First women’s footy game!

I became a card-carrying member of an AFLW team in season 1. I was finally pleased to see a women’s footy game in person – and a championship game, no less!

Over the weekend, Hamilton hosted the AFL Canada Cup, a tournament for North American women’s teams. I didn’t get to see the whole tournament, but I did make it for the final game between the Calgary Kookaburras (actually joint with Burnaby Eagles) and the Etobicoke Kangaroos.

Unfortunately, things did not go well for the Kangaroos. And this wasn’t the final score, which I think was 50 to zero? Weirdly, I can’t find any definitive report of game results in the tournament.

External links

The AFL Canada Cup

Aussie-rules football Canadian-style

AFL Canada Instagram

Lessons from sport for science

Two of my interests recently intersected on ABC’s The Science Show.

As regular readers might know, I have been fascinated with the creation and ongoing development of the women’s competition of Australian Rules Football (AFL). (I am a card-carrying supporter of the Melbourne Football Club’s women’s team!) When I lived in Australia, it was clear that there were women who loved the game, but as spectators. The game was very much seen as being for blokes. I don’t think I ever heard about women playing in the time I was there.

Fast forward to a women’s league that is growing and making international waves, and that is expanding the audience for this sport significantly. The brilliant picture of the atheleticism of Tayla Harris (shown) and her subsequent poor treatment over it made news in the US. That was the first time I think I ever heard AFL on the news since moving here.

Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel talks about how this new league teaches us a lot about how creating opportunities makes a difference for people. And that science could learn from this (my emphasis).

So let’s go back and think about women’s AFL in the year 2000. (A year I lived in Australia! - ZF) If you were a schoolgirl in Victoria, you couldn’t play in an AFL competition once you hit the age of 14. Why not? Because there was no competition open to teenage girls. You had to wait until you were 18 to join the senior women’s league, and that league was a community competition, without sponsors, played on the worst sports grounds, in your spare time, at your own expense.

On the other hand, your twin brother with the same innate ability would be nurtured every step of the way. And by the time he turned 18, he could easily be on a cereal box and pulling a six-figure salary. Very few people in the AFL hierarchy seem to regard this as a problem. ...

(N)ow when a teenage girl has a talent for football in 2019, she has got role models on TV, she’s got mentors in her local clubs, she’s got teachers and friends who say it’s okay for a girl to like football. In fact it’s great for a girl to like football. She’s not weird, she's not an alien, she is a star. You can see that virtuous cycle starting to form: the standard of the competition rises, it attracts more women and girls, the standard of the competition rises. And we wonder why it took us so long to see what now seems so obvious: second class status for women in sport is not acceptable.

Second class status for women in science isn’t acceptable, either.

External links

Science should emulate sport in supporting women

The last round of the year

Reason I love the AFLW competition, number 2,749:

Going into this last round of the home and away season, five out of eight teams had a shot at the grand final. And no team was guaranteed a slot in the grand final.

And the mighty Demons are well placed to be one of the two teams in the final. Go the Dees!

It's going to be a series of nail-biting games, and I love it.

My heart beats true

It’s only the second round, and I am absolutely hooked on the AFL’s women’s competition.

Why am I hooked? Check out the 8 February edition of the Outer Sanctum podcast. Listen to how people flooded out to the first round of games because they recognized it was something historic. Listen to people admitting they were moved to tears, particularly a lot of women who never had a chance to play in a top competitions. Listen to the presenters talk about the diversity in the league, and how different the players’ stories are from the men’s competition: the men footballers had a pretty straight line into professional sports. The women have day jobs of all sorts (one Demons player is a dairy farmer), and many excel at several sports.

And what other sporting league – particularly football of any code – would have an openly gay couple playing for two different teams and competing against each other? The bigger, longer running men’s competition has never had a single out gay player, never mind a couple.

I am so enthralled that I decided to become club member, even though I will never get to a game in person this year. I barracked for the Demons since I lived in Melbourne years ago, and I’m continuing that in the AFLW. Go the Dees!

Related posts

The best ad during a football game was in AFL Women’s, not the SuperBowl

External links

Outer Sanctum podcast
First openly gay AFL player couple: "We're proud, and proud of each other"
Melbourne Demons

The best ad during a football game was in AFL Women’s, not the SuperBowl

Nope, the best advertisement I saw this weekend was during Round 1 of the inaugural AFL Women’s competition. Powerful and emotional.


(There are a lot of shorter versions that snip out a section of this longer ad. The first one I saw was this one.)

I amazed by how directly it attacked tropes about the importance of looking a certain way, the double standard faced by women athletes, and about having the ambition to do what you want. Whether or not it was intended, it may be the most overtly feminist ad I’ve seen in a long time.

I have been watching the formation the of the women’s competition with interest, and I think this ad crystallized why I think this league is so important. When I lived in Melbourne, I was just so astonished by how much passion for footy was part of the city. It was unavoidable and infectious. That bloke’s game was an integral part of the culture.

This is a big cultural change.

Imagine being a young girl seeing an ad like this. Suddenly, a dream that you might have had that was impossible – playing professional AFL football – is suddenly possible. And if that is suddenly possible, what other things can you accomplish?

If a male wants to be a ballerina, he can be a ballerina. If a kid says they want to be an astronaut... then you be an astronaut. - Moana Hope

Even though my team, the Demons, lost in round 1, this first round has left me anxious to see more. I’m telling you, there are going to be doctoral dissertations about the creation of the AFL Women’s league in years to come.

P.S.—There is a website that streams AFL games to locations outside of Australia, WatchAFL.com. There is a free trial period that allows you to try the service until 22 March. This gets you through the regular season for free; the Grand Finale is 25 March 2017.

External links

AFL Women’s
Watch AFL

A draw?!

Close games are exciting, but this...?

The Zen of Presentations, Part 32: If it bleeds...

You have a big presentation coming up, and you need something to help get yourself in the right mental zone. Something to bring up your “Grrrrrrr!” factor.

Buy or rent Predator.

The movie has a track record of making people achieve.

Case study #1. Two of the film’s stars have gone on to govern American states. Schwarzenegger in California, Ventura in Minnesota.

Case study #2. In 2000, the Essendon Bombers had the sort of year that sports teams dream about. They went an entire season all but undefeated, losing only one game and taking home the premiership. In 2001, they were having another fantastic start to their season and were widely tipped to go all the way to a second premiership.

Then, half-way through the season, they played the Brisbane Lions. The Bombers lost that game, the rest of the season was weakened, and they lost to the Lions again in the Grand Final. The advice coach Leigh Matthews gave to his players before the crucial first meeting?

He showed his team Predator and told them, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”



Case study #3. In the back of the role-playing game supplement by Way of the Crab by author Rob Vaux wrote, “This book would never have been finished without the last 20 minutes of Predator.”

That’s one advantage of using a full laptop instead of a netbook: DVD drive so you can watch that last reel of Predator in the break before your talk.

Does red mean, “I win”?

Bright red is a bold fashion statement. Could it be because it’s a built in signal of dominance?

If you think about it, bright red often seems to be associated with dominance, ferocity, and so on in both humans and animals. A few years ago, Hill and Barton suggested that all other things being equal, red uniforms in sports gave a competitor an edge.

Assuming that there is a behavioural effect of bright red colouration, is it something that is learned, or is is something that animals innately respond to? Sarah Pryke tackles this question with Gouldian finches, beautiful birds living in Australia that have several different colour morphs as adults. These colours are controlled genetically.

Red heads in Gouldian finches does indeed signal dominance status in adults. These birds are not born with this distinctive colouration, however; they gain it as juveniles.

Pryke bred finches, and either reared the young with their parents of their own colour (e.g., offspring that will be red reared with red headed parents), or with the opposite colour (e.g., offspring that will be red reared with black headed parents). Thus, although the juveniles are not entirely socially naive, the colour of the parents around them is accounted for.

To test the birds’ aggressive behaviours, Pryke observed their behaviours around the feeders. Not surprisingly, birds will contest for the food.

Birds that will gain red later in life do not have easier time of it as young birds. They win and lose as many fights as birds that will have black heads later in life. Thus, the underlying genetics that are responsible for head colour are not tied in to early competitive success.

Pryke then took the juveniles and continued rearing them, either alone (where they would have no chance to learn social behaviours from other adults other than their parents), or in a small group with both red and black headed males. After this rearing condition, she put animals together again to study how they interacted with each other. These are still young birds that don’t have adult plumage yet, but Pryke artificially dyed the birds’ heads to either red, black, or blue. Blue is not a natural colour for these finches, so no it is a nice control.

Animals with red heads won more contests. Rearing condition, genetics, and all the rest didn’t make a difference. How the experimentally reddened finches won contests was interesting: the other birds just got out of their way. It was not the case that the reddened birds were suddenly acting more aggro than they were before.

All of this suggests that Gouldian finches are hatched “knowing,” as it were, that the bird with lots of red is bad news and should be avoided. This study alone does not mean that all animals will react this way; just because Gouldian finches have an innate response to red does not mean every other animal will also react the same way.

Even so, I may be tipping St. Kilda over Geelong this week.

References

Hill RA, Barton RA. 2005. Red enhances human performance in contests. Nature 435: 293.

Pryke, S. (2009). Is red an innate or learned signal of aggression and intimidation? Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.05.013

Explanation and evangelism

I was reading a review of Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True in the new issue of Current Biology. Reviewer Tom Tregenza writes:

Like many biologists, I occasionally panic that if the appeal of religious dogma can prevail over such a well-supported and rigorously tested theory as Darwin’s, then it can only be a matter of weeks before we’re all wearing sandals and the next breakthrough in oncology is expected to come from making offerings to a parsnip with a resemblance to the Virgin Mary. At such times, I vow that I will drag myself out of my ivory tower and try to explain what I do to the (surely fairly rational?) man in the street. Similarly, reading the manifestos of those seeking election to offices of the European and American Evolution Societies, there is universal agreement that evolutionary biologists need to do more to explain their work to the public. The fact is, however, that we’re still not very good at delivering on these good intentions.

This reveals a lot about why good intentions don’t deliver. People think the problem is that people outside of science don’t know. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they don’t care.

To use a wacky Zen metaphor...

I enjoy Australian Rules Football, for a lot of reasons. Those around me... don’t.

I might think that this is just due to their lack of information about the game. So I should go around and explain to them the rules and how it’s played. Then they will automatically become more interested, right?

Not necessarily. They may understand the game on an intellectual level, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to start bugging me to set up a footy tipping competition, start checking the AFL website on weekends, adopt a team and learn the club song. In short, they won’t care.

Getting someone to care is complicated. Marketers spend all day and all night trying to work it out. It isn’t just about explanation. It requires evangelism – not in the religious sense, but in the general sense that Guy Kawasaki talks about is always talking about. The sort of evangelism that sales and marketing people talk about. Going out there and connecting with people and demonstrating passion, solving peoples’ problems, engaging with them.

A lot of scientists are out there explaining Aussie rules football and wondering why people don’t show up for the games. The people who don’t show up for the game are not necessarily ignorant or uneducated about how the game is played. It takes more than explanation to create a fan.

We might be better off if we ditched phrases like “public outreach” and thought about “building a fan base.” We should create science fans.

(I’ll bet this post didn’t head in the direction you thought it would from reading the title.)

Wrong again

Geelong didn't have a date with destiny after all.

Hawthorn 18.7 (115) d Geelong 11.23 (89)

The GF tip for 2008

I think Geelong will duplicate Essendon's fairytale season. Geelong over Hawthorn by 40 points.

Go the Cats!

Wooden spoon

Poor Dees. I guess it's a case of wait 'til next year...

Note: The "wooden spoon" indicates the team that comes last in the AFL home and away season.

Bad start

...For my Dees. A thumping at the hands of the Saints! Blast!

On a related note, I loved this article that catches a little bit of the passion that got me actually interested in Aussie Rules when I lived in Melbourne. Remember it the next time you're looking for a pub in southern Australia.

So much for my tipping

One point?! So much for my prediction of a blowout in this year's AFL Grand Final. Congrats to West Coast.

A quick tip

West Coast vs. Sydney: I don't have a strong feeling for which way it'll swing, but I'm betting that it's going to be a blowout instead of a close game like last year. That was certainly the case the last time two teams (Collingwood and Brisbane) faced each other in back-to-back premierships: a close match the first year, a blowout the second.

Yes!

Go the Dees!

Weird week

As you can see, I decided to spruce up the joint a little in a fit of mild boredom.

Not been a great week in a lot of ways. The online learning system for the entire university went down Thursday afternoon and is still not back up. Was kept busy by another job candidate visit and a guest seminar speaker. Next week: two more job candidates. Week after that: job candidate and seminar speaker. And the seminar speaker is mine invite, Jim Belanger from Louisiana State University.

Meanwhile, saw a lot of stuff that was depressing. Like the kafuffle here in Texas about Eric Pianka (documented over at Panda's Thumb). A couple of members of my department are prominent members of the Texas Academy of Science. I'm a member myself, but wasn't at this year's meeting, where Pianka was honored for his research, and where he gave the talk that precipitated the current tempest. So this story is closer to home than I'd like.

Also was somewhat worried to learn 60% of America's fresh vegetables come from one valley in California. And was extremely depressed to learn that about 30-40% of Americans don't know where food comes from. (These last two from this week's Science Show; specifically here.) When about a third of people are so divorced from anything biological that they don't know that meat requires killing an animal, is it any wonder why we can't convince people of more subtle biological theories like evolution? Or why people don't understand the ecological principles like carrying capacity that Eric Pianka talks about?

And the Dees have lost two in a row. Dang.

The announcement of the discovery of the ancient Devonian fish Tiktaalik in Nunavut was quite nice, however. I was listening to a radio interview with one of the authors on Quirks and Quarks, and was rather surprised when they said that their fossils ranged from over 1 meter to almost 3 meters! I knew they were impressive in some of the details of their limbs and neck, but I didn't quite appreciate how... you know... big they were. That said, I was a little irritated (again) when watching the CNN news ticker at the gym about the story. It read something like this fish was a link "leading to land animals with four legs and a backbone." Which implies that fish don't have backbones, which they do.

Me time

I didn't work at all this weekend. No going to the office. Didn't even check university email. After seven day work weeks for the last month, I felt by the end of last week that I was working incredibly inefficiently. And this time, I didn't even feel guilty about it. Not at all.

So what did I do with this time? I watched the AFL Grand Final. Not a visually exciting game, because it was low scoring, but it was a very intense, close game that could have gone either way, right down to the last three seconds of the game. I saw two movies: Transporter 2 and Corpse Bride, bnoth of which I rather enjoyed. Got to go out one night, shop a little, watch some anime, and generally decompress and try to clear my head.

Didn't spend much time outside, because... let me put it this way. There was a penny on the ground outside the theatre. I try to pick it up. And suddenly I was doing a Gollum impersonation. "Aieeee! It burns us!" It was just freaking hot from sitting in the sun on the pavement. It was screaming hot, record highs out both days, with temperatures around 42°C both days. It was dificult to handle the sunscreen and seatbelt in the car, and I felt like my bum was burning a little when I sat in the car seat. I didn't like it. Temperatures cannot drop soon enough for me.

I think my efforts to clear my head worked at least a little, as I was able to quickly pull together a short letter of intent for a grant today and get it into the mail before the mail guys picked up the outgoing mail. I also got a few other things finished, and was actually able to start planning ahead for a meeting I want to go to in a few months time.

A mysterious scratch: the tone of the week

I woke up last Monday morning with a big scratch on the left side of my face that was not there when I went to bed Sunday night. And that has sort of set the tone for this week, which has been not a very fun one.

Tuesday was marked by an interminable college meeting. It when on for about 2 and a quarter hours, and I got about two or three useful pieces of information from it. Luckily, I was smart and was working through the President's address in the morning, which I heard went on for an hour and forty minutes, and had about the same amount of useful content as the afternoon meeting.

I think one good thing I learned around this time was that the first stage in our green card application went through. And quite a bit faster than I was expecting. Now, we begin phase 2: which means more money, medical exams, pictures, and more paperwork. But it should be worth it, as it should make it possible for my S.O. Sarah to get a job, which would be a huge difference.

Wednesday was marked by more meetings, although these were my own fault, because I called them! I'm the graduate program coordinator, so I wanted to meet with our Master's students. I ended up with a two hour meeting in the morning, and a one hour meeting in the evening (for part time students with day jobs). They were good, but draining. Plus, I had people one after the other in my office, again mostly talking about the graduate program.

I think Wednesday was also the day I got a rejection letter for one of my manuscripts.

Thursday was the first day of class. I didn't have any classes to teach, but it's always a ratty day, so I went to the beach with my student Michael to collect mud shrimp and sand crabs. The sand crabs have become scarce: only saw one that I hit with a shovel. The mud shrimp were more plentiful, though. It was a good trip, but again, a couple of hours in the sun and heat on the beach meant I came home with a bit of pink on my skin and was again pretty tired.

By Friday, half the mud shrimp we collected the day before died. It was also my first day of my class, plus I was presenting a paper for our Journal Club. I was also running around trying to deal with a variety of administrative things. Like a graduate student who is apparently missing one class to graduate, and I could have sworn I'd checked he had that requirement. Don't know how that happened. Went to the pub for a bit afterwards, but had to leave when Chris and Jason started smoking their foul cigars. Luckily, by then Sarah was there to rescue me. Again, just a long day.

And this morning I wake up to find Port Adelaide won their match over the Dockers, which means tomorrow's match with Essendon is a must win if my team the Demons are to make it to the AFL finals, and break the odd-year hoodoo that has plagued them for years now. Go the Dees!

And I spent most of the day at work because there's so much that needs doing. And more mud shrimp died. And I'll have to go again tomorrow to try and get a little more work done in time to meet some Monday deadlines.

Oh, something I've been forgetting to mention: I have a little technical essay up at the International Society for Neuroethology website. It harkens back to my first post-doc.

Bits and pieces

What have I been up to lately?

I've been talking to job candidates a lot. Even though I'm not on the search committee this year, I'm trying to get as much face time with each of the candidates as I possibly can. I think we're three down, and have four to go. Whee!

I'm grinding away on another grant proposal, this one for the Coastal Studies Lab. I've got a few weeks to work on it, luckily, but it requires coordinating information from several people, so that'll make it a bit tricky.

I'm geeking out over the start of the new footy season, even though my first tip for the season was wrong.

But even that pales in comparison to the top-flight geek-out I'm having over the latest teaser trailer for the new Doctor Who series. It's going to be a bit of a struggle not to watch that over and over while I should be working! It makes my heart go pitter patter thumptthumpthumpthumpthump...