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!

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.

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!

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).

We have listened closely to these concerns and this has led us to conclude that the defence shows are no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier’s position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content.

Given that the arms fair business makes up only about 1% of Reed’s overall turnover, I suppose it’s not going to be too hard for them to say goodbye to it, but this case does highlight the campaigning potential of academics. In this particular situation this bargaining power was amplified by the fact that Reed Elsevier’s main business is journal publication, an area that relies heavily on the authority gained by having big names in the field appear in your journal. Even a top tier journal might never recover from the effect of a boycott by top academics. Of course, how effective or indeed warranted other academic boycotts are is questionable.

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.

An interesting discussion has started up around the science blogosphere about science writing techniques and whether the usual conventions are necessary or even useful. Chad Orzel started off by listing his pet peeves, some of which I agree with, especially

Myth 4: Scientific results are supposed to be a surprise. This one is more structural than the others, and I think it’s a result of unduly rigid adherence to the artificial Abstract-Introduction-Procedure-Results-Conclusion format. I get tons of reports in which students tie themselves in knots in the Abstract and Introduction trying to avoid presenting any hint of what their results were.

This isn’t just confined to student reports of course. There are lots of examples on the arXiv of abstracts that contain little to no useful information about the result, instead blandly announcing “an investigation into the properties…” Not only does this not encourage me to stop and open the paper on my daily trawl through the long list of new papers, it also often stops these papers being picked up by the keyword filter I use on CosmoCoffee.

Some of Chad’s other “myths” I don’t particularly mind, including Myth 1, not using first person pronouns. Using the passive voice can seem impersonal at times, but at the other extreme you could have “I filled the pipette and then I added the mixture and then I …” I take the view that procedures and instructions should be passive or at least first person plural, whereas speculations, observations and conclusions should be more personalized, using “I” or “we” as appropriate. Sean Carroll talks more about the origins of these “myths” at length, suggesting that Bacon intentionally tried to depersonalize scientific writing in order to emphasize the objectivity needed.

In a similar vein the denialism blog links to an article about “How to write consistently boring scientific literature”. Basically one should dehumanize all aspects of the text, remove any further insights or speculation, sanitize the prose of humour and originality and write extremely long treatises filled with irrelevant exposition.

On that note I will quickly end this post!

The mass reconstruction of CL0024+17 obtained in such a way is remarkable. It reveals a ring-like dark matter substructure at r 75″ surrounding a soft, dense core at r<50″. We interpret this peculiar sub-structure as the result of a high-speed line-of-sight collision of two massive clusters 1-2 Gyr ago.

This suggests it might be a similar analysis to the bullet cluster evidence of a while back.

[Update] Here’s the headline picture from the NASA mission page:

It’s not a resource per se, but I probably should have mentioned the Astronomy Picture of the Day, run by NASA, which features a different space related picture every day. As you can see, some of these are amazing works of art in their own right, but with the accompanying blurb you can also learn some science while you’re at it. The official site doesn’t have an RSS feed unfortunately, but Jef Poskanzer has put together an unofficial feed which you can use to get your daily helping easily.