Crawfish Boils and On the Road Again...

Last week's post came to you from the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston, MA.  This week, it is coming to you from Atlanta, GA.  I just arrived here for the APS April Meeting.  My room is a beautiful corner room with two great views!  So I've chosen the better view from one of my windows:

Actually, I am here a day early so that I can attend the Professional Skills Development Workshop which is designed to improve the communication and negotiation skills of women physicists.  I'm looking forward to this as, while I would love to improve my communication skills, I really feel that I need to develop negotiation skills.  I am currently working to transition my current postdoc position (which is temporary by definition) into a more permanent position, not only because I love my work and the opportunities I have here, but my husband also works at the LIGO Livingston Observatory as an engineer.  The fact that I am this early in my career and living under the same roof with my husband, who is also happily employed in his field, is almost unheard of.  This is known as the two-body problem - when two academic professionals are challenged to find a way to find jobs together; I plan to write a blog post on this later.  That being said, I almost want to jump and any offer that can be scrapped together for me - the last thing I want to do is ruin the good thing I have going.  This is exactly one of the reasons that women tend to make less than men, even in physics - we undersell ourselves.  While I have no intention of trying to wring every penny I can out of a new position, I want to make sure that I am at least being compensated properly for my work.

As for the APS April Meeting, I will be giving a talk on the latest burst gravitational wave all-sky search results.  The information for my talk is here and the "plain English" science summary of the paper is here.  Once I give my talk, the presentation will be publicly available on the LIGO Document Control Center (DCC).  I will also be attending the APS Forum on Education Executive Committee Meeting and this will be the last of my term.  I have more than enjoyed the others I was privileged to serve with and it has been wonderful to get a chance to spread my wings a little more in physics education.  Of course, I have days and days of interesting talks and other activities to look forward to.  I will make sure to Tweet points of interest so make sure to follow me @livingligo.  You can also follow others' Tweets from the meeting using the hashtag #APSapril.

Between my trips to Boston last week and this one to Atlanta, I did get to be home in Baton Rouge for a few days.  Yesterday, the observatory staff was updated on the large scale status of the Advanced LIGO upgrade by the program leader, David Shoemaker.  While that was very informative (all is going well), the best part of the day of the crawfish boil we had outside afterwards.  For those of you who don't live in the American South (specifically the deep south), crawfish/crawdads/mudbugs/crayfish (but don't call them the latter around the natives lest you truly out yourself as not one of them) are essentially small freshwater lobsters that yield about the same amount of meat in their tail as a shrimp.  The meal takes "family style" to a new level: everything is served in heaps and you get a tray instead of a plate and it is heaped with the crawfish, sausage, corn-on-the-cob, and potatoes.  Oh yeah, and you don't get utensils.  This is a get-your-hands-dirty kind of meal.  Here is what my lunch looked like (before I started tearing the little critters apart - the communal aftermath from everyone at the table wasn't nearly as pretty):

This is considered a "dainty" portion.  A few other tips on how to fit in as a local:

• Don't sit while you eat crawfish - you stand so that the juice that can sometimes explode out of the body when you separate the tail from the head doesn't get all over you.
• Suck the heads!  Once your remove the tail, don't through away the top part of the body - that's where all the best flavor is.  As I have never done this myself, I am not sure if they are referring to the seasoned boil that remains inside or if they actually suck the "stuff" out.  To me, it just looks like the poor thing is trying to escape!
• Again, don't call them crayfish.

And a point of common sense - take your watch off!  Mine still smells like crawfish!

March LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston

So, I am at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston right now.  As you may (or may not) know, our two collaborations are very close knit.  We schedule our upgrades to be around the same time, we always share our data, and we collaborate on our science to get the most from our work.  Being a part of a big international collaboration is exciting and gives you a new perspective on international politics - in science they exist, but are much easier to deal with since we are all working for the same goal.

Here is the gorgeous view from my hotel window:

Personal Complexes:

Another thing about being one of over 800 scientists and engineers working on a project is that you can feel small.  I've written before about the Impostor Syndrome - when people who are fully qualified and competent feel inadequate.  Sometimes, these meetings bring those feelings back to me.  Every time someone comes to me and asks me what I do, I feel like my worth is being weighed.  But it absolutely isn't!  After all, I do the same thing to new colleagues that I meet and I am only interested in learning more about them and maybe working with them in the future.

I was starting to feel inferior while I was traveling here...  I was sitting at my gate during a layover and a colleague I consider a friend was sitting in his seat diligently working on his computer.  What was I doing?  Reading a vampire book.  The self-loathing voice in my head immediately chimed in with, "See, there is someone who is deserves the esteem of the collaboration.  He works hard and makes the most of his time.  What are you doing?  Reading a book about things that don't even exist!"  As I was resigning myself to mediocrity, he put his computer aside and started talking with me.  During our short conversation, he paid me the most unexpected complement.  I'm not going to repeat it here, but I was speechless and ecstatic at the same time and tried not to tear up.  I smiled and thanked him because his words forced me to think well of myself (not that I told him that).  If he is reading this, you know who you are and what you said even though you don't know how much it mattered to me - THANK YOU!

I've been trying to work more on these issues but I don't ever expect to completely get over feeling inferior to my peers.  Not that I really want to - I've met many scientists who thought they were a divine gift to science and I can't stand them (even if they are right)!

The Science:

The final data analysis from our last data run is finishing up and we've been talking about these results and preparing for the demands the MUCH more sensitive Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors will place on our analysis infrastructure.  This has been a time of reorganization.  I gave a short talk about the functionality of the gravitational wave simulation software (called GravEn) I wrote while I was a graduate student.  This has been the standard software we've used to measure the sensitivity of of our burst data analysis methods.  We are also taking time to consider if there is a better way of doing it.  So far, it seems like GravEn is still the bee's knees and that makes me very happy!  (The science summary of the last burst data analysis paper is here.  The plots that show the sensitivity of our methods to different kinds of signals [the second and the third] were made using the simulations I produced.)

There have also been talks on the status of LIGO, Virgo, GEO, the Japanese KAGRA detector, and the status of what used to be the LISA space-based detector (this was a partnership between the ESA and NASA until budget issues forced NASA to cancel being a full partner).  There is progress being made on all of these fronts - even LISA (which is now led by the ESA and known as NGO for the New Gravitational-wave Observatory).  Every where you walk around the conference hotel, you see small groups working together on a project and a few very tall people in red uniforms (the Wisconsin Badgers are staying in our hotel for their NCAA Sweet 16 game tonight against Syracuse).

What Would YOU Like to Ask a LIGO Scientist/Engineer?

As part of a talk on the collaboration's outreach activities, this blog was featured!  (Those who don't know my science work will often still know me as the "Living LIGO Lady".)  It was also announced that I would like to feature interviews of gravitational wave people (scientists, engineers, etc.) on this blog.  When I originally started writing this, I wanted to make science human and accessible.  I feel like I am running out of human things about me to talk about (I'm not all that interesting).  But there are so many others with different backgrounds and stories that I would like to share with you.  I already have a list of questions I am thinking about asking (not all of them will be mandatory, of course) but I want to invite you to tell me what questions you would like to as a LIGO person?  Tweet them to me @livingligo or leave a comment here (below).  You can also email me at amber@livingligo.org.  I'm thinking of using my husband, a mechanical engineer for LIGO, as a Guinea pig (he can't cook and likes to eat, so I think I can convince him :P ).

Until next week!

The LIGO-Virgo Meeting on Normal Days

Wow!  I can't believe the attention my last blog post got!  I was meaning to post everyday, but with the reception of the "Big Dog" post, I couldn't think of anything nearly as interesting to follow it immediately.

The rest of the LIGO-Virgo Meeting has been continuing on at its usual frenetic pace.  The meeting starts at 8:30 am and lasts until 6:30 pm (assuming we aren't running late).  Monday evening was the meeting dinner which is always nice to catch up with colleagues you don't get to see often (with more than 800 members of the collaboration spread across the country and around the globe, meetings are sometimes your only time to talk face-to-face).  On Tuesday morning I had the pleasure of organizing a Women's Breakfast for the collaboration and I believe this is the first time something like this was done (it was suggested and sponsored by the LIGO Lab Diversity Committee).  About 40 women from all levels of LIGO (student to professor, engineer to scientist) came and contributed to the discussion.  It was very informal and the conversation was productive!  I believe that this will become a regular event and I would like to move it from a breakfast event for two reasons:  First, we had a limited time to talk before the main meeting started and second, I am not a morning person!  The breakfast started at 7 am (don't you feel bad for me) and I prefer not to acknowledge that anything before that time exists :)

Today is the last day of the meeting proper.  This afternoon and tomorrow is a special EPO (Education and Public Outreach) meeting where all of us who are interested in doing outreach get together and organize our efforts.  There were also 2 days of informal meetings before the LIGO-Virgo Meeting started on Monday.  These meetings are by the individual search groups to discuss their data analysis.  There are 4 main sources of gravitational waves: continuous (long duration), inspiral (binary pairs merging into each other), stochastic (noisy background gravitational waves, perhaps the relics of the Big Bang), and burst (short duration gravitational waves from unanticipated sources or from sources that we aren't sure what to expect).  Each of the groups search the data looking for their special kind of gravitational wave and publish their search methods and results.

In closing, about 340 people attended the LIGO-Virgo Meeting and this was the view from near my seat this morning (my seat and computer is in the middle at the bottom):

Conference Calls and a Poster

Conference Calls

When you work with scientists from around the world, you end up on a lot of phone meetings.  Today (and every Wednesday) I had two. 

The first one was the "Burst" data analysis call and I drew the short straw and got to take the minutes of the meeting.  I am not someone who is good with names (I once had a class of 4 students and I messed their names up all that time - I knew each person well, I just forgot their label); now imagine that you only have a voice to go on.  This is not my strong point but it wasn't too bad today.  We discussed what needs to be done now that our latest science data run is over to complete our analysis looking for gravitational waves.

The second call was with people I collaborate with at Penn State to keep the MATLAB library of software that has been written for various LIGO purposes available and up to date.  That doesn't mean that we write it all (I have only written some of it), but we work with the program authors to make sure that their work makes gets into the hands of the other scientists to use.  Right now we are working on taking some of the programs that have been written to perform utility functions (like checking to see if a time is in daylight savings or doing calculations on where a star was at any given time) and pulling them together into a general toolbox.  Creating a toolbox like this will help keep duplication of effort to a minimum (that is, to keep people from repeatedly reinventing the wheel) and help insure that users are getting the correct values from these basic utilities.  We are right in the middle of going through this pool of computer programs to make sure that they are documented well and up to date.

Poster

Last year, I had the honor and privilege of working with the APS to create a poster on gravitational waves.  It was a wonderful experience getting to be someone who communicated the science of LIGO to the public and I learned much from the APS editors on how to express concepts in more understandable ways.  I wrote way too much content for the poster with the idea that it is better to have too much and cut it down, than to not have enough and have to create more content later.  The side benefit to this is the full version of the text that I wrote was then adapted for the science pages on the ligo.org site!

The poster as premiered by the APS at the joint APS/AAPT Meeting in Washington, DC this past February.  LIGO also arranged to have the posters included with the November issue of the AAPT magazine "The Physics Teacher" and to have the posters mailed to every physics department in the US.  I was thrilled!  So, now I am starting to spot the poster in the wild.

A few days ago, a friends of mine who is now at the Coastal Carolina University sent me a picture of it hanging outside his office:

I also just got my November issue of "The Physics Teacher" and it was so cool to get a copy of the poster in my mail box!

If you would like to get a FREE copy, you can request it (or another great poster on the top 10 reasons to study physics) from the APS here.

Sorry for getting so giddy about this!  This is just one of those things that make your day and remind you why you get out of bed in the morning.  :)