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Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Abstract accepted! (#phdlife)

The week after Easter, just before we went on vacation, I got a very nice email. It read as follows:

Subject: ND 2016 - Decision on your abstract
Dear Mrs. Rose,
The organizers are pleased to note that your abstract ND/793 was accepted as a regular contribution to the conference. The slot allocated to your contribution is 20 minutes: 15 minutes for your presentation and 5 minutes for questions.
To confirm your attendance please complete at your earliest possible convenience your full registration for the conference at www.nd2016.eu (General Information, drop-down menu: Registration). You will be entitled to submit a regular paper for the proceedings.
Yours sincerely,
Arjan Plompen,
On behalf of the Organizing Committee

I have quite some work to do before this, but now I just definitely have to do it; so it's a good thing 🙂 The abstract I submitted for the International Conference on NUCLEAR DATA FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY is this:


Prompt fission gamma ray emission from the (d,p)-induced fission of 233U

Prompt fission gamma-ray spectra have been measured in an experiment at the Oslo Cyclotron Laboratory (OCL), using a 12.5 MeV deuteron beam on a 233U target.Charged particles were recorded with the SiRi particle telescope, in coincidence with γ-radiation in the CACTUS γ-detector system,  and fission fragments were recorded with the NIFF PPAC-detectors .  CACTUS consists of 28 5”5” NaI(Tl) crystals,  mounted on a spherical frame;  with a total efficiency of 15%.

The (d,pf) reaction has been used as a “surrogate” reaction for the (n, f) reaction, and characteristics such as the prompt fission gamma ray spectra, and the γ multiplicity have been studied. Both characteristics have been extracted as functions of excitation energy, in the energy range 5-10 MeV, in the fissioning nucleus. The results are compared to a similar experiment from the OCL on the 239Pu isotope.

The setup enables us to study the nuclear level density and the gamma ray strength function, and these properties have also been extracted for the 234U isotope, from the same experiment. These results will also be presented.​



It will be a nice experience where I'll be presenting basically half of the results from my PhD - which is a good exercise for the thesis defence that will (hopefully) be a couple of months after this conference...
Writing this blogpost actually reminded me that I haven't registered to the conference yet - on the TODO-list! Brussels, here I come! (Ok, not yet, but in September, I'll be there 🙂 )

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Science doesn't know everything…
...that's why we are still doing science! 
If we knew (or thought we knew) everything, we would've stopped - and I'm pretty sure the government wouldn't have used any money on universities or anything.
For example: where does uranium come from? 
We don't know!
I work with uranium (uranium-233 and -234 in particular), and we know it exist here on Earth, but how was it created in the first place? Actually there are MANY elements we don't know how got here - like silver and gold. But we know they exist, and we get better and better models and theories for how it happened <3 (One theory is that the heaviest elements here on Earth are created when two neutron stars collide - really cool and amazing!)
I work mostly with understanding everything about what goes on with my precious uranium in a fuel that's based on thorium (thorium is turned into uranium in a nuclear reactor; therefore I care about the uranium, even though the overall topic of my research is sort of thorium fuels), not really how it was created out there in Space, but the cool thing is that a deeper understanding of the uranium nucleus may also let us know a little bit more about how uranium has been created. 
The bigger picture is how thorium fuels behave, and how uranium is created - which my work will give no real answer to; but hopefully my PhD will eventually give us one more tiny mini piece in the total, gigantic science puzzle. You, know - baby steps. No giant leaps here 😉
Today I've been reading about gamma radiation and stuff for several hours, before I went to a great talk about nuclear astrophysics (by one of my PhD colleagues - Jørgen), before I went back to my office to punch numbers into a table, and look for a specific plotting program I haven't worked on for a couple of weeks (I eventually found it, so tomorrow will be plotting day), and suddenly it's almost 7'clock.
I realised I actually think of gamma radiation a little bit like sweat. Since when you heat a nucleus, it gets rid of that extra energy by sending off gamma rays - the nucleus sweats 😀 And we study the nucleus by studying its sweat; it's a little bit like we're trying to figure out how it was heated by looking carefully at the sweat. And eventually this may tell us more about the Universe...
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PS: I'm glad I spend more time wondering about how uranium and other heavy elements were created, than when it became "acceptable" for women not to wear a bra - like some bloggers do. Guess we're different...

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Goals
We just git back to work after the Easter holiday, but next week we're actually going on vacation again... On Sunday morning we're off to Tenerife, to see the sun and feel some warmth, but if I'm going to have a chance to relax (I realised last week that the Easter holiday and this vacation was only one week apart, and I'm not exactly feeling great about it - especially regarding yesterdays post about the panic phase of the PhD work) I need to finish some stuff here at work. My goals before Saturday therefore are:
  1. Finish my article draft and send it off to Supervisor Jon; so that we can discuss it when I come back again (and hopefully also he won't think I'm stupid and lazy)
  2. Finish the curve fitting of my analysis: these results are important in the article I'm starting to finish, and they will be used for further analysis - see goal 3.
  3. Use the curve fitting results from goal 2. to calculate** stuff (this will go into another article <3)
  4. Refresh my memory of the fission gamma ray part of the uranium experiment, and reply to an e-mail about this. (If I'm really good, I'll also make some drafts of some figures from this analysis, that will go into a third article 😀 ) 
And I only have today and tomorrow to do it. I've therefore "locked" my self into the University Library, where I can work without being interrupted - my problem is that I'm too social; I love <3 to chat and have coffee breaks and all that, but sometimes it's just better to be anti social in the library 😉
Hope you all have a great day!
always helps to write the article draft in the style of the journal you want to publish it in - all the sudden it almost feels real 😛
**For the extremely interested reader, we're using results from our experiments here at our lab in Oslo to calculate so-called cross-sections: The cross-section is sort of the probability of a nucleus to behave in a certain way when it's bombarded with a certain type of particle, with a certain energy. In my case the nucleus is uranium-233 (one of the most important nuclei in thorium based nuclear fuels), the particle it's being bombarded with is a neutron (it could be protons, or gammas, or alpha particles, or whatever), and I want to know more about the probability that the uranium nucleus will absorb this neutron.

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Similarities between pregnancy and working on your phd
This other day, when I was having lunch with some other lovely physics ladies, and we were talking about finishing of the PhD and especially the THESIS DEFENCE (OMG!), I panicked a bit, thought I had to be able to talk about shell model calculations in my PhD defence (which I know nothing about!) and everything... I realised that working an a PhD is kind of similar to being pregnant:

For a long time I've just been like oh it's wonderful to be a scientist, I do science and it's soooo awesome, and I'm on my way to become a PhD in nuclear physics *heart heart heart*


I've more or less felt like this... (cartoon from xkcd.com)


Pretty much like the first 7 months of pregnancy, when it's more or less like oh it's wonderful to be pregnant, I'm growing a baby in my tummy and I'm glowing at the same time, and I'm on my way to become a mother *heart heart heart*


Me back in 2010 - starting to get big




Then suddenly: point of no return, and only the really hard and horrible part left! *panic panic panic*
You realise that you actually have to give birth, and it's scary, and you don't want to, and you don't think you can... And it's no fun anymore. Definitely too late to go back!
Or when there's not much time left (December is the very last month I'll receive any salary from the University, so it would be sort of nice to be finished at leas by then) before you have to hand in your PhD thesis. And to do that you actually have to write these things that have to be published in real scientific papers (Wikipedia can't help you now), and if you manage that you have to defend everything - in front of an audience, and they will ask about everything, and maybe even be mean :/ And it's no fun anymore. And you can't go back after so many years "publicly" working on a PhD!

I guess it's only the hard part left. 
I did manage the last, hard part of being pregnant, though, and it all went really well - also the time after <3
But I do feel like it will be extremely nice when this is all over, and I can look back and say I did it! (Hopefully...#fingerscrossed)

I did it, and now she's 6 years and awesome <3



Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Never give up
So it turned out I was looking at the wrong output from my Talys nuclear reactions simulations , of what happens when a uranium-233 nucleus is being bombarded with neutrons with all kinds of energies. (Talys is a program for simulating lots of types of nuclear reactions; it's free, online, and everyone can check it out here, if they want to 🙂 ). When you run a simulation (or 60, like I have) you get a folder with lots of different files, and silly me was looking at the wrong file... "Of course": the file I needed to plot wasn't the "totalxs.tot", but the "rp092234.tot". If I'd read the manual more closely this would have been clear, but it's more than 500 pages. Still on my to do list to read it, though.

This a typical research story (at least in my world) - and, oh, how I hate it!

Yes, it does feel sort of good when you realise why things aren't working, but it's not like I've solved a great problem, I just happened to be an idiot, looking at the wrong output file (and, of course, it's nice to not be an idiot, but the solving this is'n taking me big leaps forward - I'm just not an idiot right now).
I guess I just have to repeat to myself: Never give up.

no matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up, and never give up!

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Publisert 2 kommentarer til Norges beste formidler – hvem får dagens studenter til å glemme å sjekke mobilen?

Hva er god undervisning? Hvor er de beste foreleserne nå for tiden? Hvordan bedømmer man egentlig kvalitet i undervisningen? Er den klassiske forelesningens tid virkelig over? Hve lærer studentene å tenke?

Jeg er utrolig stolt over å ha blitt spurt om å være med når Morgenbladet skal kåre Norges beste foreleser! Sammen med Helene Uri, Erling Sandmo, Therese Eia Lerøen og Victor Norman, skal jeg være med å finne vinneren. 
Vi har i denne sammenhengen alle forsøkt å svare veldig kort på to spørsmål: 1) Hva er god undervisning?, og 2) Hvorfror er god undervisning viktig? Slik svarer jeg: 

1. Et viktig nøkkelord er «trygg». Den som underviser, må være trygg på det faglige innholdet og trygg på seg selv i rollen som underviser. Hvis underviseren i tillegg er engasjert og åpen, vil studenten føle seg trygg og motivert – to viktige faktorer for læring.
2. God undervisning kan kurere en students dårlige selvtillit, slik at vedkommende kan få realisert potensialet sitt. Motsatt, med dårlig undervisning, tror jeg man kan være uheldig å miste nettopp dem som kanskje har et stort potensial, men som trenger en ekstra «push» for å få det ut. Disse studentene kan godt ende opp med å bli de beste, men med dårlig undervisning kan de kanskje like gjerne falle av.

Alle kan nominere den de mener er akademias beste underviser. På nettsiden kan du også lese andres nominasjoner (allerede noen timer etter at dette ble publisert hos Morgenbladet har det kommet mange nominasjoner - GØY!), stemme frem kandidater og dele nominasjonene videre. Frist for å nominere er 15. april, og juryens liste med ti navn presenteres i august.
Les om kåringen (og juryen) HER, eller gå direkte til nominasjonssidene HER 🙂

(Kan forresten ikke fordra det bildet de valgte av meg. Bildet er hentet fra reportasjen om Kvinnene som forsvant, og der ble det jo tatt så mange andre fine bilder - kunne de ikke heller valgt et annet, feks dette som de brukte på forsiden da de kjørte denne saken? 😛 #skikkeligluksusproblem)

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Working your ass off dinner – "Mexican" style
Remember my last post about #workingyourassoff-dinner? My super-easy super-fast Thai-reipe? If not, you can check it out HERE.
Well, life here is quite busy, as always these days (yesterday started at quarter past four in the morning, since I was going to Stavanger to give two talks, and then back to Oslo to go to a celebration of the international women's day - I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow when i finally got to bed last night), so there is no less need for quick and tasty recipes - but the same Thai all the time is a little bit boring... So a couple of days ago I made another #workingyourassoff-dinner, but this time more Mexican inspired.

Before I share the recipe with you, let me just refresh the rules for a real #workingyourassoff-recipe:


The recipe for working your ass off simple chili con carne:

You need:

  • green beens (frozen ones - I love these, and use them in all my #wokringyourassoff-dishes)
  • leek (prechopped, from the freezer)
  • mushroom - I use champingnon (prechopped, from the freezer)
  • meat - this time I happened to have fresh, minced meat, but it's of course possible to use frozen
  • Tabasco sauce - the one with chipotle is just perfection <3 (I also have a lot of different chili sauces, like normal Tabasco, habanero Tabasco, plus some others; and I use a little bit of everything to get the perfect taste, but I can really recommend the chipotle!)
  • extra virgin olive oil
  • chopped, canned tomatoes
  • cinnamon
  • butter
  • salt and pepper
  • (if you happen to have some old wine, it's perfect to put it in the pot)
You can also add peppers (all colours), tomatoes that are not canned, eggplant, squash (the peppers and the eggplants taste awesome if you chop them, put them in a ovenproof dish, pour some olive oil on top, and grill them in the oven - then put them in the pot. This of course takes more time, so then it's not longer a real #workingyourassoff dinner anymore ;)). I'm personally not that fond of canned beans, but if you like it, it's of course perfect to add. They're cheap, and since they're canned, you can store them forever before you find out that you want to make a chili con carne.
these ziploc bags from IKEA are perfect <3

the perfect Tabasco for a Mexican inspired pot of chili <3<3<3
a glass of wine is always a good idea (maybe unless you're driving, or you're pregnant, or you're 16 😉 )

 Do:

Put some flavourless oil, like rapeseed oil, in a pot. When it's real hot, add the meat and a table spoon of butter (mmm, butter <3). Stir.
When the meat is fried, add the leeks and the mushrooms. Make sure it doesn't get burned by stirring 😉

Then add the canned tomatoes. Th
is time I used two cans, since I wanted everything to be more "soupy" and less dry. Add a little cinnamon - maybe just half a teaspoon. Add the Tabasco, and/or other chili sauces. I like it spicy, so I use quite a lot - the secret is just to taste, add more, taste, add more, or not, until it's perfect for your taste 🙂 Let everything boil for a while.
Add extra virgin olive oil (I use a lot - olive oil <3) and green beans. It's all ready when the green beens are warm. It only takes a couple of minutes.
Serve it with rice or bread, or just eat it as it it - which is what I do; with salt, pepper, and some sour cream on top.
This is of course not my "very best perfect fantastic gourmet"-recipe for Mexican food, but the very easiest and fastest way (I can think of) to do it. 
It's quick, it's simple, and it's quite tasty - what you need when you're busy working your ass off <3 

I'm not sure why he looked like this - but, hey, he's a guy - you can't understand why they do everything they do 😛 (He was actually very happy about the food <3 )

2

Publisert 2 kommentarer til Three favourite apps – that will help me on my path towards my degree (and all the other stuff too). TIPS!
2016 has so far been quite successful when it comes to working focused on my PhD project: My second article is starting to look like the real thing, and it's not that long until I can send it to my co-authors (I hope - everything takes more time than I think it should), and after that to the journal where we'll try publishing it. I've also finally managed to "go back" to working on some stuff that will hopefully be part of an article with my extremely talented colleague, Cecilie. Together with my office mate, Fabio, I'll also probably have what we need for a third/forth article.
The key word is focusing, and that's what I want to talk about now:
I'm unfortunately extremely "good" at procrastination! In addition I a have an "illness" where I sort of tell myself that if I haven't started some task after a certain time of the day (let's say it's already two 'o clock, and I have to leave early, at four, to get Alexandra in kindergarden) then I might as well just not do anything - extremely stupid of me! However, often it's just not enough to tell yourself to get a grip - I'v tried that several times, but it's just so easy to fall into the old, bad habits again :/ Luckily, there are apps to help you with this, and here I want to present my three favourite apps, that are helping me on my path towards my degree (and world domination, of course 😛 ):

1. Pomodoro

The Pomodoro technique is a time management method, where you use a timer to break down your work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes, separated by short breaks. The "steps" in the method are as follows:
  1. choose some task to be accomplished
  2. set the Pomodoro timer to 25 mintes
  3. work on the task until the Pomodoro rings
  4. take a short break
  5. every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

Of course, you don't really need this app - you can just start your own timer - but I prefer the app, since you keep track of what you've done (and what needs to be done), and it almost becomes competition with your self (for me, this is extremely motivating), and you learn more about how much (or little) time certain kind of tasks actually take, which is extremely valuable.

Personally I have 25 minutes where I work, and then a 4 minute break. Works like a charm!

More about the pomodoro technique HERE.

2. SelfControl

This is a very simple, but extremely efficient, app for your computer, that I just started using. Maybe my most important app, and it's already changed my life <3 SelfControl helps me not to procrastinate by blocking disturbing websites, mail, or whatever on the internet. You just set a period of time to block for, add sites to your blacklist, and start it - after you've started it you're unable to access any of the sites on your blacklist (no, it doesn't help if you restart your computer, or delete the app 😉 ).
So now I start every day with a quick trip to the websites that are on my blacklist, so that I sort of get it out of my system - then I start the app, and then I can work for hours without disturbing myself with stupid stuff on the internet.
More about SelfControl HERE.


NB: When I first started it, I thought you could block different sites for a different amount of time. That turned out to be incorrect. If you block for 4 hours, you block everything on your blacklist for 4 hours. If you want to override this app you have to re-install your operating system. In other word: it's quite efficient - just the way I want it to be 🙂

Health

Maybe this sounds a little silly, but I truly believe that the Health app on my Apple watch will help not to completely become a physical wreck as I try to finish this PhD work. (I may become a mental wreck, but that's another story.) The feature I probably like the most just now as there are many hours sitting in front of the computer, is that it makes me stand for at least one minute every hour (unless I ignore it, of course) - "standing hours":
The thing is that "fitness" isn't just about going to the gym, but also about being active throughout the day. So the Apple watch measures all the ways you move, and keeps track of when you stand up and encourages you to keep moving <3 Because it all counts, and it all adds up.
Just now I don't have time to go to the gym, but at least this app on my watch makes me compete with myself, and I try hard every day to fulfil my goals, in exercise (you should be active for at least 30 minutes every day), standing, and moving around. I'm not saying this is better than actually working out, but when you actually don't have time to go to the gym, this is awesome 😀

Hope you like my tips, have a great week everyone!

6

Publisert 6 kommentarer til Sent – and back to start again

...or something like that.

Yesterday I sent what I had on my draft for this article I'm working on to supervisor-Sunniva - you, know, according to what I wrote last week I'm supposed to finish stuff and this draft should have been "finished" by Friday. Then guess what: it isn't! Even though I sent it away yesterday (2 days into this week, which is supposed to be about another article) there are so many questions about my results that I don't even know what to think. Today I asked everyone in our research group what I should do, and I basically got the answer that I have to do stuff again, several times, and just change some parameters and check if I can still reproduce my results...
Sometimes I hate science. Something about those 70% extra work for 5% extra quality - except just now it feels more like 90% extra work for 1% extra quality. Is it really worth it? Somewhere you have to draw the line, right...?
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BTW: Alexandra did algebra for the first time today! After we went to the dentist this morning, she was so proud since we figured out that she had already begun to get a new tooth, and her front tooth is becoming loose, so we had to go and visit Anders who was teaching the quantum physics students before she went to kindergarden. And we were goofing around at the blackboard (there were only two students there so early in the day, and they were working by themselves at this time) and then she wrote an A and a B ("AB") on the blackboard and asked "what is A plus B?".
I told her she had to put a plus between the A and the B if she wanted to write "A plus B". And she did.
"If A is 2 and B is1, then what is A+B?" I asked her:
So she looked at me with this face telling me "please stop asking such silly questions" and instantly replied "It's three!"
Well, that made me a very #proudmommy <3

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Finish it!
I need to start finishing stuff, or, really "finishing" - meaning, I need to work hard on one thing at a time, and then send it off, instead of just saying to myself oh no it's not good enough yet, I need to work just a little bit more, and then a liiiitle bit more, and the even a liiiiitle little bit more. If I continue like that I will never be able to make this phd. Therefore, my new mantra is Finish It!

And here's my "finish it-plan" for the next three weeks: 

Tomorrow I'm "finishing" the draft of the uranium-234 article, next week I WILL make stuff for Cecilie (that I should have done several months ago), after that I'll analyse fission of uranium-233 and make figures and send it all off to supervisor-Jon, and after that I'll make some kind of outline for one of the most important chapters in the actual thesis - "the bridge" (and by the end of the week I'll send it to supervisor-Sunniva).

Since I'm "finishing" the uranium-234 article tomorrow, I spent much of today on the webpages of the journal where we're planning to submit it, and when I left the office this afternoon it was really starting to look like the real thing (it's amazing how much getting stuff in the right style can do 😉 ).
I also read the guidelines for people who are planning to submit manuscripts, and I had to smile about this (highlighting done by me 😀 ):

LanguageIf your native language is not English, please consider enlisting the help of an English-speaking colleague in preparing the text.
Use a spell checker. (Referees are not favorably impressed by careless mistakes.)

Luckily, I have a native English speaking supervisor/co-author, so I think he'll make sure there are no careless mistakes in the final manuscript - we don't want to p*** off the referees 😛