Scott Watkins Blog

I can tell my house to turn all of my lights on and off. I can use my voice to address them individually. I can change the brightness and the colour. And it works, it really does. It’s the future. We’re here.

tl;dr: The LIFX wifi bulbs are a viable solution for complete home lighting and controlling them by voice with an Amazon Echo is probably the ‘killer app’ that makes them worthwhile. The Schlage Sense lock is OK as an electronic lock but doesn’t deliver on it’s HomeKit connectivity promises. The integration of a Logitech hub with other smart home systems is pretty good. Sonos has a great sound system and the Apple Music integration is very well done. The single biggest challenge with all of this is that most home wifi routers can only handle about 25 devices, something almost universally overlooked in any discussion of IoT or smart homes.

Over the past 6 months I’ve had the opportunity to renovate a newly-purchased apartment and build-in a number of “smart home” devices including lights, door locks, sound and entertainment systems and a voice controller for them all. This is the story of what I’ve done and how I did it. It’s a pretty in depth review of some aspects of the system but I’ve broken it into two parts. In the first part I’ll focus mainly on the user experience. In the second, I’ll go into detail about how I set it up and comment on some of the technical problems and limitations I’ve encountered. I’m particularly motivated to do the latter because some parts were actually a lot harder than I’d imagined. Hopefully by bringing a few different bits together I can help someone else setup their own system.

Our “Smart Home”

In late 2015 we bought an apartment in South Melbourne and undertook a reasonably substantial renovation. This gave us the opportunity to change all of the light fittings and completely re-do the lighting layout in every room. The apartment has 2 bedrooms and a bathroom on the top level; a lounge, dining room and kitchen on the middle level and an entrance to the street and garage on the lower level. The total living space is about 80 square metres (860 square feet or about 9 squares). The products I’ve integrated (so far!) are 24 LIFX smart lights, a Schlage Sense door lock, 2 Sonos sound systems, a Logitech Harmony Elite hub, 2 Amazon Echoes as well as the Yonomi and IFTTT apps.

Lighting - LIFX

When we bought it, the apartment had 43 internal halogen downlights plus 4 external lights on the top balcony. 43 lights in what is effectively a 6 room apartment was overkill and the halogen downlights did a very poor job of lighting the house anyway. To make things even worse, from both a practical and an energy efficiency point of view, large banks of lights were connected to single switches. In the kitchen, for example, the four ceiling-mounted downlights plus two hanging pendant lights were all on a single switch.

I first heard about LIFX bulbs at a Startup Victoria Meetup event a few years ago. LIFX are an Australian company that launched their product via a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Every LIFX bulb has an array of LEDs and its own built-in WIFI chip that enables you to control the operation, colour and brightness of every light individually. There are plenty of reviews out there about LIFX bulbs so I won’t go into great detail about their operation. However, every review I’ve read has only really considered one or two lights and often just in a lamp. This review, for example, while very good, concludes that having a smart light in a bathroom is not really useful. As I’ll explain, by considering the LIFX bulbs as a total home lighting system that is integrated with voice control, I do believe that they can be useful in every room. I think it’s a very important distinction to consider replacing every light in the home and I also think it’s useful to review them after several months of use rather than several hours or days.

As they are LEDs, the LIFX bulbs are very bright and pretty efficient. We replaced 43 dim, inefficient, 50W halogen bulbs with 20 11W LIFX LED bulbs (plus a further 4 that we put on the balcony). This reduced our power consumption by lights by almost 90%, a huge saving. The LIFX Color 1000 is capable of all colours plus white while the LIFX White 800 is limited to just the various shades of white. We have a mix of both. Most of our lights are coloured but the lights in the stairways, powder room and laundry are just white. Each light puts out a maximum brightness of around 1000 lumens when on a neutral white. In my experience, this means that most rooms only need one or two bulbs where 4 or even 8 halogens might have been required.

The best thing about the LIFX bulbs is their wireless control. If you just install them in a lamp or use them for a few days then the act of turning your lights on and off with your mobile phone may not seem to be that useful. However, we’ve now had them in place for 6 months and I can definitely say that having the entire house lit by wirelessly controlled lights does completely change the way you interact with lights. When you think about it, turning on a light switch is a pretty clunky way of doing things. The outcome you’re seeking is light but the action you have to undertake is walk to a specific place and hit a switch. Often that switch is well inside the room that you want to light so you have to walk in the dark to turn on the light. What the LIFX bulbs enable you to do is to control the light where you are going to be or where you’ve been, rather than just where you are. For example, when we arrive home we can pull out the phone and quickly turn on lights to areas such as the stairs, lounge and kitchen. We can even do this over the cellular network, the app doesn’t have to be connected to our home wifi to control the lights. 

The LIFX iOS app supports widgets so you can put your favourite lights in a screen that can be accessed even while it’s locked. It just takes a small swipe down from the top of the screen and you can access the groups. Another example is when you go to bed. I always have my iPad beside the bed to read at night and I can simply go to bed and any lights that are on can be turned off once I’m in bed. The reverse applies in the morning, I can turn on the lights from the bed so I can see where I’m going before I leave the room.

Lights can be grouped into whatever combination makes sense and are not bound by the electrical connections to the lights. For example, I can group the lights at the top and bottom of my stairs into a single group. What would normally require two, separate, physical switches can now be achieved with one button in the app. Addressing each light individually also means that I have increased flexibility with regards to which parts of a room are lit. For example, in the living room I have four lights in a square that are grouped together. However, I can use the LIFX app to only turn the back two lights on (when watching TV for example). Combinations of lights, including colours and brightness, can also be saved as specific scenes so you can have a whole range of specific setups available for activation in the LIFX app. 

The app also has built-in timers so you can trigger lights, groups or scenes at pre-determined times. You can even link these times to sunrise and sunset so the actions occur at a different time each day. For the balcony lights I have them set to come on 10 minutes before sunset and go off at 11pm, thus combining a variable and an absolute time in the same program. You can be as creative and as random as you like with programs and can even manually turn lights on and off from anywhere in the world. As a security measure to make your home look occupied, this is so far beyond a lamp plugged into a mechanical timer.

The ability to change colour is a key feature of the LIFX bulbs and they claim that 16 million colours are possible. Many reviews highlight that competing bulbs (such as the Philips Hue) don’t do a good job with all colours and are not as bright. To achieve their range, LIFX bulbs have red, green, blue and white LEDs. At full brightness all LEDs are used so the colours of the lights are somewhat washed out. Once the brightness is turned down to 50% (or lower) the white LEDs are not used so all colours appear very rich. Indoors, I don’t use the colours very often but outside, on the balcony, I’ve setup a nightly purple scene and have also got a green and gold scene that I can activate after Australian sporting victories. One thing I wouldn’t recommend with the colours is putting guacamole in a purple-lit room. Green turns a very awful brown colour under purple light and there’s no way people will put that on their corn chips!

While the colours are fun the various whites (from cool to warm) are probably more useful day to day. With normal LEDs it is often a difficult choice as to how cool or warm the bulbs should be. Furthermore, differences in bulbs can easily mean that different LEDs in the same room can have slightly different colour temperatures. With normal LEDs, once you’ve chosen the colour you’re stuck with that. With LIFX bulbs, the colour temperature of the white can be adjusted between 2500 and 9000 K. When I first installed the lights it was summer in Australia so having very cool white lights (7000 K) made the apartment feel very bright and modern. However, as we moved into winter I found the cool white too stark so I shifted the colours to 5500 K, a warmer white. Colour temperature definitely changes the way you feel in a room and having the ability to vary this at the press of a button is amazing.

Another feature of having smart lights is that the functionality of the bulbs can be increased by changes to the app or cloud-based service. In the past few months LIFX have added a number of new features to their app. It is now possible to revert back to the previous colour or setting for a light and to copy and paste colours from one light to another. Each light also has a timed dimming feature that can be accessed by a long press on each light in the app. This brings up a menu that enables you to gradually dim the light over time. For example, it’s possible to set a bedroom light to slowly dim over time.

Setting up the lights was fairly straightforward. The main difficulties I encountered were due to overloading our wireless router with devices and I’ve also found upgrading the firmware on 24 lights to be a fairly tedious process. I’ll go into detail about these issues in Part Two of this blog.

Other smart devices - lock, hub and sound

Apart from the lights I’ve also installed a few other smart home devices. On the front door I installed a Schlage Sense door lock. This is a wireless door lock that also has an electronic keypad and a physical key. Having 3 ways to get in was essential to me choosing this lock. This is our only external door and I wanted to make sure it was both secure and reliable. Unlike the lights, the lock is battery powered so it uses Bluetooth to communicate, not wifi. This means it’s quite slow to make a connection. The Schlage lock does support Apple’s HomeKit protocol which, in theory, means that I should be able to access the door from anywhere, via wifi or a cellular network. To do this, the lock needs to be within range of an Apple TV. HomeKit uses the Apple TV as a hub, making a Bluetooth connection between the lock and the Apple TV which then enables connection over the internet. I have a Gen 4 Apple TV that is about 8 metres from the lock (within the recommended range) but the lock doesn’t connect to this. I therefore put a Gen 3 Apple TV even closer, about 3 metres away. This does connect but it’s extremely slow. If I access the lock using the Schlage app over wifi it can take several minutes to find the lock. So, the idea of being able to check if the door is locked from anywhere in the world, which sounds great, doesn’t actually work. When I am within direct Bluetooth range of the lock I can make a connection with my iPhone or Apple Watch (via the iPhone). So it definitely does work that I can say “Siri, unlock the door” to my watch and the door will unlock. 

However, in practice, I need to be standing in front of the door for at least 10 seconds before the Bluetooth connection is established. In that time it is quicker just to use the PIN on the electronic keypad. I understand that the connection strength is limited by the lock being battery powered but, at present, the Schlage lock doesn’t deliver on some of its key promises. Having a lock with an electronic keypad is though, still very useful. Most days, I leave the home with no key at all and am confident that I can get back in.

The next device I setup was a Logitech Harmony Elite hub. This hub facilitates the use of a single, universal Bluetooth remote control that can connect to my TV, Apple TV and satellite TV box. Having a Bluetooth remote means that you don’t have to point the remote at the device and the satellite box can be stored out of sight in a cupboard. The remote can be customised to initiate multiple functions with a single button press. For example, I have a single button that turns the TV and Apple TV on and sets the TV to the correct source. A separate button does the same for the TV and the satellite box. The Harmony Elite can also connect to the LIFX bulbs so, if I’m watching TV and the remote is the easiest thing to access, I can use that to turn specific lights on and off. In general the remote works ok. It does rely on IR transmitters to communicate with the TV and occasionally the TV doesn’t respond. However, pressing “help” forces the remote to try again and it generally gets it right. The Bluetooth remote does lag very slightly but the supplied remote for our satellite box (a Foxtel IQ3) does this too. Logitech also have an iOS app that enables you to access all of the features of the physical remote via your iPhone or iPad. In practice, this also takes a while to connect and I rarely use it. Overall, I’m happy with the Harmony Elite as a universal remote control but, as with the door lock, some of the promised features don’t quite work as well as they should.

The final connected devices I’ll comment on are my two Sonos sound systems. I’ve had one of these (a Play:5) for several years but recently bought a second Play:5 so that I now have one on each level of the house. There are many reviews online of Sonos speakers so again, I won’t go into great detail. However, it’s important to note that the Sonos speakers are true wifi speakers. They don’t use a Bluetooth connection which needs to be specifically activated every time you wish to use the speaker. Having a wifi connection means that the speakers are always on and I can play any music from my computer, my iPhone, my iPad or my entire Apple Music collection, anytime I want. I can control each room separately or group them so that the same music plays throughout the whole house. The integration of Apple Music (subscription required) into the Sonos app means that I can play almost any song, any time, anywhere in my home. The sound quality of the speakers is amazing too and Sonos now lets you tune the speaker using an iPhone so the speaker is actually optimised for the room it is in.

Smart home apps - Yonomi and IFTTT

With the emergence of a wide range of smart home devices a number of apps have appeared that attempt to link them all together. To date, I’ve only tried Yonomi on my iOS devices. Yonomi will connect to all of the devices I’ve mentioned here, the lights, lock, entertainment hub and the speakers. A key feature of Yonomi is that you can combine many different actions and devices into a single “recipe” that can be triggered by an action or an event. For example, I can create an action that will turn the TV and satellite box on and adjust the lights to a “TV mode”. In theory, I can also have an action that turns on certain lights when my iPhone arrives at home (as signalled by its GPS position). These sort of recipes can be enhanced by linking them with another online service, If This Then That (IFTTT). IFTTT allows you to create recipes of your own or modify recipes made by others to trigger a whole range of multi-device actions. Online reviews highlight how you can have your lights flash a certain colour if you get an email or a social media message or in response to events such as sport or weather. I even read about recipes that can flash lights or play sounds (through Sonos) when bizarre things such as a spacewalk or a US Presidential bill signing takes place. Personally, I haven’t found the need to do any of these things so my use of IFTTT has been limited to a single recipe that turns my TV and satellite box on. As devices and connections improve I’ve no doubt that services such as IFTTT and Yonomi will become more important.

Voice Control - Hello Alexa

I realise that this blog is already pretty long but if you’ve stuck with me this far, keep going, this is definitely the best bit! After setting up all of the devices I described above, the main way of interacting with them was via my iPhone. This was ok and certainly useful but for a while I’d been reading about Amazon’s Echo, an internet-connected speaker/microphone that lets you control things using your voice. The Echo is still not officially available to Australians and until earlier this year it only really worked with a select range of smart devices so I wasn’t that tempted by it. However, when Amazon began opening up their system LIFX were quick to enable direct control of the lights by the Echo. This triggered (geek pun intended) me to buy two Echoes, one for each level of our house. The result was even better than I imagined.

The Amazon Echo works by constantly listening for a trigger word - “Alexa” (you can change that to “Echo” if you happen to be named “Alexa”). When it hears “Alexa” it records the next audio fragment and sends this to a a cloud-based server that analyses it for commands. When it recognises a command, certain hardware or audio responses are triggered. For the lights, this means that I can say “Alexa, turn the kitchen on” and the kitchen lights come on. It’s truly amazing. There are many reviews online that detail what Alexa can do but the short video at the top of this blog shows some of the key things I use the Echo for. I can ask Alexa about the weather or to play music or the radio. I can add things to a shopping list that then appears in the app on my iPhone. Alexa can set alarms, tell jokes, answer some trivia questions and play some simple games. I can use the Echo to activate the IFTTT routine I described above so I can say “Alexa, trigger TV on” and the Echo will send that command to IFTTT which will then send signals over the internet to the Logitech hub to turn my TV and satellite box on.

The Amazon Echo even further enhances the functionality of the LIFX lights. As with the LIFX app, lights can be added to groups but, unlike the LIFX app, lights can be in more than one group at once. So, I have groups called things such as “Living Room” and “Kitchen” but I also have another one called “First Floor”. So, when I want, I can turn individual rooms on and off but, at the end of the night, I can walk upstairs and simply say “Alexa, turn the first floor off” as I walk up the stairs and any lights that are on downstairs will be switched off. You can dim and change the colour of the lights using voice commands although the latter requires slightly more specific language. While I can turn lights on and off with commands as succinct as “Alexa, bedroom on”, if I want to change colour I have to say “Alexa, tell LIFX to make the bedroom blue”.

The Amazon Echo is amazingly responsive. The service records, sends, analyses and acts on audio commands very rapidly. For the lights, it’s generally about 2 seconds from when I finish speaking to when the light comes on, you can check the video if you want to be precise! This is obviously much quicker than walking to a switch and, as I mentioned earlier, it completely changes the way you interact with lights. With the Echo, I simply walk around the house telling Alexa to do things. I can turn lights on and off in distant rooms, I can action things while my hands are full and once you get used to the volume and tone of voice that the Echo most easily understands, the success rate of getting things done is very high.

I mentioned earlier that the Echo is not yet officially available to Australians. This is because some of the key features, such as ordering goods directly from Amazon, only work in the US. I go into these issues and describe how I bought the devices in Part Two of this blog.

Conclusion

In Part One of this blog I mainly focused on the user experience of the connected devices I have, particularly the LIFX lights and the Amazon Echo. In Part Two I’ll describe the main issues that I encountered in setting up the devices and some technical observations that have come after 6 months of use.

Light fittings

Finding light fittings to accommodate the LIFX bulbs was the first issue that was harder than I expected. The LIFX bulbs come with E26, E27 or B22 fittings. Of these, E27 is the most popular in Australia, it’s what was once the standard, screw-in fitting. The proliferation of halogen and now LED downlights has made screw-in ceiling fittings extremely rare. I was told, in one lighting store, that I was “stupid” to be trying to install screw-in downlight fittings as part of my renovation as they said that bulbs would be impossible to find and that they were obsolete. It took a lot of searching before I found some downlight fittings that could accomodate the LIFX bulbs. I eventually got Envirolux by Lucci fittings (SKU: 160269).

During my search I did contact LIFX and asked them for advice but they weren’t able to help. The more I think about it the more I believe that this is a mistake on their behalf. LIFX seem to be aggressively supporting a wide range of software partners but the light fitting is fundamental to their product. Putting LIFX bulbs in lamps (which more often have the sort of fittings they use) is fine and will provide mood and novelty lighting. However, surely a goal of LIFX should also be to target new builds and renovations and offer a whole home lighting system. I’m testament to the fact that this works but finding fittings was hard. LIFX could easily feature a list of suitable fittings on their website and link to online retailers. Light fittings have to be independently electrically certified and installed so LIFX would not be assuming any risk in creating such a list. Why they don’t is a mystery to me.

The internet of (too many) things

Most reviews of the LIFX bulbs describe their setup as straightforward and I’d concur. The app-based setup is easy. One problem that does come from having so many lights is that when a firmware device is pushed out I have never had success in getting all 24 bulbs to update. What happens is that some bulbs update but then the app tells me there’s a problem and that I need to turn the lights on and off at the switch to continue with the upgrade process. However, the app gives no indication as to which lights have been updated. I’ve therefore had to walk around the house switching 24 lights on and off. On the first few occasions it took me days to get the firmware updated in all lights. They still worked without the update but the app was constantly reminding me to update. I did finally workout that if you go into the app and email the support diagnostic file to yourself (rather than to LIFX support) you can open this text file and see a list of the Firmware status of every bulb on the network. I’d suggest that LIFX should add this information into the details under each bulb in the app, perhaps on the screen where the name is.

The biggest single problem I had with setting up the lights was that I had too many. Early on I discovered that all home wifi routers have a limit on the number of wifi devices that they can talk to at once. For some, this is as low as 10 and most seem to top out at about 25 or 30. With all of the lights plus phones, tablets, laptops and various other connected devices we needed to connect about 40 devices. The number of devices that a router can connect to is not typically specified, I had to contact customer support at various manufacturers and ask about each router. Most manufacturers only gave vague answers such as “less than 20” or, “we’ve tested up to 25” etc. I had one frustrating call where I was asking whether the limit was the router assigning addresses or the wifi chip connecting to devices. That service call didn’t provide an answer but I suspect it’s the latter.

When I setup my first wifi router, a TPLink Archer D9, I got excellent wifi coverage all over the apartment (using a 2.4GHz network) - all three levels and in all rooms. As I setup each bulb I could connect to them without problems. However, once I had all the lights setup I could see them falling off the network in the app as the router failed to maintain a connection to all bulbs at once.

Bulbs would variously go “offline” in the app and there was no way I could make them come back on. It was quickly obvious that I needed to setup a second wireless access point but this was where I ran into problems. I had considered this possibility when we planned the renovations and had installed 4 ethernet points around the house. I’d done this in case the wireless router didn’t reach everywhere. I’m no network expert and deciding what to plug into what wasn’t easy for me to work out. This website did a pretty good job of explaining what I had to do. The key points are to turn DHCP off on the second wifi router, plug the cables into the correct ports and set the broadcast channels to not overlap. I bought a TPLink Archer C9 to use as the second wireless access point. This is similar to the D9 but is cheaper as it isn’t a modem. I initially gave both wifi points the same name (but broadcasting on different channels). I ran with this setup for about 2 weeks but was still seeing problems with lights being unresponsive and dropping off the LIFX app. When I looked at the devices list in the control panels of the two wifi access points I could see that the various wifi devices we had were not evenly distributed between the two. I’ve read in several places that devices tend to stick with the network they’re connected to (even if the signal from another is stronger) until it drops out completely. This meant that for devices such as our phones, tablets and watches, that move around the house, they could all too easily all end up on the one access point.

I again contacted LIFX support about the problem and they suggested that having two separate networks might be better. Accordingly, I left the IP range, DHCP settings and broadcast channels as they were but changed the SSID on the second wifi access point to a different name. So, to be clear, the D9 was still being the modem and the router (assigning IP addresses) but there were two, differently named wifi networks, one connected to the other by cable. I then manually reset all the bulbs and a few of the hardwired wifi devices we have and then manually distributed them between the two networks in a fairly even way. The end result was that each wifi access point had 18-20 devices attached to it. After 5 months of daily testing I’m happy to say that this solution works. The lights’ connections have been very stable, our other devices have remained connected and it all works. We do turn some of the lights off at the physical switch. The downstairs powder room, for example, has an exhaust fan on the same circuit as the light so turning the light off by wifi leaves the fan on, something we have no need to do. The laundry is a room that we only use the light in when we’re in there so we usually just use the switch. Turning lights off at the switch disconnects them from the network but they typically reconnect within 10 seconds when they are switched back on. There have been one or two occasions where a light wouldn’t go back onto the network no matter how many times I turned it on or off. On these occasions I did reset one of the wifi access points and all connections were restored. This is a little annoying and is, I think, a hint that, at 18-20 devices per wifi access point, we’re probably close to having too many devices. I’m therefore open to discovering a single wifi access point that will accomodate all devices, ideally from one location. However, as things stand the lights have been very robust and the connections have almost always been re-established after power or internet outages. The system is highly reliable and even if the network or connections go down, the physical light switches always work.

Getting an Amazon Echo Down Under

As I mentioned in Part One of this blog, the Amazon Echo is not officially available to Australians. If you try and order one from Amazon, they will only ship to US addresses. There are good reasons for this. The primary one is that some of the key features of the Echo only work in the US. It is possible, for example, to order things from Amazon using voice control. Amazon do not (yet) ship electronics or groceries in Australia so this feature doesn’t work outside of the US. Next, the Echo has a flash briefing news service where the latest headlines from NPR are read out. This news service is US-focused so it’s mainly filled with stories about Donald Trump and (entirely preventable) shootings. Finally, the Echo is also able to answer many questions about US sport but has not yet discovered cricket or rugby.

As Amazon won’t ship an Echo to Australia I had to use a third party service to buy them. I used BigAppleBuddy.com, a service setup by some Australians in New York. They will order anything online in the US and then re-ship it to Australia. They charge a flat fee of $50 per order (not per item) for their service so buying two Echoes at once didn’t inflate the price too much. The ordering process involved a bit of back and forth as I had to tell them what I wanted and they then quoted me a price which I accepted. They then emailed me an invoice and payment instructions. Once they confirmed receipt of the funds (by PayPal) they purchased and then shipped the devices. Shipping was rapid, only a few days. Once I received the devices I then needed two plug adaptors (just adaptors, not transformers) for Australian electrical outlets.

Another issue with using the Echo outside the US is your physical place in the world. When setting up the Echo you have to put in a US postal code which is used to specify your location. This has long been a problem with other US-only devices, such as the Nest thermostats. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy work-around that will work for me for six months of the year. Guam, you see, is a US protectorate in the Western Pacific Ocean and Guam’s timezone is the same as Australian Eastern Standard Time. So, even though I live in Melbourne, Alexa thinks I live in Guam. A problem may come in October when we switch to summer time in Melbourne and Guam does not. At the moment we do use Alexa to set an alarm each day, you can lie in bed and say “Alexa, set the alarm for 6am”. I guess we might have to mentally adjust the time ourselves, which could be tricky after a late night! The other downside to specifying our location as Guam is that we have to use more specific language when asking Alexa about the weather. In the US you can just say “Alexa, what’s the weather forecast” and Alexa will read out the weather forecast. When using the Echo in Melbourne/Guam I have to say “Alexa, what’s the weather forecast for Melbourne Australia”. I have to specify Australia as there’s a Melbourne in Florida.

Edit (October 2016): When daylight savings started in Melbourne using a Guam postcode no longer worked to give the correct time. I therefore followed the instructions here for using Request Maker to change the timezone. The instructions are pretty clear but see my comment of 2nd October, 2016 for some specific tips that I needed to use.

The need for (internet) speed

Most people in Australia are aware that our internet speeds are pretty poor. The government is (slowly) building the National Broadband Network (NBN) but the connection of our suburb, South Melbourne, is still years away. As a result, our connection is an ADSL2+ connection that sees maximum speeds of 11Mb/s down and 0.8Mb/s up. Yes, I know, it’s terrible. Australians have, in recent times, rapidly embraced streaming video services such as Netflix. The consequences of this are that at peak viewing times our internet speeds can drop substantially. When this happens, the Amazon Echo can occasionally become a little erratic or even non-responsive. This is rare but Saturday and Sunday nights are the most problematic. I can get speeds of about 80Mb/s down and 30 Mb/s up with my LTE cellular connection on my iPhone 6S so it may be that I need to invest in a secondary internet connection that switches over when the ADSL speed drops (if such a thing even exists). Speed problems are potentially only going to get worse in Australia as there is not a lot of incentive for companies to invest in the existing network when it is going to be made redundant (soonish) by the NBN. However, it’s also possible that Amazon will improve the efficiency of their processing and reduce the amount of data that is sent up and down in response to a request.

Conclusion

Running 42.2km in under 223 minutes is not an especially significant achievement. There’s nothing magical about 223 minutes (or, for me, 3 hours 43 minutes and 6 seconds, precisely) and to put it in perspective, the men’s marathon world record is currently 122 minutes and 57 seconds! However, for the past 6 years, running a marathon under that time has been an important goal for me. Two weeks ago, I finally managed to do it and my success in achieving this was due in no small part to having a coach. This is my reflection on how I learned to run slower to run faster, how I train while travelling and on why coaching made a difference.

My marathons

I ran my first marathon (Melbourne, Australia) in October 2010. Going into the run I’d done a few half marathons and had trained by roughly following a program on the race website. I had no real idea of what it would be like and I set out with the goal of finishing in under 4 hours. While 4 hours might have been my finishing time goal, I set out on the run at a pace that was much faster than that. As I tired towards the end I was buoyed by being so far ahead of my goal. I recall thinking that at the 32km mark I was 10 minutes ahead of where I’d been on my training run of that distance. As I neared the finish it was clear I was going to go under 3 hours 45 minutes, a goal I’d thought well beyond me. I finished in 3 hours 43 minutes and 6 seconds and, on repeated reflection over the years, always felt that I probably had a bit more in me on that day, I probably could have gone a little bit faster.

Over the next six years I repeatedly set about trying to beat that first time and I’ve plotted the data from those runs on the figure shown below. The graph plots my cumulative average pace against distance. It tells a pretty sorry story and I now think I should have drawn this graph a few years ago. It’s very clear that I repeatedly went out too fast and then faded.

For my second marathon I did the Sydney Marathon in 2012. Full of confidence my goal was to go closer to 3 hours 30 minutes. Yes, I thought I could take 13 minutes off my personal best (PB), how naïve! I set out in that race running sub-five minute kilometres, a pace that was way too fast and at around 24km I started to tire. As soon as I realized that I wasn’t going to beat my previous time my motivation subsided and I jogged home to finish in 4 hours and 5 minutes. I remember thinking that pushing to get under 4 hours was pointless as I’d already achieved that.

Slowing down at the first sign that I wasn’t going to beat my PB was a habit that continued in subsequent years. The same thing happened in the Melbourne Marathon of 2013 but at about 38 kilometres I found some motivation and managed to arrest my slow-down. The result was a painful near miss, I ran 3 hours 43 minutes and 11 seconds. Missing a PB by 6 seconds is a ridiculously small amount over 42 kilometres! By 2014 I was back to fading, recording a classic “wall-hitting” effort as I slowed over the final 6 kilometres to finish in 3 hours and 55 minutes.

In 2015 I tried a different tactic and ran a marathon in the lead-up to my main marathon. I ran the DMZ Cherwon Marathon in South Korea 6 weeks out from the Melbourne marathon but ran a fairly controlled run where my aim was to stick to 6 minutes per kilometre and treat it as a long training run. This did have the unintended consequence of helping me to smash my half marathon PB in Shepparton a few weeks earlier. Over the years my half marathon times had been remarkably similar and in July of 2015 I’d finally set a new half marathon PB (by 15 seconds). A week before the DMZ marathon I managed to lower that mark by over 2 minutes, running 1 hour 40 minutes and 3 seconds. Despite this success, when I got to the 2015 Melbourne Marathon I again ran out of energy and faded to finish in 4 hours and 6 minutes.

Being coached and missing targets

As I said at the start, running under 223 minutes is not a significant goal in the big scheme of things. However, training for a marathon involves months of preparations. Towards the end you’re doing 30+ kilometre long runs every weekend and spending hours of every week running. Whatever your goal, that’s a big commitment of time. Running that much also impacts on your friends and family who also have to accept the time constraints it imposes. So, when you commit all that to a goal, even a somewhat arbitrary one, it is disappointing to miss out.

After 6 years and 4 serious attempts at beating my PB I was beginning to feel that maybe I wasn’t ever going to do it. However, my friends and family around me believed that I could so my wife paid for me to get some coaching from our friend, Chris White, who had recently taken the big step of starting his own coaching business, Go Run.

While I had always followed a training plan in the past, mostly sourced online, I’d never had anyone develop a plan just for me. With hindsight, choosing my own plans meant that I almost always succeeded in every hitting every goal. For example, online plans tend to have pace ranges for most runs and there was generally enough of a range in them for me to always convince myself that I’d done enough. Over the past six months, Chris planned out weekly programs for me and, particularly as the runs got longer, what began to happen was that sometimes I didn’t hit the target.

One of the features that Chris focused on was my finishes. In previous years I’d often run my really long runs at a fairly slow pace but very often I’d slowed dramatically near the end. I’d defended this in my head by saying that I was taking care not to get injured and that distance was more important than the time. However, what I was clearly doing was developing bad habits, as the graph shows. Chris’ plans for me this year regularly featured a long run at a steady pace followed by 3-4 kilometres at significantly faster than my goal marathon time. I only managed to successfully do this a couple of times but practicing speeding up at the end and the many kilometres I did at a steady pace of 5 minutes 30 seconds per kilometre, were to prove, I’m convinced, crucial in helping me achieve my goal this year.

The final aspect of having a coach that really helped me was the accountability of knowing that someone was looking at what I did. I’ve always tracked my runs using Garmin and Strava and I do take satisfaction from seeing me go further and faster. However, having a plan and knowing that a coach was going to check whether I completed the goals did help with my motivation on the days where I really didn’t feel like running.

2016, a new PB, finally

For 2016’s attempt at a marathon PB I decided to head north and run Australia’s second largest (after Melbourne) marathon, the Gold Coast Airport Marathon. On a perfect day under bright blue skies I finally managed to achieve my goal and finished my run in 3 hours 41 minutes and 53 seconds, a PB by 73 seconds. I was obviously very happy and managed a bit of a fist pump as I ran across the finish line. I could hear my wife as well as Chris and my other friends cheering me on from the stands and everyone involved was very happy for me. I ran the race as well as I could have hoped. I set out with a goal pace of 5.12-5.15 per kilometre and I managed to stick very close to that throughout most of the run. During the run I stayed within sight of the 3 hour 40 minute pace runner and at one point, around 18 kilometres, I actually got within a few metres of that group. Despite the temptation, I eased off a bit and let them keep a little ahead of me. Kilometres 35-38 were pretty hard and I did start to have a few negative thoughts about fading again. However, at 37 kilometres I saw I was only a minute behind the 3.40 pace group and my constant calculations in my head told me that with 5km to go I could average 5.40 per kilometre and still come in with a PB. For those final 4 kilometres I slipped into autopilot and just focused on the 5.25-5.30 pace that I’d relentlessly stuck at in my training runs. With a kilometre to go I knew I’d done it and I did manage to speed up a little, running my last kilometre at 5.07.

Training and Travel

Six years and six marathons to beat my first time did require quite a bit of motivation to keep trying. An additional complication that Chris was always concerned about was the travel that I do for work. In the five months leading up to the marathon this year I took 45 different flights, flying almost 200,000 kilometres - equivalent to 5 times around the world. In those five months I travelled from Australia to the US, Brazil, Europe (twice), China, Taiwan and South Korea (3 times). I did all of it in economy seats too. Chris was always concerned that fitting in the running was hard but we planned each week with the flights in mind. I am a pretty good traveler, I find it easy to sleep on planes and the travel between Australia and Asia doesn’t involve any jet lag. I swear by compression socks when I fly and I always found that my legs were fine to run within about 12 hours of finishing a long haul flight.

Traveling to many new and different places meant I did a lot of running in cities where I didn’t really know the roads or paths . This was sometimes challenging and there were a few times where I did a lot of laps inside a fairly small park. Long runs, where I needed to take gels and drink, also required some planning as I never run with water so I was always reliant on finding water fountains to drink from. I was always able to work something out and I didn’t miss any of my long runs. For extra reassurance, I always took some cash, my iPhone and sometimes a transit card with me on my runs so I knew that if I got lost or injured then I could always pay to get back to my hotel or apartment. I can’t run further than a $50 taxi ride!

Friends and running groups

The final thing that has helped me immensely in my running is the support and friendship that I get from fellow runners. I’ve written before about the wonderful thing that is parkrun and how, for the last 5 years, it has dramatically changed my life. In the past 18 months my work has taken me to South Korea for almost half of my time and there I discovered the Seoul Flyers running group. As well as helping me to find friends, the Seoul Flyers have helped my running by introducing two things to my training that I had never done before - track work and hills. Every Tuesday night there’s a group run on a running track and I either followed a group routine or devised some intervals myself. Running at a much faster pace than normal definitely pushed me and I found myself really enjoying it. Most of my long runs in Seoul were along the extensive running trails either side of the Han river. This is generally very flat. However, the Seoul Flyers group run every Wednesday is a run up and around Namsan (남산) Mountain. The 8 or 12km runs that I did there included climbing a 160m hill over about 1.6km. It’s very steep. Having never been a fan of hills the dozens of runs that I did there definitely improved my strength.

The biggest benefit I obtained from my two running groups was what I think of as “crowd-sourced” motivation. I don’t know anyone who has the same goals as me or who regularly runs at the same pace as me. There are many people in both groups who are both much faster and considerably slower than I am. However, every run that my friends did with me, every time they recorded on Strava and every post that they published on social media, helped motivate me to get out and do my training. There were many times, particularly with my travel, where it would have been easy to say I was too tired or too busy. But seeing that my friends were out running and out chasing their own goals, always made it easier for me to stick to my plan. For this, I am very grateful and I owe a huge amount of thanks to all of my friends and family for their support and motivation. You can hear some of them cheering, Joanne in particular, at the end of the marathon in the video below.

Where to now?

Right now, less than 2 weeks after my run, I have no concrete running goals in mind. As I made clear at the start, my times and my achievements are my own but I am very satisfied with them and I honestly couldn’t have done it without my family, friends and coach.  I’ve still been out doing some runs, easing myself back into it and I know I’ll come up with some more goals. In the meantime, I’m certain I will continue to pull on my shoes and go run.

Over the past 2 years I've significantly deepened my experience of both India and Korea. In the past week I visited Pakistan for the first time and it was definitely a safer and more developed place than I'd naively imagined so I thought it was worth writing about my experience here. At the end of my visit I read an article about the effects of terrorism on tourism in countries such as Tunisia. While Pakistan hasn't ever had quite the same tourist profile, it is definitely a country whose reputation has been significantly influenced by conflicts over the past few decades. The Pakistan I saw was a friendly, growing, developing place. 

I visited Pakistan this week as part of my work with KISCO, the Korean chemical company. KISCO has been selling dyes and colorants to Pakistan for almost 20 years and supplies a significant proportion of the materials used by Pakistan's very large textile and garment industry. I visited Pakistan to attend 3 dinners with the customers of KISCO. The first dinner, in Karachi, had over 300 attendees and the next two, in Lahore and Faisalabad, had over 120 each. Each night the CEOs of KISCO and of the local agent, some representatives of Korean and Pakistani trade groups and myself gave presentations and we then had a buffet dinner and mingled with the customers. The Korean Ambassador to Pakistan attended and spoke at the dinner in Karachi.

The most notable aspect of the dinners was that only two of the attendees were women. They were both at the dinner in Karachi and both were locals who work with KOTRA, the Korean government trade agency. I made a point of speaking with both of them and they were both Christians, members of a congregation ministered by one of the Korean KOTRA staff members. Only about 2% of the population of Pakistan is Christian and even fewer are Hindu. They both said that they'd never experienced any problems or prejudice being Christian in Pakistan, a view that was confirmed by some of the Muslim Pakistanis I met. When I did ask about "extremist Muslims" I was quickly told that there's no such thing, if people are extremist in their views and actions then they are not Muslim. It emphasised to me that the fact that we readily label some behavior in the west as "un-Christian" means we should then be quicker to label acts of terrorism committed by the likes of IS as "un-Islamic".

An important caveat to this whole account is that my trip was very brief and consisted of being driven from the airports straight to the best hotel in each city where the dinner was held and where I also stayed. I therefore only experienced very limited parts of Pakistan. There were security checkpoints with armed guards on the roads leading into the airports and at the heavily fortified gates to each of the hotels. However, progress through these gates for us, a car full of suited Pakistanis, Koreans and an Australian, was fast and efficient every time. All our bags went through X-ray screening on entering every airport and hotel. Once inside, the hotels and airports were no different to anywhere else in the world although there was some "re-checking" of documents at the airport as a a safeguard against bribery.

Karachi and Lahore are both big cities, 30 and 25 million people respectively. While I did visit the city centre of both, neither felt like giant metropolises. There were no really tall buildings in either and the downtown areas, while busy, still felt quite small. Driving around them though, it was clear that the medium density of the centres continued, uninterrupted across massive areas. Lahore was noticeably milder and less humid than Karachi, with many gardens and lots of trees around the city.  Faisalabad was similar to Lahore and there was a very large public garden beside our hotel that I did go for a run in. After I finished my run my local colleagues were divided in their views as to whether that was a good idea! I went out to the park just after sunrise (about 7am) and there was a signposted 2.1km path around the perimeter. I ran 3 laps of it and it was very busy; I was constantly weaving between groups of men of all ages and a few groups of women, who were out for a morning walk. There were a couple of other runners and quite a few people waved at me. It felt safe and perfectly normal. Reflecting on the fact that I get to regularly run around beautiful parks in Melbourne and Seoul and that this year I've run around Central Park in New York and now Jinnah Gardens in Faisalabad makes me feel pretty lucky. It's also a reminder that whatever people's differences, running in the outdoors is something that everyone can enjoy.

We traveled to the third city, Faisalabad, by car from Lahore. The majority of that drive was on a very wide, newly built, 6 lane freeway. It was built and is operated by Daewoo as a toll road. In general the roads were far superior to anything I saw in India. Even the ring road around Lahore, where we did encounter some congestion, was a big, wide road. There were still sights that were similar to what I've seen in India - lots of motorbikes and Tuks Tuks. There were also a fair few donkeys pulling carts and some ridiculously overcrowded school buses. I watched one where about 20 students climbed a ladder up the side of the bus and onto a platform on the roof while the bus was driving steadily along a highway, swaying as it changed lanes. On the subject of school, I did learn that 60% of Pakistan's population is under 35 and education, particularly in the cities, is clearly a priority. Both of these things give rise to optimism for Pakistan's continued development. One thing I always notice when visiting non-English speaking countries is the quality of the language and grammar in shop and advertising signs. The English I saw was almost always perfect, certainly significantly better than in signs I saw in Bangalore, Dehli or even sometimes in Seoul.

The freeway to Lahore

While there was a feeling among locals that corruption and self interest was still limiting the effectiveness of the government in many areas, people were adamant that, due to the actions of the Pakistan government, the security situation had improved dramatically over the past year. A recent Washington Post article stated that "Pakistan has experienced a major reduction in violence this year. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, 866 Pakistani civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks so far this year, compared to 1569 during the first 11 months of last year. Barring a major escalation in attacks next month, Pakistan will likely finish 2015 with the fewest civilian deaths from terrorist attacks in nearly a decade." To put this in perspective, 12,000 civilians have been killed by guns in the U.S. so far this year. 

One thing that the Pakistani government is doing is facilitating a massive investment by China in a port and infrastructure leading to it. Gwadar is a deep water port in the west of Pakistan that opens on to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Apparently 60% of China's oil imports currently come by ship from the Gulf around southern India, Malaysia and up through the South China Sea. This is a long journey and ships have to negotiate difficult seas and pirates. China has therefore begun to develop a pipeline from Gwadar through Pakistan, directly into western China. The Chinese government is also building a railway and road from the port to facilitate trade in and out of western China. Once completed, it will be faster to use Gwadar to access western China than to go across China to Shanghai. To make all this happen, China is investing about $46 billion dollars in Pakistan. 

In terms of industry, I only got to briefly visit one dye house where textiles were coloured and clothes made. The one I did visit was the largest in Pakistan, employing about 23,000 people at that factory. What I saw was clean and modern and the staff described their inventory tracking system that allows them to track clothes from the factory in Pakistan to store shelves in the U.S., adjusting production in response to sales. They also had a network of cameras throughout their factory so that every stage of the process can be monitored by their customers in the West. I have learned a bit this year about efforts to improve sustainability and ethical operations in the textile industry and it was good to be able to see some clear evidence of this.

No discussion of Pakistan would be complete without mentioning of cricket. I did manage to comment on Pakistan's 1992 Cricket World Cup victory in my speech each night and I can confirm that every person I asked was very ready to discuss cricket in great depth. They definitely love the game. It's still frustrating to them that no foreign teams will visit Pakistan to play but there were several T.V. channels featuring cricket from around the world. I did get to watch the end of a T20 match where some reckless batting saw Pakistan go down to England, a source of much frustration for my colleagues at breakfast the next morning.

Four days in Pakistan in no way makes me an expert. However, the Pakistan I saw was friendly and clearly developing. The article about Tunisia that I mentioned earlier was headlined "Bad things happen to good places", I think that, with respect to Pakistan, what I got see was a lot of "good" in place that is often portrayed as "bad" by the western media. I'd definitely visit again.

I’m back in Seoul, this time to attend the World Conference of Science Journalists. I was invited here to take part in a workshop on Smart Villages, a discussion about technologies that enable isolated and remote communities to generate and use electricity off-grid. The workshop was organised by Smart Villages and you can read more about their work on their website.

In my presentation I will discuss some of the work that I was previously involved with in developing the technology to enable printed solar cells. I will then discuss how social enterprises such as Pollinate Energy are using business models to get new technologies into developing countries. Finally, I will introduce a new project that I am involved with, Solar Energy Hubs. The idea of a solar energy hub is that it is a community-scale source of energy and shelter that can be assembled quickly and at low cost.

A couple of hours ago the Climate Council in Australia shared a video on their Facebook page that I was part of about printed solar cells. This video was made about a year ago so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on where things are at now. Firstly, thanks to everyone at the Climate Council for highlighting this work. I really admire what they have done and especially the way they became a citizen-led initiative in the face of government opposition.

As for the printed solar cells, well the work is still going really well. If you go back through this blog you’ll see that I chose to move on from CSIRO late last year. This was a very positive decision on my part as it has given me the opportunity to explore a whole lot of new areas. I remain very close to my former colleagues, very connected to their work and very supportive of it. The work is definitely continuing so, if you’re here to find out more about the project, you can contact the team at CSIRO directly through the flexible electronics website.

As I’m no longer an employee these comments are my own views and I genuinely believe that we still have an opportunity to make printed solar cells in Australia. I also think that it’s not just a case of needing more government funding (although that would help). As I say in the video, the path to commercialisation for these devices is through intermediate products. This means things like advertising displays, cases for laptops/tablets and maybe things like clothes. The technology that CSIRO and the VICOSC partners are developing is not yet ready for going on to rooftops today. But it is ready now for some of these short-term applications. So, what’s missing? Well ideally what we need is for a company in Australia to commit to manufacturing these devices. CSIRO and the universities are not going to make and sell these directly but they do have the equipment and people such that a company could use their facilities to do a pilot or small-scale production run. The devices they can print at scale today can make 10-20W per square metre and probably cost about $10 per A4-sized device if done on a reasonable scale (hundreds to thousands). You can do a lot with 10W of power and I think that early applications in advertising or maybe sensors are ready to go now. 

10-20W per square metre is still about 10-20 times less power than the panels you might buy for your roof today. However, what’s really exciting about printed solar cells is that the lab results on very small devices are now exceeding the power conversion efficiencies of silicon-based devices. There’s still a lot of research to do to translate these new materials to large-scale devices and this is where the government comes in. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is still alive and still funding work. However, in my view, even they have been a little too conservative in their investments. Australia has a great history of success in developing silicon solar cells but that industry is mature and has moved off-shore. ARENA still has a chance to direct some of it’s funding to these new, really exciting areas of solar cell research and I really hope they do.

I'm not always motivated to immediately post things to this blog, I tend to like and share things more often on twitter. However, a colleague just shared this blog post and I found it very interesting. It's written from the perspective of someone who has worked for a long time on indigenous relationship issues and uses this experience to reflect on what both men and women can do to improve gender equity. There are some excellent points in the blog and I encourage you to read it in full. Below is a list of specific things that the authors have come up with for both men and women to do.

Last night I attended the announcement of the ANZ Nexus Australia Innovator of the Year award. The submission that Sally and I put together was chosen as one of three finalists but the award ultimately went to the very worthy StartSomeGood Giving Circle. Congratulations to Sarah, Bryony and Tom.

In this post, I answer the question “what did Scott do next?“

Late last year I decided to leave my role at CSIRO and explore other things that I could contribute to. Since then, I have done a lot of really enjoyable things, met some wonderful people and learned new skills. After initially returning to India to do some more volunteer work with Pollinate Energy, I have continued to assist them through the production of a few new videos (playlist here). In doing this I challenged myself to learn a lot more about video editing. Using my new MacBook Pro and the programs Final Cut Pro X and Motion, I’ve learned about key framing, cropping, title creation and a whole host of other things. I’ve spent hours perfecting seconds of video but each project I’ve done has made me a little bit better at it. When I bought the new laptop I signed up for Apple’s One2One program and have had several personal training sessions with staff at the Apple Store at Chadstone. They’ve taught me so much and at $129 for a year I can’t recommend that program enough.

In the past few months I’ve been to dozens of seminars and networking events hosted by groups such as Startup Victoria, Startup Grind, the Melbourne Social Enterprise Network and the Disruptive Business Network. I also attended the excellent Above All Human conference and I’m going to the upcoming Link Festival in Melbourne. I found most of these events on meetup.com or twitter and I strongly recommend them. At every meeting I’ve met interesting, inspiring people and learned about great projects in Startups and Social Enterprises.

As I previously described, I was also extremely fortunate to attend the Nexus Australia Youth Forum, a 2-day conference featuring changemakers, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Perhaps the best thing to come out of Nexus Australia is that I met the wonderful Sally Hill, co-founder of Wildwon, a social enterprise that helps create events and experiences to build communities and promote ideas. Together, Sally and I put together an application for the ANZ Nexus Australian Innovator of the Year Award. This competition is open to attendees of the Nexus forum and you can watch our application video here.

Our idea is to build a social enterprise that organises events to showcase and promote the development of for-good technologies. It’s TED talks meets Kickstarter in real life. We’ve been shortlisted and the winner will be announced next week. Whether we win or not, the idea of promoting the development of for-good technology is definitely something that I am very interested in.

While all this has been happening I’ve also been speaking with my great friend, Dr Sung Yong Cho, who is now the CEO and President of Kyung-In Synthetic Corporation (KISCO). KISCO is a large-scale developer and manufacturer of dyes, inks, fine chemicals and other functional materials. The KISCO group had sales of over $US 300M in 2014, employs over 800 staff at 8 manufacturing plants in South Korea as well as one each in China and Turkey. The business is backed by a R&D centre in Seoul with over 80 staff and is supported by representatives and agents in over 60 different countries. Sung Yong was a PhD student that I co-supervised in Cambridge and Melbourne and has grown the company significantly since becoming CEO. After visiting Seoul in December and meeting Sung Yong in Melbourne over Christmas, I have accepted a role with KISCO as a Director in their Overseas Business Unit. My role will be to help the company grow new business areas, particularly outside of Korea and to find new applications for the inks and general organic synthetic capability that they have developed. In many ways, it’s like a Startup within an existing company. I’ll be doing about 30 weeks per year with KISCO, some of that in Korea, some at tradeshows and conferences in other places and some from Australia. I spent last week in Seoul and am currently in the US attending Informex, a chemical industry conference.

I’m certain that I am going to learn a lot by spending some time in Korea and by working with a big company. Chemistry is the thing that I’ve done for longer than almost anything else but it’s the opportunity to couple this with ideas for new technologies, marketing and promotion that really excites me.

Our holiday in Hawaii in January 2015. Featuring a Segway tour, climbing volcanoes, flying in a helicopter, swimming with manta rays and turtles, zip lining and visiting a pineapple plantation.

Last night I attended a forum in Melbourne organised by the Greens around their campaign to #RespectResearch. The forum attracted a large crowd, predominantly medical-focused researchers and heard from 4 speakers:

Prof Peter Doherty (Nobel Laureate and immunologist, @ProfPCDoherty)

Dr Krystal Evans (CEO of BioMelbourne and medical research scientist, @dr_krystal)

Adam Bandt (Greens MP, @AdamBandt)

Jeannie Rea (President of the National Tertiary Education Union, @NTEUNational)

Jacquie Tran (@jacquietran) has put together a great summary of the issues raised on her blog.

To add to this, I wanted to note a few points:

There are some very good stories in Australia about scientific research collaborations. The medical research sector, with its large number of philanthropically-supported institutes, is very well funded in Australia. These institutes have good connections with universities and industry.

Krystal Evans highlighted some great examples of industry successes in the medical sector. These include Melbourne-based drug manufacturer Hospira, Biotech sensor manufacturer Global Kinetics and blood product giant CSL.

Peter Doherty did note that there are not many companies doing fundamental science research in Australia. I’d go further and say that, outside of the medical sector, research positions in Australia are few and teams are very small.

Jeannie Rea did highlight significant problems with regards to the casualisation of academic and teaching staff. However, I feel that this is a symptom of the problem (lack of funding for research and education) and that given the casualisation of many other types of jobs it is not a strong argument on its own.

The Greens appear to have done an excellent job of summarising the issues on their re-vamped website, "Respect Research". The only issue I have is with the title. As I tweeted, I think that asking/telling people to “respect” research implies a sense of entitlement. I’d suggest that the issue is more about getting people to value the outcomes of research. Our society and especially our politics, are increasingly driven by self-interest. People want to know what is in it for them. People like research but if the scientific community wants people to respect research then I think the community needs to be helped to value it first.

The bulk of the meeting was devoted to the issues and the problems, there weren't a lot of new solutions presented. As such, I’ll try and list the ideas that I took away from the discussion, both at the forum and online.

The level of industry-supported research in Australia continues to be an area ripe for improvement. Tax incentives are not the key here, many companies in this sector, particularly startups, don’t pay tax. Leveraged government and institutional investments that allow companies access to people and equipment at a subsidised rate is a much better bet in my opinion. The researcher in business scheme was, in my opinion, a great example.

Government policy reflects ideology and popular opinion. At the moment in Australia the focus is very much pointing towards demanding commercial returns on research investment. The current government has announced a new prize to reward this and signalled new, national research priorities. I firmly believe that fundamental research is still required. However, pragmatically, I think that the research community needs to make some effort to respond to these challenges. I believe that rapid prototyping, the Internet of Things, apps and crowdfunding are all opportunities for scientific research to be more rapidly translated into commercial products. There are a number of examples of Australian startups in the health space that have developed hardware and apps that have already been commercialised. One product, to be used for monitoring of respiration, has been developed outside of research institutes and is about to be launched into retail stores. Looking back, it would have been great if respiratory-focused researchers could have developed this as a short-term consumer product that would help fund more basic research. 

For areas where commercialisation is not a focus the message needs to be very clear. Social research informs policy - if you measure educational outcomes, for example, you help governments plan better education policies. If you do astronomy then the data you generate inspires many other applications (wifi!). 

For me, the clearest action that came from the meeting is that the first step in improving research funding is to make the public really want it. Adam Bandt pointed out that in all their surveys people do support research. So, the community is starting from a good place. The public doesn’t need to be converted but research needs to be made a priority so that the public and in turn politicians, see it as a vote-changer. The way to do this is by communication. Every researcher needs to get better at explaining what and why they do their work. Even last night some of the speakers were not particularly succinct. We can all do better and that only comes through practice. 

A specific idea that came to my mind was a challenge to all researchers to run a crowdfunding campaign. The proceeds of this could be used to employ a vacation student to help with research (two benefits) but the point of this wouldn’t be the money. It would be to practice communicating. Set a reasonable target, a couple of thousand dollars and challenge yourself to raise the money. If you can’t convince your networks, your friends, family and colleagues, to throw a few dollars your way then you’re either failing to communicate or you’re doing something that is not relevant. Doing a crowdfunding campaign would also train researchers to make better use of video, written content and social media. If done well enough interviews with the mainstream media could well follow. My experience with doing media releases around printed solar cells shows that if the story is succinct, well-written and that if you have photos and video, content-starved blogs and news agencies will run the story. I’m sure we didn’t do it perfectly but we did get our story out there. 

I spent the start of this week at the Nexus Australian Youth Summit. The Nexus Global Youth Summit is "an international movement of young people who are changing the world through philanthropy and social entrepreneurship". I heard about the conference via twitter a few months ago and put in an application to attend. Happily, I was selected from about 500 applicants and joined 270 of them at the two day meeting in Melbourne.

Photo via Neil Pharaoh

Over the two days we heard from a range of speakers in both large and small sessions about topics such as philanthropy, innovating for social change and investing for impact. I learned a lot from them all. There was a strong focus throughout the meeting on women, both the problems they face and the way that they are bringing about change. It was also repeatedly emphasised that we, in Australia in 2014, are living in the wealthiest country that has ever existed. People earning the minimum wage in Australia are still in the top 1% of people in the world by wealth. Australians earning the average wage are in the top 0.1%.

The keynote speakers, presenters and organisers were all amazing people, many of whom are very well known. I won't go into detail here about all of the presentations I saw but I do want to note probably the most interesting part of the meeting for me - the people I met in person. What follows is just a selection that is meant to highlight the sort of amazing people and projects that I was introduced to.

Carmen Knox is an Australia working in New York to help produce a film of the book "The Inspector of Maladies". Accompanying the film is a transmedia campaign that links people and causes around the world that are related to the book. Filming starts in December and the first film will be released in 2015. Duncan Ward is the founder and CEO of Classroom of Hope, an Australian organisation that is helping to build schools in Cambodia and Rwanda. Sally Hill is a co-founder of Wildwon. Wildwon are a certified benefit corporation and work with other businesses "to build communities, ideas and organisations by designing exceptional real world and digital experiences". Wildwon were responsible for designing Ray, the Pollinate Energy installation at the 2014 Vivid Festival in Sydney. Tom Dawkins is a co-founder of StartSomeGood, a crowdfunding platform built for non-profits and social enterprises. Matt Pfahlert is a social entrepreneur who is developing a centre for rural entrepreneurship in Beechworth, Victoria.

I've been back in Melbourne for a couple of weeks and tonight I had the pleasure of attending the announcement of the Victorian Tall Poppy Award winners. These awards recognise scientists who have excelled at both research and community outreach. The overall winner this year was my good friend and former colleague at CSIRO, Jacek Jasieniak. Jacek is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet and he is also an exceptional scientist. Jacek has done a lot of work on nanocrystals with applications in everything from solar cells to lasers. While I was formally his "manager" at CSIRO I learned at least as much from Jacek as what I tried to share with him. Now that I've left, Jacek is managing quite well without me and has taken on a new role managing CSIRO's work in Agile Manufacturing - robots, apps and how to manufacture better. In winning the award Jacek follows in the footsteps of our other colleague, Fiona Scholes, who was a Tall Poppy winner a few years ago. Lots of scientists do great research and many do a lot of work in community outreach. However, it's relatively rare to find both characteristics in the one person. Both Jacek and Fiona are great examples of this. Congratulations to both of them!    

I have spent the past week back in Bangalore, continuing my voluntary involvement with Pollinate Energy. In April I was a participant in their Young Professionals Program. 6 months later I’m apparently mature enough to be here helping to facilitate the next one.

One of the outcomes of the Impact Assessment that I contributed to in April was to confirm the demand in the community for products other than solar-powered lights. Water filters was a particularly common request. Since then, Pollinate Energy have trialed a number of different products and one of the tasks for this YPP group is to assist with developing the approaches to training and marketing the selected water purification system.

The solar lights bring an immediate economic benefit to families in that, once purchased, they stop spending money on kerosene for lighting. By contrast, water filters prevent future economic loss by preventing illness. However, people can and do still get sick even if they drink only pure water. The value of a water purification system can therefore be undermined by something totally unrelated such as food or basic hygiene practices. Water filters are also more expensive than the solar lights. In combination, this makes them a more difficult sell. However, Pollinate Energy now has an established “brand” in the slum communities here and people are prepared to trust them and the products they are selling.

The water purification system Pollinate Energy are trialling is the Tulip Table Top system, made in India by the Dutch company, Basic Water Needs.

I’m not an expert in water purification but there are a few things about this product that I really like. Firstly, the ceramic filter is impregnated with silver particles, a combination which is effective against most bacteria and suspended particles. The second key feature is that the system has a fairly easy way for the user to tell when the filter is no longer effective. This is done through the use of a small plastic guide that fits around the filtration “candle” inside the bucket. Initially, the filtration “candle” is too thick to fit though the guide. However, after repeated use and scrubbing (cleaning) the “candle” will wear down and the guide will fit around the outside. This should happen after about 7000 L of water and provides a relatively easy way for customers to ensure that their system is working as designed.

One of the downsides of this product is that the text-heavy instruction manual is not suitable for the communities that Pollinate Energy are working with. One of the tasks for our YPP group is to make some graphical and video content to show people how to use the systems as well as some additional, basic hygiene information.

While I left the work on printed solar cells behind last week, the project remains something I'm very passionate about. Tonight the ABC did a great story about the work on their show, "The Business".

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-09/printing-your-own-solar-panels/5732106

This story came about when I was approached by the journalist, Emily Stewart, a few weeks ago. When I spoke with Emily about the story I also suggested that they consider a story on Pollinate Energy. Emily did that story in a day and it went to air recently.

As I've been spending more time with the Startup community here in Melbourne it has become very clear that people with all sorts of IT skills, from coding to systems design, are very much in demand. However, I also keep hearing how the number of people studying IT in Australia is plummeting. IT is not just about being computer literate. It's about designing the systems and making the apps for other people to use. There are huge opportunities out there for people with these skills. An article in The Age today, describes just how bad the situation is. It is especially poor how few women are studying IT. The image below, from the VCAA via The Age, shows the number of students studying the two IT courses available at the highest level of High School here in Victoria, Australia. By contrast, Psychology, a field with very limited job prospects, has over 15,000 students. I don't think that balance is correct.

This week marks the end of a pretty big part of my life. I have decided to leave my position at CSIRO and my career as a research scientist. This is not a decision I have taken lightly but it is very much my decision. I am now looking for new opportunities. I have been very fortunate to be involved in a whole range of activities to do with creating and promoting technology. Recently, I have become even more involved with groups of people who are deploying technology into actual products and markets. Examples include tech start-ups and social enterprises, the latter being businesses with a social or environmental aim but that are financially self-sustainable. My involvement with these groups has convinced me that the skills that I have developed in my scientific research career are valuable to the development of these new businesses. I have therefore decided to set out and find a way for me to contribute to something new. I don’t yet have a great product idea or cause of my own to pursue but I do think that I can help others to achieve their goals. I am also potentially interested in helping investors better understand and support the development of technology. Last Friday my CSIRO colleagues organised a wonderful farewell for me. I have loved working there and managed to hold myself together to deliver something along the lines of the speech that I reproduce below: Scott Watkins, 29/8/2014 Thank you everyone so much for coming along today. I’m truly flattered by the work that went into this. I did remind Jyothi that the S in CSIRO doesn't stand for “Scott” but I really appreciate her work coordinating all this. I’m extremely grateful for the gifts and the wonderful video. Thanks to everyone who made that happen. Thanks Gerry for the cake, the team for doing the BBQ and everyone from Flexible Electronics who helped plan and set this all up. I’m really happy we had a BBQ. When I first visited here 11 years ago as a young scientist fresh from a Cambridge startup, I can still vividly recall walking upstairs with Mark, Jenny and Gerry in my ill-fitting suit and being really impressed by this place. I still am. I’ve had an absolute blast here, I really have. For those of you that I haven’t spoken to at length about leaving I really do want to emphasise that this is a decision that is all about me. I’m not leaving because of CSIRO or because of our work or the people here. I just think that there are some other things out there for me to do. I am genuinely optimistic about our work on printed solar cells and for the organisation in general. Change has been hard but I do think the changes we’ve made are for the best and I can’t wait to see what each of you does in the years to come. In whatever I do, I will always be a very proud and very vocal ambassador for CSIRO. I’ve learned so much here. Thank you to everyone that has helped me learn from the successes and the failures. Thank you for trusting me, for believing me, for entertaining me and for inspiring me. We have done great things. Thankyou to everyone that I’ve worked with across this organisation. Thanks to the people who keep everything going, to the people who have the ideas and to the people who make things happen. To those I’ve worked most closely with in Flexible Electronics, it has been so much fun. It has been a real privilege to work with you all. I can’t name everyone here but I do have to give a special mention to Gerry Wilson. Gerry is the ultimate ideas man, he’s always thinking of new things, always willing to put them out there. He comes up with ten ideas to every one of mine. Occasionally when he’d give me a lift into the city it felt like that storyline from Love Actually where Jamie is driving his Portuguese housekeeper, Aurelia, home each night. They both enjoy it so much, even if they don’t always understand each other! Gerry has been very good to me and given me so many opportunities. Thankyou so very much. And so to end. Most of you know that I attend the odd gig or two and have a bit of an interest in songs and music. I initially thought that a final quote would come from a particularly poignant song lyric that I’ve long carried in my head. But I actually struggled. Maybe this one from Peter Gabriel - "you can keep my things they've come to take me home". However, last week I had the pleasure of seeing the wonderful Megan Washington and one of her new songs did provide a line - “At the ending you begin again” So this is an ending and a beginning for me. To really end though, I wanted to finish with a quote that relates to me relinquishing a role. Most of the time, within this site, I’ve just been Scott. But outside these walls my friends and family have often defined me by the work that I’ve contributed to here. To them, I’ve been Dr Scott at CSIRO. I’ll still be Scott and CSIRO will still be CSIRO but today I am relinquishing that particular role as that Doctor. And so the end goes like this: “But times change, and so must I... we all change. When you think about it, we are all different people, all through our lives and that's okay, that's good! You've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day. I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me.”