Investigators' Blog

Nano-Girl Review

By Ebba Olsen, Age 14

Nano-Girl was a very interesting event. There were many experiments ranging from a small electric shock which had lights and sounds to make it seem bigger to giant explosions. Some experiments were more educational than others. Rubbing a balloon on a volunteer’s hair explained about the change within the atoms and the electrons moving between the balloon and the hair. While a shopping trolley powered by fire extinguishers was more just for fun.

My favourite experiment was liquid nitrogen sealed in a bottle placed in a bucket full of ping pong balls. The liquid nitrogen expanded causing the bottle to explode and the ping pong balls to go flying. While scientific and educational Nano-girl was also very humorous. She told many jokes and had a funny assistant called Boris who helped her conduct some of the experiments. Many of which were dangerous such as the washing detergent and fire experiment. This allowed Nano-girl to hold fire in her hand without being burnt.

Another one would have been the indoor lightning experiment but this sadly didn’t work because of something that happened during rehearsals. The projectors showed what was supposed to happen though. These projectors were very useful. It showed diagrams to explain how things worked as well as what was on stage so you could see it easier. Nano-girl was great for people of all ages. It was a fun experience definitely worth going to.

Pierre Roudier

Pierre Roudier

Want to know how important soil is? Here’s one of our investigators, Pierre Roudier talking to Bryan Crump on Radio New Zealand nights last week on Monday.
To listen to the interview click here

(Photo: This is peat sampled near the Waituna Lagoon in Southland)

Communities of Engagement – reflections from Dion O’Neale

Communities of Engagement – reflections from Dion O’Neale

By Dion O’Neale

Engaging with communities is a focus for Te Pūnaha Matatini so I very much appreciated the point of Rhian Salmon’s lightning talk at our initial research symposium. In her role as a climate scientist, Rhian has spent long periods of time in Antarctica, which makes for great science outreach material. But in her presentation to Te Pūnaha Matatini, Rhian questioned how scientific we are about the outcomes of the science outreach we do. Outreach activities require substantial amounts of time and effort from scientists, often for little professional recognition. Rhian advocated developing methods for reporting on and researching the impact of these outreach activities, then using the results to inform future communication practises.

Engaging with communities of a different kind is Jeanette McLeod, a graph theorist from the University of Canterbury. Jeanette spoke about one of the ecological complexity projects that will be running in Te Pūnaha Matatini — epidemic spread in possum networks. Coming from Australia where she fed tame possums in her backyard, Jeanette is now studying how the spread of tuberculosis through possum communities is influenced by the characteristics of individual possums.

As they collectively munch their way through 21000 tons of NZ native forest each night, possums interact with one another within their own social network. Jeanette, along with collaborators Mike Plank and Alex James, is using data about these interaction networks collected by scientists at Landcare Research who tracked the locations of a population of possums in the Orongorongo valley, near Wellington. Within the possum population, super-shedders (highly infectious individuals) and super-spreaders (individuals that encounter many others) seem to play an important role in affecting the spread of diseases like TB. Understanding the effect of the heterogeneity of of individuals in the interaction network could turn out to be important for identifying possible methods of using infectious disease to control possum numbers.

Networks of interactions were a theme in Dave Maré‘s presentation too. Dave spoke about what makes cities so cool from the point of view of an economist. No matter what you measure, cities are a particularly efficient way of making stuff. Whether you measure numbers of patents or firm revenues or scientific publications, cities produce more _per capita_ as their size increases. I was interested in how Dave is teasing out the different mechanisms that might be contributing to cities getting more efficient as they get bigger. Dave is looking at how higher frequency and diversity of interactions within cities might spur innovation as people are exposed to new combinations of ideas. These could be interactions within cities due to people changing jobs, or between cities with internationally connected workers spurring exporting of the firms they work for. I’m hoping I’ll be able to explore some of the ideas Dave spoke about by working with Dave’s colleague from Motu, Izi Sin. The idea is to build a network of employment relationships so we’ll be able to quantify some of those interactions within cities and look at how they might affect the outcomes of the firms or the individuals involved.

Very cool stuff: some thoughts from Marcus on our research symposium

Here’s Victoria University-based investigator Marcus Frean reflecting on last week’s symposium:

I want to talk to Alexei Drummond about influenza, and was disappointed that I didn’t get to do so at the meeting itself, due largely to being somewhat exhausted and in recovery from said virus!  I always wondered what the idea was with using local flow information to think about how the flu virus spreads, but his talk was really clear and got me excited about what was possible. I also just find the Bayesian inference over trees story fascinating in itself, flu or no flu. It got me thinking about how so many processes or diversification come down to branching over time, leaving more or less complex artefacts behind as they go. There is always this interesting issue of how to deal with the vast number of unknown tree structures that might have given rise to them. Very cool stuff. Quentin Atkinson gave a short talk about somewhat related stuff (as far as I understand it) that I would have loved to hear more about. Wow what interesting work he does though: wish I’d talked to him about that too.

I left wanting to know more about quite a few things that came up, for example Alex James’s “phylogenetics and mutualisms” connection, Jeanette McLeod’s “navigating among trees”, Peter Davis’s full-on predictive / counter-factual-capable models, Adam’s patents, Michael’s fish… !

I found Rhian’s comment about “yay” versus “reflective” aspects of the scientific enterprise salutary (if a little awkward: I might be a serial offender).

Then – and this is technically post-symposium but anyway – on the flight home I got to thinking about ideas for looking at how barter-exchange might emerge from a more primordial system in which “tit for tat” style reciprocity is first established. Talking about this with Uli en route was great – having to put the notions into words, with him saying “no that’s nuts” at suitable moments was quite a good thing! I wanted to start coding immediately, but was by then too sleepy to function: sign of a great symposium, I reckon.

No turning back

No turning back

What a week! It was nearly two years ago that I sat down with Dion O’Neale to first discuss about the possibility of establishing a Centre of Research Excellence in complex systems over a beer in Wellington. And finally, last Wednesday, in the University of Auckland’s Fale Pasifika, the Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon declared Te Pūnaha Matatini open for business.

Pierre Roudier, Geoff Wilmott, Dion O'Neale, Ken Quarrie

Pierre Roudier, Geoff Wilmott, Dion O’Neale, Ken Quarrie

 

Siouxsie Wiles, Rhian Salmon, Ed Abraham, Rebecca Priestley

Siouxsie Wiles, Rhian Salmon, Ed Abraham, Rebecca Priestley

 

Mark Gahegan, Laurie KNight, Shaun Hendy

Mark Gahegan, Laurie Knight, Shaun Hendy

Te Pūnaha Matatini is now starting to seem rather real. Te Pūnaha Matatini HQ has also been humming with visiting investigators hot-desking in our new wāhi hui, new students arriving, and a couple of top-secret projects. We ordered business cards on Monday, we launched our website on February 13, and @punahamatatini has been tweeting now for 292 days. But what really made it tangible for me was the two-day research symposium we held last Thursday and Friday.

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Logo

Over two days we asked our investigators to give three-minute ‘lightning’ talks (or lightning strikes as Peter Davis called them), one slide each, on the most exciting aspect of their research right now. This was a real success – it turns out there is a lot you can say in three minutes if you put your mind to it. We also heard from our project leaders on their plans and the PhD projects that will be offered, and heard talks from several outside organisations who we are keen to work with.

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Alexei’s Slide

Have a look at the @punahamatini and @TPMwhanau twitter feeds if you want to see the range of topics we covered.

One of the talks we didn’t tweet about was the one given by Lillian Grace from Wiki New Zealand, who gave us a sneak preview of the new Wiki site and the engine behind it. Lillian is on a mission to increase data literacy in New Zealand – to democratize data as she puts it – by bringing together disparate streams of government data in one place and making the data sets easy to work with and present. The new site went live on Tuesday so you can go see what we were so impressed by at wikinewzealand.org. It is also worth mentioning that there is more to come – they will be rolling out several exciting new features over the next few months.

But what made Te Pūnaha Matatini feel most concrete for me last week was watching Rachelle Binny and her Whānau committee get together in the wāhi hui for a meeting after our symposium had finished. Rachelle is the first chair of our early career researcher network, our whānau, and it has been really quite wonderful to watch the way she is has started to inspire and lead this group of young, talented scientists.  Te Pūnaha Matatini is no longer an idea owned by me, by our investigators, or by any of our institutions. It has been adopted and made real by the next generation of researchers.

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Whānau

Compete to cooperate

Compete to cooperate

The first conference I attended as a PhD student was held at a postcard-perfect alpine château up in the Canadian Rockies. The organisers had brought together particle physics, the physics of the very smallest things we can detect, with cosmology, the physics of the entire universe. These two bodies of knowledge both become important in the very early stages of the universe, when everything we can see in the night sky, even the most distant objects visible only with our most powerful telescopes, was compressed into an unimaginably tiny volume.

The talks would start early in the morning and run through until midday, when the participants would disperse to ski at the local resort, or to go skating on a frozen lake that was overlooked by the château. While physicists often style themselves as accomplished outdoor types, the reality is that they spend too much time at their desks or in the lab – by the end of the week the hotel had run out of crutches and knee braces. Every afternoon, after the rescue teams had retrieved our fallen, we would reconvene for talks and discussions that would continue long into the night.

The hot topic of the week was the two competing measurements of the rate at which the universe was expanding. This is a crucial thing to know if you want to know the age of the universe, and if and when it might end. There were two different research groups at the conference each claiming to have made the first reliable measurement of this rate. The discussion was running hot because the measurement of one group was almost twice that of the other.

The fate of the universe quite literally depended on who was right. To an outside observer, each group seemed supremely confident in their own measurement and equally confident that the other group had made a mistake. Someone was wrong.

Today, we know that both groups were equally mistaken. Over the next few years, each group refined their measurements to bolster their case. As new data was collected and analysed, the two measurements started to creep closer together. A few years later they met in the middle.

Science doesn’t always result in compromises like this, but when science works well, it often does so via a mix of competition and cooperation.

From a certain perspective competition between teams of researchers might seem wasteful. Why fund two research groups to make the same measurement? But in this case, the existence of a competing group eliminated any complacency that might have set in. The overconfidence of each team in their own approach was tempered by their rivalry with the other group.

The cooperation is less explicit in the narrative, but was nonetheless crucial. The teams cooperated by openly sharing their results and methods in an effort to persuade the rest of the research community that they had the right answer.

New Zealand has experimented over the years with mechanisms for driving cooperation and competition in our research system, yet we still seem to be incapable of striking the right balance. The National Science Challenges eliminated competition altogether, or at least banished it behind closed doors, and led many to conclude that they had been captured by an old boys’ network.

In my opinion, the Centres of Research Excellence have struck the right balance. They are selected through a highly competitive process, yet one which encourages large teams of researchers to come together and create something greater than the sum of its parts. And in the 2014 round we saw that incumbency was no guarantee of success. Only two of the existing CoREs were selected for further funding and four new entrants were given their chance, including Te Pūnaha Matatini.

We now need to ensure that the other side of the ledger is balanced: openness, sharing of best practice, and collaboration between the CoREs will ensure that science emerges as the winner in the long run.

 

 

 

Network science gets dirty: complex network approaches to digital soil science

Network science gets dirty: complex network approaches to digital soil science

Before meeting with Dion O’Neale I would never have thought that a project about soil could be so interesting, however his clear passion for this project would cause even the biggest city slicker to sit up and take notice. Dion is a Research Fellow in the Physics Department at the University of Auckland. He is currently involved in an exciting project with Associate Investigator Pierre Roudier, a scientist in the Soils and Landscapes team at Landcare Research, looking at ways of organising and evaluating data on the distribution of soil types in New Zealand.

Throughout New Zealand soil scientists have categorised the different kinds of soil in certain areas. This information is publicly available which means it is ready and waiting for data-hungry mathematicians like Dion to swoop in and convert it into something useful. The idea behind this particular project is that there are patterns in how soil distributions occur, however we do not have a good way at looking at how these patterns are formed, or what the results are of these relationships. By studying the data, Dion is able to take a closer look at which soil types occur together, how often this happens, and whether certain soil types only occur together in a particular region or are found together across the country.

In certain regions across New Zealand soil scientists have found great complexity in the soil. This complexity can be caused by the geography of the area, for example soils lining a river. In order to evaluate this, Dion has taken the data and used it to produce graphs and diagrams which clearly illustrate the links and relationships between different soil types. Soil scientists can then come in and look at these graphs and see the soil relationships clearly illustrated, opening their eyes to new knowledge and allowing new conclusions to be drawn.

The brilliant thing about this project is that it initiates a data driven approach which can then be met with the expertise of the soil scientists. This collaboration yields greater understanding for both parties and allows the discovery of knowledge that may previously have been hidden. It is a project that, as Dion emphasised, “is not trying to replace any of that expert knowledge, it’s trying to augment it”. This goal in itself is exactly why this project epitomises the work of Te Pūnaha Matatini: it is bringing different disciplines together to share expertise and unearth new knowledge.

The potential impacts of Dion and Pierre’s work are countless. This collaboration allows greater understanding of soils in regions right across New Zealand which, in an economy so heavily dependent on our soil, can be extremely beneficial. This project is also the first step towards an exciting new project which will utilise data from Antarctica in a similar manner, looking at soil samples from the Dry Valleys. Taking data from the dry soils in Antarctica, and combining this with access to data on any human movement in the area, scientists are in a unique position to study a virtually untouched environment.

This project represents the plethora of knowledge that stands to be uncovered when bringing together experts from different fields and encouraging collaboration.