Science Week 2006

As we come to a close of Australian Science Week 2006, I thought I do some promotion of an event I was actually involved in called FreshScience2006. Ok, that makes it shameless self-promotion, so be it.

Their webpage is here. Complete with a dopey picture of moi.

The idea is to pic 16 young scientists - basically based on the quality and marketability of their research, give them a crash course in media training, and plug their stories.

My press release was on the first day, entitled: "The life and death of diamonds.".

Its been a whirlwind since it came out. I've done about 6 radio interview in different places around Australia. A few things from that are:
ABC rural
More abc

Lessons from the media no.1: Make sure they understand you are a Dr. It was on the press release but somehow I ended up as Mr here. (I always think of Dr Evil's quote: "I didn't spend eight freakin years at uni to be called Mr Evil!").

Also I had nothing to do with Tiwi diamonds. Didn't mention em. But the NT geological survey decided it was going to start looking for diamonds there the same time as my report came out, so they seem to have got the two confused.

Also made it onto the Rapaport diamond news.

And ... da dada da ... the Sydney Morning Herald - whom I really didn't expect to pick up a science-y story. Not their thing. But here it is - smh.com

Don't wanna talk too soon, but a certain science tv show are also interested ...
And, I've been invited to write some pop-science articles on this, so we'll see what happens there.

In any case, its been an interesting time. And I highly recommend any young aussie researchers out there to try freshscience to get a leg-up in the media.

I'll talk about the other stories in upcoming posts.