Lessons From My Childhood on How to Teach

One of the best parts of my job is getting to do outreach.  This is going out and teaching the public about the research that I do.  Since I love what I do and those that I encounter are usually interested in what I have to say or they wouldn't be there (like you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't want to), it is almost always a rewarding experience all around.  However, I had some childhood experiences with outreach that were, well, a little traumatic.  However, they have taught me lessons that I use every time I teach whether in the classroom, engaging the public at LIGO, or writing for you.

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"HAIR-RAISING" TRAUMA

Ever since I was a young child, I've always known that where I am now is where I wanted to be.  That is, I've always known that I wanted to be a physicist or an astronomer.  Of course, that's not what I said; I wanted to be an astronaut since that is the hero job for the physical sciences.  My family has also been supportive of me and one of my favorite things to do was go to the planetarium.  At the time, I lived outside of Pittsburgh, PA and we would go to the Buhl Planetarium (before it became part of the newer Carnegie Science Center - the building is now part of the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh).

Front entrance of the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, PA. [Source: Wikipedia]

On the fateful trip in question, I was no more than 7 or 8 years old and I was watching a demonstration in between planetarium shows with my father.  The presenter asked for a volunteer from the crowd, preferably with long fine hair.  The next thing I felt is my father's hand on my back pushing me forward.  I wasn't interested in being the center of attention, but the presenter thought that I would be perfect for the role.

She called me forward and had me stand on a plastic milk crate beside a metal dome that was bigger than my head.  She told me that I was going to have to hold on the the metal dome with one hand but I was not to do a list of things or I would get hurt.  Then I was worried.  She had me put one hand on the dome and turned the machine on.  It made a lot noise and I feel an odd tingling over my skin.  Then I was scared.  The presenter was very happy about everything and told me to shake my head.  I did so timidly.  Then she encouraged me to shake my head with more vigor.  I shook the heck out of my head so she would leave me alone and I could be done with all of this.  Then EVERYONE who is watching this demonstration WAS LAUGHING AT ME.  Then they applauded as the machine was turned off and I was helped down from my perch and left to think I was being laughed at.

The machine with the big metal dome attached to the top.  I later discovered that this is a Van de Graaff generator.  [Source: UMN Physics department]

It wasn't until I was in middle school that I figured out why everyone was laughing at me.  That machine was a Van de Graaff generator and it deposited static electricity on me.  The warnings that worried me were to prevent me from getting "zapped" and everyone was laughing at me because my hair was standing on end.  The harder I shook my head, the more the static electricity made my hair stand out.  A lot like this:

WHAT WENT WRONG?:  The presenter didn't show me what I looked like in a mirror (as is featured in the clip above) or tell me what I looked like.  I had no idea why everyone was laughing at me or what the point of the "hair raising" demonstration was.  Without this knowledge, I walked away from the experience thinking that everyone was really laughing at ME and not the effects of static electricity.

LESSON LEARNED:  If you use a volunteer in a demonstration, make sure that they understand what is happening.

I don't have many occasions where I need a volunteer for a demonstration, but when I do I make the volunteer the focus of the demonstration so that, at the very least, they walk away understanding what happened. 

Read more about how Van de Graaff generators work.

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SWINGING FOR A "BREAKTHROUGH"

When I was too young for school, I wanted to be a big girl and play school.  Even then I loved science.  One day I convinced my father to play school with me.  Using the sliding green chalk board doors on my toy box, my father taught me about the layers of the Earth.

A toy box much like the one my father used to play school with me.  [Source: It's Still Life blog]

The Earth's layers can be generalized into 4 main layers: the crust at the surface where we live, then the mantle, and finally the outer and inner cores.

Diagram showing the layers of the Earth.  [Source: About Earth blog]

I was told that the crust was very thin and the mantle is hot molten rock (magma) [note: only the mantle near the outer core is molten but the mantle under the crust is about 1000^oF so I equated that to "molten" too as a child].  I'd seen documentaries about volcanoes on television and knew what "molten rock" meant.  This completely changed the way I saw the swing set in my back yard.  Why?  Well, have you noticed the divot under the swings where you drag your feet to slow the swing to a stop?  I saw that as eating away at the crust and I was afraid that I would break through to the mantle and sink my feet into molten rock!  I know that it really isn't logical since I'd seen deeper holes before and there was nothing but dirt at the bottom, but I was a little kid and didn't think like that.  Anyway, I then was afraid of breaking through the crust if I dragged my feet and I was too chicken to jump off.  That left me sitting on the swing waiting for it to slow down on its own.  The wait took a lot of the fun out of swinging!

WHAT WENT WRONG?:  The scale of "thick" and "thin" was not established.  When I heard that the crust was thin, I defined for myself what "thin" was.  I assumed it was only as deep as I could dig through it.  What "thin" really meant is compared to the size (radius) of the Earth.

For the record, the radius of the Earth is almost 4,000 miles and the crust is up to about 22 miles.  Since 22 miles is much, much less than 4,000 miles, the crust is indeed "thin" compared to the size of the Earth!

LESSON LEARNED:  When you tell someone that something is "big" or "small", make sure you establish what you are comparing that something to, i.e. make sure you set the scale for your comparison.

I sometimes tell this story after I admonish people to always ask a scientist how big or small they think "big" or "small" are.  I tell them that I think a "big" gravitational wave, one that we would only expect to see every 10 years or so, would change the length of LIGO's 4 km (2.5 mile) long arms less than 1/1000^th the diameter of a proton (10^-18 m).   That may be "big" to me now, but to a 5-year-old me something smaller than an atom would be most certainly be considered "small". 

Happy Halloween!

Wow!  I can't believe how long it has been since I've posted.  I've been horribly busy keeping up with teaching at LSU (and trying my best to make my lectures interesting), getting my LIGO work done (we are preparing for the 3rd software engineering run for Advanced LIGO [read about the first one here]), and some personal life complications that we all deal with from time to time.  I understand better why the blessing, "May you live in interesting times," is more of a curse.

So, to tide you over until my next full post (tomorrow), here is the feature presentation of the Science Education Center's monthly Science Saturday - Halloween Edition (2011):

Here, William Katzman (Science Education Center Lead) plays a laid back fellow with some paranormal explanations of "spooky phenomena".  I play a scientist who explains all of the phenomena in terms of science.  Before the day of the presentation, we decided what spooky phenomena we were going to use, but we never rehearsed the show - I'm surprised it turned out so well (if I say so myself)!

On Outreach...

In my last post, I mentioned that I recently visited Ole Miss to give a colloquium on outreach for their physics department.  Later that night, I also gave a talk at a local bakery on multi-messenger astronomy (public events like this are called "Science Cafes").  The colloquium on outreach was interesting to do since it made me organize my thoughts from my experiences here at LIGO (and this blog was featured) and I wanted to share my thoughts on engaging students and discussing religious issues in general.

The beginning of my colloquium at Ole Miss.

ENGAGING STUDENTS

I specialize in being the scientist that people talk to when they visit LIGO.  That includes taking visitors on a tour of the control room (where all the science happens).  I think everything I talk about is immensely interesting, but some of my visitors (especially the younger ones) will disagree.  So, how can I make this interesting for them?  Usually, anything that is gross (yet age appropriate) will get their attention.

One of the features of LIGO I like to point out is our outstanding vacuum system.  LIGO has 300,000 cubic feet of volume in a vacuum that is 8x better than the vacuum of space the space station is currently orbiting in (that is a trillionth of the atmospheric pressure you are sitting in now).  For some visitors, this is impressive; for others, not so much.  Then I talk about how your blood would boil if you went into our vacuum without a spacesuit.  And I put a little dramatic emphasis on the "boil" part.  Now I've got their attention!

Why would our blood boil if we were inside LIGO's vacuum?

The reason that blood would boil in our vacuum isn't because of temperature.  Rather, it is because our blood stores oxygen and carbon dioxide in solution.  How much it can store is dependent on the pressure that surrounds our body.  Going from atmospheric pressure to 1/1,000,000,000,000^th that pressure would allow the oxygen and carbon dioxide to be released from solution in the form of bubble.  Hence, it "boils".  To give an example that most of us encounter in our daily lives, this "boiling" is similar to what happens when you open a 2 liter bottle of soda (or pop, or Coke depending on where you live) - you release the pressure in the bottle and the bubbles come out of the drink.  Another example that many people have heard of is deep sea divers suffering from the bends when they surface too quickly.

RELIGIOUS ISSUES

In one of my first blog posts, I stated that I don't want to argue religious issues here.  I want to make clear that I am not making any statements for or against a view, I simply want to talk about DISCUSSING religious issues when the come up.

Many people who visit LIGO have strongly held religious convictions.  Fortunately, there is very little controversy over LIGO science and religion.  The one concept that can have religious implications if the Big Bang.  This theory (and I mean a scientific theory that is supported by evidence, not a hunch) states that the Universe was once contained in a very dense, very small ball and time effectively started in a large explosion.  This is at odds with many types of creationism.  While this can yield lively debate, that is not something I am interested in doing with visitors; my goal is to talk about science and what LIGO can reveal about our Universe.

My goal when faced with situations like this is to treat everyone with respect no matter what their beliefs are.  Just like it is unlikely for them to convert me to their worldview (assuming it is different from mine), I know it is unlikely for me to change theirs.  So I define what kinds of questions science can and cannot answer: science only ever asks "How?" not "Why?".  For the "Why?" you need to turn to philosophy and religion.  With respect to the Big Bang and creationism, I point out that evidence exists to support the Big Bang in the Cosmic Microwave Background.  But, even if this is not the relic light from the Big Bang, something created it and whatever it was may have also created gravitational waves.  So, while one of our documentaries claims that we are seeking the gravitational waves from the Big Bang (and many other sources), we are really seeking the gravitational waves from whatever created the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Some have accused me of skirting the subject in the way I handle religious issues and they are mostly right.  I try to respect everyone and re-frame the contentious issue in a way that doesn't conflict with religious beliefs and is still true to the science.  But I think it is also important to make the distinction in what science can and cannot do.  Some people believe that science tries to disprove God but the truth is it can't.  Science also can never prove God.

The Likely End to a Space-Based GW Detector

LISA...

(The video below is large [~44 MB] and dated, but gives good background on the motivation and specifics of a space-based gravitational-wave detector:)

About this time last year, I wrote a blog post about the NASA withdrawal from being a full partner in the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) with the ESA (European Space Agency).  At that time, it meant that US scientists would still be able to receive funding to develop research programs and contribute to the LISA effort but the ESA would be responsible for the bulk of the work.  This withdrawal by NASA was caused by the poor state of the agency's funding and the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope.  For all of us in doing research in gravitational waves, it was a horrible setback; LISA was once a flagship mission of NASA's Physics of the Cosmos program and the best hope we had of detecting low frequency gravitational waves (< 10 Hz). 

This then led the ESA to redevelop their plans for a new version of LISA (that is referred to as eLISA but is officially known as NGO [New Gravitational-wave Observatory]) in order to lower the cost of the mission by at least 20% and preserve as much of the science as possible.  This new design was published in their "Yellow Book" at the beginning of the year which included, among other things, only 2 arms in a triangular formation (previously there were 3 arms and each corner pair of arms could function as an independent detector), reduced distance between satellites (1 million kilometers instead of 5 million), and a new orbit which is similar to the LISA orbit (in orbit around the Sun about 20^o behind Earth in its orbit) but will allow the detector to drift away into the solar system over time.  Below is a short movie illustrating a few orbits - the "drift away" is not noticeable:

The newly designed eLISA/NGO received the highest science ratings of the projects up for funding at the ESA.  However, the ESA Science Programme Committee has concerns about the technological readiness of eLISA/NGO to fly in the 2020 time frame and has passed it over to recommend the JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer).  This is likely the last nail in the coffin for a space-based gravitational-wave detector in the foreseeable future.  (Note:  NGO can be considered for future launch opportunities but that is way down the road.)  There is a slight chance that the recommendation could be rejected in favor of gravitational waves when the 19 member states of the ESA make the final decision on May 2.  However, I heard the news of this recommendation from a friend who specializes in LISA science and he didn't seem hopeful for the 11th hour pardon.

I wonder what will happen to the LISA Symposium that is supposed to take place in Paris at the end of May...  Or for that matter, the LISA Pathfinder mission (which will demonstrate the basic abilities that LISA would have needed to have) which is scheduled to launch on June 30.

UPDATE:  I've heard from a LISA colleague that LISA Pathfinder is still a go!  Thanks!

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On a more uplifting front, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at Ole Miss (this link will take you to their gravity research group - they do great work!) about the importance of outreach, useful skills for it, and different ways to do outreach (and this blog was featured!).  That night, I also got to demonstrate my points by giving one of their monthly public science cafes.  This experience gave me the chance to really consider what it is that I have been doing professionally for the last 5 years...  What have I learned?  What mistakes did I make?  What surprised me?  What ideas can I pass along on how to do outreach to those who are expected to do it but aren't afforded the extra time like I am?  I'm thinking about posting a summary of my thoughts and speaking points in next week's post (unless something else newsworthy happens in the mean time)!

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!

Science Summaries on ligo.org - FEEDBACK WELCOME!

A new initiative the LIGO Science Collaboration (LSC) is undertaking is composing science summaries of all of our newly published papers so that everyone can keep themselves up to date on what new science LIGO and her sister observatories produce.  Today's post gives you a look into my experience writing one of these summaries.

One unfortunate thing about science is that almost all publications are written for an audience of other experts in the field.  This allows us to communicate to one another in efficient terminology that is all but alien to non-experts.  Some research is so specialized that it can be difficult for experts in a related sub-specialty to understand papers without careful study.  However, most physical science research is funded through government agencies - that means with your tax payer dollars.  LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (that's right kids, the same people who pay Elmo pay me!).  So, for the same reasons that I write this blog (to let everyone see inside of LIGO) the LSC is publishing these science summaries of recent publications.

There have been several already published (click on "science" and then on "science summaries"), but I wanted to talk about my experience writing one on the a paper titled "Implementation and testing of the first prompt search for gravitational wave transients with electromagnetic counterparts".  Of course, the title for the summary is a bit more succinct, "Optical, X-ray, and Radio Telescopes Seek Explosive Sources of Gravitational Waves".  This is that paper that outlines the development of the procedures and software needed to alert optical telescopes when we think LIGO may have seen a gravitational wave (I wrote about working on this in a previous blog post).

Before I started writing this summary, I re-read the paper.  Wow.  This paper wasn't too difficult to read because of jargon, but there were so many details that I thought were important (... of course I did!).  So I sat back and asked myself how I would explain this to my mother, who is a real estate appraiser and not an expert on what I do (even though she always smiles and nods when I ramble on about work).  What are the most important points I would want her to know?  The first is that we were successful in creating a system that would give us a good chance of imaging the source of a gravitational wave if we were to have a real detection.  The other was that we made partnerships with scientists who operate telescopes around the world (and they are just as excited to work with us as we were with them - but we don't talk about that in the paper).  After I determined these 2 major points, I made sure to detail the who, what, when, where, why, and how as well.  Then my draft went to the rest of the group who did the work described in this paper for their opinions.

I got many helpful comments from the project group.  There are so many small changes I was advised to make so that my prose would be better understood (I am sure my regular readers can tell me many ways that, if I just changed the way I said this or that, my blog would be improved).  Once everyone was comfortable with the summary draft, it then went to the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group in the collaboration for review.  This is where all of us who are interested in sharing LIGO's work with the public get together to plan events, etc.  The comments I got from this group had me doing some major reworking of the summary.  You see, I answered most of the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions in a few very long sentences right at the beginning.  Instead of this, it was suggested that I give a more introductory paragraph that established background instead of a flood of facts.  After these major revisions, my summary wasn't any longer and still contained all of the same information but in a much more digestible manner.

Now that the summary has been published, I am wondering what your thoughts are on it.  What could I have said better?  I've learned so much from my colleagues in writing this, but in the end, they are still experts that are just as biased as I am towards jargon.  I would love to learn from you!  Please feel free to leave comments below!

Broken New Year's Resolution and Priorities for 2012

I really do know better than to make New Year's resolutions.  Truly.  But there is one thing that I want to do more of and that is to make more blog posts.  I've noticed that it is easiest for me to make posts on Thursdays so I resolved to post weekly on Thursday.

Then last Thursday happened...

I woke up with the most painful migraine I've had (at least in recent memory).  I felt like my head was going to explode all morning and early afternoon and when I finally took the correct meds (when you are alone and trying to keep your brains in your skull, you tend to lose a lot of common sense) and felt better, but not well, I was thoroughly exhausted.  I think I was asleep more hours than I was awake that day.  Between that and the fact that I had to write a last-minute abstract to present some new LIGO results at the upcoming APS April Meeting, my blog post never happened.

But, today is a new Thursday and the first new blog post of the year!

I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday season.  I didn't murder any family members so I'm counting mine in the win column (I'm kidding - I would never harm my family!).

So, what have I been doing as a LIGO scientist this year?

1. I've had a few projects in the works that I am trying to wrap up and complete (I love starting new and exciting projects and documenting completed computer programs is not exciting to me).  One of the things that has been simmering for a long while now is a survey of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to assess the members' feelings on its diversity and climate (working environment).  I created and administered a similar survey just for us who work at the LIGO Lab (I am on the LIGO Lab Diversity Committee).  The point of surveys like these are to identify areas that can be improved to make everyone's working experience better and to find out what we are going right.  This survey is in a fairly-mature format and should be ready to release in the coming weeks.
2. There is a paper I have half written on multi-messenger astronomy and LIGO that I am targeting to  publish in The Physics Teacher.  This has been half done for a while now because other life issues have gotten in the way.  Notably, work and making an application to move up the career ladder and secure myself something more permanent (all postdoctoral positions are temporary like medical residencies - I talk about this a little in my post about "Becoming a Physicist").  This is high on my list of priorities for the near future. 
3. There is a new initiative in LIGO to write outreach abstracts (summaries) of the scientific papers we publish (like this one).  The papers themselves are almost always on the arXiv server (I can think of only 1 exception) and anyone can read these for free.  That is all well and good, but these papers are meant to be read by other experts and are horrible to wade through for someone who doesn't do that sort of thing for a living.  We are trying to make our results more accessible to everyone and these abstracts are written so that everyone can know what science we are doing.  I've been working on the outreach abstract for the paper discussing the methods employed to rapidly alert telescopes to search for possible optical counterparts to gravitational wave detections (this is the link to the scientific paper).  I've talked about working on this project before here.  When this abstract goes live, I will write more about it and discuss the other abstracts that have been written.
4. There are also numerable data analysis and software simulation projects that need to be further developed, but I won't go into those here (if you really want me to, let me know in the comments - I may tell you about it later anyway even if you don't).
5. I also still work extensively with the Science Education Center here at Livingston.  Yesterday, I traveled to a elementary school in Amite, LA to talk to about 120 kindergarteners over the course of the day.  Besides the fact that they were adorable and very interested, I had the cutest ambush of my life - a 20 little kid group hug! :)  And only a few of them where taller than my hips.  Little things like this (besides getting to discover new things about the Universe) is what truly makes my job amazing!
6. Finally, I have only a few questions left to answer from my previous call for questions!  These will be answered in the coming weeks.  If you have anything you would like to know about, let me know.  Also, I was thinking about having guest blogs from other LIGO scientists, engineers, etc.  Is that something you would be interested in?  (My husband is an engineer at LIGO Livingston with me, so I have one person that I can probably bribe into doing this.)  There are many different specialties here so this may be interesting.  Let me know!

Hope to hear from you soon!

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Today's picture comes from my office and its new vampy inhabitants:

From left to right: Vampire Julius from Paul Frank, Count Chocula from the cereal of the same name, and The Count from Sesame Street

You may remember from previous posts that not only do I have a nearly unhealthy love for vampire books, but I also have a collection of stuffed undead (do NOT call them dolls).  Here is a previously posted picture of my office with a few of the figures in the background:

And another of my name tag covered light (which really doesn't function so well as a light since I've added even more tags) with a few other figures:

Nerdy Fun for the Holidays!

Since I am not sure that I will be posting again before the end of the year (I hope so, but I also have the feeling that you will be busy with your own holiday events), I wanted to make this a fun post that will make you smile.


• Happy Helium Holidays

The APS Physics Buzz Blog team performed this wonderful rendition of Carol of the Bells using helium or sulfur hexafluoride to modify their voices and a harmonious, hilarious way!  Many people are familiar with the fact that if you inhale helium your voice becomes much higher pitched.  This is because the helium gas is so much lighter than air, it allows your vocal cords to vibrate at a higher frequency producing the high pitch.  Sulfur hexafluoride is sometimes known as the anti-helium since it is so much heavier than helium, if causes your vocal cords to vibrate much slower producing a deep, low pitch.

The beginning of this video features Becky Thompson-Flagg who is the Head of Public Outreach for the APS and is also the model for the Spectra superhero character comic books (read here about that).  She explains the physics behind the voice changes and the mild peril involved in this performance.  Then the concert begins :)

• Interactive Relativity Tutorial - Al's Relativistic Adventures

Al's Relativistic Adventures is an animated tutorial on special relativity.  While this is appropriate for middle school students, I found the lessons to be very accurate and the authors are talented at communicating complicated concepts in easy to understand ways (I even learned how to better communicate some concepts from working through this activity).  Once you are done, you are even awarded a certificate - I printed mine out and hung it in my office :)

• Play the GRB Lottery

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous events to be observed in the Universe and their origins, other than that they are produce from extraordinary energetic events), are still not certain.  They play a vital role to LIGO since whatever produces them could have produced gravitational waves and observe these gravitational waves may uncover the cause of these explosions.

There are several satellites currently in orbit around the Earth detecting these GRBs.  One of these is the Swift satellite and they have a fun GRB Lottery to play on their website (free to play, of course).  You are presented a map of the sky that has locations of past detected GRBs (notice that there is no area on the sky that is favored over another so any guess is really as good as another).  You then click on an area that you would like to select as your own and if you are the closest guess to a GRB within the two weeks, you win!  "What do you win?" you say...  Well, you get a nifty certificate commemorating your good fortune and the Swift outreach staff will send you a small gift (I got a nice package of education materials including a poster).

I played the GRB Lottery once and I won!  I decided that I would retire from my glorious reign so that the rest of you can have a chance!  :P  Below is the certificate I earned which is hanging proudly in my office:

• Physics Carols

This webpage (www.PhysicsSongs.org) has an amazing collection of covers to well known songs with physics lyrics.  They even have a special page of physics related carols!  I have to admit to getting lost on the page and chuckling to myself (and feeling even more nerdy than usual)!

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop and AAPT Summer Meeting

I've just returned from a week long trip to Nebraska for 2 conferences, one in Lincoln and the other in Omaha.

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop:

The Lincoln trip was for a special workshop on Using Astronomy to Teach Physics (UATP).  The goal of this workshop is to bring educators in physics and astronomy together, share the information on the state-of-the-art science projects in their fields and then breakout into small groups to identify ways to bring this frontier science into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  I put together a professional poster (see my post on the different types of posters for more information on scientific posters) on the educational work done in the Science Education Center (SEC) at LIGO, both locally and nationally as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group [this group has just announced its partnership with the 2012 US Science & Engineering Festival].  (I will put a link to this post as soon as it becomes publicly viewable.) While I was making this poster, I found pictures of all of the SEC staff and myself engaging students and the public in some way.  For my picture, I found one that I adore (which is shocking since I hate nearly all pictures of myself) that shows me talking to school students while giving a tour of the LIGO control room:

I found this workshop particularly interesting for 2 reasons: 1) there were talks on the different frontier astronomy projects to make sure everyone in attendance at least had a working knowledge of what the state-of-the-art is and 2) there were breakout sessions where groups who were interested in similar goals met to discuss actionable ways to incorporate the new astronomy into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  My big project that I am now working on as a direct consequence of this is a document I intend to publish in the American Journal of Physics on connections between the basic physics concepts taught in the undergraduate physics courses and the technology that makes LIGO possible.  For example:

LIGO is looking for gravitational waves that will change the length of its 4 km arms less than 1/1000th the diameter of a proton (that's 0.000000000000000001 meters).  At this length scale, one must consider the effects of quantum mechanics.  So, here's the issue: the thermal vibration of the atoms in the mirrors used in LIGO is going to be much bigger than the "big" gravitational wave cited above.  How can LIGO possibly hope ever detect gravitational waves distinctly from this thermal mirror vibration?  (The 'no math' answer is at the end of this post.)  

After publication of this document, I am thinking about approaching LIGO's EPO group to propose that we create a web site to support this kind of effort.  Basically, I would like to take the document apart and use it to make a skeleton for the web site.  Then, any time a LIGO member has a homework question, activity, etc. that they use in their classroom, they can contribute that content to the site so that anyone who is interested can also use that content.

AAPT Summer Meeting:

After 3 days in Lincoln, I then went to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Summer Meeting in Omaha.  There I got to make new friends in the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) and we did something together just about every night (which, if you know me, is remarkable since I am the type to hole up in my hotel room during down time).  I also co-presented an invited talk on LIGO outreach using demonstrations with my colleague Kathy Holt.  Demonstrations are really at the core of the outreach we so since we do demonstrations with teachers and give them the tools they need to take those demonstrations back to their classrooms, we do demonstrations during public open houses and there is often a demonstration or two when we work with student field trips.  It was great doing this talk with Kathy since the combination of our backgrounds (she was a teacher before working at LIGO) give different and useful perspectives on what we do in the SEC.

Then, besides going to other talks, I also had some academic service obligations.  I believe that I have mentioned that I am on the APS Forum on Education (FEd) Executive Committee.  Even though the AAPT is not affiliated with the APS, they work together closely since they both serve physicists but with different focus.  Because of this, the AAPT Executive Board meets with the APS FEd Exec. Comm. to coordinate efforts and we had a good lunch meeting this year.  I am also on the AAPT Committee on Graduate Education in Physics and this committee also met to make plan for the upcoming AAPT Meetings and to discuss the broader impact activities we are undertaking.

In past blog posts, I have included pictures of the city I happened to travel to as seen from my hotel window (see Long Beach, Milwaukee, Anaheim).  The view out of my window was a horrible view of a parking lot and another hotel.  Fortunately, the view from my colleague's room was much better (she got a room in the main hotel for the conference and I didn't since I waited too long to make my reservations).  So, here is the view of Omaha from the window:

OH!  One more thing...  When I was flying from Omaha (whose airport in actually in Iowa), the north terminal of airport of evacuated for a "suspicious package".  Luckily for me, I was flying out of the south terminal.  Once I got home, I found out that the hours long closing was due to someone's physics classroom apparatus that got TSA's panties in a bunch (it went through security as a carry-on).  I suppose it's good that they were awake enough to think something suspicious but what concerns me is that it is almost a certainty that the same thing was carried on the plane to get to the meeting at all.  I guess it wasn't as threatening then :) 

Answer to the quantum mechanics question posed above (highlight text below to uncover the answer):

The thermal vibration of the mirror's atoms would indeed make it impossible to measure a gravitational wave only if the laser was so well focused as to only shine on the area of a few of the mirror's surface atoms.  Fortunately, that is not the case in LIGO!  The beam spot on the mirror is about 10 cm (4 inches) in diameter.  In that area, there are MANY surface atoms that are vibrating.  By observing this large area, LIGO effectively averages over the vibration of all of the atoms that the light falls on yielding a zero net motion.  Thus, LIGO works just fine!

How I Came Into Blogging

I never thought that anyone would be interested in what I had to say, especially in an ongoing basis.  I go to work (albeit to a pretty cool job), go home and do normal things that everyone else does.  Who'd be interested in that?

But then I thought about how scientists are usually perceived.  I've noticed that people who were having a normal conversation with me will talk to me differently when they find out I'm a physicist.  I've had adult visitors to LIGO be in awe and mention that they have never met a physicist before.  My response to that is that they don't really know that - the person in line behind them in Walmart could have been a physicist and they would never know it.  When scientists are portrayed in media, there is usually something about them that puts them apart from the "everyday" person.  I admit that the characters on CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" have gotten a lot of the quirks right (I can label the characters with my friends) but the show only shows the interesting parts of their lives where their quirkiness comes to the fore - I can guarantee you that if these were real people, their 'boring' times are just like everyone else's.

Still, I didn't think that this was enough to base a blog on.  Last February "Astro Guyz" David Dickinson requested a tour of the LIGO Livingston facility so that he could blog about it.  I was more than happy to take him around (regular readers of this blog know that I LOVE to talk about LIGO to anyone who will listen).  After showing David and his wife around we talked about their experiences blogging (they are both experienced bloggers).  They were very encouraging and I was intrigued.  Read Astro Guyz blog post from his visit to LIGO here.  Below is a picture of William Katzman (LIGO Livingston Science Education Center lead), me, and David Dickinson from this post:

Astro Guyz also gave me my YouTube debut:

Months later, on my birthday, I decided that there is no better time than the present to start my blog and see if anyone was interested in following what being a scientist is really like (not just the stereotypes).  Now I had to find a way to let others know that the blog exists.  For that I turned to Astro Guyz and sciencegeekgirl.com (a blog run by Stephanie Chasteen - a well known science education and communication expert who I was acquainted with).  They were both very helpful in giving me hints and their common advice was along the lines of "if you write it, they will come" and to "use Twitter".

And here you are!  :)

I hope that this blog is serving its purpose by letting you see what I do on a daily basis.  I know not everything is thrilling (like this post) but every now and then I get to tell you about a bit of excitement (like the "Big Dog" blind injection - which was picked up by Discover Magazine's Cosmic Variance blog and Discovery News).

I'd love to hear your thoughts!  Is there anything you would like me to talk about?  Just drop a comment below or send an email to amber@livingligo.org.

This xkcd Comic Hit Home With Me: "Teaching Physics"

xkcd is a comic that tends to be a bit on the academic side but I think their warning disclaimer tells you better what this comic series about than I can:

"Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

Of course, this warning is tongue-in-cheek but it does give you a flavor of what the comic series contains.

My husband forwarded this comic from this a few days ago called "Teaching Physics" (click on it to see the full size image on xkcd.com):

Now, I have talked at length on this blog about doing education outreach at LIGO.  In that process, I interact with many students, teachers and people from the public and I use the 'rubber sheet' analogy often when describing that gravity it really an effect of the curvature of space-time.  However, this only works if one thinks about a real rubber sheet that they could interact with on Earth, i.e. there is still gravity around to pull masses down on the sheet.  Most people have no problem overlooking the fact that we are using gravity to describe the curvature of space-time but there are the few who bring up the paradox to me.

This is where I disagree with how the instructor in this comic handled the situation.  To me, the correct response is not to sigh and dismiss this useful (if imperfect) analogy.  Instead, I recognize that the observation is a valid one and compliment the person on being insightful (usually including that most people don't see the problem).  I then ask them to take the gravity around them for granted and just use the rubber sheet as a visualization tool.  After all, there are many analogies in physics but if you think about any of them for too long you start finding imperfections in them.  (Like using water waves to describe properties of light [electromagnetic] waves - a few problems with this include that water waves need a medium [water] to propagate and water waves are easily damped when light isn't.)

I'm not criticizing the author of this comic!  After all, I don't think this instructor is doing "outreach" as much as teaching in a formal education setting.  I've had a lot of experience there too and, depending on the student (like are they the kind that try to be difficult at every turn or are they truly being insightful), I very well may have had the same reaction.  And I just love that there is a comic out there that makes me jump up and say, "That's happened to me!"

Weekend at the APS April Meeting

The APS April Meeting started in full swing on Saturday 30 April.  The meeting is composed of many (~12 or so) parallel sessions during the day (form 8:30 am to 5 pm).  These sessions are composed of invited talk (about 30 minutes each) and contributed talks (about 12 minutes each).  In the evenings, there is usually a feature presentation and on Saturday night was on of the best ones I've been to.  This event was titled "The Physics of Hollywood" with panelists Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of "The Big Bang Theory"), Bruce Miller (executive producer of "Eureka") and John de Lancie (the character "Q" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation").  Junnifer Ouellette (author of "The Physics of the Buffyverse" was the moderator.  The picture below is from the back of the room when they were showing a clip from "The Big Bang Theory":

The panel at the front is hard to see here, so here is a zoom:

The people seated by the screen are (from right to left): Ouellette, Prady, Miller and de Lancie.  It was great!  They even answered one of the questions I have wondered about for a while:  Exactly what positions do these characters hold at the university?  They are clearly not grad students but they don't seem to be faculty members either.  Well, it turns out they are just like me...  They are postdocs!

I also had another "in the wild" sighting of the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The picture below is the poster as it was distributed on the APS outreach table:

 

After another full day of listening to talks (I primarily go to sessions focused on gravity or education, unless there is something I don't specialize in that seems especially appealing) on Sunday, I had the Executive Committee Meeting of the Forum on Education (I serve on the Committee as an APS-AAPT Member-at-Large).  The FEd is just one of many units that members of the APS can join that address their special interest and their executive committees are the way these units are governed.  (Perhaps I should write a blog post detailing the governance structure of the APS - but perhaps that is more bureaucracy than anyone is really interested in...)  I may be very early in my career, but I have always felt welcomed by these physicists who are much more distinguished than myself.  So, I love going to these meetings (we only have one face-to-face meeting a year) and I get fed too!

That pretty much sums up my weekend at the APS April Meeting!  There are 2 more days left and I speak on the last day (Tuesday).  I am in the final stages of getting my talk approved by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations since my talk is on their behalf.  I will write more about this process, how the talk went and about a few other things I got to do while at the meeting.

More on LISA & Giving Public Tours with My Hubby

Since I've last posted, I've gotten to work with my husband (Derek) on two public tours of LIGO.  That's something that doesn't usually happen since he doesn't work with visitors on a regular basis.

1:  The first tour was on the 9th to the local chapter of the AIAA (to which my husband is a life member) based out of Stennis Space Center in MS.  I took the engineers and their families around the site and answered their science questions while Derek discussed his work at LIGO and his dissertation work (helicopters).

2:  The second tour was the monthly Science Saturday open house this past weekend.  The theme this month was "Rockets" in honor of the 50th anniversary of humans in space and the last shuttle launch later this year.  Since Derek is an aerospace engineer, he was recruited as our local "rocket scientist" to interact with the visitors.  I helped find some interesting footage of rockets for him to discuss during a short presentation which he presented wonderfully (yes, I am a proud wife).  As usual, I took visitors on tours of the site, but you are probably getting tired of listening to me go on about that :).  Below is a super-slow motion video of the Saturn V rocket for Apollo 11.  It was filmed at 500 frames/second over a little more than 30 seconds.  This video is over 8 minutes with commentary on what is going on.  It's awesome (and even better in full screen)!

If you want to see it in real time, it's here (with corny music):

In my last post, I discussed LISA, what it is and how NASA had recently withdrawn its partnership with the ESA (European Space Agency) in this project.  Below is the official statement from the Albert Einstein Institute on the ESA's response.  The original document can be read here, but since it is a PDF, I copied the text below for your easy reading:

NASA withdraws from partnership with Europe. ESA Science team begins to rethink LISA design.

It was just in February this year that ESA kicked off the process of picking the next major mission in its Cosmic Vision program, with presentations at a meeting of Europe's astronomers and planetary scientists in Paris. Among the favorites was the first gravitational wave observatory in space, called LISA, which had already been given a high scientific priority in the USA by NASA's 2007 Beyond Einstein review and by American astronomers' 2010 Decadal Review of Astronomy. But now NASA has admitted that cost overruns on its James Webb Space Telescope mission will remove so much money from its program that it cannot commit to being an equal partner with ESA on any major science mission in the near future.

ESA's management has reacted swiftly to this news because it must still find the best use for the whole of its space science budget for the rest of this decade. The LISA project team, as well as those of the other two missions -- IXO (a proposed space X- ray observatory) and JGO (a proposed mission to explore Jupiter's moons) -- have been asked to rethink their designs and scientific objectives to see if they can fit within a European-only funding envelope and still return good scientific results. Over the next year it is expected that ESA will officially adopt a new strategy in view of the NASA withdrawal, and then decide which of the three missions will best fit that strategy. Meanwhile, ESA scientists and engineers are supporting the science team of LISA as well as the other missions so that they arrive at the best possible redesign in a very short time.

The Albert Einstein Institute, as the world's largest research institute dedicated to exploring all aspects of Einstein's theory of gravitation, general relativity, is a major contributor to the LISA mission. “The European LISA team is working hard on the redesign now. We are optimistic that we can fit the new conditions and still deliver outstanding science by opening the gravitational wave window in space”, says Karsten Danzmann, European Mission Scientist for LISA and director at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany. “We hope that NASA will at least become a minor partner in a redesigned, smaller and less expensive LISA mission, and meanwhile we are benefiting greatly from the input of our US colleagues, who want to see LISA fly and do its unique science even if they do not get full partnership in it."

Last Day at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting

Today is the last day I am at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in CA.  While the main meeting is over, last afternoon and today is the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) retreat.  This is different from the education work I do at the LIGO Livingston Science Education Center (that is physically on-site at one of the LIGO observatories) since the EPO group seeks to serve the all of the public (not just those people geographically near the observatories) and this work is done by all of the collaboration, in this country and around the world.

One of the fun things that have been developed recently and used for education and outreach are computer games about gravity and gravitational waves!

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SPACE TIME QUEST (created by the gwoptics group at the University of Birmingham, UK)

You are the principal investigator (PI) of an interferometric gravitational wave observatory like LIGO.  You select the location for your detector and design it to fit within the budget for your project.  At the end of the game, you turn on your detector and look for gravitational waves.  The deeper into space you can detect gravitational waves, the higher your score (and you can compare your score against others' high scores).  My first try at the game, I was able to detect gravitational waves from more than 29 Mpc (~94.5 million light years) away.

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BLACK HOLE PONG (also created by the gwoptics group at the University of Birmingham, UK)

This is a new take on the classic game "Pong" except instead of paddles, you use black holes to gravitationally move and sling a mass into your opponent's half of the screen.  Every time the mass enters your opponent's space, you score a point.  This is currently a 2 player only game (you can't play against the computer yet) and you can even use your Xbox controllers!

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SLINGSHOT (created by the RIT Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation)

The goal of this strategy game is to shoot your opponent's spacecraft on the opposite side of the screen.  However, there are planets in between that attract your projectile gravitationally (they warp space-time) deflecting it from a straight path (the game name of Slingshot refers to the fact that stars, planets and moons can be used as a gravitational slingshot to speed up spacecrafts or other masses - NASA used this to get the astronauts from Apollo 13 back to Earth when they were low on fuel).  The strategy is to account for these deflections and still destroy your opponent's spacecraft.  This 2 player game can be very addictive!  Download it here.

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Talk to you next week!  (Below is a picture of me at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting taken by my friend, Cristina Torres:)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY...

Like I mentioned in a previous post, being at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting always overlaps with my sister's birthday.  That being said:  "Happy Birthday, Brie!"

This is Brie and me at her high school graduation last May (I am much older than her [don't you dare ask how much] and no, neither one of us is adopted).

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):

Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop

Sorry for the lack of posts!  I've been trying to get work done and prepare for the Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop that I have just returned from.  It was great getting to see Milwaukee (I was just sure to keep my mouth shut about being from Pittsburgh!).  This is the first meeting of a new series that brings astronomers who are interested in gravitational waves together with physicists that are interested in the astronomy that can be extracted from them (gravitational waves, that is).  When I give tours at LIGO, I often remark that there is very little difference between an astronomer and a physicist here since the goal of the research is to observe the universe in a new way.  And that statement is by-and-large true.  But the real difference between us is the detail of knowledge we know about particular things.  Meetings like this are truly working on bridging that gap.

The day before the workshop began, there was a welcome reception at the Polaris restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency hotel (where most everyone attending the meeting stayed).  I was thinking about blowing it off since I had been traveling all day, but was VERY glad I went since the restaurant was one of those slowly revolving ones that gave you a great view of the city.  I'd never been to one before so it was a nice surprise.  On top of that, there was wine, beer, Hors d'œuvres and good conversations with colleagues.

The next day started early with setting up the poster presentations (at larger meetings, scientific research posters are presented in place of talks - I plan a whole blog post about these posters soon!).  The poster I brought was about the human vetting of candidate gravitational wave detections for optical follow-up (I wrote about this in a previous blog post).  I was told where my poster would be displayed and when I would be giving my 1-minute "lightning talk" to advertise it.  Below is my poster on display:

The day was then filled with presentations on various topics of interest.  The major points were neutron stars, black holes, super nova, observational techniques, transient astronomy (that is where my poster on following-up on possible gravitational wave detections fit in) and tests of General Relativity.  About 160 scientists attended this meeting.  Below is a picture of about 75% of the meeting room showing a presentation in progress:

Want to know the real secret about meetings like this?...  The real progress happens during coffee breaks and meals.  This is the time that people can talk one-on-one and collaborate.  For example, at the welcome reception (that I was thinking about blowing off), I ran into a friend of mine who is working on a book about gravitational wave astronomy.  Through talking with him, I expressed interest in the book and now I will likely be giving it a proof/comment read.  Then, at the banquet (more on that below), I ran into another colleague who is working on expanding LIGO's outreach to schools by working on a program that will bring scientists into classrooms via internet conferencing (like Skype).  Since this is something I've been wanting to do for a while now, I am now working with them on this project.  (If you are a teacher, and would be interested in having me Skype with your classroom, please contact me at amber@livingligo.org.  There is also a program called "Skype in the Classroom" where you can sign up to participate collaboratively with other teachers.)

One of the things to really look forward to during the meeting is usually the conference banquet.  This time, it was at Discovery World (a science museum).  We were treated to a reception in the aquarium part of the facility followed by a very nice dinner.  There is nothing neater than to have a good drink while getting to explore a museum (and touch sting rays).  I took the picture below during dinner.  It isn't the best picture and only shows a few people, but I took it and now you get to look at it :)

When the meeting wrapped up after 3.5 very full days, I was excited by the experience but tired and ready to go home.  One of the best parts of the little down time I did have was the view from my hotel room.  I was on the 11th floor of the Hyatt Regency and had a great view of downtown Milwaukee:

On a side note: this hotel was the location where then presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning in 1912.  (The hotel was then the Gilpatrick Hotel.)  He then went on to deliver his campaign speech and mentioned more than a few times that he had been shot and that "it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose."  The bullet entered his chest bust didn't damage his lungs since the bullet first passed through a steel eyeglass case and a 50 page draft of his speech.  Since the bullet didn't pose a threat to his health, it was determined to be more dangerous to remove it than to leave it alone - he carried that bullet in his body for the rest of his life. (You can read more about it here.)