Category Archives: academia

Still So Far To Go

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Sometimes one deludes oneself into thinking that progress has been made on some important social issue, and then out of the blue, there’s a reminder of just how far things still have to go. Check out this post – supposedly a report on the contents of a physics seminar given by a woman – on the blog “A Quantum Diaries Survivor”, and get a reminder of what women in physics are up against. Near the beginning of the post he spends one of the longest paragraphs of the piece talking about how her hair was done, how fit and attractive he thinks she looks, wondering whether she works out…(!) It’s so completely awful to do this sort of thing and he does it so spectacularly completely that I actually thought it was meant to be a parody of some sort! From his comments in response to people pointing out the inappropriateness of it, it turns out that he really does not get it at all. Not a bit.

It is really sad. It is so embarrassing too, when anyone female shows up in a physics context and guys just start behaving like they’ve never seen a woman before. That silliness alone is simply embarrassing, but this is quite a bit worse I would say, since it is damaging to the cause of women in the field.

I really shouldn’t go on, and I will risk sounding preachy and self-righteous (and I’ll just get yelled at and nobody will learn anything) but it’s important, so I will try some words:

Of course there are contexts in which we can discuss things about each other that take note of (even celebrate) our differences in gender, race, and so forth. I’ll be so bold as to say that with appropriate care, we can even legitimately talk about whether we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Switching

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Back in LA, and down at the USC campus. Good to be back! Click below for larger view.

campus overhead from google maps Well, it is the first day of the new academic year’s teaching cycle. I’m here in my office at 7:30am (the power of jet-lag) and somehow have to switch my mind back firmly onto teaching and other matters. It’s always tough to do this, since there are always lots of intensely interesting research issues that continue on my mind from the Summer, and I know that some of those will gradually begin to fade (if I am not careful) as my other duties take up so much of my day to day. My first class (part one of the upper level electromagnetism course) is at 10:00am, and I want to plan out the structure for the whole semester, and write a syllabus to hand out and discuss. As well as the first lecture, of course. I’ve not taught this part of the cycle before, and so I’ll have to be writing new lecture notes.

I want to try some new things this year. In particular, I’ve become increasingly concerned […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Than A Hint Of The Old Days, II

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A strange but satisfying aspect of my time here (I’m at the Aspen Center for Physics, recall) has been the fact that due to some odd serendipity, there’s a ton of people from the “old days”. Which ones? My Princeton years, in the early 90s, as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study (and later at Princeton University). These are not all people doing what I do, but in a wide range of fields such as high energy physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics. Several of us were postdocs together. I’ve been chatting with people I’ve not seen for a while, sometimes not since those days, or they are people I met back then, and with whom I have a pool of shared memories from those days. So it has put me in mind of those times somewhat.

A quick example. Soon after I arrived last week, I was walking along, chatting with Petr Horava (Berkeley) about various things, and we got on to reminiscing a bit about our time together as postdocs in Princeton. And then minutes later, as though conjured from the very substance of our conversation, who should walk by but one of the Gods/Legends of the field (then and now), Princeton’s Alexander Polyakov. He walked by in exactly the same sort of way he would back then, either coming from or going to a walk along the river or canal, perhaps to give us a lecture. Petr and I looked at each other, and continued our walk and talk.

The great news for me last week was that Polyakov then gave a talk. I’ll admit to being a big fan of his physics. When he gives a talk nearby, I show up, no matter how confused I might end up at the end. There’s going to be good stuff in there – it’s only a matter of time before it sorts itself out in your head. Often years. Decades. Several of us sat in on his graduate class back in Princeton in the early 90s just to try to catch the pearls of wisdom which we’d pick up as he lectured on….. Well, I’ve no idea to this day what the class was really about. He would show up (probably fresh from a walk), with no notes or anything, and just pick up a piece of chalk, stare out the window for a few seconds, and then start writing stuff. Essentially, he was randomly jumping around the subject matter in his widely under-read book “Gauge Fields and Strings”. He was all over the book. It was not always a simple and coherent path through the subject matter, and it seemed that he was largely exploring whatever took his mood in the moment, but I suspect that was largely my ignorant young mind’s impression.

Polyakov in Aspen
A. M. Polyakov in the middle of giving what for me was an excellent and intriguing seminar at the Aspen Center for Physics. Click for larger view.

Sadly, it is the type of course that these days would score close to zero in most […] Click to continue reading this post →

SciTalks

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I learned from Jonathan Shock and Sara Tompson about SciTalks. In Jonathan’s words (from a comment on another post):

“There’s now a site where people can link to, review and rate scientific videos online. This is a great step as there are so many wonderful lectures online but currently they’re spread all over the web and it’s always hard to tell the quality and level that a lecture is going to be.”

Jonathan has also done posts about online resources in theoretical high energy physics, including a recent one where he discussed SciTalks a bit more.

jennifer goldbeck on the semantic webThis got me thinking a bit about where we are going with all these resources, how useful they are, and -very importantly- how easy it all is to find, and then to search through. (Imagine there are 10 hour long talks broadly on your favourite topic. Assuming there are no accompanying files, how can you search them to find a specific fact that they might mention, without sitting through ten hours worth of material?) Well, ironically, one of the first things that caught my eye on SciTalks was a rather nice talk by Jennifer Golbeck (given at FermiLab last year) entitled “Social Networks, the Semantic Web, and the Future of Online Scientific Collaboration”. She’s quite interesting about this very topic… She describes online collaboration, data sharing, social networks, etc, all in the context of helping us do science (not just physics by the way!). She also illustrates her subject matter -still staying on topic- using examples of data sets from Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Is there a Perfect Pitch?

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And the immediate followup question is “Should there be?” I’m referring to the story on NPR’s Marketplace the other day about the effects that some women’s voices have on whether they are taken seriously in the workplace. The audio is here, along with a transcript. The article, entitled “Professional women? With little-girl voices?”, is by Ashley Milne-Tyte.

The piece begins with a clip from the recent news, of Monica Goodling (Former Justice Department White House liaison) speaking in her defense during the hearings over the Justice Department firings. She has a noticeably “little-girl”-pitched voice. (I’m sure you remember hearing her during the news or the live broadcasts, and possibly your first instinct was to ask yourself why – in the political feeding frenzy aimed at bringing down Alberto Gonzales from the Attorney General position – the Congressional Democrats were now rounding up and grilling small children. (Or at least that was how it was for me for a split second since I mostly don’t watch television news – I find it too slow and otherwise annoying – and so I heard her on the radio.) It was then announced in the news piece who it was and I thought nothing more of it at the time…)

My own take on this is that it does not matter. You just learn, and move on. Since coming to the USA long ago, I adjusted my expectations about what are […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Two-Body Problem

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Ah, the two-body problem. On NPR’s Marketplace last week, Kai Ryssdal had a piece entitled “Studying ways to help 2-career couples”, covering a “Dual Careers Conference” at Cornell. The audio is here, along with a transcript.

It’s an important issue, (which I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on here, since I’ve been blogging too much this morning so far), and I’d no idea that there were conferences devoted to it.

From the point of view of academia, there’s one aspect of it which still has not penetrated very far in the minds of many, in my mind. It is one I tried to emphasize when this issue came up during various advisory committees I’ve served on with relevance to matters of hiring, diversity, etc. What’s on my mind is that the two-body problem (as it is jokingly referred to by some) is not always to be thought of as a “problem” from the point of view of potential employers. In fact, if you can work with a potential employee to find employment for their spouse at your or a neighbouring institution, it actually can strengthen your faculty roster in many ways. Aside from the obvious ones, there are the benefits of having happier employees who are committed to setting down roots, rather than an employee who is spending a lot of time travelling to or calling their spouse in another city, wondering every day whether their job is really worth that strain. Retention is a huge issue in managing your faculty. The value of settled employees cannot be overstated if you take the long view for your organization.

Anyway, have a listen to the article (or read the transcript). There’s the usual interview with members of couples who are academics and struggling with the issue, and it’s interesting if you’re not familiar with the matter, or perhaps if you’re in academia, early in your career and wondering about what the job market holds for you. And if you’re currently wondering whether to date other academics or not, don’t be put off (at least not by this issue!). Things are getting better. Employers are getting smarter […] Click to continue reading this post →

Penguin Opportunity?

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So I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but there’s been an awful lot of penguin movies (or movies with a big penguin component) recently. There’s yet another one to come out soon about surfing penguins. I’m slightly annoyed by it already, and I can’t really tell you why. It could turn out to be good, I suppose…

So I got to thinking that this could be theoretical physics’ big break! We can pitch our own penguin movie, since we have up our collective sleeve…

The penguin diagram!

penguin diagram

This is a type of “Feynman diagram” describing how various particles interact with each other in a specific process. (More on Feynman diagrams here, for example.) What does it have to do with Penguins? Well, this picture I got from Wikipedia might help:

penguin diagram

melissa franklinjohn ellisApparently, John Ellis is responsible for their appearance in the literature, pushed along by Melissa Franklin. The usual suspects were involved too (drinks, a pub, darts, etc…) From the Wikipedia article here is the story, in (we’re told) John’s words:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

First Day of the Rest of Their Lives

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Cliché, I know, but I presume that is what calling it “Commencement Day” is all about. Is that not right?

commencement day
(Commencement Day: Part of the crowd of graduates, family, and friends assembled in front of the grand stage set up in front of the Doheny library.)

commencement daycommencement dayYesterday was both a happy and slightly sad day for me, because I’m a bit of a softy when it comes down to it. Quite a number of the students I taught over the last few years graduated yesterday. While I was so pleased to see them all happy and looking forward to moving on, and meet their parents and siblings, I was also a bit sad, since I won’t be seeing them around the campus any more. I feel like I’m losing a number of good friends, which seems like an odd thing to say given that I don’t really know them all as friends in the usual sense…. But I got accustomed to seeing them around, spending time with them talking, laughing, worrying, puzzling… getting coffee, milkshakes… They became a real part of my life for a while… Now they are off to take on the world. I feel a bit like a parent… perhaps I’m getting broody?

The campus was lovely yesterday, even more than it usually is. The ground staff […] Click to continue reading this post →

Point of View, II – The Event

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Thursday 12th’s “Point of View, II” event was a huge success. See here for the blurb on what was coming up. Below I intersperse that with a little about what actually took place, and give you a link to video of the event.

One of the great things about the format is that we’ve no clear idea what each presenter is going to do, where they will take things in their examination of the theme, so it adds somewhat to the excitement of the events. Do come along to some of the Categorically Not! events (of the same type) which happen every month at Santa Monica airport. Web link here.

Don Marolf of UCSB will tell us what Einstein’s relativity REALLY means to the physicists who study our world. Different observers’ perceptions of space, and even of time itself can give different answers. How do we make sense of that, and what are the consequences?

don marolfWe started with Don Marolf (click left for larger), who did a really great job of telling the audience about what the theme “Point of View” meant to physicists, in the context of Relativity. He had some great computer slides, but in addition he produced various items from his pockets during the talk to use as props to illustrate things. Don is an excellent presenter with a huge amount of charm and energy and an infectious laugh and so gave us a great start to the evening.

Poet and author Michael Datcher, who teaches literary nonfiction and poetry at Loyola Marymount University, will talk about the role of the writer as a witness and also his newly launched journal of literary nonfiction, The Truth about the Fact.

michael datcherWe then went in a very different direction with Michael Datcher […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Worlds Collide, II

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I think I ought to explain, as promised, why I am in New York. The first thing to mention is that I wrote the previous post in this miniseries (it was written on a flight to Dublin, and finally posted when I returned) before I knew about any of what I’m about to tell you, so it is rather funny to me…

casino royale shoot

The week that I returned from Dublin I noticed a phone message from an editor of a magazine asking me to return their call. A couple of days later I learned what it was about. It’s a magazine that largely focuses on buzz about people and projects in the entertainment and fashion industry – Music (R&B, Hip Hop mostly), Movies and TV, etc., as far as I can tell, along with some coverage of parts of the business world. Its readership is mostly younger African American males, I think. As far as I can tell, the intention is not to be about those things in particular, but it is largely reflecting the interests of the readership it is targeted at. It’s a major product, jumping out at you immediately when you are in the magazine store (the striking picture of a woman on the front helps it grab your attention, of course).

Each year, the magazine does a special issue featuring a group of individuals who are doing “major things” in the industries I mentioned above. It is a combination of a focus on new talent that’s about to become more widely known, or just bringing to readers’ attention the existence of some of the people who are making significant impact in what they’re doing.

Somehow – I do not know how – they got my name. It turns out that they spent some time reading some of things I’ve written here at Asymptotia too. Now normally, you’d expect things to stop at that point, but in fact it did not. They decided to broaden things out a bit and include me (if I was willing) in this year’s feature issue.

I thought about it for a day. It is quite an honour to be approached, and I’m also impressed that the magazine’s editors are being creative in this way (it would be easy […] Click to continue reading this post →