What tools (or self-rolled code) do people prefer when making big publishable figures of spectra? The example given was an echelle spectrum, where the spectrum is loooong, and has many spectral orders to stack onto one or more pages of the journal.
Since this is a shamelessly self-generated Ask AstroBetter, I will award a beer for the best answer (or source code.)
TEDxMidAtlantic recently, where I gave a talk about space telescopes and modern astrophysics. It was thrilling (and frightening) to talk to an enthusiastic crowd of 800 people at a professionally-produced event. The next speaker, my favorite chef Jose Andres, even began his talk by riffing on mine: “I’m happy we’re finding water on distant planets. With water, I can cook — I’ll have a job forever.”
I was amazed at how excited the TEDx crowd was, in person and on Twitter, by dark energy. I would have thought this was old hat — the discovery was 1998, the Nobel prize was 2011. People are clued in, right? Nope, not at all. I was mobbed by people who wanted to know about Dark Energy. What is it? Can we find it on Earth? What happens if the Universe flies apart? Apparently even folks in bars want to learn about dark energy.
So, what can we learn from this?
Here goes. Don’t assume that the public knows, remembers, or understands the key discoveries of the past 20 years. I’m finding that when I talk to the public, I’m regularly surprising the heck out of people with three core ideas:
Every galaxy has a black hole lurking in its center.
The universe is expanding ever faster and faster, driven by unknown cause.
We’ve found hundreds of planets orbiting other stars.
These, I would argue, are the three most important recent discoveries in astrophysics. Everybody should know them, right? One was even the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. But I’m finding that people *don’t* know this stuff, and are blown away when they find out.
This is really helpful for me to know, because I’m tempted to talk about my own research in more detail than a public audience wants. So I’m now trying a new approach of the Really Big Picture, and then add a dash of “honest-to-god actual-research” near the end. Audiences are actually fine with the bulge mass / black hole mass relation, if it’s explained clearly. And they like seeing a little data, especially raw images from Hubble or Spitzer, and how we turn those into results. But we need to keep the big picture out in front, because the public doesn’t know it yet.
And for my last twitter review post, here are some miscellaneous quotes or paraphrases from several different talks that I found interesting, humorous, provocative, or inspiring.
This was a panel discussion where panel members included heads of postdoc fellowship programs and successful ex-postdocs who have moved on to faculty, research staff, industry, and education positions. Overall the discussion was interesting but rather open-ended. Here are my tweets, with some additional explanation in a couple of cases.
The object of your training is not necessarily to turn you into a faculty member. Be flexible.
Consider education, management, policy… you can often have a much bigger impact.
Postdoc period is a time of stress and transition, but also a time of learning and searching for your place.
AAS Survey 2000-2006, 270 new postdocs available each year and NASA named fellowships 10% of those.
97% of NASA named fellows are still in the field, 85% have permanent positions (not necessarily faculty). — These stats are 2000-2006 before the economic downturn.
Our training is incomplete w.r.t. knowing how to interact with people (non-specialists).
Research shouldn’t be 100% of your time. Maybe organize a seminar, teach a class, something else.
You don’t need a named fellowship for an R1 faculty position. You do need to demonstrate the whole package.
Carve out time to demonstrate your independence and the skills that faculty already exhibit.
Faculty search committees ask “Are you a match to our department?”
The number of postdoc positions has tripled in the last decade.
The number of tenure track faculty positions in the last decade has not changed.
“Do not assign yourself a flat prior to the probability you will get a faculty job.” – J. Johnson
There is the possibility of exploitation in hard economic times. We as postdocs should be aware.
There is some precedence for NSF/NASA to incentivize permanent positions. This is highly debated.
One suggestion to provide bridge funding for new faculty lines during bad times when faculty aren’t retiring.
There is a gigantic information asymmetry when applying for faculty jobs… the rumor mill helps but isn’t perfect.
Beware, there can be false information on the rumor mill and self-serving behavior.
If you attended the session, what were your questions and take-away messages?
I attended AAS 219 in Austin and rather than take my own personal notes, I decided to tweet (@jlu_astro) during some of the sessions. My goal was to extract the most interesting and useful information so that anybody not in the room could get a small taste of what the session was like. Over the [...]
I think this was the breakout meeting for Twitter at the AAS (#aas219)! And once again, @doug_burke has compiled some interesting stats and figures about the tweets coming from the conference. With 45 tweets, I came in as #15 in the list of frequent tweeters! Also looks like the meeting reached a crescendo on Wednesday. [...]
I don’t tweet much these days (except about #bikenyc) but if there’s one place where I pile on the bandwagon, it’s at conferences, and AAS in particular. I’ve said all of this last year and the year before last, but I’m going to say it again. And I’ll probably say it again next year. Twitter [...]
Following our post on how Hubble users’ operating system choices have evolved with time… Here’s a summary of the operating systems used to access AstroBetter since May 2011: Grabbed from Google Analytics. Our readers are considerably Mackier and less Linuxy than I would have thought. Comments? And Kelle points out the small-but-growing fraction of y’all that [...]
In the interest of fully supporting the intellectual efforts of astronomy graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, Emily Freeland, Aaron Geller, Nick Murphy, Laura Trouille and the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy have created a petition to encourage the establishment of family leave policies by Astronomy Departments and Fellowship Committees. Widespread adoption [...]
Previously on AstroBetter, we’ve discussed what operating systems are used in our profession, in particular relative numbers of OS X (Mac) versus Linux users. While it’s good for us at AstroBetter to know our readership, we can use Google Analytics for that. It’s more important for the astronomical community to know the broader landscape, so [...]