This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. Fun Friday, my name is Jafsan Du and the weekend is nearly here, a tiny spot of optimism in the sea of worker day, drudgery, and what better way to extinguish even those small hopes than to talk to man amity? Feeling pumped? 10, it's time to Matt's plane.
You're punking everyone this week, haven't I? In a sense, I'm not in the sense of making a joke at their expense, in fact we're going to do quite the opposite. This is another one of my attempts to empower people and make them feel like they're the ones in control. So when we talked about ratings last week, we were looking at the way that those ratings can be used as a subtle method to change our behaviour.
This week we're looking at a movement that is enabling people to buck those trends and make their own claims on science and knowledge. How is that punking us? Because we can all be punks because being a punk is a good thing. I have a little ornament, explaining punk that sits on my desk.
I'm not kidding. And it reminds me every day. Most people think about punk in relation to music, but it's come to mean a subculture that believes in DIY. Do it yourself, doing it for yourself.
So it's about not waiting for someone else to come up with solutions or to do things for you. And I wanted to talk about punk science today because it's a new DIY movement and it's rethinking the way that we develop scientific tools and also the way that the technologies are being used. So I don't know whether this is an official term. I got it from an article in the Economist of All Places, but it fits.
So as far as I'm concerned, from now on, it's the punk science movement. No, but it's cool and it's fun. And in the same way that the internet has allowed us to work remotely or access information away from libraries or filing cabinets, the old way that we access information, those same technologies are allowing outsiders to become players in the scientific community. And they're enabling new forms and sources of research to enrich our knowledge base.
Yeah, but isn't this just like another way of creating more fake news? If a report comes out in a science journal, then some guy with a smartphone in a garage can claim his research refutes the results of experts. Well, the chances are that there are going to be those fringe players and they're always not jobs who take advantage of whatever kind of technology to further their own agenda. But that's what peer reviewing is for it, allows us to identify the crackpots while at the same time allowing a channel to introduce novel concepts and challenging ideas, or concepts that have been accepted or challenging rather the ideas and concepts that have been accepted as mainstream.
So in a sense, what it's doing is similar to the internet and the way that it has made information cheap and accurate and most importantly accessible. So, for example, we talked on previous shows about smartphones and apps transforming farming in developing countries. I know not the most interesting topic, but in developed countries farmers have access to all kinds of information about weather and climate and soil and food price movements, trends in crop rotation, seed varieties, all kinds of things that make a big difference to the money they make. Modern farming in the West is very, very high tech.
Yet in a lot of countries, particularly developing countries, the techniques and the availability of information and the yields of the crops have changed very little from generation to generation. So something as simple as an accurate weather forecast can have huge implications on how and when farmers choose to plant seeds or harvest their crops. And how does that apply to science in terms of this DIY movement? Well, let me ask you a question.
What do you think about when you hear the word scientists? You know, what kind of mental picture do you come up with of the place that scientists work? The first one pops into my mind is back to the future, duck from back to the future. One of those with a crazy hair with a white lacquer, scientist.
Okay, and what kind of place would you work in? Maybe not duck brown, but what kind of place would a scientist work? Labs, you know, labs. That's where they belong, right?
Labs. No, not labs. No, no, no, I mean, that's true. And that's the kind of picture that we see in movies and TV.
Yes, that's why I give you some back to future. Like you said, people in white coats wondering around pristine labs that are, you know, airtight and gently unlike duck browns, lab, which is a very captive. But you know, there's banks of equipment with flashing buttons and there's cameras and there's microphones and everything's being recorded. And yes, those kind of places do exist.
But I think most of the people who work in the sciences probably work in slightly less fancy and comfortable surroundings. But even those less comfortable and less fancy surroundings still require a lot of money, which means that if you want to be an independent scientist, you're going to have to be somebody who's really rich or in the most likely case, you're going to have to go and work for a company or a nonprofit organization or some kind of research institute or, you know, Institute of Learning. It will be some third party body. It's going to have its own agenda.
And of course, most research these days has some kind of profit motive built in. And that's not a bad thing. When you're spending what could turn out to be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, you need to get some useful results. Give us some examples here.
OK, this is not really cutting edge stuff, but I would really love to know whether a Lego man's head would stay on its body if you fired it around the large hadron super collider. That's right. Exactly. And I'm sure plenty of listeners will agree with that.
Yeah. Why don't we know that? Why can't I carry out that experiment? Because switching on the super collider costs thousands of euros and dims every light bulb in Switzerland.
So there has to be a really valid and important reason to justify using the machine. So if I go back to the earlier point, if you work in the sciences, the chances are you either join an existing research project or your own research project will have been weighted and vetted by another body that's giving you the funding. So where would punk science fit in then? Punk science is and got to hate using this.
Punk science is a disruptor. It allows people who are outside these structures to contribute to the field. So that could mean that they're creating their own equipment or techniques to carry out research in the field. It could also mean that they're using inexpensive tools and carrying out the kind of research that doesn't closely follow or mirror specific disciplines within the scientific world.
That does mean, of course, that there is a small chance that someone will open up a black hole in their living room or something like the case we reported on a few years ago where a man in the US, I think it was, was found to be conducting experiments with radioactive material, literally in a saucepan on the stove in his kitchen. Luckily, the crazies are usually in the minority. But most of important of all, I think this closes the cost gap or at least it helps to close that cost gap. So it enables research that may have a smaller scope.
It might only benefit a small community and it allows individuals to engage in fieldwork without needing the backing of large national or supranational organisations. I think as a concept, it may be a little bit difficult for the listeners to sort of get their head around. It's not the idea that people who aren't scientists are engaging in scientific research. It's a little bit out there.
I would say just fakes like these are not real scientists. Can you give us an example of that explain why this is actually a good idea? Well, I would have thought by now that BFM and our listeners have got to the point where I don't have to explain myself anymore. But then I guess if I didn't have to do that, each of these shows would be 30 seconds long.
So, you know, I'll go with it. To start with, I'll give you an example that was in the economist article I was talking about early. Now, if you want to read the piece, you can find it on the economist's website. The piece is called Do It Yourself Science is taking off.
Now, back in 2014, a geographer at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada wanted to know more about the amount of plastic in the waters around the around the coast of Newfoundland. Marine plastic, of course, is one of the biggest environmental stories that's broken so far this year. And that's partly as a result of the work of researchers like Professor LeBouaran. However, at the time that she wanted to start her research, Canada had a government that was not particularly sympathetic towards environmental science.
And as a result, there wasn't a lot of money around. So she had to come up with a way of measuring the amount of plastic in seawater that was cheap and didn't require a lot of labor. And her solution was as simple as it was in genius and it used technology that was readily available. You're building up the tension, aren't you?
If I am the answer is going to be a bit of a letdown. Professor LeBouaran used a simple pair of baby tights stretched over a plastic bottle that had been cutting half. Yeah, exactly. You can see it.
So you tow it behind the boat, it sieves the water and collects the pieces of plastic, another bits of small debris. The water just goes back down through the the feet of the tights and leaves, the plastic behind. It was relatively easy to get the fish on along the coast to sign on because she called this baby legs, by the way. It cost the fish and nothing to tow a pair of tights behind the boat.
It was helping to generate data that could be used to determine the health and the toxicity levels of the fish stocks that gave them their livelihood. So it was quite easy to get them to sign on. And of course, it's not just about the cost and ease of use. We used to looking at scientific research as something that's quite remote from us, not something that we can easily get involved with.
So this is kind of like the social media of scientific research. As an ordinary person, in this case of fishermen, you can play a valuable role in gathering the data. So you become part of the solution. And psychologically, that investment can be very important.
You know, it's very easy to watch or listen to the news and hear about some survey or report and feel that it has very little to do with you. This kind of project invests the local community in the research itself. And that can help to make the outcome and the impact much more power. God knows what you're building in your own lab at home.
So punt science is what we're talking about with Matt Amadeh from College of Bob. We'll be right back. You'll be right back. Bringing fresh meaning, BFM 89.9.
And we're back. My name is Jasandu. It's fun Friday before the break. Matt was showing off his baby legs.
Yes. In case you just tuned in, you missed the first half of the show and no, it isn't one of his many deformities. It is just an example of punt science that is changing the face of scientific research. So Matt, what else have you seen on your cyberpunk radar?
Well, I think the thing that most impresses me about a lot of this punt science stuff is how much fun a lot of it is. Look at the baby legs example. How cool is it to look over the back of your boat and see a pair of child's legs stragging in the surf behind you? Now, the thing, the fact that I think it's cool to have a pair of disembodied toddler legs dragging along behind you probably tells you more about me than it does about the science.
So we'll move on to another example. But as I said earlier, some other developments in the punk science environment are about making the technology and equipment cheap and accessible. There's often a big disparity between the kind of equipment that's available to hospitals, labs or police forces in developed countries compared to the kind of equipment that those same organizations and institutions have in developing countries. In November, the science daily website reported on a story from the biomedical optics express.
Now, I don't know if everybody caught that story. I'm assuming that that general doesn't have a daily mail or Fox News type reach. So yeah, so if you miss the story, it's fine. A team at the University of Houston has put together a plan that would allow anyone with a basic smartphone and access to a 3D printer to build a microscope capable of fluorescence microscopy.
I know that doesn't sound terribly exciting, but it is potentially transformational. It makes a very expensive and versatile piece of machinery easy to manufacture to maintain and repair. Essentially, the smartphone does all the processing and with 3D printer, you're making the actual lens. That means if there's any damage to the lens, it's something that you can easily replace.
But what can you do with the microscope for? What's the usage for this microscope? I'm glad you asked me that question. If your timing is as ever impeccable, it's especially useful for doctors in remote locations because it enables a wide range of diagnostic analysis as well as looking at things like waterborne pathogens.
So it's a much more sophisticated tool than a traditional microscope because you can inject dyes that fluoresce under the microscope. So you can actually start to see these things. And it brings cutting edge diagnostic medicine to places that may not have sophisticated labs or bloodscreens or tools close by. Can one person really have all that much effect?
If you go back in time to the science of the Victorian era, that was very much about individuals, usually men of independent means, in other words, rich people pursuing their passions while everyone else did the work. Take a look at the history of science in the 19th century and you'll be amazed at what inventors and scientists of dubious training and morality actually accomplished. But even today, yes, one person really can make a difference. Another example from the economist piece.
There's a NGO in Tokyo called a safe car, a safe cost and it maps radiation levels. So the organization was founded after the Fukushima power plant disaster in 2011 by a Dutch guy called Peter Franken. Now he's an expat based in Tokyo and he bought a cheap giger counter at an electronics store and he started driving around in his car and mapping the radiation levels as he went from place to place. And he found the levels were often much higher than the ones that were being reported in the media and that also they varied hugely from street to street.
So you could literally go a few hundred metres down the road and there was a huge spike in the levels or there'd be a massive drop. And that was partly because the government's readings were quite broad and they were aggregated. They didn't have the machinery to make those same kind of granular results. And as a result, the public didn't trust the information that the government was coming out with.
So with help from friends and volunteers, Franken cobbled together a machine that took the readings as well as GPS data and uploaded everything to a website which helped to build a much more accurate picture of the spread and concentration of radiation. Today's savecast is a mainstream NGO which sells cheap radiation tracking kits for about US 500 US dollars and they're invited to speak at international atomic agency conferences and their methodology is now being adopted by the scientific community. So yes, that one person really can make a difference. Is there an open source element to all this?
Very much so. While some research like the new found them plastic gathering survey using baby legs is about gathering data. A lot of research is obviously all about the intellectual property, the IP rights, whether it's a commercial company or a university. The research is often about patents which are of course a valuable commodity.
A lot of the science stories we report on geeks involved startup companies that have morphed out of the research by the same people who founded the companies and did the work at universities. So you can see that there's a path from the this kind of academic world into the commercial world. Punt science isn't seen as a way for non-scientists to get onto the patents letter. Of course, there are going to be a few people who do exactly that.
But mainly it's about the geeks and garages subculture that has always existed. You know, when I was a kid, we didn't take our TV to a repair shop. We handed it over to a neighbor who was a retired guy and would like to take things apart in his shed. So he would fix our TVs and our radios and we all know those people and it must be really frustrating for them to live in a world of printed and molded circuit boards that they can't really alter and software that can't be tampered with.
So of course, they have to come up with their own things. Does the scene have any rock stars? Well, it's probably still a bit too underground for that. But it does have some personalities for sure.
There's a young Indian guy called Ayush Sunayla and he gets millions of views for the videos on his YouTube channel, SadiqRaf, that's SDIKROF. And I kind of like his approach. Apparently he wasn't good at school. He doesn't have much in the way of formal qualifications and he tackles things from the perspective of ordinary Indian families with not much money to spare.
So if you go to his YouTube channel, you'll see videos that let you make a Spiderman web spinner, for example, so you can build your kids and they can like, that's clever. It is clever or make your own roller skates or with materials that are easily available. He shows you how to make a soldering iron out of a normal disposable butane lighter. You know, it's about giving ordinary people access to technology, even if they have to do it themselves.
And it's especially necessary in places where they can't afford to buy that stuff from a traditional manufacturer. So one of his videos shows you how to make an air cooler out of a water butane and old fan. It's really ugly, but for people who can't afford air conditioning, yeah, exactly. It works and it's something that you can put together yourself in in an afternoon.
And more importantly, his machines can usually be powered with solar electricity or they don't require independent power because he knows many of the people watching the channel don't have constant or reliable access to electricity. If you're thinking of letting your kids check out his YouTube channel, take a look at it first because he does have something of an obsession with building his own weapons and blowing things up. You know, he's only like 19 or 20. He's still a kid himself.
Science, right? So yeah, there's some really interesting stuff there, but do exercise a little bit of caution. Are there any larger organizations who are bringing the makers and the scientists together? Yeah, very much so.
As we mentioned, there is a big open source element to all of this. The Economist piece mentions an environmental organization called Public Lab, which is based in the States. They act as a resource for a lot of this DIY gear. So for example, the massive oil spill that was released after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig disaster in 2010, mapping the spill was an enormous task.
So you might be surprised to learn that quite a lot of it was mapped by volunteers using old digital cameras tied to kites and balloons. And the blueprints for that kind of thing were on sites like, as I said, Public Lab. If you go to publiclab.org, you'll find instructions from making all kinds of equipment from gas spectrometers to infrared cameras, plus information on all the things that those gadgets can be used for. Do you think this is a useful model for hearing Malaysia?
For sure. If there are any organizations that are already doing this kind of work in Malaysia, please drop us a line on the BFM Twitter, which is at BFM radio, or you can come and contact us on the Maps Blain Facebook page because we'd love to hear from you and find out what you're doing. There is a similar community organization in Indonesia called Life Patch, which is based in Yogi Kata, which is bringing together art, science and technology and making them accessible to ordinary people. They have both a do it yourself and a do it with others, ethos, and they've worked on projects that range from cataloging the street art of Yogi Kata to monitoring the water quality of the city's rivers.
There is one organization, the BGBG initiative, guys, but they also kind of do all this repurposing stuff and a little bit of science and a bit into it as well. But I think in terms of actual product, it's still very limited. It would be nice to see if there are people who are especially bringing the science part of this to life. So what is your final message to all the punks out there, man?
That science doesn't have to be difficult and inaccessible. If you're not a scientist, but you want to get involved in projects, contact the organizations that we've mentioned today or do a Google search and find some others, even better, look at what people are doing elsewhere and see if you can adapt that model and use it to follow your own passion, you know, start your own organization. We live in a very complex world. You can't necessarily wait for governments or other bodies to fix the things that are important to you.
And of course, you can use Facebook and Twitter and all those fantastic free resources to build your own community and contact other people who are already doing this kind of stuff and who can help you out because as we've said, one person can make a difference and I'm not talking about me. I'm not talking about Jeff, you know, I'm talking about you, the guys listening to the show. Park signs from Matt Amadeh from College, but also check out the Matt Splein Facebook page for more information on the shows. Also, if you have a startup or an SME and if you think that Matt can help you, head over to his website.
It's www.culturepop.com. It's culture with a K where you'll find information about culture pops consulting and also mentoring programs will be right back with Geeks box after this. Okay, nine point nine. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the business station.