Tag - Keith Richards
Google’s non-scientific approach to management
From 10, 000 clues, 8 simple steps to good management. So ran the subheading to the New York Times article about Google’s “plan to build better bosses”.
Quants not quals, as you’d expect from a data-driven company. And so it must be a scientific approach, mustn’t it. Loads of data and data-mining as only Google can do. On Project Oxygen (neat name, an element as well as a metaphor)
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The New Optimists Recommend Science Books – Keith Richards and Jenny Uglow give their recommendations
In the final part of our New Optimists Recommend series, we have recommendations from two very special contributors to the book. Firstly, Keith Richards – who edited the book – offers up a series of recommendations for recently published science tomes he’s enjoyed.
Bill Bryson – Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society: This has to be the ideal companion to The New Optimists. The range of subjects, styles and approaches does justice to the ideals of the Royal Society – and it’s beautifully produced. It’s perhaps a tad heavy for bedtime reading, but the attraction of finishing every day with a new essay was too strong to resist. Get it on your bedside table.
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Why evolution isn’t “true”
How many people in the US, do you suppose, believe in evolution? According to a survey reported in The New Scientist in 2006, a high percentage don’t. Another survey carried out here, indicated that 50% of us Brits don’t either.
If only, as Ian Stewart reminded us in the 2009 Lunar Society Annual Lecture, it were zero percent who believed in evolution!
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Keith Richards
Dr Keith Richards edited and wrote the Introduction to The New Optimists: Scientists view tomorrow’s world and what it means to us.
A specialist in applied linguistics, Keith is in charge of graduate studies at the Centre of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. As well as a distinguished academic and teaching career, he has also designed, developed and delivered learning programmes for industrial clients.
In his Introduction, he explains how he organised the essay collection into four parts, each comprising chapters related to the same broad theme, and within each chapter, he gathered the contributions themselves:
- Part 1: The Microcosm: Tackling the big challenges
Chapter 1: Cancer
Chapter 2: Changing bodies - Part 2: The Macrocosm: Interacting with our world
Chapter 3: Living in the natural world
Chapter 4: Living in the virtual world - Part 3: Transformations
Chapter 5: Getting to the heart of things
Chapter 6: Changing behaviour - Part 4: The ways of science
Chapter 7: Working together
Chapter 8: Thinking differently
Chapter 9: From where I stand
Booking via eventbrite for the launch
I’ve just set up and tested the booking system for the celebration dinner to launch The New Optimists on 14th September, the opening day of the 2010 British Science Festival — go to http://newoptimists.eventbrite.com and reserve your place!
This launch is a big celebration dinner, co-hosted with
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The final piece of the jigsaw
The New Optimists, the full MS, is now completed! All that was needed was my own contribution, an ‘afterword’ to come at the end of the book. Completed today . . . I started at the beginning, telling the story of
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Afterword to The New Optimists
For some time, I’d thought about publishing. The revolution with print-on-demand and web-based technologies has changed the game. In the cold damp light of a winter day in early 2009, I speculated that much could now be done with insouciance, a laptop on the kitchen table and a lifetime’s fascination with how scientists work, how seemingly ordinary men and women as part of their daily routine engage with extraordinary matters and, to paraphrase the mathematician Ian Stewart, defend us from believing what we want to.
An initial idea to provide written demonstration of the value created by scientists has, through the efforts of many people, morphed into a fledgling not-for-profit multimedia publishing venture, Linus Publishing. The book you’re reading now, The New Optimists, is its first offering.
The scientists who feature here, over half of whom are professors, over two-thirds working in medical and life sciences, have written “this most exhilarating of books”, as Jenny Uglow describes it in her Foreword. I thank every one of these remarkable men and women.
In the Foreword, Jenny has done the scientists proud, creating such a lyrically pertinent context for their work.
Thanks are also due to Keith Richards, whose light-touch editing of the essays themselves, and his imaginative structure for the book as a whole adds to the impact of the essays both individually and collectively.
The book you’re now reading simply wouldn’t exist without an experienced publisher on board. Right at the outset, Etica’s Julian Roskams saw something catching in providing a means for these scientists to tell their tale. It’s his efforts that have translated all the ideas of all of us, scientist and non-scientist, into paper and print. His cheerfully calm professionalism has never wavered even when I have been unreasonably demanding.
There has been much other work behind the scenes. Fiona Alexander, Steve Bedser, Nick Booth, Chris Buckham, David Edmonds, Kevin Johnson, Alison Murray and Mike Smith have, in their free time, responded to my calls, my texts, my emails and from time to time have met, often over my kitchen table, to make things happen.
“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures and conversations?” As Jenny Uglow says in her Foreword, this collection of essays “is itself a kind of conversation”. Pictures in a book, however, present a costly option. But we have these intriguing, inspiring images on the bookcover from many-times Wellcome Image Award winner, local photomicrographer Spike Walker. He readily agreed to designer Jonathan Doyle using them, as did the Wellcome Trust. On the back cover, we have a derived image of dopamine, one of the birth of a daphnia; the spine has an image of human brain cells; on the front cover are the images of urea, the moment before a (failed) human IVF, a spider’s mandibles and liver blood vessels (double injected with two pigments to show the complexity of the blood supply). All of these are visually delicious examples of how science enables us literally to see the world quite differently.
As you’ve read here, many people have given of their time and energies. But there are some bills that can’t be avoided, some favours that go too far beyond the reasonable. Aston University and the University of Birmingham (College of Medical and Dental Sciences) have sponsored this early stage of the project, and I thank them very much indeed for their generous support.
As well as this book, we’re creating web and e-book versions and, funding permitting, multimedia spin-offs about aspects of the scientists’ work. Plus, there are plans afoot for our next publication about science, about its value and impact on us all, as well as its beauty and excitement.
Much can indeed be done with insouciance, a laptop on the kitchen table . . . and a wonderful coterie of over 100 people. I salute them all.
Kate Cooper