Day 3: M.bovis 2014

So on to day 3, another sunny day in Cardiff.

This was the day when I was doing my plenary talk. I think it went well. I had lots of positive comments which ranged from 'neat' and 'cool' to 'well done'. Spot the nationalities in those comments. Some people find presenting really quite easy and can stand in a room of 300 people and talk away without notes. Other people, like myself, get a bit stressed by this prospect: not outwardly, but it requires a great deal of focus and concentration beforehand. This means that it can be difficult to concentrate on any talks beforehand. Which was a shame, because directly before my talk Douwe Bakker was talking about the quality of tuberculin, how it was very poor, the difficulties of standardisation, the variations in its quality and what that means for test results. He was talking about it as a scientist, but for a social scientist interested in what disease actually is, and its multiple forms, it was amazing. But like I said, I was trying to focus...

I suppose you get a feeling of knowing when a talk is going well or not. I had 45 minutes to work that out! You can get that sense of flow and things fitting together nicely. I felt a lot of responsibility not just to present something interesting, but to present something on behalf of my colleagues: to bang the drum for social science. That adds to the pressure, and it was great to hear their feedback afterwards as well. All of that meant that it I was quite exhausted afterwards: using cycling language, I'd blown up. Recovery took a while...

What picked me out of my post-plenary glaze was the New Zealanders talking about their new NAIT electronic ID system. I know a little bit about this, so it was good to hear Stu Hutchings and Kevin Crews talk about it in more depth. The tracing capabilities are fantastic and they're are now able to show the movements of cattle across NZ. This is particularly important given the rapid expansion of the Dairy industry in NZ at the moment. I know some people are surprised that NZ dont already have that kind of system. What I found most interesting was how it would lead to changes in their risk based trading system. Farmers have become used to describing themselves in terms of their C-status. Thats going to change. Itll be interesting to see how they react.

The conference dinner was in the evening which was great. We were entertained by a Welsh male voice choir who sang in A cappella style. Some good Welsh favourites like Calon Lan and Myfanwy were in there. But strangely they sang no Tom Jones, not even Delilah. In A Cappella the singers dance along to the music to act out the song. Surely a version of Tom Jones' Sexbomb would have been ideal?!