Infinitely writing...

I suppose this is primarily my fault for pushing everything off. So what have I been doing?

I submitted two abstracts for the upcoming MS&T 2014 conference. One oral presentation and another poster. After the pressure of preparing two presentations last time, I decided I didn't enjoy the experience so much. Although what I've also come to realize though is that presenting any research project for the first time is typically a lot of pressure of how receptive the audience will be. That is to say, last MS&T I presented on both the nano-Ni abnormal grain growth features and the information from the 3D nf-HEDM dataset for the first time ever and was already incredibly nervous for each one individually, and compounding the two did not help.

On the other hand, I was certainly nervous when we had to present our GBE results the first time at the 5th Recrystallization and Grain Growth conference, but when I presented on our next study at TMS 2014, I found myself comfortable with the overall situation. I suppose after giving one presentation, I felt I had validation of my work (as nobody from the audience ridiculed or challenged me) and secondly, and maybe more importantly, I had ownership to the work. The second time presenting it then is essentially watching the growth or next step of the research project. The topics for this upcoming MS&T 2014 involve one on the 3D dataset, and a second (poster) on some of the computational homology studies we've performed. The first should be extremely interesting (although it'll more or a less a repeat of the upcoming 3DMS talk), while the second is again, another side project.

Aside from that, I've been writing my drafts for my papers I keep putting off. I finally felt one was in more of a complete form that I should send off to my collaborator (but not my advisors just yet), and mixing in a second one with additional data now. In addition to the papers are my overview document, which I've begun making more of an effort thanks to my roommate, who had to turn her's in today. Her deadline essentially made mine more real, and forced me to sit down realize what needed to be done.

As a result, this weekend has almost been nothing but writing (and of course procrastinating like in this picture shown...)

Graduate Science Cafe and Graduate Symposium

These are two entirely different things.

The first is something a group of classmates in the material science department are trying to start, where we basically dedicate a hour or two each Friday morning to discuss any paper we thought was particular interesting, or maybe just a general science event of the week.

Perhaps the one most notable news of this week, is the report of a 1.5 micron giant sized virus released from an melting ice cap, that was still found to be ACTIVE (note I chose not to use the word alive). Global warming or not, this does stress why we should be sensitive to things such as climate change rather than just saying, "Oh this winter is much colder than the previous one." In this case, while the giant virus doesn't infect humans, it's size scale is something that we as a scientific community have not approached before, and hence the delicacy and requirement to further investigate it.

Overall we talked about a plethora of stuff, and I had a lot of fun with my other four classmates. While no time is set yet for each week, just comment and let me know if you (imaginary readers) are ever interested in joining.

The second was the Graduate Symposium.

Now in it's seventh year, it went extremely well. I wonder if I am more biased simply because I presented as well, and therefore had an overall good impression of it being a participant as well, or that all the student posters and speakers were excellent. The graduate symposium acts to provides all of us a chance to learn about one each other's research, but I noticed one more additional detail which isn't advertised. That is the interaction between students and professors (who are not their advisors). Having several professors stop by and talk about my poster, and be genuinely interested and understand what is going on, revealed to me the breadth of knowledge they have. It does make me wonder how long or how much one has to read before they can engage students to critically think like so, rather than just being receptive to what the poster is presenting.

Good talks. Content or Speaker?

Is it the content that matters, or the speaker? I think the answer is obvious, but for the sake of discussion I'll continue.

After attending many talks, listening to several seminars, giving a few of my own presentations, and finally watching a multitude of YouTube videos, the answer lies in both. A novel presentation can be ruined by a poor speaker (here I'm referring to poor flow, lack of confidence, or wrong emphasis). But similarly it seems a good speaker can still give a bad talk (again not organized, or overall lack of new, fresh content).

Here are some things I've noticed in good talks. The speaker is calm and natural, and nothing else beyond that. It's easy for an audience to detect nervousness, or something that is too emphasized, too forced. Being excited isn't bad in science, after all we're humans and not robots. But forcing excitement lacks the genuineness of an Eureka moment.

A good talk walks you through the whole process. You're not just being thrown theories, data, and results at you, being forced to absorb it. Instead you're suppose to walk through the thoughts of the speaker, run through the same procedures, and see the same results as they did.

And there's a multitude of ways this can be achieved. Sometimes it's breaking down a presentation into simpler concepts for the audience to understand. These may or may not be relevant to science, but as long as the analogy is drawn and the audience recognizes it. Other times you have to show the flow, step by step, and spoon feed your audience in a subtle manner. Make sure they appreciate the math as much as you do, rather than being intimidated by it. 

Often, the good talks come from the older professors. (I have heard excellent talks from students and post-docs, but I am simply stating an observation with the first point.) But then we have to realize how many talks they must have gave. How many "ums" and pauses they made, how many times they thought they gave a poor talk. How many times they were tongue tied, wavering their voice, or their knees shaking below them.

Public speaking comes with experience. Every opportunity you are presented with a talk, you should strive for the best. Even if it all goes wrong, as long as you have learned and taken something out from it, it was not a lost cause. As a scientist, being able to give a good talk is absolutely something we should strive for.

TMS Conference Re-Cap (Part 3 of 3)

The talks
I unfortunately found no posters that stood out as outstanding to me. But there are several talks that really stood out to me. I'll try my best to summarize them. 

This is by no means the best of list, but just the ones that did stick to me.

D.P. Fields and M.Taheri's work with Nye tensors to calculate the minimum GND content. Especially through the use of higher resolution systems such as ASTAR is absolutely impressive. While at first I was threatened by their work, I realize I'll never be on the TEM and whatever they do is a nice compliment to the scientific community of annealing twin formation.

D.J. Jensen's talk on X-Ray synchrotron for investigating old problems such as recrystallization and abnormal grain growth. After hanging around the physics group too much and being amazed by their work, I realize it doesn't matter unless something important is being investigated with a purpose. And while a lot of focus is on crack formation, voids, plasticity, old problems matter just as much. In fact these are often overlooked because we have forgotten about them even though we are constantly being provided with a new set of tools.

G.S. Rohrer's talk on big data. This one may be biased since he comes from Carnegie Mellon and is an excellent speaker. However he really emphasizes a point on data transparency and sharing. While the emphasis is to share data by making it readily available once you're done investigating your areas of interest, it also makes just as much sense that others can repeat the same data analysis on your data for validity.

TMS Conference Re-Cap (Part 2 of 3)

My actual oral presentation

To this day, I'm not sure if both of my advisers have been present in one room to see me speak at a conference. Although I would prefer it in order to receive their full criticism. Even then, only one of them did see my Australia talk (out of a total of four talks) and the other is still at zero. But I suppose they really have no reason to attend given that they've seen all the work, the slides, and I've practiced in front of them before. I wonder if they did attend, would I actually end up doing worse from all the added nervousness.

This time one of them was leaving Thursday morning, while the other had his talk scheduled at the exact same time at 8:30. While I was hoping to have a larger crowd, especially those who work in the similar area of recrystallization and grain growth as well as annealing twin formation in the context of grain boundary engineering, going on the last day AND the first thing in the morning is never easy... (That being said, I do know people who work in my area who gave talks later in the afternoon, but unfortunately they didn't show).

The room consisted of primarily the other presenters of the symposium and then my colleagues (really I should just say friends). Overall the talk went extremely well, and although no thought provoking questions were asked, the audience was definitely curious. My classmate, who has no idea what I work on, said in one talk he got a really good idea and fully understood.

I emailed my advisers to let them know of the audiences' questions and response. And one of them informed that someone else (a professor) in the room thought I did a good job. Furthermore the professor even offered to ultrasonic fatigue some samples (although in all honest we're not so much concerned on the actual performance of these materials, but just characterization). So again, something must've gone correctly.

One thing I did keep telling myself was that if one has done good work, then others will come and listen. No one will criticize good work and will only aim to help build on it via questions and discussion. Repeating that in my head helped reduced the nervousness (which I still have every time I've talked), and despite stuttering and mumbling a little, everything went well.

TMS Conference Re-Cap (Part 1 of 3)

Yes I'm over a week late...

Overall the TMS 2014 conference was an excellent experience, especially being my first TMS ever. Although rather pricey, that was a fault of San Diego and not of the conference itself. I'll divide this post up into three parts...

Student Poster Session
This actually turned out to be a very enjoyable experience. Although it conflicted with the talk times, there were still several people who passed by. And while the majority were my own classmates, it was fun to show them essentially what I count as a side project.

The poster contest also implied that there were judges who talked to each presenter to understand their work. Although we we're suppose to get a total of four judges, because of me running in and out, I only met with two of them. 

Talking to a judging panel was surprisingly more nerve wracking than I expected. I suppose it's primarily the issue that you know someone is critiquing what you're presenting, versus just reading it for information. 

Furthermore, it isn't necessarily your work that is being critiqued, but how well you're explaining your work. Again, in some sense this reminded me of the three minute thesis. One judge asked me for a brief run down, while the other asked me for a sixty second version.

This really tested both your ability to convey information, but whether you had the right stuff on the posters to support what you were saying. Ultimately, my poster was often felt overshadowed by my neighbors awesome poster, which was also a MC model. But she won both the division and best of show!

My own rewards from the poster session is that someone (one of the judges) actually told the other that I had something really interesting and to check it out. So I must've done something right in this last minute poster I made...

More to follow-up tomorrow! 

Valentines Day Research Special

I wrote this a long time ago, specifically on July 12, 2012, but seems appropriate to post for today:

Foreword

This writing goes beyond the scope of any general thermodynamics whether undergraduate or graduate level. While the reader is expected to have a foundation in thermodynamics, it is by no means necessary to enjoy the contents of this piece. There will be references to other fields, such as statistical mechanics or phase transformations, but for the most part this has been written to be accessible to all.

Introduction

Thermodynamics is governed by three laws, the most relevant to everyday life is that entropy, a measure of chaos, or more correctly disorder, always increases in the universe. Typically, a college student's response to his messy room is that it's natural as the room shifts towards a disorder state. Such interpretations of entropy results in an unclear definition of what exactly entropy is and when we should refer to it. We should clarify that for the purposes of this writing, that entropy should only be regarded as measure of disorder of states, and more specifically the most probable state is the most entropically favorable one. 

On the other hand, we are raised with this notion of true love as a result of childhood classics and Disney movies. If we apply the concept of true love or a soulmate in life, then, based on the current world population of 7 billion people, the probability of us finding this person is 1/7,000,000,000. It's more or less impossible! Yes in science there are other occurrences of even lower probability, but we digress. To find that one correct person for us is extremely unlikely, and application of statistical mechanics to such an idea would suggest that it is entropically unfavorable.

However, a controversial argument that arises is what happens if we do find this "true" love. The person that we would pack up our bags, move, and go the end of the world with them. The one who in a single instant causes us to change everything on how we approach life. If such an event does occur, it is very clear that such a person introduces large deviations from the norm for us. Our structured, ordered lifestyle is suddenly destabilized, and we again use that classic word: entropy. So to summarize the points we have stated, the process of finding the person is entropically unfavorable, but the actual event of finding the person is entropically favorable. How do these two terms balance each other out as we look at Equation (1).

Eqn 1 -   Entropy of Universe = (Entropy of finding True Love) + (Entropy of meeting True Love)

Note that there is a distinction between finding and meeting based in this context. Furthermore, this equation looks only at the final state of the reaction. In reality, a person needs to meet and date a few, several, or many individuals before they possibly find their love. Again, I have stated that this is unlikely as it is impossible for someone to date all 7 billion people, let alone meet all of them. The modified equation would be to add additional terms noting each and everything dating/relationship encounter we have in our lives. This will of course, vary from person to person depending on their lifestyle, as reflected by Equation (2).

Eqn 2 -   Entropy of Universe = (Entropy of finding True Love) + (Entropy of meeting True Love) + (Entropy of relationship One) + ... + (Entropy of relationship X)

What are the values for these additional terms? Well the easiest approach is two view two people as essentially two atoms. Initially we have two individual states which we are now attempting to bring together as a pair with a positive bond between them. Such a requirement requires energy input from both people in order for the reaction to occur. The eventual fact that these people do break up in their journey to find their true love immediately indicates that such pairings are not the lowest free energy state. An interesting point is that going into a relationship introduces entropy as we make sacrifices and adjustments to our lifestyles, but similarly, if a stable state is established, then breaking up results in further entropy as we find our lives in a further mess in attempting to pick up all the pieces. This is especially more prevalent depending on the length duration of the relationship, but this introduces a kinetics issue, which will not be discussed. To conclude, the entropy term to each of these relationships is positive. 

To be continued...

 

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Which obviously never happened =P