One of the slightly more unusual stories I've interviewed here, while in Rio, but I have been very aware of the occurrence. Here's the BBC piece on why fans are booing and what it tells you about Brazil.
This week, I interviewed for the new publishing platform, The Ringer, on a piece about neurodoping. Some interesting stuff about how much more could be done by athletes to enhance performance, and a good example of something that does not yet engage the anti-doping authorities. Should it? Probably not, but it might, so who knows what will happen next.
This week, Gizmodo wrote a piece which really sets out why the anti-doping problem is far greater than authorities imagine and why they cannot begin to tackle the extent of it with a mediocre budget available to the World Anti-Doping Agency. The piece does not get too focused on the ethics, but the wider culture of human enhancement that surrounds sport. Take a look here.
For the next 17 days, I'll be working at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. This will be my 10th Olympic Games, including Winter, Summer, and Youth, since Sydney 2000. At every Olympic Games, I have multiple roles and agendas.
Since London 2012, I have been working with the IOC Young Reporters' Programme, led by Anthony Edgar, who is the IOC's Head of Media Operations. Understanding how the media work is one part of this work and it's really ethnographic, as I work among the journalists. I also use the opportunity to develop my own practice as a journalist, but I'm not nearly in the same category of those people who work on assignment after assignment, day after day. Over the years, I have got to know quite a few of the best journalists that come to the Games and they have an extraordinary work ethic.
Most accredited people at the Games - if not everybody - has a very specific role to play and often only see a fraction of what happens around an Olympic city. Part of what I try to do in my research, is obtain a holistic sense of the operation, which means going to sports, press conferences, local neighbourhoods, and understanding how the city runs the Games.
I'll also give a talk at a conference while here, and interview a lot for the media. It's a full on fortnight. The last 8 Olympic Games are being written up in my next book, Sport 2.0, coming out with MIT Press next year. It's the end of an era - the first decade of social media - and it's fantastic to be at yet another Olympic city. This will be my third book to write about the Olympic Games, but it goes much broader than that, into all things digital, from social media to virtual reality.
There's no better way to get to know a city and its community than to examine it through the lens of the Olympic Games and I look forward to leaving Rio a little more of a Carioca than before I came. Show time.
My Photographs from the Games
Here's the latest doping article I was involved with, produced by VICE magazine. It's a pretty thoughtful and unusual piece, doing a lot of interesting historical work. I wasn't aware that my colleague Dr Paul Dimeo lost his role on US Cycling anti-doping due to speaking out. It's an unfortunate situation in the world of sport, that it only utiizes like-minded people to hold such roles. Imagine a democracy where everyone thought the same thing. Societies progress by setting up tensions between competing views. Very little can progress on the anti-doping issue, without some agitators calling into question the effectiveness of the mission, every step of the way.
This week, I interviewed for BBC Newshour Extra on the state of the Olympic movement. We covered everything from the role of arts in the Olympics, the rise of e-sport, the importance of nationalism and, of course, the doping debate. It is a really fun programme, with some pretty serious issues covered. Take a listen here
Over the last year, I've been involved with organizing the European Science Open Forum, through my role on the European City of Science programme. We've produced events all over the region, from performances, to talks, and installations. One programme I have been particularly proud of is our Young Reporters programme. We've had students from Salford and Manchester universities, along with A-level students from UTC Bolton, reporting activity around the conference.
Our students have had an amazing time, meeting Nobel laureates, leading science editors, and covering content from graphene to e-doctors. It's been a fantastic week and such a great experience for all. Here's one of their videos:
This weekend, I had the chance to speak at the BlueDot Festival, an amazing science, art, and music festival at the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre. My talk was part of a programme of events curated by Josh McNorton at FutureFest and I focused on the era of human enhancement and how it's playing out in the world of sport.
This week, I took part in the Great Science Share, an event that formed part of the European City of Science in Greater Manchester this year. It was essentially a scientific conference for and by kids. Schools came from all over the region and showed what they had been doing in science.
I took along Ethan who helped me give a short talk to children about my journey through science. It was a wonderful day and such an amazing experience for all involved, a real highlight of my year.
Last night, I was at the British Library taking part in a panel on doping in sport. Doping seems to be in the news all of the time at the moment, with revelations about Russian involvement and is made worse by the allegations of corruption in sports federations.
I have spoken in so many debates about doping and, inevitably, i tend to be the one who, now let me get this right, people love to hate. Yes, that's the way round I think. I argue for doping in sport. I argue that the present anti-doping system is out of sync with our emerging culture of human enhancement. I argue that we need to re-think everything.
I have been saying this for 15 years and nothing has changed. Officials still claim unbelievably low levels of doping in sport. Athletes claim it is much higher. Athletes keep getting abused, but still bear the brunt of the sanctions.
I don't have a solution to the problem, but neither does anti-doping. In my system, the world of sport takes on more responsibility for steering athletes to safe forms of performance enhancement, invests into helping them make performance gains, ensures an appropriate relationship between athletes and their advisors - including physicians.
I am told that my system is too onerous on the sports world, that it is inconceivable to ensure a high quality of care in a developing country which lacks even the infrastructure to develop sport. I am told there are not enough resources and yet NBC paid $8b for the next 16 years of Olympic coverage. The lack of resource in anti-doping undermines its credibility and it cannot attend to its duty of care to athletes more widely without approaching this from a public health perspective. Yet, in the wake of the Beijing 2008 test results, the IOC wants federations to figure it out. I don't understand this at all, but suspect it will not go very far to solving the problem.
In my world, athletes are under medically supervised doping. they will still be at risk, but they will know more about those risks and be better equipped to diminish their impact on health. This alone is reason to make doping legal, but there is an even stronger claim to be made in relation to what we ask athletes to do, which is transcend human limits. They can't do this without technology. Doping is one means by which an athlete can do this, but there are others.
Here's an article which I published 10 years ago, setting out the case for a different model and here's the final video
Yesterday, I was interviewed on live Russian tv, following the IOC anti-doping Summit, which took place in Lausanne. The outcome of the summit was as good as it was likely to get for Russia - the Olympic team is ok to compete, but a blanket ban on track and field athletes, with the right for individuals to prove their innocence. The means by which they do this is still a bit unclear, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport will be the key legal vehicle through which to do this.
My view is really simple, the Russian situation is a symptom of a broken system and there have been and will be others that will fall foul to similar circumstances. I am completely against state sponsored doping as it was previously known, but supportive processes to allow athletes to enhance their performance through supervised and safer means is a better way to protect athletes and a level playing field. It will be a different kind of equality to that which we have now, but it will be more transparent, fairer for all, and ensure we no longer look upon sports performances with suspicion.
Yesterday, I went to Warwick University to give a talk about using social media for research and impact. It was an event organized by Luke Robert Mason, focused on young scholars mostly. The question that I am often asked at such meetings is how much time I spend doing social media. The answer is usually that it is hard to quantify, but that it's not just time spent communicating.
My time spent using social media is time spent doing the kinds of things that we need to do as academics, to stay ahead of the curve. A lot of it is about discovery - finding out about new projects, initiatives, headlines, research, networks - which feeds into wider processes of research that I undertake. Usin social media means I also use email much less than I used to. Instant messaging through WhatsApp or Facebook are now critical ways for me to contact students and colleagues.
However, the main reasons I use social media a lot have to do with the underlying principles of its ethos - it is user centred, so you can decide what you want to say, rather than rely on the media to interpret it for you, it is the place where people are discovering learning opportunities - and it allows us to grow our communities more effectively.
All of these things are crucial to doing research and so using social media is a no brainer for me.
here are the slides
This week, I gave a talk within the British Science Association Masterclass on Science Communication, which took place in Manchester. I decided to present something that was autobiographical, as I wanted to talk about the diverse ways into #scicomm.
In essence, I started #scicomm work as a PhD student, first designing websites to get ideas out, but also quickly starting to write about my ideas for the media. Most of those ideas were very closely connected to my PhD research, but not always. From here, I moved into a School of Media, which led me from science into an arts context, in which I could spend time bringing the two together. I did this by teaching at a range of art schools, while also trying to work with artists who were interested in exploring scientific ideas.
During that time, art works became a part of the means of science communication for me, but not necessarily within its service and I have always advocated a form of disruptive science communication, which does not focus simply on the scientific accuracy or information.
Over this period, I became closer to producers, curators, and art directors, which then brought me into their world and, since around 2009, I have been involved with some such activity. As a producer of creative work - film, media art, bioart, and more, - science communication has become more of a place to stimulate the involvement of others and I now sit on various steering committees where I can do that most effectively.
The key message for me is that, wherever you start in science communication may be very different from where you will be in 10 years, so don't get too hung up on being a particular kind of communicator. Also, find ways to bring together the original research and the communication activity, as much as possible. This means starting to think about collaboration very early and pushing out ideas when they are not fully formed. This feels risky, but it's crucial to make things happen and to keep innovating.
I also talked about how science communication can happen in all kinds of spaces, from industry conferences to going into schools and doing workshops. The opportunities are incredibly diverse, but we don't all have to do everything.
My second appearance at Sheffield Documentary Film Festival this year was part of a discussion about National Bird, a film dealing with the complexities of drone warfare. It takes the perspective of thee drone operators, who put themselves out on a limb by talking about their experience and concerns about such work.
It was a complex and far reaching discussion in which I covered the relationship between military and civilian drone applications, the idea that losing the human from the field of combat may diminish some aspect of our capacity to take moral responsibility for destruction brought by drones. Other philosophers have made this case and the views of protagonist Lisa Ling, who was with us, made it all the more apparent.
Today, I took part in a conversation focused on the ideas within a documentary directed by Roy Cohen called Machine of Human Dreams. It focuses on the story of Ben Goertzel and his work to make a robot which could demonstrate Artificial General Intelligence. It was a great chance to re-visit some of the early ideas around the AI research world and we covered so much ground, from Deep Blue vs IBM and the Turing Test, to a future in which all human jobs become automated and where we need to figure out what will be left for us to do.
It was fantastic to take part in this event and fantastic to see how a neuroscientist who took a documentary film module while at university found a way into telling one of the most complicated stories in science today. Very grateful to Erinma Ochu, who worked with Wellcome Trust to curate this programme of events, which gave me a chance again to be at the amazing and inspiring Sheffield Documentary Film Festival.
This week, I was in Cheltenham for another amazing science festival. It was a fantastic chance to share a stage again with Emeritus Professor Kevin Warwick, whose company I have enjoyed many times. I also met the fantastic Mark Miodownik. Together, we unravelled the world of superheroes and explored how closer we have come to making them a reality. I talked about the promise and peril of technology, the number of ways in which we are already superhuman, and how the idea of what it is to be a superhero has changed over time. Here's what I did.
This week, I spoke at Oxford University on the subject of e-sport, focusing on governance and a vision for its contribution to society. I feel strongly that e-sport can be a way of recovering intergenerational relationships - children who are lost to gaming - and that it can be a way of building careers and competitiveness in digital innovation. Here's the talk.
This week, I featured in an article on doping within the magazine Men's Health. My quotes:
“Athletes are in the business of attempting to transcend human limits,”
“Especially at the elite level, sport is inherently a relationship between technology and nature,”
“Sports organisations have a moral obligation to ensure that they are investing in the safest forms of performance enhancement for athletes,”
“Managing the health and safety risks associated with performance enhancement – that’s the priority.”
While in Lausanne last week, I interviewed for SportCal on the doping debate, in a week where more positive tests were revealed, this time from the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games samples. Callum Murray did a good job of pulling together my views on where we are and why anti-doping can't work. Sir Craig Reedie offered a brief reply to the article, noting the years of engagement WADA has had with me on this subject.
Throughout these years, i've always tried to find common ground as a starting point. It's sometimes hard, as my view often is seen as fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport. I completely reject this. I am passionate about sports, I care about their role in society, and I want the best for athletes. I just don't think anti-doping does that.
Reedie's proposal - outlined in his response - is to bring more money into anti-doping through media sponsorship may change that, but it still feels like a drop in the ocean, when at the heart of the problem is a question about the future of humanity and our biotechnological future.
This week, I am in Lausanne for the Sport Future Rendezvous 2016 conference, organized by good friend Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet at the University of Lausanne. I took the chance to talk about the biodigital interface, the growth of e-sport, biotechnological change, ingestible sensors, and virtual realities. But the big controversy, as always, was my views around doping, which did hijack the futures debate a little. In any case, here's my presentation.
Thanks to Michel Filliau for the photograph.