Life as a Physicist

Is returning to the west coast. You can sleep late. Very late. Roll over, and sleep some more. Finally, you can get up. Fully rested. Hey — it is only 7:18am!

At a recent All DZERO Meeting — the general internal meeting — our spokes people showed a list of “common sense” rules about blogging. If you read blogs from people out in the business world you’ll find successful bloggers following a set of guidelines:

• Make sure you are clear when you are posting something personal or some official company position.
• Don’t reveal secret information
• Be nice to the company

Walking outside these is bound to get you a talking to from your supervisor. Things are no different in a large experiment like DZERO, CMS, ATLAS, or CDF. There was a recent incident that specifically prompted this (not on DZERO, thank goodness). If you have username/password access to the DZERO agenda server, you can see the two slides of the talk here.

What I find strange is that our field — especially particle physics — is a very collaborative field. We depend on each other to get anything done. So if you piss off people you’ll have that many fewer people to work with. Walking outside the blogging lines is one way to do that. So I’d think just that pressure would keep one on the straight and narrow. At least, it does me! Well, mostly on the straight and narrow.

Another article I saw yesterday in the NYT discusses the lack of women in computer science (you might get the feeling I end up reading only the NYT - I do read the Economist too, but I don’t have online access, so I almost never write about it…). I initially started reading it because of the picture of Ed Lazowska - a faculty member of the U of W (and someone I’ve actually met). I liked this line:

For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.

Uh.. Physics too!

The big problems, these and other experts say, are prevailing images of what computer science is and who can do it.
“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

Yes. Yes. We know we are nerds… But I’m sure it goes beyond that!

My wife and I (both of us are physics professors at UW) were walking down the hall in the Hyatt for the APS meeting when the following conversation occurred:

Me: Hey — we haven’t turned on the television the whole time we’ve been here!

Her: Do we even have a television?

Me: (pause) I don’t know. I can’t remember one!

Her: Wait, you put your portable on top of it when you were talking to your student on the phone!

Me: Oh, right! I guess we do have a television!

I’m at the APS April meeting (which is why there haven’t been many postings). Since yesterday afternoon everyone has been talking about the shootings at Virginia Tech. How ugly. And as a member of the University of Washington — where a domestic-dispute related murder-suicide happened just a few weeks ago in a building next door to mine — and a “new” parent I find this affects me a more than I expected.

First off, I have no idea how the VT community is possibly dealing with this — we had enough trouble at UW dealing with the grief and (ongoing) fall out from the two deaths at UW. These tragedies defy logical explanation simply because they are not logical. I fear that we will never be able to completely eliminate the chance of something like this happening. In the case of the UW shooting it looks like there are things to examine and fix (for example how restraining orders work, a call for us as members of a society to keep a closer watch on each other). But there will always been ****-heads like that that manage to slip through.

I wish VT the best of luck.

The New York Times already has an article up commenting on how familiar the news cycle has become. And, as if to drive the point home, they already have an editorial up that discusses getting to the bottom of the blame — though not before the facts (and then goes on to suggest gun control, missed signs of personal instability, etc.). It includes the following line:

Campuses are inherently open communities, and Virginia Tech has some 26,000 students using hundreds of buildings over 2,600 acres. It is not easy to guarantee a safe haven.

As a parent I think “How can I keep my kid safe when she (finally) gets to university?!”, but as a faculty member I really don’t like where the parental-half of my brain heads. My parent-brain asks “could we put up a wall?” or something along those lines. As a faculty member I think that would be awful. Universities are supposed to be open communities — and couldn’t the trouble come from within!? Well, we could put up a wall and let everyone in, but only after they go through the equivalent of airport security! 36,000 students. I have no idea how this is going to turn out.

No matter the specific issue that drove the person at VT to do this, the general issue will be discussed. And yet, as a society, we must not become a series of gated communities.

[Update: The best writing I've seen of this so far in the nyt is another editorial by a faculty member at VT. Much better than I could ever do.]

Buffer overruns are a particularly difficult source of bugs, and in the right places, security holes in software. Wikipedia has a marbled-mouthed description of it:

A buffer overflow is an anomalous condition where a process attempts to store data beyond the boundaries of a fixed-length buffer. The result is that the extra data overwrites adjacent memory locations. The overwritten data may include other buffers, variables and program flow data.

It has some great pictures of what it is talking about, however. Basically, a program stores something where it shouldn’t.

It sounds like the Mars Global Surveyor was a victim of something like this:

…an errant computer command five months earlier had been placed in the wrong location of the computer memory for the spacecraft. That, in effect, implanted a fatal defect in the spacecraft, disabling a safety feature to prevent the solar panels from rotating too far and mangling its ability to communicate with Earth in case of a mishap.

In short — no error checking caught that errant computer command. What a pity. It is very difficult to catch these sorts of programing errors (I see them with some regularity in our experiment’s code base).

The end of the new york times article describes what happened in the last minutes of the Surveyor’s life. The controllers watching from Earth must have been going nuts, helpless and unable to communicate:

In its last 13-minute contact, the Global Surveyor reported numerous alarms to mission controllers but gave no indication that it was in immediate danger.

As the spacecraft tried to recover, it ended up in an orientation such that the Sun was shining directly on a battery, causing it to overheat. The Global Surveyor misinterpreted that signal, sensing that it had overcharged the battery and stopped charging its other battery, as well.

Meanwhile, because the June error caused the craft’s antenna to point in the wrong direction, mission controllers on Earth could not get in touch with the craft again.

I’m going to ask Toby, who is part of the GLAST team, if they have done these sorts of checks. Or if this discovery means a delay while they check over the GLAST software.

The Sarbanes-Oxley act, fall out from corporate scandals like Enron, requires, among other things, chief executives to sign their company’s financial statements. The act is also has a reputation for a dramatic increase in the paper trails that public companies must keep track of (apparently, even instant messages under certain circumstances).

Here in Academia we have our own little version. And I stress little. It is called effort reporting. Here is the deal. I get a grant from the federal government, via the National Science Foundation. They pay for my students, my post-docs, my summer salary, computer equipment, etc. In return for the grant one thing I commit to doing is spending a certain amount of my time working on the grant while Washington State is paying my salary. This is called cost sharing. I’ve shared some my time on Washington’s nickel on grant duties. In return, the NSF has given me the grant and the state of Washington gets to keep some fraction of it.

Now, unsurprisingly, the NSF wants to know that I have actually spent that amount of time working on their grant. So every single quarter I get a form to sign. I have to sign it. And it says, basically, that I spent all the time that I committed to working on my grant working on my grant. No problem, right?

Well, not so. Despite being only a single page this thing is complex enough that I am constantly messing it up. Even experienced professionals mess it up. Apparently the university is trying to redesign the form because so many people mess it up! And check this out: when the government drops by to audit the university one of the things that they check is that all of these forms have been returned on time and correctly filled out.

I’m complaining about this right now because the last one I filled out was incorrect, apparently. I got a new copy today. The payroll person in our department is on vacation and I couldn’t find anyone else in the main office that could tell me how to fill it out! I know that I’ll feel foolish when the payroll coordinator comes back: “Oh, just write 100% here, 2% here, make sure that you then write 98% here, leave those two lines blank, and then sign and date!” It will take me 30 seconds.

This seems crazy to me because a bit of paper like this doesn’t in any way assure that I’ve spent the required time on the grant. Even more frustrating is I spend more actual time on it (i.e. nights, weekends, etc.). And this bit of paper seems to send the message that they don’t really trust me.

At any rate, hopefully they won’t dock my pay because I’m late with this form…

What were you doing at 9am Pacific time this morning? My original plan was to watch the live video feed of the MiniBooNE result!

First of all, congratulations to MiniBooNE. That was a lot of work! There are several open questions in the neutrino sector, however most of them are questions that no one has been able to answer up to now. But there has been one nagging problem: the LSND result. It made no sense in the context of results from other experiments. As more and more evidence gathered it became clear that the community had to recheck the LSND result. MiniBooNE was designed to do this. And this morning they released their result. All is right with the world: MiniBooNE contradicts LSND. We’ll probably never know exactly what went wrong with LSND, but at least now we can all drop the caveat from our talks (”as long as LSND is incorrect).

My friends all tell me the talk was rather dramatic. Apparently, towards the end, a blow-by-blow account was delivered as the experiment, internally, unveiled the result. Exciting talk, is what my friends have told me so far. Julia, however, decided to have her own kind of excitement! Paula is away, and I think she misses her mom. Woke up every 2 hours last night and demanded food almost every time (it has been months since she has done that). This morning she refused to get up and I wasn’t to insistent as I was sooo tired!

Ah well. Perhaps the video will be archived and I can download and watch it.

Statistics and I have never really gotten along. Sure, I know the basic stuff, sqrt(N) errors, and when pressed I can rederive how you propagate errors. But when it gets right down to it? Not really.

During the single top analysis I ran into some very odd behavior that, I think, boiled down to statistical and interpretation issues. There was only one thing to do — dive in. In our single top group there are at least two people who know quite a bit about statistics. Whenever they would give talks I’d always have to download the slides and study them privately. Statistical issues can become complex fast and if you aren’t already versed in the lingo it is very easy to get lost.

So imagine my surprise when  I recently found myself in an email conversation with that expert in statistics and I understood the emails we were sending back and forth! I guess I learned a lot during those single top studies. I didn’t mean to. And I certainly wasn’t trying to learn for the sake of learning — I was just trying to solve an analysis problem I had. I know that that sounds silly.

But still, it feels good when you surprise yourself at how much you know as compared to how little you thought you knew*.

* do you love the English language as much as I love the English language?

When your “p” key has stopped working. When you email is arriving faster than you can reply to it. When… Coming back from a short break is always difficult!