Durham Cathedral, taken by Ian Huston

The list of participants and the programme outline are on the Durham website, however I do not expect the slides of the talks to be uploaded except perhaps by individual speakers.

Due to it being organised at the last minute and the fact that it took place quite close to the start of the academic term the meeting wasn’t as well attended as others have been, but this allowed for more discussions and for everyone to get to know each other quite well. It also meant that the speakers were allocated 30 minutes each including time for questions, a time scale which is a lot more manageable than the ten minute slots that have previously been used.

The talks and discussions were of a very high quality over the two days, helped by the generous lunch and tea breaks which encouraged the research conversations to continue. The setting was also superb, the Ogden Centre being a very impressive place with a friendly open atmosphere. On Monday evening we were shown what must be one of Durham’s most spectacular outreach efforts, the 3-D film Cosmic Origins, which shows a journey from our solar system, through the Hubble Deep Field, out to the Last Scattering Surface. A 2-D version of the film is embedded below, but for the full experience the 3-D version, glasses and all, needs to be seen. The film was shown at the 2010 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

The two days of talks were really enjoyable and the unrushed pace of the meeting should be replicated next time if possible. With a one day meeting time constraints are very severe, but I think longer time slots and extra discussion time could still be beneficial. I tweeted a few times during the meeting but penetration of Twitter in to the cosmological field has not reached the levels seen in the Science Online London conference last week.

I would like to thank everyone who helped to organise the meeting and make us feel welcome in Durham. I hope to put together a few overview posts about the work that was presented so they should appear here sometime in the future.

The deadline for registering your interest in attending or giving a talk is tomorrow the 16th. Funding is being provided for travel costs and PhD students and postdocs are especially encouraged to apply to speak. More information about the programme and location is on the meeting webpage.

My talk was on Thursday afternoon in the inflation session. The slides are here in pdf format and embedded below by SlideShare. Bear in mind that the talk was only 12 minutes long, and that I have opted for a minimalist approach so there is very little text per slide!

After last week’s Science Online London 2009 conference which I attended, I have been thinking about how to get fellow cosmologists to start interacting online. I am not sure whether anyone else will use it but I have started using the hashtag #cosmo09 on twitter and have created a FriendFeed room for the conference. There might not be much activity, but if people do want to use these tools, at least they will have somewhere to start.

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!

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.

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!

For anyone in London or the surrounding area, the next London Cosmology Discussion Meeting will be held on the 12th of June in room E1, Physics and Astronomy building, UCL, Gower street. The line-up so far is:

Daniel Mortlock (Imperial College London) : “The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey: The Cool And Distant Universe”

Anais Rassat (UCL) : “The 2 Micron all-sky Redshift Survey (2MRS)”

There hasn’t been an LCDM for a while and this will be the last meeting of the academic year so hopefully a good crowd will attend. Unfortunately there is something on in our department that day, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get down to Gower Street for the meeting.

Finally, Cosmo ’07 is being held in the University of Sussex near Brighton this year, and registration is now open. The cost depends on whether you want to stay a full week or just 3 days, and there is a reduced student rate as well. Should be an interesting meeting, and hopefully the weather will be nice in Brighton for one of the last weekends of the summer.