Out and about

A good deal of the research we do at Te Pūnaha Matatini is intended to inform government policy. But it is one thing to do the research, and quite another to have that research influence policy. This is why there is a growing interest in the relationship between research and policy, although there are still many different points of view on what this relationship should, let alone does, take. Over the next month or so we are going to post a series of blogs that discuss some of the issues that face researchers who wish to influence policymakers and policymakers who wish to use research.

In this first post, I am going to review aspects of this issue that are touched on in my recent book, Silencing Science. There I discuss the reasons why so few scientists seem to be prepared to engage with the public on subjects that are politically contested (tl;dr? Try this article from the Education Review). There are lots of motivations for avoiding contentious debates in public, but one concern that scientists have is the risk of damaging their relationship with policymakers, with the consequent implications for funding and their job. Understanding this relationship is important if we want to improve the use of research in policy.

The model I used to analyse this relationship in Silencing Science was borrowed from Roger Pielke, based on the analysis in his book The Honest Broker. He identifies four modes in which scientists can legitimately engage with policymakers: the pure scientist, the science arbiter, the issues advocate, and the honest broker of policy alternatives. As I wrote:

“The first two modes operate when a scientist provides advice on issues with policy options around which there is political consensus. The pure scientist simply summarises the state of knowledge in a particular field without reference to policy options. If a scientist is asked by a policy-maker to weigh in on the evidence for or against the effectiveness of a specific policy option, they adopt the role of science arbiter. In both cases, the scientist can claim to be sticking to the science, and can put themselves at arms length from the politics of the day.”

I would argue that these two modes dominate the approach that New Zealand scientists take to engaging with government. These are the silent scientists; they may engage behind the scenes with policy-makers, but they generally don’t make an effort to inform the public other than through very passive channels (e.g. see the Royal Society of New Zealand’s report on the water fluoridation). Pielke argues that these modes are appropriate when the policy implications are not politically divisive, but when policies have serious political ramifications, Pielke says that a different approach is needed.

From Silencing Science again:

“The situation is more complex for the science advisor when providing advice on policies that are politically divisive. In this case, Pielke argues that the roles of the pure scientist or the science arbiter are poor choices. By standing back from politics, Pielke says, scientists risk becoming pawns in a contested public debate. When scientists claim they are sticking to the science on hotly contested issues, their scientific authority can be hijacked by special interests.”

The recent inquiry into the Ministry of Primary Industries’ (MPI) failure to prosecute over illegal fish discards illustrates this. The inquiry found emails from an MPI senior manager in 2014 that revealed serious concerns about the way illegal fish discards were being monitored:

“discarding is a systemic failure of the current system and something we have not been able to get on top of from day 1 of the QMS [Quota Management System]. FM [Fisheries Management] can’t quantify the tonnages involved but we suspect they are significant to the point that they are impacting on stocks.”

Yet in May 2016, prior to the release of these emails, the same senior manager was quoted in an MPI press release saying:

“Science is the bedrock of our approach to fisheries management and New Zealand invests $22.5 million each year to ensure our fisheries science is up-to-date and accurate.”

This response makes me very uncomfortable. The Ministry is using the authority of science to deflect criticism and legitimate public scrutiny of the strengths and weaknesses of its management systems.

In this type of situation, Pielke suggests that scientists are better to approach the issue as an advocate, or an honest broker. The advocate takes sides in a policy debate, openly going beyond the science to grapple with the policy implications that may stem from the science. Indeed, the fisheries story and the inquiry itself were sparked by University of Auckland researcher Glenn Simmons arguing for much stronger monitoring of discards:

“… the future sustainability, traceability and certification of fisheries will depend on how government addresses the under-reporting problems, which have long been evident and which should be a cause of concern. Unreported catches and dumping not only undermine the sustainability of fisheries, but result in a suboptimal use of fishery resources and economic waste of valuable protein.”

Simmons’ role in the debate is not something that many scientists would relish. He has been subject to criticism by the Ministry and has his work critiqued in the media by his peers – while peer critique is a crucial part of science, scientists are not always comfortable when it takes place in the public eye. Nonetheless, advocates like Simmons play a crucial role in getting issues on the policy agenda.

The trick to pulling this off, according to Pielke, is to avoid using your science to mask a hidden agenda. An advocate must be explicit about where the science ends and values take over, acknowledging that scientific evidence alone is not sufficient in itself to make a policy decision.

The fourth option is that of the honest broker. In this role, the honest broker, like the advocate, acknowledges the gap between science and policy. Rather than trying to weigh in on a particular side of a policy debate, though, the honest broker attempts to consider a range of possible policy options, perhaps even using their expertise to introduce new solutions that were not yet on the table.

The honest broker is perhaps the most difficult stance for an individual researcher to attempt. Individuals are very rarely in a position where this is practical, as it requires the synthesis of the expertise of a wide range of colleagues and a diverse set of political viewpoints. In Silencing Science, I single out the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment as an example of an honest broker, but the Commissioner is supported in that role by a large team and is in the position to take a significant amount of time and care in weighing in on issues. As Pielke has pointed out, honest brokers are almost never a single individual. More typically this is a role for committees or panels.

In New Zealand we have several bodies that might be in a position to take honest broking on. The Royal Society of New Zealand “produce papers, convene panels and hold events to provide expert advice to policy-makers and contribute to public debate.” Generally this advice is undertaken in the pure scientist or science arbiter mode: a recent advice paper on sugar and health, for instance, almost entirely avoids policy recommendations, focussing instead on summarising evidence linking sugar consumption and health, despite the intense debate around policy options such as sugar taxes and mandatory labelling.

The other significant body is the Network of Science Advisors chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. The terms of reference and membership of this group is not readily available to the public, so it is difficult to comment on the way they operate. We are going to be discussing this group in a later post, together with some recommendations about how we think it could be utilised more effectively.

While Pielke’s model is a useful entry point into this discussion, it does have a number of shortcomings. Over the next few weeks we’ll be discussing this further in the New Zealand context.

Shaun Hendy

Te Pūnaha Matatini is sponsoring a Health Analytics Workshop following the 2016 Joint NZSA+ORSNZ Conference.

What: Health Analytics Workshop following the Joint NZSA+ORSNZ Conference
When: Thursday 1 December, 2016 (full day)
Where: AUT City Campus
Registration: Workshop participants, including those not attending the conference, can register for the workshop on the conference registration page.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers in healthcare analytics. People with problems meeting people with solutions!  Practitioners – please bring along your current “pain point(s)”.  Researchers – please talk about your success stories with the health sector! We look forward to an exciting, productive workshop.  If you have any questions please contact Principal Investigators Ilze Ziedins (i.ziedins@auckland.ac.nz) or Mike O’Sullivan (michael.osullivan@auckland.ac.nz), or Associate Investigator Cameron Walker (cameron.walker@auckland.ac.nz).

Programme

• 10-11:20 Researcher Presentations
• 11:20-11:40 Morning tea
• 11:40-1 Industry Presentations
• 1-2:30 lunch
• 2:30-4 Facilitated Networking Session
• 4-5 Drinks

Note

• If you wish to give a presentation please contact Ilze Ziedins.
• Workshop organisers will post titles of presentations closer to the event at the conference website, along with information about the facilitated networking session.

Applications are now open for student summer internships at Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence. Projects include one at the Auckland City Council titled: “Indigenous knowledge as evidence in local government decision-making: challenges and opportunities.”

Get in quick! Applications close Monday October 24.

Find out more and apply at the Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga website.

In the immortal words of Vanilla Ice – Stop, collaborate and listen. Collaboration is a cornerstone of modern science and with flight tickets cheaper than ever before and the internet effectively eliminating the expense of correspondence, academics and researchers are looking further afield and reaching more contemporaries across the globe. However, different institutions have different facilities and research focuses, not everyone speaks the same language, and so perhaps these researchers may be picky when it comes to who they work with. It raises the question of whether they do have a preference in collaborator based on affiliation and, if so, can this preference be measured and distilled into cold, hard data?

Of course they do, and of course it can be. More to the point, why?

Arguably the most tangible and conveniently quantifiable means in which academic collaboration manifests is in scientific papers and articles, typically with several authors from varying affiliations. A notable drawback in previous studies on research collaboration is that the measures used (such as the fractional count detailed in Nature Index) consider results for each institution, rather than individual academic, and disregard the size of each institution; as a result, smaller and younger institutions may stack up unfavourably compared to those that are more established and larger. For example, take a look at how the eight New Zealand universities compare against each other:

• The nodes representing each university are weighted by their respective output (total number of co-authored papers by academics affiliated with these universities).
• The links connecting universities to each other are weighted by the number of papers co-authored by researchers from both institutions.
• The higher the link weight, the more that the connected universities are attracted to each other.

The skewing effect that university size has on this network is pretty apparent from how Lincoln University has much fewer co-authorships with Victoria University and University of Waikato than with the rest of the network, given its relatively small output. Also of note is that the University of Auckland and AUT have a much lower link weight than one would expect for two universities across the street from each other, yet the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury have a much stronger link despite being at opposite ends of the country.

First, to address the effect of institution output. We do this using something we call the revealed comparative preference (RCP) of an institution i for collaborating with institution j:

where X_ij is the number of co-authorships between i and j, X_i is the total number of papers co-authored by i with other institutions in the data set, and X is the total number of co-authorships between all the institutions in the data set.

Plainly speaking, it’s a measure of whether two institutions are doing more than collaborating than we might expect with each other relative to their tendency to collaborate with the other universities in the data set. If  P_ij > 1  , then universities i and j share more co-authorships than we expect relative to the other institutions in the data set, so we say they have a comparative preference for collaborating with each other. Conversely, P_ij < 1  indicates that the two universities are doing less than we might expect.

Anyway. Here’s the NZ university network revised with the links now weighted by their corresponding RCP values:

Better. Here it’s apparent that AUT has a stronger link with Auckland Uni in addition to Lincoln and Waikato, and it should be pointed out that University of Auckland, AUT and Massey University are also closer to each other in the network, bearing in mind that all three have campuses within Auckland.

Now with a working measure, we move on to a larger sample. Bring on the Australians.

Clearly the Tasman Sea has a solid effect on the way New Zealand based researchers connect with those based in Australia; the links within the NZ cluster of universities have greater RCP weightings than those within the Australian cluster, implying a preference for domestic rather than trans-Tasman co-operation. Another feature to consider is that the Australian universities in the same states are grouped together, which is consistent with the idea that geographical proximity plays a significant part in a researcher’s choice of collaborator.

It would only be natural to wonder how academics interact on a global scale – do we ever grow out of talking almost exclusively to our friends and shun outsiders in some weird, grown up, Mean Girls-esque collection of cliques?

From observing how the Dutch and German institutions are grouped together, we might conclude that the language barrier is a large hurdle to overcome when jointly writing scientific literature – this also seems apparent from the Chinese-Hong Kong cluster, as well as Korean and Japanese institutions as well. But languages also tend to cluster geographically, so it is hard to disentangle the effect of language from distance.

It’s no question that with the constant progress of technology, connecting with people is becoming less costly. However, there are factors remaining that impede the prospect of a totally connected scientific community, some of which have been speculated on here. Of course pictures and hand waving don’t constitute a solid argument, but a thorough analysis of these factors and their effect on university collaboration will be in store for you, dear reader.

In the meantime, perhaps one should learn German, or Mandarin, or Dutch, or even Japanese. It’s not that hard.

About the data visualisations
In order to make the larger graphs efficient enough to be used in browser, the amount of connections a node could have to other nodes was limited to its top four RCP values. This change had no significant effect on the clustering observed when the full connection matrix was used. The change was only implemented for the QS, ANZAC and benchmark data sets.

Author

Bonnie Yu is a research assistant at Te Pūnaha Matatini and a member of Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Whānau group for emerging scientists. Her research projects focus on university collaboration networks.

The data visualisations of this post were prepared by fellow research assistant, Nickolas Morton.

Armed with knitting needles and crochet hooks, Drs Jeanette McLeod, Julia Collins and Phil Wilson are on a mission to bring maths to the masses.

The trio are behind Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Maths Craft Festival, running at the Auckland Museum on the weekend of September 3-4. The festival promises to get into the ‘knitty gritty’ of the maths behind craft and the craft behind maths with a range of hands-on activities and a series of public talks.

The mathematicians were inspired to start the festival after a serendipitous encounter while Julia was on holiday in Christchurch from Edinburgh. While visiting the University of Canterbury, Julia met Jeanette and discussed the mathematical things she had knitted to pass the time on her travels.

“Not only were these objects great ways to start conversations about maths with strangers who wanted to know what I was knitting, but making them also helped me to understand some deeper mathematics.”

Jeanette had a similar experience with crochet and knitting and the pair thought it would be great to offer the public a chance to learn not only about maths but different crafts as well. It wasn’t long before fellow mathematician Dr Phil Wilson became involved, bringing his experience with making origami models and his fascination with fractals.

Phil believes everybody will find something valuable at the Maths Craft Festival: “Teachers can get new ideas on how to engage their pupils with maths, knitters and crocheters will discover new and intriguing patterns, scientists and students can find new ways to explore shapes and patterns, and parents can relax with some zen colouring-in while their children try to see who can build the biggest fractal.”

Jeanette, Julia and Phil have planned a range of activities, including crocheting hyperbolic planes, building fractal sculptures, making Möbius strips, and folding origami dodecahedrons. Guest speakers will also be offering a series of maths and craft themed talks on topics from the mathematics behind knitting, to turning geometry into art.

“We hope that people of all ages and backgrounds will attend, no matter if they’re a novice knitter or a mediocre mathematician; a child in age or a child at heart,” Julia says.

The festival runs September 3-4 at the Auckland Museum. Visit www.mathscraftnz.org for further details.

What: Maths Craft Festival When: 3-4 September, 2016 – 10am – 5pm
Where: Auckland Museum
Cost: Free entry to festival with museum ticket
Web: mathscraftnz.org
#mathscraftnz

The festival is principally sponsored by Te Pūnaha Matatini, with further sponsorship provided by the University of Canterbury’s College of Engineering, the University of Auckland’s Mathematics Department and the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies.

Did you miss our Reframing Innovaton campaign with Figure.NZ? Catch-up on the conversation from around the web with our Storify:

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Congratulations to new Associate Investigator Dr Cate Macinnis-Ng who recently received the Roger Slack Award in Plant Biology. The annual award by the New Zealand Society of Plant Biologists recognises an outstanding contribution to the study of plant biology in the last five years.

Cate specialises in plant functional responses to environmental conditions. She is particularly interested in the impact of climatic variability and change on carbon and water fluxes of the forests. Since moving to New Zealand in 2010, Cate has been exploring the physiology of our largest and longest-lived tree, kauri. Among key findings Cate has found evidence for drought adaptations in a species previously thought to be highly vulnerable to water stress. This research has laid the groundwork for a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship exploring limits of drought tolerance using a NZ-first throughfall exclusion experiment. Cate will be presenting her work at the upcoming NZSPB annual meeting at Queenstown Research Week on September 2nd.

He aha te kai a te rangatira? He Kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero. Nō reira, nau mai, haere mai!
You are warmly invited to attend a PBRF forum focused on the Māori Knowledge & Development Panel led by Professor Margaret Mutu and Dr Aroha Harris.

The forum is:

• Aimed at clarifying MK&D panel criteria
• Offering guidance, tips and suggestions from our Panel experts
• Chaired by Dr Melinda Webber (AD PBRF Faculty of Education and Social Work)

Date: Monday, 22 August 2016
Time: 4.00 – 5.30 pm (Drinks and nibbles from 5.00pm)
Venue: Women’s Federation Room, Old Government House
Please register your interest by emailing Emma on e.buchanan@auckland.ac.nz by 18 August for catering purposes.

A joint initiative of the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Education & Social Work.

What are you going to do after you finish your PhD? Where do you want to go? Are you going to become a lecturer? These are all questions that I field on a regular basis. Rather than going with my instinctive response of “What the hell? I don’t even know what my PhD is about yet!”, I usually say something like “I don’t know, but hopefully something in conservation or consulting”. Apparently this puts me in the minority of PhD students in that I do not desire to go into academia.

This was a topic discussed at the New Zealand Association of Scientists conference I attended on the 26^th April; you can also read about it in my previous blog post. One of the speakers referenced the Royal Society report where it stated that while about half of PhD students continue on with research, becoming early career researchers, most end up leaving academia for work in industry. This is despite most PhD candidates desiring a job in academia at the outset of the project. The question asked at the conference is how can we, as the scientific community, support PhDs and Post Docs so that if an academic career does not pan out they can successfully and relatively painlessly transition into industry? As one of the members of the emerging researchers panel said, when she was faced with the current situation, it is not unusual to feel like the best option is just to “give up”.

I am lucky in that I have a great team of supervisors (I have 4 ± 1 supervisors) who want my PhD to be more about preparing me for future work rather than me just churning out papers. They have suggested that I take opportunities to learn skills that will be useful in industry and that I take time to build connections inside and outside of academia. However, not everyone is as lucky in having such excellent supervisors. I have heard horror stories about supervisors who refuse to meet with their students and those who take no role in preparing the student for the future. What can we do for these students without supervisor support?

This is a place where student-led organisations can step in. The Te Pūnaha Matatini Whānau committee is well aware of these trends and are currently working on a number of projects to address this. The Whānau has connected with industry partners such as data analytic companies. The intention is for TPM Whānau members to be eligible to undertake internships at the companies. This will teach the members new skills and give experience that will be valuable in industry. We are also organising a data debate on the issues of data privacy between industry members and Te Pūnaha Matatini.

Ultimately however, no matter how supportive the supervisor is, it is up to the student to make sure that they obtain the experience and skills they need. As one of my supervisors said, “if you are smart enough to get to PhD level you are smart enough to look after yourself”.

With that I will sign off and go look after myself.

Jonathan

About

Jonathan Goodman is a Te Pūnaha Matatini Whānau committee member.

In my post on Monday, I looked at New Zealand’s research and development spending. The R&D dollar is just one of the proxies used to try to understand innovation and while it is certainly an important input to the innovation process, it is possible that our low level of reported spending relative to other countries might reflect the fact that we don’t have R&D tax credits. Having said that, Finland operates only a very modest R&D tax credit scheme, yet its businesses outspend New Zealand’s in R&D by a factor of four as a fraction of GDP. It is likely that R&D spending is underreported in both Finland and New Zealand relative to countries that have generous tax credits for R&D.

With this caveat, it is still interesting to drill down into the data on R&D spending. In this post I would like to make use of Figure.NZ’s data to look at R&D spending by industry in New Zealand. As the plot below shows, in 2014, the three biggest spending industry sectors in R&D were computer services, machinery and equipment manufacturing, and other services (there is a similar plot in Get Off the Grass using data from 2010 but aggregated at a higher level).

Computer services is not only now the biggest spender, it is also near the top of list of the fasting growing R&D investors, as you can see in the second chart (below). Investment in R&D by the computer services sector grew by 40% between 2012 and 2014.

Computer services are arguably the biggest success story of New Zealand tech sector in the last decade. Indeed, much of the growth in our ICT exports in the last decade has come from services. Our exports finally seem to be losing weight.

I will end this post with two more charts from Figure.nz that illustrate the mismatch between the success of our ICT sector and the government’s strategy for public sector R&D. Public sector R&D is largely carried out in our Crown Research Institutes (which makes up most of the government sector expenditure in the first figure below) and universities (which makes up the largest share of the higher education expenditure in the figure below that). Health and environmental research are the two biggest areas of expenditure in public R&D, but ICT is well down the list both in government and university research. The ICT sector is arguably our most innovative goods and services sector, but it is relatively low on the priority list for public sector spending.

On the one hand, the ICT sector seems to be doing very well – why worry about its low priority in the public sector? Well, one of the key outputs of public R&D are skilled researchers as public R&D projects is also where young researchers cut their teeth before joining the workforce. In the long-run, if we want to continue the growth of ICT services in New Zealand, then we will need to match this with growth in public support for ICT R&D.

About

Professor Shaun Hendy is the Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini. Shaun teaches in both the Department of Physics and the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, and has a range of interests, including materials science, innovation, science communication, and the use of evidence in public policy.

In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2013 he was awarded the E. O. Tuck medal for research in applied mathematics. Shaun tweets (@hendysh), blogs, and has a regular slot on Radio New Zealand Nights as physics correspondent.

In 2012, Shaun was awarded the Callaghan Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Prime Minister’s Science Media Communication Prize for his work as a science communicator. His first book, Get Off the Grass, co-authored with the late Sir Paul Callaghan, was published in 2013.

View Shaun’s Figure.NZ data board.

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