209

Today, I have 209 days left to work in this university. While this body is physically ageing, I still push myself to work with the hope of finishing up my duties and often after work, my mind is pretty exhausted. However, it does seem that whatever one does is never enough. But let me start with good thins first.

As I have mentioned in the last post, I have been invited to the National Physics Undergraduate Project Conference as a keynote speaker. When I was first approached, I asked them what precisely they want me to speak on. They give me a tentative title "How to be a physicist". I searched the web for such a title and I thought it wasn't that enlightening. Thus, I counter-suggested the title "The Physicist: Some Modes of Thoughts" because this will let me explore what should be on the physicist's mind. I began reading some books that I had including Penrose's The Road to Reality book. It took me a while for me to conjure up some story. Essentially I left many other duties just to do this and put off a PhD student appointment on Friday afternoon since I did not want to get distracted from my brewing up ideas for my presentation. I began finally preparing the slides by Friday evening. The slide preparation continued on Saturday until Sunday 3am (skipped some Raya invitations that my other half went to). I was pretty exhausted thereafter and had a little nap before the presentation.

The presentation was recorded as FB live. On the Webex platform, I could see there were about 30+ people attended (including organizers), but on FB I saw more than a hundred views. I decided to download the video from FB and put it up on my YouTube channel so more can access it (apparently the video is copyrighted and YouTube said that the video cannot be monetized - which I did not intend to anyway). So here is the video.

I hope this will be useful to others.

Now let me get to something rather negative. On Friday itself, I received a warning letter regarding my reports for my research grant. This is due to having not sending in the second correction needed for my report - the first correction was submitted and I did not expect the second correction. Personally, I find this is very strange that reports are even "refereed" by administrators (like papers). I certainly think this should change, allow the researchers to focus on the real research, and trust researchers more. 

Just today, I discussed with an officer from INSPEM to help me out together with my PhD student. I really hope that this can be settled soon. Really appreciate the help. I can't imagine the future of researchers who are being heaped with extraneous duties which do not help much the research and teaching (the core duties) but only help administrators. Coupled this with an environment where academics had to report to different administrators and even support staff. (Quite a few times I have been told off by a support staff for various reasons with the thinking that academic staff haven't got enough on their hands.) Again, I do hope that someone will take this up.