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

Do not disturb - Busy Writing

This was originally a hand-written. My computer had crashed in the morning and I decided to use pen and paper to use whatever thoughts came into my head. Therefore the first line which states, "write write write" does literally refer to writing, where as "type type type" maybe seem more appropriate now.

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Write write write. That seems to be a major part of my life now. Whether it's writing down the next draft of the paper (which I'm still at draft one for one, and draft three for the other), or writing my overview document, writing abstracts for upcoming conferences, or writing weekly reports. And on top of all that, there's also this blog.


But there's also an additional amount of subtle writing skills required as a researcher, which adds up the to writing total. These might be the chicken scratches one makes for notes and ideas that come from reading a paper or a spur of the moment. While short and concise (in addition to messy), they need to contain enough content just to re-spark the same idea when we glance at it again at a later time. There are the do-it notes to yourself, which vary in degree in tone, some just stating a task to be completed, while others are more stern, telling YOU to finish something. At that point one has to wonder if they're on the verge of insanity for talking to themselves in such an aggressive manner.

There are the outlines for presentations, as well as writing in the presentation in itself which turn out to be a challenge. Too many words and instantly the slide or poster becomes too cluttered, too full, and ironically, too illegible. Too little and you wonder if anyone really took anything out of what you just said, or even if they understand you to begin with (this is a frequent problem of mine).

There are many moments of writing  required of researchers and scientists. Sometimes they're immediately obvious to us, such as the requirement to write and publish papers (although one can also attempt to avoid that). While other times they are more subtle and are in our every life. Ultimately we'll find that there are no shortcuts to getting better at any of these things, but to continue practicing and attempting each one.

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In other words, this post has been written to motivate me to continue blogging.