Citations and Paper Length

Interesting paper on astro-ph this morning from Kris Stanek. As it turns out, in general, longer papers tend to get cited more. The exception is that, in astronomy, two of the major journals have a "Letters" section, which limits papers to 4 pages. These Letters do tend to be cited more than other short papers (presumably because they are Really just longer papers squeezed into a shorter format). Thus the graph of number of citations versus page length looks an awful lot like the state of Ohio:
The paper also includes some silliness-tinged career advice.

Proposing a Thesis Thing, Part the First

Sometime in November or December I started writing a blog post (most of which is included in this one, with the tenses slightly changed) on how I have to do a thesis proposal this year and what all that entails. So this is going to be a roughly five month saga compressed into a multi-post few week funfest, seeing as how there's been this Date set for April 18 or somesuch.

As I alluded to at the time, I spent several days just after Thanksgiving at a conference in Tucson. One of the ironic aspects of attending a conference on galaxy and black hole evolution is that I have done very little work which could be construed as directly relating to most of the topics discussed those three days. And yet I kept being drawn to galaxy evolution and I kept saying it is what I want to work on... The idea, I supposed, was to actually get around to doing just that.

See, I was supposed to present a "thesis proposal" in February, as the next step in this whole getting a PhD thing (the previous step being the candidacy exam last summer). (Or so was the case at the time. April is the new February, apparently.) The thought of choosing a thesis topic somewhat terrifies me, mostly because of the stereotype that choosing a thesis topic is equivalent to choosing what I'll be working on for the rest of my life. My aversion to such a decision stems from the same aversion I have to say, traditional marriage: it's not that I can't see myself working on something for the rest of my life, it's that I wouldn't want to work on one thing to the exclusion of all else.

Luckily, real life isn't a pure manifestation of stereotypes, and what a "thesis" (or, more relevantly, a "thesis proposal") should be varies from advisor to advisor. If all goes as planned, I'm essentially halfway through graduate school (or at least I was in December), which means that I will be applying for jobs in (eep!) about a year and a half. My advisor seems to think that the thesis proposal should basically be a default plan for how I am going to write enough interesting papers in that year and a half so that people will want to give me a job. In other words, it's not so much what I will be doing, but what I can do if nothing else more interesting comes along. Yet, despite the seemingly nebulous nature of said proposal, I was still somewhat freaked out over the whole thing back in November. And December. And January. Then in February and March I just kind of ignored the problem, hoping it would go away ...

Paper Writing

The Sunday before last, I finally got to the point on my current distraction project where I could begin writing it up as a nice paper. That evening I started coughing, no big deal, but by Monday afternoon I was completely overcome with the flu. As it turned out, over half of the graduate students succumbed to the same flu ... and essentially all of us fell sick within 24 ours of each other. As we explained to the prospective graduate students visiting Thursday and Friday, one of the great things about the department here is the high degree of interconnectivity... so that everyone is put out by the plague simultaneously. So last week became an utter waste, but by Friday I was beginning to feel like myself again. Then between Friday morning and Saturday night, central Ohio was visited by about 20 inches of snow—the most snow in one storm here ever. I managed to dig myself out and get into the office on Sunday. And so for the last few days I've been trying to remember how to write a paper.

The quote of the week, I think, comes from Tuesday when I told a professor (with whom I have co-authored a paper) that I can't remember how to write papers. I said I was in my "wandering the halls" phase. The response? "No, no, you seem to be remembering just fine ... this is how you've done it before, if I recall." I couldn't argue with that.

Then Wednesday morning a link was sent my way, and I had no choice but to rearrange the books on my shelf.I discovered that a large fraction the textbooks I own are black or blue; apparently I am not a mathematician (because, as everyone knows, all math books are yellow). I don't know how long I will be able to keep the books like this; normally I sort by genre and then by size within genre (I think I'd need at least an order of magnitude more books before I considered sorting by author, which is apparently how God intended).

The amazing thing is that I'm actually making vague progress writing the paper; I'm almost finished filling everything in—including figures and tables—so soon I'll officially be at the "revision" stage... when I go back and redo everything so that it is at a quality level where I am not embarrassed to show the manuscript to my coauthors. Whee fun.

More astro-ph Nuggets

Today's first piece of fun on astro-ph is a short paper by Travis Metcalfe on "The Production Rate and Employment of Ph.D. Astronomers," or: how difficult is it to get a tenure-track job given that you have a Ph.D. in astornomy? I haven't actually read this preprint, but Travis had a very interesting poster at the AAS meeting last May on the same topic, so I am guessing it is based on the same information.

The second is a short conference proceedings by Chris Stubbs on the Crisis in Fundamental Physics, or, what will happen if w really does equal -1. Translation: what if the properties of the dark energy really are the most boring vanilla stuff we can come up with ... and thus also boring both theoretically and observationally. This, combined with Simon White's screed from a few months ago, paint the question of dark energy as inherently interesting (there is something going on in the universe that we really don't understand, and it might be related to why our really-good-for-everything-else theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don't play nice together), but in the meantime it poses a scientifically and sociologically potentially crippling/stagnating problem.

Citations and arXiv.org

A couple of years ago, a paper came out saying that astronomy papers posted on astro-ph get about twice as many citations as those which do not. Plenty of people think that if you are going to post a paper to arXiv, then you should time it so that it, for example, shows up near the top of the daily astro-ph listings. The second paper on today's astro-ph list takes this a step further, showing that the papers appearing near the "top" of the daily astro-ph listings receive essentially twice as many citations as those further down on the list. The interesting question here—one which it's fairly difficult to disentangle—is whether this difference is really purely due to a positional bias (people glance at the first few papers on astro-ph in the morning and then stop, and thus are more likely to remember and cite those first few papers), or if it is a selection effect (people who care enough to make sure their paper is near the top of the list might simply have better science to share, or be better at self-promotion in other contexts, like conferences).

There might be a lesson or two in here somewhere ...

The plan was for me to come back from South Carolina on Wednesday and do my oral exam on Thursday. Roughly speaking, that's what happened, but like many stories, there's a nice "travelling sucks" story stuck in the middle.

So Wednesday morning, my mom drove me up to Charlotte and it was no problem at all getting to Detroit (I was flying Northwest). As we were landing, a nice thunderstorm broke out, and so we got to sit on the tarmack for about an hour before someone would come out and bring out the jetbridge so we could get off. I grabbed a sandwich and talked on the phone for a bit (long layover) and worked on my presentation some. I was working enough that I didn't even notice my flight back to Columbus had been delayed a bit, but I didn't care since I didn't have a tight schedule. When they finally let us onto the plane, the two people ahead of me in line got all huffy with the boarding ticket lady because they didn't realize that they couldn't bring their big suitcase onto the plane and had to check it planeside. Oh, and they were rather drunk. Finally get on the plane and one of them is sitting across the aisle from me and smells like a nice ashtray—quite unpleasant. Eventually someone comes onto the plane and asks to "talk" to them "for a minute." They go; I get two seats to myself. We then sit at the gate for another twenty minutes for security to deal with the drunk people (why they needed the plane there to do that is beyond me). We then go sit on the runway for about an hour before the pilot tells us that we don't have enough fuel to get to Columbus because we're being rerouted, so they take us back to the gate before letting us know the flight has been cancelled. By this time it's after 8pm, and I was supposed to be back in Columbus before 6:30. Needless to say, Northwest was fully uninterested in getting me back to Ohio that night; they said they "might" be able to get me back "tomorrow." Tomorrow? Might? I have an exam at 2:30 that I'm—oh yeah—unprepared for! In the meantime, I had made friends with some ladies in the back of the plane (apparently watching smelly drunk people get kicked off a plane is a bit of a bonding experience). One of them was able and willing to rent a car on her company credit card and drive the four of us back to Columbus. (Thanks, Robin!) By the way, this is another example of why to never check luggage; I was the only one in the car with all of the stuff I had been hoping to leave with. I pretty much never spend time around "real" people, so I was pleasantly surprised when the conversation was lively and interesting the whole way back—and it definitely made for an upbeat ending to a rather shit-tastic birthday. I was dropped off at the airport, where I picked up my car and finally made it home sometime after 1 a.m.

Thursday, I was fairly dead to the world. I was reeeeeally hoping that some combination of caffeine, adrenaline, and maybe even anxiety would suffice for waking me up, but not so much. The hour before the presentation I spent trying (unsuccessfully) to nap on my desk. The talk itself went okay; somewhere in my academic past I have learned to give a half-decent presentation on auto-drive. The more than an hour of questioning afterwards, however ... let's just say it was a rather embarassing experience I'd rather not reminisce over and leave it at that. I passed of course, and I went out for wings afterwards (BW3s has finally re-opened near campus), but I am forced to wonder how it would have gone if I had actually been cogent and lucid, and actually, you know, prepared for the ordeal instead of taking a five day joy trip to a place that has the power of giving me a really thick accent.

Anticlimatic

I forgot to mention that I am now done with classes. Forever. In a rather anticlimatic move, I discovered on Sunday that apparently my final class will not be having a final exam this week. As such, I did my final classwork about two weeks ago, when I actually turned in a problem set late (I had the due date remembered wrong). Apropos, I suppose.

Also, apparently this exam I'm trying to stay awake all day to work on is a "candidacy exam." It seems that I am not yet a PhD candidate, and somehow being a PhD candidate is different from having been admitted into the PhD program. Or something. I get the point of the exams, I do, but the language and the bureaucracy come across as forced and arcane. And buraeucratic.

General Exams Begin

I start my general exams today. I think that's what they're called. I've been informed they are definitely not quals or qualifying exams, but I don't understand the difference in semantics, and seeing as how they're just something I have to do, I don't really care either—thought I might again in a month.

As I explained last time in agonizing detail, our department just changed the policy for the exames-taken-after-classes-are-finished. I, like everyone else, chose to do the "new format," which is to say, I'm going to be learning a whole lot about the Lyman-α forest in the next ten days. (It's supposed to be two weeks, but thanks to extenuating circumstances, well, ten days is kind of like two weeks, right?) Then, a little less than two weeks after I turn in a pile of summary papers to my committee, I have an oral presentation scheduled ... on a completely different topic.

I spent today reading the Rauch (1998) review article of "The Lyman Alpha Forest in the Spectra of Quasistellar Objects." ("Quasistellar object" is a back-in-the-day word for "quasar.") Man, review articles are intense. The first review article (fine, it's actually from a lecture series, but anyhow) I ever read was Narayan & Bartelmann's discussion of graviational lensing. For the two years I worked on gravitational lensing (starting from absolutely no knowledge whatsoever), every time I went back to the article, I discovered some little nugget of information that simply hadn't penetrated my skull previously. Hopefully in the last four years I've learned a little bit about how to learn, as well as gained a tad of astronophysical background ...

Let this also suffice as a warning that blog posts might be somewhat more intermittant than usual for the next couple of weeks.

Please Step AWAY from the Dark Energy

An interesting essay by Simon White showed up on astro-ph Wednesday night entitled "Fundamentalist physics: why Dark Energy is bad for Astronomy." The whole thing is an interesting sociological read, highlighting in very clear terms the adage (mantra?) that astronomy doesn't want to become like particle physics:

Dark Energy is the Pied Piper's pipe, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.

This topic is big enough that both Rob and Sean have already commented on it (I was travelling! no interenet!). As someone who got into astronomy because cosmology was so interesting (I didn't like astronomy as a kid, and MIT doesn't have a separate astronomy department), I find this topic to be quite enlightening. Sure, we could all be working on what is arguably the "most interesting" topic, but what's the fun in that?

What I found most interesting in the essay, though, were the cold hard numbers behind the reality of the situation, i.e., how the culture of writing and citing papers has changed in the last, say, 30 years. The final figure in the essay outlines how the number of refereed papers, distinct authors, authors per paper, and references per paper have changed from 1975 to 2006.

The numbers in parentheses are the 1975 values.

By 2006 the number of authors had quadrupled but the number of papers had only doubled. On the other hand, the mean number of authors per paper also doubled, so that the number of papers signed by a typical astronomer remained constant at about 2 per year. The size of the astronomical community has thus increased dramatically and a drop in the mean productivity of its members has been masked by the tendency for more individuals to sign each paper. In 1975 over 40% of all papers in the major journals had a single author and fewer than 3% had 6 or more authors. In 2006 only 9% of papers had a single author while almost 28% had 6 or more authors.
...
As an extreme example, the fourth ranked astrophysicist by citations to papers published over the last decade has never written a first-author paper for a refereed journal and has gained almost all his citations through his right to sign official papers by a large collaboration in which he played a purely functional role

Why these trends occur and just how bad (or good) they are is harder to pin down. I know that big long author lists are extremely uncommon in most fields; are there even any other fields within physics that support papers with more than 6 authors on an "oh, that's normal" basis? I doubt we've found a nice equlibrium within the collaboration system yet: the benefits of "more people means more ideas" has to be balanced out by the fact inidividuals can get lost, e.g., that after the first author, it's difficult to track down just how much each author contributed.

Quals

Our department's chair of graduate studies met this afternoon with the students who will be taking qualifying exams this summer to (unsurprisingly enough) talk about taking qualifying exams this summer. The matter is made slightly more complicated than usual because the faculty are apparently discussing a new format for the written component of the qualifying exam.

Let me back up. The general idea is that graduate school consists of two components: becoming familiar with the language and basic material of the field, typically via classes, and contributing to the field via new research and publishing papers. Because one needs to have at least a rough grasp of and familiarity with the material in the field, it's standard for the first two years of a PhD program to be primarily dedicated to taking classes, and for the following years to be class-free and dedicated to towards the "dissertation," i.e., research. At the end of the first two years (or, rather, the completion of classes), students have to take "qualifying exams" (the exact name varies from institution to institution) to demonstrate that they have mastered knowledge of the field; after passing quals, they are given a Master's Degree. In a PhD program, the Master's Degree really doesn't matter... it's like getting a shiny gold star, or a consolation prize if at this point in their academic careers someone doesn't go for the PhD. (This is, of course, a markedly different paradigm from programs in which the Master's is the end goal.)

In our department, we have to take nine classes our first two years. This isn't as heavy as it sounds, since we're strange and on the quarter system; at any given point, we aren't taking more than 2 "real" classes. Because we're a small department (compared to, say, a physics or engineering department), all of the students take classes at the same time, so the graduate classes are offered every other year. At the end of the year, the 2nd year graduate students (e.g., me, this year) take the qualifying exams. Typically, qualifying exams ("quals") have both a written and an oral component. Currently, the written component consists of being tested—again—on the material from the nine classes. There are nine 45-minute exams (or eight if the professor from the last class [i.e., the last class ever!!] we took is feeling magnanimous and is willing to use the final as a qualifying exam) spread out, morning and afternoon, over two days. Each individual exam is written by the professor who taught us the corresponding class. To pass, one must average at least 60% over all of the exams. As you can expect, these exams are preceded by lots of freaking out and studying, and the time spent freaking out and studying is generally not accompanied by nice productive research. We're told we shouldn't worry about quals, and that if we have a good research track record by the time we take them, we'll pass, but from what I understand, that message doesn't exactly... sink in, shall we say. It is true that it's almost unheard of for someone to flunk quals here—rumor has it that it has happened once in the last five years, but no one seems to admit to knowing who it was. This is quite unlike other places who try their best to weed people out of the program. Why admit students you're just going to try to get rid of later? You prospective graduate students out there: when you visit schools you're considering, try to get a solid answer of what percentage of students in an entering class pass quals, and what percentage of students in an entering class actually leave with a PhD.

So the format of the qualifying exams might change. The philosophy behind the possible new format is that we've already passed all those silly classes; why be tested again on material we've already demonstrated mastery of? So, instead, we could do an in-depth excursion into a field of research we're interested in, like "brown dwarfs" or "galaxy formation." The proposed format consists of three parts: (1) summarize three papers in the field (two to three pages per summary); (2) do, and write up, some order-of-magnitude calcuation related to the field; (3) write a 5–10 page description/review of the current state of the field. One complication is that the University wants a guarantee that this is our own work, so none of these papers can include a copy-pasted bit from some other paper we've co-authored elsewhere (even if it's published and we are the first author).

If the faculty approve this change—and as uninformed graduate students, we don't know whether or not it will be approved—then we second-years get a choice between the old and new formats, because we've been told since we arrived that we would be given the old format. We each get to decide individually, which is nice, I suppose. I currently don't know which format I prefer. One the one hand, I absolutely loathe timed, written tests, and I think I know what I would do for the research field excursion format. On the other hand, the test-taking format is over at a set time: if I decide half an hour before the exam is supposed to start that I want to study for another week, then I'm shit out of luck because I have to take the exam anyhow. But for the paper-writing format, if I decide half an hour before I plan on turning the stack of papers in that I'd like to put another week of work in, I'm basically free to do so... which also means that I'm more likely to spend more time than desired (i.e., being a silly perfectionist) on the paper-writing format than on the test-taking format. Either way, it's a chunk of time spent not doing research; the question is simply how to minimize that amount of time and effort.

The oral component of our qualifying exams consists of a short presentation on some (not necessarily published) research we've done while at OSU. The trickiest part of this component is timing: it has to happen within 30 days of the completion of the written component, and we have to have a committee for it. A committee means four faculty members who are both in town and willing to basically sit and listen to the presentation; ideally, this is the same committee as one's thesis committee, but doesn't necessarily have to be. The problem with that idea, of course, is that it assumes that we know what the hell we want to do our thesis on, which some of us *ahem* most certainly do not. One of the problems with the old sit-down-and-take-tests format of the written component is that, since they are tests, all of the second years took them at the same time, so the 30 day clocks were all set at the same time. This year, there will be 7 students taking qualifying exams, so if our clocks all started simultaneously, this would mean that in one thirty day window, seven days would have to be found in which four faculty could administer the oral component of the qualifying exam. Not impossible, but since it's probably June or July, lots of people are out of town, and therefore it's common for the same faculty members to end up on lots of committees, which tends to make them grumpy, and no one wants a committee full of grumpy faculty members.

The next stage of this complicated process is the thesis proposal. The clock for the thesis proposal starts after the oral component of the qualifying exam; we have one year to get our thesis committees together and propose some topic for our theses. This typically means that thesis proposals happen in the late winter, early spring; the third year graduate students are currently wrapping up this process. There are some places that require a written thesis proposal, but since that's just unnecessary paperwork, here it's just another 15-minute presentation. This is actually the part that has me the most scared, but since I've got another year to stall on thinking about it, it's not so bad quite yet.

Spring!

Well, spring has officially been here in the northern hemisphere for several days now, and now that I attend a school whose terms align accurately with the seasons, this also means that spring quarter will be starting Monday. The ice and snow are being replaced with more savory things, like flowers and pollen and ants, and apparently our office building isn't going to have the air conditioning ("cooling systems") turned on until April 10, so it'll be like going to a tropical non-breezy treeless forest every day.

Now, the most important aspect to remember about this upcoming quarter is that I will be taking my Last. Class. Ever. Sure, there might be some set of exams I'll have to take at the end of the quarter, and they're probably going to even give me another degree, but such things are inconsequential when we consider the raw facts of no more classes. See, classes and I, we just don't get along. I'm not a big fan of sitting still for extended periods of time, let alone having time taken out of the middle of my day for sitting still. We used to be pretty close: I took classes and they gave me good grades and everything was hunky-dory. Then in 10th grade it happened: I did my first research project. I had a couple of magenta liquid crystal cells I hooked up to a battery and some switches, and I spent hours and hours heating them up and freezing them (my first fun with dry ice) and watching how the impurities in the material affected the phase transitions. I was hooked. What's the point of taking classes when I could be having fun instead? So for the last nine years (yrrgh! that long??) I've been rather impatiently waiting until I could quit wasting my time on all these silly sit-and-take-notes and then do-these-everso-enlightening-problems classes, and start doing real science.

And when I put it that way, I'm not quite sure I've entirely internalized just how exciting this is going to be.

Faculty Search

So there's this paper I've been stalling on writing for the last while. It's difficult to define "while" in this context, but there have been at least two months during which I feel like I just... haven't done anything. Or the things I've been working on haven't been the right things. Or all the time I think I've been working I've secretly been playing computer games without telling myself. Or perhaps with the quarter starting in January I managed to come across a veritable plethera of excuses for not working.

Once such excuse is that we've had four faculty candidates visit in the last six-ish weeks as part of our search for a theoretical cosmologist. The OSU Department of Astronomy being the graduate student friendly place that it is, this means that a handful of us (myself included) got to have lunch with all of the candidates, sans faculty. Well, all of the candidates except the unlucky one who visited in the middle of last week's snowstorm and University shutdown. I think the setup is fantastic: I'm a fairly judgemental person, and I like free food and talking about science. Then there's "speaker harassement," the hour-or-so the graduate students spend with the speaker (we do this for any colloquium speaker, not just job candidates) after their talk, harassing them about science and minute details of their talk. Different people react differently during speaker harassment; we often get visitors who treat speaker harassment as fun and interactive, asking all of us graduate students our names and what we're working on and with whom, but then we also get the ones who sit there like duds just waiting to be asked something. I have also noticed when eating out with visitors, in general, that some will make a point of asking me about my research, whereas others are satisfied by keeping the conversation in their own area of expertise. Normally, I just assume that those who don't ask me what I'm working on after a two-hour science-laden conversation simply don't care to know what I'm working on, and they don't care to know what I am working on because on some level they are a big fat self-centered jerk. Ah, but with the faculty candiates I found myself wondering: do they not care because they don't think of graduate students as Real People with Real Research, or do they not care because I give off "I AM UNINTERESTING" vibes, or do they not care because they are ignorant and afraid of anything outside of their own little niche?

In any case, I've been glad to note that I have enjoyed talking about science with each of the candidates—whatever writer's block I have isn't due to falling out of love with astrophysics—though it is quite entertaining to watch certain cosmologists' eyes glaze over when I mention I'm cataloging variable stars at the Galactic center. (Stars are so boring!) Sociologically, the entire process is quite entertaining to observe—entertaining because, as a lowly pion, I don't have to deal with the political decision-making goop of the whole thing. It's this intricate dance of, we're trying to impress the candidate so they'll like us, and the candidate is trying to impress us so we'll give them a, you know, job offer. It's also interesting learning about the job-search-and-pick process from this end (e.g., what exactly does one have to do in order to leave a "good impression"?) before I have to go through it myself. During a one-hour job talk, for example, it's probably a good idea to know whether or not your presentation has a burning desire to be two hours long. That falls under the "obvious" category. In the not-obvious category we have such examples as, how much of what kinds of science should I do now in order to ensure I'll be able to find a job when the future arrives?

It's just a hunch, but I'm going to guess that it's probably better for this paper to get itself finished so I can move on to something else. Rather than, you know, not.

Winter Quarter Rundown

Many of you have told me that you like it when I give "my perspective." I'm not sure what that means, but here's a bit of my perspective for you: life sucks when it's cold outside.

Now, the cold and the suckage are probably not actually causally related, but I can at least assume they are. Winter: cold and busy and stressful. Summer: warm and busy and not stressful. Clearly, I can blame the temperature. Well, that, and in a Perfect World, I wouldn't waste two minutes putting on complicated clothing just because I want/need to *gasp* go outside. Not to mention the gas bills. Oh, yes, and "cold" is another word for "sick," and "sick" is another way of saying, "I'm not really going to get any work done today, but I'm not going to have any fun either."

This quarter I am taking two classes (because there are two classes to take). They are Radiative Gas Dynamics and Observational Cosmology. Observational Cosmology really means, AGN and maybe some observational cosmology if there's time left at the end of the quarter. I'm going to learn a hell of a lot of physics and astronomy this quarter, and it'll be great, but let's examine my schedule for Tuesdays and Thursdays for a moment, shall we. In short, they are Teh Suck. The idea is that we can dedicate the other days of the week to Doing Research, but seriously, days like Tuesdays and Thursdays this quarter make me want to crawl under my covers and get drunk. Specifically, I've got Coffee from 10:30 until Radiative Gas Dynamics starts at 11:10 or so, which goes until 12:30. Then Observational Cosmology launches at 1:30 and goes until 2:48 (:48? what the ... ?). Thursdays are even better because we have colloquium at 3:30 (with unskippable donuts at 3) until 4:30 or so, and speaker harassment at 5. Yick yick yick. I think I also have office hours on Tuesday, at like 4 or something.

Oh, yeah, and I have office hours this quarter. Because I'm apparently TAing and introductory astronomy course. It's not that TAing takes a lot of time—it takes five hours a week, max, and that includes the office hours that will be sparsely attended—it's that it's just something else to keep track of and do. I'm not TAing because my advisor was particularly unwilling to pay me (i.e., to give me an RAship) this quarter, but because I'm supposedly near the end of my current project and they really need TAs this quarter. This is one of the top ten things wrong with the quarter system. The astronomy department has several two-quarter sequence classes; they all either go fall-winter or winter-spring, and so winter just winds up being "let's teach lots and lots of astronomy classes!" time. At least I don't have to go to the class I'm TAing. It's at 9:30AM every single morning. I have the sneaking suspicion that the professor I'm TAing for would really kind of like for me to go to class every day, but is nice (and smart?) enough to not ask me to. Seriously, why do people take this class? I'm sure it's "intersesting," but 9:30AM interesting? If it were something like galaxies or cosmology, I could understand. But this is the solar system. And so far, it's not even "cool" solar system; it's like, zomg what causes a lunar eclipse?! See, this is why I wasn't an astronomy major.*

And, oh yes, I'm apparently close to the end of my current project. Which is to say, I'm finished with my current project, except that I need to actually write the paper. And, apparently, it has been decided that I should have said paper done by February 1. February 1 is terrifyingly soon, in case you hadn't noticed. And, of course, now that I've mentioned it on my blog, I have to have said paper finished by February 1. Well. We'll see how that goes ...


* Please ignore the fact that MIT neither has an astronomy department nor offers a B.S. in astronomy.

Questions Raised by ApJ Proofs

My peanut star paper got accepted and is set to be published soon. How soon is unclear, though. On the proofs, after the author list, it says, Received 2006 October 9; accepted 2006 November 8; published 2006 December XX. But at the top of the page, it says, The Astrophysical Journal, 654:L000-L000, 2007 January 1. So what I want to know is: is this paper mollishka et al. (2006), or mollishka et al. (2007)? I know it is probably 2007, but 2006 would make me seem so much more productive and would be much less confusing ... and apparently the page charges are less per page for 2007 than for 2006, but the page charge sheet they sent with the proofs was for 2006 and not 2007.

Also, since when did Kelvins become kelvins?

Epic(?) Bets

Which do you think will be discovered first: the Higg's boson, or an Earth mass planet orbiting a G or K dwarf star* in the habitable zone?

Last night at the astronomy department holiday party, Jason and Jon (two graduate students) put $20 each on a bet that an Earth mass planet orbitting a G or K dwarf star (the Sun is a G dwarf star; K dwarfs are slightly cooler) in the habitable zone will not be discovered by the time the first one of them graduates, which should be roughly summer 2010. Scott, who orchestrated the bet and is set to earn $40 if such planets are discovered by 2010, is an expert on planet finding studies—especially compared to two graduate students! It came out later in the evening that the Kepler mission, a satellite specifically designed to search for planets, hasn't been delayed until 2012 like the grad students thought, but rather, is likely to launch in about two years. The European analog(-ish) to Kepler, COROT, is set to launch in about two weeks. The general expectation is that unless something goes horribly wrong with both of these missions—or Earth is the only Earth-like planet— then an extrasolar Earth analog will be detected by the time I get a Ph.D.

I was unwilling to get in on the planet game, but I did bet Mandeep $1.00 that the Higg's boson will not be discovered by the time I graduate. Coming from a particle physics background, he is certainly more qualified to make such predictions, but that's completely beside the point. The LHC ("Large Hadron Collider") is due to start collecting data in 2007, and there is lots of evidence pointing at if the Higg's boson exists, then it should be detected by the LHC. On the other hand, we know of at least one Earth mass planet orbiting a G dwarf star in the habitable zone, whereas the Higg's boson is still a mere postulation and prediction.


* Aside from Earth itself, of course!
N.B.: This post title is shamelessly stolen from a recent similarly-themed post over on Galactic Interactions.

Fun with ApJ Week

This past week I received the proofs for the galaxies paper I submitted to the Astrophysical Journal (aka ApJ) in June. "Proofs" include to two versions of the paper: the actual proofs as well as the redlined manuscript. The proofs are an example of how the paper will look when it actually appears in the journal, tables and figures and everything. When verifying that the editors didn't ruin my figures, for instance, I look at the proofs. The last page of the proofs also includes a list of "Author Queries," which is where they explain that they have rearranged such & such sentence and ask if the rewording maintains the intended meaning of the sentence.

The redlined manuscript is a wholly different matter. In this case, while the proofed version was 15 pages, the redlined manuscript was 40. The two aspects of publishing a paper in an honest-to-goodness peer-reviewed journal are first the science editing (which includes the process of peer-review) and the secondly the manuscript editing. This second stage is so that all of the papers will conform to the same set of standards, so that they will all "look" the same. This is also the stage where an editor sits down with the paper and corrects all of the grammar and spelling mistakes. As you can imagine, this is the stage at which a well-written paper will sail through the process much more quickly than a poorly written one.

The redlined manuscript is the means by which the editors let the authors know of all the changes they made: every hyphen added or removed, every comma added or removed, every rewording and every cleaned-up equation. Well, not every-every. For instance, I prefer the word "barstrength" to "bar strength" when referring to the strength of a galaxy's bar; every instance I had of "barstrength" was changed to "bar strength," but this was only explicitly pointed out in the title. Some authors therefore sit down with their original manuscript and the new version and compare the two word-by-word, searching for inconsistencies and unremarked-upon switches of "which" and "that". Before electronic submissions, careful comparison was a much bigger deal: what if numbers were mistyped in a table? Now, though, such egregious errors are much less likely.

Then there are the various "grammar" rules set by the Journal. For example, apparently ApJ doesn't like it when sentences start with numbers larger than 9, so a sentence that I began with "Forty-eight of our 75 galaxies ..." was summarily changed to "Of our 75 galaxies, 48 ...". Then there are the rules that seem to change over the years: if it is consistency they want, then the rules should remain consistent. If an equation had brackets in a paper published four years ago, it should still have brackets in a paper published today.

For this paper, there weren't terribly many changes, and we didn't protest about any of them. At this stage, all I had to do was read through the manuscript carefully several times and email the editors back with a go-ahead. It felt very rewarding for so little work, but then, all of the real work had already been done. The maunscript editing stage is simply much easier than the scientific editing stage, which we're going through with the peanut star paper right now: the referee has sent back comments, and now I have to put actual effort and thought into incorporating and responding to them.

MIT Asks For Money

Let me preface this post by stating clearly that my time at MIT was worth every penny, and if I had to make the decision again between where I am now and a debt-free-MITless existence, I would quickly re-choose my current debtridden state.

That said, last night I was called for the second time in a week by "a sophomore at MIT."

The first time, I was in the backseat of a full Jeep about to be dropped off. "Hi! This is Allison, a sophomore at MIT. Do you have a minute to speak?" "If you're asking for money, don't waste your breath, because you're not going to get any." I have to give her credit; she just kind of laughed and tried to convince me that they were just trying to ensure my contact information was still up-to-date. I said it was, and she started to ask if she could just talk to me about my impressions of and time at MIT, and I mentioned that I was kind of busy at the moment, but could I call them back in ten minutes? Well, no, they don't take incoming calls, but someone would call next week. You'd think the fact that I was willing to return the call in ten minutes would imply that I would be able to take an incoming call in ten minutes, but let's not jump to conclusions here.

Apparently last night is next week. "Hi! This is Amanda, a sophomore at MIT. Do you have a minute to speak?" "If you're asking for money, don't bother, you're not going to get any." "Uhm, okay, bye." Apparently we're not even going to pretend to care about all of my delightful insights of my time served at MIT or bother asking why I'm unwilling to give handouts.

I'm not exactly sure just why I get so infuriated whenever MIT asks me for money. A large part has to do with the fact that it will be many many more years before I fully pay for that education, and I will not even consider freely giving them money while I'm still being forced to give them money. A lot of the irritation is because I completely disbelieve that my money will be put to a good use; if I were to ever donate money, I would donate it directly to a student or living group, where I could be more gauranteed of students benefitting from my hard-earned cash.

Then there's that part of my current anger that certainly has to do with the answer another alum got upon asking just why does MIT need "just anything you have": because higher percentages of alumni who donate money translates into higher rankings. What?! Yes, that's right: MIT is claiming to care about rankings. What the hell?! Are we having trouble with name recognition here? Are we actively trying to attract the kind of student who prefers another school simply because a statistically insignificant ranking system based on questionable criteria implies that a small liberal arts school up the river is somehow "better"?? It's not like MIT is trying to crack the top ten or create name recognition that goes hand-in-hand with "research institution" instead of "football."

Ah, well. They'll call again in a year, and perhaps then I will be prepared to explain to the unwitting sophomore why MIT should care about exactly why an alum is unwilling to donate money.

Paper Revision

I spent this week in the "well, we're going to submit this paper tomorrow afternoon, so ..." phase. The paper in question has eight authors, including four faculty members here. I hadn't fully appreciated just how... fun... it can be to have so many authors on a paper. Granted, at least everyone on this list is on speaking terms with one another, and they're all reasonable people with a distinct desire to get this paper finished.

I gave people all of last weekend to get comments to me. A few people actually sent comments, several others acknowledged (in person—their offices are down the hall from mine) that they had received my email, and the rest were silent, but easily tracked down. One person had actually checked most of my references, finding one error that amounted to something like this: "Like Jones et al. (2003), we used the spherical black cow model of Appleseed et al. (1994) ..." But if you go and look in the relevant table of Appleseed et al. (1994), you will find that the cow is actually brown, not black. There's nothing in any of the tables in the entire Appleseed et al. (1994) paper that says anything about black at all. Jones et al. just mistyped something somewhere, it seems. No big deal; we add a footnote saying we realize that Appleseed et al. found the cow to be brown, but since Jones et al. used black, we will too. Meanwhile, one of the authors who felt like they should actually "contribute" in order to be included in the author list, starts considering whether or not the cow prefers greener pastures, and in the process does a simple calculation to reveal that the cow is actually a nice hamburger (with pickles and mayonnaise). Well and good: I type out a paragraph explaining how this is odd, as cows who are hamburgers don't make for very stable cows. But as it turns out, this calulation depends sensitively on what color the cow is. So we redo the calculation using brown instead of black, and find out that the cow is only dangerously close to wanting to be a hamburger, but since this situation is still not very stable, we keep the paragraph in. But now we're making a big deal of what color the cow is! And so the author in charge of running the simulations is asked to re-run the simulations with a brown cow, which, of course, takes another day.

Then there was the author who said, "I don't know anything about elephants, so I won't comment on that section." Said author then came back with a huge list of complaints about how they didn't understand the section about elephants. Unfortunately, some of these complaints were perfectly valid, but others... not so much. And I don't yet have the skill (or tact) to politely explain why certain points simply do not need to be addressed.

I also learned this week to not show coauthors un-proofread versions of a paper. It seems so obvious, when I put it that way, but I didn't phrase it as such last night in my head as I rushed out in order to have dinner with the colloquium speaker. And so the emails started pouring in about repeated words and dangling participles when all I really wanted people to do was to comment on the new science.

There are interesting differences in approaches here. I was personally rather annoyed at myself this morning, as most (if not all) of the minutiae pointed out to me I could have caught if I had, you know, just read the paper. This made some of the more pedantic emails all that more annoying: it's not that I don't know what a dangling participle is and that they should be banished, but I simply hadn't yet read the paper and fixed those particular problems. Then there were the emails which implied that I hadn't caught errors such as variables having one value in a table and another in the text because my eyes had "glazed over" upon reading the paper so much. Erm, not really. The most productive approach was taken by the author who simply read the paper, checked for internal consistency and good grammar, and gave it back to me mid-morning with a few scientific comments and suggested citations to boot.

I did finally post the paper to astro-ph this afternoon, and I really do hope all of the co-authors are sated by the current version. I'm still waiting for one of them to send me one-more-sentence before actually submitting it to the journal... but I fully expect to submit it Monday. Hopefully this particular iterative process terminates...

Journal Club Talk: Star Formation Rates

One of the "neat" things done here to help graduate students become accostomed to talking in front of a group of people is a weekly journal club. The idea is that every Friday at 12:30 (usually people bring their lunch) a grad student gives a half hour talk (assuming no interruptions, of which there are always plenty, so it's usually more like forty-five mintues or an hour) on some recent paper. Usually, this paper is completely unrelated to their own research, so that instead of the student "defending" their own work, they are learning new science.

Journal club is one of the aspects of the program here that I gladly tell prospective students about, but personally try to weasel my way out of. In principle, it's a great thing to force grad students to learn how to make effective slides, to become comfortable standing in front of a room full of people, to be able to easily field unsolicited questions. In practice, it's fantastic, as long as I'm not the student in question. I succeeded in not giving a talk last year, but when, on our way to the conference in Japan in June, Paul (who is in charge of scheduling and running journal club this year) found out I hadn't yet given one, I found myself first up on the list for this year, unable to sneak out.

Thus I found myself standing in front of the department today talking about "Radial variation of attenuation and star formation in the largest late-type disks observed with GALEX." I had resolved to not be one of those students who waits until the last minute to prepare, but well, there's this paper I've been procrastinating on for a while, and I didn't get around to mailing it out to the co-authors until Wednesday night... which meant that I didn't start, uhm, reading the paper until yesterday morning.

I felt like I was in Junior Lab all over again, only I actually found the material interesting, wasn't being graded (per se), and didn't have a lab partner to ask questions of. It took me all day to actually read the paper, and I didn't start even making slides until about 5p.m., when I realized that I haven't actually given a talk in over two years. Everyone these days seems to be using PowerPoint... which I haven't used since, I think, 1997? So I dallied for about half an hour, finally deciding that, in fact, LaTeX would be easier.

I finished the slides this morning, and then Paul suggested that I might want to practice. That was about when I started trying to crawl out of my skin. Normally, I don't get the slightest bit nervous when talking in front of a group, but then, normally, I actually know what the hell I'm talking about. This... this, I couldn't have given you a solid definition of "attenuation" or told you how astronomers ("we") estimate star formation rates 48 hours ago. So, I tried practicing, and it was disastrous: I couldn't stand still, I couldn't find any words not etymogically related to "uhm," and I definitely couldn't remember half of what I actually wanted to say.

But the talk wound up going fine, I think. Have you ever been so tired you can't fall asleep? It was like that: I think I was so nervous I forgot to be nervous. There was a plethora of interuptions (before I could even get off the title slide!), which, as I discovered, actually helped. If your audience keeps interupting you, it makes the "talk" more like a conversation than an information dump. Some people get really nervous and upset if their audience can't keep quiet, asks really difficult questions ("But isn't that just bogus?"), or talks amongst themselves. I find that not only do I not mind, but I actually kind of like it: it takes the pressure off me. Furthermore, if need be, I know I can always regain control of the room (since I am standing in front of it).

The paper itself is fairly interesting, and, from what I can tell, important. The most compelling result "concerns the notion of a threshold" of star formation. The rate at which galaxies, or more specifically, regions within galaxies, make stars has lots of implications for galaxy evolution and other areas of astronomy. Unfortunately, we can't just take a yearly (or million-years-ly) census of a galaxy and count up how many new stars we see. Instead, people model what the spectra of stars of different mass look like (how much light they put out at different wavelengths) and the relative numbers and ages of stars of different masses, which can then be turned into "we expect to see this much of this kind of light when stars are forming at this rate." One star formation tracer is quite popular because it involves looking at an emission line from hydrogen, called Hα, which is a very strong feature in red light, which we can see from the ground. People have noticed that in most galaxies, at some large radius, Hα just quits being seen. Since this radius corresponds to a surface mass density, people have also talked about a critical "threshold" density below which no star formation can occur. The star formation tracer used in this paper, on the other hand, is ultraviolet (UV) light, which cannot be seen from the ground (at least while we still have an ozone layer in the atmosphere!). So, the data are from a satellite, GALEX. The main problem with the notion of a star formation threshold is that it's not actually a star formation threshold; it's an Hα threshold. This paper shows pretty convincingly that UV radiation is still seen beyond the threshold at which Hα is observed, which, presumably, means that star formation is occuring. They argue that no more Hα is seen at large radii because really massive stars (more than about ten solar masses) are needed in order to have Hα, and these stars are very rare and die very quickly. When it becomes very improbable to have even one of these massive stars within a large region, then no more Hα will be seen. The UV light, on the other hand, is sensitive to slightly less massive (and therefore more common) stars, and can therefore be seen at larger radii.

The Undergrads Are Back

Well, Wednesday was the first day of classes (quarter system, hence, oddness, but that's another post). The most noticeable change between this week and last week is that the undergrads are back. The only upside of this I can see is that now the restaurants near campus will once again have reasonable operating hours; on the other hand, now there will be hordes of people at them as well ...

The astronomy department here is situated on the top floor of one of the chemistry buildings. One the first floor is a little coffee stand that also serves cold sandwiches and pastries. There are 40,000 goddamn undergrads at this school, and I swear, at certain times of day (like noon) they are all on the first floor, milling around the elevator. And then they look confused when the elevator doors open and people want to, you know, get out?

Most of them manage being lost and confused without actually moving, but some of them need a little nudge. These are the ones you find on the stairwell between the second and third floors looking for the basement (it's completely irrelevant that there are no classrooms above the 2nd floor, by the way). Or they wander into an office on the fourth floor (that no one can find if they are looking for it) trying to find a room in a different building.

Then there's the girl who visited our theoretical spectroscopy class this week. It's about one minute before the bell rings (yes, we have bells; yes, this is a "real college"; yes, it's demeaning; yes, I jump about ten feet every time it goes off and I'm standing near it; apparently a past president was a former high school principal and the university has never quite recovered). The professor is standing there at the front of the room, you know, in front of the chalkboard, talking about the densities and temperatures of tokamaks and the broad line regions of active galactic nuclei. And this girl, the type with the long hair that she probably spent an hour that morning trying to make look "natural," with the jeans that ride just a little too low and the shirt that's just a little too tight, walks in, completely oblivious to the fact that there's this man talking. "Hi guys," she says, smacking her gum. And she sits down on the far side of the room ... and right around then, the professor is done speaking (he had successfully completely ignored her entrance), and so we all get up and leave. She looks flabbergasted, like she can't figure out why we're all getting up and leaving ...

Then there are the ones who want me to join their clubs or sign their petitions or whatever the hell else it is they're trying to do. And I can't help but laugh when I'm just walking along, minding my own business, and someone comes up to me and asks if I want to enter to win $25,000 for grad school...