Online seminars during the coronavirus epidemic

My 3yo son, realising that many things are cancelled at the moment, asked me this morning "is working from home cancelled?"  Alas not.  As it looks like we'll all be working from home for at least a couple of months, various schemes seem to have popped up to start research seminars that are given over the newly dominant teleconferencing platform, Zoom.  

The nuclear reaction theory community has started a series of seminars, detailed on https://reactionseminar.github.io. I wasn't aware of it when the first seminar was given, but I plan to attend future seminars.  One will be given by my Surrey colleague Natasha Timofeyuk.  I'm not aware of a similar initiative by the nuclear structure theory community (structure + reactions is a traditional way of dividing up low-energy theoretical nuclear physics, though I sit in both camps).  I would certainly join one if it started, though I'm not quite keen enough to start such a project by myself.

Based at CERN there is a series called Seminar on Precision Physics and Fundamental Symmetries which includes nuclear physics, but is broader than that.  There will be two seminars per week (Tuesday and Thursday at times to suit the speaker) starting today: https://indico.cern.ch/category/12183/.

If anyone knows of any more, please advertise them in the comments below.

That's my son who asked the question in the picture, during one of our daily permitted excursions for exercise.  It was at the weekend when the weather was very cold, and a streak of hailstone is caught in the picture too.

edit: Thanks to JINA-CEE for responding to me tweeting this blogpost.  They point out their online seminars in nuclear astrophysics.  See https://www.jinaweb.org/events and look for the events tagged "IReNA online seminar"

Working from home

Today is day one of working from home for me.  The University stopped its face-to-face teaching at the end of last week, and now although the University is still open, there is little justification for going in.  I have contemplated walking in – it's about 15 minute walk for me – and chances are I could get in to my office and shut the door without bumping in to anyone, but for now I'm attempting home working.  

The hardest parts are (1) having my partner and 3 youngest children here and (2) there not being as good a desk or other working space as I have at work.  (1) is hard because I have to resist the temptation to spend the whole day helping with childcare, but at least being here I can help for little bits during the day in short breaks which I couldn't do if I was in the office.  It's just hard to strike the right balance.  I am still full-time at work and have the various associated obligations that go with that.  With a bit of time and practice, I'm sure I'll get there.  For (2) I might need to invest in a better office-type chair to sit in, or to clear some space at the dining-room table.  Our house is in a kind of chaotic state thanks to having builders in building an extension (started last September, end date hopefully another 3 months).  There's only a partial roof on our house, and the dining room in particular is the dumping-place for everything that had to be moved somewhere.  Still, the environment is not too bad for working.

The University have just launched a new VPN program for us to use.  It's unfortunate that their planned roll-out and replacement of the old VPN co-incided with the Coronavirus pandemic, but there you go.  In fact, the VPN only has some minor use for me for accessing those of the University websites which are only available on campus (some management/teaching ones are, some aren't).  The most useful aid to home-working, which the VPN doesn't do as standard is to run a SOCKS5 proxy so that I can make all my web-browsing happen through a machine at work.  It doesn't actually help me access some work-based websites because it doesn't change the DNS to resolve internal-only addresses, but it lets me access journals and other professional websites from a University IP address - something the split tunnel VPN doesn't do.  

Here are some brief instructions for setting up a SOCKS5 proxy from a Unix-based machine (e.g. linux or Mac OSX):

• Use Firefox and install the Proxy Toggle add-on.  Set up its preferences to look like this:

• Open a terminal and type ssh -N -D 1337 -q myname@machine.my.uni.edu except that you should replace myname@machine.my.uni.edu by a machine at your University that you can ssh into.

• Turn on proxy browsing in your Firefox by clicking on the icon that's been added to the toolbar.  It should look like this:

 

when the SOCKS5 proxy is not active and this:

when it is active.

When you are done, you can quit the ssh command with ctrl-c and switch the proxy back to the off position. 

Coronavirus 20th March

Today is the last day that the University is operating roughly as normal, at least in terms of teaching undergraduates.  We've been teaching as normal this week, and from next week everything is to be done remotely.  For me, this is relatively easy, as this is my light teaching semester, when I only have project supervision to do.  Today is also the last day my middle two children are at school (oldest already been off since beginning of week and youngest is only a few months old, so no school for him anyway).

I'm all set up with a University-issue headset, and I've done my first meeting with the Zoom teleconferencing software, so I feel more or less able to go with working from home.  The difficult thing will be getting anything done while in the same house as my family, with young children.  We'll just have to see how that goes. 

My parents made it home from Spain in a mad dash last weekend.  They had gone their for a 1-month holiday on the car ferry via Bilbao.  They drove back over the period of 2 days getting through France just before the borders within Europe were generally shut (though they might still have let people through to return to their homes, I think).  It's a relief that they are at home.

The FaceBook group I set up in the nearby roads has had lots of people join it.  For now no-one has requested help with things like getting groceries, but I expect that will change if things carry on like they do, with more and more people being asked to self-isolate at home. 

Coronavirus 15th March

Here are some photos from my nearby branch of Waitrose:

They show where the pasta usually is, where the toilet rolls usually are, and where the baby wipes normally would be.  Panic buying has hit Guildford.  It's a bit dispiriting to see, and to realise that at the first sign of a social difficulty, in the form of the effects of people having to self-isolate because of the Coronavirus, is that people go and take more from the supermarkets than they need, thus depriving others.  There were a couple of things on my shopping list that I couldn't get (Lemsip, baby wipes (and I actually have a baby that needs wiping)) but I'll manage without, and will probably be able to pick them up when they are re-stocked.  But still, a bit sad.

It's Monday tomorrow, and my flexible working arrangement mean that I work compressed hours, which involves me staying at home on Mondays to spend time with my #1 son.  As a bonus, my #2 daughter's school has just (at 23:15) emailed to say it will be closed tomorrow because a staff member has developed symptoms consistent with Coronavirus infection.  Aside from looking after kids, my other plan is to make and distribute leaflets to all the houses in my block to set up a network where people who need help shopping (for example) because they are self-isolating get the help.  Hopefully it will not much be needed, but it would be awful if it were needed and it wasn't there.

On the plus-side, Waitrose had loads of half kilo "Essential" tiramisu, and on special offer too: