Author: Sinead

Perpetually curious, gamer, Science Communication graduate, healthcare admin, too pedantic for my own good.

Theresa May’s Reform Plan

11 January 2017 / Sinead

Theresa May’s mental health reform speech on Monday was the first time I’ve heard her say more than a soundbite, and also the first time I’ve heard her talk about anything other than Brexit, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

At the opening of her speech, I wanted to support her. I wanted to believe she would say something genuinely meaningful and compassionate. I also hoped (perhaps naively) that she would make reference to the effect of austerity upon mental health. May is in a good place to acknowledge the negative impact of previous political choices, after all. While she is maintaining many of those choices, she didn’t instigate them. She has mostly inherited the bad decisions made by others, most obviously David Cameron, becoming essentially the country’s largest-scale supply teacher.

Initially, her opening discussion of the overt and covert injustices present today were impactful, leaving her actual reform strategies as arguably the weakest element of her speech. Similarly, while her view on reducing stigma (below) says all the “right” things, it does so without providing anything tangible or practical, or any awareness of where the Government themselves have been guilty of removing that attention and treatment.

Anti-Deskbot Deck Construction #2

14 December 2016 / Sinead

Following on from the first post, here’s my attempt to build a deck that can hold its own against Deskbots.

Strategies

Given the high ATK values of Deskbots, attacking them head-on is almost guaranteed to go badly. Therefore the best approach seems to be a mixture of;

cards which can attack directly to avoid confronting Deskbot 003.
cards which can do damage outside of the battle phase to avoid Deskbot 009’s effect-negation.
cards which can prevent other cards from being destroyed by battle.

Anti-Deskbot Deck Construction #1

13 December 2016 / Sinead

After losing countless matches to my friend’s Deskbot deck thanks to his ability to reach 15,000 ATK by turn 5, the idea of building an anti-Deskbot deck has been tempting me recently.

However, I’ve never built a counter- or anti- deck before, let alone one for an archetype this strong. Because of this, my first step needed to be figuring out the components of a Deskbot deck, in order to find what type of cards and effects may be useful against their traits.

No Man’s Sky – Who was to blame?

27 November 2016 / Sinead

Just like the rest of the internet, I’m going to talk about No Man’s Sky...

More specifically, about the 1.1 update announced today.

If you could have lived our lives over the last months, you’d know how meaningful this is.
Here’s update 1.1 https://t.co/4TelmFIgsK
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) November 27, 2016

1.1, known as the Foundation update, will add two new modes (Creative and Survival) to the main game and will introduce a Base Building feature, while adding features to existing mechanics like farming. Foundation also promises to improve multiple parts of the resource management side of the game, by making resources easier to store, automate and use. The patch list is one of the longest I’ve ever seen.

A recap for anyone who needs it: the pre-release material for No Man’s Sky set 2016’s largest hype-cycle in motion. Every showcased aspect – from its spectacular graphics, to its appearance of a living and shareable world, to the interviews and quotes from Hello Games which never gave specific information about what would or wouldn’t be part of the game – converged to give the impression that NMS would be “all games to all people”. It created a sort of excited vagueness which allowed consumers to expect NMS be amazing while not knowing exactly what it would consist of; a recipe for disappointment.

Review | Fun Science – Charlie McDonnell

22 November 2016 / Sinead

I’ve recently finished Fun Science by Charlie McDonnell, and after reading it I’m surprisingly impressed both by the book itself and its potential value for science communication.

Firstly, some context. Charlie McDonnell is a filmmaker/musician/ vlogger/presenter… and now author. Last month he released Fun Science (the book), inspired by his 2011 YouTube series of the same name. Fun Science (the show) has also returned,and covers topics included in the book. (A playlist of all of the YouTube episodes is below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLEB92E275F78C7301

Uni Update- November

19 November 2016 / Sinead

On November 15th I handed in my dissertation, and officially completed my MSc.

Having finished is a strange concept; I haven’t got used to not spending most of the day writing yet. Not spending all my time thinking about my dissertation and the ideas surrounding it also means I’m catching up with a lot of ideas I had been ignoring (and plenty of tasks I had been ignoring too).

It also means I’ve had some time to think about the dissertation module as a whole and about elements I wish I’d done differently. Beyond the obvious wish that I’d procrastinated less, one part that I know I would change is supervision.

Part of the issue was my project being unique among the external projects. Each person doing an external project had two supervisors, one based in the Sci-Comm unit at UWE and one based within the organisation they were working with. The intention was for the external supervisor to handle questions about the research and practical advice, and for the UWE supervisor to cover academic advice, assignment questions, and writing feedback.

Uni Update – October (Part 2)

8 October 2016 / Sinead

I’ve now received the marks back for my presentation from Tuesday, so that’s two out of three dissertation elements complete.

While my actual score (62, one mark higher than my proposal score) was unexpectedly high, the feedback I received was what I had already assumed: the weakest point by far was in not explaining my sample and method clearly enough, while the strongest point was in how I explained my results. Also, the feedback said I made sense of why the research is taking place within UWE and right now- that I got its relevance across and connected it to the study aims. I’m glad I got that feedback, as I struggled with explaining the research relevance in my proposal, so to know I successfully communicated it this time is reassuring.

Uni Update- October

6 October 2016 / Sinead

I’m now in the final month of dissertation writing, and thanks to completing my presentation defence today, I’m 20% closer to finishing the overall project too.

Overall, I think the defence went quite well- given how long I took to get it finished, things could easily have gone very wrong. I only finished the script on the morning- repeatedly changing my mind about how much context and history I needed to include, combined with doubting my ability to explain the idea well, meant I’d repeatedly put it off until I felt more confident about what I was doing. In hindsight, that was a really bad idea, and I got lucky.

Uni Update- August

30 August 2016 / Sinead

After the great few days of releasing the survey, everything uni-related has slowed to a crawl again.

So far I’m disappointed- I may have got 33 responses after two days, but two weeks later I’m only at 40. There’s been so little progress, and literally zero response from the UWE Facebook group.