I work from home - I like to watch videos, to pretend some sort of human interaction.

I like watching videos on interesting topics, probably another thing that makes me feel like I'm interacting with people whilst working from home, alone, all day. I'm going to keep a log here for you, on the ones I think people might like to know about.

30/10/13

I watched (mostly listened whilst writing up some notes, it's a long one) the Commons select committee hear evidence on women in Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) careers. As a woman at the beginning of her STEM career it was a good watch, opening my eyes to the amazing amounts of support that there is out there. It was good to hear about  the people that are fighting our corner with things such as the Athena Swan Charter, and support through career breaks.

My supervisor has said to me before that it's not easy to be a woman in science, and that to ensure success I need to make a strong headway from the beginning, this was touched upon in the evidence heard. I really hope I don't become a statistic and become another woman in a STEM career to slip out of the "leaky pipe".

I'm here to stay!

29/10/13

This video came up on my twitter feed, so I watched it with a cup of coffee, and replied to the twitter comment, and got a retweet from the BES for my efforts! Professor William Sutherland giving a lecture on improving decision making in the policy environment. My PhD is based on the scale at which policy decisions are made, so the video was highly relevant. There were three specific highlights for me.

Firstly, I'm innocent!! Professor Sutherland declares those of us that have started our PhD's post 2006 are innocent of the problem surrounding bio-fuels. Although that isn't really something I would have looked into anyway, it's nice to be told I'm innocent!

Secondly, the future. The scale at which policy decisions are made is dependent on how far we look into the future. The BES get together every year to assess which issues are looking to be important in the future and which of those require action. The future is something that within my PhD is a big problem, where do we stop? Which future are we planning for? How many generations? Questions I need to answer.

Thirdly, the policy checklist he presents at the end. At the end of my PhD I am aiming to produce a framework to help make decision making in ecosystems services more fluid, check lists would definitely work well within the framework. Also I love lists, and lists of lists, but specifically lists of lists of lists!