Science Twitter

I joined twitter a while ago. It is a great tool to learn what other people are doing and to send small BB's of encouragement to other people. The other day I stuck my neck out and asked for help with research on Elliptical galaxies. I have a student with a keen interest in galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing. I had to get up-to-date with these and especially where we could make a difference.

Twitter responded in awesome fashion. And even better, Jackie Monkowiez put it all in a Storify:
Best Twitter Thread Ever!

These are some of the suggested papers:

The Great Big Review Paper
Renzini+ 2006
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.astro.44.051905.092450

Graham+ 2013
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013pss6.book...91G

Ongoing discussion on the Initial Mass Function in these following papers:

Cappellari+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04267

Lyubenova+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07448

Smith+ 2014
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.443L..69S

Conroy & van Dokkum+ 2012
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ApJ...760...70V
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012ApJ...760...71C/abstract

and also there were these papers:

Schombert+ 2009/2015
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AJ....150..162S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ApJ...699.1530S

Bender+ 1993a,b
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992ApJ...399..462B
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993ApJ...411..153B

Faux Emergency

Two things that have always sort of annoyed me with academic culture is the interruptions and the faux emergency. The two are related.

First, there is an underlying understanding that if you are on your office, you are approachable. Some academic institutions have an open door culture where no one closes the door. This is impossible right now with a busy lecture room right outside my door. Even with the door closed it's plenty distracting. One thing that I really like about the new place is the fact that everyone knocks. It's a little thing but it allows me to disengage and focus on the visitor. Want me to do a thing? Knock on the door first.

Secondly is the faux emergency. This happens when a deadline or requirement has been poorly communicated and suddenly it's an emergency. Not only am I now interrupted for a thing but a "drop everything and do this RIGHT NOW".

So tempted to blow this sort of thing off. The issue is however often that if I do, it's some poor student that suffers. These are often not the creators of the faux emergency however.

These two issues completely shred my ability to do much focused work (e.g. Writing) during business hours.