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GradSchool Graduate

Apologies for the lack of content over the last year…I hope to update more from now on!

As a graduate student any time taken away from the main task at hand, getting a PhD, can seem like a wasted opportunity. Especially when the time is not actually for a resting holiday in the sun, but is focussed on those hard-to-define transferable skills we are all told to cherish.

So, it may come as something of a shock to learn that I have just spent some such time away from my work, honing those tenuous skills, and have come back re-energized and full of enthusiasm. I spent three (and a half) days last week in sunny Bournemouth, at a UK GradSchool, organised by the UK Grad team (soon to be known as Vitae). This consisted of team building exercises, project management tasks, interview workshop and an outdoor component to bring it all together.

I hope I don’t give too much away, but the main thrust of the week was solving different problems and facing different scenarios in small groups of about 6 or 7 PhD students. Tutors, with a wide range of career and personal experience, helped us learn from each exercise and guided us through the emotional experience of a new team being formed. It’s hard to describe what working with 5 other PhD students from wildly varying areas felt like, but it was definitely intense. By the end of the week, people had gone through more with the others in the group than perhaps they ever had with those they work with every day. In particular the opportunity to give and receive individual and honest feedback on how we affected those around us was surprisingly powerful.

Interview skills were explored in a task designed to test students as both interviewees and panel members. Sitting on the other side of the desk really highlighted how much of the process is about the applicant selling themselves. It was hard enough to distinguish three candidates answers from each other after a long morning, so making an impression is clearly important.

Overall, my experience of GradSchool has completely brushed aside any reservations I had about it taking up valuable time. I may not measure last week in terms of words written or papers read, but the skills learned (and hopefully friendships made) will make the coming year much more manageable.

To learn more about the GradSchool program visit the introductory page at UK Grad, but be warned that word has spread and courses are booked out months in advance!

Posted 28 July 2008 § Conferences and Meetings § Research § Tools ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

New tools for a new year

As the new semester is starting in earnest, I think it’s time for me to post the first update for a few months. One of the main differences between post-graduate and under-graduate life is that as postgrads we don’t have a 3 month break over the summer. As seminars finish at the same time as lectures, the summer months can be more productive as long as you don’t get distracted by the summer sunshine. All of this is by way of apology for not posting more frequently over the summer.

The new academic year has brought with it some new tools from one of my favourite web resources Cosmocoffee. As you can read in this forum post, there are three new additions to the service. Firstly new search options are available which allow you to use the search page on Cosmocoffee to search the arXiv, ADS and Google Scholar. I don’t know how useful this might be, as I tend to use the integrated search bar in Firefox to directly search SPIRES and the arXiv.

The main update however is the addition of a bookmarking system to the arXiv listings. While not as fully featured as either Citeulike or Connotea, this is a very intuitive system and can be easily integrated into your workflow if you already use Cosmocoffee to access new arXiv papers.

The final tool is a complimentary function of the bookmarking system, allowing multiple users to share lists of bookmarks in a “Journal Club” system. There is a rudimentary management system, with the ability to add users and other managers, and move papers into “old” and “ignored” categories. There is also an anonymous list of all the papers that have been bookmarked so far, which provides an interesting insight into the reading habits of Cosmocoffee users.

To use the bookmarking system you will need to register at the Cosmocoffee site. Since last year registration has been restricted to people affiliated with academic institutions.

Posted 11 October 2007 § Cosmology § Research § Tools § arXiv ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Post talk and pre trip

My talk in Portsmouth was on Tuesday of last week, and with the exception of a bit of trouble with the train on the way down, it seemed to go well enough. I didn’t run wildly over time or commit any other glaring mistakes, but did get a bit of a grilling in the question session. I suppose I need some practice on how to deal with problem questions, in which an answer can’t or shouldn’t be attempted in a short space of time. Trying to answer these questions invariably means leaving out details, which just fuel another question and so on.

This week there is an international conference taking place in Imperial College. Called PASCOS, it focuses on particles, strings and cosmology, so a little bit of everything really. I headed over there yesterday to see a specific talk by Hiranya Peiris, who recently co-wrote a paper citing us, and doing a numerical simulation which validates the tensor mode bound in our recent paper. It was interesting to actually see someone citing my work, with my name up in lights on the screen!

And next week I might get to meet yet more people involved in the work I have been doing recently, when I go to the ICTP in Trieste for a “workshop” on Strings and Cosmology. I realise now that it is not so much of workshop as a large conference, with around 200 participants registered. But it’s a good reason to get away from the recent dreadful weather and incompetent suicide bombing doctors here in London.

Posted 04 July 2007 § Conferences and Meetings § Cosmology § UK Cosmo § arXiv ‡ Comments (0) °

First talk imminent

So it turns out that I am going to give a talk at UK Cosmo next week. It’s only supposed to be 18 minutes long, which you might imagine wouldn’t be that difficult to put together, but as you can tell from the lack of posts here recently, I’ve been having some problems.

The talk is supposed to be based on our last paper (which will soon appear in JCAP by the way), but with limited time I think I will have to speed through it pretty quickly. As a lot of the paper draws in techniques and results from string theory, I might have to gloss over those to.

The audience is going to be large (at least 50 people), with a mix of postgrads, postdocs and faculty from across the UK. And with a varied mix of theoretical and observational cosmologists, I am finding it difficult to find the right level to pitch the talk at.

To make things a little harder, I have written the talk using Beamer, which is a very impressive presentation class for LaTeX. But I have never used it before, so I am constantly dipping in to the userguide to find out how to do things that in OpenOffice would be simple. That said, I really like being able to incorporate equations into my presentation with no fuss at all, as opposed to the tortuous methods needed in other programs.

With any luck I will be able to overcome these problems before next Tuesday, so here’s hoping the train to Portsmouth gets us there on time!

Posted 20 June 2007 § Conferences and Meetings § Cosmology § Inflation § LaTeX § QMUL § Research § UK Cosmo § arXiv ‡ Comments (0) °

The End of Cosmology

Here in Queen Mary, we hold a discussion group every Wednesday during term time. The paper we are discussing this afternoon is a recent essay by Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer, which has been causing a bit of a stir in cosmology circles, both in the blogosphere and the real world. The essay won 5th prize in the annual Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition which always features some interesting reading material.

The conclusion the authors reach is that our knowledge of cosmology and the expansion of the universe would simply be unobtainable in the far future. The acceleration of the expansion of the universe will leave nothing but our own small group of galaxies inside the observable horizon. Evidence of large redshifts at long distances will simply not exist. They reason that pseudo-cosmologists of the future will have to conclude that the universe exists in a steady state, with no reason to expect a big bang initial event.

The New York Times’ Dennis Overbye described the essay as “one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read”. While I don’t think I would go that far, there are some worrying aspects. As mentioned in the NY Times article, science in the far future will be hamstrung without enough observational evidence, and will end up trying to explain meaningless coincidences.

[T]hey will puzzle about why the visible universe seems to consist of six galaxies, Dr. Krauss said. “What is the significance of six? Hundreds of papers will be written on that,” he said.

The most troubling aspect of this argument is that it does suggest that we are perhaps even now engaging in the same sort of trivial pondering due to lack of evidence. For example any evidences of multiverses or the like which might once have been observable could now be trapped forever beyond even our future theoretical capabilities.

This isn’t the first time this sort of scenario has been suggested, and in fact dark energy is not even required to fuel the acceleration. George Ellis and Tony Rothman came up with a similar idea back in 1987, in a paper called The epoch of observational cosmology (ADS abstract and link to PDF).

Posted 06 June 2007 § Cosmology § Curiosity § Research § Science § Space ‡ Comments (0) °