Monday 29 September 2014

Link Round-up 29th September 2014

Happy Monday everyone! Here's this week's link round-up:
  1. Ok so I've gone for a slightly sensationalist title here. On the positive side Yelena Serova is the first Russian woman on the International Space Station! On the negative side at the pre-launch press conference Yelena was asked about make-up, her hair and if her daughter would miss her. Well done to the press for continuing to be the problem and not the solution.
  2. The heart of the milky way smells like rum.
    Yes that's right, the alcoholic drink! Thanks to radio astronomy it's been discovered that a dust cloud close to the centre of the Milky Way contains molecules of ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their taste and rum its smell. However, the similarities to more earthly rum don't end there. The same dust cloud also contains billions of litres of alcohol! Unfortunately we won't be partying there any time soon as the gas cloud is around 27,000 light years away.

  3. On 19th September the Royal Society announced who would be recipients of this year's University Research Fellowships. Unfortunately out of  the 43 awards made only 2 were made to women. Now, could this be due to around only 5% of the applicants being female? No, in fact 19% of applications were from women, which isn't great, but that's almost 1 in 5. On top of this, looking at previous years the percentage of awards that were made to women was more comparable to the percentage of women applying in the first place. In the article above Professor Athene Donald discusses the figures, issues and what could be done to improve things in the future.

And finally... The piano guys are back with a medley of Batman music! 

Currently Reading The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks. The same book as last time because its 816 pages long!
Currently Watching Psycho Pass. In the near future people are constantly psychologically screened to assess their mental health with the aim of catching those with a 'criminal mindset' before they can ever harm society. Psycho Pass follows investigations of the Public Safety Bureau as they try catch both active and latent criminals. Spoiler alert, it's pretty awesome.

Monday 22 September 2014

It's the Final Countdown...


I can't hide from it any longer. In 9 days time I'll got a year to go on my PhD. How do I feel about that? Pretty happy to be honest. I've had a tough few months research-wise so instead of being the panic station this threshold would have been a little earlier in the year, I'm actually pretty relieved.

In many ways, now is a good time to take stock and to attempt to work out what happens for me next in terms of work and even applying for jobs. In many ways this year won't be much different from the others. However, it looks like I'm going to have extra pulls on my time in addition to what I'm used to. 

Firstly, I'm going to be doing 'official' demonstrating work this year. I'm not sure how this is going to effect things for me other than I should get paid for work I was already doing. However, at the moment I am revamping a lab script and desperately trying to remember how I did my 3rd year project; which was 3 years ago. Yeah, that's fun. Beforehand, with my unofficial demonstrating if there were things I couldn't remember I could pass the problem on, where as now... Well, that's not really going to be the case. I think a few days stood in front of the laser going, "Why? Why!? WHY!?" should be enough to help me work out most things. However, I don't feel like I've really got the time to be doing that.

I'm also beginning to look at and think about applying for jobs. I know I'm a year away from finishing, but quite a lot of graduate schemes are already open for applications! Therefore, if you're a final year of degree, beginning to look for work in September and October for the following year is not a bad idea. There are jobs that won't be open for application just yet, but by thinking about this early I'm hoping to be clarify what I want to do (by reading websites and going to careers fairs) and I'll hopefully be prepared for when the right jobs for me open up, or I'll be able to apply before the ones currently open close.  

Then there's that other little thing I need to complete. My thesis. 70,000 words of joy for me to write. I haven't started so much on the words yet, but I do have a plan and a thesis template set up, so that's something, right? I mean I'm ready, I'm prepared, but not quite started yet. I actually don't feel that worried about writing up at the moment. As the day when I stop getting paid looms I'm sure I will be, but right now I'm ok with it. I've written big documents before and I'll have plenty to say, I'm just not looking forward to rewriting things.

So, final year starts here. Roll on next September!


Monday 15 September 2014

Link Round-Up 15th September 2014

It's September so, it's a time of fresh starts for a lot of people. However, some things aren't changing, like how it's time for a link round-up!
  1. The European Space Agency (ESA) have selected a landing site for the robotic comet lander Philae from the Rosetta probe! The landing area, catchily named Site J, is far from a perfect place to land the robot, but it's the best available option. All being well Philae will land on the comet on 11th November, where it will hopefully make the first ever measurements of a comet, from a comet. To follow Rosetta's progress, pop over to the ESA's dedicated Rosetta blog at http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta .
  2. With the Scottish independence vote to be held later this week, the BBC has reported on the discussion about how Scotland leaving the union may effect scientific research. It has previously been reported that a 'yes' vote would end existing funding arrangements, so an independent Scotland will need set up their own funding bodies. As a result it seems scientists aren't very certain that independence is a good thing, with 69% telling Times Higher Education that they will vote 'no'. 
  3. Scientists at the LHC can't directly detect the Higgs boson, instead they look at the particles it becomes when it decays. The Higgs decays into photon (light particle) pairs, but the LHC has detected more photons than expected. This has prompted speculation of a second Higgs or other particles being involved in Higgs decay. However, after crunching more and more of the Higgs data, researchers at CERN now think that the Higgs is behaving as current theories would predict after all. 
And finally... if you've not heard of the Lego Academic twitter feed, check out this article on the New Scientist website.
Also, I'm launching a new blog! Overly Excited Opinions is a review blog, so if you want to know what I think about media and literature, rather than science, head on over and check it out.

Currently Reading The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks, the next volume in the Lightbringer series. I'm not very far in yet, but the fall out after the events of the last book is still being felt and it's shaping up to be a great read. I just hope my favourite characters survive!
Currently Listening to The Awesome Mix Volume 1 aka the soundtrack to one of the best films of the summer, Guardians of the Galaxy. Will it make me want to dance around the lab? Why yes, of course it will, and I don't think I'll be able to resist.

Monday 8 September 2014

Final Thoughts on Photon 14

As a finally summing up about my experience at Photon 14, here's short list of some ideas and thoughts about the conference and what I might do at conferences in the future.
Just in case you missed my original Photon conference diaries, they can be found in 3 parts here, here and here.

So after Photon 14 I think that....
  1. Poorly constructed talks really annoy me so I promise to do my best to always construct my talks well.
    At the conference I saw a few talks that really missed the mark for me. Most of the problems stemmed from a very simple sentence, "I'll just skip over this slide for time". Now, to me that smacks of being under prepared and to an extent I think it doesn't look very professional. Another pet hate I had was "Here's a concept that is important to this work but my colleague will talk about that in a few minutes". If its important to your work you should describe it, I might not be here for the rest of the session. Other's peoples talks shouldn't be used to convey your key concepts, as we don't all have the luxury of that and it isn't fair. So rant over, to sum up this means that I think that it's important that you have rehearsed your talk well and that it is fully self contained.
  2. Tablets are useful and yet not useful at the same time for note taking.
    I made notes on my iPad during the conference which, on the one hand, worked really well as I didn't have to write them up and struggle with my dodgy handwriting! On the other hand it was actually harder for me to type and listen than write and listen, but I got better at that with practice so I think that wouldn't be a problem next time. Also, there was quite a temptation to procrastinate as there was all of the internet at my fingertips. So, I found the best way to use a tablet was to turn the wifi off and use a note-taking program to help with taking my notes.
  3. You should always tell people what you are doing.
    It's well worth explaining what you do to anyone you meet at a conference, as you never know where it might lead. I spoke to a couple of people about what I did and one conversation might well lead to a collaboration. So it's always well worth having an elevator pitch of your project to hand just in case!
  4. You should take in concepts in talks that don't necessarily link directly to your work
    I found it was worth really listening in all biologically related talks as it actually helped me notice trends in research and work out where I might fit on the greater landscape of research (and what might make my work stand out). Even in some of the very tangentially related stuff it's worth taking stuff in. I found finding out about the amazing properties of fibre optic cables really interesting. It is something I'll remember and you never know, it might come in handy someday! 
And that concludes my coverage of my last conference of the year! 
I don't know if I'll be going to many more conferences in the next twelve months as I might just be chained to my desk writing. But I hope than my diaries and thoughts on my experiences have been interesting and (hopefully) entertaining too!

Nine Months of BLOGden Blogging

I hadn't really remembered until I saw a message on the Ogden Trust facebook page but, officially anyway, my time as a Odgen Trust Blogger (BLOGden Blogger) has actually come to an end as of 1st September. I started this blog as part of the BLOGden project to hopefully share my experiences as an alumni of the trust with other people. However, just because BLOGden is over, that doesn't mean I'll be stopping writing. Oh no. I'll still be here tapping away every week posting links, new articles about what I've been up to and bits of PhD/Science related information and stories that I manage to conjure out of my brain.

While I'm here, I'd like to say thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. It's always nice to see that my traffic counter has gone up when I log on and I hope you've enjoyed what I've written so far and continue to enjoy the things I write in the future.

That's the main message done. As I'm a scientist, I can't help but give you some data to sum up my BLOGden time, but feel free to look away now!

Between 31st January & 31st August I have:
Written 33 posts
Had 1337 views (not all of those are from my parents... I hope)
Had an average of 191 views per month
With "I've got an answer, but what's the question again?" being my most viewed (clicked on) post with a grand total of 65 views

Wow. That's pretty awesome! Fingers crossed the next 7 months will go just as well.

Saturday 6 September 2014

Photon 14 Fun Times 3 (Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th September 2014)

Wednesday - Day 3
In comparison to the first two days of the conference Wednesday was a lot less exciting or busy. I had nothing to worry about and no real must see sessions to focus on so I went with the flow a bit. The first session I went to was on 'Ultrafast and Attosecond Physics', a pretty impressive title. So what motivated my choice? Well, firstly it sounded exciting and it had two talks on spectroscopy going on, so it sounded like the best option for me. There were some good presentations, but I don't really remember them very much to be honest, as there wasn't a whole lot to take in but, that's life. Sometimes you get lucky, other times you don't. After lunch (still not great) I went to the plenary on translating your research into a product. That was definitely worth going to, with the current head of the institute of physics talking about her opinions on how research should become a technology. Interestingly she said quite strongly that the trend for spinning out companies from universities to sell the research, with academics heading up the new company, is not a good idea. I found that very interesting as Leeds and Sheffield seem into creating new companies to make money. The proposed alternative was that you should licence your work to an existing company and not be greedy about the money. It's curious, because if spin outs didn't work universities wouldn't keep creating them. Anyway, I have some food for thought now. Unfortunately, I didn't have a similar experience from the second plenary. The speaker was talking about the integration of light with metal, so at first I was fine, until he talked faster and faster and jumped around a lot. I think the most frustrating thing about the whole experience was that before he started the speaker said this was going to be an introductory talk! Ha! It definitely didn't feel like one to me.

So with the whistle stop tour of business and "introductory" physics over I had 2 more sessions to attend. I went with 'trapping and manipulation', which looked at ways of trapping and cooling molecules or atoms using lasers. I then went for optical and quantum metrology for the final session as it's related to what a lot of people in my lab do. Again the theme for the afternoon was interesting but not relevant, not helped by the fact I felt like I was reaching conference saturation point by this part of the day!

Wednesday did not end with the talks though, we had the conference dinner to go to. The dinner tried so hard to be gourmet. It really did, but it just couldn't match it's own aspirations. I mean on bake-off night they made the error of calling a chocolate roulade a terrine! Mary Berry would not be pleased with that! Culinary confusion aside, I had a really nice time and there were lots of free drinks, so they got that right. I also managed not to let the networking opportunity slide during the dinner. I chatted to someone from Leeds I didn't know and one of my supervisor's collaborators I hadn't met before (Yey networking). The cherry on the top was when one of my lab mates won a prize for his poster. With the meal done we headed home via an impromptu networking session with some other attendees (aka a pub trip).

Thursday - Day 4
Day 4 finally! Time to go home! Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed photon, but I really wanted to be back home. However, I did have a good time in the last two sessions before home. I managed to find a talk on monitoring biology through some really complicated laser work. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not sure if it will catch on because of its complexity, but there were some really nice ideas about trying to observe the light given out by a protein when it was doing different things. Hopefully there might be a way to make the process easier so that we can exploit it in the future. The final session I attended was on fibre optic sensors. It was a session that probably won't help my project, but it was really interesting. It turns out that you can use fibre optic cables with special elements in to act as sensors for temperature, humidity, force and more! And, people are working on incorporating them into metals and concrete to give in depth analysis about what's going on inside structures. How cool is that! One of the talks even covered a way to set concrete using microwaves! Sometimes you forget that there is some really fun science in the world and I'm so glad my last session of the conference left me thinking, and with a smile on my face.

Wednesday 3 September 2014

Photon 14 Fun Times 2 (Conference Diary, Tuesday 2nd September 2014)

It was time. Presentation day. It started earlier than I thought it would, as I accidentally got up at 630am, thinking it was 730am... Oh dear. At least it gave me time to run through my presentation in my head once more and write my diary of what happened on Monday. I was already starting to feel nervous, why? Well, I had to present in this room, the Great Hall. 
The Great Hall at Imperial College
Pretty big right? Much bigger than the room at TERMIS, the only glimmer of hope was that it was relatively quiet on Monday so hopefully it wouldn't be too full. Still, I got ready and headed out for the morning plenary. I had considered skipping it so that I could go through my slides, but I'm really glad I went. The talk was given by Proffessor D Walker and was talking about the interplay between academic research and industry and was an extremely candid account of his successes and struggles in industry and in trying to deal with conflicts of interests his work entailed. Prof. Walker was a fantastic speaker and I took loads of notes of hints and tips to look back on later.

Before my session kicked off there was a coffee break, and after feeling pretty calm in the plenary I was starting become more nervous again. After adequately caffinating myself I thought it might be a good idea to have some calming camomile tea (well it always worked for Peter rabbit), before heading to the great hall for the first 2 talks of my session. Let's just say the camomile tea didn't work, in the first 2 talks I didn't feel less nervous, but I did just want to get my talk over and done with and let whatever was going to happen, happen. During the questions section of the speaker before me, I got set up with a radio mic and got ready to go. I'm some ways it was strange, when I was announced and walked up onto the stage my nerves faded a bit. I was here now, I was on stage and I just had to get on and do it. So I got on with the show. Although I went through the slides a little quicker than I wanted to, I managed to say everything I wanted to say with only a slight bit of uming. The best thing was that my hand didn't shake too badly when I laser pointed at the screen which I like to think created the illusion that I was more together than I really was. The next hurdle was the questions. To be honest, this was what I was dreading the most. I was steeling myself for criticism. But I got lucky. The worst I got was a, "would a standard set up beat this?", something I could confidently answer with a no. The other question I possibly left myself open for and was about exactly how much easier our set up is to create, but I think I gave a good account of myself and explained how I might improve things in the future. With that I could escape relatively unscathed. On the whole, I think my talk went pretty well, I was better at TERMIS, but I also practised more and wasn't as worried about the audience. That being said I didn't crash and burn so I'll call that a result!

After my talk there were 5 more talks, they were good, but it felt like a very long time. Especially given my tea consumption. Unfortunately I didn't have any feedback coming out of the session as my supervisor ran to my lab mates talk straight after mine. But I got some at lunch, firstly from another lab mate saying it went well (phew!) then a really great bit of feedback. A conference delegate came up to me and thanked me for giving a good talk that he was able to follow, and contrasted it to the other talks. We then had a chat about how surprising it is no one has done my experiment before and he suggested it could be possible to look at putting motorised lenses in. That made my day, you can't really ask for more than that. If at least one person from outside my lab understood and enjoyed my talk I could go home happy. Unfortunately, I didn't get any feedback over lunch from my supervisor as he was busy talking to various people, but I assumed I'd he him later. I didn't know his departure time so I ended up missed him, but he passed in that he thought my talk went well so that's quite nice I suppose. In case you're dying for another lunch update, it was similar to Monday in terms of sandwich fillings but with fancier bread which made it hard to tell what you were getting, so I'll keep my rating at 2.5 out of 5.

The first talk after lunch was 'How to get Published' and I was in two minds about whether to go or not because I've been to 3 how to get published talks in the past and, well, they haven't got me published! I made a few notes, but it wasn't a world altering talk so maybe it was a good  gentle warm up after lunch activity. We then had 2 more talks sessions to go to, firstly I went to another session in biomedical techniques where I heard about some interesting technologies for live microscopy. They were pretty cool and looked at imaging cells in zebra fish, so the idea was that this could help with drug development studies. However, I would question that, as if I've learnt one thing from my tissue engineering studies it's that as animal testing isn't that effective! 3d models in the lab with lots of cell types is the way to go if you ask me. My final session of the day was all about new imaging techniques, which I chose as the most relevant set of talks out of a lot of things I don't really do. I learnt a couple of things, but not anything useful in my project, but that's the thing with conferences, you have a few relevant things and a lot of irrelevant things and I can't complain as I've had over a day of relevant talks, much more than at TERMIS. So, the art for the rest of the conference with be working out tangentially relevant talks to go to, or just going to what seems interesting to broaden my horizons, and I'll let you know how that goes later.  Right now I think I need a sit down with a good book.
(The Lies of Locke Lamora, if you're not reading it read it I've told you enough times. Oh. If you're under 18 you possibly shouldn't... But still make sure you get a copy when you're old enough. I should shut up. I'm rambling, see, this is what conferences do to you!)

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Photon 14 Fun Times 1 (Conference Diary, Monday 1st September 2014)

Ah sleep, how I love it so and yesterday the first day of Photon started with not much of it. After a 430am start and a first train at 545am we made it to Imperial College for the first day of Photon14!

Things kicked off, as they invariably do, with a plenary lecture. A plenary is basically a big invited talk that everyone should probably attend. Our plenary was given by Professor Sir Peter Knight (I bet that being Professor Sir makes filling in forms tedious) on quantum technologies. It wasn't really about the science behind quantum technologies, more the work Prof. Sir Knight had done to secure funding for the field and what the government might expect us to produce in the near future as a return on that investment. It was quite a refreshing opening plenary, but it did make me wonder who was involved in setting government expectations.

After the plenary, we broke up into different sessions, with various specialist themes. There wasn't much that directly related to my work, so I plumped for "Adaptive and Active Optics" because it was going to be about laser related stuff. I think I probably made the right choice as although I don't know if I'll use what I learnt. However, I'd say that I now have a greater idea of how adaptive optics work, mainly through using deformable mirrors which you can change the shape of to optimise your optics set up. As this session concluded the morning, it was time to see just how well photon was going to perform as a conference by sampling it's lunch offerings! Conference lunches are important ok! You need something to look forward to and it needs to get you through a very long afternoon. So, the food. It was average, although I don't know if that's fair as my bar was set by Italy and I don't honestly think anyone will ever beat that, but they should still try to! The buffet was a mix of standard university catering sandwiches and fruit, but there were some nice surprises in the form of mini-meat pies and mozzarella sticks. So I'd give it a rating of 2.5 out of 5, however, change could be afoot on Tuesday and Wednesday as that is when we require tickets to get our lunch!

After being fed I wen to a careers talk entitled "making the most of your early career". We were told at the start it wasn't a hard sell for the institute of physics and their careers services, but it definitely was. I basically learnt what booklets I should look at downloading from the institute's website and the other advice was highly generic. I wanted to know what would make me stand out! How to know what to choose! There was one thing I hadn't thought of and that was becoming a journal reviewer, but I think that's for post docs really. At least the next plenary was good, and signalled the start of stuff more important to me, with the speaker talking about imaging single cells in the eye using light microscopy. It was interesting, although it seemed most of the functional imaging relied on the use of chemicals or viruses to create contrast and it don't think doctors would be too happy with that.

The next 2 sessions were focused on biomedical optics, firstly looking at spectroscopy (in slightly different forms to what I do) and then clinical methods. I didn't get as much out of the first session as I had hoped, but the second section was great! There's some exceptional work going on to manipulate endoscopes to make it possible for them to be used as microscopes. This could mean that you just use an endoscope to look at a tissue sample, rather than doing a biopsy, or you could get a better biopsy. Even better in cancer surgery the surgeon might be able to check if a tumour was fully removed while surgery is still happening, rather than having to send off the tumour for analysis, a process which takes days. Therefore, people will only need to have 1 operation rather than 2 if not all the tumour is removed in the initial cut.

After dropping stuff off at the hotel we nipped back for the poster session and drinks reception, aka the networking session, but we won't call it that. To be honest I neither networked or read many posters, mainly as I did my round of the posters at lunch and I really didn't feel up for networking. The other networking barrier was the fact my supervisor wasn't there. At TERMIS one of my supervisors introduced me to a lot of important people in the field, but that opportunity wasn't open to me last night. Oh well, there's always tomorrow! If I survive my presentation that is...

Monday 1 September 2014

Conference Time!

Hello everyone! This Monday, once again, it's conference time for me! I'm heading down to London for Photon14 (a conference focused on all things related to light) run by the Institute of Physics at Imperial College. So, I'll be repeating what I did for TERMIS and write a set of diary posts detailing what I get up to at the conference.
 
As I'm in England at a university I should have decent internet access and will hopefully upload the posts during the week as I write them, before doing some kind of thing linking them all together (which will probably appear next week). The Day 2/Tuesday post will probably be the one to look out for as that's when I'm presenting so wish me luck! Incidentally I'm presenting at 10:45, the same time I presented at during TERMIS... Do I sense a conspiracy at work here? I suppose there's only one way to find out. To London!