SGO's Advent Calendar

Today is the first day of Advent. It is also our first day in SGO without Iina Sirviö, who completed her bachelor thesis last Friday and therefore moved back to Jyväskylä for her studies.

But before leaving, as she knows that chocolate is generally a good remedy against yearning, she offered a nice Advent calendar to all of us.

SHARE THE CHOCOLATES

Now, all we need to do is find a fair way to share the chocolates equally, taking into account each one's trips and holidays.

Kiitos, Iina, ja nähdään pian!

Research Ethics

Euthanasia, animal testing, biofuels, Milgram experiment... Although in physics we do not have the same ethical issues as in biology, medical science or psychology, there are quite a few situations a physicist encounters in his scientific life which require being careful, be it while processing data, publishing a paper or making public statements. This blog post itself has been ethics-checked with the utmost care and contains no plagiarism nor bear any kind of conflict of interest.

In the University of Oulu, all the doctoral students are required to take a Scientific Research and Ethics course during their PhD. For some of them, it is a topic they never dealt with before.

THINK BY THEMSELVES

This course consists of a couple of general lectures introducing the concept of ethics from a philosophical point of view, followed by several field-specific lectures. This enables to treat differently the students in medicine or biology who may open people or animals to publish scientific papers, students in humanities who may make statistics from personal data to publish scientific papers and students in physics or mathematics who may publish scientific papers. Finally, a group work on a research-ethics-related topic and leading to a presentation during a seminar allows the students to think by themselves about what ethics involves, based on a concrete case.

And for those students who may fail this ethics course in this autumn term, another one will be held next spring. In Finnish. Lesson no. 1: don't mix it with vinegar.

Acronyms in Science

This week, a SGO¹ delegation has been spending a couple of days in Oulu. Objectives: sort out study requirement issues for PhD students, discuss about optical measurements, visit the mathematics department, spend a day to brainstorm ideas for the ongoing science projects and even take a course. 

Waiting for the green light

In the process, we inherited an old instrument which will certainly make a blog post on its own in the near future and we visited the SGO Oulu group.

STILL TIME FOR SCIENCE

We dedicated the whole yesterday to discuss Derek's and my PhD projects, as all three involved supervisors were present. Many burning issues – such as ECTS² credits harvesting, follow-up group meetings, DTP³ and PSP⁴ submission – have been clarified, and still, we had time to discuss about science. I dare say that it was quite a fruitful day.

Among the science topics, Derek presented very exciting results about riometer interferometry using the LBA⁵ array of KAIRA⁶, while I introduced the radio-occultation model on which I have been working and about which I am about to submit my first paper (see picture). We also quite extensively discussed about the ongoing study of the high-latitude ionosphere response to solar wind HSSs⁷. More about these studies and results in the coming weeks' posts.

Today, Derek is taking the Introduction to Doctoral Training course, organised by UniOGS⁸. As we will be heading back to Sodankylä in a few hours, he will follow the afternoon session online via Connect-Pro. Provided the 3G connection will be good enough in the car...



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¹Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory
²European Credits Transfer System
³Doctoral Training Plan
⁴Personal Study Plan
⁵Low-Band Antenna
⁶Kilpisjärvi Atmospheric Imaging Receiver Array
⁷High-Speed Streams
⁸University of Oulu Graduate School

Ruska in Tähtelä

In Finnish Lapland, mid-September is well-known as the ruska time of the year, when leaves turn orange or red and the ground itself shows golden shades. It is the best time for mushroom and bilberry picking.

Scarlet trees are particularly gorgeous

Ruska only lasts for typically a few weeks. Mosquitos are (almost) gone, temperatures are still warm and days are still long, allowing very pleasant walks in forest. It is also the season when the hunting activities are increasing.

NO FREEZING TEMPERATURES

Every year, ruska occurs at the same period, as it is triggered by the drop in the daily amount of natural light reaching the trees. In Sodankylä (and therefore in Tähtelä), ruska reaches its climax during the second and third weeks of September (the official starting date and time are still actively debated). 

However, some years show a better ruska than others. To have a good ruska with outstandingly colourful displays, the air must be rather dry in late August and early September, and slightly freezing temperatures are required at night. This was not the case this year in Sodankylä, and leaves therefore tend to fall from the trees as soon as their colour changes. Yet, the landscapes still prove breathtaking.

Misty sunrise on the Kitinen river

In a week or so, most of the remaining leaves will start to fall. Then, after the equinoxe, days will become shorter and shorter; evenings will soon get darker and darker, nighttime temperatures will drop below zero. And within less than one month, there will be the first snow falls.

Winter is coming.

Two Sodankyläläistä in Oulu (cont.)

After four days in the University of Oulu, the premises start to appear less and less hostile and labyrinth-like, and most of our brain capacity can thus be allocated to the modern statistical methods.

They were all gone

The topics covered during the summer school provide a valuable overview of the tools and techniques that any scientist who deals with data may need to implement someday.

The first day was mainly an introduction to the concepts of probability, likelihood and statistics, with a particular focus on the two possible paradigms (frequentist and bayesian) and their different philosophies. The second day, the lectures dealt with parametric modelling and statistical inferences, while the main topic of the third day was regression and curve fitting. Finally, measurement uncertainty analysis, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, time series analysis and spatial statistics were on the programme of the last two days.

The Secret Map

Every afternoon, a couple of hours were dedicated to practicals directly related to the examples considered during the lectures. These exercises were implemented in R. R is a free software programming language specially designed for statistics, which contains a great amount of useful packages. In addition, R enables to obtain nice and highly-tailorable plots.

TOO OPTIMISTIC PRIORS

About forty students were taking part to this summer school, with various backgrounds from biology to quantum physics. As not everybody knew one another, a "get-together" evening was organised by Exactus at some bar downtown on Wednesday evening, with a concert of the Groovesisters, a local duo (keyboard and drums). It turned out that, albeit statisticians, the organisers had set slightly too optimistic priors regarding the number of students who would join in. As only eleven of them showed up, and as about eighty free-drink tickets had been bought, let us say that we did not run short of beer...

It was slightly cloudy

After this pretty intense yet fruitful week, the homesickness has become unbearable, and soon will we be driving north to enjoy the colourful ruska and go picking lingonberries.

Two Sodankyläläistä in Oulu

This week, the Exactus doctoral programme of the University of Oulu Graduate School (also known as UniOGS) organises a summer school around modern statistical methods for natural scientists. Exactus coordinates the doctoral training of students preparing a PhD in so-called "exact sciences", namely astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics and statistics. Incidentally, two of the members of the SGO staff who are currently preparing their PhDs within the Exactus doctoral programme are taking part to this summer school.

Statistics can provide the scientists with highly-valuable tools and methods which may not seem absolutely straightforward at first glance to the neophyte. Yet, the most confusing aspects encountered during the first day turned out not to be mathematical ones but had rather to do with finding directions inside the university buildings.

Entering the R gate

A FOUR-STOREY BUILDING

Let us just recall a few key figures. Slightly more than 15,000 students are studying in the University of Oulu. Population of Tähtelä: about 60 people (during working hours, in the peak season). Characteristic dimensions and main facts of the Polaria main building in Sodankylä: 60 x 60 x 7 m, two storeys, two corridors, about thirty rooms. In comparison, the Linnanmaa campus main building is more of the order of 300 x 400 x 15 m, with four storeys, too many corridors and an infinity (or so) of rooms. No wonder why such a vast and overcrowded place traumatised those two Tähtelä guys far more than the Bayesian inductive learning approach (and its implementation in R) to predict the color of the next ball drawn from a box given the outcome of a first observation.

We were clearly outnumbered

Hopefully, by the end of the week, the probability to reach the next lecture room without getting lost given the location of the previous one will be of the same order as the probability of being eaten by mosquitos while wandering by the Kitinen river in July.

To be continued...