Quantum Diaries » 2010 » June » 02

The SnarXiv

Flip Tanedo — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:08:08 +0000

Before I explain anything, consider the following two screen shots:

The first image comes from the arXiv.org (“archive”), the official (pr)e-print server for papers in fields such as physics, mathematics, and computer science. The second image comes from a the snarXiv, a delightful parody by a friend and colleague of mine, David Simmons-Duffin, a high energy theory grad student at Harvard.

The snarXiv is a game of “computer-generated mad libs” that presents intelligently-constructed abstracts for hep-th (high energy physics: theory) papers. It’s a little more sophisticated than filling-in-the-blanks—as David explains on his blog—but the punchline is that these “fake” abstracts often sound like actual papers one might read. It’s been a big hit with grad students who, I think, sympathize with the feeling of not understanding paper abstracts due to jargon. (The feeling passes with time… very gradually.)

The snarXiv became so much fun that David made a game out of it: arXiv vs. snarXiv, which presents readers with two paper titles and asks them to identify which one is real. (I’ve been having mixed results…) The interface takes some nice statistics about which real titles most often believed to be fake.

In a recent online conversation one of David’s friends noted that a blog post about arXiv vs. snarXiv got several hits in Korea. I joked that his game will steal popularity from StarCraft II, so David made a rather nice desktop wallpaper which made me laugh (and was actually my desktop wallpaper for a while):

Cheers,
- Flip

The Two-Body Problem

susanne — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 01:54:56 +0000

It seems that almost everyone of my colleagues is either single or in a long-distance relationship. Exceptions usually last only about two years. This is due to the international nature of our job, and the fact that for the first several years in a scientific career, we have to change country, often continent, every two to three years. More often than not, partners can’t just drop everything and tag along.
Personally, I have lived in long-distance relationships ever since I changed countries to start my PhD. Only the last one and a half years have been an exception.
My husband and I met in my office in Munich, and the three months we spent in the same office were the only time for the next three years that we spent at the same place. Unfortunately, we weren’t even together at this point, we were merely concentrating on finishing our respective theses. Then, a period of frequent flying followed. Luckily, we lived “only” 1000km apart and there are lots of low-cost airlines in Europe. For the next two years, we managed to meet every weekend. But this whole traveling business was rather tiring and not exactly what we imagined for our relationship. Even the first year of our marriage, we lived apart!
Still, we were among the lucky ones. Once, having lunch at a big table at a conference, we discovered that of all present, we actually had the shortest commute! Just can’t compete with Sweden to Boston. Also here at IPMU, many of our colleagues are far from their partners (even spouses), and sometimes the distance between them is closer to 10’000 km than to 1000.
That we now share again an office makes us the envy of many. And it is owing to a unique opportunity that presented itself to us: even though we both had one more year to go in our respective postdocs, we applied to join IPMU, which was just opening its doors and had as many as 20 open postdoc positions.
Whether we will manage to find also our next postdocs in the same place is unfortunately very unclear, given that we live in an economy where even finding a single position is not obvious…
Sadly, universities help with the placement of spouses often at best at the faculty level, and also there I see many cases where things don’t work out. Greater efforts in this direction would certainly benefit the ratio of females in academic positions who have children. Raising a child while working in a highly challenging and competitive research job seems daunting enough as it is. But with spouses living thousands of kilometers apart, it becomes a near-impossibility.

New US LHC Facebook Group

Flip Tanedo — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:23:32 +0000

Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you all know that there’s a new official US LHC Facebook group. Prior to this there was an unofficial LHC fan page that posted this blog’s RSS feed; that page now seems to be no longer maintained and US LHC was unable to have them pick up our new feed, so we started our own group. While it’s still a long way from the tens of thousands of fans the old group had before, this group is maintained by the US LHC outreach effort and we hope to pick up more fans with time. Spread the word.

Note: the Facebook page posts our blog posts (and Twitter stream), which can also be directly subscribed to via our RSS feed. No Facebook account is necessary to keep up with all of your favorite posts. (But if you’re on Facebook anyway, it makes me smile when I see that US LHC is getting “likes.”)

-Flip

Reith Lectures and the Scientific Citizen

Zoe Louise Matthews — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:52:49 +0000

I recommend that if you have a spare 30 minutes today you give this a listen:

The Reith Lectures 2010: Scientific Horizons

Martin Rees gives an excellent lecture here and the debate hits upon my own concern for science communication. As I have described before, I strongly feel that no matter what your background it is healthy practice to develop a scientific way of thinking, to be critical of the information you are bombarded with in the media and question where it comes from. Some of the questions to Rees were touching on the issue of how exactly people might do this. Interestingly, the journalist perspective seemed, in this debate, to be that the public want definite answers, certainties, whereas science “trades in organized doubt”. In reality, you need the doubt in order to get to the certainty, and I think that this way of thinking needs to be admired and embraced if the relationship between science and the public is going to change.

Recently, Physics World have given me the exciting opportunity to write some particle physics stories for them, and I am learning that there is a frustration between the scientific community’s concerns to be factual and clear about measurements, not to mislead anyone, and the (even scientific) public’s apparent need for a clear-cut, well-defined breakthrough in the news. Physics World readers have the advantage that they are able to access the papers behind the stories, but how clear is it, even then, what the pitfalls and potential problems with the measurement are? Only the experts of the field are familiar with them, and if they are ignored or even diminished for the sake of a story, any subsequent criticism from other scientists and measurements that dispute the result make the journalists look foolish, the scientists look untrustworthy and confuse the public even more. The reporter for Physics World, James Dacey, expressed this frustration in his blog recently here.

Hannah Devlin and Mark Henderson’s report (and my appearance) in The Times on Saturday has highlighted the uncertainty scientists like myself are now facing in our career futures. However, I do have a major passion, that is becoming clear now that I have to consider options outside of academia. Whether in employment or not, I want to work to help the public think like scientists. From understanding the significance and credibility of the “study that has shown X” to learning about the conflicts and debates that go on within scientific fields, skepticism is more useful and often more interesting than the punchy unquestioning headline, and I think, if done properly, the public can handle more doubt than they are given credit for.