For anyone living in a city during a pandemic, the benefit of parks to your physical and mental health is obvious. There is space to properly social distance, space to meet up with friends, space to exercise or kick a ball around, benches to sit on, air to breathe, life to live. Then there is the life in the parks, the trees and shrubs and birds and insects, all the stuff that comes under the vague heading of greenspace or nature. So, to celebrate World Cities day and in the interest of public health, let us explore a very interesting area of research developing at the intersection of ecology and psychology: meaningful nature experiences.
It’s finally here. The day we’ve all been waiting for… It’s World Statistics Day! And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than writing about a beer-brewing statistician who changed the world through his ingenious statistical inventions and the sublime stout he helped to perfect. Let’s call him “Student” for now.
If you’re trying to compare two groups based on some variable and you use a t-test, then you have “Student” to thank. Maybe you want to compare two species of finches based on their beak sizes. Maybe you want to check if film critics preferred Karl Urban or Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd. Or maybe you’ve brewed two beers with slightly different amounts of hops, and you want to know which one tastes best. These questions (and countless more) can be answered with more confidence thanks to “Student”, our brewer-statistician extraordinaire, and his t-test, which for many (if not most) young scientists is the first test learnt to analyse data.
As well as creating a topic that students around the world cover in Stats 101 courses, “Student” also helped to perfect arguably the most perfect beer on the planet. Guinness is sold in over 150 countries around the world and through its classic adverts and futuristic foam faces, it really is a global phenomenon.*
A classic Guinness advert (not to scale).
During the early 1900s “Student” was in charge of Guinness’ experimental brewery in Dublin and founded their statistics department. He had to deal with small sample sizes in his experiments due to production costs and wasn’t confident with the statistical approaches at the time. So, instead of using a standard normal distribution to estimate errors, he invented the Student’s t-distribution, which accounts for sample size. This idea led to a “logical revolution” in how we understand data.
How come the vast majority of people who use t-tests don’t even know the creator’s name? Probably because Guinness didn’t let “Student” use his real name when publishing his findings! One story is that Guinness didn’t want their competitors knowing that they had their own statistics department, so Gosset published under a pseudonym, “Student”; now scientists around the world agonise over the p = 0.06 results of their Student’s t-test.
Student’s original publication
Well today, World Statistics Day, let’s celebrate the brewer-statistician extraordinaire: William Sealy Gosset. In a parallel universe we would compare two groups using the “Gosset t-test”. So let’s all raise a hypothetical pint of a Guinness to this brilliant “Irish”** brewer, who apparently had “more energy and focus than a St. Bernard in a snowstorm”. To Gosset!
The perfect pint
* This blog was not sponsored by Guinness.
** He was actually English but I think improving Guinness grants immediate and retroactive Irish citizenship.
There are >20,000 different species of bee worldwide. They are a diverse group, encompassing the tiny 2mm long Perdita minimaand the massive 38mm long Megachile pluto. They all* have one thing in common: their larvae feed on pollen from flowers. The protein in the pollen is necessary for larval growth and development, and thus for producing healthy adult bees. When visiting flowers to collect pollen and nectar to fuel flight, adult bees transfer that pollen from flower to flower, thus making them brilliant pollinators.
And bees are ever-increasing in popularity across many sectors including conservation, gardening, fashion, marketing, and public/corporate strategies. Their popularity means that there has been an increase into bee research, and lots of excellent conservation strategies (including our own All-Ireland Pollinator Plan), but it also means there has been a lot of mis-use of bees in corporate and even well-meaning conservation strategies (see Charlotte de Keyzer’s excellent “bee-washing” website). And as their popularity spreads, so does the amount of incorrect information about them, which makes an Melittologist (someone who studies bees), buzz with frustration…
So here’s a blog I’ve been meaning to write for some time** – six statements about bees that are often used, but aren’t true…
Esteemed and valued colleague, educator and mentor to so many, Professor John Rochford, retired in September 2019 after 34 years of service. His retirement was very fittingly marked on January 10th by a symposium which celebrated the influence of John’s teaching and mentorship and the far-reaching impact he has had on his research area of wildlife biology. The symposium was organized by Prof. Celia Holland and Fiona Moloney who put together a fantastic variety of contributions. The speakers were all John’s former students who have gone on to make their mark in academia, journalism, public education and as professional ecologists and wildlife rangers.
What started as a good excuse to take a break from thesis writing (while still being productive), ended up being two of the best days I’ve ever had in college – the 2020 Zoology/Botany Postgrad Symposium.
The audience settles in for the second day of presentations.
For two days we were treated to the most incredible talks on a wide range of topics, covering theoretical, lab-based, and field work. It was incredible to see the wide range of research being done in the department. It’s difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on, but these talks gave a great insight into some of the incredible work being done.
The New Year Plant Hunt is a yearly event held by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) that helps to record how plants are reacting to our changing climate. Over four days during the Christmas holidays, volunteers will simply head out for walks, of no more than 3 hours each, and record all species seen flowering. The aim of this citizen science project is to record all plants flowering in mid-winter, in order to help document the effects of climate change on plant phenology.
Common gorse (Ulex europaeus)
This year, a total of 1714 people took part in the event and over 14,000 plants were recorded blooming throughout Britain and Ireland. Botanists from TCD joined different local walks. Together with Cian White and fellow naturalists from UCD, we went for a nice walk… on a covered landfill site! Our goal was to study an area that wouldn’t necessarily be surveyed by a less committed group, and I think we did achieve this.
Island biologists often work in beautiful and interesting places. It seems only fitting that when they meet up to discuss their work, they do it somewhere like Réunion, a volcanic oceanic island in the Indian Ocean, administered as a French department and the site of the 2019 Island Biology conference. Armed with my Junior Cert level French, I made the journey to discuss my PhD project on the birds of Sulawesi and the work of the TCD Biogeography Working Group.
As well as launching our lab theme song, this World Bee Day, I was privileged to meet the President, Michael D. Higgins, at Áras an Uachtaráin. Along with Una Fitzpatrick, the Chair of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan from the National Biodiversity Data Centre, we visited the walled garden in the Áras and discussed bees, the importance of pollinators and the plight of biodiversity in general. The President is a staunch advocate for nature (see his impassioned speech from the National Biodiversity Conference here), as illustrated by his press release today…
This was my first time in Kobe, famous for its beef and
cheesecake. Much of the city was rebuilt in the wake of a devastating
earthquake that claimed the lives of more than six thousand people in 1995. The
city mascot is Kobear (コーベア), a pun almost as clever as the bear is cute. The
conference centre was a vertical maze of meeting rooms and halls, with signs in
Japanese and an army of concierges attempting to funnel us towards our venue of
choice.
I had met Dr. Maria Dornelas at the entrance hall on day one and introduced her to Yuka Suzuki. I’ve known Yuka for a couple of years at this point, but we had never worked on anything together until this conference. Yuka and I had been chosen to organise a symposium at the Ecological Society of Japan’s 2019 annual meeting (ESJ 66), an honour not often given to such early career researchers. The ESJ meetings do not have plenary speakers, meaning that the few invited speakers that headline organised symposia act as the big draw. So, the pressure was on for us to deliver a symposium that people would find interesting and inspiring.
Zoology TY week is a programme of events put on for 24 transition year (4th year) students per year, drawn from schools across Ireland. Gaining a place is a competitive process, with 90 or so applications in each year so far. The winners get to experience what it’s like to be a zoology undergraduate, participating in workshops, practicals, lectures and discussions, with a tree walk, a bird race and a mini-field trip thrown in. They get hands-on experience and also the opportunity to discuss the life of a zoologist with undergraduates, post-graduates and teaching staff. The sessions are designed to show the breadth of the subject, ranging from consideration of tiny biology like the genetic analysis of what makes an embryo grow correctly, through individual animals in their parasitology, marine and terrestrial biology, and behaviour, up to the entire system in ecology and evolutionary biology. They are taught by the same lecturers as teach our undergraduates, so the TY class get to know their future teachers too. The following blog consists of paragraphs written by the Zoology TY class of 2019, half way through their week.
Applications for next year’s TY week will open in November – look for an application form on the TCD Zoology website then!
