IT Girl – Fashion, fitness and fixing things

headscarves, the whole lot. However, as a lowly IT girl, the only resemblance I have to my heroines of the silent movies is a (slightly lopsided) bob and a penchant for gin cocktails.

You see fashion, in the world of the IT girl, is rather less fun. There are no cigarette holders or strings of pearls and certainly no stockings rolled down to the knee. Clothing must be “practical” (shudder) in case desks need to be clambered over to access misbehaving printers and the like. My shoes must be comfortable and my makeup must not startle the engineers. Oh, and I am not allowed to wear my dungarees – not even my smart pair.

This has limited my wardrobe somewhat. My current working day ensembles tend to resemble pajamas (leggings, vests, baggy jumpers) which does little to improve my post-lunch napping tendencies. As for comfortable shoes, if I could get any closer to actually wearing slippers I would.

I am loath to admit it, but the comfortable shoe plays a vital, if unattractive, role in my day. My job involves rather a lot of walking about, the site is large and things must be carried from one end of it to the next. Quite often this necessitates the use of the IT girls’ natural enemy: The Yellow Trolley.

The Yellow Trolley, unloaded, appears to weigh almost as much as me, it has runners that stick out right at ankle height and four wheels, each of different sizes and each with a sense of free will rare to an inanimate object. Adventures with TYT often result in bruising and swearing and multiple sudden encounters with door-frames.

TYT and I travel around 5km a day around the site, with me doing at least another three without the sadistic thing. This is a horrific amount of exercise, but thankfully it is well balanced out by the unremitting supply of free food. Not only do I get jam doughnuts and chocolate biscuits on tap in the office, but I am frequently offered sweets, fruit and snacks on my travels to repair hardware. Unfortunately the continuous stream of junk food, combined with long distance marches in the hot sun and ridiculous levels of air con really do play havoc on an IT girl’s complexion.

Blending in with the IT crowd is turning out not to be so hard really, despite my lack of interest in Wimbledon limiting the conversation somewhat. People in the department are friendly, helpful and surprisingly forgiving of my general ineptitude. They are also very interested in what they do and incredibly keen on explaining it to me. So far I have found out what the Vulcan Laser does and have been promised a tour of the Diamond synchrotron - this is all very exciting to my little nerdy heart.

Now I have been an IT girl for a whole seven hardworking days and actually do appear to be capable of fixing things. This is quite reassuring to my line manager, who I feel was rather worried upon my arrival when I couldn't get my desktop PC to turn on. Things that I have been able to repair in one way or another include a CD drive that could no longer write CDs (I didn’t realise people still did that either) and a printer that had an annoying squeak to it (the squeaking ceased once I jammed a lolly stick between the two offending pieces of plastic).

My repair approach may be a little ad hoc, but it is effective. The greatest fix that I have managed though, is securing five days paid leave over the summer, along with a four day bank holiday weekend. This mean that they will pay me to go to my graduation. Really, being an IT girl could be much, much worse.

Published on The Yorker

IT Girl – An introduction to the rest of my summer

don’t understand computers. I should make that clear now. Not only do I not understand them, but I distrust and slightly fear the bloody things too. I am pretty sure my laptop is running a vendetta against my coursework and any university desktop I approach seems to commit hara-kiri before I can complete the most simple of tasks.

With this is mind, I am spending my last ever long summer holiday working 9-5 for 11 weeks in an IT support service. But this is not just your bog-standard IT support service; this is one that runs in a technology department within a massive campus full of engineers and physicist. When they need IT help, you know something isvery wrong.

But Imogen, I hear you ask, you are a biochemist! What would possess you to take such a job? Well, like most things I do in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time. All my previous summer jobs (almost all summer, every summer, since I was in sixth form) have been in a biochemistry lab; it is time I saw some more of the world of science before I commit the next three years of my life to just one field. The theory is quite simple, I really must learn about computers to get on and this is the perfect opportunity to get hands on experience working with the wretched things. After all, one must know one’s enemy and all that.

And so, with this in mind, I was up and out of bed at the crack of 7:30am on Monday morning and was soon being driven out of the city by my (remarkably chipper for that time of morning) mother. No, she is not my personal taxi service, she just happens to work on the site too.

On arrival at the site, I was swiftly whisked through reception, given a yellow lanyard to make clear my status as “visitor” and “not to be trusted”, dragged through a maze of buildings and into a room that smelt of stale caffeine and nervous engineering students.

a room that smelt of stale caffeine and nervous engineering students

The source of the former turned out to be a free(!) coffee machine, which I quickly got myself acquainted with whilst I surveyed the crowd that was generating the latter.

After the standard round of introductions, it was clear that we were all here for summer placements or year-out courses. Networking opportunities were mostly overlooked in favour of trying to deconstruct the coffee machine to get a stronger espresso and comparing dissertation projects. I couldn’t be sure what went over worse, my placement in IT support or the “bio” in my degree title.

However, a riveting two and a half hour health and safety lecture soon took my mind off that. All clued up to what to go in case of asbestos (don’t touch it) and klaxons sounding (enter the nearest “substantial” building - scary) I headed up to my new office. It only took three wrong rooms until I found my new boss and was set up at my massive desk, with two windows and four monitors. Logging in barely took ten minutes and soon I was kitted out with my official ID card and administrative access to an alarming amount of computing power.

Thankfully I didn't have to deal with anything involving a server yet and instead I spent the next few hours pushing a trolley full of computer parts around seemingly unending corridors, fixing mechanical faults in printers and playing with the kit in the metrology lab – they have a photopolymer 3D printer and all sorts of exciting devices.

By the end of the working day I had walked 8km around the site, eaten my lunch alone as I couldn’t find the main canteen and driven the trolley into a small brick wall that I swear wasn’t there half a second before. I am still yet to interact with anyone within two decades of my age here; all the summer students appear to be kept individually trapped in small rooms where the damage that they can do is limited.

I was shattered and, for the first time in a while, extremely grateful to be spending the whole summer living at home. Nothing quite like a massive plate of homemade spaghetti Bolognese to perk up the end of the day.

@ImogenWrote

@YorkerComment

Publish online at The Yorker 03/07/2013

Science Highlights of the Week - Sixth Edition

Stubble is Sexy.

A study in Australia has investigated how much of a man's socio-sexual standing, as perceived by woman and other men, is based around their facial hair.

Photographs of ten men were taken when they were clean shaven, after five days of stubble growth, ten days and then after six weeks of growth (full beard). These images were shown to a mixed group of volunteers who rated each photo for the qualities of sexual attractiveness, general health, masculinity and parenting abilities.

The study found that both men and woman ranked the fully bearded images as highest for masculinity, parenting abilities and health. The perception of three qualities were seen to increase linearly with facial hair growth.

However, whilst the men reckoned the fully bearded guys were also the most attractive, women ranked men with thick stubble (10 days of growth) as most sexually appealing. This perception could be linked to previous studies which have found that women tend to judge men with much thicker facial hair as more aggressive.

Gonorrhea is Getting Serious.

Antibiotic resistance is a rapidly increasing (and well documented) problem in many diseases and with over 17, 000 gonorrhea infections identified and treated in the UK last year it is no surprise that the drugs are beginning to fail.

The antibiotic ceftriaxone is the only drug used to successfully treat the common STI but cases of gonorrhea recorded in Canada, America and parts of Europe that have not responded to antibiotic treatment are on the rise. Currently, about 6% of gonorrhea infections diagnosed in Canada are not treatable with available antibiotics.

Untreated gonorrhea can lead to serious complications in both men and women as the bacteria can spread through the body, causing pelvic inflammatory disease and eventually affecting joints and heart valves. In women, long term infections can lead to infertility.

Whilst cases of resistant infections are still low, but it has been predicted that by 2015 these cases will be more common than the treatable strains. It is not likely that a new antibiotic will be developed by this time.

The Evolution of the Penis

Four researchers at the University of Georgia have published a study of how the evolution of the human penis has been affected by mate selection by females. In comparison to other closely related primates, the human penis is disproportionately large. From an evolutionary stand point, this is an interesting phenomenon as it seems selection for reproduction was precopulatory rather than post-, i. e. reproductive selection was not just dependent on sperm survival but on what the paper has described as "cryptic female choice".

There are many factors that determine mate choice and this study focused purely on the visual. The study involved the use of artificially generated images of men of varying heights, penis size and hips:shoulders ratios - in total 343 different figures were produced. These were shown to heterosexual women who rated their attractiveness as sexual partners (and before you start wondering, all the penises depicted in the study were flaccid).

Taller males with wider shoulders were consistently selected as most attractive, independent of penis size. However once individual factors were taken into account, for example, at one given hip:shoulder ratio, penis size had a small but significant increase in perceived attractiveness. Interestingly, after controlling for hip:shoulder ratio, penis size elevated relative attractiveness far more strongly for taller men than for shorter ones.

The relationship between penis size and attractiveness was not linear; a considerably larger-than-average penis (more than 2 standard deviations from the average of 8.9cm) made for a less attractive figure.

Most research into female attraction has shown that height and wide shoulders are the most important factors in mate selection but the findings in this paper does suggest that selection on penis size was potentially as strong as selection on stature back before humans began to habitually wear clothing.

Science Highlights of the Week - The Fifth Edition

Scientists Try To Make Mice Puke

Rodents are unable to vomit, a response which is seen in almost all other mammalian species. Researchers at the University of Pittsburghnoted this, and looked it to the phenomenon.

A range of rodents (from mice and rats to mountain beavers) were given chemicals that would induce vomiting in other mammals. However no retching or vomiting was seen.

It is thought that a mixture of anatomical constraints (the rodent aesophagus is very long and not fully muscled) and an absent neurological component is behind this odd trait.

An Alternative Approach Against MRSA

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest challenges modern medicine is going to have to face. New antibiotic drugs are expensive to develop and few have been produced in recent years.

Scientists at the Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology have shown that the use of bacteriophages (think viruses that attack bacteria) as a means of infection control.

So far, they have seen success in curing mice infected with either MRSA or Anthrax using this approach without development of antibacterial resistance being seen. Whilst human clinical trials are a long way off at this time, this is a very promising step towards the next generation of antimicrobial drugs.

Paranoid? So is Everyone Else.

In a paper published in Current Biology, researchers observed that people would assume that the gaze of others was directed at them, especially in low lighting or when the other was wearing sunglasses.

This is possibly because we have evolved, as a species, to utilise gaze to determine if we are being faced by friend or foe. The direction of another's gaze is used to provide insight into their focus of interest, and simple ego assumes that we are the most interesting thing around.

What's wrong, honey?

Using fMRI scans, researchers have seen that men are, in fact, less able to read a woman emotional states that they are another man's. It seems that this may be due to a difference in brain activity between the genders.

Participants in the study were shown different faces and asked to judge the mood that that person was feeling as their brains was watched for activity. The function of the amygdala is thought to be key in empathy, but when men looked at women's faces, there was not as much neural activity seen in that location. Yet when they looked at men's images, activity was seen and more correct answers were given.

Careful, Your Gender Gap is Showing

When Elise Andrew, the owner of the Facebook page "I fucking love science" posted a link to her personal twitter account on the page, a lot of people got over excited. Whilst some of them, like me, were keen to expand their exposure to rather marvelous puns about transport proteins (oh come on, it is funny), an alarming number of Facebook commentators took it upon themselves to be shocked about her gender.

STEM gender gap - An unnecessary barrier ©Doctree; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Statements ranged from the confused: "Dude ur a chick? Wtf???!?", the confusing:"MUST BE A LESBIAN! just kidding", to the pretty insulting:"Please sell this page to a male.". And not all were, it seems, made in jest.

So why is there this alarm that an incredibly popular page focused on the wonderful world of science could be run by a woman?

Gender bias across all STEM subjects is a still a massive problem. It is a problem seen all the way from how lab partners treat each other in high school chemistry lessons to who gets what job and which pay packet well into adulthood.

The general idea that women neither like nor do well in math and science has been widely accepted by many people and for many years. Girls are meant to prefer the "arty" subjects, they like fiction and writing comprehension, let boys play with the chemicals and the machines. And yet, when interviewed and assessed in primary school, girls get higher grades and are more likely to express an interest in maths or science than boys.

The problems seem to begin in high school as girls are drip fed the idea that they are somehow under-qualified to perform scientific tasks. A study performed by Psychology Today, 72% of 11 year old girls felt that they were confident in their STEM skills, but only 55% of 15 year olds described themselves as confident. However when comparing the results of standardized test scores no loss in actual ability was seen.

This loss of self-confidence leads many to forsake the science subjects that they may have performed very well in at GSCE and choose A levels in areas where they haven't been convinced that they are innately unable to perform in.

This trend follows into higher education and post-graduate education choices. Growing up I was lucky, I come from a family of scientists across all fields and went to an all female high school, gender discrimination in the sciences wasn't something that I experienced. So it wasn't until the first year of my biochemistry undergraduate that someone suggested that "Surely doing just biology would be more girly?" and another informed me that "You don't look like enough of a nerd to do chemistry".

Whilst the male to female undergrad split in the biological sciences in the UK now lies at around 50:50, look sideways into the chemistry, physics and engineering fields and you'll find only one woman for every eight men.

The 2011 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (in the USA) showed the average weekly earnings of a woman in biological sciences ($853) versus that of a man in the same field ($1,117). This all adds up to a woman in the same area of work earning a little over £9000 less a year compared to her male counterparts.

You may have noticed that this study is rather general, perhaps the women are working part time (perhaps for childcare reasons) or in less well-subsidized areas and thus their average income is brought down?

Researchers at Yale in 2012 thought this too. They produced a set of CVs, each one with identical qualifications but half were identified as being from men, and half from women. They gave these CVs to 127 science faculty members (of mixed genders) at the university and asked them to rank the applicant on a scale of 1 to 7 and also suggest a mean starting salary that they would give each candidate.

Regardless of the gender of the professor, or even their field of study, the female "applicant" was consistently offered a lower starting salary and ranked lower on all accounts of competence. Over all, a woman going into this (albeit fictional) job would expect to earn over $3000 less per year than her male counterparts.

There is little to suggest that things are any different this side of the pond. If I wish to persue a career in academic science, a decade from now I can expect to be earning noticeably less than any guy in my graduation class who follows the same path. And God forbid I take time off to have children - or even suggest to a prospective employer that one day in the future I may wish to start a family.

But what can be done to address this ongoing inequality? Groups such as theWISE Campaign aim to encourage woman and girls to enter the STEM fields, but progress has been slow and any "trickle up" effect seen from encouraging girls to take science A levels has yet to make an impact. The Athena SWANaward, given in institutions to recognise their commitment to advancing women's careers in STEM academia, is helping to encourage universities to be aware of the bias that can and will affect their female STEM graduates. The Department of Chemistry here in York is the first Chemistry Department in the UK to hold an Athena SWAN gold award.

Will these groups (or any of the multitudes like them) have a positive impact on women's role in science and academic research? I do hope so. However the big change will need to come from a long overdue change in the way that "science" is seen as a boys-only club; young girls should not find themselves forced out of doing what they want to do by the opinions of others.

Published YorkerOnline 27th March

@Yorker Comment

@ImogenWrote

Science Highlights of the Week - Part Four

The Genetic Sequence of Wheat

The draft genome of bread wheat (Triticum urartu) has been completed. By using this data published in Nature, it is hoped that new strains of wheat that are tougher and giver greater yields will be produced through genetic modifications.

This has brought the debate over the use of GM crops to the surface again, as there are still many who worry that the use of GM plants will lead to the breeding of superbugs or cause adverse reactions in those that consume them. However, as the human population rapidly increases, global food shortages are a genuine threat and any process that can speed up the already intensive selective breeding of foodstuff will likely be welcomed by future generations.

Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

As anyone who has done a 16 hour library stint knows, learning gives you a headache. However all that education may also be causing physical damage, What has now been seen in mice is that exposure to a new environment causes double-strand breaks in DNA in neurons (a single molecule of DNA is broken into two). This is then associated with the movement of histones (DNA packaging proteins) and the rearrangement of other proteins around the neuron.

In a healthy brain, this damaged is quickly repaired and the neuron restored, but in transgenic mice made to mimic a human brain suffering from Alzheimer's this damage is seen to be more severe and longer lasting as the standard repair mechanisms have been disrupted.

This is no excuse to skip on the workload though, as all studies so far have seen that increased brain activity through life, especially in later years, can lessen the risk of neural decline in old age.

Scientists Spend Time Watching Cats

Most cat owners will chat with their pets, I for one have just had a very interesting conversation about the nature of gender bias in the scientific community with my feline companion.

In this vein, two researchers from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo and the Department of Psychology, Keio University have looked into whether or not our furry friends actually recognise the voice of their beloved owners.

In short, the research showed that, unsurprisingly, they do recognise their owners voices but they mostly choose to ignore any calls whatsoever.

Science Highlights of the Week - Part The Third

Higgs Boson Confirmed?

In a press release from CERN on the 14th March, it has been announced that two and a half times more data has been collected from the Large Hadron Collider and analysed.

This new data points towards the particle in question being confirmed as the elusive Higgs boson. However more research is needed to truly be sure what kind of boson it is.

Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria On The Rise

In the last century, we have become ever more dependent on the use of antibiotic drugs. This is not particularly news to anyone who has been following various bacterial epidemic scares across the last few year and ideas to slow the development of resistance have been around almost as long as antibiotics themselves.

A recent report in the UK lead by Sally Davies has highlighted 17 key policies that should be followed to prevent the spread of such resistant pathogens and slow down the evolution of new, even more dangerous ones.

Sex Could Be Good For The Brain

In a study involving rats, researchers in Maryland have seen that sexual experience has a positive effect in increasing neurogenesis(growth of new brain cells) in adult rats.

This is due to the effect of the hormones released during what the paper euphemistically calls a "rewarding experience" on neuron growth and the function of the hippocampus - an area important in memory.

Unfortunately, improved mental function was only seen for some time after sexual experience, if behavioral testing was left too late, little or no improvement in cognitive task was actually seen. On the other hand, frequent sex and often could very well have a strong positive effect on your brain power, at least for a short while.

Congratulations Commander Hadfield

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has taken over the helm of the International Space Station (only the second leader not to be American or Russian).

Hadfield (here on Reddit...) has been part of a skeleton crew manning the station since 21st December, with cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and astronaut Thomas Marshburn. They will return to Earth on 13th May, a total of 144 days in orbit.