YouSaid · the spoken record

Jessica Wade

lines on the record: 73
first: 2023-04-05
most recent: 2023-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Will I do next? Well, I really, really want to make it in academia, not just because I love the science, but also because I really like this idea that you can try and do these little incremental changes to make it better for the next generation of scientists. Whether that's making scientific funding more equitable, whether that's really shifting how we teach to make sure that we're teaching in a way that's preparing for this group of researchers to go out and change the world, not just teaching because it's what someone's curriculum was 10 years ago, but saying this is really exciting and this is what we want you to learn about now and you're in the university, you've connected, you've checked in, you want to be here, let's do it too. So the transformative education, the research, and also this progressive idea of making it more fair and equal, I want to stick around in academia to make that happen.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So as last week at this high magnetic field lab in France, getting this opportunity to do solid-state NMR, so to do nuclear magnetic resonance, but of thin films and materials. And it's completely fascinating, another one of these weird and wonderful magical scientific techniques. But just writing the biography of the person I was going to work with meant that I was really prepped for going. And if I'm about to see someone speak, writing their biography before means I get this. So that's definitely my best work habit, you know.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unusual successful work habits. I suppose it has to be the Wikipedia editing, right? Like I go into the lab or teach or whatever research proposal I'm writing every day and then I go home and after dinner I edit Wikipedia and part of it is this advocacy and this I really want these people to be celebrated and to be honored. But I also get this huge chance to learn new things every single night that are out of the kind of little bubble that I'm in of learning about chirality and how that influences technology. I learn about a cool new spectroscopy or a cool new university I've never heard of or what people are doing for this particular type of technique and then that opens my ideas and perspectives for something else. And actually, you know, I, as a scientist and as a material scientist, am very interested in new materials and new ways to study them. And so I'm always going around the world trying to do experiments with cool and interesting people. And one of the best ways to prepare for going to do that experiment is to write the Wikipedia page of who you're going to be with.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and that is a bit later than when all of this stuff was happening. And she also had a really hard time to get to being where she was. So you saw this idea.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Known, so I've explained it, you have to be quite creative to do that, but you get it so much reinforced when you're in Italy, and particularly in Florence, that before people could do this a lot and they didn't talk about it all the time, they just did it. Similarly, though, they also didn't recognize the contributions of women and there's almost no Artemisa Gentileschi is one of the only women Renaissance artists or women artists that the world has. And that's a bit later.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsessed with materials, obsessed with innovative new techniques for painting, for architecture, for building buildings that you can't feasibly imagine working without a computer or without a huge infrastructure to be able to make it happen. The metallurgy of the doors, the woodwork, the kind of beautiful glass nanoparticles being used long before we'd be able to study and call them nanoparticles, you really learn that this idea that everything has to be in silos, that scientists are distinct from artists or craftspeople was completely gone then, you know, in Renaissance in Italy, they just didn't have that. You had to do everything. And then you go into high schools now, and it's like you have to choose whether you're going to do the sciences or the arts. You have to choose whether you're going to study physics or whether you're going to study art. I obviously always knew creativity was very important for being a good scientist because if I'm going to design an experiment no one's ever done or explain something in a way.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allense an awful lot of, well, I tried to learn a lot of Italian. I was very lucky to have a landlady who was a professor of history of art at a university in Florence and only spoke Italian. And I spoke no Italian and was very genius. But also, you know, you get this extraordinary perspective, which you do whenever you're in Italy, about how extraordinarily interdisciplinary and kind of multi-talented these Renaissance masters were.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm definitely not the most famous. You are the most famous person in your field there, I will predict. There are very awesome people there. I don't know. I think probably people think of you. It comes back to that earlier point about it being negative. People think of you and judge you just for that. And so you have to constantly be doing, like, I love the science I do. So you're constantly doing this awesome science as well. And then, oh, actually, they are a serious scientist. You've always got to kind of prove them wrong. So you definitely have that. Whether they dislike me because of it. I'll find out soon enough. I'm currently on one of those awful, you know, UK funding works. I'm on a fellowship, which is like a year and a half more funding. And so let's see, right? If everyone's going to push me out for writing this, then more power to another institution that gets me.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is interesting because I've had so many emails afterwards from academics who are just like, I'm thinking of writing a kid's book too. Like, can you give me some advice about this? So obviously a lot of people are thinking about it.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some people, yeah, right, my peer review was the editors, but I think, you know, some institutions are a lot better at that than others. Some institutions in the UK, a lot of institutions in the US, will recognize that public service aspect of what you do in promotion and in recruitment. And they'll see it's really positive. I can think of a few absolutely phenomenal professors who have really incredible research programs and some very public-facing aspect of their work or some people who work on really huge innovative parts of reforming education. We have less of that in the UK to what you have in America. You could shift it a little bit. We're trying to at the moment. One of our big funding councils has made fellowships where 20% of your time can be on something like policy or like looking at equity diversity and inclusion. So it's starting to happen. But I still love all the other parts of my job. I love being in the lab and I absolutely love teaching undergraduates. I didn't write this book because I wanted academia to be like, oh, children's books are really valuable.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell? Yeah, zero or negative is right. Probably negative. A lot of people are just like, oh, she's not very serious about the science she does because she does this. I think that academia should reward anything that is kind of taking the science or the outcomes of their research to a bigger audience, right? Whether it's something like going out and giving public lectures, whether it's something like doing a kid's book, that's fantastic.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was illustrated by a phenomenal woman Melissa Castrion, who's just got this beautiful, whimsical approach to illustration. It was her first nonfiction book, and when she was asked to do it by the publisher, all of her illustration friends were like, Don't do it. Nanotechnology, it will be so dry. But I'm very glad she did it because it's completely beautiful and that's probably helped get it into people reading it. But it's been translated into all of these different languages. It's got all these stars, these American literacy, you know, guilds, these library prizes, which I never dreamed possible. But I think it's just because materials are really exciting. And I had to do no work to make that book exciting. She did some to make it beautiful. But I think it's just show me people in the world want to read about this.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That children's publishers don't want you to write whole book for a six-year-old about vibrational spectroscopy. I mean, it was just a huge opportunity to be able to write it. It made me very proud to do what I do. I absolutely love being a scientist and I think I know that. And then you write it down and you're just like, this is the coolest job in the world. But also that we don't do enough to get young people and parents excited about material science and chemistry. You know, you go into a bookstore and all of the books for kids are about dinosaurs or about space or like gross things about the human body. But they're not like here's amazing materials that you can use as a solar panel or potentially will become a quantum computer one day. So I think that it made me think a lot more about that. Like our responsibility as people who work in materials of going out and talking about these things to young people. And, you know, the public response to it has been absolutely extraordinary. I thought, you know, non-fiction, hardback kids. So it's a really hard sell.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I don't think we're getting the most disruptive or exciting scientific ideas at the moment from just funding the few big people who've always had science funding. You know, I can think of a few people in the UK who consistently get big research grants, and I don't think their labs are producing massively innovative or exciting stuff. They just consistently have this money thrown at them. So I would say the pursuit of fairness is because we want science that is exciting and impactful. And at the moment, we're not seeing that. We're just seeing the same people get huge multimillion pound grants.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it can be absolutely fantastic and transformative, and you know, especially in things that are kind of clinically relevant, having these amazing institutes where you've got clinicians working with basic research scientists and computer scientists and analysts. Fantastic. I would say, you know, we're still at risk there of creating these little empires where certain people gets huge amounts of scientific funding and other people don't have that opportunity in that seat at the table. So sure, fund people, but make sure that we're representing an equal and fair in the decisions of who we fund.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, then we're just going to favor the people who in places or have this prior history of writing these things and can write these savvy three-page proposals, right? We need to give people the support to be able to write them. Something I've seen a lot, not only on kind of trying to improve things for celebrating women scientists, but it's just this complete inequality and access inequity in the way that we give people support and access, this kind of hidden curriculum in academia has a huge influence on the type of science that we fund. So I think sure, reduce the page count. I had to write something recently for an American funder where they were just like, just write 20 pages. And I was like, what do you mean, just write to any pages? So I think definitely reduce the page count. But I think beyond that, we need to make sure everyone's getting the same opportunity.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should make the proposals three pages and we should make sure everyone has the same support to be able to write those. You can be at one.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not being very responsible for everyone else working on materials. I'd say we need to invest more in molecular materials. But I'd also say we need to get rid of these biases. You know, things like making sure everyone has equal opportunity to prepare for interview, making sure everyone has equal opportunity to put the time into writing a proposal. I wrote a bunch of proposals last year, which completely exhausted me, but would take, you know, a month to write this perfect. Sure, but isn't that totally?”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are just as innovative, just as kind of creative and just as wonderful at doing the science. I think there was a really interesting paper recently that looked at the impact of kind of institutional privilege on generating number of science papers. And it wasn't that people were making more breakthroughs. It's just that they had more opportunities to make those breakthroughs because you've given them so much money to be able to do it. So I'd get people to judge based on the research that was being proposed and the infrastructural support that they'll get to be able to do it. I'd also think we probably need to have, and I think this is starting to happen, we have a national quantum technologies program here. There needs to be a really serious look about how we create materials and technologies that are actually going to benefit society and not just be these things that we have to cry genically cool or do it in extraordinary vacuum chambers and get a little bit more creative and forward-looking at looking at new molecular materials and thinking about these new challenges to make sure that we make these technologies. So from a very personal”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would probably try and shift the narrative at the moment from judging people based on their resume or their previous track record. We have a huge amount of institutional bias in the UK. If you work in a few universities, you're much more likely to get science funding than if you work in others. And if you are judging people based on their resume, which we do, you know, we submit our CV, we call them, and also our research proposal. people often look at the CV first, check where you work, check if you've had career gaps, check all of these things that they're quite biased about, and that impacts their likelihood to kind of fund your science. The DFG, the German Research Council, quite progressively a few years ago flipped it so they no longer got people to check the resume and just evaluated based on the proposal of the research. And it was much more democratic and fair and gender balanced because you didn't have that bias grouping in in that. So I changed that.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have demonstrated that quantum computation is possible, we're really, really far away from it being societally relevant or useful. And maybe we don't need it right now for the types of things that we're going to need to do.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you've got some kind of systems with a very primitive number of qubits that can do some kind of calculations, these quantum bits, and they can do some kind of mathematical calculations much more efficiently and quickly than their non-quantum counterparts. I think getting enough, and I'm really not an expert in this, but getting enough of those qubits to work in harmony to actually do anything that's computationally useful for you or I is way, way off where people are currently at. And at the moment still, I'm not sure if you visited any labs that are doing this or any companies that are doing this, but they have these kind of isolated molecules trapped in vacuum chambers or they have these cryogenic chambers where they've got 100 different qubits in a room the size of a football stadium, each there trying to connect and interact with each other. I think that's a long way away from what we can imagine happening in our own personal homes or in our companies or in our lives. So whilst”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to detect those magnetic fields optically, you could generate some kind of medical imaging system that was much more flexible, again, could operate at room temperature. So I think you'll see innovations in things like medical imaging and also in optical communications”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot around optical communications and encrypting data transfer and things like that. You know, if you can harness circular polarizations of light, you can multiplex the way you send data. You can make use of left and right-handed channels, but you can also encrypt the signal that you're sending because only the sender and the receiver know what to expect based on the kind of chirality of those patterns that are produced. So I think probably in some kind of encrypted optical communications, you'll see this, but again, not know entirely that that's what's happening, but making more efficient and more kind of more impactful technologies like that, we will entirely have. The particular aspect that I'm really excited about at the moment other than all the other work I do because I love everything I do, but is trying to use chiral structures to be able to detect really weak magnetic fields, particularly kind of the magnetic fields associated with brain function. So when neurons are sending signals around your brain, they generate these tiny magnetic fields. If you could use some kind of chiral structure,”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can do this room temperature operation and probably chirality will have some big role to play in that. But like with all areas of science and all areas of any academic aspect that we're studying and probably lots of conversations you've had around these tables, there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of words. Chirality is important and useful word for me. It means a lot of different things to people in the quantum world. You know, you can have chiral electrons, you can have chiral phonons. So probably it will be hugely important. But what particular aspects of chirality, I'm not entirely sure yet.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think kind of five years from now, or probably even less because display manufacturers are so extraordinarily quick at the way that they innovate, you'll see chiral molecules being the active layer of your LED display. So if you've got an Apple iPhone or I think Nintendo Switch has an OLED display or if you've got a massive OLED television at home, you could kind of double the efficiency of those displays by just using something that emits circularly polarized light. We're working on that a bunch in academic research, but display manufacturers are on that too. So kind of five years you'll have that and your power consumption, you will only see it in that your battery won't be drained as quickly because you won't be pushing all of this power into generating light from a pixel which isn't very efficient because you'll have increased that efficiency. I think probably kind of 10 years from now you'll see quantum technologies that are enabled by molecules and particularly by using the topology and the shape of those molecules to make them more efficient.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually a really fantastic and perfect point. We use it at the moment to optimize the way we process these materials. So I've got amazing chemist who's made this beautiful molecule. I want to turn it into a thin film to put into a device. I'll work out exactly how to do that really efficiently by doing some microscopy but doing a lot of the spectroscopy to work out how do I perfect the recipe to put it into that device. If we could do that kind of inline in manufacturing processes, which you do a bit fit for inorganic semiconductor industry, then you'd have this really efficient way of creating a technology where you know every single time this is what the molecules are doing and that's how we're going to put it in there. I'm sure they do it in display manufacturers already, but that's kind of how I envisage it.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is on the Mars rover, which is out there at the moment, collecting data from Mars and looking at the organic signatures from their arm inspector, he's now in the natural history museum looking at microplastics that are found in birds that are washed up on the beach, using spectroscopic Raman signatures of their kind of exact molecular packing and confirmation. So it's just this technique that takes you to all of these wonderful places centered around this amazing vibrational effect which we can't see. It just seems like magic to me, which I just really love.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within your structure and how they're arranged and ordered with respect to one another, so I can then take my molecule, take my material, put it under this laser, find out exactly what's there, but also how kind of ordered and arranged these things are, if I'm trying to make something for a quantum application, I want them to be super well ordered and super well oriented, and I can't ask the molecules what they're doing. They're way too small to see with an optical microscope, but I can use this vibrational spectroscopy to work out exactly what's going on, and I can do it in situ, I can find out what's happening when I apply charge to it or heat it up. So you can work out a huge amount just from this interaction with light. Raman spectroscopy is just, I love it, because it's so versatile. My friend, we did our PhDs together. He did Raman spectroscopy for solar panels originally. He's called Joby, I should say. He then went to work for NASA on the Mars 2020 mission, doing the Raman spectroscopy for the Sherlock instrument.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, spectroscopy is a huge encompassing and wonderful term, as you've just illuminated in those examples. Basically, normally spectroscopy is you shine a light on something and you see what light is transmitted through or reflected from it and you work out what that thing is because you're looking at the electronic structure. Raman spectroscopy, which is the type that I'm particularly excited about, and you can use it on paintings, is a vibrational spectroscopy. So instead of looking at electronic energy levels, we're looking at vibrational energy levels. But long story short, you sign a laser on a molecule or on a material or on a painting. You make all of the bonds, the chemical bonds within that structure start to vibrate. So if there's a kind of carbon-carbon stretch, that will start to vibrate and do these wood in wonderful stretches. And then that, as a result of that vibration, scatters the light that goes back at a slightly different energy to the light that you shone on it. And you get this Raman spectrum, we call it, but you get a spectrum, which is a kind of extraordinarily molecular fingerprint of all of the different chemical bonds.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it were not, it won't have to be super gold. That's a very exciting thing. If it works, if we can kind of systematically produce these chiral structures in a really ordered and beautiful way. But also, if we do the science to get it exactly right and have the theory behind what's going on, at the moment there's huge excitement because people have these experimental results and they're like, whoa, let's go and change the world. But the kind of backup theory for why these processes are happening is still not there. It's still not got a kind of universal agreement. So I think molecules will provide us a whole bunch new opportunity in quantum that we've never seen before.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a part where we learn from biology and could use it in some kind of quantum realm. So we'd learn from something like DNA, would learn from the topology of DNA, this chiral shape, and we'd use it to filter electron spin or to detect photon spin, and then we'd use that to enable some kind of quantum sensor. Definitely that.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That already exists and say, hey, we can do it more efficiently, but give it new functionalities that we couldn't before by controlling the shape of the molecule.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the end goal, not only giving you this new flexibility so that carbon-based, lightweight, easy to process, relatively low environmental impact, much less so than the semiconductors we use at the moment. But also that you get these kind of new functionalities like generating really twisted lights or generating really highly spin polarized electrons that can enable you to go out and do things that are more useful for the kinds of technologies we're creating. So if you could create some kind of chiral molecular thin film that at room temperature could spin filter electrons, can that enable some kind of quantum tech thing to happen much more efficiently without the huge infrastructure that we need at the moment to enable and to kind of enlarge these quantum properties? So we don't have to do it at cryogenic temperatures. We don't have to have extraordinary pressurized compartments to be able to do this. We can just do it on a benchtop with some kind of molecular material. So that's the end goal, not only to take a tech.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on the handedness of the molecule and the spin of the electron, which is quite kind of revolutionary from trying to control not only charge transport but spin, which would enable a whole bunch of new technologies involving aspects of quantum. But people are trying to push within the chirality community that this could also explain the reason for homochirality of life on planet Earth, because electron transport is much more efficient if you only have these electrons moving only in one direction and they're pushed through by the shape of the structure. Lots of things like chlorophyll, a chiral, lots of these kind of forms that you have, proteins, a chiral. So is that shape, that very structure, to enable this efficient electron transport that makes life on planet Earth happen more smoothly? So there are various theories of that. I'm not sure how much I'm on board with them yet.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascination of a lot of scientists. Well, there's one that kind of comes back to the quantum part at the end, but these molecules that I work with are chiral molecules, so they're molecules where, well, some of them that I work with are just helices. They're kind of twisted structures where you connect these benzene rings together. And because of the ways they're connected, they can't lie flat in a plane. So they twist up or twist down. What I was trying to do with them, particularly”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, naturally occurring life all DNA in human life or in plant life or anything on planet Earth is right-handed. All sugars are right-handed, all amino acids are left-handed. There's some reason that that happens, that life selects for that. We still don't know the reason that that's the case.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And right handed light, so light that twists clockwise and counterclockwise, we see it in molecules and we see chirality and in things like shells, in snail shells, in wisteria barks, you see that twist that's clockwise or anticlockwise.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, very nicely, very succinctly. So I work on functional molecular materials, so carbon-based materials that can be kind of semiconductors. Semiconductors are obviously hugely useful for any kind of optical or electronic device, solar panels, light emitting diodes. The chirality part is that these molecules can exist in these beautiful and weird and wonderful forms, but they can also exist as non-superimposable images of one another. That's what chiral is. So a great example is your left and your right hand. If you put them together kind of palm to palm, they're mirror images. But if you put one on top of the other, they're quite clearly not. And we see that kind of non-superimposable mirror image nature across multiple different length scales in the human made and the naturally occurring world. So you see it in electrons and photons. You'll remember from chemistry, you had spin up and spin down electrons. You drew out a little up and down arrow. You see it in left.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, he was a great episode. Okay, he's just coolist, isn't he? He's so cool fangled massively. I'm going to listen to that also on the way home. But I do think that you've got an extraordinary culture in the Wikimedia Foundation who are the people who facilitate Wikipedia. They're very global. There's only about 200 people who actually work for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're very young. They're very enthusiastic about open source. They're very forward-thinking and what this encyclopedia should be. And they're always pushing boundaries, changing the interface, changing the graphic design, all of these different things to make the user experience better and the editor experience better. So I think that from that nature, because you'll have this push from the actual employees, we just need to do that part as the community that Wikipedia is serving to make sure that the editorship represents the kind of global community who read Wikipedia. So I think if we keep pushing for that, then it doesn't have to ossify and become backwards and archaic. We can keep progressing for something that's more fair and equal and representative.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wiki editing world was 2018. There was very little about her online. You know, she was 90. She'd done all these things in the 60s and 70s. And she is an extraordinary woman, but very little about her and really little honoring her and celebrating her. Now her Wikipedia page is up. She's in all of these lists of top women in the world. She's been inducted to the US Air Force Hall of Fame. She's won a medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Every time I see people talking about GPS, they're like, Dr. Gladys West, the mathematician enabled this. So I don't want the metric from Wikipedia that tells me how many times that's been viewed. I want the kind of society to be like, look at this cool, awesome woman or this cool or some scientist of color. And now we're starting to celebrate them. So I like that kind of, I guess it's enabled by Wikipedia that the world is starting to honor them.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I prefer not to know, but also that's not why I'm doing it, right? Like, I just want these stories there. But I think sometimes if I'm trying to get particularly academics to get excited about editing and I'm like, well, there's 15 billion people who look at this every month. And we did this Wikipedia edit on last time and a million people have already looked at the pages, then they're like, well, I'm going to go on and write about the science I do then. But I do think that the thing I find amazing isn't the kind of Wikipedia data and the numbers that come back, but seeing how these people are then celebrated in the public eye. There was a phenomenal, is a phenomenal mathematician that I wrote about called Gladys West, who is 91 now, born in Virginia, went to a historically black college and university, studied math, became a high school teacher for maths before working for the U.S. government and doing the calculations that enabled GPS. So she worked out how far from a perfect sphere the surface of the earth was so that they could put satellites around it and help us with navigation. And when I wrote about Gladys West, it was kind of the beginning of”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sometimes it's useful. You can get page views. So sometimes that's useful as a kind of motivator for why people. So you can get page views. Yeah, you can. I mean, I don't look at them because you prefer not.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also writing citations for people to become fellows or get big awards and medals and honours, and I think I can keep doing that even if ChatGPT takes over my evening job of editing Wikipedia pages.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wikipedia that bouncing around things before you land on that page about that women scientists. So I don't think that my work here is entirely futile just yet. And actually, you know, part of what Wikipedia has really shown me is women are just not getting enough awards for science. So I spend a lot of my time not only researching these people.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the kind of beautiful thing I think about Wikipedia is that when I land on Wikipedia, I don't usually go on it to type in the name of a woman scientist. I do that a lot, but one doesn't go on it and type in the name of a woman scientist. One goes on it and types in climate change or number theory or some kind of thing that they're interested in or the name of their high school or their university. And then they look through the alumni or they're just clicking around and they find their way to this page. And I love that, like the kind of sleuthy, stealthy part. You're saying these women are here or these black scientists are here or these scientists from Africa are here and you've just not found out about them yet, but they're learning about it because of the topic that they're interested in. And I worry that if you have something like ChatGPT and you go on and you ask one of these questions, like tell me about number theory, it will just give you the answer about that and potentially the few big men names in the field. But you'd miss that chance to do that kind of beautiful weaving that you do around.”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it will take away from Wikipedia. I think the kind of beautiful thing about Wikipedia is you can interrogate it quite a lot. You know, you can see who wrote what, when they wrote it, and when that reference was added, what that reference is. You have that kind of talk dialogue behind a Wikipedia page. So most people just land on the read aspect of Wikipedia. But if you go to history or go to talk, the tabs across the top, then you see what was contributed to and when, and you have a discussion around what is and isn't on the page. I think things like ChatGPT are very useful at giving you a kind of very quick answer or, you know, if you were looking up a person and said, you know, make me a short PowerPoint on this, it might give you that starting off point from which you go on and find out more things. But I think the ability to interrogate it and to look at, again, coming back to my earlier point, really where it looked for that information, you know, has it been broad in where it's collected that from? Is it using actual appropriate citations?”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Topics aren't on Wikipedia instead of getting angry, I think you should just do something about it, right? So it takes nothing to contribute and to edit and to learn how to edit and everyone should sit there and give everyone in the world this access to the knowledge that they have”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's used to writing papers that sit in a desk and then eventually get shredded? You're going to write something that the whole world will see. Everyone gets excited about that, irrespective of their gender or their ethnicity. So I think we should do the study. We should get the data and try and find out how many Wikipedia editors are autistic. But more just kind of creating this ecosystem where people who get this opportunity to learn and find out awesome facts also feel that social responsibility to give that back and give that access to everyone else in the world. Because maybe Wikipedia isn't so important in North America or Europe where we have free and open access to a lot of literature or a lot of texts or we have popular science publishing. But in other parts of the world where they don't have access to that, actually having Wikipedia is completely critical. So I wish we'd get away from this kind of blame. And it's just like the women scientists thing, you know, a lot of people get angry that these kind of”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think before we test that site, we should probably get data. I think there's probably a huge number of autistic women who would say that actually it's just very underdiagnosed in women because they socially assimilate to take on the very virtues or the stereotypes that you as a woman have to have as a young person in society. And so they kind of put a blanket over issues of autism. But I'm not going to go there because I'm not an expert. But I think that's what they'd say. But actually, I think everyone gets excited about this kind of contribution to open knowledge. I've written a bunch of Wikipedia pages, but I've also trained a lot of people in how to edit Wikipedia, you know, from young people in high schools to academics at universities to members of the general public. And they kind of find it awesome, this idea that you can research something, pull together all of these different sources, maybe do some kind of history aspect and go through archives, and then write something that's actually on the internet. If you tell a high school kid,”
2023-04-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source