October 2008 Archives

Yesterday Jim Al-Kahlili was at the IOP to film a clip for the BBC One Show about new Bond film A Quantum of Solace. There have been quite a few enquiries at the IOP about the film's physics related title, but this time the film crew wanted to know whether Jim felt the Bond baddies' use of physics was giving science a bad name.

From Ernst Blofeld who tried to blackmail the world with two stolen atomic bombs in Thunderball, only to try his luck at germ warfare in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, to Hugo Drax who threatened to blow up London with a nuclear missile in Moonraker, science has always been at the centre of the Bond villains' plot to gain wealth and power.

However, as Jim pointed out, Bond is a man of science himself and fights his opponents with expert use of gadgets and information technology. So really, in the end, it's simply the better scientist who wins, and so far this has always been 007.

On Monday, I gave my "what I did at ICWIP 2008" talk to the RAL WiSET (women in science, engineering and techonology group). It went well even though the crowd was a bit sparse - serves me right for booking the talk during half term.

I'm hoping to book a recap for a wider (male-inclusive) audience for later on, as I've had at least three people say that they wanted to hear the presentation, but couldn't make Monday. I want to include some men, as there's a lot of stuff that was discussed that has potentially beneficial impact on male physicists as well. Stuff like site visits, which can improve the working climate for everyone, and childcare and career clashes, and the two-body problem.

One of my hot rant-buttons is this: I always get really annoyed when issues like childcare are ghettoised as "women's issues", because there are plenty of women out there who don't have or want kids, and a lot of fathers out there who need support. Childcare is a parents' issue - doesn't matter if male or female. It would really help level the playing field if it was socially accepted that men were as likely to take time out of work to look after small kids as women.

I'm only asking for a widespread change in society here - shouldn't take too long, honest!

Regardless, I want to get the message spread that changing things to improve the lot of women in physics also improves the lot of men in physics too. It's a win-win situation - and this really needs to be publicised. I'll try my best! 

Wired Magazine recently published a list of some of the best physics videos on the web. Featuring tesla coils, superconductors, raps and superfluids - the list proves that there's plenty of videos out there that will make many people go wow-wow-wow in wonder at what physics is all about. It's also a great resource for teachers looking for short video clips to impress the kids. Here's just a few of them:



Japanese astronaut Takao Doi proves that a boomerang will always return to the person who threw it -- even in outer space:


Superconducting levitation: A fantastic lesson about exotic materials and magnetism in just over six minutes:

Check out their user comments section also for other great videos that Wired didn't feature.

This is another one that's going to be written up at greater length for Interactions, but on Friday I had a very interesting day at the National Space Centre in Leicester, which I visited to cover their new "Space Academy" educational programmes.

The idea is to use space as a hook to provide curriculum support for pupils from Key Stage 2 right up to post-16 education. The Centre's position as both a working facility and an educational institution makes it a great choice of location -- and they've got some interesting items lying around: some solar cells from Hubble that were retrieved in 1993 after becoming unusable following micrometeorite bombardment, a test-tube of dust from a Martian meteorite and the logbook from the unsuccessful Beagle mission to Mars, which worked from the Centre. And the two disused rocket boosters decorating the canteen.

I had to chuckle, though, after viewing the animated film on the life cycle of stars in their Space Theatre. Though produced by the Centre's in-house team, the show had been commissioned by a planetarium in Nashville -- which meant that describing the development of stars using the word "evolution" was expressly forbidden, as was any reference to the Big Bang.

 

Apologies for not reporting on the final day of the conference before now. I'm going to use the excuses of the excellent conference organised tours, my travelling home and then jetlag!

Friday rounded the conference off with a couple of presentations - success stories from women physicists from South Africa and Vietnam. The chairs of the various workshop strands reported back, and their conclusions and recommendations were all distilled down to a set of resolutions to be presented at the 26th General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in Tsukuba, Japan.

I've copied the resolutions below:

The representatives assembled in Seoul unanimously recommend the following actions to the IUPAP 26th General Assembly in Tsukuba, Japan:

1. Promote through the IUPAP Liaison Committees and physical societies the formation of additional regional or national working groups for women in physics. These working groups would assist worldwide in the efforts to increase the participation of women, while being a resource to attract, retain, and advance women in physics.

2. Publicize site visits as an effective tool for improving the "climate" of physics workplaces, and encourage their implementation to help the workplaces become more supportive of both women and men. For a site visit, an institution or physics department invites a team of physicists to assess the work environment for women and to give advice for improvements in gender equity.

3. Actively encourage organizers of IUPAP-sponsored conferences to provide, associated with the conference programme (a) professional development workshops for attendees and (b) outreach activities aimed at the public and to engage both girls and boys from an early age in the excitement of physics.

4. Charge the IUPAP Working Group on Women in Physics (a) to oversee the administration of a global survey of physicists in 2009, (b) to continue to assess the progress of women in physics, (c) to make useful resources available globally through the internet, (d) to organize the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in 2011, and (e) to report at the 27th IUPAP General Assembly in 2011.

5. Urge IUPAP Liaison Committees and physical societies to take the leadership in their countries to encourage broad participation of their members in the global survey of physicists.

 In total, there were 283 attendees at the conference, from 57 countries. And, from a very unscientific straw poll of the UK delegation, it seems unanimous that everyone really enjoyed their time at the conference. I know that I've been feeling more energised and enthusiastic about my job since getting back (though that enthusiasm is wilting somewhat in the face of the huge pile of emails I've had to sort through).

I'll be keeping this blog going, as there are several things that I spotted over the conference that I'd like to blog about. I've also got shedloads more photos to show off too! So, even though the conference is over, this won't be the last you've heard from me! Or, I've no doubt, the last of my involvement with the whole issue of women in physics. 

It was my birthday on Wednesday. I mentioned this in passing to a couple of people, then at the conference dinner on Thursday night, lo and behold - a cake appeared and everyone sang happy birthday.

I have to admit it - I cried I was so touched.

And I had a great time wandering around attempting to feed everyone cake.

To the UK delegation - thanks guys! You're brilliant!!

 Yup, that's us - the UK delegation to ICWIP 2008. That's me in the middle with the long hair trying desperately to not drop my slipping notebook on anyone...

This morning kicked off with two fascinating presentations. The first was on teaching physics at tertiary level by Pratibha Jolly of India. The main idea I got out of that talk was that physics can't really be taught, but it can be learned, and that lecturing doesn't give students the physical intuition and understanding that doing simple experiments can. Also, there's strong reason for believing that student who get good marks are doing so by playing the system, rather than understanding the curriculum (to be fair, I did the same myself when I was in school).

The second plenary talk of the day (given by Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann from Brasil) was on super-massive black holes and their effects on galaxy formation. Did you know that if the Earth was to become a black hole it'd have to be squashed to 9mm in diameter?

 (I've got shed-loads of notes to sort out and put some form of sense on from all the talks - but it's been exhilarating, hearing about all sorts of cool physics, and all done by women too!)

I went to a session in strand C after the plenary talks this morning, discussing how to improve the general working environment for women in physics. (My male colleagues will be pleased to hear that it improves things for men too). There were some really interesting surveys presented from India and South Africa, which were very telling about preconceptions about physics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of female entrants into a physics course in India was directly related to the amount of outreach activities that had been done the year before.  

 It was my turn to present after lunch, my poster on how rain field modeling is used for radio communications. I wound up commiserating with a radio astronomer about how difficult it can be to keep radio noise out of one's measurements, and the general state of radio spectrum management today (one of my pet rants).

 I rounded the day off with a personal development workshop on transitioning to a leadership position. I think I was a bit of a disruptive influence, as when I was asked to think of what award I'd like to win, the only ones I could think of were the IgNobels... dearie me...

Still, it was interesting, using different ways of determining where it is I actually want to take my career, and it's definitely given me food for thought.

 Conference banquet tonight, and some of the UK delegation are threatening to find a karaoke bar.... I think I'll join them. It is a very important part of Korean culture after all...

 

It appears that yesterday's blog post vanished into the ether (probably because my hour of interweb time was nearly up just as I pushed the publish button). Darnit - will have to do a quick recap...

Yesterday morning started with a very decadent (not to mention sweet!) breakfast of doughnuts, as provided by the conference organisers. The conference was officially opened by a selection of important people from the IUPAP (Internationa Union of Pure and Applied Physics), and also included the president of the Korean Physical Society, and the Korean Minister of Gender Equality.

(It caused general amusement when the president of the Korean Physical Society encouraged everyone to bunk off the conference to climb the mountain behind the hotel!)

The keynote speeches that followed were fascinatingm covering such diverse topics as particle accelorators and the search for the Higgs boson, laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensates, microscopy and using light as nanostructure tools and single molecule chemistry. I learned a lot from them, as they were pitched to physicists, but not experts in the field.

Lunch was bi-bim bap, a traditional Korean dish of rice, veg and pork, served in seperate dishes along with hot pepper and sesame paste that you mix together according to your tastes. It was indeed very tasty, though I wussed out of using any of the hot paste.

I spent the afternoon attending the country poster session and strand  D workshops, all about the arcane mysteries of finding and getting funding. The first session of that was a long list of all the funding organisations in various parts of the world, especially those who will fund international collaboration.

 We had a quick break for dinner in one of the hotel's restaurants. I was getting a bit culture clashed, as it was a French restaurant with Korean staff in berets and stripy jumpers, with Irish and English folk music playing on the sound system. The food was excellent though.

The second D strand workshop was held in the evening, and was concerned with writing proposals. Now, I have to confess to some small amount of experience at this, but even so it was good to hear others' experiences, even if the winning formula can be summed up as:

good idea + right funder + following the rules = money (maybe)

 I have been taking plenty of photos - now I just have to figure out how to upload them here. Stay tuned!

It's been a very long day today, and by my reckoning one that started about 30 hours ago. But I'm safely installed in the hotel room, with internet, having registered at the conference and met the rest of the UK delegation. And a fine body of physicists they are too - and very much devoted to the aims of the conference. (This was ably demonstrated by the fact that we were the last to leave the room where the opening reception was held - well, there was interesting conversation and wine flowing...)

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The trip itself started off a bit fraught, as I arrived at terminal 3 of Heathrow to discover that I needed to be at terminal 1, and then couldn't find the right check-in area. Still, that was mitigated by there being no check-in queue and very little at security (and I got called "young lady", which is always a good way of improving my mood).

You would think, that with all the international travel I've been doing recently, I would've thought that bringing some euros with me for my plane change in Helsinki would be a good idea. Um, well, the thought never occurred to me until I got there, and faced a two-hour wait, gasping for a cup of tea. Hurrah for large boxes of duty-free fruit and liquorice gums, and bottles of water, all paid for by the trusty credit card.

The flights themselves were grand, though there were several unhappy toddlers on board, making their displeasure heard in ways that would not disgrace a b-movie monster film. I caught a few catnaps here and there, but nothing of any statistical significance (which explains why the room is swaying somewhat, and I'm even less coherent than usual).

I'll introduce the rest of the UK delegation later, and go a bit more into the structure of the conference. It was the opening reception this evening, which was the most relaxed opening to a conference that I've ever been to. About the only down-side was that all the students who'd been at the open lectures in the afternoon decended on the buffet tables with extreme prejudice. Still, it's nice to know that students are students the world over.

And now, you'll really have to forgive me, because I really need to get some sleep! I'll be back tomorrow with the further adventures of the UK delegation, so, until then...

So, this is the first post in a brand spanking new blog, kindly provided by the good folks at the Intitute of Physics.

My name is Sarah Callaghan, and I'm a senior research scientist/project manager type person working in the Space Science and Technology Department of STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The reason I'm posting here is to blog my experiences as part of the UK delegation to the International Conference on Women in Physics (ICWIP 2008) which is being held in Seoul, Korea, in less than a week. Hopefully the end of the conference won't mean the end of the blog though!

Before I dive into the glamourous life of an international jet-setting physicist, I thought it'd be a good idea to give people a bit of an idea about myself. In the broadest of outlines: I graduated with a BSc in Physics and Music from Cardiff University, then went to work for the Radio Communications Research Unit at RAL. I did my PhD (entitled "Fractal analysis and synthesis of rain fields for radio communications systems) part-time while still working at RAL, in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth.

I'm still working at RAL, though I've recently moved groups to become a part of the BADC  where I'm getting involved in managing projects on several topics, including radio propagation modelling, designing the business cases and software infrastructure for data journals, developing a common information model for the climate change community and helping with the UK-CIP 08 project.

In the past I've done a lot of work making and validating long-term earth-space radio propagation measurements, analysing meteorological radar data to investigate the spatio-temporal variability of rain fields and investigating the effects of implementing new techniques for radio systems to improve spectrum efficiency. For all of those many years working in radio - I'm still not the person who knows why your tv is getting interefered with. Though I do know a few people who might.

My main area of scientific interest is rain, and how it changes in space and time, and how this impacts radio systems. I can talk about that for hours (and believe me, I have done!)

Outside of work, I have a husband and toddler, both of whom keep me busy. I relax by making stuff out of stuff. I'm especially fond of geek knitting, and have knit several Klein bottle hats, and foisted them on various friends and family members. The next project that I've got in mind is knitting myself a Sierpniski gasket shawl. It might take a while - I've yet to master the intricacies of knitting lace.

And that's me, at least for the moment. I'm sure that more stuff will come to light, as and when new posts go up!