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.

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:

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.

Now that we have finished the preprint version I can concentrate solely on writing up my PhD thesis. It’s going to be a long few months!

This is clearly very similar to the long held Irish Young Scientists Exhibition, which has introduced many secondary level students to the joys (and problems) of research for the last forty-four years. Despite much badgering of my science teacher in school I never managed to enter the main competition, but I always tried to visit the RDS in the first week of January to see the show.

The new UK version of the competition is not open to the public unfortunately, so only registered school groups and some VIPs will be able to see the talks, workshops and competition exhibits. As part of my outreach activities I have volunteered to guide school groups on one of the exhibition days. While I won’t be speaking to them directly about my work, I think it will help that the volunteers all have a science based background and should be able to field most general questions about the whole scientific enterprise. I am doing this as part of the Science and Engineering Ambassadors (SEAs) program that I recently joined but which normally entails more direct outreach with school visits, careers fairs etc.

I imagine there will be a lot of media coverage in the run up to the event on the 4th-6th March, especially as this is both the International Year of Astronomy, and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.

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!

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.

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.