Australian Synchrotron Open Day, 2009

High Voltage

I finally got around to uploading a gallery of photos I took from the Australian Synchrotron Open Day last year.

What is a Synchrotron?

A synchrotron is basically a particle accelerator, but instead of trying to find the Higgs-Boson (or create black holes and cause the end of the universe, if you’re a nutcase who believes that sort of nonsense), it uses a radiation by-product to do high energy science.

Synchrotrons accelerate electrons, not protons or other matter. When you have electrons moving about, you get electro-magnetic radiation; i.e., light. This light is high-energy light, so think X-rays. And just like your doctor can use X-rays to look inside your leg to see how broken it is, researchers can use high energy light to look inside materials, do fancy crystallography, all sorts of things. This is why the tagline for the Australian Synchrotron is “the brightest light in the southern hemisphere”.

This is really useful for all sorts of practical, every-day industrial purposes, like analysing soil samples. Synchrotrons are another awesome example of brilliantly useful things coming out of pure science research, even though it wasn’t what we were looking for in the first place. This is one of the great things about science; just trying to figure out how stuff works so other people can come along later and go “Ooh! I can totally use that to do this really useful thing over here!”

Open Day

Mmmmagnets!

The Australian Synchrotron has held an open day for the past 2 years that I’ve lived in the area. It looks like they do free tours if you book, but I couldn’t see anything on their website about the Open Day being a regular event.

There was an amazing level of public access, as you can see from the photos. I booked ahead for a guided tour of the control systems, which ended up being a tour of pretty much the whole facility. Not only did we get to see the control room, complete with inflatable kangaroo mascot, we also got to see inside the concrete bunker of the beam path itself.

At one point we had to clamber over the linear accelerator. We were close enough to touch the beam path! How cool is that!?

It was a really popular event, and I hope they keep holding it.

Check out the full gallery of high energy science/industrial machinery porn by clicking here.

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Posted in SCIENCE!, WIN. Tagged with black hole, photo, SCIENCE!.

By Justin Warren

12 January 2010

1 comment

I Believe You Have My Stapler

One of the biggest reasons I don’t want to take a permanent role at a large corporation is their furniture. It’s not my number one reason, but it’s in the top five.

The chairs are awful. They’re bulk-bought, partially adjustable, cheap, and nasty. Sometimes a company has a policy for how you can get a better one, usually involving medical certificates, being 7 foot 2, or weighing 148kg.

I’m 5 foot 6 and 62kg. No snazzy chair for me.

If I’m lucky, the desks are adjustable. Usually though, the furniture police have the special key thing you need to adjust the height, or (as in one place I worked at), they’ve actually bolted other, non-adjustable pieces onto the adjustable bits, so none of it can be moved. Again, I’m 5 foot 6, so I perch on a chair that’s too high so I can reach the keyboard, and need phonebooks so my feet reach the floor.

This sucks, but I have a solution.

My New Hiring Test

Should I ever interview for a permanent role, here’s a question I’m going to ask:

“I would like a small, discretionary budget I can use for things like a chair, LCD screens, whiteboard markers, that sort of thing. Five to ten grand per year. Would that be possible?”

It’s a question, not a demand, because I’m interested in how the question is answered, more than the specific answer.

I’m expecting that most companies would just say no. A slightly more progressive company may at least entertain the idea. A better company will ask me about why and be willing to be persuaded. The best companies will already have something like this in place.

Here’s why.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

A crappy chair annoys you every day. A too-high desk is irritating all the time. A too-small screen is frustrating every time you open a large spreadsheet.

I want the power to make these small annoyances go away, because small annoyances grow into large ones over time. If I have a comfy chair to sit it, doing boring work tasks sucks that little bit less. I can deal better with all those minor annoyances you get with any job.

A small budget of my own is great for several other reasons:

I get to solve my own problems. Since people are different, there will be loads of different problems. Jill over there might be fine with the standard chair, but wants a footrest. Adam might want a different mouse. They get to solve the problem that affects them specifically, all by themselves.

I’m accountable. I only have $4k to spend (say). If I buy a $3k chair, the money’s gone. I can’t decide half a year later that I should have bought a $2k chair because now I don’t have enough money to buy extra pens. It teaches people that company money isn’t just an endless pile that they get to spend on whatever they like, because hey, it’s not my money.

It demonstrates trust. The company doesn’t assume that I’m stupid and need a manager to figure out what sort of chair I want. People are pretty good at figuring out what their own personal preferences are, and in my experience, managers are almost universally woeful at it.

Penny wise, Pound foolish

A really good chair, say an Arthur Miller ‘Aeron’, costs about $1300 retail. LCD screens are, what, $300-$500 each? An Aeron will last more than 10 years, and an LCD screen will last 3-5 easy.

Try getting your work to buy you one. Listen to the excuses. No doubt there will be company policies, or the need for managerial (or worse, finance) approvals. If you’re super-lucky, you may get to fill in a business case!

Then think about this: If you’re on $100k a year, you cost the company $400 a day. If you goof off for just one day, that’s an LCD screen worth of wasted company time. You can waste an equivalent amount of money with no oversight required at all. But you can’t buy an LCD screen for yourself.

The higher your salary, the worse this is. At my level, salaries are $175k and up, so it’d take about 2 days of watching YouTube videos to buy an Aeron. Or, I could just go to 16 hours of pointless status meetings over the year. Same thing.

Implementing a change that saves a team of 5 people an average of 10 minutes a day (by, say, improving the timesheeting system) is a cost saving of $15k. Enough for everyone to have an Aeron and 2 LCD screens each.

I have total discretion to waste significant amounts of company money with no oversight at all. But I can’t buy my own pens. How empowered am I really?

What would you buy if you had a personal budget for the year?

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Posted in Business Management, Rant. Tagged with furniturepolice.

By Justin Warren

22 November 2009

4 comments

5 Tips for Conference Calls

I often work with clients remotely, so I spend a lot of time on conference calls. Here are my top 5 tips for making them better for everyone.

1. Speak up

Nothing is more frustrating than straining to hear someone mumbling quietly to the room. If you’re talking, presumably you want other people to listen to you, right?

You’re probably familiar with those lumpy phone things that get used in meeting rooms for conference calls. They have a couple of microphones for picking up the voices in the room, but usually don’t have per-person mikes. This means you get background echo mixed in with your voice, and the mike is a fair way away from you.

The person on the other side of the table is close, and doesn’t have phone system attenuation to deal with. Plus, they can get clues about what you’re saying by lip reading, watching body language, etc. The people on the phone get none of that.

You need to speak up, projecting your voice so that it can be heard clearly in all parts of the room. That way, the mikes have the best chance to pick up what you’re saying, and the people on the phone can hear you.

Also, practice speaking with clear diction. The voice algorithms used by phone companies tend to blur phonemes, so if you slur from one word to the next, the phone will make it worse.

2. Mute your phone

If you’re not talking, mute your phone.

No one needs to hear your children crying, or the dog barking, or your other phone ringing.

Take care to know when your phone is muted and when it isn’t. I’ve been on a few calls where someone made a snide aside to someone in the same room on their end that wasn’t intended to be heard by everyone.

Only they weren’t muted at the time. Oops.

3. Announce your presence

There are some sneaky people who dial in to a conference call, and then sit silently (with their phone muted, if they’re super-sneaky), listening to what others have to say.

It’s true that you can find out some interesting things with this technique. Many a time I’ve heard people badmouth a colleague on a conference call, only to have them pipe up and inform everyone that they heard every word.

It’s important that everyone in a meeting knows who else is there. The sneaky technique above is underhanded and disrespectful to your colleagues. Don’t do it.

4. Be on time

A conference call is just a meeting. Being late for a meeting is poor form. So it is for conference calls.

Some conferencing systems announce your presence to the whole call (see tip 3 above), so being late interrupts the person currently speaking. That’s like walking into a room 5 minutes late, slamming your notebook down and saying “Hi everyone! I’m here!” in the middle of the VP’s opening statements.

5. Take turns politely

If you’re on the phone, and there’s a room full of people on the other end with three talking at once, you can’t pick them out spacially because you only have one sound source: your phone. This makes it even harder to figure out what’s being said.

Make sure there’s only one conversation going on at a time. And don’t talk over one another. It’s rude normally, but it’s worse on a conference call.

Conferencing systems tend to favor a single voice over all the others, too, so if you’re talking, you can’t hear anyone else, and they can’t talk over you.

I’ve been on a few calls where someone on the phone was droning on and on about something irrelevant, and the meeting chair couldn’t get a word in edgewise to interrupt and keep things moving. That person’s reputation suffered as a result.

Don’t hog the spotlight. Make sure you yield frequently so other people have a chance to speak.