Academic Crisis – Judges need to be judged

Judges are in need of judgments. Recently, my student participated at an undergraduate research symposium. Our project was in the competition. He is a freshman and he just started the project with me a few months ago. I did not expect him to win. However, I do think that he had enough stuff to present and I’d be happy if he just got an honorable mention.

I have noticed that I have always held a higher standard than most people. So for me to think that he had enough stuff to present might be an understatement to others. Nevertheless, he did not even get an honorable mention at all. I found it absurd. My student was disappointed. He being only a freshman was able to tell after viewing other students’ works that his was not too bad, if not the best of all. He could not understand why those projects beat his. I tended to agree with his sentiment. The more I thought about it the more furious I became. Mind you, there are 19 branch campuses in the Penn State University College. Only 4 projects are currently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and mine is one of them. The student has been working with me on a project that is funded by NSF. None of the other projects presented at the undergraduate research symposium is funded by NSF or NASA or any other federal agency that I am aware of. The results of our work will be ready for publication in top peer-reviewed journals. I won’t comment on the significance of other participants’ works. Suffice to say that ours can be and will be published in a few months. By the way, I am to give an invited talk at an international conference on the same project in a few months. That tells you the caliber and the quality of that project.

So what is wrong with the judges? How in the world can those judges not see the significance of our work? Well, it seems to me that nowadays people are so limited to the knowledge of their own field that they know not a thing about other fields. The other thing is that people should not judge any project when their work is in the competition. Hello, this is called “Conflicts of Interest”. It never ceased to amaze me that the academic people with a Ph.D. fail to grasp that. You do not do things that will compromise academic integrity. Everyone knows it but most people become oblivious when it comes to their own interest.

Anyway, I feel sorry for my student. I thought this would be an honest competition. I was furious that he experienced the ugly side of the academic world. Sorry to vent. But it is a morale issue in academia. More and more academic people have become less honorable in issues related to honors and awards. I feel it is time someone stood up and said something to put a stop to it.

Good Eats – More Greens Please

I was in Vienna two weeks ago. I loved their pastry among other things. It is a beautiful city. One evening, my colleagues and I sat at a dinner table and we were discussing about food in different countries. Most of them did not find any American food worth mentioning. I actually like American Steak and a hearty salad. With a glass of red wine and a roll or two, I needn’t ask for more to please my taste buds.

One of the things I missed so much when I was outside the United States was a bowl of salad with Oliver oil and Balsamic vinegar. I’ve been to quite a few countries, and surprisingly people outside the US do not eat as much green leaves salad as the Americans. In Taiwan, they don’t have the greens as in the States and the choice of salad dressing is very limited. In Corsica, their salad is in a different context. I remember one time when I was with a colleague in a café for lunch at the Lightning workshop in Corsica in 2008. I was overjoyed when I saw salad on their menu. The menu was in French, but I thought salad should be universal. How different could they be? So I ordered a salad and a sandwich. When the server placed my food on the table, I was both speechless and disappointed. It was a dish of rice with tomatoes and some herbs. “That is not salad.” I blurted it out after my initial silence. Then my colleague, who can speak French, said to me, “It is. It is a rice salad. I thought you knew and I thought that was what you wanted.” Well, I saw the word “ritz”, but I thought it was not the main thing on the plate. So instead of one side dish (which would be the salad) and the main dish, I inadvertently ordered two main dishes. Naturally, the sandwich became my dinner. Essentially, it is very hard to find places that serve good green salads outside the States.

Angels in Life

I used to be quite fired up when people did me wrong. As I’m getting older, I tend to look at the people and the situations in a more positive way. I think these people who placed an obstacle in my path were angels in disguise in my life. I certainly would not appreciate their effort in making my life difficult at the moment, but I have to admit that it was these people that provided the force in me to make changes, to make me become better, and to grow out of my comfort zone. I’d say they deserve a gold-embellished Thank-you card for making the person that I am today.

Well, ideally I would do so, but in reality I think I would feel more comfortable just wishing the worst for them in my private thoughts. Alas, I’m only human.

Noise, noise, and more noise

I was awakened this morning around 6:30 AM by constant blasts of sounds from a loud speaker. I live close to a middle school about 5 min away from it. I have found that they still ask students to gather in the open field in early mornings in Taiwan and listen to what the school administration has to say. That would be fine with me, except that their sounds are really loud and become a constant noise to me. The noise does not always stop there. I went to my office early this morning since I could not get back to sleep any more. I was just about to get settled, ie, ready to work. There it goes again. The sound of construction. Unbelievable! Since I came to my host institution this September, there were not many days that were quiet. There has been construction going on, and on, and on….

What is funny is that the construction workers use loud speakers to communicate with each other. Oftentimes, I can hear they joke about something. It is ridiculous. Mind you, we are in a building where students attend their classes, and it is not just my building that is affected but also the nearby buildings too where classes are going on. I can’t believe the university would let the construction go on during the semesters. A student told me that he can’t hear very clearly what the professor says when the workers are working. Even so, this thing goes on and on and on….I guess people in Taiwan have a high level of tolerance. I have an urge to complain, but since I am just a visiting professor here and I already have complained about something else to the president of the university that I think I would learn to adopt the attitude of tolerance for a change, and hopefully the construction work will end soon. How soon? ASAP!! Speaking of complaining to higher-ups, it is very effective. After I complained, the things I complained about were dealt with promptly. Why can’t things be handled this way before people complain?

To be or not to be a scientist

After being in the business (ie, conducting scientific research) for long enough time, I started to think maybe I should do something else. I have had the thought since 2007. It all started from experiencing a hard time to get my ideas accepted by my peers. I wouldn’t give a damn (pardon my language) if my ideas got accepted or not if it weren’t for the fact that our career status critically depends on the number of publications and grants. It has become increasing annoying to see crappy papers get published while I have to work extra hard to get my ideas/work accepted published. It is also getting annoying that I have to educate my peers on some of the subjects that they should be familiar with. It is even annoying to find errors in the publications, and I have to ask myself why reviewers did not pick them up on these mistakes. Some mistakes are very obvious. I used to write short papers and tried to be succinct, but have been forced to elaborate on things that I thought my peers would surely know.

Now I just think the whole peer review process is nothing more than a joke. The journal ranking is also laughable. I think I should do something other than science. Doing scientific research is hard but supposedly fun as well. Now I just feel a bit sick of the mentality of the scientific community. Scientists are merely a bunch of close-minded people with a subjective view and they think their views are always in the right. Most of them don’t even dare to think outside the box. Scientists are supposed to be open-minded with an objective view. I’m simply disappointed in my peers and wonder if I should do something else that is easier to get satisfaction.

My New Year’s Eve – The Celebrity Style

These are a few pictures of fireworks taken from a mansion at the New Year’s Eve. The mansion is on top of a mountain (I think), thus providing a vintage view of the Taipei city. The tall building in the pictures is Taipei 101 building, the second tallest building on Earth (as I understand).

We were invited to attend the New Year’s Eve party hosted by the owner of the mansion. We arrived around 8 PM, and didn’t get back home until 5:30 AM the next day. I don’t recall ever being staying up so late in recent years. When we arrived, the tall gated doors were wide open. At that moment, I felt I was in a movie. Here I was in a mansion that you only see in movies. The furniture in the mansion was the French court style, very delicate, expansive, and fancy looking.

That was quite a night, eating great food (lobsters, oysters, choice meats) prepared by a restaurant chef, watching fireworks in the courtyard of a mansion on top of a mountain, surrounded by like-minded people. We had BBQ (the Chinese style, no BBQ sauce) in the rather chilly weather. It was fun, especially when I didn’t have to do the work. There were some other guests coming and going. The fireworks started at 12:00 AM exact on Jan. 1 2009, and it lasted about 180 seconds, I was told. After watching the fireworks, we went back into the mansion and stayed until close to 5 AM.

We were invited to attend a traditional lunar year-end banquet by a company’s president who was at the New Year’s Eve party and is good friends with the mansion owner. It was nice. We were sitting close to the stage. We won the 3rd prize raffle. We went up to the stage with other winners to have a picture taken. We were invited to watch the live recording of a few shows hosted by the mansion owner. It was fun. I had a good time in Taiwan. I worked during the daytime and enjoyed these activities after the working hours. My winter break ended with a flight on Business back to the States. There were too many people on Economy so I was bumped up to Business. I was praying to be bumped to Business, and my wish was answered. ;-)

Utilizing Lightning Energy

Watch the demo of how lightning energy can be stored and utilized to power an LED light on my Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/profhuang) or click on the video below.




Chris Alright (a former student of mine) and I designed a model in 2006 that demonstrated the utilization of lightning energy from atmospheric lightning discharges. The equipment consists of an electrostatic charge generator and a metal house on a piece of pilewood. Inside the model house, there is a simple RC circuit with an LED indicator and a switch. The essential ideas of this model are that we can use a capacitor to store charge collected from air discharges and the charge can be used to power an LED when enough charge has been collected.

Chris had moved on to University Park when we videotaped the demonstration. I asked my teaching assistants (Pietro Iadevaia and Robert Thacker-Dey) to help me to do the demonstration. Our Digital Commons specialist videotaped and edited the film for us.

Chris Alright took physics with me in 2006 and asked to do an Honors project for the “Electricity and Magnetism” course. Since I just got into the field of lightning research, I thought it would be great if his project had something to do with lightning. We discussed what his project would be – something to do with lightning discharges. Initially, I wanted to use a magnetic field sensor in the physics lab to measure the change in the magnetic field during lightning discharge. The Van Der Graaf generator would be used to produce electrostatic charge that would discharge through air. It was to simulate lightning discharge, and the magnetic field sensor would be used to measure the magnetic field. It did not work. The laptop that the sensor was connected to froze every single time when the lightning discharge occurred. After two weeks of trials, we gave up. It was obvious that we needed to come up with a different project. So I sent him to do some research to find projects that would be feasible.

He came back with an idea of building a Faraday Cage to demonstrate how it could protect a house. I told him it was a great idea, but how about doing a little bit extra? How about building something that could use the lightning energy when the Faraday Cage is not used? So we discussed how we could accomplish that. I told him what I thought would be required for the project. We needed a model house that is conductive, a device that can store the charge collected, and an optical device that uses the stored energy from lightning discharge. After discussions, we decided that a model house made of aluminum, a capacitor to store the charge, a couple of resistors, and an LED indicator would be required. He came back after a few weeks with the model house and a Faraday cage made of copper wires. That is a great thing to have a bright student to work for you. You tell them what you want, give them stuff, and they come back with a finished product. That is simply fantastic.

When I asked him to construct the model house, I had no idea if it would work, that is, if it would be possible to collect charges from the discharges and store them on a capacitor. If you searched for topics on utilizing lightning energy, you would find quite a few articles that say it is not practical to utilize lightning energy. Perhaps that is true, but I think I wanted to show that lightning energy can be utilized if we want to. During the demonstration, we turned the Van Der Graff generator on. When the charge on the generator was large enough, it would discharge through air. The metal house was positioned to be near the generator. After a couple of minutes of discharge, we would have collected enough charge to power the LED. It was quite exciting to see the LED light lit up when we pressed the button of the switch. We proved it that lightning energy can be stored and utilized. Of course the laboratory lightning discharge is very much smaller than the lightning discharge in nature. Image if we had the device to harvest the lightning energy from nature! Anyway, the important concept of this demo is that it can be done.