tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21516110257721282622024-03-12T17:02:59.315-07:00Benne Holwerda's Research BlogBenne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.comBlogger181125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-10388478358280723982023-04-10T06:49:00.003-07:002023-04-10T06:49:34.507-07:00E-mail Scourge<p>I am on sabbatical. I had not quite appreciated what all I can do while on sabbatical. A big goal was to organize. Mess and clutter, digital or otherwise are sources of stress and I wanted to remove some. </p><p>Last week I was offline (well mostly, please clap) and I let all the email pile into the respective email boxes. Email is a terrible way to do certain tasks and yet Universities etc have decided that all communication will be over email. So having a view of what all comes in during a given week was illuminating. </p><p>The vast majority are FYIs from automated lists. </p><p>The majority of which I rarely actually need to read. All I do is file/archive them. Informational content is almost zero. </p><p>Time to employ filters. This was the goal of the exercise. What emails can I safely filter? Most.</p><p>Improving my email signal-to-noise was one of the goals. Organize the folders various things go into. And I am adding relaxation to my post-vacation state. Email creep will happen again. But being offline nicely shows what can be filtered and what has actual informational or actionable value. </p><p>Time to email collaborators ;)</p><p><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-6532356047476667092022-06-09T15:37:00.001-07:002022-06-09T15:37:09.622-07:00 Mode of transport<p><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I’m one of nature’s bike commuters. Of course growing up in the Netherlands this is a lot easier. There is infrastructure for that. You can pedal and think and honestly not pay that much attention to your surroundings. You know. Commute. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I commuted by bike in Baltimore, South Africa, and to ESA and Leiden observatory. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I haven’t commuted to work on a bike even once here in Louisville. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I mapped it out before moving here, the university has a bike encouragement program, the bus has bike racks up front. Why not?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And that’s what I’m wondering about. First off is much less infrastructure for biking here but that did not stop me before in the US. I suspect it’s also the pressure from work as a professor. And there was a lot of that. A LOT of the work is instantly forgettable admin churn. And there is so much of it. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I can do email triage etc on the bus so I did that a lot. And twitter of course. Gotta twitter. Otherwise I’d have a moment of mindfulness. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But then the pandemic hit and I just took a car to work because who else was going anywhere? And the habit stuck. And then kid 2 had to be collected from school 1 while kid 1 had to be collected from school 2. And so on and so forth. But do I really need to do this? Kids can take busses to school again. And I can move back to the bus or possibly…maybe…bike there? A colleague biked in the other day. I should try. And another colleague has started researching e-bikes. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The second car is now old enough to qualify as a “historical vehicle”. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the bicycle for the commute. Just wish my class didn't end at 7pm. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">UPDATE: I did bike in! This was the proof-of-concept. Didn't die. Of traffic or heatstroke. But it does feel like a thing an e-bike would be very nice for. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-58404717986341446572022-04-13T11:56:00.004-07:002022-04-13T11:56:43.841-07:00Visit to STSCI<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This week I got to visit STSCI, one of the most formative places for my scientific career. The idea that science is for everyone, data should be available and easily accessible, my philosophy on working with students etc etc all can be traced for a large part to my 6 years (2000-2003 and 2005-2008) I spent there.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It was a very warm welcome. It was ridiculously good to see so many science collaborators and friends. All of whom have of course not aged a bit and are still very much amazing.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I had to endure some genteel ribbing about not taking the job there 5 years ago. Fair enough. And I had to remind me that the giddy atmosphere has a lot to do with the ridiculous good performance of JWST after a flawless launch and that I was the second in-person speaker. People were happy to see me and just happy to see each other and science together. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So I am planning a second visit where I can calibrate the emotional vibe of this one. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I tallied up all the stuff kicked around. A dozen paper ideas (not all are going to make it because there is only so much time in the day) and half a dozen telescope proposal ideas for the coming year. Oh yes, sciencing in person is<i> frikkin awesome!</i></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i><br /></i></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i><br /></i></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-46299047689584343902022-03-28T08:49:00.002-07:002022-03-28T08:49:29.356-07:00The Deadline Game<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Deadlines are a thing in astronomy. There is always one on the horizon. Telescope time, grants, more of those. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A big part of becoming an effective professor is to deal with them. And I do not deal well with last minute frantic editing. The kind that much of academia seems to thrive on. I cannot proofread or edit effectively that way. And stress messes me up (small infections, poor sleep, mental health effects etc). </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So start on time. The favorite thing professors tell their students. And I did. I wrote a first draft of several Hubble proposals months ahead. When I had the first idea. AND I decided against several. So start early and NOT do some. Only way to scope out a reasonable week before the deadline. Trick is often for me it’s not just time but also energy. I had a spring break and I got a bunch of stuff done in it and rested up. But it’s a fine line. And I was still pretty stressed. There are little tells (see above). </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But once again it’s done. Managed not to think how much is riding on successful proposals (me getting paid over the summer, students actually doing Stuff) and just gushed about how fun the science will be. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-12337041410800992102022-03-08T11:52:00.008-08:002022-03-08T11:53:27.088-08:00Tenure File Mental Notes <p> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Ok so I am procrastinating on working on my tenure file. A little.</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Here are some of the thoughts I had while I was putting this together. There is little to no clear guidance and a lot tends to change when the next Dean in charge of the process rotates in or another “system” is adopted. This is to be expected. Nothing is set in stone and if, for example, not having all your publications loaded is fine, it could be dropped. </p>
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<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Have a google drive or dropbox or something that is on the cloud and on your computer and organize EVERYTHING in there.</li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s ok to rename things. I am liberally renaming files to more legible titles that are descriptive. Why? Because no one is reading this whole thing.</li>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>No one. Make it easy to skim.</p>
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<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Make a little note explaining what this giant list of files is. Explain acronyms etc. I keep adding more. And this is what MNRAS stands for. </li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Everything goes into the cv. I did not fully appreciate that. Send it to your HoD. There is a thing that all the different levels expect. Check with those experienced with the process. </li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Hey do you have a summary sheet or something that HR made? Check if it has your birthday and/or social security information on there. No need for ID theft...</li><li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There is going to be a time-wasting thing. Possibly linked to point 4 or 2 or 7. There is some task that feels insulting and grinds in that last exposed nerve you have left at the end of the process. There it is. Expect it. It may well be yourself who is making you do it. </li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Completeness is great but it’s more about box checking. You should have something in every category. It’s nice if you have everything but it’s ok if you miss that committee you were on for a week four years ago. </li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Use the official PDFs of your publications. I had quite a number of preprints initially because working from home but I took the effort of downloading the full in-print versions and replaced them. Looks much better but also has the DOI numbers on them. </li>
<li style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Summarizing plots. I made a plot with h-index, number of citations, number of papers etc etc. All lines racing higher. It’s meaningless of course but looks impressive. Pre/post improvement of undergraduate in my astro class. Pretty picture of Hubble release and one of my book. </li></ol>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiF2Yc6RKrWd69spQwMDl1IaAijnMFy-0RuyvSQIVOzUKMgCUQl4LbdLw2gdUbLhZjpcsCm2ca-FmqMiPsyOI9s00XqmGoWT6hb_4HHX2CFU7L5tw6gGAdqfGhsYOcd5icHANBdhHz_0A5itbckE1-X601pnIVdbJFx1cLOT6Wo22YyMdWtb4YaGrad" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="1187" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiF2Yc6RKrWd69spQwMDl1IaAijnMFy-0RuyvSQIVOzUKMgCUQl4LbdLw2gdUbLhZjpcsCm2ca-FmqMiPsyOI9s00XqmGoWT6hb_4HHX2CFU7L5tw6gGAdqfGhsYOcd5icHANBdhHz_0A5itbckE1-X601pnIVdbJFx1cLOT6Wo22YyMdWtb4YaGrad" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhI3Xzw5jIcY_pUih2b-Aje2yio89H3xV2k5wpzD5aLAUiLxPxhufGy6lS3IC8qLHbGsxgJUHBGClYBoYNSKJvjuSUKqH77tIEPumms1GKxX0yhr_UVS1xDCmj9VZx-GXA8_7-GG6UyWtI60DoVUhKXImYrq2JGJ6jP948QfcMIfXHTF2bBjZLvSbMW" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="860" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhI3Xzw5jIcY_pUih2b-Aje2yio89H3xV2k5wpzD5aLAUiLxPxhufGy6lS3IC8qLHbGsxgJUHBGClYBoYNSKJvjuSUKqH77tIEPumms1GKxX0yhr_UVS1xDCmj9VZx-GXA8_7-GG6UyWtI60DoVUhKXImYrq2JGJ6jP948QfcMIfXHTF2bBjZLvSbMW" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Doesn’t that tell you I’m solid researcher and teacher? Sure it does. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-79414778741276605072022-02-28T11:00:00.001-08:002022-02-28T11:00:05.841-08:00ESA Hubble Image of the Week<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhkKmPHSEGEHGC91iohppcdXn4UamKiV3lfuLeTXkpcLL1xvyep_P-WfYZFCDdoEsT8nIby8on56zLKZz8ovVE7f6xxl_xsp6euph8bpTuOT-U-XKYUsHM6-pXVLL-xWeOZC4rcdJru8rSd2sGQro2-d8gPylV1tylyx18RxudiNPTDMhgXL7eNSBn" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1291" data-original-width="1280" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhkKmPHSEGEHGC91iohppcdXn4UamKiV3lfuLeTXkpcLL1xvyep_P-WfYZFCDdoEsT8nIby8on56zLKZz8ovVE7f6xxl_xsp6euph8bpTuOT-U-XKYUsHM6-pXVLL-xWeOZC4rcdJru8rSd2sGQro2-d8gPylV1tylyx18RxudiNPTDMhgXL7eNSBn" width="238" /></a></div><br /> https://esahubble.org/images/potw2209a/<p></p><p><br /></p><p>One of the overlapping galaxies in my STARSMOG program was selected by ESA for an "Image of the Week". Nice pick me up after last week and let's just say the *waves hand at everything*.</p><p>Minor guilt trip to follow to the missing scientific analysis that I am sure I'll be able to get out any day now. It does help that I have a graduate student working on this now. </p><p>NGC 4496A, an old friend from thesis days when I counted the background galaxies (n>1, the obvious one you see here) in WFCP2 data. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-43230868532020138982022-02-11T13:25:00.002-08:002022-02-11T13:25:24.463-08:00Online doesn't work (for us) ... or does it?<p><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue; font-size: x-small;">I’ve seen a bunch of people whine about how online classes and workshops etc doesn't wooooork. And inevitably they are thinking of the classes we threw online in a few days in March 2020 or now because you have <5yo kids (hey remember kids? Under 5? Not vaccinated yet?) and of butt-numbing zoom marathons of online talks that were “conferences”.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Yes *<b>those</b>* didn’t work. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The online format. Some observations.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Synchronous</i> sucks. Different time zones, connectivity, the “you’re muted” conversation. In class, trying to keep an eye on those student on the laptop, and those in class and oh god why is it resetting? This <i>hyflex</i> option can go take a hike. Instructor overload and poor results for students/participants. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Asynchronous</i> with dedicated synchronous is awesomeballs. Record your talk. Make a second take, check the captions, make the slides available. People can watch it when it fits their schedule. The synchronous part happens for an hour or two with discussion, active participation. The interactive parts. This works pretty smoothly for classes and workshops etc. The rest of your life happens around it (since it is still sharing a space with you) but you can do it. You don't feel terrible about missing some. You didn't when it was a conference in person did you?</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I feel this is the future for a lot of events. I hope it is. Even though I love going to conferences and hanging out with friends old and new. </p><div><br /></div>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-25203213658587740512022-02-07T12:48:00.005-08:002022-02-07T12:50:31.135-08:00Kleinscheiss Tag<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">Of course the Germans have a term for it.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I was reading this medium article. <a href="https://link.medium.com/x4NljxKmkib"><span style="color: #dca10d;">https://link.medium.com/x4NljxKmkib</span></a></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There is term for that in German — ‘Kleinscheiss Tag!’ — it means ‘little shit day.’”</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Or I call it a “crud/cruft burn day. It’s when I discard or deal with all the little requests that have piled up in the email and todo lists. </p>
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<p style="color: #dca10d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: black;">From unrelated comic here: <a href="https://theoatmeal.com/comics/self_love">https://theoatmeal.com/comics/self_love</a></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This week has been all Kleinscheiss days. Yeah I like the term. Not the activity. All of it is small administrivia or short emails.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And it’s “just this one little thing”. I let all my email etc pile up for a week just to see how much of it there was during a summer week.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Not too bad, 200 new emails to deal with. Unsubscribe a bunch, answer, and of course start dealing with the 100+ items that were sitting in the Today/This Week/This Month folders already. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s happening. Doing some of the more substantial (medium Scheiss?) like replying to referee reports and what have you. But designating a day for Kleinscheiss is for the stuff that has taken on emotional baggage. You know the memes. The stuff you’d keep putting off even though it really only takes 15min. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Blarg. Burn them with fire. Or you know. Cross out that item on the list. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjTq-vk5bIYjr3IZTfTxSM8mGe9G_8BAj9zYj_Hku1BFUVhDrGuDoB7OzTZ7hVt8_4pfOSTIDcg4eKFKiTRnNarxDd9zC_ddMui6mH3m99jy_SiVkao2BLU8lw_y33ZpBQXqTkteZySGyl-9cRhAYk6UKjtZnwN1YUxMZv2WdUIqW1VnDRiDqBJP1N2" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="709" data-original-width="567" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjTq-vk5bIYjr3IZTfTxSM8mGe9G_8BAj9zYj_Hku1BFUVhDrGuDoB7OzTZ7hVt8_4pfOSTIDcg4eKFKiTRnNarxDd9zC_ddMui6mH3m99jy_SiVkao2BLU8lw_y33ZpBQXqTkteZySGyl-9cRhAYk6UKjtZnwN1YUxMZv2WdUIqW1VnDRiDqBJP1N2" width="192" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-57840374676276961952022-01-21T16:11:00.001-08:002022-01-21T16:11:11.932-08:00Productivity methods and why they failed (for me)<p><b style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">Trello</b><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">. - someone made me use it. Confusing and visually noisy. Abandoned almost immediately. And it cost money to expand to enough board for me to use.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Why it failed:</i> overload from large team. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Kanban board</b> - found a lovely app that allowed me to color code my tasks and neatly see my progress. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Why it failed</i>: only worked on my iPad. So only available on one point. So abandoned because I’m cheap and won’t shell out for cross-platform. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Bullet Journal</b> - hasn’t failed per se. Adopted this after reading a lot about it and listening to productivity podcast. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Why it would fail:</i> tricky to track progress. Feels like treading water on small tasks. Also: only works where my journal is. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Why it hasn’t yet: analog. Something pleasant about that. Satisfaction in physically crossing off tasks. Allows me to acknowledge tasks that I do but are not associated with an email. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Inbox 0 </b>- sorta working. Adopted 5 years ago so should be considered a success. Big thanks to Matt Kenworthy for getting me starting. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Why it’s failing:</i> does not differentiate between a 2-day task (rewrite this article) and a 30min one. So weight is given to shallow, short-duration tasks. Overwhelm from spam(ish) accounts as well. And I’ve abandoned checking the “waiting” and “someday” folders because...well overwhelm. But the biggest reason: it’s now (forcibly) split between two accounts. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Time blocking </b>- like the idea. Block time to deal with This Thing. Be realistic about what you really can do each day. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Why it would fail?</i> Because 2020/2021 that’s why. Labore interruptus. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>To-do list on a pad </b>- literally the worst of all worlds. I would lose the pad and walk around feeling I missed something. I keep finding old ones from years ago. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Suggestions? Other than Hermione's time turner?</p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-31783837788933494392022-01-17T18:44:00.003-08:002022-01-17T18:44:40.967-08:002021 Wins<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">One of the healthier things to do at the end of the year is to tally the wins. 2021 wasn’t exactly the easiest year with the pandemic raging on and my tenure file due.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #1 the tenure file</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This was months long process and it is in. Talkmabout a win list. 5 years of grants, papers and more. I won’t lie. This is an anxiety machine. What needs to go in, what is considered sufficient, what actually gets read etc. is vague enough to add to a general background of anxiety for most of the year. It was a relief/anticlimactic event to have it in. I’m sure there is some more to do. I haven’t heard a peep for months. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #2 the book</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I finished my book. The key thing here is finished. I didn’t aim for amazing, brilliant, complete, comprehensive or even fully spelled right. I aimed for complete. If that sounds like I don’t like the end result it’s not that. I can’t really judge. But I did what I set out to do: write a 200+ page book on a topic I like. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #3. Bike to school most days</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Ms C has a bike and she and I have been biking to her school most days. We are the only ones. Sometimes scary but it’s been lovely. And doubling down on our Dutch-ness. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #4 m plays football (soccer for US audience) </b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This took some doing. Mr M got into a soccer team and we managed to stick with it. And he likes it! Both of these are “trying to be involved parent” goals. Weirdly harder and easier with the pandemic. No travel so I can be there consistently but part of a churn of weeks that seem to grind relentlessly. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #5 classes did ok</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I mean not amazing but “pandemic good”. I still got everyone, well most everyone, there and over the finish line. Calling that a solid win in pandemic semesters 3 and 4. Students liked the classes too. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #6. Students did ok</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I’m working with students on research. Which is going fine amazingly. They are writing their papers and applying for grad schools. I’m in awe they are functioning at all, even thriving as a group. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #7 kids in the swim team</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">With the pool opening back up, R got them swimming lessons and they got into the (not hypercompetitive) swim team. Get them to move again. Yay. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #8 40th first author paper </b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I resubmitted my 40th first author paper days before my 45th birthday. These numbers are converging. That’s a good thing right? I’m happy I got some of my ideas on paper and into journals. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #9 school clicked for Ms C</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Transition to middle school amidst a pandemic was weird and stressful but we all stayed with it and c is now enjoying classes and clubs. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #10. The house got better </b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">New windows installed, kids got their own bedrooms, redid the columns on the front porch, restored the octagonal window out front, basement fully waterproof and outfitted with small gym. Yeah not bad. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Win #11. The garden grew some food</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is 99% Robin but our chaos gardening approach did seem to yield a lot of tomatoes. More gardening to come. Death to lawns. </p><div><br /></div>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-27347959989549311742021-12-01T08:55:00.000-08:002021-12-01T08:55:20.365-08:00 Spoke and hub<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">In one of the Cal Newport books (I’m re-reading his last three to cull all the insight and distill, more on that probably later), he mentions the setup at Bell Labs and a famous MIT building. They all have a “spoke and hub” setup so people can collaborate and interact serendipitously and then also withdraw in places of privacy and focus.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is a key metric I feel for a good scientific environment. And maybe if you are looking at a place of future employment: when being whisked around the campus or department, can you identify where the hub is? Do people seem to appreciate and respect their spokes? Or is it a place where you get your real work done at the coffee shop? </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This sort of hit home with me how we work and how the spaces I’ve occupied as a scientist varied in their approach. Space Telescope, the Kapteyn Institute and Leiden Observatory all had a coffee spot with both free (bad) coffee and space to mingle, chat, and collaborate. ESA was interesting since it was a small department in a huge organization but there was a similar break room. UCT had a cozy break room as well. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The flip side is how well the offices are appointed and how much people’s space is respected. Here the story is varied. UCT and Leiden were not great as various people felt it was ok to start a sentence in the hallway and expect an answer from me by the time they actually got to my desk and I was still taking my headphones off. ESA was amazing as quiet working on stuff was expected and encouraged. STSCI was somewhere in the middle with open doors everywhere but generally good boundaries, respected by everyone. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So for those of you on the job market interviewing. This is something to look for. Can you pick out the hub? How do people treat the spokes? Indeed this says a lot about how much good science you’ll get done there. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-30617536912994369852021-10-12T07:09:00.002-07:002021-10-12T07:09:49.499-07:00Technological Determinism and the near demise of IRAF<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">I’m reading the book “a world without email” by Cal Newport (it’s probably an aspirational title) and he introduces the term “technological determinism” ie when a piece of new technology steers human behavior rather than the other way round. Often in unpredictable ways. Unintended consequences of new technology adaptation.</span><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Of course there is a corollary in astronomy: the discontinuation of python 2. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Python 2 is what kept the IRAF tools <i>pyraf</i> alive for many of us. The pyraf wrapper allowed us to simply call a bunch of trusted tools. No need to learn how to manipulate images as numpy arrays, imcalc will do this for you. But then the python project decided to discontinue support for python 2 and everyone had to move to python 3. Grudgingly I did so too. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This happened while the astropy package had not yet quite reached the maturity of toolset as IRAF. In some ways it still feels like it is catching up (I'd like to rotate this image around this RA and Dec, how do I reduce this spectrum etc). </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">OTOH python 3 and astropy were much more optimized for database manipulation. So student projects and the science as a whole much more became focused on that. Part of a drive away from individual sources and more the study of populations from large surveys, accessible from servers. Etc etc. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Not a bad thing. And mostly something that was happening anyway. But I am left wondering what else it drove. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-51396044594063789082021-06-08T09:42:00.000-07:002021-06-08T09:42:09.478-07:00The zero sum game<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">Just finished the book “the sum of us” by Heather McGhee. It is a fascinating book about the effects of racism and the adverse effects on white people through the razing of community resources (she starts with the example of public pools and how the response to desegregation was to drain the pool rather than share it). Basically racism is why we can’t have nice things.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The main premise in her analysis of the thinking of white society in the US is the cornerstone of “zero sum”. If “they” (you’d be amazed how people can put additional baggage in this single word) get more then “we” (same) must be getting less. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This suddenly snapped a whole bunch of things into context for me. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This got me to thinking how the “zero sum” attitude pervades academia and astronomy. In some cases there looks to be indeed a zero sum (telescope time, tenure track jobs, and grants). But is there? The zero sum attitude is something that rears its head more in times of (artificial) scarcity: only a few high-z galaxies, just a few exoplanets. Yet it’s pretty clear that the sum of all of us produces more and better science. Inclusive collaborations that produce public data for all to enjoy and use. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But if you are raised in the zero sum thinking (white, male) then such cooperative efforts are at best a learned experience and at worst threatening. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-1936900709704726402021-06-08T09:38:00.000-07:002021-06-08T09:38:02.723-07:00Personal and Professional knowledge Management System(s)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">I was listening to the “focused” podcast and then an episode of “Mac power users” about PKM (personal knowledge management) systems. Basically what app to use.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A while back I got into Evernote. It was elegantly designed and allowed met to access my notes on stuff everywhere (iPad, phone, computer). Ideal. I have taken copious notes on a conference for example. I’d like to take notes on talks and tag them (this is aspirational, I still take notes on paper). </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And I like to take notes (plenty of sketches) while I talk to my students. The iPad and Apple pen are really nice to use there. But Evernote isn’t really great with the sketches. And I’ve noticed I stopped using it almost completely. It loads super slow on phone and iPad so I move on. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So I noticed I partially stopped using Evernote but I do keep notes and save links. But they are scattered everywhere. Two email systems (work and personal) hold notes I’ve taken, there is the iPhone notes app that I’m typing in right now, Twitter and Facebook bookmarks, random text files on my desktop, paper notes, google docs, and I suspect there are more. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So I need a single system that</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">1 works on iPad, phone and computers </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2 allows me to sketch</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">3 synchs easily between everything</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">4 doesn’t take forever to load</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">5 OCRs my sketches for ease of finding stuff</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">6 allows me to share a note easily</p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">7 allows me to back and forward link notes to see connections </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">8 can link to other stuff (like references in bibliography) </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">9 I can just drag a pdf and other files in and done. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So do I reinvigorate my Evernote? Or move everything into Craft? Or will craft slow to an unmanageable crawl as I load all the stuff into it? Time to explore. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This weekend was the final straw. I tried to put some loose ideas I had while running into Evernote. The phone app just sucks. It takes a literal minute to load (yep. a whole 60 seconds, waaaay too long for this). And copies things weirdly, does not capture tweets (critical since so many people tweet links to interesting papers or data etc).</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I am migrating notes from *everywhere* to Craft. It does not OCR yet but let's see. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-22714620398614197522021-05-28T10:02:00.000-07:002021-05-28T10:02:48.966-07:00Data as leverage <p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">The latest astronomy arxiv thing (its a thing. More than a little for many people clearly. Check Twitter.) got me thinking about the use of data and especially reduced data as leverage.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In an ideal world we all out our final data products on a repository. Documented and free for all to use. Reduced data represents labor. Often a lot. Archiving it properly and documenting it sufficiently is even more labor. So an underlying idea is that people who performed that labor get rewarded for that somehow. A rather central tenet of observational astronomy I would say. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But I notice some more about this particular case. The labor was probably students and Postdocs. The telescope is private and only *very* recently made any effort to be closer to public and accessible (basically a newly onboarded partner insisted on it). And I suspect this sort of using data as leverage (and thinking in terms of leverage) goes hand in hand with private telescopes. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I can point to publicly funded telescopes as a safeguard to this. Similar senior people that had a large survey in hand could eventually not use it as leverage. The data was public and a completely different group ran it through the reduction pipeline. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Now this is not the main thing coming out of this. There is the whole dynamic on senior people not protecting their junior colleagues again. There is the relived trauma of seeing a certain name flash by on arXiv. But it was all made possible by the fact that data is leverage. Huge part of the power play in US astronomy. As if I needed another reason to be an ``open skies" astronomer. </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-17190701042325224072021-02-15T08:26:00.001-08:002021-02-15T08:26:58.225-08:00Post-Pandemic Academia<p><i> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“When this pandemic is over....”</span></i></p><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have started to think about what will be different in the post-pandemic university. Some things will be good, some bad. Here are my predictions. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Paperless is here.</b></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everything had to be done over email so all forms etc had to be signed electronically. God I hope we will never go back to paper forms that are signed with a pen. I will refuse to do that. Just. Nope. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I could not be happier. So much easier to file and search. No more crappy yet bigger file size scans of a “signed” document. Adobe had this feature before “The Matrix” came out. Sign your documents like a grownup. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Recording lectures </b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Making recordings of your lectures and PDFs of the slides is going to be standard practice. I’m ambivalent about it. It may be good for student participation and success but also is an indirect additional burden on the professor. Not a huge effort per class but it adds up. But universities have invested frantically during the pandemic in streaming and recording equipment and they’ll want a return on this. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Hybrid outstays it’s welcome.</b></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Similarly, there will be a push to keep doing classes in “hybrid”. That’s a much bigger effort on the professor’s part. I can’t really do it. Can’t teach effectively to people in the class and online. Just...no. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I suspect this will see a push because you can charge more for it or advertise it to potential students. And you can keep doing it in snow days! Oh your kids got a snow day from school. Too bad because you don’t! </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>WFH is the new standard. </b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh I love working from home on writing. Honestly it’s even better in a coffee shop. Or an airport. My office on campus ranks someplace below a busy intersection with McDonalds wi-fi in how conductive it is to writing and other deep work (coding). Erratic temperature control, that weird smell, that time they flooded it, constant interruptions, loud people outside the door, planes landing nearly on top of it, brownouts. Nope home office it is! I already blocked off a day for errands and writing in the before times and in all honesty, I expect I’ll up that to 2-3 days a week. The trick will be to group those things where I have to be on campus for. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Meeting with research students over zoom</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Honestly I’m keeping this. No one has to come to campus and really it’s not that much better in person (see campus office above). I’m thinking individual zoom and maybe group meetings every two weeks or so on campus. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Poor places replace colloquia with zoom zolloquia </b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes! Speaker from Australia? No problem! Speaker closer by? Maybe in person. Record these and put on a YouTube channel. Online talks are here to stay. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>No flying for a committee</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No TAC or funding committee is *ever* meeting in person ever again. Just nah. So much easier on zoom. When we’re all on zoom. A reasonably well run meeting does not need to be in person. Shame. Too bad. But I also thinks it helps with being more impartial and fair. This makes it easier for anyone to be in "the zoom where it happened" i.e. decisions are made. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Online conferences are a thing now</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And they’ll stay that way. Learn more about stuff while never traveling. Bliss. Seriously. Conference travel can be cut in half. When done well. The social aspect we all miss but they are great for mix and match, asynchronous viewing. Which brings me to...</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Conference proceedings are dead</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Long live the archived talks and slides. No more overpriced books years later. Good riddance. </div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-58171794661196896552021-02-12T13:30:00.000-08:002021-02-12T13:30:57.331-08:00Professor Starter Kit<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am coming to the end of my tenure track period at UofL and part of that is making me evaluate my systems for professoring. I’m also talking to students how to set up your research. So inspired by all that, here are the things to set up before starting to professor.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></p><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Personal Knowlege Management System</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is a first critical setup. Pick your system wisely. I had Evernote already in use partly because it has mobile app as well. Something that allows you to “capture” ideas for student projects, notes on telecoms or meetings and is searcheable! One spot for it all. One system. I keep hearing about others. Omnifocus or Roam Research. It’s worth spending money on. I use Evernote for all this but the phone version is sloooow. And some notes I could have sworn were there are not. As soon as you don’t trust a system anymore, chaos descends. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A university is a large organization that hands you pieces of paper to ask you about much later. This is the system where scans of all this dead tree nonsense is going to end up in. Grab, scan with phone, stick in PKM and shred. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Tenure Box</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">BEST piece of advice I ever got. Make a Tenure box folder in email. Grab a box and write “tenure box” on the side with sharpie. Anything that could potentially make you look good, stick it either in the email box or the cardboard box. No need to sort, you can do that later! </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Email</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Inbox 0. This is the way. It’s the only way. Every possible request and task will show up as an email. So it’s best to distinguish between a few timeframes where you file ongoing email assignments and “done” (archived). Mine’s are today/this week/this month/someday/waiting. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The waiting one is for stuff you’ve done your bit for but are waiting on others. After a while, go through that and send reminders. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It does not need to get more involved than that but I file email more. Especially useful are folders for each grant application and each grant administered. Grants management at a university is chaotic at best. You can be the one providing structure. Optional folders are for each research student you have and each class you teach. Or not. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Email is asynchronous. Unfortunately most of the University’s management will think of it as instant message or slack like, expecting an immediate answer. Students sometimes too. Disavow them from this notion immediately. Work email is from 9-5 on workdays. You can expect an answer within 24hrs if it reaches me during those times. IM it ain’t. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">State what action you need. I wish more people do this. The US army has a method for that: BLUF, bottom line up front. In brackets State what you need from the other person. So many academics come up to it sideways in a 3-page essay. The bluntness and utilitarian nature of bluf is appealing to my Dutch self. More of that. Start doing it yourself and ask others to do the same. The number of times I had to parse through several layers of forwarded emails with FYI to realize there was something I needed to do... rude really. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Email is suck a timesuck that I started calling it “the churn” after the expanse. It still is and can be anxiety inducing but an organized inbox lowers anxiety levels substantially. Also: “meh I’m too late for that.” is also “done”. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Task Manager</b></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Email is NOT a task manager. Or tracker. You list for yourself what you need/want to get done today. I did paper todo lists forever and they are both demotivating and easily lost. I am trying a Bullitt journal and I’m liking it a lot. I’m working from home though so it’s easy to have this as part of the setup. There are electronic ones for todo lists. Fine. Pick one and stick with it if it works. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Research structure</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Parse your research ideas into projects for (a) you (in your rare spare time), (b) Postdocs and grad student projects and (c) undergraduate projects. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The latter desperately need structure. So chuck every idle though with the latest data release from a survey into you PKM system. You’re gonna need those. Anything that just requires someone to read less than half a dozen papers and comes with a CSV file of data. Set up a dummy undergrad project: overleaf doc for the report, fileshare for the data, code, and papers. And a setup of the goals. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Undergrad projects are a net time loss in most cases. The goal is not a paper. But with enough organization and clear goals you may come close to breaking even (it would have taken you just as long on your own). And let’s not compare here with professor-at-full-speed. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Teaching and Service structure</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These are time sucks. Teaching is fun and a primary responsibility and inspiring students is so rewarding yadda yadda. It’s a perfect gas of efffort and time, taking up every minute you’ll let it. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Odds are that your colleagues don’t care. And underestimate the amount of time it takes to set up a new course. And all your courses are new. So ask about which of your friends has taught the course. Grab their stuff. Steal their slides, their assignments etc etc. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once you get there, see if there is a teaching track prof who taught this class. Get their take on the class. Buy them lunch. Steal their stuff. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Service is often “light” because you’re on tenure track. But it’s considered “light” by those who have been at the place in question since forever. No one left a record on how to do the thing you’re supposed to do for the department. So you have your Task and since you’re the new guy it probably officially Sucks. Parse out what needs to happen. Pick the brain of the last victim and then <i>write it all down in the order it’s supposed to happen in a google document. </i></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Your future self or the next hapless Service victim will thank you. Share. Make their life easier. Easiest favor ever. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Grants Management </b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Another part of the University that will get mad at you for “not doing things the way we always do them” despite never telling you how to do them in the first place. Tip 1. Identify the grants you really want and identify a (tiiiiny) grant you don’t give a shit about. Do the tiny and/or bullshit grant proposal first. This is your tryout of the grants management system. How long does everything take? What’s a good padding before the deadline? Which parts of Grants Management are responsive to email and which only to threats of physical harm? How many different versions of the proposal clearance form does it take? Who gives you this year’s budgeting numbers? Build a note with how to do what and when. Use this forevermore but be prepared that GM will get revamped and renewed into something even more Byzantine and you’ll have to adapt once more. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you’re feeling animosity towards the GM people and their litanies of why laptops aren’t a real computer or why a student can’t have one, remember they are already working with the University and Funding agency’s budgeting management systems every day. They already are in hell. Possibly for years. Take the time to let them tell a story. Patience, politeness and a kind word will get you far far more than impatience and frustration, even if that is what you're feeling in great spades. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You’ll identify the one person that actually knows what they are doing. This is your new friend. Ply with alcohol and gifts. Bribe outright if you have to. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">GM isn’t there to help you write a grant. This was a major realization of mine. They are there to ensure that the University gets its cut from your grant. Nothing else. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Routine</b></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Academia is chaotic. On purpose or not, it’s where all the noise of a large organization comes together with all the organizational skills of a bunch of people that never took even so much as a class on spreadsheets. So you need structure. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Are you a morning or evening person? Do you have a family or no? There are a LOT of variables here and basically none are your employer’s business. You need to decide. With a family it’s pretty much proscribed: you need to get them to school. That sets the starting point to your day. And it’s finish. Do not let others pressure you into working long hours that you’re not optimized for or do that stupid burning of the midnight oil. Business hours are 9-5 people. Workdays from Monday to Friday. I took public transport for a while and it provides a wonderful excuse: “I need to catch the bus sorry.”</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Decide when your day has a beginning and an end. Decide when they are. Or it will be decided for you. And then a STEM professor will end up telling you to work 200 hours a week because they’re so fabulous at maths. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ranting aside, by having a routine (check astroph, write for an hour) you can make steady and relentless progress towards the stuff you’ll be judged on. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Design your rest and downtime</b><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This goes with the above. There is an underlying “of course you’ll work 100 hours a week” attitude which guarantees just shoddy performance and sloppy work. You’ll be judged on the result and not the process. No one can really tell how long it takes anyone to do some on the things you do. Play up that they were “laborious” or “very hard”. Practice your “I’ve got so much to do rant”. Paint dark circles under your eyes. Academia is horribly toxic work culture. STEM doubly so. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No one by you will say enough. Don’t let your body do the talking and set rest times and rest activities (like running or reading the murderbot books for the Nth time). Whatever restores. Saturday is off limits. Sunday is ok for some light reading or prep for class. </div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And if you need a quip to shut the all-nighter people up: “I don’t work 70 hour weeks, I did it right the first time.”</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-30482992091425858812021-01-19T13:41:00.002-08:002021-01-19T13:41:26.484-08:00JWST doesn't have a problem? Happy to be proven wrong.<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wrote a blog post in 2020 (that's SO last year) about my worry for the JWST. It came partly out of a place of frustration of the past semester. </span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The deadline was...not at a great time. But I would be hard pressed to point to a time this academic year that would have been good. Or even okay.</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So maybe it partly was a Lucy-with-the-ball problem? Would the deadline be postponed at the last minute? During the semester from hell, we were kinda hoping for it? And there was precedence for this with the last Cycle 1 deadline. So anyone strapped for time/focus/mental energy would think twice about writing a proposal from scratch. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So there was a timing problem and a hype problem. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Timing</b> - well 2020. Pandemic. Some light sedition. It's hard to think ahead 1.5 years into the future and about science. Nothing really that the JWST project could have done. Well maybe not announce at the beginning of my semester, expecting a result at the end. Still. Act of Deity kind of situation. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Hype</b> -- there was some clear group think for a sustained amount of time that sort of hinted at a HUGE oversubscription of JWST in the first call. Big instrument, big science, lots of time already allocated. It made sense. One could point to C28 for Hubble where the rate went to 1:12. Not great for science since it becomes hard to gamble with the time and do something truly new. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But this (mostly over twitter but also back when talking to people in person. I miss people. And talking science in person), was the hype that built. Not all of it came from non-JWST folks too. So to me, looking from afar (like <i>hinterland</i> afar) started to conclude that this was going to be <i>intense</i>. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Part of the hype was a byproduct of JWST project doing its due diligence. No these were not HST proposals, yes you need to do more work upfront. Get on this <i>now now now</i>. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So time to adjust the recommendations.</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>More lead time? </b>If there is nothing else to be done, announcing at the beginning of a typical academic semester and expecting proposals at the end...yeah the call could open earlier. Oh who are we kidding? We know how astronomers work...we've seen the plot. It could work <i>in theory.</i></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Set expectations?</b> Also not something the JWST project was super keen on. What if they low or high balled their oversubscription prediction. Still. 4:1 is fine?</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Split phase 1 and 2.</b> Honestly I still don't understand why this decision to combine was made. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Rolling or mid-cycle proposals.</b> 1.5 years till science operation is a long time. More science might happen. I might actually sleep well for a night (more likely after jan 20 for some reason) and come up with a decent science case. Either call it early cycle 2 or simply adopt the mid-cycle proposals. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So the news that I am now seeing (still via twitter, still from a lonely hill in the hinterland) is that it was a solid cycle. 30% women PIs (comparable to HST C28) and a nice spread of geography and new users. Whether it included people from all career stages is something I am curious about. Also curious if it was all R1s or if there was a decent spread too. Not all my questions have been answered yet. But I clearly was too pessimistic last time. Hurray. Happy to be wrong. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-54112912456731874792020-12-30T14:28:00.002-08:002020-12-30T14:28:44.369-08:00 JWST has a problem all right<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The stats of the James Webb space telescope cycle 1 proposal round came in the other day. In summary: an over subscription rate of 1:4. A little less even. </span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There was immediate spin how the stats were a good thing. Enthusiasm from around the globe! So many investigators! But that does not change that the 1:4 oversubscription is a disappointment. If I were part of the project, this would and should worry me. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;">Remember the collapse of the Arecibo telescope. Ran on a budget of 17m$/yr? That also has a 1:4 subscription rate (source: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/ugrad/backgrnd/intro2arecibo.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1609445765628000&usg=AFQjCNEx9Cq9Y86i1PJzM4lLjc0-Ufj2NQ" href="http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/ugrad/backgrnd/intro2arecibo.pdf" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">egg.astro.cornell.edu › ugradPDFThe Arecibo Radiotelescope - Cornell University</a>) a few years ago. If your shiny new telescope that hands out grants with their data has the same subscription rate as a 60 year old radio telescope that doesn’t, you have a problem. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Let’s go over what the issues are. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JWST has the Herschel problem</b>: the lifetime is inherently limited by consumables. 11 years and change. So it is paramount all the science that can be done with it is envisaged now and proposed. The pressure is on. But the Herschel community only figured out what it wanted by cycle 3... this means there may be some science I can do with JWST but I don't quite know how yet. That's a problem for cycle-1 but should go away soon.</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JWST has a hype problem</b>: for years we now have heard it was going to be revolutionary. And soon. This led to predictions of an oversubscription rate of 20:1 etc. Especially since much of the first year goes to GTO! Better get ready! We tried. But apparently could not think of <i>that</i> much. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JWST is a technical Matterhorn</b>: The modes of the instruments are myriad and very complex. Instead of a science case (phase 1) and a technical (phase 2) it’s all combined. This makes every proposal an enormous time and energy investment. The project thought they could get around that by documentation and hype (see above). Get started early! Go to a workshop! But in the end the complexity made it similar to a radio telescope: only the initiated can realistically propose. This issue did not completely go away especially with the last problem.</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JWST has a timing problem</b>: oh hey there was a pandemic. Everyone is trying to do their normal work with 10-20% extra effort for every damn thing. So there was less time to work on proposals. But it also had the poorest timing: a deadline on literally the last day of everyone’s semester (ok in the USA) after announcing the opportunity effectively at the start of the semester from hell. And this was the second cycle 1 deadline. It’s getting harder to believe that the project will stick to the timeline this time. Most astronomers expected a third “cycle 1” deadline. After JWST slips even more due to the pandemic etc. It won’t be called that of course. It’ll be the first“mid-cycle” or something. But in reality it’ll be cycle 1c. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The JWST project could simply not imagine that we did not have any science for it. It was the most amazing thing ever. So poor timing, making the proposals technically hard, a pandemic semester would all be overcome by the community. This is not unique to the JWST. You can always add to an academic’s workload. Until you can’t. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is also the reason I don’t expect the gender stats on cycle 1 to be released. Those will be too embarrassing. Men got to put them in but all the women had child care and school from home dumped on them. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But it will get more competitive later! I hear you say. Different prediction from earlier. This was the first cycle. Much was taken up by guaranteed time and early science projects. Maybe. But when WFC3 was installed, demand for it peaked in the first cycle it was offered. True for every new HST instrument. And this is a whole package of cool new instruments. What gives? At this rate we could be done in year 4... ok some new ideas and follow up and barely end up filling the observatory's lifetime. If that happens...it might be time to update the resume. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So what can JWST do to improve the numbers. </p><ol style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Split phase 1 and 2.</b> This was a lesson learned from the early Hubble proposals. ALMA want through something similar. </li><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Smarter timing.</b> It’s not just your own internal capacity that’s in play here. Make sure your customers can do the work. </li><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Less modes. </b>Honestly. Get me a spectrum of this thing over there. Don’t make it harder than that. More templates etc for phase 2. </li><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Stop thinking of this as an observatory.</b> Despite all the instrument modes, it’s a much narrower science range. Does high redshift and planetary formation. Throw in some AGN science. That’s...sorta it? Spitzer wavelengths but high resolution is not as wide a field as Hubble covers. Maybe we'll get excited about brown dwarfs suddenly. </li><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Organize a legacy survey mode.</b> No not the “survey” mode but legacy proposals like ANGST and PHAT. ERS is filing that niche but JWST is already the same amount of time away from end-of-mission as HST was when the call went out for legacy. Time to organize some conferences and think up must do science. Eg it’s pretty clear that all the nearby known planets will need to be done. And all the CANDELS fields. Just do them. Make scheduling all that less of a headache. </li><li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Build up an archive. </b>Ok I am biased here. But have this thing snap NIR high-resolution images whenever it can means there is something to scour for New Stuff. Something to combine with Roman or Euclid. </li></ol><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">All this comes from a place of worry for me. I like JWST and much more so the people working on it. I really want it to succeed. If it doesn’t hit the ball out of the park next cycle (which will still be pre-launch let’s be real here) it will be in big trouble. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-91640576723257803142020-12-10T13:23:00.001-08:002020-12-10T13:23:51.571-08:00Literature Workflow<p> Everyone has a workflow for a given process. Most astronomers it's work frantically against a deadline and collapse. I'm not a fan. </p><p>For literature resources, you also need a workflow. The smoother the better. The less you have to think about where that paper was or how to organize your references, the better. It makes it much much easier to write the thing. </p><p>So here is a short intro how *I* organized my literature. Eventually. </p><p>It began with Ron Allen suggesting I'd pick a system. He was vague as to what system. His system involved a giant drawer in his office with physical folders. I got started that way. It devolved into a mess.</p><p>A better way is a reference manager some kind. I settled on bibdesk fairly quickly (this is back in 2000) but I made a new .bib bibtex file for each paper/project I was working on. This also devolved into a mess.</p><p>I need one file. <b>One BibTex file to rule them all.</b> </p><p>So I made one. Bibliography.bib. </p><p>That's it...that's...my bibliography file. I spent a day or so merging all the files and weeding out all the duplicates. Set up so that pdfs of the papers automatically go to a folder. Name+ last two digits of the year as the identifier and it works? It lives in my dropbox so I always have it?</p><p>I was quite happy with that for a quite some time. It's where I'd dump new astro-ph papers in (for later reading hahahah anyway) and so often I'd have the astro-ph already or I could refer to the most recent work. </p><p>And then I moved to Overleaf. Aaaah. I *love* it. Version control? No problem! Every project tagged and searchable. </p><p>But How To Do The BibTex?</p><p>Here comes my second to last trick: I have one project called <i>Up To Date Bibliography Here</i>.</p><p>Yup. I always upload my bibtex there. As a rule I export it in bib desk as "minimal bibtex" so that it's small. And then I can import or refresh it in the project I'm working on. </p><p>And the last tip: there is a command line tool called ads2bibdesk and when I call it with an astroph number of an article identifier, it loads everything in...it's done. </p><p>At the end of every paper there is just:</p><p>\bibliographystyle{aasjournal}</p><p>\bibliography{Bibliography} </p><div><br /></div><div>and it's...done. </div><div><br /></div><div>Pick a system, design the whole flow (from search/atro-ph to final document) and then...trust that system. </div>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-83463176803619472020-10-05T08:48:00.000-07:002020-10-05T08:48:09.338-07:00Student paper accepted!<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The paper by my undergraduate Shawn Knabel was accepted. I tweet stormed about it. I have certainly helped large swaths of it but I can say with absolute certainty it’s his paper. He responded to the referee entirely on his own. </span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s an amazing achievement. It’s a very solid paper that looked at the aspects on how one identifies strong gravitational lenses in surveys using spectroscopy, citizen science or machine learning. And how little these three techniques agree. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This brings me to the other pet of the process: how much of the struggle to get this thing out had nothing to do with the science. The grant that was supposed to pay for it ran out and could not allow for extensions, the referee kept finding new fault where there was none (the main result of the paper didn’t change over 6 referee reports. At some point it felt like hazing. If you were the referee and read this: I hold you in low professional esteem. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And that brings me to the issue in the astronomy community: why is this considered ok behavior? The “I had to endure this as a grad student so...” attitude. The thinly veiled disdain for science done at state schools or undergraduates. Or horror of horrors both. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But this success means I should keep pushing. A paper is an excellent equalizer for my undergrads that want to go graduate schools. I disagree that US graduate schools now effectively expect this but it offers a clear avenue for how to get my students into them. </p>Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-6812363862298847942020-10-05T08:14:00.000-07:002020-10-05T08:48:14.209-07:00Sciencing in times of Corona<p> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m trying to get a science done. This is anything from getting grant proposals set up to telescope time proposals, helping students do their science projects and trying to finish the occasional paper myself. </span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Let’s admit to ourselves at least here that this is very likely more than we could finish in a good year. And this is not a good year. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Yet we feel that as a field, or tenure committee or whatever, there is a nonzero chance collective amnesia sets in and we all fear of being labeled “unproductive”. For 2020 and 2021 (this is going to last longer and take time to recover...). </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">S lets see what I have in the hopper:</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>8 scientific papers at 50+% complete.</b> Many almost ready to go to coauthors or with comments or referee reports. Yeah. That should go down. That’s too many. I should finish some. But...</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>5 student projects that could/should be papers.</b> That’ll take more work but is very beneficial to these students. I should get cracking on those. But they are overwhelmed and so am I. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I agreed to write <b>a book</b> a few months ago. There is a draft. For me it’s a challenge to stop writing about certain things apparently. Still. Need to wrap that up. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics grant proposals. </b>These are huge with lots of moving parts. Stressful to pull together and shepherd through the University and NSF bureaucracies. I’ve...Eh... started. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Students count on me to get them funding for their phds. And support undergrads. Oh and myself and my family. Summer salary. Eish. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>The James Webb Space Telescope proposals</b> are due on November 24. In a giant “don’t care” by this project they just put it on the last day of just about everyone’s classes. May as well write “for Ivy League use only” on the side of this thing. But I’m stubborn so... yeah preparing some. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is not only hard. This is functionally impossible. So time to pair down, punt and of course “good enough” all of this. </p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-17593887407191047282020-10-05T08:05:00.000-07:002020-10-05T08:05:58.445-07:00Teaching in time of corona<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have no clever tricks to make this all easier. This is just a collection of my thoughts now that I’m halfway through the semester. </span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I am teaching a 100 level astronomy class for a relatively small class (25) using our planetarium. And a 300lvl python/computing class in a well equipped computer lab. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So I have well equipped classrooms. With microphones. And in one case already set up recording equipment that is pretty high end. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">First up: it’s exhausting. Accept that the room with social distancing and masks gives little to no feedback. And online classes even less. Pour energy in, wonder the whole time how it’s going. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Secondly: ruthlessly organize. The number of moving parts has increased dramatically with a bunch of small tasks such as uploading recordings and slides, making sure pre/in-class materials are available to students. So set up a schedule and stick to it. Class equipment goes into the “teaching bag” together with spare masks and sanitizer. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Thirdly: prepare and work ahead. A lot. I went in expecting to get sick by now or something else massively going wrong. I still expect it. So all the pre-class material was already in blackboard before the semester started. I’m uploading the 300lvl classes ahead of time. As soon as I realized that these were just going to be recordings...the asynchronous also applies to the preparation! Which is good because the end of the semester brings the crunch of JWST and NSF major deadlines. So I’m up to week 11 recording these and I plan to finish recording for the semester next week. I’m sure the building will burn down soon after. Or something. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Expansion: the work-ahead approach was one of the main takeaways I had from the spring. The asynchronous part should not mean that students can catch up later but also allow for them to work ahead to fit their schedule. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Not that I’m smug about this. I am doing this because I expect more things to break. Soon. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Next: flexibility. Students are not doing so hot right now. Even if every class now takes 10% more effort, that means they are over-taxed. And that is before one or two of their classes started descending into pure chaos. So. Flexibility is key. Deadlines, how many assignments will get you full marks. Etc etc. Oh and extra credit assignments. Lots of them all over the place. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Prepare for all online. This is part of flexible but basically build a completely online course (everything in one spot) and teach in person as long as circumstances allow. Weirdly. I’m still in-person. Ok. But ready to switch. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Hybrid/Hyflex. No. Just no. It assumes perfect internet for everyone (ha!), No emergencies (Haha!), and that instructor can be in two places at once (oh haha very funny). It. Does. Not. Work. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I noticed this when certain committees were online/in person mix and then it falls to the people in the room. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Foregiveness: it’s ok. Oh the kids did not learn about that? Oh well. The foregiveness goes towards yourself too. Science is suffering badly (next post). It’s ok. 2020 (and likely 2021) are mulligans. </p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-47296160370884568092020-06-10T14:24:00.001-07:002020-06-10T19:42:01.135-07:00STRIKE 4 BLACK LIVES This blog post is not to signal anything. I am putting this here so I can remind myself.<br />
<br />
The call went out a week ago for a strike of higher education. I went on strike in grad school once and I know it did not impress The Powers That Be.<br />
<br />
But this strike is smart: a commitment to read and educate ourselves and to commit to improved practices in the future. And we can commit a Day to plan and take action.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.particlesforjustice.org/">https://www.particlesforjustice.org</a><br />
<br />
The initiative is by Dr. Brian Nord, a very respected physicist and machine learning expert and <a class="es hh bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bo hi br bs hj hk" href="https://medium.com/@chanda?source=post_page-----8cee942e7f22----------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(41, 41, 41); color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Chanda Prescod-Weinstein</a>, a cosmologist and long-time voice on social justice matters in STEM.<br />
<br />
see the NYT article about it here:<br />
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/science-diversity-racism-protests.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience&smtyp=cur">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/science-diversity-racism-protests.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience&smtyp=cur</a><br />
<br />
And I am glad to see some of my colleagues from UoL on there. As a University, it certainly has committed visibly towards justice. So this is for myself and the Physics Department. How can I help clean up my corner?<br />
<br />
I am starting here:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a-lzdtxOlWuzYNGqwlYwxMWADtZ6vJGCpKhtJHHrS54/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR2Lq-yVBWPPo03J68KaxbzosGyP8bzrrgBsdSqii-wbY2U6gSfN1jS-uho">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a-lzdtxOlWuzYNGqwlYwxMWADtZ6vJGCpKhtJHHrS54/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR2Lq-yVBWPPo03J68KaxbzosGyP8bzrrgBsdSqii-wbY2U6gSfN1jS-uho</a><br />
<br />
some more reading I've been doing today:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/724918/">https://muse.jhu.edu/article/724918/</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://medium.com/space-anthropology/diversity-is-a-dangerous-set-up-8cee942e7f22">https://medium.com/space-anthropology/diversity-is-a-dangerous-set-up-8cee942e7f22</a><br />
<br />
And Dr. Tana Joseph has a video talking about decolonization in SA;<br />
<br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/414809354?fbclid=IwAR2fHOQiXAfvorke1xrKzhiVssjHDq9veKbD4Tkpf_TEIfBUmp9Mu22wemQ">https://vimeo.com/414809354?fbclid=IwAR2fHOQiXAfvorke1xrKzhiVssjHDq9veKbD4Tkpf_TEIfBUmp9Mu22wemQ</a><br />
<br />
There are some clear actions that I can take. Starting off: <b>the Louisville Bail fund</b>.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/louisville-community-bail-fund?source=twitter&">https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/louisville-community-bail-fund?source=twitter&</a><br />
<br />
Protests continue here in Louisville for Breonna Taylor and David McAtee and the Bail system is one more element of a twisted system. Put some money where my opinions are.<br />
<br />
<b>Vote</b><br />
2.4 years to go before I can...but who's counting?<br />
<br />
Back to UoL Physics. Louisville is 15% black and 5% Hispanic. These numbers are not reflected in the department. We do not have representation of these groups in the faculty and we are unlikely to get any with hiring freezes and increased reliance on adjuncts. I am not in a position to do anything about that right now but I'll see if Dr Brown who is a Dean and a co-signature on the strike, has any thoughts.<br />
<br />
So.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Goal</b>: get a representative number of black and hispanic students in physics and astronomy and make sure they feel valued and part of it.<br />
<br />
<b>Issues: </b><br />
- structural racism in almost any facet of society<br />
- loss of students from high school to Uni<br />
- Perceived lower preparation for Uni Physics levels.<br />
- lower participation of BIPOC in Physics.<br />
<br />
The lack of students that major in physics at UoL due to the last two point seems closest to home (and most directly my responsibility). So that is a place to start.<br />
<br />
<b>Assets</b>:<br />
- SPS chapter, full of active and enthusiastic students. Small but sociable.<br />
- The Louisville Astronomical Society. Both can help me organize public events. Trick will be to make sure to include all in the advertisements.<br />
- The Bullitt Lecture. I am the organizer. Look for a more diverse lineup of speakers. Advertise to broader community.<br />
- Planetarium. Lovely space for outreach. Costs money though. Knowledgeable people and a mobile planetarium as well.<br />
- UoL community partnership with West Louisville<br />
<a href="https://louisville.edu/communityengagement/signature-partnership-1">https://louisville.edu/communityengagement/signature-partnership-1</a><br />
- Absolutely no money for this whatsoever. Add this to grant applications.<br />
<br />
I'm already involved with science classes at one school. Easy, the kids go there. that is the kind of low-hanging fruit I will gladly keep doing. Add some inclusive element to activities I or the University do anyway. New initiatives seem to be discouraged.<br />
<br />
Stuff I <i>can</i> do:<br />
<br />
<b>Low bar:</b><br />
- organize with SPS events to include everyone on campus. Make sure that these are open and advertised to all. Go with SPS to African Studies department? And I mean sit in and listen.<br />
- LAS events on campus.<br />
- Student research opportunities (paid). Make sure I add at least one a year to every grant. Reorganize this as an advertised group project?<br />
<br />
<b>Mid-height bar:</b><br />
- Organize Planetarium shows for schools in West Louisville. This proved surprisingly tricky with just the one school. Something to explore with the Planetarium people and the community engagement project. See if PTA can fundraise for this. The mobile planetarium is cheaper (525$ per school or $7 pr student for main planetarium plus bussing.)<br />
- engage with West Louisville Community partnership. Seems not much has happened since 2017, the year I got here.<br />
- Fix up the dome on top of the building for open nights. On-campus is much more accessible for everyone.<br />
- Spanish language Planetarium shows. I mean surely...nope.<br />
- A Bullitt Lecture Speaker that isn't a Senior White Dude. Goals for 2021/22 I'm afraid (this year's has to be cancelled).<br />
<br />
<b>High bar:</b><br />
- explore again about making UoL a <a href="https://www.apsbridgeprogram.org/about/">Bridge Program</a>. When I asked earlier it was promptly shut down but this is worth exploring and pushing for. There are programs at Ohio State, Indiana and Vanderbilt.<br />
- Push for BIPOC faculty. volunteer for the next search committee? >>18mo? I mean we are two professors short in our department.<br />
- Summer camp. Can the university support such a program? As part of a undergraduate Bridge program?<br />
<br />
<br />
I'll set an alarm to alert me in November (after Fall semester which promising to be full of distractions) and check if I made any progress.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2151611025772128262.post-75342229145476523532020-04-02T13:33:00.001-07:002020-04-02T13:33:50.622-07:00Science in the time of Quarantine <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPf6FmmCPi7I7SxSwUfR10EibnyBalMSTf7T9WF-eEXAqBh22dNBnpvXhJeo4-w80IlgjL2fl0TEKvu39l5XRk3cCSckrYjBeZtvUDtcrG2fhJLEi2QxZAyIe9XGAbD-jVm2EX1FTY96o/s1600/ETABTHPXsAAfU8G.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPf6FmmCPi7I7SxSwUfR10EibnyBalMSTf7T9WF-eEXAqBh22dNBnpvXhJeo4-w80IlgjL2fl0TEKvu39l5XRk3cCSckrYjBeZtvUDtcrG2fhJLEi2QxZAyIe9XGAbD-jVm2EX1FTY96o/s320/ETABTHPXsAAfU8G.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
I have a few tells. To me they are very obvious. They surface when I am stressed/anxious/under-pressure/overcaffienated.<br />
<br />
I have them all right now. This is not normal. I am not "working from home", I am sorta trying to do work while a whole mess of other stuff is happening. Which is fine. I wrote an email explaining to the students that my main goal now was to wobble in for a landing with the semester with the class. Do what we can when we can and sorta hope things will be ok.<br />
<br />
That doesn't mean I haven't been doing some research related things. But out of order, probably badly or sorta ok but f*ck it this will have to do. Things were almost derailing already before spring break. I got a bunch of HST proposals in (because of course) but not every one of them got a last polish. fine.<br />
I am submitted proposals where I can but sometimes it won't be a nice looking as my best work. It may not be. There is some stuff going down. The kids are home from school for weeks now and may go completely feral in Minecraft. Popping into the store feels like a heist from Mission Impossible. It's weird.<br />
<br />
So while I still feel the pressure to produce (will the powers-that-be take this into account for tenure, at the moment they say they will but how?) and I sorta am? But focus has gone out the window. Doing the right project at the right time? In order? Ha! I just randomly grab A Thing and hope I don't get too distracted till its done.<br />
<br />
Telescope proposals (all delayed, all for telescopes currently shuttered), funding proposals (hmmm what will the Federal budget look like when these get reviewed?) and papers (how am I paying for all these?). all the while working with people who are also just trying their best at home.<br />
<br />
So I got some stuff done. To counteract some of the anxiety I am having. I don't expect others to. Please grade accordingly.Benne Holwerdahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05699847364012275794noreply@blogger.com0