Symmetry factor

So that’s the question I asked myself today when I walked in to one of the At&T stores. My contract with AT&T is up, so I wanted to explore my options. And of course, with the recent iPhone craze (and being somewhat of a gizmo geek), I wanted to check them out. So here is how the real thing looks like (I’ve got to play with it for about five minutes while in the store):

It’s thin, light and, to me, has a physical feel of an iPod (well, the redone one, with metal outer shell) and “virtual” feel of a Mac. Very intuitive controls. Lots of functions. Huge screen… What can I say, Apple makes very nice products. So if I were looking for an expensive toy to play, I’d have definitely gotten one — com’on, this thing also makes phone calls! But at $5oo up front and somewhat expensive data plans I think I’ll wait this one over. I’m seriously thinking about Blackberry Pearl… what do you think?

P.S. BTW, no crazy people running around in (or waiting outside of) that store, I’d say, they had a usual day.

P.P.S. They also had no iPhones to sell — only the working display units — so they said that if I wanted one, I’d have to wait 3-5 days — and the lady clerk was sooo0 apologetic… I guess, some things make you feel like a kid again: “But I want it NOW!”

Grigori Perelman, the guy who (a) proved Thurston’s geometrization conjecture (and, along the way, the famous Poincaré conjecture), (b) was awarded the Fields Medal (the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”), but declined to accept it, (c) is eligible for a $1M Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute, but did not claim it, is somewhat of a strange celebrity in Russia. When he sent his papers to ArXiv (and the proofs were checked and found correct), the press was all over him, but he just hid from all the attention in his modest St. Petersburg appartment — and even stayed inside there without going outside! Now, that’s unusual…

Now that press turned their attention to bigger and better things (like Paris Hilton’s affair), he apparently got the long-sought rest… not quite, at least in the geek community! Some fellow (user of LiveJournal) spotted him in St. Petersburg’s subway and snapped some pictures of him (see here). Of course, they will never appear on front-page of CNN or other major news outlets — there is no way that the life of a great scientist is more interesting than the life of a teenager charged with DWI…

My question here is this: what makes people tirelessly watch Paris Hilton or
Britney Spears as they go by their lives, drinking and/or partying? Is it some sublimation of a natural human desire of having everything but doing nothing? Maybe someone should release a computer game “Find Perelman”, where one has to analyse clues, locate the mathematician and convince him to accept his Fields Medal… kinda like “Myst“… This should bring some attention to math… but of course I’m just mumbling…

It’s spring — prime time for a college newsletter. Ours is called CLAS Notes (CLAS is for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences). It’s a nice newsletter which has interesting stuff about stuff that happens in our College. Nice read. This year, however, our editor decided to include a new section — grants and awards (presumably awarded from the time previous newsletter was published). Closely examining it I realized that my funding comes from a slightly unusual source, Nutrition and Food Science, given that I’m a particle theorist, mainly working on dynamics of heavy quark systems. Check it out (click on a picture to make it bigger):

Wow! Now, tell me that I’m not doing biophysics! Actually, I’m in a good company — my colleague from condensed matter physics, a couple of computer scientists, several mathematicians and even a professor from English Department! Now, it is understandable why I was ascribed that source of funding — I myself saw “Quark” in a cheese section of our grocery store a couple of days ago. But apparently one of research directions of our English department is relation of poetry and food, I guess..

P.S. In reality my funding comes from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy (have to acknowledge them in every publication)…

I saw an interesting thing today. This morning, when I arrived to our physics parking lot at WSU, I noticed a WSU policeman “distributing” parking tickets to some cars illegally parked on our lot. But that’s not what captured my attention. He arrived to our lot driving a nice car from Daimler-Chrysler… oops, sorry, Daimler, a nice little Mercedes. Of course, Detroit is not Aspen (where police drive Saabs), so there’s got to be a reason for it. And there it was: it was a nice fuel-cell vehicle! Here is a picture of it (which I got appropriately asking for permission):

Nice! It’s a great way to do evaluation of new technology, right at the University that feeds car industry.

It’s been a month since ArXiv.org, one of the main sources of information for particle, nuclear, astro and other physicists implemented new scheme to identify papers submitted there (and two weeks since my last post — finals as well as other matters). I guess the big idea behind changing the old scheme, when papers were identified by topic, year, month, and a number, say, arch-ive/YYMMNNN, to a new one was that the old one was not good enough for computers (as it was fine for most of the humans I know who use the archive). For example, it used to be that paper identified as hep-ph/0610039 simply meant that the paper in High Energy Physics - PHenomenology was submitted to archive in October 2006 and identified as paper number 39. The new scheme assigns identifiers as arXiv:YYMM.NNNNvV (see here for explanation of ArXiv labelling scheme). I wonder that if the new scheme is better for automatic classification, what was the point of introducing it at all, and not, say switch to DOI (Digital Object Identifier) numbers… In other words, I don’t know what subject class this paper belongs to just by looking at the archive number. Of course, this is not a big deal, as I can always download a paper and look to see what it is about, but for my colleague, say in Irkutsk, who sits on a modem line and pays for service by kilobyte, it might not be that easy…

I must however add that I think that along with SLAC SPIRES, the ArXiv is one of the best inventions that made life of particle physicist easier — no more preprint mailings and “manual” library searches. Kinda like moving from paper newspapers to online ones. It might be interesting to find out if the idea of on-line versions of newspapers (say, New York Times) was invented by newspapers or “modeled after” phsyics preprint servers such as ArXiv. Might be another thing for physicists to be proud about…

I wanted to tell you about the project HiSchool DiSCo. This is a project that I started almost a year ago here at WSU as part of outreach effort supported by my CAREER award. The idea was to set up a network of (Linux-powered) computers at local high schools, both in Detroit and suburbs.

Why? Well, the way high performance computing is going nowdays, scientists and engineers will be using powerful grids of computers to solve computational problems. In fact, data from the highest-energy-to-be accelerator in the world, the LHC, will be processed using Grid technology using computers all over the world. There are many other exmples in physics and astrophysics (ex. LSST). Also, grids can be used for drug design, data minig, etc… The idea of Grid computing is very similar to electric power networks (”grids”): users of electricity can access electric power without actually wonderting about which power plant that energy is coming from. So, IMHO, its the way of the future in high performance computing.

Now, how can I interest high school students in this cool technology? And, generally, excite them about science and engineering careers? And make them think that physics is not boring? Certainly, no one will allow them to play with, say, the LHC Grid. This is where the HighSchool DiSCo comes in. Basically, it’s like a “toy grid.” Those computers in high schools would be used for the dual purposes of teaching high school students the basics of Linux/Windows administration and scientific computational methods and as a commodity cluster for high energy physics computations (in my case, analytical calculations of pQCD corrections). An many other things.

NSF thought that it is a good idea and funded a research assistant to work on this project. And that’s where we got stuck — no money for computers to place in schools!!! I was trying to get some private money and, naturally, contacted our University Development Office. They were “helpful” by enthusiastically agreeing to help, sitting on a proposal for almost a year doing nothing. Blew all private foundations’ deadlines without even letting me know… Of course, who cares about $30-50K when one can work on funding for a new building for several milllion $$$… At the end, I even had to spend money I got as part of one of the local WSU “outstanding faculty” awards to buy some computers… But still, no money for computers at schools! This is how the project looks like now, at least the WSU part of the cluster:

Maybe someone has some ideas of how to get this thing fully-funded? Or can offer funding? I’d appreciate the info…

I am a faculty advisor for the WSU’s chapter of Society of Physics Students (SPS). What that means is that I help our undergraduate and graduate students who are members of SPS with what they need from the faculty/Chair/University/… — basically a liason between them and anyone else when senior faculty involvment is required. Our SPS fellows are really a great bunch! After some years of inactivity, this year’s incarnation of SPS is burst with activity — among other things I just have to mention a program for tuitoring of high school girls in Detroit that they developed! Of course, this is all due to their leadership, Aragorn Steiger, Emmet Brown, Wesley Leonard and their “cabinet” (see the above link to our SPS chapter). Of course, I’m trying to help them with anything I can, but it is really their sucessfull enterprize and my help is minimal. They are running a fine SPS chapter and should be recognized for that.

Yet, in a surprise development, they informed me yesterday that recently they nominated me for the Outstanding Student Organization Advisor Award, which is a part of WSU’s  Campus Life Leadership Awards. Moreover, they also informed me that, as of yesterday, I won that award!

Thank you, guys! I really appreciate that!

P.S. They also told me that this award was also a recognision for the HiSchool DiSCo project that I’m trying to run, but which really needs money to buy new computers… I’ll blog more about this project tomorrow.

I noticed that my blog has been hit many times with the following search request: postdoc salary (in physics or particle physics or at some particular university/lab). I take that, besides general curiosity, someone gets an offer from somewhere and wants to know if the place is kinda cheap, i.e. tries to pay as little as possible. So I wanted to address this issue here.

While the possibility of a place trying to pay as little as possible is certainly a possibility - I’ve heard stories about Ivy League schools trying to hire Nobel-Prize-grade people for cheap (well, at the time those people haven’t won their Nobel Prizes yet), most of postdoc salaries are written in the grant applications of faculty who are trying to hire those postdocs. So there is almost no wiggle room there. Of course, salaries of less experienced postdocs would generally be smaller than those of more experienced postdocs, but at the end all those numbers are still in the same ballpark (I already talked about that here). The only exception would be national labs (FNAL/ANL/BNL/SLAC/…) where salaries are generally higher. And of course universities located in places like New York City pay more and maybe even offer University-assisted housing. So, excluding those things and things like prize postdocs such as this, this, or this, the general bracket for a postdoc salary in particle theory is $38K-$42K this year. When I was a postdoc, those numbers started in the low 30’s…

I was recently pointed to an interesting paper in Physics Today “Experimenting with plagiarism detection on the ArXiv” by Toni Feder (thank you, Andrei Sidorenko, for pointing it out). Let me shamelessly copy the first paragraph of that article: “Starting this summer, submissions to the arXiv, the online server where many physicists check daily for new preprints, will be compared with the server’s existing 400 000—and counting—manuscripts to check for plagiarism.” Apparently, this news was already discussed a couple of years ago in an interesting article in one of the old issues of The Chronicles of Higher Education (sorry, you might need a subscription).

It is an interesting development. According to this paper, Paul Ginsparg (creator of the ArXiv) and his graduate student Daria Sorokina did a study which found that about 10% of all papers on arxiv has blocks of overlapping text! Indeed, this should not be surprizing, as many authors reuse their own papers when they write conference proceedings. But then, excluding those, they still found about 1% of papers that were clear copies of other authors’ work! Once again, it’s 1% of 400 000 papers — you can do the math (that is, unless you work in a Honda Dealership in Farmigton Hills or, as I recently learned, at Home Depot)!

I think this kind of software is really needed. I recall a scandalous case of one fellow who submitted a bunch of papers to the arxiv which were just copies of various papers he found on the same arxive. In particular, he copied several chapters of the BaBar Physics Book. I wrote one of those chapters! 

Nowdays, you can even fight self-plagiarism! But then again, it should be easy to remember what is published and what is not… Although I can recall at least two instances when this happened: I was refereeing a paper submitted to Physics Letters B when I noticed that almonst all text of that paper was exactly the same as the text of previous paper written by the same author! Well, the formulas were different — maybe that’s what counts — as the author talked about a different meson system. But all the text was the same!!! Then the same happened when I reviwed another paper for Physical Review D. Apparently, some people just want to improve their paper count… 

I am on the Graduate Recruitment and Admissions Committee this year. What it means is that within our department I am part of the group of three people who look through applications of prospective graduate students and decide who would be the best candidates to become grad students in our department. I will write later on what the application should have in order to be successful. Today I wanted to mention some things the applicant should avoid. Well, first and foremost, the applicant should aviod NOT following what we say in the advertisment or on our admissions pages. That is to say, we, as any other physics department in the US, require each applicant to fill out an application form. In our case, this application form is on-line, whch is very convenient for both applicants and us. We specifically say that we need this form — and this is not just another burocratic requirement — it conveniently contains GRE/TOEFL scores, basic info about the applicant, letters of recommendation, transcripts (as attachments), … In other words, all that we need to make an informative decision on who to admit in one place!

And then there is another thing — personal communication. If we contact the candidate and he/she does not reply for weeks, it tells us something about the applicant and his/her intentions (for instance, we don’t want some applicants from overseas to use the deparment to get visa and support for a year before they leave for engineering or computer science — believe me, it happens more often than one might think… so we learn to root those out in the first place). But then there are also other types of e-mails. Oftentimes I get messages from prospective students that go something like that (quote):

“I have gone through website for the vacancy of phd studentship. I intend to do my Ph.D in CONDESED MATTER PHYSICS. As my interest lie within your frame of research work, I would like to join for Ph.D in your esteemed group. Please consider my application for the same. I will be glad to work under your guidance. … I want to become a part of your group to pursue exiting projects.”

Come on! It is sooo clear that this person didn’t even look at our DEPARTMENTAL website, leave alone mine! For starters, my “official” website clearly states that my research interest is theoretical particle physics. And so my group and I are doing just that, theoretical particle physics. Second, if this person looked through our advertisments, he/she would clearly noticed that all communications should have been directed to our admissions chair, not to the person who submitted the ad… So I’m inclined to treat those messages as spam… but I don’t, I faithfully forward them to where they are supposed to go in the first place, our admissions chair…