Posts by KevinDouglasPhD

1) Message boards : Cafe SETI : Dr. Kevin Douglas is User of the day - Sunday 03.23.2008 (Message 730626)
Posted 26 Mar 2008 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Thanks everyone for your kind wishes. I'm glad to be earning credits again, so I don't feel undeserving of being a user.
2) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : Back in Business (Message 724757)
Posted 11 Mar 2008 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Hi, SETI crunchers. I've been away from SETI@home for a long time. I'm now teaching in Prince George, BC at the College of New Caledonia. I've installed BOINC on my office computer since it's really fast. I couldn't even look at my own webpages at SSL, but that seems to have finally fixed itself. I'm getting some papers published from my work in Berkeley, which is nice. In the summer I am moving to Exeter in the UK, since I got a Marie Curie Fellowship. As some of you may have heard the UK is cutting a lot of their physical science funding, which is threatening the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope. First Arecibo, now JB. How sad.

Anyway, just an update and a hello.
Kevin
3) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #031 - Gone But Not Unforgotten (Message 643291)
Posted 17 Sep 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Greetings from Kelowna BC! I've been teaching at UBCO for a couple weeks now, and it's been going quite well so far. Teaching is quite a bit different from research, I must say. I can't decide which I prefer, but given I want to be a professor someday I should be good at both.

The week before teaching I spent just down the valley in Naramata with a bunch of radio astronomers and grad students for a summer school on the Interstellar Medium. It was so much fun, and a great way to get back into the Canadian astronomical community. I'd better send Eric my travel claim form though before I lose it under a pile of course notes or something.

There was a UFO conference in Edmonton Alberta this past weekend. A friend of mine works for the Telus Science Center up there so she was all excited about getting to meet Stanton Friedman. I wish I'd known about it sooner; I might've tried to get some SETI@home representation there. Apparently over 1000 people attended it.
4) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #030 - Last Week in Berkeley (Message 624527)
Posted 22 Aug 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I will depart from Berkeley in the next three hours. It has been a great 26 months working here, and though my job wasn't really doing much SETI@home related work, it was still a cool experience being able to see what goes on behind the scenes. I probably won't blog here too much from now on, but I won't be a stranger either. I think the computer UBCO is giving me will be a better machine than my laptop to install BOINC on. I think my laptop's on its last legs (and those are borrowed legs anyway since Eric got me a new hard drive about a year ago).

So long, SETI enthusiasts! The Universe Will Provide

5) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #030 - Last Week in Berkeley (Message 624003)
Posted 21 Aug 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
My days in Berkeley are numbered; that number being three, at most. My poster and talk for the conference in Naramata that starts this Sunday are both done. I need to go to UBCO this Friday to take care of some things, so the latest I'll leave is Thursday morning.

Tonight the Zappa Plays Zappa tour rolls into Berkeley. I went to their concert last year in San Francisco and it was amazing. I'll be going tonight as long as the guy on craigslist who contacted me lets me know where I can meet him. I've heard this latest tour with Ray White on vocals is really terrific.


. . . figurEd ya might likE thE LINK abovE Kevin . . . Best of Luck @ Berkeley

and in that FuturE EndEavor of Yours in BC Sir . . . Enjoy and Hope ya make it to thE COncErt and havE fun . . .


Thanks as always. The concert was unbelievable. I think I'll leave Berkeley in the next 36 hours.
6) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #030 - Last Week in Berkeley (Message 623586)
Posted 20 Aug 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
My days in Berkeley are numbered; that number being three, at most. My poster and talk for the conference in Naramata that starts this Sunday are both done. I need to go to UBCO this Friday to take care of some things, so the latest I'll leave is Thursday morning.

Tonight the Zappa Plays Zappa tour rolls into Berkeley. I went to their concert last year in San Francisco and it was amazing. I'll be going tonight as long as the guy on craigslist who contacted me lets me know where I can meet him. I've heard this latest tour with Ray White on vocals is really terrific.
7) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #029 - Back in Sunny CA (Message 618917)
Posted 14 Aug 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I am in Dan Wertheimer's super-secret astronomers-only basement suite, since I'm back in Berkeley for a little less than two weeks while my family's back up in Canada. I have a major European Fellowship proposal due in about 12 hours, and I've been working with colleagues in England on that for the last three weeks, except when I've been on the road, which has been a lot. I've driven over 7000 km in the last 3 weeks. Doesn't leave much time for pensive and critical though.

Sadly this travel means I might not see Eric again for quite some time. Before I left he took off for the Bioastronomy conference in Puerto Rico, and just before I got back he took off for the Midwest. And I'll be gone back to BC before he gets back, since I'll be attending an Interstellar Medium conference in Naramata. I have no idea when I'll be able to prepare my GALFA presentations for that...

But it was good to see everyone else today. Matt and Jeff and especially Bob seem to have gotten multibeam SETI@home going, which is great news. Now I just might try to install BOINC again on my laptop.
8) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #028 - Good Old Penticton (Message 611710)
Posted 30 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I'm in a guest office at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, just south of Penticton BC. I grew up in Penticton, from age 6-18, so it's like being home. I've visited the UBCO campus a few times but I needed to come down here to use a linux machine so I can work on some important GALFA stuff. The Okanagan is hotter than the Bay Area; it's just great. Of course come September I'm sure I'll be longing for the Berkeley sunshine.
9) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #027 - Over the border (Message 607733)
Posted 23 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I am in Kelowna, British Columbia now. Man the Okanagan is just as beautiful as I remember it. We had a fun drive from Berkeley up to BC. It took a while at the border since I had to give customs a list of everything we were bringing across, both now and in later trips. Tomorrow I'll visit UBCO and check out my lecture spaces etc. Should be fun. The outage seems to have gone smoothly so I can hopefully start doing more SETHI and GALFA science remotely.
10) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post #026 - Northern Lights (Message 604831)
Posted 17 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I almost forgot to do my regular Monday blog. Starting this Saturday I'll be away from Berkeley for about 3.5 weeks, so this blog might go on hiatus until August 13 unless I get enough time to a computer while I'm gone. Eric and Dan are in Puerto Rico this week for the Bioastronomy conference, so I'm mostly trying to shore up some loose ends with SETHI and starting up a paper on the GALFA data reduction pipeline with some colleagues down the hill.

I thought about writing a list of the things I will and won't miss about working in Berkeley. While far from complete, the things I am sure of are as follows (in no specific order):

What I will miss about my time in Berkeley
The weather
The view from SSL
My co-workers
The great restaurants discovered at SETI lunches
The eclectic music and video stores

What I won't miss about my time in Berkeley
The filthy, ugly downtown Berkeley area
Poor coverage of hockey
Election '08 hype
Fog
11) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#025 - counting out time (Message 601832)
Posted 11 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Textbook: Look at the book by Wangness. It may fit your expected needs. I tried 3 textbooks over my sophomore E&M teaching years and Wangness beat the others (including Griffiths) handsdown from the student's feedback; and mine as I recall. Griffiths is the pits.


Thanks PhonAcq for that recommendation. I'd looked at that one, and went back to look at it again after you suggested it. Not enough on circuits, and a little too much on propagation of waves. But I agree it's a good text. I think there are slightly different curriculum paths between US and Canadian universities. A lot of 2nd-yr E&M courses in the US dive right into stuff that requires vector calculus - Berkeley is a perfect example with Purcell's book. In Canada, at least from the universities I'm familiar with, "classical" E&M in all its calculus-laden glory is taught in 3rd & 4th years, from texts like Griffiths and/or Jackson.
12) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#025 - counting out time (Message 601093)
Posted 9 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Today feels so much like a Friday, since last Wednesday was a holiday and I've been at work every day since. Yesterday I was up here while my car was supposedly getting new tires, but the garage had to wait until this morning to get a full set of the tires I wanted. Now I have some beautiful new treads for my upcoming 12,000-km road trip, which starts next Saturday.

I've been trying to pick out a good textbook for one of the courses I'm going to teach at UBCO. It's a second-year intermediate E&M course, so there's some E&M theory but nothing heavy on vector calculus like Griffiths' Intro to Electrodynamics. Lots of 1st-yr texts cover the E/M theory and basic circuit theory quite well, but it would be good to find something a little more sophisticated. Any suggestions? Something that mixes theory and practical applications well. The other two courses I'll teach are 1st-yr physics and 1st-yr astronomy, so I'll have quite a lot of students.

Oh, anyone in the Bay Area who is looking to buy some slightly used furniture for a real good price can contact me.
13) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#024 - deuces wild (Message 599631)
Posted 6 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:

... but these are still pretty noisy compared to the kind of spectra we get from ALFA.

Any ideas as to why that is?


Quite simply because ALFA is a state of the art receiver, whereas the line feed has inherently less optimal systematics etc. With GALFA we can get the system noise to less than 0.1 K in a few seconds, while for SETHI spectra a typical 13-second spectrum has ~ 2K noise rms, so we need a few hundred of them to bring the noise down to something comparable.

And we don't get a few hundred spectra per pixel that often, except near 18 degrees when the telescope is stowed. Here's an image of sky coverage:



Each pixel represents how many spectra went into the averaging for that position. In this map it ranges from 0 to over 640 (the white pixels which cluster mainly near dec=18). It's a good example of the non-uniform sky coverage which makes the SETHI survey less than ideal. Hopefully Eric and I will submit a paper on it soon, warts and all.
14) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Budget Cuts Threaten (Arecibo) (Message 599450)
Posted 6 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Try going here.

Thanks for the newsletter link. That is a very slow download at the moment.

Aside: Is the line-feed antenna still in use for anything or is it completely idle now that s@h no longer use it?

Regards,
Martin


It's still listed as having available "CH" (ie carriage house) receivers for experiments at 47 and 430 MHz. I don't know how often it's used, though. I forget but maybe those ones will be some of the soon-to-be mothballed receivers.
15) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Budget Cuts Threaten (Arecibo) (Message 599136)
Posted 5 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
Cuts threaten world's largest telescope

Any more news on this?

The staff count has been reduced (layoffs), and the budget is (or is to be) drastically reduced.

Arecibo gets to be used pretty much only for only the presently funded ongoing surveys.

Anything more in the news?

Regards,
Martin


Try going here.
16) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#024 - deuces wild (Message 597893)
Posted 3 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
If you ever do a roadtrip out to Edmonton, Alberta from Kelowna, drop me a line.

This SETI supporter would like to buy you a cold one for all that you do. :)

Bax


Sounds good. I have family all over Northern Alberta (mostly Grande Prairie region) so it's a good possibility.
17) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#024 - deuces wild (Message 597539)
Posted 2 Jul 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I have been working at SSL for two years and two days. And, in two months, I won't be working here any longer - though I'll only be in Berkeley for probably half that time.

Trying to find a place to live in Kelowna - not easy to do from a distance, but I've got some promising leads. I'll be on a road trip from July 21-Aug 5, so I really want to take care of finding an apartment in BC before that. Also hoping I can go to a great ISM Conference in the Okanagan just before my teaching job starts. But if I go to that, the last time I'll see Eric is around July 14, before he leaves for a conference. Then either one or both of us is away from Berkeley for the rest of the summer.

I've run a couple new SETHI cubes, using my blacklist (BL) to exclude bad spectra, as well as not running the median cumulative filter (MCF). I'm mostly interested in redoing the Galactic Plane regions, since they are most severely affected by the MCF. The BL seems to have gotten rid of some streakiness in the cubes too, but these are still pretty noisy compared to the kind of spectra we get from ALFA.
18) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#023 - Good Evening, Here is the News... (Message 593996)
Posted 28 Jun 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:

Kevin , My very best wishes to you and your family ...


Thanks, Byron. It'll be nice to be back in BC. Today was my 34th birthday. I had some fun looking at HI, dust and UV data in Taurus. Another paper that could be done this summer...
19) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#023 - Good Evening, Here is the News... (Message 593628)
Posted 27 Jun 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I'm nearly at a loss for words. Today I learned that a grant proposal for the GALFA project has received funding from the NSF...

Congrats all round!

And change is good, so long as you can keep pace with it!


So... s@h is collecting data from ALFA... How is the data collected for GALFA different? Or used differently?

Is there a link to a good summary for GALFA?


Thanks Martin and everyone else for the good spirits. To answer your GALFA question: there are multiple backends at Arecibo that can record simultaneously. SETI@home has its own data recorder, and for HI obs with GALFA we have a separate spectrometer, which we call GALSPECT. That spectrometer was built by people with SETI@home ties too: Dan, Jeff Mock, others. If you look at the GALFA Website you can read about other GALFA science besides Galactic HI - there are continuum and radio-recombination line surveys in the planning stages, but the GALFA-HI is the only group that's done a lot of observations to this point. And then of course ALFA is used for other things besides Galactic surveys, like pulsar research and extragalactic observations too.

I'm taking the Kelowna job!
20) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#023 - Good Evening, Here is the News... (Message 592600)
Posted 26 Jun 2007 by Profile KevinDouglasPhD
Post:
I'm nearly at a loss for words. Today I learned that a grant proposal for the GALFA project has received funding from the NSF. It is possible that as a result of this new funding, I might relocate to another university. On top of that, I was offered a teaching job at the Kelowna campus of the University of British Columbia. Wow. Too much all at once. It's weird to think I might not be here come September.

All that overshadows my other news, which is that the SETHI datacubes are all done (as of last week, actually). In the last week I've run some algorithms over the spectral database to weed out bad spectra, and it's done an excellent job of doing so. I think about 99.92% of the bad spectra have been properly blacklisted from further processing.



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