 We're live on J5JL, this is ThinkTech. And more specifically, this is Science at SOES, a program that has gone on a special series for the past semester. Courtesy Pete McGinnis-Mark, who was an emeritus science researcher at SOES at UH Manoa. And it was handled what amounts to a course over the past semester. And today we're gonna look back at that course and we're gonna look forward to that course too and talk to Pete about how it was. Pete, was it as good for you as it was for us? First of all, Jay, thank you very much for hosting me on my show. Yeah, it was great fun. I got to meet many of the graduate students within SOES and help them a little bit in terms of public speaking. And I learned a lot from it. I think the students did as well. And from my point of view, it's been a great success. You know, we did a movie about climate change and COVID, the connection last year. And one of the scientists who spoke on the movie was Angelique White. There were others too. And every scientist who spoke said that it was really important now for scientists to be able to talk to the public because in the past there hasn't been that much connection between science and the public. But now it becomes critical, do you agree? Oh, absolutely. And two of Angel's post-docs actually appeared early in this season of science at SOES. And I would not only say that, you know, the issues related to climate change is important that we communicate with the general public, but also just the wide variety of other research that is being conducted at SOES that affects everybody's lives here on Oahu, whether it's sea level-wise or whether it's obviously with Red Hill and the water system there. When we have a tsunami or volcanic eruption, not only are researchers at SOES taking care of the research side of it, but many of the decisions that the state is making are based on the results from SOES research. Yes, and this will be more and more in the future for sure as climate change gets worse and it is and it will get worse. So Pete, what is SOES? Do you call it SOES? There are those around who call it SOES that they're geographically minded. Oh, why is that shirt you've got there, Pete? What is that shirt? I've got my SOES t-shirt on in celebration of today's event. So if we have the first slide, SOES is the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology and it's a real gem at UH Manoa. Obviously people probably are not familiar but there's a large number of research professors and instructors, over 200 of them. More importantly, we raise about $130 million a year in federal grants and of course the follow through of those monies really helps the community in terms of sustaining parts of activities here on the Wahoo. There's a large number of graduate students and many of these students go on to be really world leaders in some of the activities. For example, in my own field, some of our former graduate students now fly cameras around the moon. So on the current Mars rover, we've had instruments going to Saturn and Jupiter as well. So it's not widely known but SOES has some phenomenal researchers and we also train the next generation. Our students have been highly successful for over 30 years now. And it's world famous, isn't it, Pete? Absolutely, yeah. In terms of the oceanography, we've got this 75-meter long research vessel which does deep water research. We're ranked probably fourth in the world as far as the kind of research we do in oceanography. Clearly, like for coral reef studies, 90% of all coral reefs in the United States are in Hawaii. So it makes sense. Our Institute for Marine Biology, for example, is a world leader in that area. I mentioned our own space research, you know, we're building our own satellites. Many of our students have gone on to work either with NASA or other universities and the list goes on and on. Our renewable energy, for example, Hawaii is a phenomenal place to test smart grid technology and new batteries, for example, because it's a small, self-contained island state, you can tinkle with aspects of the smart grid to really understand what's going on in a much better way than you could elsewhere. So yes, ecosystem dynamics, some of the tropical meteorology, deep blue water oceanography. Yo, SOSD is a world leader. We rank, say, in the top 20 in most fields in the United States and in some instances, we're in the top five. So it's a particularly good area of research to be in here in Hawaii. Yeah, silly you for retiring. You should have stuck around. Oh, no, I've got plenty of ideas. I haven't retired from research. I just have taken on an emeritus position and my current real interest is trying to get a program to prepare geologic maps for the astronauts when they return to the moon probably in 2026. So that's what I'm putting a lot of my effort into right now. Get a hurry. Yes, get a hurry. So Pete, let's look at slide two. And we're talking about the four departments in SOS. And let's talk about where the participants in the science and SOS program have come from among those departments. Okay. Let me just tell the viewers. I'm a geologist of sorts. And so my home department would be the Department of Earth Sciences which was originally called Geology and Geophysics. And so I know most of the students in that department and it's easier for me to persuade some of them to come on the show. I am absolutely hopeless at atmospheric sciences. And so I don't have the network of people that have come on the show from that department. I know individuals in the Department of Oceanography and in Ocean Resources and Engineering. But that sort of gives some idea of the diversity of candidate students that we could have brought on to the show that there's a wide variety of skill sets from numerical modelers. People would go out into the field. Some who work in laboratories. And we've got some really sophisticated instrumentation here at SOS, University of Hawaii at Manawa. That is world class. And so many people have different backgrounds and part of the challenge of this whole series Science at SOS was to ensure that there was this diversity of guests as well as getting the graduate students to appear. Many of them had not been on live TV before and so coaching them a bit on how to prepare materials as well as present themselves during the show was an important educational experience for them. Are the ones who were not in geophysics and planetology as nice as the ones in geophysics and planetology? I think we have a great bunch of students across the board in SOS. Many of them were super enthusiastic or a bit somewhat nervous to come on the show. It was a little difficult at times to talk to say an oceanographer who was preparing her next research paper to persuade her not to worry about preemptively talking about the results because each of these shows was very much sort of a top level discussion. Our goal was to try and inform the general public about some of the activities at SOS not to go into the details of the latest research paper. I know more of the students in earth sciences and could talk to them offline about the value of coming on the show but from all of the other three departments we had representatives and that was pretty good. You've been in and around the media for a long time on ThinkTec for example but that's only one. I know you put a lot of time into preparing and helping them prepare for these segments. Did you find that you were nervous Pete? Never crossed my mind. To be honest, this is so enjoyable and low-key. No, nerves never came into it. If you go to a congressional hearing and you're trying to defend the budget but you're part of NASA, that's when you get nervous. The first talk I ever gave was at Caltech at a symposium with 600 people in the audience. That was nerve-racking. With all due respect, a ThinkTec show is fairly low-key and very enjoyable. We want it to be that way. Let's go to slide number three which is a picture of all the guests that have appeared on the show, this very interesting group. I noticed, let me just take a closer look at that. Most of them seem to be women, Pete. Why is that? Two-thirds of the guests this semester have been women. Twofold, Jay. One is that there seems to be a trend within the school that more women are taking up graduate degrees than the guys are. So the population of candidates to come on the show is probably about 60% women, 40% guys. But the other thing was that they have a great little network. Mali came on the show in early February and she has lots of friends and she just went off and she told her friends, hey, this is a great fun thing to do. And it turned out that quite a few of her friends were women. And so that sort of encouraged them to come on the show and it made my life easier to just ask people who were almost volunteering to say, please bring me on the show when you get the chance. And so, yes, it was surprising to me as well but as I said, two-thirds of the guests were women but that's the way it turned out. Yeah, this was kind of a volunteer thing. In other words, they would come to you. You would go out and publish, you know, the fact the show was taking placement then they would respond and they would come to you. So this is their choice, be on the show. Absolutely, yes. The original idea of making it a course where they got university credit never actually panned out. First of all, we started very close to the start of the semester so we couldn't get this sort of thing accredited by the university. But the other thing is that it was much easier to persuade a student to come on the show just for one lunchtime presentation as opposed to committing to be at the same place at the same time for 15, 16 weeks. So the course idea I thought was interesting but it never really panned out. And as a result, the show never really exploited the idea of having real-time questions being sent in by email so that some things worked and some things didn't work for the show. Well, you know, as you said, we're low-key. We like to have fun, actually. This sounds like it was that and it's very important to us. Let me ask, you know, this reflects, at least in shows, an increasing number of women who are learning to be scientists, taking graduate degrees in science. I think most people walk around the street thinking, oh, a scientist. A scientist is usually a man. But that's no longer necessarily the case. And I want to ask you about science in general. Not only it's those, but nationally and internationally. Are we seeing new dimensions in the participation of women? Certainly there are more women getting into the fear of noun than there was when I was sort of just starting my work at UH Manoa. And also added diversity, trying to get Native Hawaiians involved, other minorities as well. There's much more awareness in trying to sort of make science embracing for all individuals. And for sure there are more women in my field. And I think that's also true, particularly in oceanography as well as in atmospheric sciences. And we'd start and see more women being given tenure track faculty positions and post-op positions. And so the pipeline for these other groups is starting to really produce some exciting results. Let me go to the next slide, Pete. This is the background work that you did for the show. And you did a lot of work to help them. And it's not only in the science, although partly it must be. It's in the presentation. Can you talk about what you did to help them and what these two views of the slide represent? Absolutely. So you're correct in saying that a lot of the work actually took place before the 30-minute show. And so I would identify a student guest. And about a week before they came on the show, I'd say send me some ideas on what you'd like to talk about. And on this slide here, we've got two different examples. On the left-hand side, illustrations of original drafts of ideas. And you're probably well aware that it's tough to read either small print or equations or something like that. So the original drafts on the left-hand side, one of the things I did was just to go through and sort of spiff up and simplify these illustrations. So the two on the right would be my take of what the student was trying to show, making them as large as possible and as simple as possible. Because we realized that not all the viewers are familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, for example, or any of the other science. And that also, if we go to slide five, the next one, it wasn't just the individual slides to make them fairly simple. One of the other things which I really try to work with the students on was to have a coherent story. So we didn't want to have five or six or ten randomly selected slides. As we are doing today, you know, there's some method to my madness in terms of the the sequence in which material is presented. So you start off with an overview, you show a few examples of the science, and then hopefully draw to a conclusion. If we get enough time at the end, you ask the student, well, what are you going to be doing once you graduate or has this produced some exciting results which were a value to the state, for example. So the two things, one, making each individual slide as intelligible to the viewer as possible was time-consuming. But then also working with the student going back and forth, what order of the slides makes a coherent discussion for 30 minutes. And inevitably, some of them think they're going to present 20 slides. Thank you all for only three slides. Again, that timing has always been as you, as a host have found out, you know, pacing the whole presentation is really important. And getting that across the student, we thought this would be, say, the equivalent of an elevator speech, except it's 30 minutes. And so trying to instruct some of the students, some of whom are only in their second year of their PhD, others who are close to graduating, or we had a couple of post-ups on board as well. So, you know, there's a different skill level and knowledge based at the student's head. As we discussed earlier, it's important that scientists, including, you know, post-doc scientists, you know, know how to present. And it sounds to me like this was very valuable to the participants to hear from you about it, to work with you to establish not only, you know, legible, understandable charts and graphs, but also to put them in a storyline so they made sense. And Lord knows that's a valuable skill in defending and dissertation. It's a valuable skill in presenting to industry. It's a valuable skill in presenting to the 600 members of Congress that were listening to your remarks, some of whom I am certain I know they would have a lot of trouble wrapping themselves around the concepts you were describing. So, the presentation is very important. Yeah, yeah. And to do it without stumbling as you're talking and to sort of, if you've got individual points that you want to get across, how does the student put that in her discussion so that, you know, the viewer actually goes away realizing, oh yes, there's two or three bullets that are really important. Yeah, very valuable for them. But let's go to the next slide. This is slide six. This was some shows are really difficult to host. And I'd like to hear about those in particular. Oh, yeah, well, I don't wish to pick on Kelly too much, but as I said earlier, I'm a geologist. And so some of the students which I had on the show, they were doing research that I didn't actually understand. Kelly's was one of them. She was using the lasers to look at the potential health of vegetation. And this diagram here basically shows that the color of the vegetation changes if it's sick. And so how can you use the lasers to understand that. And it was like the blind leading the blind or most days. I was learning in real time something about the show. And the next slide as well, number seven, which Kay Takazawa had. Kay was talking about a topic called infrasound, which is sound waves that the human ear cannot hear because they're such low frequency. And for example, he presented a discussion on a media, which exploded over Siberia back in 2013. And the diagram at the top, the one with sort of yellow and red. That's so an acoustic sonogram of the different wavelengths of sound that could hear. And similarly the Tonga volcanic eruption, which took place in January of this year. Trying to understand how you interpret sound waves is something which I don't really do most days. And so trying to lead the student who some hopefully intelligible questions and to give them a chance to showcase the kinds of things which they have been studying perhaps for five years was one of the other challenges. What was that like for you, Pete? I mean, they always say that science should be cross-disciplinary, that every scientist has to at least know about other areas of science and who knows that may feed into, here's her specific area. So what was it like for you to study in one area and then you have to learn others? It's great fun. In retirement, you can afford to be a clock ticker or an armchair academic sort of thing. So it's a little bit outside of your comfort zone. I've got to admit. But on the other hand, it really engages the student because they have to make a greater effort to educate the person that they're talking to, let alone show something useful for the audience. In contrast, if we go to slide eight, which was Rose Gallo last week, Paul Rose, she's a second year graduate student working on Kilauea Volcano. And I let slip that, hey, this is something I've been working on myself for the last 40 years. Poor Rose. Paul Rose was having an interviewer who was asking a lot of historical questions about the Kilauea eruptions or sort of magma processes and as a second year grad student, she may not even have had classes in some of the material which I was asking. So it's a mix and match. Throughout the semester, we had some students who were quite senior and knew an awful lot about the topic. And it was almost even debate between the two of us. Ones like Kelly and Kay, I had no idea at all what they were talking about. And Paul Rose had an interviewer who had spent the last 40 years working on the topic that she's been involved in for 18 months sort of thing. I know that you didn't treat it as a formal course and therefore you didn't give grades, but doesn't that put you as the instructor at a disability when you have to give grades about a disparity of knowledge on your part and on their part when you have these various different subjects being presented? How would you have graded them, had you graded them? I think one would have to know more about the place of where the student is in his or her degree program obviously the postdocs are expected to be an expert in the field. A second year grad student naturally doesn't know as much as a fifth year graduate student and it's the same issue. In some of my other courses, I've had undergraduates sitting in with graduate students on a fairly high level course. Clearly you don't grade the undergraduate quite as tough as you would do a graduate student and in this particular case with the think tech shows, you would like the students who really have sort of worked very hard to get more credit as opposed to just recycling a conference presentation they gave last month. In general, how did they do it? I thought they were excellent and so none of them really stumbled. We didn't say anything unrepeatable on the air. We had a coherent discussion in each case. I was just delighted with the way the whole series turned out and I'm hoping that sometime in the future the pounds would be at so slowly worthwhile doing this again. What did you learn about how to do this? Because I've won a similar think tech series in the past, it was easier for me just to fall back into the same routine for the shows. What I did learn is that it's really helpful for the students to practice this kind of thing. On the previous think tech shows, one of my guests should never be on live TV before, never been interviewed, but she then graduated, moved to NASA, got our space flight centre and three months later had a national press conference where she was discussing some of the results. She said it was really helpful just to do the think tech. I think it really is valuable experience for the students for the interviewer. Who cares? I think you enjoy it. There's that. There is that point. What last thing I want to ask you about, you refer to the fact that this could happen, may happen, hopefully will happen again, and the powers in Manoa will have to make that decision and you'll have to be available for it and so forth. But when you do it again, will it be the same? Will it be different? What changes would you make? How would you organise it in an optimal way in a way that you see as the best possible parameters, the best possible configuration going forward? The main problem I've had has been on some occasions finding the diversity of student guests. We were biased towards the earth science students as opposed to atmospheric sciences or oceanography. I would like more preparatory work done so I actually didn't spend half the time the previous week on the show just trying to find a guest. I think the format is really pretty good. I don't believe that having it as a formal course where all the students have to sign up for the entire semester would actually work. The other issue, if it was a course, it would mean that you just had a random selection of students appearing one at a time on the show. I deliberately picked individuals who I thought had something interesting to say, which means it's not as helpful to the students who would need practice giving a presentation like this but may not have been the ones that were selected. Trying to be more inclusive of the types of students that we have within source so that everybody has this opportunity and hopefully gets the experience. That needs a bit of work. I don't think that doing it as a formal course would really solve this problem but greater diversity and helping the students who really are more self-conscious about giving presentations because they have to go away from the national or international conferences to give talks. That's more scary I think from talking to me for half an hour as well as when they go and get a job whatever if it's in academia or in business they still have to give presentations so this guidance on making it simple enough to be understood and having an idea of how to lead the story is really important. Striving to achieve those goals is really important. I can only say Pete it was great to have this series on ThinkTech. We love this kind of series about science and we love having you on. You are part of our family for many years and that is that we have always felt that science could be made public. To anybody who wants to watch they may learn less than a graduate student would learn but they would learn something they would be exposed, maybe they would make a decision a career decision based on what they saw and heard on the show and I think that's very valuable for the community. We have always encouraged scientists like you and your students you talk at their level and this goes way back in ThinkTech's history and you did and you would and you will and this is a great contribution to the community conversation and to the careers that come out of you age. Thank you for saying that Jay and I should have added presenting the science to the community recognising that SOAST is doing highly relevant research for the benefit of our community whether it's water or whether it's coral reefs or whether it's sea level rise or whether it's volcanic fog these are all topics which impact everybody here in Hawaii and I don't think that message gets out often enough to the community or a legislator so this kind of thing with ThinkTech has been really helpful from our point of view we'll come back again soon. I hope so. In the meantime thank you very much for doing this thank you very much for joining me on this retrospective here today and I hope that at some point in my life I will be able to get a SOAST shirt just like you have Pete. There it is SOAST at UH Manoa. Pete McGinnis. Thank you. Thank you Jay. Take care. Goodbye everyone. Thank you for watching. Thank you so much for watching ThinkTech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com Mahalo.