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!

Bittersweet: The End of A Professional Service Term

I have mentioned many times on this blog that I feel that performing service to my profession is just as important as the research and public outreach that I do; in a way, this is a form of professional outreach.

I have had the uncommon honor to serve on the American Physical Society (APS) Council and then, half way into my four-year term, I was elected to serve on their Executive Board.  I have met many new colleagues whom I would have never met otherwise since we don't work in the same field of physics.  Even better, some of them have become friends (good enough friends that I will even discuss my Impostor Syndrome issue with them - I wrote a whole post about this).

As far as contributing to the profession, I have had the opportunity to work extensively on strategic planning for the next decade of the society and represented young physicists' concerns on many issues.  Even more than that, I am now able to better understand the workings of my professional society, understand the concerns of physicists who work in industry, outside of the United States, etc. and learn more about the politics (inside and outside of physics) that make research happen (or not).

My term comes to a close (on both the Council and the Executive Board) at the end of this year and I have just traveled back from my last meetings in Salt Lake City, UT.  I am sad about not getting to meet the new people who will be elected to replace all of us rotating off this year (I do recognize if we never left, there would be no new people!).  A big relief to me is that I won't have to travel so much - if you serve on the Council, that is 2 trips a year and then if you serve on the Executive Board that is an additional 3 trips (or 4 trips next year).  Since I HATE to travel, this will mean more nights in my own bed <contented sigh>.

The view from my hotel room in Salt Lake City.  This is facing Temple Square and the LDS temple is visible between the 2 red-orange buildings.

If you are reading this and are not a physicist (I hope some of you aren't since it is for you that I really write this blog), I hope that I have given you a little peek into the physics community outside of LIGO.  If you are a physicist, I urge you to consider expanding whatever service work you do to the APS, AAPT, OSA, etc.  It can be a lot of work, but I would definitely do it all over again.  Of course, service isn't all work (just mostly):

Wine tasting during the APS Executive Board Retreat, Santa Barbara, CA (Photo: Ken Cole)

Special thanks to Ken Cole for permission to use his picture of me (above).  Ken is the APS Special Assistant to the Executive Officer (and has done a great job a wrangling me these last years) and is also a gifted photographer.  You can view more of his photos here.

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!

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.

April APS Executive Board & Council Meetings

I've arrived at the site of the APS April Meeting after a few delays in my flights (the storms in the south and mid-west on the 27th required flight plan changes and congestion at airports).  As long as I make my connections (which I did since I had a 3.5 hour layover), I don't mind since I have a Kindle full of books (vampire books are my guilty pleasure).  However, I did land over an hour late at the Orange County Airport and after taking the SuperShuttle, I arrived at the hotel over a half an hour into the Executive Board dinner.  I was disappointed since the food is usually wonderful and the conversation even better but it wasn't horrible to jump into the shower and get to bed early.

The Executive Board Meeting started at 8:30 am on the 28th.  Like the last Board Meeting, strategic planning for the future years of the Society took up more than half of the day.  This planning is led by a facilitator to focus our discussions on a topic and organize the brainstorming conversation that results.  The experience has been a fulfilling one since I had a few ideas develop in the process and feel that they may become a reality in the future.  It feels good not only to have your ideas valued, but to feel like you are making a lasting impact on something.

Today is the Council Meeting.  Since I am writing this during this meeting, I don't have much to share so far.  However, the schedule for today is very similar to the meeting I described last November.  I did take a short walk to the back of the room and I thought you might be interested in what a meeting of the Council looks like:

Here, we are discussing the budget for 2012 and comparing it with the actual income and expenses for different activities (like publishing journals and professional meetings) of the society in past years.

As far as the April Meeting is concerned, over the last two days preparations for this have become apparent.  Registration booths have gone up outside of the hotel lobby, and display boards for research posters are up (see this post about what professional conference posters are like).  There are also more physicists milling about.  I find it interesting that I can identify other physicists but I'm not exactly sure what it is about a person that indicates that they are like me...  Is it they way they carry themselves?  Or is it they way they dress?  Or is it that these are the people who don't look like they are planning a day of fun at Disneyland (just up the road)?  By tomorrow, it will be very easy to tell since all of us will have name tags!

Well, it is almost break time in the Council Meeting...  I write more soon.  Have a great weekend!

Off to the APS April Meeting & Another View Out of My Office Window

This week I will be heading out to the American Physical Society's (APS) April Meeting.  There are 2 main meetings of the APS every year - the March Meeting and the April Meeting.  These meetings are separated by sub-fields of physics.  The March Meeting hosts materials physics, polymer physics, biological physics, condensed matter physics, chemical physics, etc.  The April Meeting hosts astrophysics, gravitational physics, particle physics, etc.  Since the communities of the April Meeting's sub-fields are fairly small (but related), the April Meeting is the smaller of the two.  I work in gravitation, so I go to the April Meeting (although I did get to go to the March Meeting for a day last year since I was invited to give a talk on the work done at the Science Education Center here at LIGO Livingston [read that abstract here]).

I plan on giving you a first hand account of the meeting from my experiences!  Thursday and Friday I will be in the APS Executive Board and then APS Council Meetings (which I've written about in the past when discussing professional service), and then the meeting itself starts on Saturday.  I will be giving a talk on Tuesday afternoon (the last day of the meeting); you can read the abstract for my talk here.

Until the excitement begins, I wanted to share with you a sight that I see out my window from time to time:

What you see here is the #2 dewar being filled with liquid nitrogen (you can see a condensation cloud to the left of the truck).  There are 4 such dewars on site, two on each arm with one being just outside of the corner of LIGO and one just before the end of the arm.  This liquid nitrogen is used to cool segments of the arms to near absolute zero (about 77 K) so that any stray gas that may have been introduced into LIGO (this includes residual gas from work being done within an end or corner chamber) freezes to the side of the segment and does not contaminate the vacuum in the rest of the arm.  The arms themselves have not seen atmospheric pressure since around 2000.

LIGO is one of the largest ultra-high vacuums on the planet with over 300,000 cubic feet of volume with a pressure about 1 trillion times less than the atmosphere.  And the scene above is one of the ways we are able to maintain such a high quality vacuum over long periods of time.

APS Executive Board, Council & Thanksgiving

I hope all my US readers has a nice Thanksgiving holiday!  It's been a while since I posted, so let me tell you a little about what I've been doing...

APS Executive Board & Council Meeting

My last post was about how doing professional service was a part of an academic life.  That is exactly what I went off to do between 18-19 November at the APS Executive Board and Council Meetings.  The first day, I flew out to Long Beach, CA where the meetings were taking place and, in the evening, I went to the Executive Board Dinner.  I always like these more informal gatherings since it allows me to learn more about the others and am serving with and I always learn some thing new, be it about physics or some other bit of wisdom.

 This is the view from my hotel room at the Long Beach Hyatt.  This is one of the best views I've ever had.

During the day of the 19th was the Executive Board Meeting and the Budget Committee Meeting.  This meeting is where a smaller group of people go into much more detail on topics that will be brought to the Council.  Basically, this is where many issues are debated first so that the Council Meetings proceed much more efficiently.  This was a full day of meetings for me as the Executive Board Meeting was followed by a meeting of the Budget Committee (on which I also serve).  This meeting of the Budget Committee saw the approval of the budget for next year.  While I'm not enthralled by accounting, I've learned so much about how a large society like the APS stays afloat.

The evening of the 19th was the usual Council Reception and Dinner.  This is just like the Executive Board Reception and Dinner, but we were treated to a special viewing of the Division on Fluid Dynamics' Gallery of Fluids in Motion (the Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting took place starting the day after the Council Meeting).  Then we were able to watch the incredible videos illustrating current fluid dynamics research (you can see them too here - you can also find the still images linked from that page).  My favorite one was the "Wet-Dog Shake" (found here - find the movie under "Ancillary Files" to the right of the page).

On the 20th was the Council Meeting (where I represent the Forum on Graduate Student Affairs).  These meetings are open to the membership and the usual agenda proceeds as follows:

• Approval of Minutes (8:30 AM)
• Report from the President
• Report from the Executive Officer
• Report from the Treasurer/Publisher
• Report from the Editor in Chief
• BREAK (10:10 AM)
• Fellowships
• Panel on Public Affairs
• LUNCH (Noon)
• Report from the Canadian Physical Society
• Report on Education and Diversity
• Report on Outreach
• BREAK (2:10 PM)
• Report on International Affairs
• Report from Washington
• Unit Bylaw Changes
• New Business
• CONCLUDE (3:30 PM)

There were several extra points to this regular agenda.  First was a debate on the merit of several proposed new prizes and awards to be awards by the APS or one of its units.  Next was a discussion on the formation of a new unit called the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public (units are special interest groups, called forums [non-research area specific] or topical groups or divisions [based on the number of members in the unit]).  Also, at every November Council Meeting, there is an election of 2nd year Councilors to the Executive Board and I was very happy to see colleagues of mine be elected.  The best part of the meeting was a lunch talk by one of APS members who worked in estimating the oil flow from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill this summer.  It was fascinating learning how these scientists went about making the estimates and why the estimates changed several times (basically, not all of the flow was oil [there was a significant amount of methane gas] and the oil was spewing into the Gulf from many different places).

My place at the APS Council Meeting.  Even though this meeting is open to the membership, I didn't want to take a picture of the other Councilors since I didn't have their permission to post their photo on this site.

I flew home on the 21st only to ship out again to visit my family for Thanksgiving on the 23rd...

Visit to My High School Alma Mater

Since I went home to visit my family, I contacted my old high school and asked if they would be interested in me coming in and talking to students.  They were nice enough to have me (and my husband) and we got to talk to the AP Physics class about what we do at LIGO; I talked about physics and my husband talked about engineering).  The most rewarding thing for me was that I was in that class with the same teacher (Hi, Mr. Bowman!) when I went there.  And it was there that I first fell in love with Relativity and gravity.  So it was great to come back full circle.  I also got to give a few copies of the poster I worked on with the APS to them (FYI, I'm not beyond shameless self-promotion.)

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving went about as well as any family gathering goes.  It was great to see everyone, but it wasn't without its own stress.

Thanksgiving day was full of baking and cooking and eating :)  It was nice to get to see my family - especially my younger siblings!

I also got to have Thanksgiving, Round 2 with my husband's family on Saturday.  That's one of the nice things about marrying your high school sweetheart - their family usually lives close to yours and you don't have to chose who to visit on the big holidays.  Needless to say, I am very sick of turkey.

That's about all I have to talk about right now.  Maybe later I will bore you with a post about catching up on work after a trip out of town :)

Professional Service

Sorry about the slow posting this week!  I've been busy getting ready for a trip and Thanksgiving.  By themselves, they aren't that bad but I still need to get my regular work done so I've been trying to get ahead on that.  Hence, I haven't been on the blog as much as I'd like.

In my "About Me" section, I mention the 3 main parts of being an academic: research, teaching and service.  I've already talked about my research and teaching, so let me tell you a little about professional service.

Service covers basically any activity that enriches your profession but doesn't come in the form of teaching or performing research in whatever it is you do.  This could be sitting on a committee that helps ensure that the working environment is comfortable or you can serve the larger community through professional societies.  For physicists, the main professional society is the American Physical Society (APS) but I am also a member of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

This week, I am traveling to the APS Board and Council Meetings.  I sit on the APS Council as the representative of the Forum on Graduate Student Affairs (FGSA).  The Council is the legal decision making body of the APS and we vote on everything from general statements, to journal subscription rates.  Councilors are elected to the Board after 2 years (of a 4 year term) on the Council.  The Board does more behind the scenes discussions on matters before they are brought to the Council for a vote.  The Board meets 5 times a year and the Council twice (luckily for me, 2 of the Board Meetings happen the day before the Council meetings).  I will be sure to post later this week on what happens at these meetings.

Service is often seen as thankless work.  In many ways, it is.  That is one of the reasons I try to find ways to serve that I personally feel are fulfilling; that way even if no one notices the work I do, I still feel good about it.  Serving on the APS Board and Council is not only fulfilling, but I also feel deeply honored since I was elected by my peers to these posts.

Photo by Ken Cole, APS

The picture above shows Gay Stewart (University of Arkansas), Stefan Zollner (now of the New Mexico State University), and me at the LaserFest gala event that was held at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on February 12th this year.  All of us are on the APS Council and were invited to represent the APS.  For me, this was a night when being nerdy was cool!  I got to mingle with several Nobel Prize winners.  This photo really doesn't show the extent that the Smithsonian went to for this gala.  You can read more about it and see great pictures here.  This is definitely a time when service was not thankless!