Day 68-69

This will just be a short post. It's basically a flag to myself in that I am going to promise to deliver something here and hopefully that will keep me to my promise. I've started to teach myself optimal control for ordinary differential equations. That is, looking at solving systems of ODEs which involve some "control" that is involved in some other quantity that we wish to optimise in some way.

For example, say we have an exponentially growing tumour (#cells is x) being treated with some drug (concentration u) such that the governing equation is
x'(t) = ax(t) - u(t), x(0)=0.
Say that drug is also harmful to healthy cells as well. Then we might wish to minimise both the tumour size at some endtime (T) and also the effects over time of the drug. eg:
min { x(T) + \int_0^T u^2 dt }.

So basically I'm looking into optimal control theory for such problems. It doesn't look too horrific actually. I tried looking at this years ago when I did my postdoc (my boss had published some papers on optimal treatment of tumours) but it was over my head. Now I think I can actually understand some of the material that's available on the subject and I think I can write about it myself.

The plan is to write some short notes on the topic that are understandable and make them available here soon (next couple of weeks). Then y'all can let me know what you think. yay :-)

Day 65 - update

Things are coming together nicely!!! Some simple matlab-ing has led to some simulations that suit the needs of the paper perfectly! Outstanding!

Day 64-65

I went to bed last night at about 10.30. This is quite usual since the coming of Dan Jr. I don't tend to stay up late much at all for work or any other reason. Anyway, I sat in bed for about 30mins before realising I wasn't going to sleep. Ideas and mathsy stuff was running through my head - so I got up and started doing some work. I did a fair bit of work on the stability analysis (of steady states) for my 3 PDE model of Chlamydia infection model.

I decided that the work I did a few days ago was for an overly complicated model - I didn't see the point of having both an exponential death term (remnant from a previous version of the model) and a logistic growth term...so I've dumped the death in favour of the logistic growth. This also (of course) has the effect of somewhat simplifying the analysis/algebra for the stability work.

A little 3am mad scientist action.

One of the great things about this place we live is the glass doors that I can use to write on...basically big enough to work like a blackboard. This is great for doing algebra and messy stuff that you want to scribble out and over the top of - like stability analysis and nondimensionalisation etc. It looks difficult to read, but it's actually ok once you focus. Particularly at night it is good to work with too.

So anyway, I worked on this until about 4am this morning which is basically unheard of for me these days. I really only went to bed then because I had hit the end of the algebraic work and I thought to bust out some matlab to start doing simulations and numerical work at this stage of the night was getting kind of ridiculous.  I really should have kept going though - I felt fine waking at 7.30 this morning, so I'm sure I'd have survived.

Anyway, more tonight - I think I can finish off the draft of this in the next couple of days or so.

Day 61 - Things will get in the way

So even on holidays I'm distracted. I spent a long time today doing algebra (stability analysis on the steady states of my PDE chlamydia model) which was really great (haven't done that in ages) but then at 5pm as I'm walking through the door bringing little Dan home, work calls. I had forgotten to rerank applications for the QUT vice chancellor's scholarships.

Rerank? Yes rerank. I already did it once. I had ranked all but about 7 of the fifty or so applications in my pile, all along the way thinking that some of the written statements and supporting materials didn't match. Then finally I realized that they were all wrong. The cover sheets with written statements had been given to me with the wrong supporting materials. I was so pissed. I was meaning to do this Friday before I left work, but forgot. So I've tried to do as much as I can tonight but will now have to go to work in the morning to finish it off.

The point is, even when things seemed to be going well, something came along and stuffed it up - now I will need to attempt to catch up with where I wanted to be somehow.

Although in good news my algebra on the stability analysis revealed an error in my previous work and a nice new result about the stability requirement for one of my steady states - yay!

Now off to read about the Ruth-Hurwitz stability criterion.

Day 60 - two months in

So, it's basically two months down today. I guess I'd say I'm reasonably satisfied with my progress even though I've really got nothing to show so far. Lots of different projects are progressing well and I've had a whole heap of new opportunities open up too. I have one completed manuscript (the one that's been rejected three times!), another of Masoum's very nearly there (needs a couple of pages cut down to meet the 10 page limit), and another three manuscripts nearly half written. I've also got two conference papers about 80% written.

I'm on holidays now for about 15 more days. I'm on recreation leave til Friday and then we have holidays until January 4 because QUT is closed for Christmas. Obviously there will be things going on like Christmas and so on, so I won't be working all the time and I have to take this into account when thinking up any plans or goals, but I'm still hoping to get a fair bit done this week in particular. My current aim is to resubmit the thrice-rejected paper, finish my CTAC paper and another chlamydia modeling paper by the time I return to work. Let's see how that goes!

I'm also planning to get right back on track with the projects of my phd students. Sometimes I feel that they really suffer with me having a dual job (ie my admin-ish job and my academic job)...actually it's more that they suffer because my time is constantly full of meetings. Although at the same time it might be good because they seem to be really good at dealing with being in the deep end looking after their own research! Anyway I'm planning on getting on top of their current models and getting some really good input too them by week 1 of 2011.

Another interesting development: I'm the acting head of maths from January 4-14. I'm curious to see how much less or more work this is compared with being acting assistant dean. That position can be quite time consuming.

Anyway I guess we'll see how I'm going by e end of the week!

Day 57

Thoughts and reflections

Wow, the days are ticking by fast. Tomorrow is my last day of "work" until January 4. Next week I decided to take 5 days off to read books and work on things that I want to work on...and essentially ignore my email. The plan is to put together more concrete plans for my various projects that I'm working on at the moment and get my head together about what I'm doing next year.

I've realised something over I guess the last year really, but it's probably a culmination of the last three years where I have been focussed on the whole Teaching and Learning thing as Director of Studies (and its predecessor job titles). I need lots of things on at once to be able to make progress on anything. When I don't have much going on, I don't get much done. It's almost like I'm too free and can't focus on tasks. When I have a LOT on, I do little bits and pieces, but I get things done. When I'm super-stressed for time, with back to back meetings etc (say filling in for the A/Dean) I get LOTS of things done and can be really productive. Also, I've noticed that I really benefit from outlining my tasks to myself and sorting out how to get through each project - maybe that's obvious to most people, but I never worked that way before and haven't worked with anyone like that either. So for me, it has been enlightening.

Skype!


This morning I had a skype meeting with Dr Dan in Trondheim to restart our Chlamydia research work. It was good to get back onto this and get some plans down on paper. I think it ended up with Dan to be working on some coding for solving our (not yet really written) stochastic DE model.

That's another thing I've learned - my progress/productivity is really dependent on "check-in" meetings like this. I need constant reminders and kick starting to get through things. I can't just do it myself.

I think it's really great that I've been able to realise these things about myself - it seems to me it's important to get to know how you work and to know how you can get things done and why you sometimes don't get things done.

Day 50-51

This is a little of the topic, but I thought I'd quickly comment on something from The Australian, Higher Education supplement, from Wednesday. Disclaimer: all personal thoughts...does not reflect my institution or my faculty/discipline etc.

Casual numbers blow out

Jill Rowbotham writes about the explosion in the casual workforce in Australian academia, where currently around 60% of academics are employed on casual or sessional terms. The story is related to the doctoral research of Robyn May from Griffith Uni.

There is a statement that "They are stranded in casual positions and there is no career path" and it is essentially this that I would like to discuss. To make such a statement about such a diverse workforce is surely dangerous. For example, from my own experience as both a casual academic and now a full-time academic who is involved in some small way in employing casual staff, I see this as exactly the opposite of my experience. The casual work I completed while studying my PhD was basically part of my training as an academic - there was the research training in the PhD and the teaching training as a casual tutor/lecturer. Now as a full-time academic, we often talk about the sessional staffing positions in that way also. That is, by employing for example current PhD students in these positions, we are taking part in their academic training and assisting them in one day being an excellent applicant for an academic position. I don't think this is a one-off, at least in the area of mathematics...perhaps I am wrong?

Certainly there are uncertainties around future work - but that is the case with any casual job. At least with academia, there is some certainty around the schedule (ie the weeks of the year) and also to some extent how much work will be on offer - student numbers and therefore tutoring work, are roughly steady from year to year, and so too are the available people to staff these tutorials.

Personally, I would hate to see casualisation disappear (not that I have any reason to believe it will) as it would remove what is an excellent training ground for academics and also a real source of supplementary income for what I think would be a greater number of people than would be the case if all the positions were to become full or part time.

Day 47-49

A few downers

Well, the paper about teaching maths to students of non-English speaking backgrounds was rejected...again! No feedback. Just inappropriate. I'm determined to keep trying though. I reckon one more try at a reasonable journal and then I'll go to a fall back position of hitting up the C ranked journals. Hey, at least they are peer-reviewed!

Also, the American Institute of Mathematics workshop application was rejected...so no free trips to the US next year for everyone...sad. I have of course asked for feedback from them, but no response yet.

Uppers


I had a cracker of an idea last night about a way to use my simple mathematical skills and apply them to an area of government policy/action that may be a) actually useful and b) aligns nicely with QUT's strategic directions and advice to "become more active in public policy guidance etc". I'll not share until I actually know it's not a dumb idea! I'm speaking with someone from the relevant area next week, but at first glance (google scholaring) my idea has not been done yet but certainly seems to be useful from my perspective.

Masoum, one of my PhD students, has almost finished her second conference paper. We are just refining it and cutting down to the required number of pages. This one is a CA model of chlamydial infection and interaction with the immune system. It's also the basis for a good chunk of her PhD thesis. We talked about timelines to finish off her project, thesis etc on Monday - so that is exciting...for both of us, since she will be my first HDR completion as principal supervisor.

Day 42-46 CTAC wrap up

It took me a while to get back to writing this...so my memory may be hazy.

I didn't enjoy CTAC as much as I could have, but mainly due to the weather. Sydney was cold and rainy...not fun. The conference itself was not bad though, especially since I'm no computational mathematician, so it is kind of out of my interest zone. If anything, my interest would be tied to computational linear algebra, but there wasn't much on offer. It was quite heavily focussed on computational fluid dynamics. Although, there is a rumour that it will be better next time because we are most likely hosting CTAC in Brisbane in 2012.

Talks of interest

Some good talks that I saw included Qianqian Yang's - numerics for fractional diffusion equations. I think I've basically seen it before, but I think it's cool stuff, so it was good to watch again. Eventually I will understand that stuff. I didn't get to see Tim Moroney, Michael Dallaston or Julian Back though. My student Masoum did pretty well. Unfortunately she had to follow me and I already explained chlamydial infection in my talk, which took away from her description I think. However she did well in that her description was more detailed than mine and also more specific to her problem, so I was very pleased with it. She also showed that she knows what she is talking about, both in the biology and in the simulation area.

My own talk went pretty well considering I wrote the entire thing about 12 hours (most sleeping hours) prior to delivering it. I went with the "I'm a research group leader and don't actually do any work, so here's an overview of the problem before my student actually tells you something" method. It seemed to go ok. I think it was good for me too to actually get back into thinking about the basics of the problem.

Chairing


I chaired one of the three (simultaneous) final contributed talk sessions, featuring Fawang Liu, Mike Hsieh and a Professor Watanabe from Japan. It turns out that people who you expect to be troublesome and go over time, aren't/don't always! So that was good. We were basically on time. Not many questions though for the speakers, except Mike who got a couple.

Venue




I have been to UNSW before, so I knew what to expect. It's an interesting campus in that it is a hybrid between a technical institute and a Go8 university. The hybridisation being over time rather than a current one.



It's nice to walk around and see these ugly old concrete blocks or really ugly brick buildings with the concrete crumbling away at the edges to reveal the steal formwork beneath, and then right next to it, see a beautiful (faux?) sandstone building or modern architecturally designed building full of glass and weird angles.  Plus, knowing that it used to be NSWUT and is now one of the top 5 unis in the country on pretty much any measure you can find makes me wonder where QUT will be 60 years into its life... Oh, and they had blackboards in the main lecture room! Vive la chalkdust!

Lodgings


I stayed at the Parade Lodge, just down ANZAC Parade about two blocks away from the main entrance to UNSW. In reality, it wasn't that bad. There was plenty of room, private bathroom, a fridge, a window and relative peace and quiet. It was by no means fancy, it was very simple like a big dorm room I guess (not that I've really been in one of them), reasonably clean...but: the internet was super shoddy AND I had to pay for it. I hate that in Australia, internet is not free in hotels/lodges. Horrible. Fortunately I had my tetherable phone and 1G of available data - which I more or less used up.











Food and Culture


Was great, if only because I found a Colombian restaurant staffed by actual Colombians!!! I had a huge feast of empanadas and very spicy salsa, then a big plate of Bandeja Paisa (see picture) with a lulo juice. Great first day. On the Sunday I took the day off essentially and went into Sydney to see the Annie Liebovitz exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It's not really my thing, but she does interest me a little (although Susan Sontag is much more interesting to me...but they have an obvious connection) plus Charisse went when she was in Sydney, so I went for a look. I didn't really like the portrait shots, but the real action photos of her and Susan I found really interesting and enjoyed those.











Sunday also featured a solo meal at the Lowenbrau cafe at the Rocks - yummy preserved meats and veges with bread a litre of beer. Yum. And also dinner with A/Prof Wilson and Mrs Wilson at Surry Hills - tasty pizza at Pizza e Birra. Also yum. On the way to the Wilson's I took refuge in a corner pub while it rained - I love these little pubs they have in Surry Hills (and I'm sure, other places that I haven't been to). They are just like a lounge room that happens to have a bar behind it. I managed to come in just as three Aussies gave some poor pom a hard time for supporting a soccer team that wasn't his home town team, but a more successful side. Very amusing. Although, we were copping it on the tv screen in the test cricket at the time, so the pom was ok with it.

The conference dinner was good but nothing amazing. Italian food - not bad...poor beer selection. Afterwards, the boss tried to convince us to walk to the SCG (about 3km away) to do a nudey run...but some party pooper (cough-Elliot) made us turn around. So we just had some beers at the Doncaster.





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I guess not much else of interest happened. That will do!