Major Changes...

I promised a string of articles written by yours truley to appear on SLAC Today this week. I lied. Well, I didn't really lie, I just spoke too soon.

It was announced this past Monday that SLAC's Director of nearly a decade has stepped down and been replaced by a temporary director until a permenant replacement is found. Although the lab knew this was coming at some point, nobody knew exactly when. So, as you can imagine, SLAC Today has been completely dedicated to announcements about the old director, new director, changes being made at the lab, and announcements for events to commemorate the now ex-director.

And wow has it been busy here in the communications office.

People have been scurrying to make sure everything that's happening is being communicated clearly and promptly to the entire site. The subject is touchy to say the least, so everything is being carefully crafted and edited several times before being published. It's been an interesting few days.

And to make matters worse, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the head of the communications office is leaving SLAC at the end of the year to do the same job for a European fusion project based in France. He has become a steadying influence and face at SLAC and his departure at this critical time of changing directors has added to the general unease permeating the air.

But the lab continues, life goes on, and great science is still being done at SLAC. And they're keeping me very busy in my final few days. I've got about 10 stories or so in some form of the writing process. I'm sure they're happy I'm leaving them with a large number of stories to run while the next intern goes through the arrival process that takes a few days...

Blazars... The Final Edition

I posted twice earlier about a complex scientific story about Blazars, you can catch up on them here and here.

I first outlined everything I knew in an informal way. Then I posted the rough draft of the story I wrote about the information I outlined. Here, now, is the final text that was edited several times and posted this morning on SLAC Today.

Which do you think is best?

Scattered across the universe, certain galaxies emit enormously powerful jets of relativistic particles intertwined with bursts of gamma rays. Although thousands of these jets have been observed, the precise mechanism by which gamma rays are created has mystified astronomers for more than 15 years. Recently, a team of SLAC scientists made a surprising discovery about the source of the most powerful of these gamma rays that raises as many questions as it answers.

One of the main questions researchers seek to answer about these unique radio galaxies—also known as "blazars" or "quasars" depending on the jet's orientation—is where, exactly, the gamma rays are created. Researchers believe that a black hole at the center of each quasar emits the jet of particles including electrons, positrons and protons. For years they postulated that the gamma rays were created within this jet stream. But later studies led some to believe that the gamma rays were instead produced by a yet unknown physical phenomenon very near the edge of the black hole itself. Now, SLAC researchers Teddy Cheung and Lukasz Stawarz, in collaboration with Daniel Harris at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, believe they have finally nailed down the location of gamma ray production.

"It's much farther down the jet than most scientists thought," said Cheung. "It's a very surprising result."

Cheung and his associates recently argued that gamma rays are emanating from a disturbance, or "knot," traveling down the jet flow about 326,200 light years from the central super massive black hole in M87, the only jet close enough to Earth for detailed observation. This places gamma ray production in this galaxy 100 times further from the edge of the black hole than previously believed.

To make this discovery, Cheung and his colleagues used data from four different experiments focusing on different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum; the Hubble Space Telescope observed visible light, the Chandra X-ray Observatory focused on x-rays, the Very Large Array received radio data, and the Very Long Baseline Array scanned the radio spectrum. All four showed a pronounced spike in intensity of the knot's emissions early in 2005. The team then compared their data to gamma ray observations of M87 made by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS). Because HESS data also showed a spike in gamma ray intensity at the same time, the team concluded that these gamma rays are produced in the knot.

"The fact that the knot is producing these gamma rays so far away from the jet's origin raises many questions about what makes this location in the jet special," said Cheung. "We think the jet here has been refocused due to interactions with the external medium, but this is just one plausible scenario. Hopefully it's a question that will be solved by scientists in the future."

—Ken Kingery, SLAC Today, September 7, 2007

Winding Down... or Winding Up?

It's been about a week since I updated my posts here. The reason for this is, honestly, blogging just about every day for two months got very tedious. It was too much and I quickly found I had run out of things to talk about. But with my apologies in mind, stay tuned for my final few posts, they'll be worth the wait...

I should put that in my final paper on the blogging experience...

Moving on, today marks one week until my last day at SLAC. And am I winding down with less stories coming across my desk? NO! Ha, that's laughable. As you can imagine, they're going to get their money's worth from me before I leave! And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I would absolutely hate just sitting at my desk for a week mindlessly waiting for my departure day.

So that gives me plenty to talk about. Hooray!

The McCallum-Turner articles have actually come along nicely. I have only a couple more to write for full-length website articles. Although, there are still plenty in the hands of my editors that I have to then get final approvals for, which means relying on others to read through them and send them back. This can be a hassle. But oh well.

Lots of profiles have been assigned to me as well. As you can probably guess, this makes me happy, because I enjoy them and I'm good at them. My editor apparently agrees since she gave me several to do before I leave... (that and she told me that I was)

I completed one recently on SLAC's Housing Office which was fun. The women in the office are extremely nice and very helpful, not to mention excellent at their jobs. I also recently did a story about the Pief Mobile. This is a cart that the first director of SLAC--a world famous physicist--drives around the site in. His assistant recently gave it a few modifications such as lightening bolt decals and special licences plates that read, "e-XLR8R 2." Cute, huh?

I've also got several science stories in the work. One I'm particuarly fond of. It's about trigger software at the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Basically this software has to decide whether a particle collision is interesting enough to record or not in 40 milliseconds. This is a tall task when dealing with complicated physical processes, some of which are still theoretical... Story to come soon...

So stay tuned. The next couple of weeks on SLAC Today will be the week of Ken!

The Pink Pig of Success

The WHAT?!?!?!

You read it right, you're monitor isn't malfunctioning, I said the pink pig of success. Never heard of it? Well that's because you don't work in SLAC's communications office…

Every week in our office meeting the director hands out a pink toy pig that, when turned on, walks, oinks and wiggles its tail. The award used to be a golden pig that looked rather like a Buddhist statue, but it was retired when the head kept falling off…

Anyways, I was happily surprised to receive the award this week for my general efforts in keeping a steady flow of stories coming to SLAC Today. I think the straw that tipped the scales were my two stories last Friday about Monte Carlo software and the CosmicVariance blog. The director seemed to particularly enjoy those two. But he also cited the general volume of stories I've been generating, that several days have consisted entirely of my works, and that we're getting along fine with just one intern. (I guess sometimes they have overlapping interns to share the story workload?)

But the pig is soft and nice to pet when I hit a bad spell of writer's block.

For example, I spent the past couple of days whipping out two stories in a very short amount of time. Granted, they were no brainers, just a couple of short pieces to fill in some blank spots in SLAC Today, but they turned out pretty well none-the-less. The first ran on Thursday and was about a small set of three garden boxes at the corner of a nearby building that contain corn, jalapeños, and basil.

I actually had to do some investigative reporting on that one by tracking down the employee the make-shift garden belongs to. Luckily, it belonged to the first person I asked…

The second short ran today and was about the computer help desk moving a few hundred feet to the lobby of their building. Again, nothing special, but I did whip it out in a matter of an hour or so, including interviewing, writing, and editing, which is a pretty fast turn-around time.

To bring this post to a close, just let me say I've only got two weeks left here at SLAC, and probably won't be posting much anymore. Perhaps just a few more total. So enjoy them while you can…

Busy, Busy, Busy

Hello again everyone, it's now Tuesday, which means I missed Monday. Why? Because I'm busy again at work and got home a bit late yesterday. Why am I busy again? You guessed it… McCallum Turner paragraphs and articles!

Who of you out there had 6 of the 11 people getting back to me before the end of Monday? Because if you did, you're the big winner! And in the meantime, my editor and I are scrambling to write these paragraphs up, get the rest of the contacts to respond to us, and write/edit stories for SLAC Today. On top of it all, I'm working on editing and adding a little to the Symmetry magazine feature I'm writing.

Which all leads to me being extremely busy…

And it's nice to see that someone has been busy reading and commenting to my blog as well. Many thanks, it's nice to have a few actual bits of feedback now and then. The rest of you readers could learn a lesson.

That is, if there are any more readers out there… are there? No matter, I'll keep plowing ahead anyways.

As of the end of Tuesday, eight of the eleven paragraphs have been written, two are being taken care of by my editor, and the last we are still waiting on. And after all is said and done, I have to phone everyone up for quotes and more personal touches for SLAC Today articles…

At least I'll have plenty of more time to hunt everyone down.

A New Assignment

I've got two stories online today at the SLAC website, and I really like both of them (as does the head of communications here, which of course makes me happy :o).* The first is about MadGraph/MadEvent, which is a computer software program that creates randomized "practice" events for scientists to analyze and learn from. I spotted it in a pre-print (a summary of a recently released scientific paper) and asked to do a story on it. My editor isn't very thrilled with computer software and programming, but trusted me, and I think it turned out fairly well anyways.

The second story, is about the CosmicVariance blog site that two of SLAC's employees contribute to. I spoke about my experience speaking with them a couple of days ago.

Today I was assigned a new task that will give me experience in an area I haven't really dealt with before. In an earlier post, I spoke about a group meeting with a group called McCallum-Turner who is an outside consulting firm examining the administrative side of SLAC operations. It is part of the communication office's job to tell the lab what's going on and how they can offer feedback and comments.

Or, more specifically, it is now my job to let the lab know this.

The company has identified 11 areas of administration that they are targeting in their examination. Each area has a point of contact from SLAC, and it is my job to take information from them and disseminate it to 11 short articles about each of the areas.

For example, one area is Leadership, but what does this really mean? Is it anyone who is a department head? Is it the director of the lab only? What procedures, forms, etc. fall within this category, and which are of the most interest to McCallum-Turner?

The writing and analyzing part shouldn't be so bad, but it could be a pain to track down 11 different people to interview on a subject they may already be growing weary of. Any bets as to how many make my life more difficult than it needs to be?

*I wonder what the proper form is when ending a set of parenthesis with a smiley face? Do you put two end parenthesis side by side? e.g. :o))? That just doesn't seem right...

The Future of Public Outreach

Another one of my weekly profiles appeared on SLAC Today this morning,* and it is another shining example of why I typically enjoy doing profiles. I was a little doubtful when a coworker approached me with the profile idea of a woman at SLAC who loves things that are "tiki" themed. I didn't see much of a story there.

I was wrong.

Read the profile and you'll find out why. It's a great profile and she's a very interesting person. She's got a great job and does fantastic work on websites, and never went to college. She's self-taught. It flies in the face of everything I've ever been taught about getting a good job in technology…

Anyways, today's topic is about the future of public outreach, particularly at SLAC and similar particle physics labs. There has been a lot of discussion recently on how to modernize the public outreach effort. The ideas range from promoting employees to list SLAC on their Facebook or MySpace profiles to creating an entire lab environment on Second Life.

The Facebook and MySpace outreach/group idea isn't bad, but I don't know enough about Second Life to comment on this. Personally, I don't understand the whole phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that the lab couldn't reach thousands of people through such an effort.

The idea of Second Life is that you create a character, pick a place to live, and create an entire second life for yourself. You get a job, buy clothes, buy cars, meet people, date, and who knows what else. There's a lot of people out there who spend more time on Second Life than they do in their real life. Again, I don't understand this, but it exists, so SLAC should try to capitalize on it.

The other idea is to create some content on YouTube that would highlight the different labs and the science going on at them. Now this is a wonderful idea. The physics is so interesting and forward thinking that there's got to be a ton of visually stimulating places, people, and events they could put on YouTube.

I just read an article that claims YouTube is now responsible for 10% of all of the internet traffic, which is mind-boggling. This is obviously an outlet that you want to take full advantage of, if you can…

*Notice that I just can't bring myself to say "SLAC Today today..."

Cosmic Variance

Welcome back from the weekend everyone. This week is off to a promising start with two stories on SLAC Today. One is a short piece about a Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) intern, who won an award for the summer. It's my third piece that has SULI mentioned in it, so you can see how large of an event it is. The second piece is about an ATLAS workshop occurring this week at SLAC. ATLAS is one of the experiments taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Last Friday I had the pleasure of interviewing JoAnne Hewett and Risa Wechsler who are fellow bloggers. The only difference between me and them is that they have Ph.D.'s and people actually read their blog. The, with five other scientists, contribute regularly to www.CosmicVariance.com. The website was recently reported to be the 4th most visited blog about science and the most about the physical sciences by Science magazine. They have about 4,000 readers every day.

So what makes their website so successful?

I think a lot of it has to do with time. They've been doing it for over two years, and the two guys who started the site had been blogging for over a year before that. Eventually they gathered readers, and brought them all together into one place.

Secondly, it helps that they really know what they're talking about. They are experts in their fields and are constantly on the cuff of cutting edge research.

And finally, they must be very good writers, because just because you know about a topic doesn't mean you can communicate it clearly to others. And they obviously succeed at doing this, or they wouldn't have grown over the past few years.

So what do I think makes a good blog?

Time, talent, patience, knowledge, a good topic, and people spreading the word…

Blazar Revisited

I've got one story online today about some sink holes that about to be repaired on SLAC grounds. The water drainage system is old and breaks down now and then, but SLAC is always quick to right the wrongs. It's not a terribly interesting topic, or story for that matter, and one of the hard parts of the job is making stories like these more readable. Because when you get down to it, the story could easily be told in one or two sentences.

But moving on.

A few days ago my blog featured information garnered from a SLAC scientist about recent studies of a "blazar." I tried to explain it informally here before writing the story as a writing exercise. I want to take the experiment one step further.

I'm posting below the rough draft of the article I wrote based on the information. Read through both, let me know which is clearer, which is better, what I could improve on the article below, and what is good about it. Then, after the story goes through the editing process and the scientist, I will post that as well. In this way, you can get a glimpse of a story before its written, as its written, and after its written.

And, if you feel like it, you can contribute to the editing process.

Enjoy.

When American astronomer H.D. Curtis spied a jet of light emanating from galaxy M87 in 1918, he ignited the study of a phenomenon that continues to this day. The jet consists of elementary particles—electrons, positrons, and protons—enclosed by a magnetic field, beaming from the galaxy's center at nearly the speed of light. Through a number of complex interactions, these particles create gamma rays. Recently, a team of SLAC scientists made a surprising discovery about the source of these gamma rays that raises as many questions as it answers.

M87 is the only galaxy of its kind close enough for detailed observation. Scientists believe that the two jets of particles—pointing in opposite directions from the disc-shaped galaxy—come from a Super Massive Black Hole at the center of the galaxy. Galaxies that actively produce these jets are called quasars. Because one jet points towards Earth, its properties appear more extreme, making M87 a type of quasar called a "blazar."

Scientists have studied the blazar for decades. One question involves the gamma rays it produces. How are they made? Where do they come from?

"We have ideas, but the details are not there," said SLAC physicist Teddy Cheung. "It's a mystery."

It's a mystery that scientists are now one step closer to solving. Cheung and his associates recently determined that the gamma rays are emanating from a disturbance, or "knot," traveling down the jet flow 100 parsecs—326,200 light-years—from its origin. This places gamma ray production 100 times further out than previously believed.

For several years, scientists have been observing this particular knot in several ways. The Hubble Space Telescope observed visible light, the Chandra X-ray Observatory focused on x-rays, and the Very Large Array received radio data. All three showed spikes in the knot's emissions early in 2005. Scientists then compared this spike to gamma ray observations of the entire jet stream made by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS). Because HESS showed gamma rays spiked at the same time, scientists concluded that the gamma rays are produced in the knot.

Scientists have long believed the gamma rays come from an area closer to the origin, where the jet is more compact and processes that would create them are more easily theorized.

"The fact that the knot is producing gamma rays so far away from the jet's origin raises many questions about what exactly is going on in that knot," said Cheung. "Hopefully it's a question that will be solved by scientists in the future."

SLAC… A Great Place to Have Lunch

A few days ago, during the SLAC Summer Institute program, I was having lunch at the SLAC cafeteria when a thought struck me.

"What a great environment to have lunch."

What made me say that?

Well, as I sat there, I realized that I was having lunch with four very different, yet very similar individuals. One was a young, female physicist from Romania, another was a young, male physicist from Germany. Both were at SLAC for the conferences on dark matter.

Rounding out the group were two coworkers, one from Australia and the other originally from Scotland. As you could expect, the ranges of experiences and viewpoints in any topic imaginable would vary, and stimulating conversation would ensue. As it happens, that day we talked about drunk driving laws and general alcohol tolerances of different cultures.

This may not have a lot to do with my education in the way of journalism or particle physics, but it was very good, I think, for life lessons in general. And it's like that all the time at SLAC. There are many permanent residents from every country imaginable, and there are always conferences or meetings going on that attract an even larger international crowd.

It's a great environment to live in, and I think Americans in general could benefit from working in such places. There are many different views on many different topics and many different cultures to learn about. Too often, I think, we get stuck in our own country and don't broaden our horizons. Sure there are differences between Boston, San Francisco, Ohio, Miami, and Texas, but they pale to the differences between France, Spain, Germany, and Romania, which occupy an area even smaller than the United States.

It's not our fault there aren't many other countries around with strikingly different cultures, but we would do well to remember there are other countries out there, and try to visit them once in a while.

Blazars

Yesterday afternoon on my bike ride home from work I stopped by the Physics and Astrophysics building on Stanford's main campus to speak to a scientist about a possible story. Every Friday, SLAC releases summaries of all the scientific papers published by SLAC personnel. The idea came from one of these papers.

I have yet to attempt to write an actual article about all that I learned, which was a ton. It's going to be a challenge to figure out how best to explain the topic, blazars, while not boring anyone or getting long-winded. So, as an experiment, I'm going to try to explain it conversationally here first.

In this way, I hope to fully get my head around the subject and also figure out what exactly the main points are that I need to get across in the future article.

So, here we go.

Scientists believe that the center of every galaxy contains a Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH). This is exactly what it sounds like, a big ass black hole, up to 2 billion times bigger than our sun, which is simply unimaginable.

Some of these are "active," meaning that they are currently spewing forth large amounts of particles in a jet stream. If you think of a galaxy as a Frisbee, the streams are shooting straight out from the center in both directions.

These streams contain electrons, positrons, and protons. These particles interact with a surrounding magnetic field to create radiation and photons. These, in turn, also interact with electrons to produce gamma rays. Nobody is quite sure how these processes happen, or where they happen, but they happen.

These galaxies with active SMBHs spewing out streams of particles are known as quasars. When the jets are more or less pointing straight at us, one stream appears much stronger and dominates the other stream pointing away from us. These are called "blazars."

There is one blazar close enough for scientists to study in detail; a galaxy known as M187. And in the jet stream coming out of M187 are several bright "knots" of "stuff." Nobody quite knows what's going on in them, but we can see them, and study them, which is what the scientists did.

They pointed observation instruments at one knot in particular for several years. In early 2005, emissions of x-rays, light, and radio waves from the knot spiked. At the same time, another experiment recorded a spike in the gamma rays emanating from the blazar as a whole. Thus, they have deduced that the gamma rays are coming from the knot.

This may not seem very exciting, and in reality, it isn't terribly. But this proves that gamma rays are coming from a place 100 times further away from the SMBH than scientists previously thought possible. This raises many interesting questions about the processes occurring in the blazar and the jet stream, and could make scientists rethink some of their assumptions about blazars in general.

The end.

Now I'm going to try to cut this in 1/3, make it more readable, and more interesting.

Wish me luck.

The International Linear Collider

Greetings all. Monday saw a rare absence of work by myself on SLAC Today, but today a story was run that highlights future paramedic coverage at SLAC's fire station. The article itself was pretty easy and straightforward to write, but not terribly interesting. But it did get me out of the office to take a picture of a fire crew at the station, which was fun, because they're good people.

Today's topic deals with Fermilab, located in Batavia, Illinois, about a half hour west of Chicago. Fermilab is one of the world's premier particle physics laboratories. Many ground-breaking experiments have taken place here, and it is home of the current highest energy particle collider in the world.

On a side note, its also a beautiful setting. The grounds are a protected haven for tons of wildlife, including buffalo. The main building is a site to see in itself, as it was designed by someone with rather unique tastes.

But with the Tevatron (the powerful particle accelerator) scheduled to shut down in a couple of years when the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva begins experiments, Fermilab is looking toward the future. And the most ambitious vision of the future is the International Linear Collider (ILC).

Assuming the LHC creates as many results as most physicists expect, the ILC is the next logical step. Though it would collide particles at only 1/28 the energy of the LHC, it would be extremely useful.

Why, you ask?

The LHC will be smashing protons together. Protons are made of quarks and gluons. When they collide, different particles smash together, some annihilate, and some may not. The resulting event is a mess of ricocheting particles as well as newly created mass. The collisions are complex and sometimes unpredictable.

The ILC, on the other hand, would collide electrons and positrons. These are fundamental particles that are not made up of anything else (that we know of). Their collisions would be simpler, cleaner, and easier to observe. So even though the particles would technically have a fraction of the energy as LHC particles, all of that energy would be focused into just one particle and one collision. Technically, each proton at the LHC is made of 6 smaller particles which would divvy up the energy.

The ILC is a long way off and its fate rests in the hands of many different factors. And even if approved, Fermilab would have to win the bid to host the machine. So they are cautiously planning on experiments and projects that would help them win such a bid, but would also prove valuable in themselves if the ILC never comes to fruition.

But it would be nice to bring the frontier of particle physics back to the United States.

What to do?

Alright, this one is for everyone who is still reading my blog from SLAC or anyone on the west coast. I've figured out that I've only got five weekends left here in Palo Alto, including this one, and I need to make the most of them.

So, keeping in mind that I love the outdoors, microbrews, athletics, amazing restaurants and generally having a good time, what should I do with my time?

I've been to San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Yosemite.

I've eaten at Hobbee's, the steakburger place, the original pancake house in los altos, The Cheese House deli in Town & Country Village, The Counter, Oasis Beer Garden, and Gordon Biersch. Anything glaring that I'm missing that just screams "Good Eats" in or near Palo Alto?

Also, I love brewpubs. Here's a list of where I've been nearby...

Buffalo Bills in Hayward
21st Amendment in San Francisco
Half Moon Bay in, well, Half Moon Bay
Russian River up in Santa Rosa
Calistoga Inn & Brewery in Napa Valley
Downtown Joe's in Napa City
Seabright Brewery in Santa Cruz
Burlingame Brewing in Burlingame
Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto and San Francisco
Tied House in Mountain View
Pacific Coast new Berkeley
The Bear's Lair on UC Berkeley's campus

Seems like a lot, but there's a tons more. Anyone know of anything particularly good? Anything that screams west coast I haven't seen or done?

Oh yeah, I went surfing in Santa Cruz too....

The Value of Meetings

In case any of you missed it, I had one story on SLAC Today yesterday. It was about low conductivity water, which flows through large wires for heavy equipment such as magnets and klystrons to cool them off. It's interesting, because you wouldn't think of water flowing inside of a wire. It just seems counter intuitive.

Or maybe it's just me.

Anyways, apparently water isn't very conductive in its purist state. It is the impurities such as salt and minerals that conduct the electricity, which I find fairly interesting.

Anyways, on to today's topic, which was actually brought up at the bar yesterday evening after work. (And yes, I had myself a couple of Guinnesses, is that plural right? I mean come on, they're the same price on-tap as bud light. What would you do?)

Earlier in the day the entire communications team met with a couple of guys from a firm hired to audit SLAC's administration procedures. Our job in the process is actually rather important. We're responsible for letting the site know what they're doing, how the process is moving, and calming any fears or doubts that the faculty and staff may have about the process.

Well, at least I think it's important.

Now, since I've only been there for about 3 months, I didn't have anything to contribute. This could have made the meeting extremely boring (even though we did get a free lunch out of the deal) but I payed attention anyways.

Why? Well, because the director of our office, and several others, had very insightful questions and intelligent ideas. They have this wonderful way of knowing exactly what to say and in what way to say it, and I think a lot of it comes with experience.

Everyone has to sit through boring meetings now and then, it's a matter of life and work, no matter what job you have. The key to it all, and to becoming a good leader in an organization, is still being able to pay attention and contribute in the end.

During my time in Indiana's Department of Media Relations, I rarely attended the weekly staff meetings. Usually I wasn't even in the office on Fridays when they tended to occur, but I also assumed they didn't really care much what I was working on, because it was never much or that important. But now I realize the reason for attending isn't for them, its for me, and my learning experience during my internship.

And so I go to every Symmetry magazine, media relations, and general meetings that I can. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they're boring at all, I'm just saying that I see the value in them, and that I may not have gone to them a year ago.

If I'm not careful I'm going to be a grown up soon. Think I'll go out and have a few beers to knock myself back down a couple of pegs...

Rules of the Site

In the excitement of possibly receiving a massive amount of hits on my last post, I completely forgot to inform you about my story appearing yesterday! My article on the search for dark matter appeared, which you can read about on two former posts here, and here. Or you can simply read the article from SLAC Today by clicking here.

Well my blog has now been officially publicized on SLAC Today and it brought in a staggering total of comments of… zero. Notta. Zilch. Nothing.

Slightly disappointing, but I did receive several comments around SLAC and a couple of emails. Through word of mouth, I believe many people did check in on my blog, its just nobody left any comments.

I can understand why, it may seem like a bother to take the time to leave a comment. Also, to do it properly, you have to sign up for an account to this overarching blogging site. And nobody likes to sign up for something that may eventually lead to their email accounts being spammed back into the Stone Age…

Which brings up an interesting point. Part of the idea of this project is to learn about blogging. What works and what doesn't work? Well, apparently, when you make people sign up for something in order to post comments, you get less comments. This may be an important point for bloggers in general, and for any future blogging I may do.

Unfortunately, I can't change the fact that the blog site that hosts these random thoughts requires you to sign up to properly submit comments (that is, non-anonymous comments). And if they did, there is the chance it could open up an entirely different can of worms. Would people start leaving inappropriate messages with no way to track who is doing it, or to stop them from doing it in the future.

Only one way to find out—give it a shot in the future.

Welcome to my Blog Take 2

Greetings all. Even though this is my 33rd post, it is the first one that will come up when (hopefully) those who read SLAC Today take an interest because of the short article that is running tomorrow. So welcome to everyone who is new to my blog.

It is 33 posts long, but let me assure you, they are short and mostly harmless. (You'll notice I have a fondness of Douglas Adams.) I invite you to take a few minutes and read through them. But if you're busy and overworked, as so many of us get sometimes, allow me to summarize...

My name is Ken, I'm from Ohio, this is part of an independent study for my masters degree in journalism from Indiana University, I'm here until mid-September, SLAC is doing a ton of amazing science, I'm learning a lot about writing and media relations, I'm enjoying every second of it, and I am a sort of beer connoisseur and rather enjoy Guinness and microbrews...

I hope many of you will return often and let me know how I'm doing on my stories on SLAC Today. Feel free to critique, correct anything I get wrong (which is probably a lot), and leave ideas for future stories.

Just so everyone knows, you can leave comments without signing up for a thing, and it takes about 30 seconds to do. But if you don't have an account, comments must be left anonymously, so I just ask that you leave your name in the body of the comment.

So with all of this in mind, please take some time and read through a couple of prior posts. If they really suck and you start to go brain dead, then by all means, stop. But if its even mildly interesting and a decent distraction from work, leave me feedback and help a guy out with his graduate project.

The SSRL - An Inside View

Greetings all, I've got nothing on the website today which gives me free reign to talk about something that happened to me today which was very, very interesting.

I got to see the inner workings of the synchrotraon known as SPEAR3 operated at the Stanford Synchotron Radiation Laboratory, or the SSRL for short.

It may not sound exciting to you, but we're talking about state-of-the-art, drop your jaw, holy %$@* technology here! There are magnets inside that weigh 10,000 pounds. To be installed, they take the roof off and lower them in with a crane. They produce local magnetic fields of two Teslas. That didn't mean anything to me either until my guide told me that's a stronger magnetic field 40,000 times stronger than is produced by the Earth itself!

Granted, the Earth's is much, much larger. But this is much stronger.

These giant magnets, and others that are smaller, are responsible for focusing the beam of electrons, making them wiggle to produce x-rays, or changing their direction. The beam comes to a "wiggler" or an "undulator" which makes the electron move back and forth. This produced x-rays. The x-rays continue on a straight path to a testing station where scientists use them in all sorts of experiments. Meanwhile, the beam of electrons passes by more magnets which deflect it a bit to the left or right. Eventually, the beam goes in a giant circle and produces many different lines of x-rays for scientific use.

Oh, and by the way, it's usually filled with radiation. But the whole place was shut down today for a three-month maintenance and upgrade period, which happens every year, and allows for safe access. Since it's usually a radiation hazard, I don't think they let the general public get a look at this stuff ever, so I had a good time poking around (authorized and careful, of course).

That's it for today, I'll try to get some pictures eventually and keep telling you more about this amazing facility, but I got home from Vegas very late last night and need to get some sleep.

There are all sorts of wires, smaller magnets, tubing, circuitry, and other neat-looking things everywhere.

Detecting Dark Matter

Nothing much in the way of stories published today, so instead I will focus on the second part of my series about Dark Matter.

An earlier blog described the concept of dark matter. Now, I'm going to go into some detail about the article I've written that just got final approval today. It talks about how scientists are trying to prove what dark matter really is, and the techniques they are using.

First, particle accelerators create mass. When the particles are smashed together, so much energy is released, that new mass forms by Einstein's famous equation of E=mc^2. So the more energy you have, the more massive particles you can create, which is why the LHC will be able to probe deeper into the depths of matter than any experiment before.

If any new particles are created by the LHC—remember that everything is still technically theoretical, nobody knows for sure what will happen—they will almost instantly decay into more stable particles. Scientists can not "see" the new particles, but they can see what they decay into.

When the particles are created, they fly out of the event in every direction. And when they do, their momentum, or energy, must be balance. That is to say, the energy from one side of the collision has to equal the energy from the opposite side. When they don't, it means there is a particle shooting out carrying energy that scientists can not see.

Now, detecting a new particle like this does not necessarily mean it is what dark matter is made out of. It could be a brand new particle that has nothing to do with dark matter. To find out, scientists must first detect dark matter in the "real world," that is, outside of a particle accelerator.

To do this, scientists are studying the skies looking for gamma rays, positrons, or anti-protons that don't seem to be coming from anywhere. If found, these sources could mean that there are invisible particles colliding on their own in outer space. Meanwhile, here on earth, or rather under it, scientists are trying to detect a dark matter particle striking a regular particle. By shielding the experiments deep beneath the ground, other types of particles are blocked from the experiment. So if something hits a particle in the experiment, it can only be an invisible particle that made it through thousands of feet of solid rock.

When all of the data finally comes in, and scientists get lucky enough to spot new particles both in the accelerator and outside of it, they must be compared. If their properties are the same, then scientists will have found dark matter.

Do I sound like I know what I'm talking about yet? What was confusing about that whole rant? Let me know so I can do better next time…

Multimedia Requirements

Just one story on SLAC Today this morning about Lylie Fisher who is an artist who recently donated a number of prints to the Director's Office to hang. I talked about meeting her and the director a few days ago, and this story is the product of that meeting.

Yesterday I was asked to snap a picture at the GLAST collaboration meeting being held on site. Today I went and interviewed a few summer interns and was asked to bring the camera for photos. Tomorrow I plan on going out with an employee in the housing department to profile how that office works—and you know I'll bring my camera.

Every story needs a picture, and almost every picture needs to have people in it. This is the law of the land when it comes to SLAC Today articles, and you can guess who is responsible for producing the photos…the writer.

I don't think this is just at SLAC or just for interns either. I think this is a very common requirement in the world of journalism today. Nobody just writes anymore, they have to be proficient at taking pictures and video for online editions. This fact really makes me appreciate the photography class I had to take at Indiana University. Now, hopefully, my pictures don't completely suck and contain a certain measure of style, color, and design.

And I've found that I really enjoy taking pictures. At least, I do when the subject in the view finder is interesting. Sometimes it’s a bit tedious to take pictures for stories here at SLAC, but now and then I get a real treat, like the car show/barbecue picture I took early last week, or the "rat rod" photo I took a few weeks ago.

If you happen to be interested in some more of my photography, such as pictures from Stanford's campus, San Francisco and Yosemite, check out my gallery website at www.kodakgallery.com/kingery.

Clips in Symmetry

This week I get to add another publication to my list of clips when the new Symmetry magazine comes out. Symmetry is a joint publication put out between SLAC and Fermilab, the two largest particle physics labs in the country. It's aimed towards the general public and seeks to explain ideas and theories in simple, easy-to-understand language. But primarily it is aimed towards other scientists to inform them what's happening in the field, and to policy makers to inform them about what goes on at the national labs and the particle physics community.

Whatever the reason or purpose, I think Symmetry is a great magazine. The writing is excellent, it is very informative, and none of the features are too long to finish within 10 minutes. And the artwork is amazing. The photography and layout of the publication makes it fun to flip through.

So while I'm working on editing a feature about poster art at particle physics labs, I've already gotten a couple of short clips in the most recent edition. A few of the stories I wrote for SLAC Today got repurposed in the "Signal to Background" section of the magazine.

This section is a collection of short, quirky stories from different particle physics labs around the world. They're meant to be light and often humorous, to sort of show the human side of the scientists the public often doesn't get to see.

The stories they chose include the one about the physicist who participates in the Russian game show spin-off, the rigging crew at SLAC that wear the same colored helmets, and another I wrote specifically for Symmetry about a pneumatic tube in Canada that shoots radioactive pharmaceuticals to a nearby hospital.

So when you get a chance, check out the online edition, enjoy my shorts, and hopefully take the time to read some of the features to learn a little bit more about particle physics.

P.S. – The "60 seconds" section is excellent, and a truly maddening Sudoku was published last month that I still haven't managed to finish…

Just Because You Can't See It...

Hello everybody and welcome back from the weekend. I've got one story up today on the website and it's about the two-week summer workshop called the SLAC Summer Institute, or SSI for short. Student workers have been running around the office for weeks getting everything ready for this massive event.

This year's topic? Dark matter. If you haven't heard, allow me to enlighten you. (ha ha ha I'm so clever!)

When scientists observe the way galaxies move throughout the universe—such as the way they spin—they find that the mechanics are all wrong according to Newton's laws of gravity and Einstein's of relativity. The only way the universe can behave as observed is if there is about 20 times as much matter and energy that we can't see than what we can see.

That's right folks, visible matter accounts for only 4% of the stuff in the universe.

So take the entire solar system, the entire galaxy, and all of the trillions and trillions of stars and other galaxies that we can see through our massive telescopes and multiply it by 20.

That's a lot of invisible stuff.

And out of that invisible stuff, roughly 2/3 of it is a substance known as "dark energy" or "vacuum energy." This stuff is causing the universe to accelerate its expansion. You would think that gravity would be pulling everything back together eventually in, say, a couple of trillion years. But no, this stuff is causing the universe to expand faster and faster and faster…

The remaining third is dark matter. Again, we know its there because its gravity effects that of the matter we can see. But we can't detect it. Nobody knows what its made out of. There are a bunch of experiments that are trying to find out, but that is another topic for another day.

Why?

Well because I said so. And because I have an article coming out for the website in the near future about that exact topic…

So I won't waste a good idea for a future reference to satisfy your curiosity now. If you want to know… go find out! Or stick around and keep reading this blog for a few more days.

At the Mercy of Sources

Just one story online today about computer outages because of monthly server updates. The story isn't really all that interesting, it's just to let the lab know when and why they won't be able to use certain site computing functions. But the story behind the story is kind of interesting…

My editor asked me to go to the computing help desk to ask about the topic. The entire site had received an email saying when the outages were occurring, but not really explaining why very well. Seems like a simple enough assignment to go to the help desk and ask a few questions and write it up… right?

Wrong!

The first guy I talked to was pretty helpful, but informed me he wasn't really the guy to talk about it, and all the information was second hand. Instead I contacted the person who sent the email out originally, but he was not easy to get a hold of. And because I was on deadline, I badgered him, probably to the point of stalking, with phone calls, emails, and notes left taped to his office chair…

Hey, a writer has got to do what a writer has got to do…

Eventually he got back to me, I whipped something out, got it edited, and sent it back to him asking for any revisions to be sent to me by 10:00 am on Wednesday morning.

So far, so good.

Get an email Wednesday morning saying he has sent it to some other people in his group for edits and suggestions and will have it to me soon. Super, I can wait. But then 11:00 rolls around, and nothing. Lunch come and goes with no word. And then before I know it, it's 2:30 in the afternoon and my editor has to have the story to publish the next day! It's extremely bad form to publish something without letting the contacts have their say in this line of work.

So I go into panic mode and start stalking…

Eventually, at around 4:15, I get the edits back. They have basically doubled the length of the article and ruined the creative flow I had so delicately pieced together! (OK, so it wasn't really that bad, but it did contain a lot more information that probably wasn't necessary…)

But if they think people need to know it, then I need to leave it in. So after some editing, I chop out some words, rearrange some lines, and soften some of the language. I send it off to my editor and back to the source and head for home…

Next morning I find out that my source had sent me yet another edit after I had left work. Ahhhhh!!! I hope they're all happy with what we published that morning…

"Ken,
Allowing us to shed some light on our internal processes definitely helps to keep our users informed and feel more empowered. Thank you for writing the article, you did a great job."

Whew! Another crisis averted. But it just goes to show you, in this line of journalism when you really want to make everyone as happy as possible, sometimes you are at the mercy of your sources. This usually isn't a problem, but occasionally, they are either busy or you're simply not at the top of their to-do list, and things can get hairy.

All of these problems would go away if there simply weren't any deadlines…

Hmmmm….

Science and Art

Two short articles today on the web. One is a short profile about a former Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Intern (SULI) summer intern who has done very well for himself. I did that a couple of weeks ago when stories were very slow…

The second is much cooler. It’s a short piece, with a killer photo I might add, that describes a barbecue held on-site yesterday. The Mexican-style meats, rice, stuffed peppers, grilled tortillas, and mmmmmmmmmmm it smelled amazing!

Later yesterday afternoon, I went and sat in on a meeting between the director of SLAC, Jonathan Dorfan, and a local artist originally from Australia named Lylie Fisher, who recently had an art display in one of the buildings on site for several months.

I now regret never having made it over to that building to look at all of her pieces, because they are gorgeous. And they're also very interesting because they used photographs taken from physics research four decades old.

Bubble chambers use superheated, pressurized liquid that cause particles passing through to leave behind bubbly trails that are then captured by cameras. The resulting picture looks a lot like computer produced events of today's particle detectors, except they are actual pictures of trails left by particles and not just recreations on a screen.

Fisher took enlargements of these photos, cropped them, and painted directly on the photo with acrylic paints. The colors are bright, vibrant, and I love them. You can read more about her work and look at some of the pieces at her website here, or on SLAC Today here, or on Symmetry magazine here (this last one has lots of great images).

Anyways, they got into a long conversation about science and art, about how they both explore different sides of the same coin. Particle physics asks, "Why are we here?" by investigating the very essence of how matter is created, while art takes the philosophical approach. Fisher said her goal was to combine these two elements into single pieces of art that would not only generate thoughts about existence, but raise interest in physics.

I think its interesting that so many scientists at SLAC have artistic backgrounds, whether in music or in art, and so many have deep appreciations for the arts. It would be a great initiative to find some way of combining the two in schools throughout the country. Sadly, with art programs disappearing every year, this probably won't happen. But one can always hope for a future push, because they really are not all that dissimilar.

Progress Thus Far

Today I've got one short story about an art display that was recently put up in an office building here at SLAC. The photographs are aerial views of beautifully colored salt marshes in the near-bye bay. Check them out if you have the time.

It recently occurred to me that I am now more than half-way done with my internship here at SLAC. Partly because of this, and partly because the professor overseeing this project asked, I'm going to take a look back at where I am compared to where I started.

First, I've learned that no story is too small to make a difference to somebody. Some of the most complimented pieces I've written haven't been about cutting-edge science or amazing experiments. Instead, I get feedback on profiles and human interest pieces. Sometimes writing these types of articles gets monotonous, but praise from the SLAC community helps a lot.

I've learned to tighten my writing style. I now pay more attention to passive verbs and I try to get the point across in fewer words. The use of a solid topic sentence in every paragraph and making sure a complete nut graph appears have also helped a lot.

I've definitely learned to handle heavy editing and constructive criticism. Several stories have been handed back to me with a "this sucks, fix it!" But of course in a much nicer and more diplomatic way along with suggestions on how best to go about rewriting it. And I know not to take it personally, because usually the second draft is much closer to being publishable with few edits.

I definantly now have no hang-ups about nearly stalking people to get an interview.

My interviewing skills are also getting better. I've learned to go in with several questions that I know need to be answered. And I'm getting more comfortable digging deeper and asking spin-off questions when something doesn't quite make sense to me or I sense an interesting answer nearby.

But some things haven't changed. I still rarely use any form of prewriting like an outline. I basically come up with leads and flows in my head before putting them on paper. OK, well, the computer screen. Maybe because of this I still write too quickly occasionally, which might contribute to the several stories that come back with heavy edits. Hopefully the next lesson I learn is to produce excellent work in rough drafts by taking more time to ensure they're decent.

Questions Raised are Questions Answered

Apologies all for not blogging last Friday (like any of you probably really care… four posts a week is probably enough to keep up with, I know its enough to write!) but I absolutely HAD to finish rereading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince so I could start on The Deathly Hallows on Saturday morning. I am happy to report I did, even though it took me until 1:30 in the morning to finish.

So after a full weekend of reading excellent work, I am now ready to return to my own writing projects.

I would like to point out, however, that Friday's issue of SLAC today was my second exclusive issue. All three stories were written by me. I am slowly taking over the office of communications…

Or so I thought until today when I don't have any stories appearing. But fear not, I am in the works on nine more, which is keeping me rather busy during the day.

I would like to take the opportunity, however, to answer a couple of questions from the Indiana University professor who is so kindly overseeing my project.

My stories, and all stories, on SLAC Today are written for a general audience who may or may not have any scientific background at all. SLAC has over 1500 employees, about 1000 of which are not scientists and might not have any scientific training at all. Writing scientific stories which the layman will completely understand is one of the most challenging aspects of my internship so far.

For example, a previous article about kinematic calculations of the expansion of the universe took about six drafts to get right. A more recent article about monitoring GLAST took about five drafts before I got all of the scientific jargon out of it. And then when I submitted it to the scientists to look over and approve, one of them put a lot of the jargon back in that I had worked so hard to remove, which brought about a discussion between my editors and myself about which terms should be left and what should be simplified. This is a delicate decision and often I agonize over only a few words for a whole half hour.

So how am I doing? Anybody out there with little or no scientific background, please take a look at the two stories I just mentioned and tell me if you understand it all. And if you don't what words, phrases, or ideas do you find troublesome? Let me know so I can do better next time around…

Space… in 3-D!

Today I've got one and a half stories published on SLAC Today. Why the half you ask? Well, one of them is a short little blurb about the SLAC Summer Institute that is starting in two weeks. This year's topic is dark matter, and I actually wish I could go to learn more about it. It's a fascinating topic. Maybe they'll let me slip into a couple of the lectures…

Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about today is the second story about 3-D animations at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics (KIPAC) visualization lab. I personally visited the visualization lab and was very impressed with what I saw.

You can read the article for details, but I'll give you the highlights here. There are two projectors which have a polarized light filter over each of their lenses. Polarizing light is basically making sure that only waves traveling in exactly the same direction make it through. Anything coming at an angle doesn't make it.

When light is polarized in two different directions, and special glasses with similarly polarized lenses are worn, the effect is a 3-D image. But I'm not talking about your typical cartoons here.

No, instead these movies are created from actual data taken from space. Through complex observations, and even more complex calculations which can take weeks, scientists can form models of really cool events like galaxies forming, the early universe expanding, black holes colliding, and more.

This data is then fed into a rendering program written here at SLAC. You can't find it anywhere else. The program takes the data and creates a 3-D movie in a matter of days, if not hours. The difficult part is actually deciding what you want to highlight. You can't visualize more than one variable at a time. It wouldn't make sense to show the expansion of the universe via temperature and density variations at the same time.

Instead, the lead choreographer, for lack of a better term, chooses which variable will best highlight the data. He also chooses what color scheme to use and which angles to view the movie in. These sorts of decisions can take weeks, but the results are stunning. You can check some of these movies out at the KIPAC's website.

Also, there is another program that lets you imagine you are the captain of the Enterprise (I know I'm a dork.) Again using real data, you can fly through an actual representation of the Milky Way galaxy. You can choose which direction to fly and how far, and the stars passing have real names and data. It's pretty neat.

More on the LCLS

One story is on SLAC Today about a labor pool group that does a lot of the miscellaneous tasks around the grounds. It's nice to interview regular guys who don't get a lot of props for their hard work and to recognize that without their efforts, jobs on-site would be much more tedious and frustrating.

On to today's main topic; the Linac Coherent Light Source. Some of you may remember me talking about it in a previous blog. I described how the LCLS works, how it takes x-rays produced from accelerated electrons to take pictures of extremely small objects extremely quickly.

Revisit that post here, or visit the LCLS website here, for a refresher…

Today's question is this: How do the scientists actually prepare a sample of something to put in front of this amazing x-ray laser beam?

Answer: Good question.

There are currently two projects underway at SLAC to answer this question. One is called the LCLS Ultrafast Science Instruments (LUSI) project and the second is known as Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE). The purpose of LUSI is to investigate hardware technologies to be used with the LCLS and PULSE was commissioned to explore how the LCLS can be used to its full potential.

For example, technologies exist that can drop a stream of single molecules into the beam line to "take its picture." But every time it drops a molecule, it is oriented in a different way. This makes it extremely difficult to create a high-resolution image of the complex 3-dimensional structure that is a molecule.

Current projects using x-rays to probe molecules have to crystallize the sample first. This makes the sample uniform and simplifies the calculations immensely. However, some molecules, proteins, or other objects can not be crystallized, and the LCLS is capable of so much more than investigating crystallized structures. So one of the projects is to create a machine that can inject a single molecule into the beam line in roughly the same orientation every time.

So the question of how exactly samples and materials are going to be probed by the LCLS beam remains unanswered. But be assured that many scientists are working on it, and when the time comes, the LCLS will produce an amazing array of results.

This is but one of the many projects currently underway at SLAC to ensure that when the LCLS comes online in a couple of years, we will be ready to use it to its full potential.

Schoolin' Matters

Today was the second day of being busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. I've got interviews to conduct, stories to edit, pictures to take, people to harass until they respond for an interview, stories to write and now pictures to find...

Towards the end of the day I sat down with a couple of coworkers and began a process that I've never done before: the creation of a brochure. I am going to be helping to create a new Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) brochure because the old one is out of date.

(by the way, I didn't have to look up what LCLS stands for just now, and that's kind of scary)

Anyways the three of us sat down and began discussing what it is we liked and didn't like about the old brochure and where we wanted the new brochure to go. It was then that the director took some control and suggested we go through the process of:

1) Identifying our main goals

2) Identifying our key audiences

and 3) How we are going to achieve our main goals for our key audiences.

This seemed extremely familiar. It is exactly the process that I'd read about and been taught in graduate school. You can imagine the shock of actually finding that processes found in text books are actually used in the real world, and that they actually work! It turns out that some of the exercises that seemed tedious in class is actually very applicable on the job.

Who woulda thunk it?

So now I've got the task of looking through archived photos to try and find pictures to use in the new brochure. It should be a fun diversion from the usual routine. We shall find out. If it sucks, you'll be the first to hear my rants about it....

I'm Baaaaaack

Greetings everyone, I have returned to SLAC from my short vacation and am here to bore you all to tears yet again! (and there was much rejoicing.)

I believe I forgot to mention this, but my sister and brother-in-law came into town on Wednesday and we all went to Yosemite National Park on Thursday and Friday, then up to Napa Valley on Saturday, and to Golden Gate Park and Fisherman's Wharf on Sunday. I don't think I have to say this but it was a busy four days.

But wonderful.

Yosemite National Park is something that no human being should go without having seen. It is absolutely astonishing and I want to go back for at least a week every year from now on.

Anyways, I came back to work expecting a mountain of emails and editing to get to. I was not disappointed. I have an entire feature story for Symmetry to edit as well as final edits and photos to complete for about five others. One thing is for sure, I won't get bored this week.

But I also came back to a pleasant surprise. I received an email from a coworker with "Congrats" in the subject line and a link in the email. Turns out that my story for SLAC Today was picked up by Physorg.com. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I think its one person, or several persons', job to to cruise the net and find interesting physics articles and repost them in one place. This lets people who are interested in physics peruse one site for news instead of the entire internet.

So my story in SLAC Today was about the LSST and a clean room with a machine to test materials to be used in its construction. The LSST is a very large telescope that will take detailed pictures of the entire southern hemisphere's night sky in just two nights. The continuous sky scan will build levels of detail never seen before. It's an astounding project, and the camera that is being built for the telescope is equally impressive.

If you want more information, read my article, and visit the LSST website.

I am slightly excited because this is the first time a story of mine has been picked up by an outside source. I don't know if anybody out there actually read it or not, but somebody did at least once in order for it to show up on the website. So that's kind of cool....

Endless Editing

Somebody famous once said, "A writer is only as good as his editor."

Actually, I'm not sure that anybody famous ever actually said that, but if they haven't, then somebody famous should and take credit for the statement of genius.

There is a large truth to this statement. I'm not sure, it could be that I'm simply not a very good writer, but all of my stories typically come back to me with lots of corrections, style pointers, and rewrite assignments. Now don't get me wrong, most of them are superficial, but some, especially the sciencey ones, require a major overhaul.

I, however, choose to believe that this is not because I am a poor writer, but rather because I am a poor editor. I believe I simply have trouble editing my own work, and am not sure I'd do much better with others' work. I've never had an editing class and absolutely hated grammar in high school and college. It's a difficult talent to master, and it is difficult to edit your own work, made doubly hard by the fact I have no practice editing.

That last sentence was probably a run on, and the whole paragraph was probably too long and could be shortened to just a few short, yet quirky, lines. Here, let me give it another stab…

Some may call me a poor writer, but I call myself a poor editor. Poll any writers and they'll tell you editing their own work is difficult. This inherent problem is compounded by the fact I've never been taught editing skills—I hated grammar in school—and thus have trouble editing text, especially my own.

What do you think?

Calming Public Fears

Every morning at SLAC the communications office, or all of us available at the time, trek over to the SLAC cafeteria for a morning coffee, breakfast, and a chat. It's a great way to start the day, a relaxed meeting where all conversation can be business or absolutely none of it. And it gets us out of the office creating opportunities to network with the rest of SLAC and occasionally solicit story ideas....

Anyways, today's breakfast was abnormally long and interesting. We had a visitor eating with us that morning, Peter Fisher, head of the MIT Particle and Nuclear Experimental Physics division.

Fisher and a team of researchers from MIT recently made a major breakthrough in the area of wireless electricity technology. Apparently it is quite feasible, and possibly even easy, to do away with the whole system of electric outlets and cords. Instead, some sort of long wave electromagnetic waves would permeate the area which special chips could transform into electricity using resonance to build up the charge. Theoretically, the correct wavelength could cause vibrations in a device to build up until energy is transferred between the two. I'm a bit sketchy on the details, and this is not the point of this entry, but for more accurate and complete information, look at the BBC or the Boston Business.

His team recently started a company that holds the patent to this technology and they're already planning meetings with potential investors. The idea is to just sell the technology to any interested parties such as, oh I don't know, Motorola.

The conversation eventually wandered into the area of public health. Think about this technology for a second, what it does, what it implies, and now imagine the number of people that are going to be scared more electromagnetic waves in the air will somehow give them cancer or something. It's a legitimate worry, but the Fisher assures that the technology is completely harmless. Apparently, we get a much higher radiation dose flying across the country than we ever would from this technology over 100 year time span.

Fisher is a prestigious physics professor at MIT. His word is good enough for me. But there are plenty of people who won't be convinced. There are people who think power lines and cell phones kill, and still others who don't believe we ever landed on the moon... Not everyone will be convinced.

So what is the best way of handling the skeptics?

The general idea seemed to be to listen to them, listen to their worries, take them seriously, and make it a united problem. Assure them that their worries are your worries and everybody wants the same thing, safety, and nothing will go foreward until it is proven safe. The point was made to not create any type of conflict because the second you do, the media will be all over it. The moment there is a conflict, even where one shouldn't exist, there is a story.

Now this sounds harsh on journalists, but I think it's true. Sure there are a ton of responsible journlists out there who would ask all of the right questions, get their facts striaght, and write a fair article that tells the truth. But it only takes a few to run with the false conflict, blow the story out of proportions, get the facts wrong, and create a giant mess out of the whole situation.

So walking the fine line between giving enough information, keeping journalists happy, and keeping the public calm, is yet another aspect of a media relations job not usually handled by a journalist.

My future career path y'all.... Oh happy days lay ahead...

Wednesday Holidays

Well folks, quite honestly, there's not much going on in the office today. I think it's from having the day off in the middle of the week, a lot of people just took the past two days off entirely. Several people went home early and it's been rather quiet. I'd love to go into depth on some amazingly complex insight into media relations or writing or science, but I'd be forcing it, and forcing writing is never a good thing I've learned.

So let me just say that I spent most the day writing a feature for Symmetry magazine and I think it should turn out well. For the rest of the blog, let me tell you about the joy of stouts...

If you don't like Guinness, I would advise you stop reading right now.

To me, a proper stout should be thick, creamy, and nitrogen poured to give that cool effect when a properly stored Guinness is poured. It looks like two separate liquids are mixing and separating, and its just so cool!

But I bring this up because I've had two excellent stouts in the past week. One was call Lord Stanley from Burlingame Brewing and the second was from Seabright Brewery in Santa Cruz simply called an oatmeal stout. Both were rich and smooth with chocolate and coffee undertones, sweet and mildly hopped. They made me very happy :o) But I still have many microbreweries in the area to visit. The only thing that may make me happier then a great stout is a great scottish ale similar to Boddingtons, but that's another entry for another day...

True Public Relations

Today I sat in on a video conference between SLAC and Fermilab's public relations teams. The groups meet every week to talk about lab issues in the media and collaborate often in trying to get their messages out to the public.

One issue that was discussed, and has been discussed before, is the recent failure of Fermilab's "triplets." These are very large, superconducting magnets that will focus the particle beams before they collide in the Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN in Geneva. The support structures of the magnet broke due to asymmetrical forces applied during a pressure test at CERN late in March.

The LHC was planned to be completed later this fall, but many, many different set-backs have caused the projected completion date to be pushed back to the spring of next year. Though the failure of "the triplets" is one of the set-backs, it is by no means the only thing delaying the project.

Fermilab has, and has always had, a policy of complete disclosure in all things related to their science, so they have made no attempts to hide or conceal any information about the test failure. It is partly because of this policy that they are worried CERN is placing un-due emphasis on their magnets' failure. So they're basically worried about shouldering an unfair amount of the blame for the LHC not being completed on time.

Long conversations have ensued about the topic. Various strategies discussed about how to handle the topic in the media and in relations with CERN. Nobody wants to be blamed, but nobody wants to sound whiney or like they're trying to weasel out of responsibility, but at the same time, don't want too much of the blame shifted to their facility.

It's an interesting problem, one that will play out over the next few months, and an insight into the political side of a public relations position. Crisis management, the yin to the yang of good writing…

Be Careful What You Wish For

Alright ladies and gents, first things first, and the first thing is a story on SLAC Today about a new type of cooling system being installed in new computer hardware at the lab. The content is mildly interesting since the technology does bring water within a foot of rather expensive equipment, but its not exactly cutting edge technology either. I saw very similar systems at Indiana University while I was there.

But you may enjoy the title: A River Runs Through It. Pretty corny eh? I may have found a new favorite pass-time... coming up with incredibly corny titles for my stories... more to come.

Anyways, I'm sure you all saw this coming, especially those of you with more than a few months of journalistic experience. I shot my mouth, er I mean my fingers, off at the end of last week complaining that nobody was getting back to me. So what happens this week? That's right folks, everyone and their mom got back to me.

But it wasn't as bad as you might think.

For one thing, two of the people who responded declined to be interviewed. They're either too busy or don't want to be profiled/written about. And since we're in the business of making people happy at the lab, we must oblige. I still got plenty of leads on stories though, like the one about the homemade truck I talked about yesterday.

But in addition to that, I'm working on and redrafting stories about GLAST (a space telescope) monitoring, the homemade car, 3-D movies at the Kavli building, a former SLAC intern, and am trying to work on the Symmetry story about poster art in the midst of it all. I'm sure I forgot a couple in there too, so back to work on Thursday with plenty to do. Which is great, it keeps the day moving fast, helps me learn how to interview and teaches me to write betterer...

A Sweet Ride...

Amidst a flurry of activity in today's office that included multiple story leads, interviews, and the return of my officemate and director of the office, one thing stood out; a homemade car that is described as a "rat rod."

This tiny car is absolutely amazing. It has a bent wrench for a steering rod and another for the gas pedal. The gear shifter is made of a screwdriver. There is no hood and when you sit in the seat, you're right next to the gear-shaft running to the back wheels. What floors exist is made coca-cola trays. The front lamp is one, giant light, a cow bell hangs from where the front fender would be if there were a fender, and a raccoon tail hangs from where the windshield would be if there were a windshield.

Need I go on?

Anyways, I took a quick spin in the passenger's seat around SLAC grounds to find a tree to take a picture of the car. The guy was really nice and had actually driven the thing 50 miles from Morgan Hill that morning (apparently bugs and rocks are a lot more of a hassle when you don't have a windshield).

But the rat rod has won awards, and you can tell why. It is immensely cool and very well put together (it gets up to 120 mph before the front wheels start to wobble). Apparently it has beaten Harley-Davidsons and a 2002 Camaro in a race.

See all the amazing things I'm learning about and experiencing at SLAC? Once again, the life of a writer RULES because you get to meet people like this and see things exactly like this car. It's something I will never see anywhere else, and I get to ride in it and write about it for money!

Story Schedules

The main lesson I have learned over the past couple of days is this: always space out the beginning and ends of your stories.

I know what you're thinking. This is quite evident because then you won't get bogged down with tons of interviews and have troubles meeting deadlines. But this is where you're wrong my friend. Dead wrong.

I have no problems juggling interviews and writing times and getting things in when they need to be. I do have problems with something that every journalist knows is outside the realm of their control; getting people to call you back.

Yesterday and today I started on no fewer than six stories, but only one contact person has bothered to get back to me, which makes for a pretty slow day. I've managed to stay sane by editing older pieces and researching my feature for Symmetry, but come on SLAC folks, have a heart for a guy trying to do his job and give me a call back!

And I would ceaselessly call and write emails and show up on doorsteps, but I don't want to be annoying and scare them off of the interview either.

Such a delicate rope to walk.

But by Monday at noon, if I haven't heard from them, I am going to be forced to track one or two all over the site and corner them like a wild, rabid dog. And I don't like going to that place inside myself. It gives me indigestion…

Process Journalism

So today I have a very, very sciency (is that a word… didn't think so…) article on SLAC Today. After some edits from the scientists it turned out a little more dense than I would like it, but I still think its good and am pretty proud of it.

OK, so maybe it's not too great, but it took a loooooooong time to get it to the point where it was publishable.

The story was generated from a list of scientific article pre-prints published by SLAC every week. The list gives every paper being published by SLAC personnel and a short description of the work along with it. Every week I read through the pre-prints and try to pick one out to write about.

This was my first. And it shows.

The first draft was pretty terrible. I didn't even have a firm grasp on what it was I was writing about. But the real problem was that I wrote like I am now, sort of off the cusp. I now believe that, especially when dealing with science-related articles, it is extremely important to have a rigid structure to the story.

This means a solid lead with the actual news in it, a solid nut graph to explain exactly where the story is going, and solid topic sentences that encapsulate the paragraph they precede.

The original draft basically had none of these, and my editor let me know it.

So I re-drafted it and it got a little better.

Then I studied a little more on what exactly "kinematics" is, re-drafted, and it got a little better.

Then I asked the researchers again what exactly the "cosmic jerk" is, re-drafted, and it got a little better.

Next, I asked why using x-ray clusters is innovative and new, re-drafted, and it got a little better.

Finally, it went through some final edits, I (you guessed it) re-drafted, and it got a little better.

Then it was sent off to the scientists for approval and editing. They re-drafted some bits, and it, well… it got more accurate scientifically speaking.

So seven drafts later, I had a working article that was much better than the original. I learned a lot about writing more sciency articles, and it was a great experience.

By the way, I have since written another article based on a pre-print, and got it done in two drafts. :o)

P.S. - Despite the time stamp on this, it was written on Thursday the 28, but my computer was on the fritz...

Conducting Interviews

My story about John Ku and Music for Minors ran today. Great guy, great story, check it out here…

Today was pretty quiet in the office, but I did get a fair amount of work done including, but not limited to, editing, redrafting, writing and interviewing.

Interviewing.

Hmmmm.

The quintessential way that we get information and quotes for stories.

Discuss.

I conducted three interviews for my developing work on poster art at particle accelerator labs for Symmetry magazine. Two of them were via the telephone due to geographic limitations and the other was in person just a few hundred feet away. The difference was astounding.

It may be easier to type an interview as you wedge the phone between your head and shoulder, but live interviews, even those that require a quick pen, are infinitely better. You get a sense of the person, see what the office is like, what sort of gizmos are on the desk, what is on the computer screen when you arrive. You get eye contact and body language. You get descriptions with hands and a description of the person. It's more relaxed and flows better.

So I would like to contend once and for all, that the only way to be a good journalist (or PR writer) is to get out of your office and meet people on their grounds and take in information with ever sense available and not just your ears. I've had teachers and mentors tell me this for years, and I always believed them, but it is something else entirely to experience first hand.

Video conferences are better, but still aren't quite the same. I don't believe technology will ever catch up to actually being somewhere.

The Best Laid Plans...

First, two stories today on SLAC Today, one about an end-cap toroid magnet being installed at CERN that involved me calling Switzerland at 7:00 a.m. (damn time differences). The second is a short piece about SULI interns coming to work for the summer.

But tonight what I want to discuss is a story that ran several weeks ago. Though it turned out alright, there were a few nasty surprises along the way. In other words, the river was running low and there were a lot of portages that slowed me down (I'm still on a canoeing high...)

The story I'm referring to is a process piece from the Stanford Synchotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL, which I've blogged about briefly). Specifically the article was about arsenic poisoning and research to determine which natural substances inhibited its flow through the water table.

The process started innocently enough. A co-worker took me down the SSRL to introduce me to one of the employees who oversees the scientists using the beamlines. You see, SLAC and Stanford have nowhere near enough scientists and projects to even make a dent in the potential of the SSRL, so naturally scientists from all over the world visit to make use of its amazing abilities.

Anyways, the guy we were supposed to meet wasn't there, nor were the users of the beamline. No problem, we called the guy and figured we would set up something for the next day. Simple.

The next day rolls around, I call the guy, he informs me he can't make it that afternoon but he would inform the users I would be stopping by to talk to them about their research. So I head down there later that day and the users are clueless. Not only about my visit but about how to even begin explainging to me what it is they are doing.

Well now we have the beginnings of a problem.

Next day I call the SLAC employee again and he informs me it is that groups first time using the SSRL and there is a much more experienced group coming the next day that I should try. This is a little concerning because my editor is expecting something on her desk the day after, which is pretty quick turn around time. But he promises they are experienced and very good at talking to people like myself.

So again, I wait.

Next day rolls around, call the guy again, and again I can't reach him so I head back to the SSRL (and am beginning to be very glad it is only a few hundred yards away). Again, the two people there have no clue who I am or why I'm there. The scientists running the test samples tells me she doesn't speak good enough English to speak with me and to try the girl the next morning.

Well I'm becoming exasperated now and think she speaks English quite well and even has quite a lovely accent. But if she doesn't want to talk....

So I head back again the next morning to do an interview, learn about the science, background information, and spit out a story in one day. I feel determined to do this partly because I know I can, but also because it is only my third week or so on the job and I feel the urge to prove myself.

Again the girl down there has no idea who I am or that I was coming, but she is very nice and sits down to explain to me what she's working on. But, she informs me, I should really be talking to the girl who was there yesterday because the samples she is running are actually hers.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Ten seconds later, I've calmed myself, and ask if we could please just go through it then. Fair enough she says, we do, I leave happy. I get the gist of the idea and feel I have enough to write about. So I sit down and a few hours later turn in a copy to my editor.

Whew! That was rough....

It's not over....

Editor comes back (remember a final draft needs to be done by the end of the day) and says my quotes stink, which they do. They simply provide information that doesn't need to be given in quotes and don't add any color to the story.

So what to do?

In the world of media relations the writers are often asked to draft quotes for their subjects who can then tweak it or work off of it themselves. This is usually either because they are too busy or think the writer may be able to state their main idea more articulately. So this is the route I take. I draft a short quote based on the gist of our conversation, and send the story asking her to either OK the quote, tweak it, or provide one in the same spirit.

I know some of the journalists are screaming out there (if anyone is even still reading this far down....) and I am sure my "boot camp" journalism instructor at Indiana is rolling in her bed this instant having nightmares about the words I just spoke.... But as I am learning, this is how journalism is practiced in the real world and sometimes there is simply no way around it.

But usually there is a way around it and there probably was. Either way, I didn't find it.

Anyways send it along and an hour later I get a heated reply saying no it's not alright and please don't quote me at all.

And now I'm really in trouble.

I head down to the SSRL to apologize and work things out. She informs me she worked for her school paper and just hates it when people make up quotes. Plus, it isn't even her research and doesn't feel right being attributed the credit.

This makes perfect sense, I apologize, she says its quite alright, and we sit down and edit the damn thing.

To make a longer story slightly shorter, the other scientists got back to me and edited the article but did not want to be quoted but the director of their research group kindly cooked one up for me. The result was an actually decent article that was a pain to get done but taught several good lessons.

Don't let deadlines push you to do stupid things.
Make sure people know you want to make up a quote first.
Talk to the people who are actually doing the research.
Talk conversationally first, don't be a reporter first.
Make sure they know you are in Public Relations and you're going to make them look good, and let them edit anything you write.
and Haste Makes Waste.

With these in mind, similar stories will hopefully never happen again. It's not my coworkers fault for not helping me my first time, I didn't ask for much help and he was headed on vacation. It wasn't my editor's, she needed a story to fill the next day's space. It wasn't the researcher's, one was uncomfortable talking and one it wasn't her reserach. It wasn't mine, I was just trying to do my job and do it well.....

...Of Mice and Men

End Station A

Well folks, I'm back after a highly successful excursion on the Grand River, or what is left of it after a long period of time with small amounts of rain...

Today, aside from catching up on many stories, edits, and other miscellanious chores that pop up after being gone for two days (and battling a stomach bug of some sort), I visited End Station A.

I could just tell you that End Station A is home of the original experiments at SLAC that used electrons accelerated by the linear accelerator. I could stop with a description of the cavernous concrete bunker with extravagant machines that look like they're from the future. I could... but this is an opportunity to teach you so much more...

End Station A was home to the experiments that led to the discovery of quarks, one of the two fundamental building blocks of matter.

Now wait a minute, you may say, I remember being taught in school that the fundamental building blocks of matter were protons, neutrons and electrons. I remember this as well, but do not recall learning anything at all about quarks. But it turns out that protons and neutrons are both made of three combined quarks--protons of 2 "up" quarks and 1 "down quark, and neutrons of 2 "down" quarks and 1 "up" quark.

To make matters more confusing, quarks were discovered at SLAC in 1968. Now how quarks did not manage to become large topics of discussion in my high school physics book 30 years later is beyond me...

Now it turns out there are 6 "flavors" of quarks, including anti-quarks, which make up mesons and a lot of other stuff that get really confusing really fast. But if this piques your interest, here is a link to an excellent site that does a spectacular (though very long) job of explaining just about everything there is to know about particle physics.... Check it out

But beyond all of this physics talk, I thought it was very interesting to walk through hallowed halls of physics and see where the real, Nobel-prize winning work took place. Especially since through time and technology advances, the facility is now simply a test station.