CHIPP is the acronym of Swiss Institute of Particle Physics, which I belong to, since the beginning of my PhD. The CHIPP annual planery meeting is usually 2 days long, but since there are many things going on this year, it was a 3-day-meeting at Sursee, in the Canton of Lucerne. Even though most of the students were not attending the meeting, I was pretty impressed by the number of particle physicist in a small country like Switzerland. Perhaps less than a dozen back in my howe town.
Along with updates from phenomenologist engaging with LHC physics, current status of the LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS were also reported, neutrino updates, along with several planned experiments at CERN and PSI regarding anti-hydrogen and positive muon. While most of the items above were known before I arrive at the meeting, there were several "new and interesting" proposals going on at the moment.
First, LONG baseline neutrino experiment from CERN to Finland. Yes, no kidding,
read here for more details. Next, a 100 km tunnel for e+e- collider at CERN (read here).
Considering the time needed from planning to actual physics run of LHC experiments,
the plans were quite reasonable and sounded plausible from what we have achieved currently in the LHC and neutrino experiments. Hopefully all these projects get funded and receive huge international supports.
Other than physics related projects, it seems that plastic scintillating fibre detector is a hot research topic at the moment. A professor from Geneva University claimed that it was his idea to start with, and now everybody is following the same path. Other than application for LHCb experiment, it is also intended for mu3e experiment where timing and very high rate are crucial for the reconstruction of muon decay vertex. Several type of MPPC arrays were also developed together with Hamamatsu and I hope that I am able to build something nice for my coming project in the muon compression experiment.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Learn to Teach
Some of the people are born as teachers but to teach is a skill that you have to go through intensive training and accumulate experience to excel. To teach is not only to stand in front of the stage and to give a talk. It is much more than that, and of course depending on which type of course or thing that you are teaching, theoretical or practical.
I have registered for this course "Learn to Teach" which is offered by the Learning Center of ETH Zurich and University of Zurich. And I am glad that I have attended this course. It was a 3-day course targeted at PhD and PostDoc who has teaching assignment now or plan to do so in the future, and only limited to 10 people.
On the first day, I was informed through the email to bring a thing that is related to your life or that could explain what kind of person you are. I brought my Japanese electronic dictionary which was with me most of the time when I was in Japan. Others have brought things like book, spoon, crystal and pencil, and each has an interesting story linked to the life of its owner. Then came the fun part; everyone has to give a 3 minutes presentation explaining their research works and they will be recorded! It was the first time I had such thing and I found looking at myself in the video very funny. Maybe I should have tried it before as I could see many of my habits, quite a few of bad ones, and also how my voice and accent were during the presentation.
After the presentations, we were taught about the important points when giving a presentation, especially the short one. Those are like understanding the level of your audience, speaking with confidence, engaging audience, etc. Also we have learnt about how to give feedbacks to our colleagues. While there is no strict rules, usually they are grouped into head, hand, heart and other observations. At the end, we reviewed all the videos taken and gave feedbacks one by one in details to everybody. I won't tell the details here but there was a lot of "aha" moments for me, and I will keep all of them in mind when preparing for my next presentation.
Second day started with the introduction to teaching portfolio, which is kind of similar to a documentation of your teaching, but including also your teaching style and what kind of teacher you aim to be in the future. This is particularly important when you are applying for a job with teaching assignment, and I believe this is also important for non-teaching positions because this shows that you have the experience of teaching and also communicating with the other people, unless your teaching is one-way-traffic. There was also a section about how to plan a lesson and it was very useful for my teaching duties in the advanced student laboratory of institute for particle physics.
The final session of the day was about "Use of media" and it was really interesting to find out the pros and cons of every available media nowadays, such as blackboard and whiteboard, flip chart, Overhead Projector (OHP), and the digital version of it (like a camera). We were being told to tell a story about using the media, and some of the groups did it really well and creatively. I was working with two others on the blackboard, and we have shown that blackboard is really good for teaching subjects like mathematics and physics where equation derivations are heavily involved. However, it is not so nice to use when you are teaching subjects like biology because it takes time to draw the cell, etc and a bad drawing often confuses the students. Also, as I have experienced it before, it is really bad for the students in the front row as they have to inhale a lot of chalk dusts.
On the final day, we were given some tips on how to deal with stress during teaching, and I am eager to try them out during my next presentation. Then I will tell you if it works or not. :) Finally, 10 of us were asked (a day before) to present something based on the topics discussed (Use of media, teaching portfolio, presentation, lesson plan, etc).
I spent my whole night preparing a teaching plan for my student lab and I received very helpful comments and also compliments from the others. Hopefully I can make my lab appear more interesting to the students and they learn more effectively with some guide from the plan as well.
The course ended with a final feedback session among the teacher and the students. I have complimented her for the well prepared course and also her concentration ability to absorb the content of the presentation and at the same time observing the "head, heart and hand" of the presenter. To me it was very difficult, as I could only focus on either one. Overall, this course was very successful as I can everybody was very happy with it, and I hope that everyone will continue to improve their teachings and to make this world more wonderful with their researches!
After the presentations, we were taught about the important points when giving a presentation, especially the short one. Those are like understanding the level of your audience, speaking with confidence, engaging audience, etc. Also we have learnt about how to give feedbacks to our colleagues. While there is no strict rules, usually they are grouped into head, hand, heart and other observations. At the end, we reviewed all the videos taken and gave feedbacks one by one in details to everybody. I won't tell the details here but there was a lot of "aha" moments for me, and I will keep all of them in mind when preparing for my next presentation.
Second day started with the introduction to teaching portfolio, which is kind of similar to a documentation of your teaching, but including also your teaching style and what kind of teacher you aim to be in the future. This is particularly important when you are applying for a job with teaching assignment, and I believe this is also important for non-teaching positions because this shows that you have the experience of teaching and also communicating with the other people, unless your teaching is one-way-traffic. There was also a section about how to plan a lesson and it was very useful for my teaching duties in the advanced student laboratory of institute for particle physics.
The final session of the day was about "Use of media" and it was really interesting to find out the pros and cons of every available media nowadays, such as blackboard and whiteboard, flip chart, Overhead Projector (OHP), and the digital version of it (like a camera). We were being told to tell a story about using the media, and some of the groups did it really well and creatively. I was working with two others on the blackboard, and we have shown that blackboard is really good for teaching subjects like mathematics and physics where equation derivations are heavily involved. However, it is not so nice to use when you are teaching subjects like biology because it takes time to draw the cell, etc and a bad drawing often confuses the students. Also, as I have experienced it before, it is really bad for the students in the front row as they have to inhale a lot of chalk dusts.
On the final day, we were given some tips on how to deal with stress during teaching, and I am eager to try them out during my next presentation. Then I will tell you if it works or not. :) Finally, 10 of us were asked (a day before) to present something based on the topics discussed (Use of media, teaching portfolio, presentation, lesson plan, etc).
I spent my whole night preparing a teaching plan for my student lab and I received very helpful comments and also compliments from the others. Hopefully I can make my lab appear more interesting to the students and they learn more effectively with some guide from the plan as well.
The course ended with a final feedback session among the teacher and the students. I have complimented her for the well prepared course and also her concentration ability to absorb the content of the presentation and at the same time observing the "head, heart and hand" of the presenter. To me it was very difficult, as I could only focus on either one. Overall, this course was very successful as I can everybody was very happy with it, and I hope that everyone will continue to improve their teachings and to make this world more wonderful with their researches!
Sunday, June 9, 2013
CERN Computing School at Split, Croatia
About three years ago, I went to the Computing school co-organized by CERN and Brunel University at Uxbridge, London and enjoyed it a lot. This year I had the chance again to participate in the smaller version of it - thematic school, which means instead of focusing on network, computing and data analysis, it is now focusing on one single topic, which is computing technologies for this year. The school director is a very wonderful guy and his passion has bring the summer school to a higher dimension - study hard, play hard and social hard! I have been to many summer schools and have never experienced something like this. And this is going to be his last year organising such schools and he is retiring by the end of this year. :(
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| Port of Split, Croatia |
The venue of the school was at Split in Croatia, and is a tremendously scenic city alongside with Dubrovnik. The city lies along the coast of Adriatic sea and within the region of Dalmatian. It has a very rich history, from Roman period until Communist period just 20 years ago. As they have became part of European Union (EU) since 1st of July, the country is developing fast and the standard of living will be improved over the coming years. The living cost now is just slightly higher than in Malaysia so act faster if you wanna enjoy this country with less $$.
Back to the school, we spent the whole week learning about the front end of computing technologies. Basically our situation now is different from like 15 years ago where every few months you will see a new processor with higher and higher frequency. The era of parallel computing is evolving very fast, not only CPU but GPU and accelerator are heavily involved in delivering high performance computing. Of course, without the software part, hardware is nothing. Currently there are several ways of parallelise your program such as OpenMP and Intel TBB. The former parallelise your program at compiler level whereas the latter is library-based. OpenMP is currently the standard and I have started to implement it in my simulation and analysis programs. It's pretty simple.
We had also other lectures about comparison of different compilers, awareness about memory when programming something, and data oriented design. Overall I have benefited a lot from it and got to know more people in the physics computing field. I am also very fascinated by the development of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, which has 61 cores and 244 threads. This was unimaginable for me a few years back.
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| Closing dinner of the school (my table) |
Sunday, June 2, 2013
First time living in a hostel with strangers
Arrived one day earlier at Split, I have chosen to live in a hostel, in a 6-bed room. (Well, for cost reason obviously! It was about 15 CHF) Many have done it before, some even frequently, it was the first time for me! Living with somebody else in a room is nothing new for me, as I had experienced it before in the past when I was participating in training camps and summer schools, where I knew who will be my roommate before hand. However, it was totally unknown this time and I felt both excited and anxious.
Fortunately it turned out great and I got to meet a few young Asia students currently doing academic exchanges with European universities in different countries. What an exciting way of knowing new people! Perhaps I should try more in the future. :)
We hanged out together during the night and had dinner together as well. I particularly enjoyed the conversations regarding their experiences travelling in Europe during their 6 months stays over here. It was kind of luxurious to come to Europe when I was still studying in Japan but it seems that it is pretty common nowadays as the cost for travel has gone down. Also with lots of travel blog, offline phone map and Trip Advisor-like apps, it has became so easy and convenient to travel anywhere in the world.
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| Tchaikovsky Hostel |
We hanged out together during the night and had dinner together as well. I particularly enjoyed the conversations regarding their experiences travelling in Europe during their 6 months stays over here. It was kind of luxurious to come to Europe when I was still studying in Japan but it seems that it is pretty common nowadays as the cost for travel has gone down. Also with lots of travel blog, offline phone map and Trip Advisor-like apps, it has became so easy and convenient to travel anywhere in the world.
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| After dinner |
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Entering 3rd year of PhD
Time has flied so fast that now I am entering the 3rd year of my PhD. After upgrading myself at the EDIT 2013 school at KEK and J-PARC, I am back in ETH taking some courses to improve myself and also spending time on teaching the advanced student laboratory. At the same time, since a postdoc from PSI is leaving to the United States, I was travelling a lot to PSI to have more discussions and had some kind of technical and knowledge transfer about one of the projects that I have to take over from him. It was a waste that I didn't spend more time before, to work together with him. However, that whole month was really fruitful and I had a better idea of how this project is going forward.
Not related to my PhD but on 5th of May, there was the 13th General Election of my country. As I have already went back during the Chinese New Year, I have decided to vote by postal and therefore one week before the election, all the students went to Bern to vote at the Embassy of Malaysia. The voting process was not so complicated and there was around 30 people who were there deciding the future of our country. And we were following the announcement of the results the next week while having party at one of the students' house. The outcome was disappointing for a lot of people but it was moving into a good direction I would say, as a democratic country.
Something worth mention about this year was that, IT IS REALLY COLD! Seriously, the weather has been very cold (than normal years) since October last year, and while other European countries are having > 30 degrees, it was around 10 degrees in Zurich. And during a long weekends (+Monday), I escaped with my gf to Milano and Cinque Terre in Italy, because the weather forecast said that it WILL BE SUNNY over the WEEKENDS!
It turned out that the first day in Milano was rainy but not so bad. I had to spend 4 hours taking a train there though. However the shops over there were too high end that I managed to buy only the postcards and an Italian basic conversation book. Looking at how people spending their money, I was very suspicious about the economic crisis mentioned in the newspapers. Next day in the morning we took the early train departing to Cinque Terre, the town Monterosso to be exactly, which takes about 3 hours. On the way the train went through Genova and started from there we had a nice view of the coast from the train.
As we arrived at the Monterosso, the first town on the North of Cinque Terre (5 villages), we were overwhelmed by the tourists, mainly coming from America. But still, it has been a long time we have been to a beach and we completely forgetting about the other tourists. After checking in, we took the train departing to the last village, Riomaggiore. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was a landslide a few days before and they have closed the hiking trails linking the 5 villages. So we had to take a train from there to the 4th village from the north, Manarola. And this was the best of all, and one of my favorite travel locations so far. The sky was super blueish and the seafood in the restaurant was perfect, if not too much. We couldn't eat until the next day basically, after having 6 appetizers, 2 main courses, fine wine and desserts as lunch sets they offered.
Not related to my PhD but on 5th of May, there was the 13th General Election of my country. As I have already went back during the Chinese New Year, I have decided to vote by postal and therefore one week before the election, all the students went to Bern to vote at the Embassy of Malaysia. The voting process was not so complicated and there was around 30 people who were there deciding the future of our country. And we were following the announcement of the results the next week while having party at one of the students' house. The outcome was disappointing for a lot of people but it was moving into a good direction I would say, as a democratic country.
Something worth mention about this year was that, IT IS REALLY COLD! Seriously, the weather has been very cold (than normal years) since October last year, and while other European countries are having > 30 degrees, it was around 10 degrees in Zurich. And during a long weekends (+Monday), I escaped with my gf to Milano and Cinque Terre in Italy, because the weather forecast said that it WILL BE SUNNY over the WEEKENDS!
It turned out that the first day in Milano was rainy but not so bad. I had to spend 4 hours taking a train there though. However the shops over there were too high end that I managed to buy only the postcards and an Italian basic conversation book. Looking at how people spending their money, I was very suspicious about the economic crisis mentioned in the newspapers. Next day in the morning we took the early train departing to Cinque Terre, the town Monterosso to be exactly, which takes about 3 hours. On the way the train went through Genova and started from there we had a nice view of the coast from the train.
As we arrived at the Monterosso, the first town on the North of Cinque Terre (5 villages), we were overwhelmed by the tourists, mainly coming from America. But still, it has been a long time we have been to a beach and we completely forgetting about the other tourists. After checking in, we took the train departing to the last village, Riomaggiore. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was a landslide a few days before and they have closed the hiking trails linking the 5 villages. So we had to take a train from there to the 4th village from the north, Manarola. And this was the best of all, and one of my favorite travel locations so far. The sky was super blueish and the seafood in the restaurant was perfect, if not too much. We couldn't eat until the next day basically, after having 6 appetizers, 2 main courses, fine wine and desserts as lunch sets they offered.
Manarola
Then we spent some time walking around the village and took some nice pictures. And if you like photography, this is definitely the place you should visit in the future. Afterwards, we went to the other villages as well and there were very nice as well, although not as much as Manarola. Then after having a night walk in Monterosso with delicious local ice creams, we were completely exhausted. The next day, we spent about 8 hours on the trains, with a break at Milano while waiting for the train, and finally reached Zurich in the night.
This trip was really random but I am glad we have made it! :)
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Japan trip spring 2013
A few weeks after coming back to Zurich, I had a trip to Japan to attend a detector technology school. It was my second time going back to Japan after graduating and the longest one as well for more than 2 weeks. Basically I spent 1/3 of time in Tokyo, 1/3 in KEK and 1/3 in J-PARC. First time to do was of course to meet my fellow Malaysian friends in Tokyo (quite a lot were from Osaka but now working at Tokyo) and then enjoy Japanese Rahmen! (was eating it almost everyday when I was at Kyoto) Seriously, my life won't be as interesting without them, and some of them were with me during my ups and downs in Kyoto and Tokyo. I am very glad to have them, and it was a hard decision to leave Japan and to go to Switzerland.
Before starting of the school, I had the chance to visit my lawyer friend at Roppongi for lunch in a Chinese restaurant nearby. He was my badminton buddy back in my dormitory at Tokyo, TIEC. Even though we are from completely different background, we had good time together and were competing in a badminton team tournament together as one of the men doubles.
Back to the real business, I was thinking of participating in EDIT since last year. However, I had not much experience with the latest detection technologies that time hence has postponed it until this year. It was being held at Fermilab, United State. I have chosen photon detector and neutrino detector courses for the school and was glad to be given both my first choices under tough competition. I spend my first week at KEK for the photon detector, and have learned a lot regarding it. (I am working with it as well in the advanced student lab and realised from this course that there are several flaws in my setup at ETH.)
There was a free day during the course which is sunday, and I visited a Japanese badminton family at Kitamatsudo. I knew them through my senior in Japan and have been keeping in touch with them since 4 years ago. I would visit them when I was in Japan to play a few rounds of badminton and this time he presented me with a Yonex racket that I was dreaming of getting one (It was about 285 CHF! and I had given up buying it). At that moment, I was completely stunned and said no, no, no, I can't accept this. However, in the end I was being persuaded somehow. What a gift!!! After the badminton session we had lunch together and I shared with them some stories of mine in Zurich. Sometimes I felt that myself is very lucky to have met so many nice people in my life. This is also the reason why I have been working so hard, hope that one day I would make them very proud of me.
For the 2nd week, I went to J-PARC for the neutrino detector course. Coincidently, my coursemate at Kyoto University is my teaching assistant! (I was supposed to be working together with him during the master course but I have decided to go to University of Tokyo to challenge myself.) I had fun working there from early morning until the evening, and then dinner together in the somehow rural Tokai village. But it was fun, with lots of great foods, especially seafoods (well maybe with lots of radiation as well). We were partying until quite late in the last dinner, and it was such a wonderful school that I will miss for some time.
As the semester was already started, I couldn't spend any extra time here and had to leave the next day to Zurich. As my gf is missing Japan very much, I am pretty sure you will be reading my 3rd trip to Japan very soon. :)
Before starting of the school, I had the chance to visit my lawyer friend at Roppongi for lunch in a Chinese restaurant nearby. He was my badminton buddy back in my dormitory at Tokyo, TIEC. Even though we are from completely different background, we had good time together and were competing in a badminton team tournament together as one of the men doubles.
Back to the real business, I was thinking of participating in EDIT since last year. However, I had not much experience with the latest detection technologies that time hence has postponed it until this year. It was being held at Fermilab, United State. I have chosen photon detector and neutrino detector courses for the school and was glad to be given both my first choices under tough competition. I spend my first week at KEK for the photon detector, and have learned a lot regarding it. (I am working with it as well in the advanced student lab and realised from this course that there are several flaws in my setup at ETH.)
There was a free day during the course which is sunday, and I visited a Japanese badminton family at Kitamatsudo. I knew them through my senior in Japan and have been keeping in touch with them since 4 years ago. I would visit them when I was in Japan to play a few rounds of badminton and this time he presented me with a Yonex racket that I was dreaming of getting one (It was about 285 CHF! and I had given up buying it). At that moment, I was completely stunned and said no, no, no, I can't accept this. However, in the end I was being persuaded somehow. What a gift!!! After the badminton session we had lunch together and I shared with them some stories of mine in Zurich. Sometimes I felt that myself is very lucky to have met so many nice people in my life. This is also the reason why I have been working so hard, hope that one day I would make them very proud of me.
For the 2nd week, I went to J-PARC for the neutrino detector course. Coincidently, my coursemate at Kyoto University is my teaching assistant! (I was supposed to be working together with him during the master course but I have decided to go to University of Tokyo to challenge myself.) I had fun working there from early morning until the evening, and then dinner together in the somehow rural Tokai village. But it was fun, with lots of great foods, especially seafoods (well maybe with lots of radiation as well). We were partying until quite late in the last dinner, and it was such a wonderful school that I will miss for some time.
As the semester was already started, I couldn't spend any extra time here and had to leave the next day to Zurich. As my gf is missing Japan very much, I am pretty sure you will be reading my 3rd trip to Japan very soon. :)
Monday, February 18, 2013
New year 2013
Finally I have my own time to invest a little bit to this blog, after 6 months. So this is basically how I was in the past few months.
As I have mentioned before in my previous post, together with JE, ZY(F) and CL, we went to Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary for our year end holidays! It is worth noting that I have decided to buy the ticket after looking at the SWISS advertisement for just 5 minutes. CHF 120 for return direct flights was for sure a good bargain and I managed to convinced my crazy friends to tag along. And the next next day after sending off ZY(M, hope to have him back but well, he doesn't like Zurich, haha) at the Zurich Airport, we were back there again flying to Vienna airport. We were eating like hungry ghosts everyday at Vienna, from Schnitzel, Spare ribs to dozens of desserts at famous cake houses. Visited a couple of palaces, museums, and christmas markets in the city.
After 2 days in Vienna, we took a train to Budapest and arrived there with highly alert mode, as we have heard that pickpocket rate is very high there. Although our plan was to look for suspicious people and avoid them, in the end I think we were the most suspicious people there. This was for the first time I have been to an ex-communist country and I could really feel the difference compared to cities like Zurich, Vienna. As Hungary is in the middle of Germany and Russia, they suffered a lot during the World War and it took them quite some time to recover. For that reason, the living standard here is not as high compared to western Europe and the living cost is also much lower than in Zurich. 100 CHF was basically enough to survive there for 2 days including hostel and foods and souvenirs. The best view in Budapest was perhaps the Parliament that is situated next to the Danube river.
It took me a few days to recover from the travels and then it was 31st of December 2012. As usual, together with a bunch of crazy PhD students we went to Ah Fatt's place at Dietikon and had our new year eve party over there. On the way back, we did our count down in a bus with many strangers and that was superbly amazing! Afterwards we went to Rigiblick to enjoy the view of Zurich downtown and fireworks, of course not without beers and snacks. Different countries, different locations, different friends every year. Time is ticking away from us .......
Before I could spend time flashing back all the previous events, busy life started again in the new year. After several meetings at PSI, I had also a demonstration of advanced student lab for physics teachers in Switzerland. Then a special lecture on Bayesian analysis in a particle physics experiment by my boss's PhD supervisor. Then I was back in Bolehland again together with CL. Oh, and before that, I have won finally 2 single matches and being promoted to D1. However, my team fared badly and was last in the 3rd league. Will be dropped to 4th league in the coming season and hopefully we can get back to 3rd league again next year.
Back to my back home trip. Celebrating my birthday on the arrival day's evening (haha, on purpose!) was perhaps not a good idea because of jet lag. The foods were really nice but my stomach wasn't in fully enjoy mode. But still it was great to be back at home. Maybe it is because of me getting older and the limited time I could spend with my family, I started to appreciate time together a lot compared to last time. My parents are in their 50s, and I am soon 30s. No matter how far apart, I love you Mummy and Daddy! and of course my sister as well. (else she will kill me, :p) In this 2 weeks, I have accomplished almost everything that I have planned to do, such like hair cut (bloody hell RM 7 only!!! compared to RM 150 in Zurich), car driving lesson (yes, I still don't have my license yet, T.T), new specs (luckily the eye sights are not getting too bad), meeting elementary (after 17 years! everybody still the same. What a miracle!) and high school friends, etc. Chatting with them reminded me of how little I still remember of the past.
This is most probably my brain is full of information about new location and friends each time I moved to another city. (Penang->Osaka->Kyoto->Tokyo->Zurich) And I am sure the list will continue to grow. Two weeks were really short, I wished to have more. Perhaps after my PhD, I can think of spending 3 months with my family.
As I have mentioned before in my previous post, together with JE, ZY(F) and CL, we went to Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary for our year end holidays! It is worth noting that I have decided to buy the ticket after looking at the SWISS advertisement for just 5 minutes. CHF 120 for return direct flights was for sure a good bargain and I managed to convinced my crazy friends to tag along. And the next next day after sending off ZY(M, hope to have him back but well, he doesn't like Zurich, haha) at the Zurich Airport, we were back there again flying to Vienna airport. We were eating like hungry ghosts everyday at Vienna, from Schnitzel, Spare ribs to dozens of desserts at famous cake houses. Visited a couple of palaces, museums, and christmas markets in the city.
After 2 days in Vienna, we took a train to Budapest and arrived there with highly alert mode, as we have heard that pickpocket rate is very high there. Although our plan was to look for suspicious people and avoid them, in the end I think we were the most suspicious people there. This was for the first time I have been to an ex-communist country and I could really feel the difference compared to cities like Zurich, Vienna. As Hungary is in the middle of Germany and Russia, they suffered a lot during the World War and it took them quite some time to recover. For that reason, the living standard here is not as high compared to western Europe and the living cost is also much lower than in Zurich. 100 CHF was basically enough to survive there for 2 days including hostel and foods and souvenirs. The best view in Budapest was perhaps the Parliament that is situated next to the Danube river.
It took me a few days to recover from the travels and then it was 31st of December 2012. As usual, together with a bunch of crazy PhD students we went to Ah Fatt's place at Dietikon and had our new year eve party over there. On the way back, we did our count down in a bus with many strangers and that was superbly amazing! Afterwards we went to Rigiblick to enjoy the view of Zurich downtown and fireworks, of course not without beers and snacks. Different countries, different locations, different friends every year. Time is ticking away from us .......
Before I could spend time flashing back all the previous events, busy life started again in the new year. After several meetings at PSI, I had also a demonstration of advanced student lab for physics teachers in Switzerland. Then a special lecture on Bayesian analysis in a particle physics experiment by my boss's PhD supervisor. Then I was back in Bolehland again together with CL. Oh, and before that, I have won finally 2 single matches and being promoted to D1. However, my team fared badly and was last in the 3rd league. Will be dropped to 4th league in the coming season and hopefully we can get back to 3rd league again next year.
Back to my back home trip. Celebrating my birthday on the arrival day's evening (haha, on purpose!) was perhaps not a good idea because of jet lag. The foods were really nice but my stomach wasn't in fully enjoy mode. But still it was great to be back at home. Maybe it is because of me getting older and the limited time I could spend with my family, I started to appreciate time together a lot compared to last time. My parents are in their 50s, and I am soon 30s. No matter how far apart, I love you Mummy and Daddy! and of course my sister as well. (else she will kill me, :p) In this 2 weeks, I have accomplished almost everything that I have planned to do, such like hair cut (bloody hell RM 7 only!!! compared to RM 150 in Zurich), car driving lesson (yes, I still don't have my license yet, T.T), new specs (luckily the eye sights are not getting too bad), meeting elementary (after 17 years! everybody still the same. What a miracle!) and high school friends, etc. Chatting with them reminded me of how little I still remember of the past.
This is most probably my brain is full of information about new location and friends each time I moved to another city. (Penang->Osaka->Kyoto->Tokyo->Zurich) And I am sure the list will continue to grow. Two weeks were really short, I wished to have more. Perhaps after my PhD, I can think of spending 3 months with my family.
Monday, December 24, 2012
End of the year 2012
2012 is quite a fruitful year and "luckily" the "End of the world" didn't turn out to be true. Even though there is still a year end holiday trip to Vienna and Budapest to follow, I am quite satisfied with the overall performance this year and managed to identify a few sections to be improved.
Celebrating CNY at home was very rare for me in the past few years due to the crashing dates of CNY and examinations in the Japanese universities. For the first time I went back to Penang together with my GF for CNY taking SQ. It was always happy to be back in your hometown and meeting family, relatives and friends. Visiting each other during the CNY, BBQ at high schoolmate's house, Karaoke, Futsal with old time friends, Birthday party in a hotel restaurant, and more .... all are good memories, considering I would not be going back for good in the near future.
On my flight back, we have a transit at Paris and we spent several days touring around the city. However, it was damned cold! At the moment we left Zurich, the temperature was around 5'C and we expected it to go up once we returned. Hence all the clothes with us were not so strong against the below zero temperature. Fighting with those crazy cold winds, we managed to go up the Eiffel Tower, only to find ourselves shaking like hell the moment we walk out to take some pictures. Due to the extreme cold, most of the time were being spent in the hotel room or cafes. On the last day we took TGV back to Zurich and felt relieved when we reach home! Paris, see you next time during the summer.
Perhaps the most encouraging event in terms of academic is the acceptance of my first co-authored paper by PRL. It was not the kind of breakthrough in Physics but still I felt proud of it after putting lots of effort onto it.
The most "exciting" moment of the year was the trip to QED 2012 international school at Corsica. Started with the delay of flight from Zurich to Paris CDG (well, Air France), then I missed my connection flight from Paris Orly to Ajaccio. I had to wait in the airport for 8 hours and I fall asleep for at least 3 times during the wait time. Luckily all my belongings were still with me. It was already 12 am in the night by the time I reached Ajaccio and had no choice but to take a taxi to the Institute of Scientific Research Cargese. Fortunately the arrangement was being made by the organiser and I just had to wait for the taxi driver to pick me up at the airport. There was another Hungarian woman sharing the taxi and thanked god she could speak some French and communicate with the driver. Imagine 90 mins of drive in the completely dark island roads without any conversation! Despite all these bad starts, the QED school turned out to be a great one and I managed to learn a lot and made some geek friends. And for the first time I have prepared both oral and poster presentations.
Soon after I came back from the school, I started my football training for the MSA 4 nation football competition. After weeks of exercising with a group of African football teams, I managed to contribute a bit to the 2nd place won by MSA.
I attended Swiss Physics Society Meeting this year which was held in my university, ETH. I gave a talk this time (last year at EPF Lausanne which was poster)
and it was not bad I guess. 2 months later I gave another one during the Zurich Particle Physics PhD seminar after I came back from another school at Zuoz. This was the one organised by PSI biennially, and I managed to met up my junior in Tokyo during the school. In fact he spent some days at my place and I brought him to some places in Chur and Zurich. I guessed he was quite shocked with the living cost here.
At the same time, I was busy on the EM field simulation for the beam time at MuSR, PSI. After working most of the time on COMSOL and GEANT4, finally I got to identify some mistakes in the simulations done by others last year and did some corrections to the data analysis last year as well. The beam time turned out to be successful as well as there was no serious problem during the run and the data looks okay. The analysis is still on the way but should be finalised soon.
In September, I re-visited London again to renew my passport. It was a kind of coincidence as my last trip here ended on 5th Sep (2010) and this time I arrived on 5th Sep (2012). The process of passport renewal was quite simple and the nasi lemak sold at the Embassy of Malaysia was very nice as well. This time I managed to visit some of the places that was missed last time, such as Hyde Park, Oxford Road (don't come here unless you want to have an empty pocket or wallet), and more. Also I have visited my physicist friend at Cambridge and joined a punting trip around the river.
He had given me the wrong number but somehow we managed to meet each other on the street (Penang lang faces, haha.) thanks to a time window discussed beforehand. Did a lot of shoppings and eatings (Dim sum, Rahmen, Fish n Chips, etc) Gonna come here again next year when my GF has to renew her passport. :)
This autumn marked my first participation in the Swiss Badminton League, 3th league. Even though it is quite expensive to get a license, I like the system here where they record all your played matches and even has a ranking system just like the one of Badminton World Federation. The classes are from D3 to A1 (D3,D2,D1,C3,... until A1), and you get points by beating the players ranked above you. Points gained through tournament and interclub are being calculated together. Throughout the autumn and winter, I managed to win a few matches in the tournaments but however I lost all my 8 matches (singles and doubles and mixed) so far. There are still 8 league matches next year and I need to put in more effort in my training. Even though I have joined a training course at the beginning of December, it will take some time to fully utilised what I have learnt there.
So, bye bye 2012 and hope that you are a good one, 2013!
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