Never realized I hadn't posted in over 2 weeks!
Sorry, folks
Things have just gotten away from me the last week and a half...posting should be back on schedule starting this weekend.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Posting resumes Thursday
I know I've been saying this periodically but this will be the last time I say it...I'm visiting relatives and although they have Wi fi I don't have a private room to work.
I'll be home Thursaday and will get back into the swing of things then.
I'll be home Thursaday and will get back into the swing of things then.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast
From SteelScience: Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast
“I'm not saying Boots are the Mafia... Nivea for Men are,” Matt Gunther, nuclear physics PhD student, laughed as he aired his frustrations on the price of suntan lotion. In one of many strident opinions, he compares the skin protection industry to “how the Mafia would do captive business... if you don’t buy it you’re going to get cancer.”
We had somehow gone off on a tangent, but from his response to overpriced sun products, he is clearly a passionate guy.
I went to meet Matt on a rainy afternoon in Manchester to learn about his popular podcast “Hitchhiker's Guide to Nuclear”, where he and his co-host, Matt Gill, dispel the myths, update the news, and generally chat, in an hour long frenzy of all things nuclear.
Matt is on the Nuclear FiRST PhD, a joint doctoral training centre between The University of Sheffield and The University of Manchester.
He is part of the University of Manchester’s Nuclear Society who aim to “educate and inform the public as to how nuclear energy, as well as radiation and other related issues, affect us all”.
The 25 year old is a far cry from the stereotypical physicists portrayed in popular culture. He is not socially awkward, not afraid of the opposite sex, and not chained to his lab; starved of sunlight for the sake of research.
Although he does admit to enjoying a good science joke and I do catch a sneaky glimpse of a Marvel superhero postcard, stuck to the side of his computer, he’s definitely no Sheldon Cooper or Leonard Hofstadter.
iTunes following
Their monthly podcast began back in March, and for a small project that started out in Matt’s basement flat, it has gathered quite a following.
Each new episode receives about 1,500-2,000 hits, and they have around 200 unique subscribers on iTunes.
“I want to say it was by complete design,” he tells me when I ask him where the idea stemmed from. “But it wasn’t.”
In actual fact, it was started through irritation. “There was a news piece about nuclear on BBC news, it really got under my skin. I was fed up of people from the nuclear industry, as well as journalists, being very dry about the issue.
“The problem is that nuclear is such a divisive subject, you will always get extremists on both side, but they will never admit that, and then the journalists will be just as extreme.”
He tells me that he thinks the route of the misunderstandings surrounding nuclear energy , is because it is painted as such an uninteresting and dangerous topic, and it needs to be communicated in a better way.
“I suppose we wanted to do something where we got people engaged with nuclear as a subject, and to do that, we had to one, talk about new and media, and two, make it entertaining.”
The success of the venture has been born from people in the industry picking up on it, and tweeting and blogging about them.
Ironically, they have found that wherever nuclear is least popular is where they are most popular, gathering a following from Japan, Germany and the USA.
Having a listen through their back catalogue of podcasts, they have clearly gone from strength to strength, and I am thoroughly engrossed in their fascinating, thought-provoking, and often quite amusing window into the world of nuclear.
Episode guide
Each episode discusses a different issue, so far covering: radiation, weapons, Fukushima, and the economy.
The show usually includes guest speakers who join the hosts in debate and chatter with interjections of radiation and nuclear themed music separating each section.
They have also taken to the streets interviewing the public and finding out their thoughts and their misconceptions about nuclear.
“We asked the public what’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the word radiation? Nine time out of ten it was bomb, death or danger, that sort of thing, we then gave them some other examples, and they were quite surprised about where radiation can actually come from.”
The latest episodes talks about ‘The Nuclear Waste Problem’ and what the UK are planning to do with it, as well as relaying the bizarre story about the nuclear submarine commander who tried to end his affair by faking his own death, amongst other topics.
As nuclear energy has been moving ever more into the limelight over the last new month, ‘Hitchhiker's guide to Nuclear” is bound see ever increasing popularity.
Matt is modest about the endeavour, and hopes it colours the industry in a more interesting, and relatable way than current media: “We have been very fortunate with how it’s blossomed, people have said its good, and hopefully we are doing something good for the industry.”
“I'm not saying Boots are the Mafia... Nivea for Men are,” Matt Gunther, nuclear physics PhD student, laughed as he aired his frustrations on the price of suntan lotion. In one of many strident opinions, he compares the skin protection industry to “how the Mafia would do captive business... if you don’t buy it you’re going to get cancer.”
We had somehow gone off on a tangent, but from his response to overpriced sun products, he is clearly a passionate guy.
I went to meet Matt on a rainy afternoon in Manchester to learn about his popular podcast “Hitchhiker's Guide to Nuclear”, where he and his co-host, Matt Gill, dispel the myths, update the news, and generally chat, in an hour long frenzy of all things nuclear.
Matt is on the Nuclear FiRST PhD, a joint doctoral training centre between The University of Sheffield and The University of Manchester.
He is part of the University of Manchester’s Nuclear Society who aim to “educate and inform the public as to how nuclear energy, as well as radiation and other related issues, affect us all”.
The 25 year old is a far cry from the stereotypical physicists portrayed in popular culture. He is not socially awkward, not afraid of the opposite sex, and not chained to his lab; starved of sunlight for the sake of research.
Although he does admit to enjoying a good science joke and I do catch a sneaky glimpse of a Marvel superhero postcard, stuck to the side of his computer, he’s definitely no Sheldon Cooper or Leonard Hofstadter.
iTunes following
Their monthly podcast began back in March, and for a small project that started out in Matt’s basement flat, it has gathered quite a following.
Each new episode receives about 1,500-2,000 hits, and they have around 200 unique subscribers on iTunes.
“I want to say it was by complete design,” he tells me when I ask him where the idea stemmed from. “But it wasn’t.”
In actual fact, it was started through irritation. “There was a news piece about nuclear on BBC news, it really got under my skin. I was fed up of people from the nuclear industry, as well as journalists, being very dry about the issue.
“The problem is that nuclear is such a divisive subject, you will always get extremists on both side, but they will never admit that, and then the journalists will be just as extreme.”
He tells me that he thinks the route of the misunderstandings surrounding nuclear energy , is because it is painted as such an uninteresting and dangerous topic, and it needs to be communicated in a better way.
“I suppose we wanted to do something where we got people engaged with nuclear as a subject, and to do that, we had to one, talk about new and media, and two, make it entertaining.”
The success of the venture has been born from people in the industry picking up on it, and tweeting and blogging about them.
Ironically, they have found that wherever nuclear is least popular is where they are most popular, gathering a following from Japan, Germany and the USA.
Having a listen through their back catalogue of podcasts, they have clearly gone from strength to strength, and I am thoroughly engrossed in their fascinating, thought-provoking, and often quite amusing window into the world of nuclear.
Episode guide
Each episode discusses a different issue, so far covering: radiation, weapons, Fukushima, and the economy.
The show usually includes guest speakers who join the hosts in debate and chatter with interjections of radiation and nuclear themed music separating each section.
They have also taken to the streets interviewing the public and finding out their thoughts and their misconceptions about nuclear.
“We asked the public what’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the word radiation? Nine time out of ten it was bomb, death or danger, that sort of thing, we then gave them some other examples, and they were quite surprised about where radiation can actually come from.”
The latest episodes talks about ‘The Nuclear Waste Problem’ and what the UK are planning to do with it, as well as relaying the bizarre story about the nuclear submarine commander who tried to end his affair by faking his own death, amongst other topics.
As nuclear energy has been moving ever more into the limelight over the last new month, ‘Hitchhiker's guide to Nuclear” is bound see ever increasing popularity.
Matt is modest about the endeavour, and hopes it colours the industry in a more interesting, and relatable way than current media: “We have been very fortunate with how it’s blossomed, people have said its good, and hopefully we are doing something good for the industry.”
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Physics labs face fiscal fireworks
From USA Today: Physics labs face fiscal fireworks
Atom smashers drill down into the recesses of the innermost regions of reality. But fiscal reality is that they cost money, and some may be casualties of the federal budget fight.
The recipe for an atom smasher requires physicists, their machines, atoms and money. And money, it turns out, is the hardest part of the ingredient list to solve.
As Congress squabbles over millionaires' tax rates this weekend, a quieter collision is playing out in one part of the U.S. scientific enterprise, three U.S. labs that look at the humblest element of the universe, the atom.
On Jan. 7, a Department of Energy advisory panel headed by Texas A&M physicist Robert Tribble will weigh in on the future of three facilities that right now are the reason the USA leads the world in nuclear physics research. Nuclear physicists seek to understand how the innards of atoms, such as protons and neutrons, interact with each other. The field is essential to nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as well as our basic understanding of nature.
Science fans likely know these labs from discoveries that re-created matter unseen since the Big Bang, or that probed the proton, the positively charged physics particles packed into the center of atoms. One lab shocked physicists in 2009 with the discovery that these goobers aren't perfectly round.
"Just as we are poised to reap the bounty of a tremendous investment in nuclear physics in research and technology, we are looking at shuttering facilities, which seems tremendously wasteful, in addition to the loss of U.S. leadership in this vital area of science," says Steven Vigdor of Brookhaven National Laboratory, which hosts one of the threatened labs, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The others are the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Va., and Michigan State University's planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a $615 million lab, which has already received $153 million from the Energy Department and $31 million from the university.
Now, the Tribble committee faces "projected constrained budgets," with federal budget cutbacks ahead, as the Energy Department and National Science Foundation put it in an organizational letter, meaning it essentially could decide the fate of the labs. The labs' futures were first mapped out in 2007 before the economic crash, along with the rest of the U.S. nuclear physics effort. That effort is largely funded by the Energy Department to the tune of about $550 million a year. (To put that in perspective, that is about one-tenth of the cost of one of 12 nuclear-armed SSBN-X subs that the Defense Department now has on its shopping list, despite the Cold War ending two decades ago.)
You may be surprised to learn there are any big U.S. atom smashers left at all, with Europe's CERN lab and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) getting all the attention this year for its detection of a Higgs boson (better known as the "God particle" to the dismay of physicists). Once upon a time, U.S. leadership in high-energy physics was assured, too, before it was overtaken by CERN, but in 1993, President Clinton killed the gigantic atom smasher in Texas that almost undoubtedly would have found the "God particle" about a decade ago, if it had been built (it was partly the victim of another fight over the budget deficit).
As the Tribble committee heard at a September fact-gathering meeting, the U.S. labs are building on the findings at CERN. For example, RHIC smashes together the centers of gold atoms at nearly the speed of light to create "quark-gluon" plasma, a super-heated fluid of the sub-atomic particles normally hidden inside atoms, which represents how things looked in the billionths of a second after the universe started. RHIC and the other lab will sweep up behind the LHC's higher-energy Higgs boson results, plumbing interesting areas of nuclear physics suggested by its findings as well as exploring many still-mysterious facets of atomic behavior.
The shortfall in funding facing all three labs, and the rest of U.S. nuclear physics, is about $100 million total in 2013. (The overall shortfall adds up to about $900 million over five years from 2014 to 2018.) So far, it looks like one of the three labs won't be funded, Vigdor says. If the fiscal cliff "sequestration" of federal funds goes through next year, the Energy Department faces a 7.7% cut in funds, and perhaps two labs will be shut down. "That will likely end U.S. leadership in this area, which we have enjoyed since World War II," Vigdor says. Other nations, such as China and India, are making plans to expand such research, even as the U.S. cuts back. "Our leadership is being drained to other countries," he says.
Of course, things are tough all over. A White House report in September said that sequestration would trigger $417 million in cuts at NASA, $2.5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $7.5 billion in Defense Department research. "Please do not turn away from your commitment to the scientific research our country so vitally needs," read a Dec. 18 letter from 21 Nobel Prize-winners to President Obama, decrying the planned NIH cuts. The letter noted that every dollar invested in research tends to pay off many times over, a finding that economists have made for decades. Atom smashers, as one example, have played a role in the development of lasers, the World Wide Web and nuclear medicine, which uses radioactive isotopes as medical tracing devices in diagnoses and surgeries.
One irony of the cuts coming to science is that the 2007 build-up of nuclear physics came as a result of congressional concern over a National Academy of Sciences report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The report trumpeted fears of the lost U.S. leadership in science and a resultant economic decline. So, the "Long-Range Plan" for U.S. nuclear science, just as in many other areas of research, made promises that look empty now with Washington's focus turned to cutting budgets.
"Everyone can understand the U.S. budget situation and the reality of the deficit," says Vigdor, who is retiring this week. "But all this is just a symptom of the poor budget planning of the U.S. government that has been going on for a long time." If lab bosses knew cuts were coming, Vigdor says, they could have planned things better, instead of facing the boom-and-bust spending that characterizes congressional decision-making.
The good news for the committee contemplating the future of U.S. atom smashers is that they are to submit two plans, one for flat funding (effectively a cut due to inflation) and one for slight growth in the budget for nuclear physics (effectively a flat line in funding for the same reason). By Jan. 7, when their report comes due, the fight over the fiscal cliff may have resolved enough to tell us which path the nation ends up following for the future of U.S. nuclear physics, and the rest of the scientific enterprise.
.
Atom smashers drill down into the recesses of the innermost regions of reality. But fiscal reality is that they cost money, and some may be casualties of the federal budget fight.
The recipe for an atom smasher requires physicists, their machines, atoms and money. And money, it turns out, is the hardest part of the ingredient list to solve.
As Congress squabbles over millionaires' tax rates this weekend, a quieter collision is playing out in one part of the U.S. scientific enterprise, three U.S. labs that look at the humblest element of the universe, the atom.
On Jan. 7, a Department of Energy advisory panel headed by Texas A&M physicist Robert Tribble will weigh in on the future of three facilities that right now are the reason the USA leads the world in nuclear physics research. Nuclear physicists seek to understand how the innards of atoms, such as protons and neutrons, interact with each other. The field is essential to nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as well as our basic understanding of nature.
Science fans likely know these labs from discoveries that re-created matter unseen since the Big Bang, or that probed the proton, the positively charged physics particles packed into the center of atoms. One lab shocked physicists in 2009 with the discovery that these goobers aren't perfectly round.
"Just as we are poised to reap the bounty of a tremendous investment in nuclear physics in research and technology, we are looking at shuttering facilities, which seems tremendously wasteful, in addition to the loss of U.S. leadership in this vital area of science," says Steven Vigdor of Brookhaven National Laboratory, which hosts one of the threatened labs, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The others are the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Va., and Michigan State University's planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a $615 million lab, which has already received $153 million from the Energy Department and $31 million from the university.
Now, the Tribble committee faces "projected constrained budgets," with federal budget cutbacks ahead, as the Energy Department and National Science Foundation put it in an organizational letter, meaning it essentially could decide the fate of the labs. The labs' futures were first mapped out in 2007 before the economic crash, along with the rest of the U.S. nuclear physics effort. That effort is largely funded by the Energy Department to the tune of about $550 million a year. (To put that in perspective, that is about one-tenth of the cost of one of 12 nuclear-armed SSBN-X subs that the Defense Department now has on its shopping list, despite the Cold War ending two decades ago.)
You may be surprised to learn there are any big U.S. atom smashers left at all, with Europe's CERN lab and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) getting all the attention this year for its detection of a Higgs boson (better known as the "God particle" to the dismay of physicists). Once upon a time, U.S. leadership in high-energy physics was assured, too, before it was overtaken by CERN, but in 1993, President Clinton killed the gigantic atom smasher in Texas that almost undoubtedly would have found the "God particle" about a decade ago, if it had been built (it was partly the victim of another fight over the budget deficit).
As the Tribble committee heard at a September fact-gathering meeting, the U.S. labs are building on the findings at CERN. For example, RHIC smashes together the centers of gold atoms at nearly the speed of light to create "quark-gluon" plasma, a super-heated fluid of the sub-atomic particles normally hidden inside atoms, which represents how things looked in the billionths of a second after the universe started. RHIC and the other lab will sweep up behind the LHC's higher-energy Higgs boson results, plumbing interesting areas of nuclear physics suggested by its findings as well as exploring many still-mysterious facets of atomic behavior.
The shortfall in funding facing all three labs, and the rest of U.S. nuclear physics, is about $100 million total in 2013. (The overall shortfall adds up to about $900 million over five years from 2014 to 2018.) So far, it looks like one of the three labs won't be funded, Vigdor says. If the fiscal cliff "sequestration" of federal funds goes through next year, the Energy Department faces a 7.7% cut in funds, and perhaps two labs will be shut down. "That will likely end U.S. leadership in this area, which we have enjoyed since World War II," Vigdor says. Other nations, such as China and India, are making plans to expand such research, even as the U.S. cuts back. "Our leadership is being drained to other countries," he says.
Of course, things are tough all over. A White House report in September said that sequestration would trigger $417 million in cuts at NASA, $2.5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $7.5 billion in Defense Department research. "Please do not turn away from your commitment to the scientific research our country so vitally needs," read a Dec. 18 letter from 21 Nobel Prize-winners to President Obama, decrying the planned NIH cuts. The letter noted that every dollar invested in research tends to pay off many times over, a finding that economists have made for decades. Atom smashers, as one example, have played a role in the development of lasers, the World Wide Web and nuclear medicine, which uses radioactive isotopes as medical tracing devices in diagnoses and surgeries.
One irony of the cuts coming to science is that the 2007 build-up of nuclear physics came as a result of congressional concern over a National Academy of Sciences report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The report trumpeted fears of the lost U.S. leadership in science and a resultant economic decline. So, the "Long-Range Plan" for U.S. nuclear science, just as in many other areas of research, made promises that look empty now with Washington's focus turned to cutting budgets.
"Everyone can understand the U.S. budget situation and the reality of the deficit," says Vigdor, who is retiring this week. "But all this is just a symptom of the poor budget planning of the U.S. government that has been going on for a long time." If lab bosses knew cuts were coming, Vigdor says, they could have planned things better, instead of facing the boom-and-bust spending that characterizes congressional decision-making.
The good news for the committee contemplating the future of U.S. atom smashers is that they are to submit two plans, one for flat funding (effectively a cut due to inflation) and one for slight growth in the budget for nuclear physics (effectively a flat line in funding for the same reason). By Jan. 7, when their report comes due, the fight over the fiscal cliff may have resolved enough to tell us which path the nation ends up following for the future of U.S. nuclear physics, and the rest of the scientific enterprise.
.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Mercury News Interview: Shan Nair, nuclear physicist who now helps companies expand overseas
From MercuryNews.com: Mercury News Interview: Shan Nair, nuclear physicist who now helps companies expand overseas
After earning a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford, Shan Nair wrote 50 research papers on the subject and became so well regarded in his profession the European Commission picked him as one of the experts it sent to assess the damage from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine.
But while working at a British energy agency where he supervised a group of accountants, he got the idea to co-found his own accounting company focused on international trade with his wife, Vyoma. Beginning small in 1994, Sunnyvale-based Nair & Co. now employees 640 people, boasts operations in more than 60 nations and generated $40 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year -- a 25 percent increase from the year before.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, the 61-year-old Nair discussed the help he provides companies seeking to explore foreign markets and why he believes he can grow his business tenfold in coming years.
Q: What prompted you to move from Britain and set up Nair's headquarters here?
A: A lot of technology companies at the time were coming to the U.K. from the U.S. like babes in the woods with no guidance and support, which they needed. And Silicon Valley is a very open culture. Nobody here cares where you come form or how you speak English. If you have a proposition and you can show you can deliver on that, people are going to listen.
Q: What sort of issues do your clients face when they expand overseas?
A: When these companies set up abroad they are usually doing it with limited financial resources. So it's a question of balancing the risks and costs. For example, say you have a software engineer in Sweden that you want to put on the payroll. The Swedish authorities could argue over time that because some of the engineer's intellectual property has been developed there, Sweden should get some of the licensing revenue. Setting up a subsidiary will eliminate this risk, because all IP generated by the subsidiary will belong to the U.S. But it will cost about $20,000 to set up and another $15,000 to $16,000 a year to maintain it, which you might not want to do for one guy.
Q: How do you keep track of the laws in so many countries?
A: I've learned the hard way, by figuring it all out and then advising clients. So it's in my head, it's in my DNA now. Also, we have a 30-person department in India that basically populates a knowledge base on an intranet that's got all of this kind of material -- changes in tax regulations in Brazil, implications for clients, all of that written in there.
Q: Do you help any foreign Dr. Shan Nair, co-founder of Nair & Co., is shown in Sunnyvale on Dec. 10, 2012. Nair is an expert in international expansion, a highly sought after speaker on globalization and a contributing author for various publications. Since founding Nair & Co. in 1994, he has helped grow the company from a small U.K.-based professional services firm to a global enterprise with offices in the U.K., India, China, U.S., Japan and Singapore. (Dan Honda/Staff) companies that want to do business in the U.S.?
A: We have been traditionally U.S.-outbound focused. But we have a small and growing client base of foreign companies setting up operations in multiple countries, including the U.S. I would say last year, of all the new clients we got, 93 percent were U.S.-outbound.
Q: How do you see your company evolving?
A: I think the company is in a very exciting position, actually, and I don't think I've got rose-tinted spectacles. In any one country, there is a law firm, there's an accounting firm, there's a payroll company that can do what we do. But there are very few that are multicountry and there are very few that do it as a one-stop shop. In our case you can have a conversation about an issue in Japan, an issue in Denmark and an issue in Brazil in one call. We may make some very well-targeted acquisitions of companies offering synergistic services, but primarily I see us growing organically. I think it could easily get us to a size of about $350 million or $400 million, 10 times our current size.
Q: Have you seen a growing number of U.S. companies setting up foreign operations? A: Yes. Companies are going abroad at an earlier stage, I think partly for cost reasons to develop their technology in cheaper markets. Allied with that, because the U.S. market has been rather depressed, in order to achieve sales targets, they've got to sell in foreign markets. So the effect of the recession actually has been to increase our business. That's why our growth was 25 percent last year when most companies were having a hard time.
Q: What do you most like and dislike about your job?
A: I really like the positive development of the company from day one. And the variety. No two clients have the same problem. Also, the clients we have want to do everything right; they don't want to break any rules. What I don't like are dealing with HR problems, I don't have a lot of time for moaners and whiners. And my reaction usually is to fire them.
Shan Nair
Position: Co-founder and former CEO of Nair & Co.
Age: 61
Birthplace: Cairo, Egypt
Residence: Santa Clara and Naples, Fla
Education: Doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford
Previous jobs: Personal assistant to a board member with the United Kingdom company National Power; commercial head of nuclear decommissioning with National Power; research scientist with the Central Electricity Generating Board in the U.K.
Family: He and his wife, Vyoma, have a daughter, Aditi.
Five facts about Shan Nair
1. The child of a diplomat, he has lived in 13 countries and for a time fancied a career in the army.
2. He likes driving fast cars on race tracks and recalls once "hitting a wall of tires at 130 miles an hour," noting, "there were tires going everywhere."
3. A key life-changing experience was making the leap from salaried nuclear physicist to high-risk entrepreneur.
4. He and his wife set up a free lunch program for more than 1,000 poor children in India.
5. He and his wife have helped rescue abused bears and elephants in India.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
New posting schedule
Now that I've got this new full-time job, I'll be posting in this blog twice a week - on Monday's and Wednesdays.
So the next post for this blog will be on Monday.
Thanks for your patience.
So the next post for this blog will be on Monday.
Thanks for your patience.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Posts resume this Wednesday
I'm a freelance writer and I am way behind on a job I have to do, so I won't be posting here until Wednesday..
Thanks for your patience!
Thanks for your patience!
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