Varia: Early Days and Changes

After losing Lofa, loved by everyone in the house, brought me to a whole lot of deeper thinking. The more urgency I need to care for my family and for my own self. The wrinkles that appeared on my hands and legs are signs that I'm running our of time (am grateful to understand this). If my body grows physically weaker, I do hope my mind becomes clearer and wiser in thoughts. I hope I can go before I grow senile or become a burden to my family.

Having gone through much experience as an academic, I thought I should share my thoughts here and it doesn't matter if they are ignored. Much of the things I do or say have been ignored in the past, so there is nothing new in this but I do note certain people (usually beyond the place I work) do seem to listen to what I have to say. By saying this, I'm ever watchful on the things I do physically or in social media, will not be for me to seek popularity but for these actions to be considered as my good deeds.

Let me go far back in the early days of me joining the university. At the time, my thoughts were that things are pretty relaxed with activities focusing mainly on teaching. Research were probably centred on certain individuals who have started their labs and groups. At the time, I wished things to become more exciting as a scientific community with a lot of academic discussions. Tried to initiate reading groups but with varying interests, these did not last long. That drove me to just focus on my own students and build the group of one's own. The formation of the theoretical lab in the institute, has helped to expand the group much. It seems that I have attracted quite a number of students from outside UPM (see list here) and within UPM, there are a few students that went on to do their graduate study with me, but most UPM students tend to run away from theoretical physics (even those that took up final year projects with me). Alhamdulillah, today we do have a sizable theory group in the department. Each of my younger colleagues are now pursuing their own research directions. I do still hope though some of the research directions I have started, will still be continued to a certain degree, even if they are difficult.

Management-wise of the early days, I do remember participating within small workgroups and committees (pre-ISO days) to discuss what can be improved. One of the mantra those days is that we have good aims and projects but we do poorly on monitoring. Then came the ISO-days with the initial promise of we only document what we normally do. But we have gone way past that (unfortunately) and now we are forced to do more than what we normally do, in the name of continual improvement. So, in this sense, we have swung to the other monitoring extreme of controlling what we do. I do know when we first started some of these documentations, we have good reasons to maintain since some of the older records tend to get lost. For instance, the document of minutes of meeting are important when tracing the reason of why certain decisions are made. Lecture notes/test questions are kept so that future academics may be able to use them for at least historical purpose. Some of what I have done e.g. for test questions, have been adopted by the Faculty (though I must say, I don't expect people to follow the way that I do strictly since I do not consider them to be formal publications of any sort). See picture below for the example of bilingual test (English in italics since Malay is the official language) with marks at the end of each question (with some changes, we are now expected to follow this strictly). This documenting intent, to me, has somewhat changed, subject to the mercy of the auditing committee. There is already a threatening atmosphere for those who 'fail to comply' to what the auditors report. Not sure whether this is the type of atmosphere we want to keep.

In those early days, we were told that meetings are made to make decisions. Any lengthier discussions are best relegated to workshops of (trusted) subcommittees to look into details, whose output only to be presented (briefly) in the main meeting later - and best to have the report earlier for people to at least glance. This is what I have done at ITMA for instance (being responsible for publication committee) and partially in INSPEM. I noticed a lot of the meetings today tend to focus on reports and not decisions to be made. Our understanding in the early days (at least the way I was taught), one should be more prudent on the time and energy spent by so many people in a large meeting (analogous to a congregation in the mosque for Friday prayers). Being part of the management before, I can attest to that I have contribute a significant portion of my life to be in meetings and in many, I consider myself mainly as quorum fulfilling member. Given this, can we do better with our time?

A lot of things in my early academic life includes the aspiration of being a good Muslim scientist. Bought a lot books on religion beyond the books that I have in science. Having seen how academics work nowadays, I am no longer sure about the scientist part anymore. A lot of what I see today thrives on ego but yet the religious part of me tries to deflate it. Can we really harmonize this? Is the picture of an academic being a deep thinker and wise, no longer tenable? Some of these have me wishing to retire earlier (unfortunately).

Lofa

Yesterday was a sad day for all of us. Our favourite cat Lofa left us. She was having difficulty breathing that morning and was in my room. I was marking my students' test papers and she came and slept on them. My other half decided to bring her to the clinic after lunch. Little did we know that was the last we saw her. About an hour (or less), the clinic called my other half that our cat is dying. We brought her home to bury her in the back yard.

Lofa was probably the most intelligent and most active cat that we have. She was very observant of what we do and once would like to open a door to one of the rooms by reaching for the handle. We got her (given by someone) sometime in February 2021. These are the earliest pics of her.

Here she is with the 'triply punctured sphere':

She likes to explore everything she could (see pics below).

Once we brought her outside and let her go climb (unafraid) a tree in front of the house, almost looking like a koala bear.

Below are videos of Lofa exploring the fan, washing machine and the curtain to my son's room.

Here's Lofa in a group photo.

Lofa with my other half:

Being super-adorable, my other half sometimes dressed her up:

Just a day before she left, my other half put up the packing plastic near a chair in our living room as she begins to isolate herself from others.

She was the only cat in the house who is not afraid to go on the treadmill. The first video was taken when she was still healthy. The second one was taken in late May this year, after she recovered from respiration problems.

She started to become unwell only sometime in April where initially she had respiratory problems and then it was detected that she had a swollen heart besides the problematic lungs. It was sad for all us to have her leave that early. She will be missed by all of us. My son made up this video in her memory.

Goodbye Lofa and rest well.

Small

Yesterday my undergraduate student suddenly popped up the question why am I still not a professor despite my thirty years plus of working. I remembered my previous blogpost and somehow felt slighted but this is not the first time. I thought for a while and gave the honest answer, I did not apply for such a position. He then uttered the question that one has to apply, perhaps genuinely he did not know about it. Or he just wanted to make me feel small and perhaps spill some beans? The student is a student leader of some sort and my guess is that he should know some university matters.

In the past, there have been many times that students sort of question what I do. Some do irritate me for their arrogance and some I considered as simply ignorant or foolish. Reacting to these is quite delicate as one does not want to misuse one's position of 'authority'. It is only proper to guide the student to get the appropriate understanding and help him grow. I remembered once an undergraduate student who was under my supervision (way before I joined the institutes), bragged about his theoretical physics capability but he had this annoying habit of degrading the department/curriculum, bordering on some racial insinuations. Felt the need to educate him a little and challenged him to take up the MSc course in theoretical physics at my former university to prove himself he is that good. He actually did and we corresponded for a while. Later, I was informed that he sadly failed the course but scored well on the subject matter of the project I had supervised him. The point here is to be always careful not to let one's ego get bloated and underrate or undermine what efforts of everyone else in making progress (of science or whatever).

There are many instances in my life where others try to make me feel small. I can brushed off some of these, but some had some deep psychological impact on me (occasionally, I get nightmares). I often watched the insinuations and body languages of others when people interact with me, to see how they perceive me (students included). In many instances, one can see positions of power and popularity determine the way they behave. Being a 'lesser person', sometimes I see others (even those whom I thought was close friends) showed gestures, trying to avoid me simply because they have certain positions. For me, since the insinuation there is that I am not wanted, I tend to shy away from such people. However, the ones I try to avoid the most (not out of fear but wanting my life to be peaceful) are those who have acted in a way that had adverse effects on me in the university. Unfortunately, I can't really forget these events (even if I can forgive for what has happened). This is why I have always said that one should not be comfortable in positions of power and popularity for too long, else the risk of being a snob and vicious. I am not a person who likes to do office politics and I have never campaigned for any position; even after many meetings, I do not go and rub shoulders with anyone. I'm the type of person who likes to mind one's own business, unless some matters got me involved directly. So, perhaps that make me an unlikely person to lead any form of organization, which is perfectly fine for me. Indeed as I have said before, at this period in time, I do wish people leave me alone.

As I drove to work yesterday and got stuck in the toll's traffic jam, I took a picture of my wrinkled hand, to remind me of how old I am. 

Not sure how much time left I have to live, but as of today, I only have 181 days left to work in UPM (with only 129 weekdays). I wanted to finish off a few things before I go for retirement. When I met my student and younger colleague the other day, I tried to give all that I know (including possible future research). Hopefully it will get to be useful for them. Not sure of my future, but this is my situation now.

Students Supervised

In my last post, I mentioned some of the management books that I have read. Here, I felt the need to say that I don't read them cover-to-cover and in fact, whenever I wanted to use something from the books (or advices from others), I do tend to do a rethink. For me, a lot of the materials tend to come off as common sense but appreciation is still due given that the authors (or editors) have tried to systematise them. Management is not my cup of tea but having got myself into it, I would not want to dismiss it as easy (like some people think) but in fact, there are a lot of hard decision-making, thoughts of different scenarios (to foresee outcomes) and much more difficult, owing up to the decision that you have made (which could have been wrong). I'm glad that I am no longer in management but over the years, I do feel the younger people need to learn the history (and lessons) behind past decision making and also the humility to appreciate that others have thinking capabilities (right or wrong) just as good as they are.

Fast forward to last Thursday, it was the viva of my PhD student Mohammed Abdulmalek Abdulraheem Ahmed, probably my last international student. Mohammed's work is on thermal field theory and not quite a field that I dabble for research in the past. Because of this, we decided to have his previous MSc advisor Madjid Ladrem (Taibah University) and Faqir Khanna (emeritus professor at University of Alberta), a well-known expert on thermal quantum field theory (see his book here). This is probably the second time I have done this, supervision in collaboration with overseas professors. The first would be for Hassan Amirhashchi, who wanted to do a PhD in cosmology, with co-supervisor Anirudh Pradhan, who visited us in INSPEM, several times. Mohammed was my 24th graduate student and my ninth PhD student that had me as the main supervisor. Here is a pic.

Note in the above, one can see Prof. Kwek in the viva session. For Mohammed, we had two overseas external examiners (Prof. Kwek & Prof. Farhan) and one internal examiner (Assoc. Prof. Zulkifly Abbas). This just goes to show that we had difficulties to get examiners from our local community (and is generally true for most of our theoretical students).

The rest of my students are listed below (there were others that had me as a supervisor committee member within and outside of UPM).

• Ahmed Bouketir (PhD, 2000), "Group-Theoretic Quantization on Spheres and Quantum Hall Effect"
• Toh Sing Poh (MSc, 2002), "Cosmic Crystallography: CCP-Index of Thurston Manifold"
• Abubaker Ahmed Mohamed Siddig (MSc, 2003), "Mathematica Packages for Solving Schrodinger Equation with One-Dimensional Rectangular Potentials"
• Aslam Abdullah (MSc, 2006), "Extending Bianchi’s Classification of Homogenous Three-Manifolds"
• Ch’ng Han Siong (MSc, 2006), "Accelerating Cosmologies with Extended Product Spaces"
• Nurisya Mohd. Shah (MSc, 2008), "Energy Eigenequation Expansion for a Particle in Singly Punctured Two-Torus and Triply Punctured Two-Sphere System"
• Toh Sing Poh (PhD, 2008), "Proofs of Kochen-Specker Theorem Using Projection-Valued Measure"
• Mazlinda Zainy (MSc, 2009), "The Discrete Phase Space for 3-Qubit and 2-Qutrit Systems Based on Galois Field"
• Abubaker Ahmed Mohamed Siddig (PhD, 2009), "Computation of Maass Cusp Forms on Singly Punctured Two-Torus and Triply Punctured Two-Sphere Using Mathematica"
• Siti Nurul Ain Hj. Zaiton (MSc, 2010), "Qutrits and Lie Algebra Structure on Tensor Product of SU(3)"
• Hassan Amirhashchi, (PhD, 2011), "New Anisotropic Cosmological Models and Two-Fluid Dark Energy Models"
• Mojtaba Aliakbarzadeh (MSc, 2011), "Generating Mutually Unbiased Bases and Discrete Wigner Function for Three-Qubit System"
• Lam Shi Xiang (MSc, 2013), "A Network Structural Analysis of Malaysian Stock Market with Edge Density Constraint"
• Chan Kar Tim (PhD, 2013), "Parallel Computation of Maass Cusp Forms Using Mathematica"
• Saeid Molladavoudi (PhD, 2013), "Symplectic Techniques in Geometric Quantum Mechanics and Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics"
• Ahmad Hazazi Ahamad Sumadi (MSc, 2015), "Canonical Group Quantisation on One-Dimensional Complex Projective Space"
• Syed Nasrullah Ali Qazi (MSc, 2015), "Two Fluid Scenario for Dark Energy Models in a Bianchi Type I Universe"
• Choong Pak Shen, (MSc, 2016), "Characterizing Two- and Three-Qubit Entanglement by Their Tensors"
• Nor Syazana binti Shamsuddin (MSc, 2017), "Maass Cusp Form on Asymmetric Hyperbolic Torus"
• Zurita binti Ismail (MSc, 2019), "Structure of Co-Authorship Network in UPM Journal Publication Database From 2007-2010"
• Siti Aqilah Muhammad Rasat (MSc, 2020), "The Role of Compositionality in Constructing Complementary Classical Structures Within Qubit Systems"
• Mohd Faudzi Umar (PhD, 2021), "Deformed Heisenberg Group for a Particle on Noncommutative Spaces via Canonical Group Quantisation and Extension"
• Umair Abdul Halim (PhD, 2021), "Classical Aspect of Uncertainty Principle for Spin Angular Momentum in Geometric Quantum Mechanics"
• Mohammed Abdulmalek Abdulraheem Ahmed (PhD, 2022), "Real-Time Thermal Field Theory and Applications"

Besides graduate students, I also took in three postdoctoral fellows namely, Buang Ann Tay (I believe to be the first postdoc in UPM), Hassan Amirhashchi and Saeid Molladavoudi (after they graduated). I have another two PhD students (Choong Pak Shen, Ahmad Hazazi) and one MSc student (Ahmad Aqwa) who are about to submit their theses, hopefully in time before my retirement. Some of my colleagues told me this is more than enough for a professorship application but unfortunately supervised postgraduate students are not the only conditions; there are many others (some, mind-boggling). At this stage, I no longer consider  professorship as a realistic option particularly at this very late stage of my career. I have both internal and external reasons why I'm no longer considering such application (to the disappointment of my family and some colleagues). Maybe I will tell some of these after I retire or maybe they will die with me in the grave.

Managing and Developing

I'm less than 200 days away from retirement. What happened last week? Well, for some unknown reasons, my left wrist was hurting sometime on Saturday. Ignored it for awhile, hoping that it will go away by the time I have to go to work (which is on Tuesday; Monday was a public holiday). By Monday evening, the pain worsened and told my wife that I can't drive in this condition and probably need doctor's attention to see if it will go away anytime soon. First suspicion, was gout, but the private hospital doctor suspected bacterial infection since my wrist is all red and a little swelling. He recommended me to do blood tests for both gout and bacterial infections. The answer was the latter. So I was given a three-day leave with antibiotics, anti-swelling pills and pain killers (tramadol+paracetamol). Tramadol essentially knocks me out for the whole of Tuesday and in part Wednesday (got a class and postgraduate seminar conducted online that day in my half-conscious state). I stopped taking the pain killer by Wednesday morning to make sure I can drive to campus on Thursday to conduct a test (while on medical leave). Knowing that I will still be groggy, I took leave on Friday to rest. In fact, my son drove me to Sri Sendayan mosque that Friday for Friday prayers.

In my last post about academic commitments, I wrote how I spent a substantial amount of money on journals, which is supposed to show how serious I was. I also mentioned about subscribing to Science when I was part of a management team (for scientific matters). Thought I should share here that even in management, I took it seriously despite what others might think of my management skills. My first exposure to management was through the relatively smaller departmental committees. At the time, there is this tendency of putting everything in a positive light, which at the time to me, sounded really pretentious. It is always the case that no matter how positive one is, there will always be negativity in one's midst and one needs to learn how to cope with this. Always unseen, one could try to be positive but one's superior has a negative image of you. Just like administrators tend to say that some people always complain, but usually unseen is that the administrators themselves are already complaining. This is why this 'all-positive' attitude is not authentic and the main gist behind all these are our difference of opinions on how things should be. This is why I appreciated the approach of Covey of the 7-habit fame: a principled approach. One should start correctly of what we think we are. First, us an academic in a university whose main role is teaching and research. We should have always this perspective in mind: our true appointment in the university is an academic first. (I recall in one event with people from industries, the speaker even told us we should not operate like industrial or business entities, but rather like a community of 'wise people' that sees in a different light, often with a vision of depth and long-term). Whatever administrative role we are landed with is really a secondary appointment and is not a permanent post. Being a leader in the administration does not mean one is boss and others are being subjects. As an academic, one should be considered equal to one another; the administrative position is temporary and is meant to help decision-making processes smoothly (and a responsible one), for otherwise one could end up with endless debate. Being part of an academic organization, one should realize that the main activities are really creativity-driven and such activities are highly-valued. The tendency to put constraints (or controls) run counter to this view.

When I was given an administrative role, I begin reading up management books e.g. 1-minute manager, Covey-related books, leadership, body languages, images that one carry etc. Below are some books that are in my possession.

I remembered once, I was given the task of speaking on work ethics in INSPEM, that had me brooding for days. I wanted to be able convey the idea of shifting perspectives and where we start on our outlook is an important one. This led me to refer to religious texts on what is essentially a wholistic human being - not just thought as a social and political animal, which are just partial. Below is a pic of the presentation I made.

Not sure how well it went but I dedicated one section on dealing with negativities and office politics, which are ordinary parts of life. Took some ideas from the book on the right shown above.

One must be made aware of these 'characters', not only in others but also in ourselves (no exception). I also borrowed from someone I wrote to and got a copyrighted document (the person is from abroad, and I can't find it while writing this post), on what constitutes to be a 'modern worker' (see below).

The point here is to highlight working as developing one's own self, not just 'servicing the boss'. Reflect on the Muslim belief of man as servant of God but whatever services rendered is for our own benefit, knowing well all the attributes of God. One must also take note that 'bosses' are not perfect; as humans we have impaired or limited sense of justice and moral compass,, incomplete knowledge and one's own base desires that tend to mislead us. There should always be an open platform over which workers and bosses can discuss work matters in amicable manner. Often today, we get 'unfriendly' e-mails or messages instead (doing things behind the screen is easier, right?). We also heard horrible stories (elsewhere) that authoritarian bosses resorting to bullying and worse playing revenge. To me, this type of bosses should not be there in the first place and if they realise themselves doing these, they should just resign. Again, I would highlight the fact that we are in an academic organization that has very little place for regimented management (usually this is reserved for areas of safety, security and time-criticality). So I tend to adopt a very flexible management style, encouraging creativity wherever possible. But this is me and I have seen many different styles of management. 

The other area of concern is the adoption of mechanistic management that seems not to care the actual human natural response. Sometimes we are asked to adopt a culture in a short period of time, with evidence-demanding style (without caring efforts made and that not all circumstances are within control). For instance, the adoption of ranking has always been debated and one has never really discussed the necessary (natural) dynamics to be a good top-tier university (almost always demanding good scientific culture). I believe everyone in the management now knows about Goodhart's law but yet we follow fixed KPIs almost blanketly throughout different disciplines. Once, I was told off by a senior management member to take this up with the Ministry and I was taken aback. The question is what and how to proceed? Lately, I have been interested in Snowden's dynamical systems approach, which is more open and perhaps a more natural evolution. I have yet to see any local organization taking this up. Somebody told me that it won't work in our environment. Perhaps, but then we ought to ask the question what drives this 'impossibility' and can we change the dynamics? Recently,  I have posted some document related to Snowden's work on Sensemaking which is made available free online - https://practicalactionpublishing.com/book/2622/the-learning-power-of-listening. I have yet to study this properly and hope someone is interested to see how this works.

Let me just stop here (need to prepare for my lectures) and end with this remark. I do see some younger leaders being very abrasive and very harsh in judgement. One can also see this in the social media, writing away as if everyone else is not doing enough thinking. It seems gone are the days that we have used to learn about diplomacy and more humanly concern about others. Perhaps they should reconsider their position?