An extremely late take on the local elections

First of all, apologies for the late post, third year is definitely beginning to take its toll on me spare time now.

Ahh, how sweet this is. There was nothing better than seeing just about every Lib Dem in the country repeating "this has been an extremely disappointing night for our party", or words to that effect. The message was loud and clear from voters, the coalition government is not working. Yes, you may argue, mid-terms are always like this. However, what is different this time is that the Tories do not have a majority in the House of Commons. They only need to lose a few seats in the next election to Labour and they will be out on their arses.

The real dent, however, will be to the Lib Dems. Normally, large student areas are a stronghold for the Lib Dems. Not this time. Headingley: Labour gain. Hyde Park & Woodhouse: Labour gain. Rusholme: Labour gain. Withington: Labour gain. The sooner the Lib Dems are out of the office, the better. Echoing the words of Chuka Umunna, I actually respect the Conservatives a lot more. They may have a view different to that of us Lefties, but at least they stand by that viewpoint and try and explain their logic behind that. In contrast, Nick Clegg and his travelling circus pretend to oppose the Tory propositions, but still happily vote them through parliament, all to stay up David Cameron's arse.

Of course a lot of this bitterness is still to do with the tuition fees. You know, Scotland can give their students free tuition, but for some reason, England sees it as necessary to charge us £9,000 a year. Ridiculous. And yes, undergraduates can get loans blah blah blah. What infuriates me the most is that they haven't considered what this means for postgraduates. I am currently trying to get onto a graduate entry dentistry course, which comes with NHS bursaries and student loans. Only 5 places do this in the UK, each ranging from about 20-60 places on the course per intake. So you can imagine the level of competition there is. There is also the option to do the standard undergraduate course with your degree going in your favour, and there being far more options and places, meaning it is far more likely to get a place. The major HOWEVER here is that you cannot get any funding as it is a second degree without 'graduate-entry' status. Now, before the coalition government, this would've meant finding around £15,000. Very difficult, but with help from parents, bank loans and savings, it was possible. Now, for undergrad dentistry, I would have to magic up £45,000. Christ, I could have a new Range Rover that. Therefore, I cannot possibly afford the less competitive course!

I really didn't want to descend into that sort of rant, but it gets me so riled even talking about it. The whole point of the coalition was to compromise on these sorts of decisions. Torys want £9k, Lib Dems want free education. Surely the compromise would be to keep fees as they are?!

As always though, my view as student will be shot down by most. It seems these days that a student with a political viewpoint is instantly a moron. However, this is an issue that is directly putting a strain on my life goals, so I'll be as vocal about is I see fit. To summarise, seeing the coalitions faces at this election was priceless. Here's to 2015!

Dissertation Finito!

It's finished! Yes, after long hours of blood, sweat, PubMed downtime, MS Word crashes, MS Word layout fuckups, hungover practice presentations and tears, my dissertation is finally finished! I took it in to get it bound the other day, and (rather begrudgingly) handed it in. After all the aggro surrounding it, it was a bit of an anti-climax when the guy at the undergrad office simply said "thanks, sign here please..." and that was it. 70% of my Research Project module was disappearing before my eyes, to appear on some random tutors desk for them to (metaphorically) tear to pieces. Another 20% was a simple mark awarded based on how our supervisors think we did, effort-wise. Easy. However, the last 10% was the most dreaded part....the presentation.

I already had done a practice run through with my supervisor, which I stupidly attempted hungover, and it wasn't really a good preparation for the main thing. The basic setup was that I had to do a 10 minute presentation on my dissertation to an audience of other students, along with 2 academic members of staff, with 5 minutes of questions after it.

The presentation was fine, far better than I expected! The questions started off ok...the student questions were fine, managed to brave one half of the staff's questions... then came the second member of staff, who basically used me as a scratching post. She just would not let this drop! It was clear from her questions that she basically thought my alternative model was a load of shit, and she would come out with question after question until one of them would trip me up. In the end, after the question time going up to almost 10 minutes (which I deemed pretty unfair seeing as most others got 5 questions tops), she came out with a couple that I couldn't answer. She got me. It's a shame, because it all went well up to that point, I just hope I won't get harshly marked for it.

So now, 100% of the module is done...which means, one more exam and then I'm DONE! I can't wait, it's flown so much, and I'm 50/50 as to whether I'm sad or glad to be graduating. I do sort of wish I had used the time more wisely, got a bit more involved at Uni, but I guess that's a lesson learned for my next degree.

The Dissertation Write-Up Is Not Going Well

Anyone who has wrote a dissertation or a thesis will understand the sheer ballache it is to motivate yourself to get writing it. The experimenting and all the (sort of) fun part is long gone and you're left with this awfully boring write-up. My heart actually sinks when I see the Pubmed homepage these days. It's taken me ages to get my introduction wrote (the part that you basically have to put all your background reading in), by far the driest part of a write-up. I've done my methods and most of my introduction, and my reference list is already getting towards three pages long, just to demonstrate why I'm getting so bored of reading paper after paper after paper. Furthermore, my draft deadline is next week. And I still have my results & discussion to plough through. Brilliant!

To add to this, my dad's sent me money via Royal Mail (I'm absolutely skint and I don't see him much when I'm home)...and surprise surprise, they didn't knock on the door. I'm really starting to get frustrated with this now. The sheer laziness of them makes my blood boil, the fact that they can't be arsed to knock and wait to see if you're in. My bedroom's only on the 1st floor, and I sleep with my window open, directly above the front door, so there's no way I would've missed them knocking.

To sum it up, I'm stressed.

Kony 2012: A help or hindrace?

Joseph Kony. The man who, as of early yesterday, no one knew. Now, pretty much every blogger, Facebooker and Tweeter has at least seen his name. For those of you who still haven't seen the video, it's a half hour documentary on Kony, the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, a resistance force of around 2-3,000 members. The main atrocity they commit is raiding villages, abducting the children, and either forcing them into their military (if they're boys), or making them their sex slaves (the fate of the girls). Resistance results in death. What Invisible Children is trying to do is to make him a household name, so the government comes under pressure to find him and capture/kill him. However, it's at this point after watching the video that I've become sceptical of the whole thing. The documentary is below

 

There's so many questions I want answers to with this. I'll try and tackle some points, but I could literally rant all day. Firstly, IC wants to aid the Ugandan military in finding this guy. They want the money they raise to be used by the military (which, from what I've read is only about 1/3 of what they raise, the rest is all spent on PR and wages!) of Uganda. Now, something about that just doesn't seem quite right with me. First off, without trying to cause offence, Uganda is corrupt. It has a CPI rating of 2.1 (1 being very corrupt, 10 being saint-like). Their military is known for committing atrocities in itself, gang rape, looting of villages etc. Are these really the people we want to be helping? Also, if the LRA's army is made up of kids, surely he'll retaliate if he comes under attack with...well, kids. So, in order to save these children, some of them are going to have to die, probably a large number of them. We don't even know how Kony's going to react when he finds out the entire world knows is onto him. These people like to keep a low profile. So what's to say he won't order the mass killing of all these children? The Nazis attempted to burn all their evidence, what's to say he won't? This should've stayed covert.

I also must say that I found the video to be borderline propaganda. If all it takes to vilify one person on a global scale is one guy on a documentary with a huge PR budget, then that's quite terrifying, in all honesty. Think about it, if I was stupidly rich and was a bit of a bastard, all I'd have to do is make a well thought-out video portraying my chosen person to be the next Hitler and use the genius marketing tool of social networking to spread my malicious lies like wildfire. I'm not saying this video is a lie, or that Joseph Kony isn't evil, but all we've seen is one documentary on the man. Are we all willing to believe this one guy? I also disagree with the use of his son in the video. Remember that American political broadcast that tried to tell us that if gays can marry then it would confuse the children? It got completely lambasted. Because it used kids to get their message across. Well this guy is using his own son in a video to say "if my son was kidnapped and made to kill people, it would be all over the news", along with cute clips of his son doing cute son-ish things. Same principle, but when the subject is largely agreed with, it seems it becomes okay. That's because they know it tugs at our heart-strings. This is what's so propaganda-ish about it.

Another point, in a typically American fashion, the picture is that by killing one person, the problem will be solved. The fact that this force is made up of thousands of people hasn't been thought of. Think about it. There's 100 U.S. troops there at the moment to aid the Ugandan military. They have to provide the equipment to help them fight potentially 3,000 people, that's without bringing the abducted children into the equation. It doesn't add up. This isn't a fox killing chickens, this is a complex organisation, in which if one guy is killed, a new one will pop up in another base. Don't forget, they're acting "on God's command" so I'll bet they aren't exactly going to be scared of death either. 

There's so much more I can say on this, but for now, I'll leave it (maybe a part 2 rant?). I understand the cause, but I'm not quite sure I support the methods and the way they're going about capturing this guy. Why this one guy? The number of paedophile ring leaders, human traffickers, etc. out there, why aren't we trying to capture them as well? This sort of thing isn't completely unheard of in Africa. Civil wars break out all the time. Look up 'necklacing' on Wikipedia. The civilians aren't afraid to conduct this sort of thing on children. Why aren't we trying to stop that? As I said, this is wholly wrong and sick. But I don't think donating to IC is going to do much good.

The Dissertation

This is really starting to grate on me now. Nothing is going to plan, we have no significant data to use, and it's just going to make the write-up so much harder.

To explain this further (and the creepy picture), my dissertation consists of a lab project, where I'm basically looking at this guy (I'm not even 100% sure if it is a guy, all we've managed to find is that it's something to do with their eyes), C. vomitoria. No, I haven't stumbled into some zoology study by accident, what we're doing is slightly more interesting than that. The way the pharmaceutical industry works is before a drug can be put out there on the mass market, it has to go through tonnes of stages of pre-clinical testing to ensure it's safe and efficacious for human use. This starts out in computer simulations, then moves on to cell lines, then animal studies before it finally ends up in the clinical trials (more often than not the drugs fail at some point and it's back to the drawing board). Obviously, due to similarities to humans, mammals have to be used for the animal testing to be on the safe side. However, this brings up two problems in itself. Firstly, the economics of animal testing. To individually house one wistar rat for one day, it costs around £30. When you imagine the size of pharmaceutical companies and the amount of rats they test, you're looking at major ££££ being spent here. Secondly, with cranks like PETA hovering around, there's a major push to try and replace mammals in lab studies. Therefore, the proposed solution here is to try and bring invertebrates into the equation. They're cheap to breed (just throw in a carcass and collect the maggots), and don't require any form of regulation for use (it's largely believed they don't feel any pain). So, the plan is to produce a model of toxicity testing in bluebottles. The aim isn't to replace mammals altogether, but rather introduce an invertebrate stage of drug trials, if a drug fails at this point, ditch the drug, rats lives are spared (satisfying both the banks and PETA).

How we plan on doing this is testing teratogenicity in the flies (a teratogen is basically a chemical that causes birth defects, e.g. thalidomide) by injecting them with drugs, letting them pupate, and seeing what hatches out. We've used three drugs, diphenhydramine (Nytol, a known non-teratogen), fluoxetine (Prozac, a suspected minor teratogen) and valproic acid (used largely in epilepsy and sometimes in bipolar disorder, a known, quite nasty teratogen), and we're hoping to find some freaky shit when they hatch.

However, as is always the case with science, it hasn't worked. There's pretty much no difference whatsoever between the controls and the dosed flies. We managed to get one majorly deformed one, but that was with diphenhydramine, i.e. the one we weren't supposed to get any deformities with. All I can say is, WTF?!

So, it's going fan-fucking-tastic. We have no results to show, no conclusions to make (other than "we can't make any conclusions"), and to top it all, around 80% of the little fuckers didn't hatch, they just stayed as pupa, developed halfway and then seemed to give up. So I'm gonna have to find some way of blagging my way through the discussion in my dissertation knowing that our results are dog shit. Brilliant. Three years of university and it's ended with this heap of turd. Rant over.

Introduction

It feels strange writing that title without having an abstract before it. Maybe that's a sign that I've been a science student for too long. Anyway, I thought I'd do an introductory blog, as I'm sure every single one of my extremely impressive 0 followers are dying to know all about me. I'm Reece, I'm 21 and I'm currently at the grand old University of Leeds studying Pharmacology. As ridiculous as this sounds, I'm not sure as to how I ended up having this as one of my UCAS options. I was originally applying for dentistry, although I knew all along that my AS grades were nowhere near the standard that would be required of a conditional offer from any school, so decided to use my 5th choice as a backup, which I knew all along was as good as my only choice. I remember originally thinking of pharmacy, but the thought of being stuck behind a counter at Boots arguing with methadone patients for the rest of my life turned my stomach (regardless of the wage packet), and I somehow stumbled upon this degree in my research. What also seemed too good to be true was the fact that this can also lead me on to a graduate-entry dentistry course. So here I am, studying the physiological effects of drugs, writing my dissertation on the receptor profile of Calliphora vomitoria, the bluebottle fly to you and me (it's best not to ask), and shitting myself at the thought of walking out of here with less than a 2:1.

Academics aside, I was born and brought up in Salford (Eccles to be precise, but the average person has no clue who, what or where that is), commonly seen as "that shithole across the Irwell" to your average Mancunian (think of Hyacinth Bucket trying to hide away her common-as-muck family). I moved to Bolton when I was 15 and studied in Wigan for the sixth form years, until I moved to Leeds for uni. I do come back home a lot though, I'm usually out in Manchester a fair bit for someone who lives in Leeds, probably due to missing it so much. Manchester is my second home at heart, which is funny considering its proximity to Salford, you'd think I'd see them as the same, like most people. I will be back one day (hopefully with a snazzy city centre apartment to go with that), that's my aim.

That's the simple background stuff, everything else you'll pretty much find out as I slowly fill this blog up with moans and rants about anything and everything. Hopefully I'll be worth a follow!

First Post

Okay, so I've finally gotten round to starting up a blogging page, God knows if I'll have anything interesting to say. I'm new to this, so give me a while to get everything set up. Apologies for the layout, I'll try and come up with something a bit more visually striking soon!