Today is Malaysia's independence day. My thoughts on independence is that true independence can be achieved by ridding oneself of temporary worldly desires (knowing how impossible this is, one settles for a sufficient amount of interdependence). As one gets older, there is very little pleasure that one gets from the world, knowing that one will leave it soon. My concern has gravitated to what else good deeds that I can do while I still breathe. I have to make peace with all the imperfections that I have while hoping to improve myself from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. I hope that everyone else can also live with whatever imperfections that I have, too.
As part of my attempts to improve, I try to be conscious of the good things that I do. Made small good changes wherever I can and hopefully it will stay that way. Found apps made by Greentech Apps Foundation useful. I have recommended it to my other half and will also recommend to everyone else too. I have installed their apps for Al-Qur'an, Hadith and Hisnul Muslim on my phone.
Having deepened my expertise in theoretical physics, I guess this would be a major area that I could put my good deeds in. It will not benefit the society at large but I know that it is needed here as the theoretical physics community in the country is a minority. As such, I see what I do as fardhu kifayah. Whatever difficulties that we go through in pursuing this field, I hope it can be counted as good deeds. One should also be cautioned with matters that could spoil the good deed nature of its acts. This is perhaps the most difficult because it involves the ego with all its failings. It is quite easy to associate one's ego with the capability of overcoming the technical difficulties that are there in theoretical physics and that its pursuit is that of fulfilling the ego. On this, I am reminding myself and othersof the slippery slopes or boundaries between praiseworthy knowledge and blameworthy knowledge as expounded by al-Ghazali. May we be guided always.
Have not updated the blog for so long, as my mind was occupied with many matters.
I believe most of those who knew me, will know that I am essentially an introvert, being quiet most of the time. Whenever there are loud voices or there are many voicing out their ideas or opinions in a meeting or discussion, I tend to be quiet, observing and only interjecting when necessary. But being quiet, can sometimes be misinterpreted as sometimes being dumb, lazy and at other times being dismissive. Those who do, may want to read the following article on introverts. The best thing is to ask the person involved; I, myself would normally answer what is on my mind.
In most WhatsApp groups, I do tend to be quiet, apart from my own family group. In some cases, one finds the usual small talks, ceremonial or congratulatory messages. In my own frank opinion, some of these could be avoided (particularly those using videos, pictures or stickers) as they could be easy considered as wasted (polluting?) bits - of course, I don't voice out these (as I said I will often just be quiet) since small talks are often considered as good social skills and can have their social advantages. More importantly, one should not be annoying or be the one who cause any form of displeasures.
A funny thing happened recently when I posted a query in my school alumni group. I stumbled onto a webinar advertisement that had an old school-mate in the picture, namely Prof. Roszaini Haniffa. I recalled having seen her profile before some years ago, being a professor in Islamic finance in UK. However I've lost the link and I wasn't sure it was really her. So when I saw the advertisement, I immediately asked my school-mates whether it was really her and they confirmed it. Perhaps due to my rare postings in the WhatsApp group, some might felt that I may be choosing 'professor friends' over others. But it is nothing like that at all; I, myself, am not a professor and some consider I am just an average academic that has little future. However I do look up to friends who are more successful than I am, particularly in academic circles, and she was one of them. I also wanted to confirm whether she was in the same class as I was, but then I did not proceed for fear of more misunderstanding. Later, I was told that the late Prof. Mashitah (from UMP - see here) wanted to get Prof. Roszaini back to Malaysia but unfortunately she didn't get that opportunity. Here is a picture shared by Akmar showing the late Prof. Mashitah (left) together with Prof. Roszaini (right).
From this alumni WhatsApp group, I also knew that another friend, Marzuki Ismail, is now a professor in Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. I am happy for him. He was in UPM before as a radiation officer, assisting our own Prof. Yusof in the Physics Department. We rarely talk to each other at the time apart from usual corridor conversations and I think he left sometime during when I joined the institutes.
Thus, we had to dry the book with the aid of a table fan near the tv. Our cat (not sure which), being curious, decided to investigate the damp cover of the book and the result is shown below. Double tragedy.
Almost stayed up the whole night just to open carefully the wet pages one by one so that they don't stick together. It worked but the affected pages are all wrinkled.
Been listening to a lot of online lectures lately on both religion and science. Got hooked with the online live discussions of Stephen Wolfram with different guests. They are pretty intense and can go on for hours. Here is a useful one about managing life.
Last week, we received a shocking news of the passing of a friend and colleague at INSPEM, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mohd Bakri Adam. He was the former Head of Laboratory of Statistics and Computing Services before the institute restructures internally and the laboratory becomes a service division. He was one of the approachable heads of laboratory that I can discuss with. His passing was really sudden that it caught most of us off-guard. I was in my bed, woken up by messages in the mobile phone at around 1 a.m. The news that I got was that he collapsed while he was doing some gardening work. He will be missed and many of his former students went online, leaving saddening condolatory remarks.
The week before last also has seen flurry of activities surrounding International Fundamental Science Congress 2021 (IFSC 2021) organized by the Faculty. When this congress was first proposed years ago, I was rather sceptical because congress events that I knew at international level have thousands of participants and is usually organized by big associations or organizations related to the subject matter. For example, the International Congress of Mathematicians is held every four years by the International Mathematical Union, rotated between different countries. Once, INSPEM members (unfortunately I did not go) was invited to go to the one in Seoul in 2014. The director then had the grand idea of bringing the congress to Malaysia but it did not materialise and I am also of the opinion that our country has yet to contribute to mathematics significantly to be considered as a host. Locally, I had the opportunity of being part of the Advanced Technology Congress which is organized by ITMA every two years in the past. The congress itself consists of several conferences (usually associated to the themes of the laboratories in ITMA). Theoretical Studies Laboratory (TSL) in ITMA, for instance, was the organizer of Conference of Advances in Theoretical Sciences (CATS). Even this, I felt it was ambitious and our conference was the smallest due to our smaller number in researchers. Back to IFSC, the congress event itself was actually held this week and it ended yesterday. It ran better than I had expected particularly it had international partners (from Thailand and Indonesia) and as such it is moving in the right direction for the concept of a congress. Having said that, one must be cautious in not letting the number of conference or congress events proliferate too much particularly when the supporting community revolves around the same collection of people. These events are not meant for meeting the KPI of a particular department/laboratory or faculty/institute, making these units visible, but they are meant to serve a community of researchers/practitioners. Thus having too many will simply exhaust the community and spread the scientific contributions too thin. Anyway, IFSC had a good crowd and it went rather well. When the main committee asked me to find one invited speaker in theoretical physics, I invited Jesni. I was at his talk yesterday but I had to leave early because I was chairing another parallel session right after his talk. Below are some pics.
Yesterday, was also our 28th anniversary, though both of us were working. After work, we decided to celebrate a little. We bought an ice cream cake from the local Bakers Cottage outlet. Here is a pic for our small celebration, together with our kids.
In local politics, we had a 'change' in government last week when some withdrew the support for the 8th Prime Minister Tan Sri Dato' Mahiaddin Yassin. The King had stepped in and called for a PM nomination from both sides of political divide. It was then decided that Dato' Sri Ismail Yaacob has the bigger support and he was sworn in as the ninth prime minister last Saturday. Today he announced his 'new' cabinet line-up, which is pretty much the same as the previous one with some permutations. Let's hope this 'new' government will work better than the 'last one'. Meanwhile our Covid-19 new infection number is still raging above 20K modulo fluctuations during the weekend (when there were less testings). I actually am interested in the number of new deaths (indicating some failure of the health system). Yesterday was in fact the highest number of new infections and the highest number of new deaths (see pic below).
I still think that we need a change of strategy. While the increased rate of vaccination is very much desired, there is still a need to contain the spread of the disease for at least the mere need of ensuring the health system will not collapse. All the containment will ensure that unwanted mutations will be less probable. Let us pray that it will not get any worse.
Today is the new Hijri year 1443. I would like to discuss a topic that has troubled me for many years, namely research tradition and publications.
The week before last, I attended two talks on publishing. I normally treat these talks as purely motivational rather than content-driven as most of the information is available somewhere on the web (in fact there are guide books available) if one cares to find them. As such the talks are probably suited for those who are at the beginning of academic career. My worry is actually more on the values that these talks may carry (do note whatever I will say below equally applies to my own self). Good publications come from good science and not the other way round. Many times in the past, I have mentioned about Goodhart's law, which states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". This is because that once we are given a numerical target (considered as measure of quality), people tend to game the system to achieve such numbers without direct reference to the intended quality itself. Thus, their meanings get lost. For measure of scientific productivity, the number of publications has been always the easy target irrespective of what their contents are and hence manipulable. Even the number of citations (and hence h-index) can be manipulated. To correct this, one could eliminate self-citations (see Schreiber) or complement it with s-index which is an index of self-citations (see Kacem, Flatt & Meyer) but I would go further. Eliminate as well citations from our co-authors as well and that will lead to a much reliable number whose citations come from other authors (not within our influence). Removing self-citations can in fact reduce the index from 13 to 46% (see Schreiber). The only problem with this is that the index calculation is actually time-consuming.
Now, no accusations of manipulations or specific claims are being made here but merely raising the complications that can arise. It is also not in my nature (or anyone reasonable) to go around and finding faults of others nor do I want to make excuses for my own shortcomings. Naturally, every academic has his or her own yearning and ideals for achieving scientific progress but without delving into details, gross injustice can occur and may be dentrimental to scientific progress itself. One can't deny that administrators/managers tend to take the easy option of making blanket KPIs across different disciplines and a researcher in a discipline with slower paper production rate will be at a disadvantage. During a Q&A session with the speaker, I raised the concern for local theoretical physics researchers who are not able to be on par with researchers in some fields who can produce around twenty papers a year (about two papers a month). Personally, I think this is mind boggling; research ideas often take time to develop, mature and worked out completely (and some might not even get published). Having too many publications a year may also raise suspicions of not adhering to the Vancouver protocol of authorship. Retractionwatch has also highlighted such problems of prolific researchers (see also here). Being prolific is not the concern here but it is the variance across different fields and subfields (see e.g. here). One reaction I get during the Q&A is that someone knew a theorist who used experimentalist data of others to produce 70 papers (unsure whether this is for a year or spanned over several years). I know not of the name mentioned in this response and certainly the said author is not within the subfield I am interested in. What then would be a sensible rate of publication for theoretical physics (again this depends on the subfields)? I could not find a study that actually shows a number for theoretical physics but if one identifies theoretical physics as part of mathematics, one could use this statement made by American Mathematical Society: average of two or fewer publications per year. In any case, I dislike the idea of making scientific publications as a kind of sports.
So how does one proceed given it is highly unlikely that there will be any change of policy in the near future? The speaker replied is to do more networking and do (genuine) collaborative work, which is sensible. The explosive growth of knowledge in every field requires researchers to work on harder scientific problems as time goes by and given the limited capacity of an individual researcher, it requires researchers to work together in working out solutions. This is reflected in the study made by Grossmann for mathematical research: an increase of collaborating authors from 28% in 1940s to 75% in 1990s. My own simplistic approach within our group into this expansion problem is to have reading groups and have members/students read different articles and have discussions. The bigger the group, the better (the reason why our group take up more students over the years). Whatever forthcoming collaborations there would be, will be natural if everyone keeps some overlapping interests. There was this suggestion that we should look into collaborating with experimentalists, probably look into some form of modeling work. If this can really be done, it would be good but it is often harder to realise. My own early experience after coming back from my PhD was indeed to consider theoretical condensed matter research (that led me to work on punctured surfaces). I essentially bought these two books of Fradkin and Goldenfeld in Seoul to get me going (see pic below) for which I started a reading group to study these books, but after a few attempts, people lost interest.
Perhaps the two books chosen above was not suited for experimentalists. I made another attempt to work with experimentalists when I first joined ITMA. I bought one of my most expensive books ever, namely that of Dagotto on CMR (after the two-volume elephant book), to work on theories of colossal magnetoresistance. I even had a student to work on related aspects of Jahn-Teller effect with some diagonalization problems. He later gave up, and that too, failed. Thereafter, I focus what I know best - mainly theories of more mathematical nature. Perhaps the other instance of collaboration with experimentalists, was to set up a quantum information lab in ITMA and then in the Physics Department more recently. The former got shelved due to the institute restructuring. The latter was also not successful as the intended funds (two different sources) was not forthcoming. So now, whatever idea of collaborating with the experimentalists will be on the shoulders of my junior colleagues, as I will be retiring. Even if I decided to continue work elsewhere after retirement, I will stick to my own theoretical interest.
There was another remark made by the speaker that I responded in the Q&A. This is about why did we join the university and I replied indeed why should we join the university rather coyly. I think we have our own reasons (besides 'makan gaji' - the lowest level of motivation) and ambitions when we joined the university. I for one, wanted to make a tradition of theoretical physics in UPM. There were others before me, of course, who did theoretical physics at UPM. Our first head of department, Dr. Osman Ese was a theoretical condensed matter physicist but he passed away due to stroke a few years after. One can see his publication here. Prof. Karen Badri made the remark that if he was alive, he would probably made the path for theoretical physics easier. The other was Dr. Zainul Abidin Hassan who works on the Hubbard model (see here). He opted for early retirement to focus on his business. Prof. Mohd Yusof Sulaiman (nuclear physics experimentalist and solar physics) also dabbled with theoretical nuclear physics with Prof. M.A.K. Lodhi when he was around. Right after me, was Dr. Chan Kar Tim, formerly working on cusp forms and now on density functional theory and complex networks, and also Dr. Nurisya Mohd Shah on mathematical physics. Next in line will be Umair Abdul Halim who is working on geometric quantum mechanics. I do hope they will carry on with strengthening the theoretical physics tradition in UPM. In fact one should establish more theoretical work in these pandemic times as people are finding hard to get back to their labs. Perhaps rather than the theorists looking over into the work of experimentalists as suggested in the Q&A, maybe the experimentalists should consider the theories in their respective fields to work on. Perhaps then, the collaboration will be easier.
