ArXiv app for Android

I don’t regularly look up new papers on my phone, preferring the ease of checking them on my desktop at work. However when travelling or attending a conference it can be very handy to be able to quickly pull up some paper you half remember in the middle of a conversation.

As an Android user for a while now, the options were previously limited to navigating to the arxiv website which doesn’t really scale well onto a phone screen, and manually searching for the right paper, or scanning the new list.
For a while there has been an iPhone app called arXivew which listed the latest papers and allowed you to easily download and view the one you wanted.

Now, there is an Android app to compete. Read More »

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Thesis now online

I passed my viva examination a few months ago, and after very helpful suggestions from my two examiners I submitted the final version of my PhD thesis to the QMUL authorities a month ago. The paperwork all went through so I have now completely finished my doctoral training. All that remains to be done is the celebratory donning of a floppy cloth cap and scarlet robes at the graduation ceremony in a few weeks.

I think PhD students go through a range of feelings towards their theses, beginning with excitement and some trepidation when they start a blank text file, progressing through despair in the mandatory mid-cycle slough, to eventually being completely fed up and just wanting it out the door. Now that I’ve gone through all that and seen the finished product in lovely blue serge cloth, the only thing left to do was to put it online.

So the final, corrected version of my thesis is now available at the arXiv. I’m not expecting anyone to actually go read the thing but when I have lost or mislaid my copy at least I’ll be able to download it.

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Simon Singh wins appeal

Congratulations and well done to Simon Singh who today won his appeal for the right to use a “fair comment” defence in his case against the British Chiropractic Association.

Jack of Kent is going to give his analysis of the ruling over the weekend, starting here.

This is only one case however and the need for reform of the libel laws is still as pressing as ever. Jack Straw has outlined Labour’s plans for reform if they win the election. With the general election due in a few weeks, now is the time to put pressure on all politicians by signing the petition at libelreform.org.

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Customising Beamer Presentations

Someone asked me how I achieved the effects on my slides in the talk I gave at QMUL, so having written them an email outlining all the customisations I usually make, I thought the subject might be worthy of a blogpost.

I use the Beamer package for LaTeX which is a great way to include mathematics in your slides, and is pretty straightforward to use if you are proficient with LaTeX.
The default settings in Beamer are quite pretty but after a few days of a physics conference they can become quite repetitive. I like to make my slides at least somewhat different to all the others out there, and try to use my customisations to keep the attention of my audience.

One main change I think is useful with beamer is to make the equations use a serif font like a normal paper would, and not the sans-serif font used by default. This is achieved by having the following command
before \begin{document}:

\usefonttheme[onlymath]{serif}

To get rid of the navigation symbols at the bottom right of each slide I use

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

and the template I use is given by

\usetheme{Frankfurt}
\usecolortheme{rose}
\usecolortheme{seahorse}

I don’t like all the clutter that’s normally at the top of each slide
(contents, title etc) so I use the “plain” option for each frame:

\begin{frame}[plain]
...
\end{frame}

To do the black background with white text is slightly tricky but the
template below should work. Just be aware that the curly brackets
outside all the other commands are required to limit the change to
just one frame.

{
\setbeamercolor{normal text}{bg=black}
\setbeamercolor{whitetext}{fg=white}
\begin{frame}[plain]{}
\begin{center}
{\usebeamercolor[fg]{whitetext}

INSERT TEXT HERE

}
 \end{center}

\end{frame}
}

These are pretty simple changes but used judiciously they can have a striking effect. I think the most useful is the change of maths text to be serif, in line with the standard used in academic print. The sans-serif maths font just looks a little odd in comparison.

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Relativity and Cosmology Seminar

Yesterday I gave my first seminar as a postdoc in the regular Relativity and Cosmology series at QMUL.
People seemed to engage with the material and there were quite a few questions at the end.

The slides for the talk are available as a pdf or through the embedded widget below. My style for talks is heavily skewed towards minimalist slides with lots of verbal explanation so without having me beside you to guide you through them they might be hard to understand. Perhaps one day I will get around to recording the audio for a talk as well.

Slideshare:

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