 Yeah, science at SOEST. I'm Jay Fidel. It's the one o'clock clock on a given Tuesday, and I am joined, or I join, Pete McGinnis-Mark, who is a professor at SOEST, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, HIGP, more specifically, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. He has been a host on and off on ThinkTech for a long time, and we're starting an actual course today, which Pete is going to teach. Well, every Tuesday at one o'clock, this is very exciting stuff, and we are so happy to be in this relationship with UH and SOEST and HIGP. Welcome to your show, Pete. Thank you, Pete. I'm really pleased to be here on my show, but seriously, Jay, thank you and ThinkTech as well. This is a really exciting opportunity. I want to take this afternoon, this show today, to basically outline some of the goals and objectives of my new series, which I hope will be running on ThinkTech, well, for who knows how long, but certainly for this semester, which started yesterday. And it really is quite an exciting opportunity because what we will be trying to do is to attract our new graduate students as well as postdocs and give them a lot of experience in talking live to the general public and to make the point that their research is relevant both to the state as well as get some idea of what their career objectives are. Now, most of these students have not actually appeared live on television before, and so ThinkTech is a really friendly environment for which to do this. And in the world of Zoom after COVID, for example, more and more of our students are actually talking to their colleagues on the mainland or internationally over Zoom, but they haven't really been interviewed. Typically, students will go to a conference either virtually or in person and will present a science paper for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. And if they're lucky, they won't be asked too many hard questions, but what we want to try and do with this ThinkTech series is actually to bring them up to speed in how do they talk to the general public. It's kind of like what we want them to do is present a 10 or 15 minute elevator speech. You know the phrase where you might have 30 seconds in an elevator to persuade your next door neighbor or the governor or whomever that what you're doing is relevant not only in terms of the costs involved but also why it's important to the people of Hawaii. Well, we're extending that 30 second elevator speech to something like 10 to 15 minutes. And of course, you know, Jay, that you don't just appear live on the TV show for half an hour without some preparation. So behind the scenes, part of the course which I'll be teaching is to provide the students with some of the background information, you know, like slide preparation, what other topics which they think are most important that the general public would like to hear. So this is a little different from typical ThinkTech shows. It's going to be different because many of the guests, this might be their first time on television and certainly the first time they've been interviewed or resumed on their material. But also trying to evaluate how they are performing as far as the material which they're presenting, even the graphics is going to be a challenge for some of them because clearly we can't show a detailed plot of data and allow the audience to really understand it. So simplifying the work which they're doing for an audience who may never have heard anything about the kind of work that they're doing is something really new. And at Soast, Margaret McAnnes and Dave Carl and a few others, the department chairs really got excited about this concept wherein, you know, the students themselves start to get the experience of presenting their material online. So we were excited about it, delighted that ThinkTech thinks this is a good thing for our community to hear about. So I'm going to stop and let you, if you've got any questions and then I'll go into more of my post-amble. Well, Pete, you know, I'm really about this. We've been doing talk shows for almost 20 years, radio and video like this, screaming. This is really special to have a relationship with Soast and University and to have the crucible of what you do there come in into our content, into our stream, so to speak and to share that with not only the university but with the public. This is so valuable on all ends of it. You know, we made a movie last year about climate change. Chip Fletcher was in the movie and it was the relationship of climate change and the environment to COVID and how they feed off to each other. And one of the things that we learned from a number of the, I call them faculty that were in this movie was that science has changed and I would like your thought about this. Science used to be all sort of within the science, within the scientific community, but now it appears, and this is especially clear in the context of COVID itself, that scientists also must get out there. They must talk to the public. They must educate the public. For my purpose, it's a matter of part of the training of a scientist these days. If you want to be a scientist, you also have to be able to speak to the public, educate the community, agree with me? Yes, indeed. Yeah, and with all the issues over fake news and who do you believe over COVID or climate change or whatever? But Jay, maybe I can just direct the conversation in a little different direction because we've talked about SOAST and I'm betting that most of the audience really don't know what SOAST is. So Eric, if you can put up the first slide, I think it's actually worth just telling people a little bit, SOAST stands for the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology. It's one of the units at University of Hawaii at Manila. But I've put on some of the basic background information, like there's over 240 people who work at SOAST. In addition, there's over 570 professional and technical staff. We've got nearly 190 graduate students, some of whom are working on their master's degrees. Many, however, are working on their PhDs. In terms of the budget that we bring in, this is about $120 million a year endeavor. So we bring in, SOAST brings in about a third of all of the federal dollars to the University of Hawaii. So this is a big initiative and trying to convey to the general public what exactly SOAST contributes to the state of Hawaii and scientific knowledge in general is one of the objectives of this particular course. And having our graduate students actually take the lead and I'll be quizzing them both before the show on why it's important as well as what exactly their contributions are gonna be. That's the kind of thing which I hope to get out of this series. And Eric, can we go on to the second slide please? Which basically just gives you some idea of the breadth of the studies which are conducted at SOAST. And you mentioned Chip Fletcher, who is our new interim dean. Brian Taylor has retired. So there's aspects of climate change. But if you just look at the diagram, we've got oceanographers, we've got marine biologists, we've got atmospheric scientists. We worry a lot about climate change but also geology, natural hazards. For example, Hawaii has numerous natural hazards be they tsunamis or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or whatever. There's also a very vibrant space program. We launched our own satellite from the space station back in 2020. We're sending another one up later this year. Our former graduate students fly spacecraft or instruments around the moon or driving across Mars. So SOAST as a unit is incredibly successful. We're ranked somewhere in the top 20 worldwide for some aspects of the work which is conducted. And I don't feel that the community, the people in Hawaii actually realize what a gem SOAST is here in our home state. So that's one of the things which we really need to figure out. Yeah, this communication, we're talking about the communication of science, it's not only important to the, as I said, the scientific community and the public. It's important to the legislature. It's important to policymakers. It's important to granting agencies everywhere in the country and for that matter of the world. It's important for the global scientific community so that they know who you are, who SOAST is. It's really a fabulous idea. The other thing I was gonna say is that, back in the old days, scientists would go out and they would look and search and research for their science when you're talking about the earth. The things that SOAST specializes in. But now you don't have to go out, it comes to you. Climate change brings it to you and we are going to have more issues of more public interest going forward than we have ever had before. And scientists need to tell us what is going on, connect the dots and actually predict what will happen next. That's the problem about science and climate change. And let's, Eric, move on to slide three because Jay's prompted the next issue on some of the relevance. All right, and here's just four examples where we're looking at, say, the ocean as a food source or we're looking at climate change. I drove round to Kahuku over the weekend and the amount of beach erosion, which is taking place just north of Kaniyori Bay. Now we're gonna deal with the degradation of the coral reefs, the loss of the infrastructure for the road system. We look at things like ocean debris in terms of how that affects some of the marine mammals. As well as, say, I mentioned some of the natural hazards, the diagram at bottom right shows the distribution of earthquakes, which can generate tsunamis, but we've got people in our ocean research engineering department, for example, who are trying to implement new methods of predicting when tsunamis are actually gonna be dangerous. We know when the earthquake occurs, but we've got perhaps only a few hours before a warning would be issued, say, by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, even the heavy rain which we had here in Hawaii over the last month, the climate modelers, the atmosphere scientists, they all contribute to things which are directly relevant to you and I and it behooves both the professors at UH as well as their students to get out and tell the general public that we're doing great things and you're gonna need our help even more as the years go by. Yes, I predict you'll be talking to the public more and more, so this is a great program to sort of get into that, but you know, it's a course and I would like to spend a few minutes with you about the nature of a course here on Think Tech and at SOAS and I know that you're a kind and gentle, avuncular professor, Pete, but how will it work from your end and should the students out there who are called upon to present, should they be intimidated? No, I don't work by intimidation. I cajole and try and pressure the students. The way that the whole course, as you describe it, will work out. It's probably not gonna be given for credit, at least not this semester. We only started planning this about a week ago, so trying to give the students actual credit is unlikely, but it will take the form of a weekly seminar and the students are very familiar with seminars and the key difference between a regular seminar that perhaps the faculty as well as the students would join in would be that I would spend perhaps an hour before each one of the shows talking to a particular student if she's the first time on the air. Clearly there's the preparation work. So we've had courses before at the university on public speaking, but they have been focused almost entirely on how do you go to a science conference and put your research in the best possible format for other research scientists to appreciate. Here it's gonna be different. It's, yeah, we're not interested in the eighth decimal point of your measurements or what you're coding your computer programs in is primarily to be a generalist. And I found in the past, like when I did the previous shows on ThinkTech, that probably the most helpful for the participant was the preparatory work. So you sit down with an individual and say this is how a 30 minute show should be put together. And then after the show, you sort of have an individual debrief. What I'm hoping is that as with the normal university seminars as this becomes better known on campus, we will have many other students logging on and they will be able to not only watch the shows but also provide their own colleagues with critiques during real time. So that's just like a regular seminar that we would have on campus. As we get started, it's obviously we're bootstrapping the way that the course of this endeavor is put together. It might well be that say for the first two or three weeks, we'll only have one of the students giving a presentation and I'll be quizzing them on the relevance. But as say we enter into February, what I'm really hoping is that we will have less of the student giving the talk, but then we'll have online comments, hopefully constructive comments about, I didn't understand this or tell me more about why your work on say water on the moon is relevant to people of Hawaii or something like that. Yeah, it's a learning process even for you and I, Jay, that we don't quite know how this is going to work out. I think it's a really exciting concept. It's the sort of thing which the students will benefit from even if we fail, it will be something that in the past they have not heard. And with all of the social distancing over COVID, for example, we're not giving the students enough opportunities to interact either with their peer group or with the faculty. This is a new way. They're much more comfortable than you and I working with Zoom, so we'll see how it goes. It could be great. We're treating it on our end as a webinar. It's a 30-minute webinar every week, which means that you can take questions easily and the questions are reported on a special chat page for you and you can then pose as the host, you can pose those questions to the students who are presenting, so it's very open and you can rewrite the questions, extend the questions, modify the questions in any way, but you can have a regular exchange with the public or anyone who is permitted or who is registered on the webinar. That's the one thing. And the other thing I wanted to mention is we will put this out there. ThinkTek has eight platforms of various kinds and with descriptions. And when we take a webinar like this, we'll put it out there so that it is into the community. It goes not only to UH, but to the public and to that matter to the world. What's more is it's catalogable. That means if somebody wants to find out about a given subject that you have discussed on the show, they just need a keyword and they'll find it. So it is a scientific resource in many ways to the public, not only here but elsewhere. And finally, I wanted to ask you this, Pete. What does a viewer hope to achieve here? What do you see as the takeaway, the content value to a viewer who comes on and watches one of these shows? A member of the public. Is it gonna be at his level? Yes, the intent is certainly to make the information understandable to the layperson. Now I'm not quite sure if we'll hit the mark every time, but certainly it's not gonna be a detailed scientific description, but that's not my goal and in meeting with the students beforehand to prepare their material. That's one of the first things I'm gonna impress on that you cannot just present a science talk. You have to show relevance. But what the layperson might get out of it? First of all, recognition that SOAST is a world-class institution that brings in not only an awful lot of money to the state, but also provides immense amount of technical information to either state legislatures, some of the advisory boards and that sort of thing. So I doubt very much if most people in Hawaii recognize the sort of work which is done at SOAST. From a general point of view, I think SOAST and the university has not done a very good job in the past at reaching out to the general public at their level of understanding or interest. So I hope that the whole series will actually make it much more relevant. I actually put slide number six, Eric. Well, if we can just put on the last slide and I'll talk over that. Basically, what are the goals for this series? Well, yeah, I'm gonna interview a student each week and that's gonna give them experience in public speaking. I want to hear about their research and also hopefully hear about the excitement they have about research. Why commit to a four year PhD if you're not excited about it? But they have to explain the relevance of their work to the general public. That's the key thing. And basically, Eric, I can't read my own slide right now if you can go, thank you. Students should also have some idea of what their career goals are. Why are they doing this? Apart from having lots of fun now, hopefully we can convince the viewer that our students are gonna get good jobs but hopefully stay in Hawaii and high paid jobs. And finally, the general public needs to learn much more about activities at Manoa so that when the ledge decides that they're gonna cut Manoa's budget again, everybody will stand up and say, well, no, because we want to know about climate change. We want to worry about earthquakes and look at all of the exciting things which are being done for the benefit of our local kids as well as kids from the mainland. Or I say kids, but young scientists more than anything else. So, we're not sure how this is gonna work. I'm not certain who's gonna appear next week. I will be here. But it's a general effort. And I'm also hoping, Jay, you mentioned that this is an interactive zoomathon or whatever. When I gave the other series on think tech research at Manoa, there wasn't any interaction between the audience and the presenters. I think that's a really exciting development for think tech to actually utilize the internet or zoom so that you can gauge the reaction from people. And I too will be sort of promoting the links for this show in the hope that many people will tune in. Some will be from the university. Some I hope will be lay people who are just generally interested. And that's how you engage our community with what we're doing. So try and see. I was thinking for myself and the staff at think tech we want this to work and we'll make every effort to have it work. Not only because this is what we do but because so is this a special organization for us. We've been dealing with it. We admire it for years and years and we admire its faculty and its work. And it's more and more relevant, more and more important. But at the same time though it seems to me that the university could do more of this. And if this works and I'm knocking wood that it does I believe that it will. I would make every effort to have that happen but this could be useful for other departments other parts of the university, other campuses other faculty, other students, other programs. And I would like to see it go beyond that. Don't you think? I thought that you say that, Jay because I've already had discussions with the director of our Sea Grant College which has supported students not only within SOAST but in a variety of other departments across campus. And yes, this is a test program in the literal sense but I'm hoping it would actually be expanded to other departments across campus. Believe me, I'm going to be trying to push this as much as you. So hopefully it will succeed. Yeah, I mean a few years ago there was all this rage about MOOCs, remember those large online courses massive, massive online courses. They were emanating from various places on the mainland. I don't think Hawaii got into it very deeply. We thought that if Hawaii's going to do it, Hawaii has to do it in its own way, its own style the Aloha style, call it. And I think this is exactly what this is or could be a MOOC where ultimately people on the mainland watch it. Right, well it's different from a MOOC because hopefully you've got a live presenter quizzing the students but doing online classes in this manner it may not work for a 600 level volcanology course for example, but this communications aspect we teach classes on writing proposals, presenting material at conferences. This is the same kind of deal. So trying new methods for our students benefit I think is a really good idea. Yeah, so let's turn to you for a minute Pete. You have been a fixture at SOS for about 200 years now. At least, yeah. At least, yeah. And I wonder what motivates you? What gives you the passion here? What are you seeking and why? Well, first of all, I'm a lifelong supporter of SOS. I think it's a wonderful organization and it has given me a great career doing what I enjoy, which is studying volcanoes on Mars but the more general aspects of it. I just feel this is what a faculty member should be doing. You can't just present the same material in the same manner every year and expect the students to be excited. Times are changing with COVID in particular we have to think of new ways of helping the students broaden their get a better experience. So it's, you know, it's in my DNA. I'm excited about my own research and I'm excited to find out why students are excited whether it's a marine biologist or it's a atmospheric scientist or an engineer. Yeah, it's neat. Find out as much as you can. So that's what fires me up. You're a scientist, but you're also a teacher. It's an important combination. I think that's you. Can you also talk for a minute about the founding group that put this together? You mentioned Dave Carlson, a name a little while ago and there are others too. Can you talk about the way it came together, the seminal group, the seminal organizational arrangements? A simple answer would be no because it was an idea hatched by the department chairs. We have four different departments within SOAS. They recognize the need for, in essence, a school-wide seminar series. And they decided that I would be an appropriate person. You know, Dave Carl, of course, is a long-term association with Think Tech and I think he had something to do with me being encouraged to do this. I do not know why the department chairs in atmospheric sciences, ocean research engineering, earth sciences and oceanography, they all decided this is a good thing to do. I was not in that discussion. Well, we're just about out of time, Pete, but I wanted to ask you one last question. To the extent that people look at this introductory show and try to get the flavor of what you're about to do and maybe consider, you know, watching it on a regular basis or for that matter, become a student, participate in the show itself and in any event, become more aware of SOAS. What is your message to them? What would you like them to think about as a takeaway from our discussion about this great possibility, this great adventure we are embarking on? Yeah, it is a great opportunity. It's a great opportunity to learn at a more basic level what is done within SOAS. It's cross-discipline. That's the intent. So you will have oceanographers hearing about geology or an atmospheric scientist wants to know about building a widget to go in a submarine or something like that. So it's going to be broad-based. It's going to be focused on the students and we're trying new techniques to basically enhance the educational experience that you're watching now. That's great. That's really an important statement. Thank you so much, Pete McGinnis-Mark. It's so great to talk to you. My pleasure. And to have you on the show. Thank you very much, Jake. It's going to be great. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.