Back Den

Yesterday, as I was in the car heading home, received a call from my boss asking what happen during the Institute's new students' reception event. Told him about some issues raised during the dialogue, most of which are not quite under our control. But I have forgotten to mention one issue raised that is probably much under our "control" or better very much in the hands of the students themselves, an issue that could be at the very heart of the research institute.

The issue raised was misleadingly labelled research networking in the discussions but really what the matter is the dread of doing research in isolation. Yes, it's an awful situation that most of us have gone through it at one point or another. Each research problem given to a student is usually unique and he or she has to solve it on his/her own (or else it will not be his own work). Yet, it is not that hopeless. Often problems given by a supervisor (or by others within the research group) use the same mathematical tools and are related to each other. Thus the students (in their control) can talk to each other about their research and this is very much encouraged. I suggested then during the dialogue that they should run their own journal club within group of similar interests. I remember back then in my PhD days, we run a regular journal club that we called Class of '85 since most of us then were doing Part III of Math Tripos in Cambridge in 1985. The journal club discusses anything that was related to our own research. Occasionally, we invited some of the post-docs or young academics to our event - I certainly remember how Harry Braden asked me a mathematical question (on cohomology of groups) and I tried to cook up an answer (without much understanding) to which he made me realise how wrong I was. In fact, the mathematical physics group of the Department (the academics) run their own regular journal club during one lunch period (in which each graduate student had the opportunity to give a talk at least once in front of all the professors) where everyone is free to speak on what interest them.

Journal clubs should be more relevant now with the explosive growth of knowledge and the raised difficulty of research problems. I very much urge students to start this on their own instead of waiting us to initiate things. I remembered during EQuaLS5, I was informed that Prof. Mathai was telling one of my students that PhD student needs to review at least 100 papers while MSc student reviews 60. The word that should be highlighted here is "review", not simply read or worse having only the paper in possession. Indeed research is hard work and none of us had it easy.

During the dialogue session, I noticed something else too during the institute's presentation. It seems that our present lab is the only lab with two programs. The rest had three or four. This led me to think that the lab had shrunk under my administration and I've been contemplating much about it. I don't think that the program that was "dropped" did that badly and it was rather in an infant stage. Have to say that my hope to initiate complex networks research (which falls naturally in that program) is somewhat stunted. I hope there will be future opportunities again.

Continuing from my last post, I remembered another band that got me excited during the 70's. It was Back Door with Colin Hudgkinson on bass. I got to listen to them on some BBC radio recording. They sound like this:




Here's Colin Hodgkinson playing 32-20 blues, solo:




There was another band, Human Orchestra that I listened together with Back Door then. It didn't have any album but there was that BBC recording that they made (the same programme). Tried googling them but could not find them (found others instead). Anyone sill got a copy of this recording?