London: Day 1

We arrived in London early in the morning extremely tired from the long trip to the UK. Customs ran very smoothly at Heathrow and we had soon entered the country. I was struck by the number of pianos they had in the airport. Indeed, there was even one piano with "play me" written on it in various languages. It was quite comical really, as the translations were clearly a Google Translate job.

After a short time on the laptop trying to work out train tickets, we took the tube to our accommodation in Greenwich, to find out that they were not able to give us an early check-in (despite a request for this). We left our things at the hotel (at a cost of £2) and headed out to London to have a look around.

On our way in we stopped off at a supermarket: Tesco. I'm not sure if it were because we were sleep deprived or genuinely excited, but we must have seemed a bit silly to the people also using the supermarket. We were amazed by some of the products on offer, most notably Mars Bar Milk. Another highlight was chocolate Special K. This was particularly weird, as Special K tends to be marketed as a healthy choice back home. Chocolates were also extremely cheap, which is certainly a bonus. We bought our lunch there, as Tesco has a meal deal that's relatively cheap (a drink, meal and snack for £3).

Dad's girlfriend had asked that I get her a bag from Harrods, so we decided that we should get this done first. A short ride on the tube—which is infinitely better than our excuse for a public transport system at home—and we had arrived. Harrods is an odd place and it's somewhat difficult to explain in terms of Australia. It's, essentially, an unholy mix of Myer and Safeway, with a nice amount of inflation thrown in. Better put, Harrods really is just a shop for snobs. It has everything that the wealthy could possibly need in one place. It operates as a grocery story, where the snob can buy his/her caviar and jambon, it has fashion, where the snob can buy all sorts of dead animals for thousands of pounds and it has just about everything else in between.

We didn't stay for particularly long in Harrods, but we did make sure to have a good look. What got us most was the price of everything. There was even a dressing gown, made of cashmere admittedly, worth £2000. There was also a washing machine worth about £1300, which was a bit of a surprise.

The busiest part of the store was our destination: the Harrods merchandise area. This area was packed with visitors from all around the joint (English was a rarity). Gladly, we did end up finding dad's girlfriend's bag, which we purchased at a later day.

After leaving Harrods, we decided that we'd hit the clichés and head off to Buckingham Palace. Another ride on the tube and we were soon there. At this point, we were really starting to question why a country that drives on the left insists that everyone on the tube sticks to the right on escalators. The announcements were also exceedingly polite at times, which I guess is very British.

Buckingham Palace wasn't particularly busy, though that is not to say that there wasn't a crowd. It was easy enough to get a good look and get some good photos. In truth, the palace is a little underwhelming. It's neither big nor exceedingly pretty and really does miss any sense of grandeur. This dullness was exacerbated by tacky, mismatched curtains and the carpark full of Ford Mondeos.

Near the palace is Wellington's Arch, which is 1000 times more interesting than the palace itself. The fountain outside the palace, and the gates into the palace itself and the park that is adjacent to it were also much more interesting.

We left Buckingham Palace after a few quick snaps and headed through St James' Park. This was a good decision, as it allowed us to see some of the sites. There's a bridge across the middle of the park from which you can see some very pretty buildings (that I couldn't identify) and the London Eye. It makes for a good scene, that's for sure.

Leaving the park we headed over to a collection of buildings at the opposite end to the palace. One of the buildings was the guard station, where the guards to Buckingham Palace reside. There were some sillily-dressed men sitting on horses at the gates to this building. One of them looked very likely to ride his horse into the traffic.

A short stroll from the guard station are the Houses of Parliament, also known as the Palace of Westminster. That the legislature got Westminster and the monarch Buckingham must have been a hard pill to swallow, as the Palace of Westminster is the most beautiful building I've seen. This palace is home to Elizabeth Tower, more commonly known as Big Ben.

At this point, we'd just about crashed and decided to head back to Greenwich. We were, finally, permitted entry to our room and quickly moved our things up stairs from the lockers. I must admit that the room was pleasantly surprising. There is plenty of space and a surprising range of amenities, including a kitchenette that is dangerously close to being a proper kitchen. We decided to retire to bed for a nap and wake up in a few hours to have dinner. This didn't exactly go to plan—I slept through the alarm and woke up at 3 in the morning. I guess that's jet lag for you!

T Minus Two Sleeps

On Wednesday (which is technically tomorrow) I will be setting off on my first trip overseas. This is sure to be an exciting experience, but I can't help feeling a certain dread about the prospect.

I have never been away from my family for more than a few days and the most significant amount of travel I have done is probably somewhere around 5 hours. A 30 hour flight and three weeks without my family has left me feeling a little scared.

Hopefully, these feelings will pass and I will be able to enjoy my trip.

PESA State Final Introduction

Below is the text to my opening address for the Victorian state final of the Plain English Speaking Award.

Thank you for having me here and welcome to the state finals! I’m sure that we’re about to hear some amazing speeches so I’ll try to keep this short.

But before we do get cracking, I’d like to share a story or two about PESA.  

The very first time I came here for PESA was in year ten. Rather than boring you with the details of how I went—it was pretty bad—I’d like to tell you about a conversation I had after the competition.  

That conversation was with the runner-up. She was a year twelve at the time, an incredible student and had just given an absolutely killer speech. So year ten Travis was, well, he was in awe.

After the final was done and I’m feeling pretty sad and sorry for myself, she comes up to me to tell me that I’d done a really good job. Initially, I thought she was just being polite, but then she keeps talking to me.

For ten minutes we talked. And it was during those ten minutes that I got some of the best advice and encouragement that I’d ever received. She made me promise that I’d try again at PESA the next year. She gave me some brilliant advice about VCE, advice that I desperately needed. And she also gave me a heap of information about the Kwong Lee Dow scholarship at the University of Melbourne, which I did apply for and did get thanks to her.

Post year 12, I’ve been lucky enough to get a couple of jobs because of PESA. At the moment I work at the Geelong College as a public speaking coach. Aside from the financial benefit, of course, working with the students there has been absolutely incredible. There truly is no better feeling than seeing your students smash it out of the park.

For me, PESA has been a fantastic experience. I owe a scholarship, thousands of dollars worth of work and a lot of confidence to this competition. Even more importantly, I’ve met some absolutely incredible people here, many of whom I still call friends. Indeed, I met one of my closest friends in this very room.

I’ve shared some of my stories today to hopefully convince the six of you in front of me that no matter the result today, you’ve all won.

Obviously, there will be only one of you who takes home that trophy, but compared to what you will gain in confidence, in friendship and perhaps even in finances, that trophy is just a chunk of glass. Each of you is bloody fantastic for making it this far. So relax, enjoy yourselves and most of all make sure you come back with something more than a win or a loss.

On that, good luck to each of you and let the Hunger Games begin!  

Depression is Just Another Illness

If you found a lump on your side, what would you do? If you felt pain in your chest, what would be your first response? If, after a visit to the bathroom, you noticed that your pee was violent red, where would you go?

My hope is that for each of these questions your instinct led you straight to your local doctor. This is the obvious place to go after all, isn't it? A lump could mean cancer, a pain in the chest could mean myocardial infarction and red piss could be a number of things, all of them unsavoury.

Our reason for alarm is clear in these situations: each one of these symptoms could signal imminent death. Each is a very clear sign that something is wrong with your body and that it is in need of treatment. Why then do we treat the signs of depression differently?

Depression kills. In Australia, suicide is the 14th leading cause of death, making it a bigger killer than skin cancer. These numbers are even worse for males, who made up 75% of those who took their own life in 2012. Knowing it can kill, why do we ignore the signs?

Suicidal thoughts, long terms of sadness and self-harm are tell-tale signs that you are suffering from depression. They are not an indication of your weakness, they're not the start of you losing your mind, they are not even the result of your stressful life—they are signs that you are sick and that you need help.

Your brain is just another organ. Indeed, your thoughts and feelings—all produced by the brain—are just the result of complex interactions between cells and chemicals in your brain. Just like any other organ, sometimes the functioning of the brain goes awry. This is the basis of depression and can lead to devastating consequences.

Depression is a real disease. Its symptoms are real and are just as serious as a lump in your side or a pain in your chest. If you see the signs—in yourself or in someone else—get help. Seek treatment. Save your life.

The Biochem Life: Experiment 1

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've quite enjoyed Biochemisty this year and have even gone so far as to take a practical Biochemistry subject called Techniques in Molecular Science. Here's a run down of what we've done so far!

Experiment 1

Our first experiment focused on two things: pipetting and spectrophotometry.

For the most part, the pipetting stuff was pretty straight forward. We played around with the pipettes and used scales to work out how accurate our pipetting technique was. Mine wasn't too bad, although I buggered up my work with the smallest pipette (A20)—an error of 11%! The thing I was most pleased about with the pipettes was the fact that the set I have to work with this semester is set 19, which is my birthday!

My guns

After we were done with the pipetting, we moved onto the spectrophotometry. If you're a VCE Chemistry kid, you've probably heard this called spectroscopy or, more specifically, UV-vis spectroscopy. This is a pretty nifty technique based on some basic science. Light is essentially a wave of particles, with different colours of light having different length waves. All molecules absorb light at specific wavelengths better than others. A red car, for example, is really bad at absorbing red light, instead reflecting it. This is why we see the car as red, because the red light is returned to our retinae.

Armed with this knowledge and a spectrophotometer, we can do some pretty nifty science. The first thing that we did was try to work out how the compound potassium chromate (K2CrO4) absorbs light. We managed to do this by whacking some potassium chromate into a spectrophotometer and generating something called an absorbance spectra. The spectrophotometer shines beams of light at different wavelengths through the sample of potassium chromate and measures how much light passes through. The more light that passes through, the less light that was absorbed. For the mathematically inclined, the absorbance is the log of the the 1/T, where T is transmittance. Transmittance is the fraction of light that makes it through the sample, and is given by the received light divided by the incident light.

Source: http://www.di.uq.edu.au/sparq/images/spectrophotometer.jpg

This sounds like a really complicated process, but for the most part it's all about just pressing a couple of buttons and letting the machine do the work. The technology is relatively old as well, with the machine looking as though it came from the 1920s!

The Beast

When we ran the experiment, we actually generated two spectra for potassium chromate. The spectra we generated corresponded to different dilutions of the potassium chromate solution. Apparently the results start to become a bit wonky if the absorbance gets too high, because the fraction of light that makes it through becomes smaller and smaller and thus more prone to external interference or error in measurement. To allow for this, we compared a 1/10 dilution and a 1/30 dilution, and thankfully got pretty similar results.

Absorbance spectra of potassium chromate (λmax=372nm)
Lower curve is 1/30 dilution
Higher curve is 1/10 dilution

After we had our fun with the potassium chromate, it was time to get to apply some spectrophotometry to a problem. As the potassium chromate curves show, the absorbance is dependent on the concentration of the solution (note that the 1/30 dilution absorbs a lot less than the 1/10 dilution). The spectral properties (that is what light it absorbs best) are the same for both mixtures—the shapes of the graph don't change; it's merely elongated in the 1/10 dilution.

Using this information, we can construct a relationship between absorbance and concentration. This relationship is called the Beer-Lambert equation and also contains parameters called the molar extinction coefficient and path length. For those interested, the molar extinction coefficient is a constant that tells us how that solution behaves when absorbing light and path length is just the length of solution that the light has to flow through, which is obviously a variable.

A= e x c x l

Where, A is absorbance, e is the molar extinction coefficient, c is the concentration and l is the path length. 

So, with all that science dealt with, what did we do? We were given solutions of DNA and told to calculate the concentration of DNA in that solution. Kindly, we were given the molar extinction coefficient for DNA. The path length of the sample is 1cm, so that's all dealt with. This meant that we had to use the spectrophotometer on our sample of DNA to work out the concentration of DNA in that sample.

Absorbance spectra for DNA

The maximum absorption for DNA in our sample is 259nm, so this is the peak that we'll use. By taking the value from the absorption here and plugging it into the Beer-Lambert equation, we can use some pretty simple mathematics to work out the concentration of the DNA in the sample. And that, is precisely what we did. I won't bore you with the details of that!

All in all, it wasn't a particularly bad prac. It didn't take up the whole three hours (early home time yay!) and was all fairly straight forward. I was particularly surprised by how inaccurate micropipettes could be at times and a little bit disconcerted about the potential for error when using them. They are vastly better than the "first year pipettes" though. Using the spectrophotometer was quite fun as well. When we learned about advance analytical techniques in Chemistry in year 12, everything seemed so mystical. I, perhaps naïvely, always expected that these machines were only available to men in white coats, hidden in bunkers in the middle of the desert. Part of me wishes there were more bells and lights on the spectrophotometer; more fun!

That's experiment 1! I will do my best to keep you updated about coming experiments, though I won't be able to update you about ones for which we write proper reports. Stay mass spec-tacular!

Travis

Changing Impressions

At the start of the year at O-week I was roped into writing a goal for the year on a blackboard for an Officeworks promotion. Scared to death of the prospect of 18 lectures of Biochemistry, I wrote "to survive Biochemisty" as my goal.

The start of semester was accompanied with a genuine sense of fear that Biochemisty would ruin my chances of doing well in our core subject, MCB. For the uninitiated, MCB is a mash up of 5 different subject areas and is Dante's 10th ring of hell.

As it happens, after the first three weeks of semester, I found that I really loved Biochem. Sure, metabolism was just about the worst thing in the world—you try rattling off names of enzymes for a week—but the rest of it was genuinely interesting. Our lecturer was quite obsessed with protein structure, and this was fine. It's a genuinely interesting field that I really enjoyed.

Sadly, I had the opposite experience with microbiology. Before last semester, I genuinely loved microbiology. The idea that there's a whole world of biological complexity unavailable to the naked eye is one that fascinates me. Unfortunately, this didn't translate to a particularly good experience or interest in microbiology. The lecturer was entertaining but disorganised, and the content was laborious and boring.

Both experiences made me reassess my year and my future. I had been so sure that I'd enjoy microbiology that I had signed up for the second semester subject already and bought the textbook months before it started. I unenrolled from that subject and have now found myself doing Biochem—go figure.

Public vs Private

Recently I posted a link to this article on ATARNotes. It started off a debate about the public versus the private system. Here were some of the points that I made: 



Let's get a few things straight first of all:

• This report concludes that private schools receive a much greater portion (about 50% more) of government funding, that is before fees are taken into account at all.

• It is folly to suggest that private schools are inherently good for the school system because students achieve better results in the private system

Students in the private system get more money from the government (+50%) and then have fees added on top of this, which in many cases will double the amount of funding from the government. The net effect of that of course is that the private school system is much better resourced than the public school system. The result of that? A much better education. This is of course reflected in NAPLAN and VCE results.

With the emotional arguments aside, it's not hard to imagine why this is a bad thing for the education system at large. Essentially, it encourages a gulf between the two systems and means that students who aren't able to afford private education are condemned to an increasingly second rate education. The flow on effects from this are enormous, having a huge impact on those people's lives. Students from the public school system are less likely to go to university and are less likely to have high paying jobs. With the current system, this is exacerbated (remembering that this kind of funding is only a relatively recent phenomenon). Clearly, the issue with this is that talent is wasted. Rather than having the best students receiving the best education, it is those who can best afford it who receive the best education. This way, a huge amount of ability is wasted as truly brilliant students are held back by an under resourced system that desperately struggles to create an academic environment.

Considering the emotional arguments, this is completely unfair. Even the most ardent conservatives could hardly suggest that a student should be condemned to poverty because their parents were poor before them. With these arrangements, that's what we're effectively doing. Obviously, this is not the case for every person. BUT, this kind of gap between public and private has a huge effect on social mobility. It's a completely untenable idea that the quality of a child's education should be determined by whether or not their parents were successful, not whether they were. In fact, to me this seems like a very Liberal argument. That you get what you put in from life. It seems only fair that we foster an environment where you're able to do that. The system at the moment merely helps to entrench the divide between the elite and the poor, and make sure that the same people stay on each side of the divide.

That's my considered sensible approach. In reality, this really pisses me off (as you may have noticed from the original post). Whilst I was at school, I saw classmates put up with the most incredibly awful circumstances and then having to put up with an awful school was just adding insult to injury. These were kids who had to live through being physically abused by their parents, coming to school with their uniform in tatters because they couldn't afford a new one and not being able to do their homework because their mum and her new boyfriend had decided it was high time they have a root on the couch (I really do wish that were a joke, sadly not). These kids should be able to find solace at school and should be able to work hard to change their lives, as they intend to. Instead, they are met with an unworkable school environment that condemns them to experiencing the same poverty they so desperately want to leave behind for the rest of their lives. It beggars belief then that for some reason, the government finds a greater need in taking money away from already desperate public schools and feeding it into a non-government sector that can hardly decide what to do with their new cash. It's pathetic.