Moneyball in academia?

I watched the movie Moneyball with my family. There was a scene which reminded me of a number of conversations I have had over the years concerning hiring young faculty. The scene features in the trailer below. Billy Beane [Brad Pitt], general manager of the Oakland As major league baseball team is sitting at a table with the club scouts and they are discussing which players to recruit, particularly because they just lost a couple of star players.



The scene highlights how they use arbitrary subjective criteria to endorse or dismiss particular players. ["He has an ugly girlfriend and so must lack self-confidence"!]

How is this like academia?
Unfortunately, the same thing can happen. People can get very emotional and subjective, like in the movie. Over the years, colleagues from a range of institutions have told me how they (or their department) desperately want to hire a particular individual and will "mortgage the farm" to do it.
But, is the individual really worth it? I can remember specific cases over the past 15 years where this has not proven to be the case. In fact, in some cases the individuals concerned are not even doing science any more.

Is the solution using metrics to evaluate potential performance, as in the baseball movie?
No, but it is important to acknowledge that it is fairly difficult to predict future performance. Billy Beane makes that point about himself. He was the high school graduate everyone wanted. But, he flopped in major league baseball.

One minute physics

Maybe you all know all about Minute physics.
But only this week I got introduced (by my wife!) .
We watched Why the Higgs is the missing link and

I think they highlight the value of simple whiteboard talks.

Geometric distinctions between metals and insulators

Raffaele Resta has a very helpful review article The insulating state of matter: a geometrical theory.
It elegantly connects what to me are a rather disparate range of topics:
Kohn's classic 1964 characterisation of insulators, Berry's phase, Chern numbers, periodic versus open boundary conditions, quantum metrics, Anderson localization, Mott insulators, Quantum Hall insulators, ....

A central quantity defines the "localisation" associated with the ground state wavefunction.
In a 1999 PRL Resta and Sorella introduced this quantity and showed how it diverged at the quantum phase transition between a band insulator and a Mott insulator in a one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model.
In a 2006 J. Chem. Phys. paper Resta connects this localisation to Boy's localisation in quantum chemistry.

Tailor your poster to your audience

Previously I posted about the importance of tailoring a talk to the audience.
The same is true for posters.
You should not use the same poster for every conference!
The audience may be only theorists, only experimentalists, or a mix, only physicists, only chemists, a mix, only graduate students with diverse backgrounds, only specialists, .....
The background knowledge and the questions that each audience have will be dramatically different.

This post was stimulated by the recent Annual Postgraduate Poster day for the School of Mathematics and Physics at UQ. This is a great initiative as it gives students valuable experience and presenting a poster, and helps everyone get a better idea of what is going on in the School. However, I was struck by how most of the posters I looked at seemed to more appropriate for a specialist conference than for a general audience of physicists and mathematicians. Furthermore, when I asked some of the students to explain their poster to me some quickly resorted to technical jargon and I struggled to put their work in a broader context.

For such a general meeting people have really basic questions like.
What is this field about?
What are the important questions?
How does your work relate to that?
Have you got one simple concrete result that I can understand?

I am not claiming any of the above is easy. But impressing people and connecting with them never is.

A twisted quantum chemical vision

There is an interesting paper in Science
The Molecular Mechanism of Thermal Noise in Rod Photoreceptors

Samer Gozem, Igor Schapiro, Nicolas Ferré,  and Massimo Olivucci

The abstract is quite clear.

Spontaneous electrical signals in the retina's photoreceptors impose a limit on visual sensitivity. Their origin is attributed to a thermal, rather than photochemical, activation of the transduction cascade. Although the mechanism of such a process is under debate, the observation of a relationship between the maximum absorption wavelength (λmax) and the thermal activation kinetic constant (k) of different visual pigments (the Barlow correlation) indicates that the thermal and photochemical activations are related. Here we show that a quantum chemical model of the bovine rod pigment provides a molecular-level understanding of the Barlow correlation. The transition state mediating thermal activation has the same electronic structure as the photoreceptor excited state, thus creating a direct link between λmax and k. Such a link appears to be the manifestation of intrinsic chromophore features associated with the existence of a conical intersection between its ground and excited states.

If you want a "spherical cow" view of the quantum physics read the beginning of this nice paper by Irene Burghardt and J.T. Hynes.

Marketing the Higgs boson

The level of media coverage (and hype) associated with the Higgs boson announcement in July caught me by surprise. But, then I realised that if you spend $10 billion on an experiment there must be some very small fraction associated with publicity and outreach. So I did some Googling and found this CERN document which gives the annual marketing budget as slightly less than $2 million. 
Combining this with 10,000 physicists from around the world hitting their local media outlets I should not have been surprised at the level of publicity.

A helpful sentence to write in any paper

This equation/figure/table is the central result of this paper.

I love to read a sentence such as this. First, it helps me know what the paper is about. Second, it helps me decide whether the paper is important and I should read it in detail. Third, it provides a framework to try and understand the rest of the paper.

Some might complain that their paper contains so many "important" results that it is not possible to identify a single equation or figure which is central. However, I doubt this is true. And if it really is true I would encourage breaking up the paper into several publons.