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Hello everyone and hello 2024, 1st of January, and it's just Asami here and thank you all for
listening to us in 2023. We hope to keep this up as a place for Masako and I to catch up,
throw some ideas at each other, hopefully also accidentally useful for listeners who are
looking to have some free and passive English learning tools brought to you by two scientists.
Yay! So this episode is a bit of a housekeeping one. Truth be told, we recorded this episode
together in 2023, but silly me, I messed up. I messed up the editing and by the way,
we hardly edit anything in our episode, but I somehow managed to mess up the audio.
I really only just subtract background noises, put it through a compressor so that there aren't
too much amplitude change, remove privacy revealing information if there is any,
and put some music before and after and that's all the editing we do, really. The idea is to
share these uncut conversations between two bilingual friends. We usually decide on a topic
on the day before or sometimes even the day of and so we loosely know the topic. We don't have
any daihon, but I think it's useful for people to see the reality of so-called
bilingual no kaiwa and how it's full of ums and likes and you knows and imperfect grammar,
looking for words, like these things happen no matter how fluent you are at any language and
I feel like this is helpful in sort of reducing your expectations and, you know, just reality
really, to not be too hard on yourself if you find yourself using a lot of filler words and whatnot
when you're speaking English. Anyway, but hopefully you find something useful in it,
whether it's actually English expression you might want to start using or just silly stuff
we come up in conversations. Anyways, yeah, we tried to record this and I messed up the audio
so here I am re-recording. Anyways, back to housekeeping. We don't really do this podcast
for saiseikaisu or followasu, but we are surprised that many people from so many parts of the world
are tuning into our little low production effort podcast. According to Spotify, let's see,
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and Spotify, by the way, is only about 18% of the total listeners. Seems like most of you are
listening through Apple, which is totally fine. I just don't have analytics for it, so all the
numbers I'm going to talk about from now on for the next few minutes is all from the Spotify
listener base, but here we go. So I'm surprised that there are so many of you from so many
different parts of the world that's listening to this. Unsurprisingly, most of our listeners
are tuning in from Japan. Makes sense. We market this podcast for Japanese researchers looking to
supplement their English learning. Our podcast title is in Japanese, so I would imagine that's
usually the case. 8% from the US. Again, not surprising given that a lot of Japanese researchers
are based in the US. 1% from Hong Kong, and that's probably just me re-listening to make
sure that everything sounds alright. And I'm going to list, there's a whole bunch of countries I'm
going to list, all of these are less than 1%. So if you're listening to this episode from any of
the following countries I'm about to say, likelihood is that you are the sole representer
of the Esai Naito listener from this country. So here we go. You are from Singapore, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Norway, South Korea, France, Vietnam, Australia, Thailand,
Puerto Rico, Egypt, UK, and Canada. That's crazy, that's so many people from so many parts of the
world. Thank you so much for all of this. I also love that we have a pretty wide range of audience
in terms of age. Again, just from the Spotify portion of it. So, you know, take it as a grain
of salt. Well, take it as 18% of grain of salt, I guess. But 3% of 18 to 22 year olds, youngsters,
up to 8% of 60 plus year olds. And the mode was 35 to 44 year old range at 34%.
Well, we don't really know if this is similar to Apple listeners breakdown.
And therefore, it's just a number, you know, these numbers don't really represent anything
concrete per se. But it's just one indicator, I think it's quite useful.
And I like that we have a pretty huge range of people in terms of age. I like that
our content somehow is inclusive to all these people. And there's also Spotify gives you
some gender distribution. And for our podcasts of the Spotify listeners, it seems like it skews
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towards male at 61%. But again, I don't really know the base distribution of total
distribution of all of the Spotify users. So this is kind of a meaningless number, I guess.
But good job on Spotify to include the non binary and non specified
as the options you can put in your gender. Again, I think this is super important that
people have options when they are asked to identify your gender. And it should be completely
okay to not want to choose one specific things. It should also be okay to not want to specify.
So more of this in 2024, please, I would love to see more of this.
All in all, a big thank you to every one of you listeners. While we don't really care about the
exact numbers, like I said earlier, it does make a huge difference to know that someone out there
is listening to our silly little conversations. And what we have to say, you know, which occasionally
hopefully is intelligent and helpful. We started getting a few DMS here and there to our twitter
slash x DMS. It's always open at Eigo de Science. E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. Or just tweet with a
hashtag asainaito. And if you want to share your thoughts, request topics, etc. Those are the
channels you can use. Um, we haven't really fully discussed the thoughts of doing sort of
google form style, just because, you know, we don't have that high of a volume yet.
But if you would prefer to share your thoughts anonymously and directly to us, maybe that's a
useful thing to do. We'll think about it. Um, yeah, we may or may not do that sometimes in the future.
And for these DMS, you know,
Okay, going forward, we have some ideas about a sort of topic we want to discuss.
One of the ideas we discussed in a recording session that I messed up
is that I shared with Masako about my conservation science journal club.
So I recently made a switch from ultrafast molecular dynamics, which is a very fundamental
research that my PhD research topic was about, to conservation science, which is a lot closer
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to applications, specifically the application towards better understanding of appropriate
conservation treatments, preventative efforts, and other sort of science involving cultural heritage
at my postdoc. So while my exact project is a niche within a niche that is a conservation science,
I want to improve my understanding of the field, like a larger field as a whole,
and have a better sense of who is working on what kind of project. And now, I don't know about you
guys, but I have a hard time reading the papers that I don't immediately need for my project. I
know it's a good thing, I know it's even necessary, but in the daily research activity, you know,
the priority goes to stuff that are closely related to your topic and the projects that
you're doing. So in order to hold myself accountable and also share some fun science
with you guys, I want to do a mini journal club here and there on a podcast, where I pick a paper
once in a while and summarize for Masako and you guys. I think this will be a fun little experiment
and potentially a win-win situation. I didn't want to do it when I was doing my PhD, because
ultra-fast molecular dynamics requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge, like optics,
quantum mechanics, etc., which is kind of too much for 10-15 minutes
that we usually aim for in our episode. I just don't feel like it's necessarily
interesting to a wider audience. And two, I just think conservation science has a potential to
interest a wider audience, since it's a lot closer to application and requires sort of less
of a background knowledge, and more often than not, it also involves artworks and artifacts like
Van Gogh or Hokusai.
Number three, there is also a lot more paper that's available in open access for conservation
science field, which is not necessarily the case for the traditional chemistry fields.
So while I cannot promise I will always get the open access paper, but the chances are,
if you are interested enough, after you listen to our episode sharing a paper about conservation
science, you can probably google it and also get it and read it for yourself as well.
So what do you think? I think this is a pretty low-cost experiment to at least try,
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see how it goes. So when we do publish those episodes, let us know if you like it or not.
All right, I think that's it. Once again, sorry Masako, I know we recorded this episode.
I really try not to mess it up next time, but here it is. Let's see where 2024 takes us.
I hope you all had a great restful New Year's and ready to tackle on the new year.
All right, bye! That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us
at EigoDeScience on Twitter, that is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time!
