Jessica

AAS 219 Twitter Review: Miscellaneous

by Jessica January 20, 2012

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. Steven Weinberg‘s Talk on Big Science in Crises: “In the 19th century, rich men found astronomy glamorous and put money into it.” JWST’s history is somewhat reminiscent of the [...]

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Category: policy Tags: , ,

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AAS 219 Twitter Review: The Postdoc Job Market

by Jessica January 19, 2012

Continuing with my twitter review of AAS 219 sessions: The Astrophysics Postdoc Job Market – AAS Employment Committee 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. [...]

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Category: Career Tags: , , , , ,

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AAS 219 Twitter Review: Presentations

by Jessica January 18, 2012

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 [...]

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Category: scientific talks Tags: , , ,

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Follow the Rumors

by Jessica December 19, 2011

The time of year is approaching when job-seeking grad students and postdocs eagerly wait for any communication from prospective employers. While one could easily sit and refresh the Rumor Mill pages all day long, and I offer an alternative that might preserve both your productivity and your sanity this job-hunting season while also preventing the [...]

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Category: about Tags: ,

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Results: Stargazing Apps Giveaway

by Jessica October 31, 2011

Congratulations to all our randomly selected winners in our Stargazing Apps Giveaway: Star Walk for iPad — John O’Meara Star Walk for iPhone — Edd Solar Walk for iPhone — Meredith Rawls Solar Walk for Mac — Jordan We hope you enjoy the apps!

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Category: applications Tags: , , , ,

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[Link] Statistics with Python

by Jessica September 30, 2011

Astronomers rely on statistical analysis all the time. The Python programming language has some excellent add-on packages for statistics. But sometimes the documentation isn’t as helpful in “real-world” scenarios. Prasanth Nair has posted a very nice tutorial on Simple Statistics with Python over at his blog. I highly recommend it for new users of python [...]

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Category: programming, python, Uncategorized

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Python 2 to 3 transition

by Jessica August 31, 2011

You can hardly be an astronomer today without knowing how to write code. As with programmers in all disciplines, we are at the mercy of the language we code with. Computer science is still a rapidly evolving field and new programming languages come along, existing programming languages get updated, and your favorite packages/routines might get [...]

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Category: programming, python, Uncategorized

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Rumor Mill 2011–2012 is now open

by Jessica August 23, 2011

Astronomers are still social human creatures despite all stereotypes to the contrary. Thus the Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill is one of our most frequented pages on the AstroBetter wiki. We have started the new rumor mill for 2011–2012 and relegated the 2010–2011 page to archives. You shouldn’t need to update links as the page titled [...]

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Category: Career Tags: , ,

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OS X Lion Install

by Jessica July 26, 2011

Mac OS X Lion has been released and can be downloaded and installed on existing Snow Leopard machines. I have a Mac laptop for communication, travel, etc. and a Mac desktop which is my primary data reduction/analysis machine. I have chosen to upgrade my laptop immediately and test some of the software I use everyday [...]

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Category: OS X Tags:

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Visualizing Simulated Data

by Jessica June 9, 2011

More and more astronomers are writing, running, and using massive computer simulations. The complexity of these simulations (often 3D space + time) means that visualization can be challenging. Over at Astropython, they have posted about the - yt - toolkit that allows you to analyze and visualize the results of adaptive mesh refinement simulation codes (AMR). AMR [...]

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Category: analysis, python Tags: , ,

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