But the carbon footprint of cut flowers encompasses much more than their transportation from one country or region to another. To measure genuine carbon footprints the entire lifespan of the flower should be considered. This tells us much about the carbon released from fossil fuels involved in flower cultivation, their fertilisation processes, their refrigeration impacts and their transportation, as well as the methane released from binned flowers.  

Thinking about flower production in this way forces the consumer to ask important questions. Is it valid to use water for the mass production of inedible goods when this might be better used for producing food  crops? Should we waste water resources producing a luxury product that is soon disposed of by people living in better socio-economic conditions in another country?  This is particularly important given that most cut flowers are grown in developing countries where poverty is often endemic and where access to clean water can be problematic – especially if large corporations buy up land and its associated water rights.  

'It will never rain roses; when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees'
George Eliot

So this year when you go to the major supermarkets to buy your roses do think carefully.  Over 90 per cent of the flowers sold for Valentine's Day are imported, the majority from Colombia (for the US market) or Kenya (for the UK), and our major supermarkets all use these sources.  For the impoverished East African country of Kenya, rose production is big business. Most of the 10,000 tons of roses we will buy for Valentine's Day will come from there. 

The Kenyan floriculture industry is concentrated on the shores of Lake Naivasha – a complex and sensitive ecosystem which is polluted and which has suffered, in recent years, from a fall in its water level due to rose production. 

Until three years ago the industry  was growing steadily. However, a disputed election in 2007, was followed by violence and unrest which spread quickly to Naivasha.  According to the 2008 report, 'Lake Naivasha: Withering Under the Assault of International Flower Vendors,'  by Food & Water Watch and the Council of Canadians the flower industry is so important to the Kenyan Economy that in the face of such instability the army and police put most of their resources into guarding flower shipments instead of local people, so that the Valentine's Day delivery could reach European buyers in time. Since 2007 Kenyan roses have come at a cost of more than 100 deaths and the displacement of more than 300,000 people.  

Worse for the region, production has resulted in significant increases in miscarriages, birth defects and other health problems associated with toxic chemicals. 

In Kenya, some farmers have responded by taking a more proactive role and ensured their farms achieve Fairtrade status. This has enabled them to embark on a more sustainable production cycle, one which brings money back into the local workforce as well as subsidising local welfare and community improvements. 

The origin of roses is not always clear and cheap roses are often grown by companies which cut corners to avoid legislation, selling them by auction in Amsterdam so buyers think they come from Holland. Most of the leading supermarkets have smartened up their act in the last few years, asserting that all suppliers must conform to the Ethical Trading Initiative, and they do all they can to ensure the ethical credentials of their sources and suppliers.  

The best advice this St Valentine's Day is to purchase flowers with a certified Fairtrade logo clearly marked. That way you can be sure that the flower growers receive a premium to invest in their communities, or you could circumvent the ethical minefield and purchase seasonal British flowers. But do beware of mixed bouquets as the flowers in them can come from a range of sources, some of dubious ethical credentials.

Dick Skellington 6 February 2012

Cartoon by Gary Edwards