Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

I’ve been busy the last few weeks, writing documents for the Planck SGS RR, grant proposals, getting ready for the exam season, and (I know I can’t complain), travelling to the Aegean.

But this afternoon I took a few hours off and attended the Imperial College postgraduate degree ceremony. In and amongst the several hundred students received their degrees were all three of my first students (I celebrated their successful PhD vivas here, here and here). There were a couple of short speeches, and a few honorary degrees awarded (the morning ceremony gave one to F1 head and infamous labour donor Bernie Ecclestone), but most of the time was taken up by the students marching up one at a time and shaking the hand of an Imperial luminary. In addition to my students, their were a few other astrophysics PhDs awarded, including to Dr Brian May, who got (by far) the biggest cheer of the day. Me, I got the rare honor of sitting on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, in my academic regalia (American PhDs robes are heavier than those from the UK, for reasons that escape me, not ideal for a couple of hours under stage lights — and it now appears that my hood wasn’t even the proper maroon and black combo that my Chicago degree apparently calls for).

I admit I was inordinately proud of my students, in my meagre supervisory role as Doktorvater (to use the excellent Germanic term for supervisor): they’ve all done fantastic theses, important science, and most importantly by the end I was able to just get out of the way while they did the hard work. Congratulations again to each of them.

Today’s obligatory pointer to the latest on the ongoing UK physics-funding crisis: the “Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills” committee has released a pretty scathing report, mostly slamming STFC’s handling of the situation (and refuting most of its arguments for how it got us into this mess to begin with). The BBC’s Today show had interviews confirming these points with Committee Chair Phil Willis MP and Brian Cox.

At this point, the best we could hope for in the short term would be a small amount of emergency funding to close some of the most gaping holes (and as a measure of good faith) and a major change in the STFC management structure. So far, they’ve said they want to “strengthen the management team”, “consult more widely”, and “improve… communication”. We’ll see.

As usual, Paul Crowther collects all the relevant information and news, and Andy Lawrence has good commentary.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve managed to get hold of invitations to a few semi-private (semi-public?) beta versions of interesting bits of software. OK, they’re not for Royal Ascot or even a posh dinner party, but I have to take what I can get. So be prepared for some serious geekery — sorry.

Evernote wants to be your “offline brain” — a place where you can store all of the interesting detritus of your life that you might want to recall later: this “place” is on the internet, in “the cloud” as people are starting to say, accessible from your desktop, your mobile phone, etc. The further cleverness comes that this isn’t just a place to store files, but a whole lot of so-called metadata besides. So Evernote knows the type of files that you give it, when they were uploaded, and any “tags” or descriptions you care to attach. But the cleverest bit of all is that it can generate its own metadata: it can read text in your files. Well, that’s the idea. I know the camera on my iPhone isn’t very good, but it’s a surprising that it can’t read “Moro” on the left, although it gets “Against” on the right (note that the stored versions are better than these tiny reproductions):

Right now, the software is a web-based service (including one specialized for mobile devices like the iPhone), and offline clients for Mac OSX and Windows. Eventually, they claim it will move beyond character recognition to faces, video, and anything else that can be automatically parsed. Well, someday.

Still, even if they haven’t quite got it working yet, the visionary ideas behind Evernote are best described in this interview with Evernote CEO (?) Phil Libin by John Udell (whose excellent ongoing podcast series “Interviews with Innovators” treads an interesting path between the web and academia).

I’ve also managed to get an account on the Microsoft Mesh “tech preview”, discussed all over the web last week, and, in particular, touted at length on this Gillmor Gang podcast (which is how I got my invitation). I admit, I don’t quite get it — or at least it’s pretty clear that we’re in very early days here. Apparently, the Mesh will be a repository for “all” of your data, translated as needed to different formats and synchronized with different devices, with granular control of who gets to see it and use it. I guess the point is that this becomes the basis for a net-based operating system (perhaps more so when combined with something like MS’s Silverlight to handle the user interface—these all Steve Gillmor’s ideas, not my own).

But at present it’s not an improvement over (say) Apple’s .Mac service, which lets me have an “iDisk” which I can access from anywhere and which shows up on my OSX desktop as a local disk, and which furthermore automatically synchronizes my calendar, contacts, etc. But I’ll wait until the Mac and iPhone clients come around before I pass judgement. And of course there’s an opening for it to be combined with the intelligence of a system like Evernote.

Apparently, I’ve got 10 invitations for the Evernote beta-test and five for Mesh: get in touch if you’re interested. I can, of course, be bribed with, say, co-authorships (I’m an academic, after all).

This is the new logo for the Planck Surveyor satellite’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI).

I kind of like the retro 60s hand-drawn feel (or is it Le Petit Prince?) but the juxtaposition of typefaces on the bottom is awful (and “Planck” should probably be more important than “HFI”).

In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September.

Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB power spectrum with Planck, I’ve already eaten a slab of reindeer, ran for an hour up and down the snowy hills, and sweated in a sauna.

But not all the news on ScienceBlogs is bad: Dave Bacon reports that there is now access to the arXivvia the iPhone: http://arxiv.mobi has a very iPhone-ish interface, with easy access to the whole arXiv. (The arXiv is a freely-available repository of preprints and papers in astrophysics and many other scientific disciplines.) I wouldn’t want to read too many papers on my phone, but it’s great for keeping up with the day’s titles and abstracts.

Speaking of the iPhone, I have, however, realized that I have become an unreconstructed Apple fanboy: I now own (or control through a grant — one of the perqs of academia) a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, an old-fashioned iPod shuffle, an iPhone, and an Apple TV (and several keyboards and mice, a wifi AirPort Express, and a Time Capsule). Oh, and there’s the 1985-vintage original Mac, a Mac SE and a PowerBook 165c, all of which have disappeared, and a PowerBook G4, and third-generation 40GB iPod sitting in a drawer. It would be even worse but for the five-year Linux interregnum while Apple was going to seed.

There’s a blog post about gender differences in scientific literacy over at The Intersection. And no doubt, it is a scary statement about our culture and educational system (in the US in this case, although I suspect the results would be similar elsewhere) that men uniformly score better than women. But (as other commenters have noted) one question stood out:

The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27*

* that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly

Despite calling it the Big Bang (originally a derisive term coined by Fred Hoyle), the Universe didn’t start in anything that could be described as a “huge explosion”. Yes, it’s been expanding for fourteen billion years from an incomparably dense initial state, but that expansion is happening everywhere, not exploding out from some single point. So maybe women actually knew too much to be tricked by the wording?

I’ve been distracted from preparing a presentation trying to make the sure the UK (and, yes, our group at Imperial in particular) gets its fair share of the dwindling UK astrophysics budget: Newsnight has a pretty extensive package, filmed over the last few weeks, discussing the ongoing astrophysics funding issues. Most impressive was the strong editorial line, starting with always-irascible host Jeremy Paxman’s opening comment that “the consequences [of the funding cuts] haven’t been thought through. And they could be dire.”

From there, Susan Watts presented interviews with luminaries such as Astronomer Royal and Royal Society President Martin Rees (describing the situation as “poor management and poor planning…. ineptitude”), Royal Astronomical Society President Michael Rowan-Robinson, and footage from the NAM Town Hall meeting with the STFC Chief Executive Keith Mason. Watts explicitly asks “Who mismanaged what?” and interviewed Mason, “the man many of them [the astronomers] hold responsible”, who could only say that “we have to think in new ways”. Indeed.

In what I assume wasn’t a coincidence, the government today released the PM’s response to the petition to “reverse the decision to cut vital UK contributions to Particle Physics and Astronomy.” Alas, it just seems to be parroting the comments of the STFC Executive over the last few months. Roughly paraphrasing: “Actually, there’s no cut. Really, it looks great, if you only look at the numbers we tell you to look at. OK, well, it’s not a bad cut, anyway, and maybe the current review will convince us to make it better in the future. Oh, just stop complaining, we really love science.”

As usual Paul Crowther and Andy Lawrence have more extensive coverage than I do here.

For the last decade, astronomers worldwide have slowly been bringing together the infrastructure to create a “Virtual Observatory” — uniform access to astronomy data from different telescopes, with different sorts of instruments, taken by different astronomers at different times. Very quickly in the process, astronomers realized that the main problems lay not in the underlying technology, but in creating a set of standards so that it would be easy to set that data up for access and to view and manipulate that data with a common set of tools.

AstroGrid is the UK’s VO project, and they released their software this week at the UK National Astronomy Meeting, just ended at Queen’s University Belfast. (There was an excellent group blog set up for the event, with especially good coverage of the “Town Meeting” on the STFC Funding Crisis Situation, discussed here and elsewhere ad nauseum before.) You can download the AstroGrid desktop java application, which gives access to data worldwide, and tools to visualize and manipulate that data. Most of the biggest surveys to date are online (SDSS, 2MASS, IPHAS, as well as images from the Hubble Space Telescope), as well as tools for viewing and manipulating images and energy spectra. There’s also an infrastructure for adding more tools, and for manipulating data using the Python language. Getting that infrastructure just right, so it will be accepted and adopted by curmudgeonly and conservative astronomers worldwide, from Europe and America to India, has of course proved the hardest part. If you are a professional astronomer, give AstroGrid a try.

(If you’re not a professional, a more user-friendly tool is Google Sky, available online or part of Google Earth, which also had some activity at NAM.)

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a meeting of the STFC Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). We evaluate all of the large project proposals (big telescopes, satellites, detectors for particle and nuclear physics) that are submitted to the funding council. Despite the still-unresolved crisis in STFC funding, projects are still being proposed, and some of them even funded. It was eye-opening being on the other side of the table for a change — although I can’t really talk about what we saw.

But the best part of the two days was the following quote which appeared on one of the slides:

“…and unexpected systematic errors are to be expected.”