Life as a Physicist

I’m back in Seattle.I flew here last Wednsday. I’ve been here less than a week and I already miss Julia. Paula has been sending me little videos on my phone of Julia’s progress. Today it was her lifting up her neck while on her stomach. This is a big milestone for a baby — getting control of their heads. I return to Ottawa this Sunday.

So, why come back to Seattle? About the same time that we figured out we were going to have a child, I agreed to host the Open Science Grid Consortium meeting here, in Seattle.

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a loose collection of universities and national labs, all of whom contribute resources to a GRID. The OSG folks provide a software package that each site downloads and uses to configure their site. After that anyone submitting jobs to OSG will can have them run on any number of sites. It isn’t perfect, but it is getting closer to the idea of computing being like the power grid: you submit a job and you don’t care, and the results come back.

One of the big reasons I agreed to have it here is that I would like to see UW more involved in the GRID as a service, rather than the GRID as an intellectual exercise. CHEP, a conference I attended in February, has a huge number of talks concerning the GRID and how to get it to work. This is tough stuff and there are plenty of computer science research careers to be made in getting it right. But there is another side to GRID work: just having access to a large amount of computing on which to do calculations. QCD lattice simulations. LHC Event Reconstruction. Protein Folding. Gene Modeling and Discovery. Those of us that want to use this computing power really don’t care very much about how the work gets done: just that it gets done. UW has some investment in the research aspect, but we are behind the times as far as having access to GRID services for non-computer science researchers. This is what OSG is about: providing a service. UW has started to express some interest, and I have heard (grapevine, big-time) that OSG is one of the GRID’s under evaluation currently. That would be fantastic.

The meeting started today, and goes through Weds. All the talks are slowly being posted online. For someone not part of the OSG this morning was the most interesting as it talked about the science that was being done with the OSG as well as science that is done in a GRID like fashion but not on the OSG (yet).

The report The Quantum Universe – The Roll Of Colliders
came out a while back. One of the main goals of the report was to produce a glossy pamphlet that could be left on tables, with text aimed at the non-HEP scientist. If you’ve not looked at it, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

I just stumbled on the web site version of the report, which is impressively accessible – considering the web sites we physicists usually create. Check it out during your next coffee break!

My heart goes out to people living in Mumbai after these bomb blasts. I was there only a week, but the residents in that city are something else. Flickr already has a series of posts of pictures from the bombing. They are riviting. Strong stomach required in some cases.

I’ve known Matt Bowen for almost 7 years now. I first met him when I was a post-doc and he was an undergraduate at Brown University (working on DZERO for his independent study). After Brown he came to University of Washington to get his Ph.D. Which he defended, with a fantastic performance, last Tuesday. A few more minor updates to the thesis and he will be officially Dr. Bowen. After the defense, there was a bunch of Champaign. I have pictures (naturally).

It is the season of thesis defenses. Last Friday I went to Kareem Kazkaz’s defense. He also did a fantastic job. He was one of the first graduate students that worked with me (and then he moved over to a neutrino experiment). I’ve got one or perhaps two more defenses next week as well. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera to this one: Kareem wore a tux!

For those that haven’t been through this… As a professor I sit on a number of student’s thesis committee’s. If I’m a regular member I’m required only to attend the defense and general exam: about 2-3 hours for each. These consist of a 45 minute public talk with questions, and then the rest of the time (no time limit!!) is random questions from the committee behind closed doors. If I’m on the reading committee (as I was for both Matt and Kareem), a subset of the thesis committee, then I also have to read the thesis carefully and make comments. A task that usually takes 5 or 6 hours. I also have to sit on committee’s for students outside the department, as do non-physicists have to sit on our students’ committees. I have one of those in computer engineering next week (I think).

Once a month, on Friday, the UW sponsors a great series of lectures call Science Forum. Someone who has made it at UW comes and gives a talk to the community. The lectures are almost always good, and often touch on some of the key scientific issues of the day.

Last Friday Carl Bergstrom came and talked about "Ecology, Evolution, and Antibiotic Resistance." I have my issues with the talk, but the last 10 minutes of talk were brilliant.

The USA Today story about the NSA gathering phone numbers broke last week, as most of you know. I'm sorry to say that I wasn't all that suprised by the news and basically just let it wash by as another example of an over-reaction to 9/11 and the current attitude towards personal privacy. Bergstrom saw it as something much more evil — a take I'd not appreciated until he presented it. His point: it's the network, stupid.

In our society we are responsible for what we do. We do something illegal, we should take responsibiltiy for it. Then, in the McCarthy era, it became more about the people you know. If your friends were "evil", then they could rat you out. It was a once-removed type of argument. With the phone number collecting done by the NSA, however, it is now about the full web of interactions between people. If it turns out several of your friends know "bad" guys, then you become a prime suspect — even though you did nothing wrong. This is, according to Bergstrom, like McCarthyism squared (well, worse, because it is a network…). In fact, your actions no longer matter. It isn't about anything you've done in the past. It is now all about who your friends know.

It put this latest phone number scanning in a whole new (ugly) light. It also makes you realize how powerful data-mining is. Things we didn't worry about keeping private in the past, perhaps, suddenly require privacy given the increases in data storage and compute power out there!

With all the talk by the White house and others about increasing funding for science I'm surprised that every scientific discipline and sub-discipline hasn't released a report detailing why they are in trouble and how easy it would be to fix the problem with just a little $$ thrown into the mix. NASA is a current poster-boy for this:

"There is a mismatch between what NASA has been assigned to do and the resources with which it has been provided," said Lennard A. Fisk, chairman of the council's Space Studies Board, which wrote the report at the request of Congress.

(from a NYTimes article). All of these requests will collide in congress. I'd hate to be the people that have to sort them out. I hope a bunch of people with science background will be called on to help!

Is it me, or is the news about all the challenges to the supreme court on abortion depressing?

I’ve got jet lab from my India trip. I woke up at a crazy hour this morning. And, as you can tell, finished off two days of news papers.

The President of India has a Ph.D. in physics. The current prime minister of India has a Ph.D. too. I wish…

The President gave a 30 minute speech on the GRID, education, and India. As the fellow next to me said “he did his homework.” By nature the President is a scientist: he is responsible for India’s missile program. Indeed, it sounds like he used to work in TIFR, so this is a home crowd. His talk was full of details — and it sounded like he had taken a bunch of time to look at things on the web last night as well. How cool is that? He was asked to put his slides up on the conference web site — when he does I’ll repost them here so you can see what I’m talking about.

It took two days to prepare for the president’s 2 hour arrival. He was delayed (fog). It is funny feeling that your time is now your own. His schedule dictated everything we did this morning: talks were rearranged on an almost 10 minute basis.

I found out a little more about how the President is selected. I’d thought he was elected — but that isn’t quite right; at least, not as I was thinking. He is elected by Parliament — an indirect election. They frequently have famous people or other notables — often not politicians — in the post. His name was put forward by the last government and no one opposed, and here he is.

At any rate, that is the closest I’ve been of a major government functionary (2 or 3 meters away for the photo above). I must admit it was a bit of a rush. Never been that close to anyone in the US. Maybe oneday a president will address one of our Washington meetings. Though the security would be painful!

There are a lot of great talks at CHEP, and many of them I wan to comment on, but a combination of poor battery life, full schedule, and poor conectivity make it not possible.

Hmmm. The President of India is about to walk on. I’ll have to stop.

It’s good, cheap, and has side effects.

Last night, for example, we went out to a very nice restaurant. There were 6 of us. We ordered way to much food — I was still stuffed when breakfast arrived this morning. And it was amazing. In the US, for example, usually there is only one type of Paneer on the menu. Here there were four or five. And large 6 beers. Total cost? 1800 Ru (45 Ru per US dollar).

There is a downside, of course. I don’t think us westerners are all totally used to the spice. I know of at least two people that have missed afternoon sessions and last night heard about another person who may be too sick to travel home tomorrow.

Knock on wood, I’ve been ok so far. Getting sick would suck: I’d have to miss my last two dinners and probably my last chance for several years to have Indian food in India!