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 entire site from slowing down due to the increased traffic. You can “monitor” individual wiki pages and receive an email every time the page is changed, along with a summary of the changes. Setting this up requires a few steps:

1. Sign up for an account on the AstroBetter wiki. The sign up process requires information on your host institution so that we can prevent spammers. All such information is deleted immediately after your account is verified. Verification is done by us, by hand, so it may take as long as 24 hours. Please be patient.
2. Once verified, login using your new username and password. There is a box on the upper right corner of the page for logging in.
3. Navigate to the Rumor Mill for postdocs or faculty/staff positions.
4. Click on the Monitor (eye) icon at the top of the page. This will change your personal setting for the page and you should start receiving emails whenever the page changes. The eye icon should now have a red X for pages you are monitoring. Monitoring can also be disabled by clicking on the icon again.
5. To anonymously post to the rumor mill, make sure to log out.

Thanks so much for your generous contributions! It is with great pleasure that I can report that we’ve raised enough to cover our costs for another year! The Google Ads have been removed.

As a small token of our appreciation for our supporters, I’d like to send you some AstroBetter stickers. If you contributed and want some stickers, send your mailing address to kelle@astrobetter.com and I’ll snail mail some to you!

If you haven’t contributed, please consider it.

You can always access the contribution form and the links to our affiliate programs (Amazon, BlueHost, Dropbox, Thesis Theme) via the Support page, which is now a menu item in the top navigation bar.

Thanks again for ensuring the longterm success of the AstroBetter blog and wiki! As always, please continue to tell your students and colleagues about the site!

During my summer break from posting (which ends this week), I’ve been doing some administrative work for the site. I’ve decided that it’s time to start asking you, the readers, to support the costs associated with running this site. Since I want to maintain complete intellectual and creative freedom, I have decided not to request funds from any institution or government agency. For the two years of AstroBetter’s existence, I’ve been paying for the hosting fees out of my own pocket. In addition, the contributors and I have been volunteering our time. However, as a firm believer in the “You Get What You Pay For” philosophy, I think it is time to ask you to contribute. If you’re not careful, I’ll turn you in to Ira Glass for pledge drive justice.

First, I’ve set up a way to accept contributions via Amazon Payments. Amazon takes a small cut off the top, but it’s a convenient and trusted service and I suspect most folks have an Amazon account. Please consider giving, even small amounts; there is no minimum. Might I suggest $5 for grad students, $10 for postdocs, and $20 for folks with permanent positions. I expect I’ll come around with the hat about once a year.

Second, we’ve added some Google Ads on the blog portion of the site. We’re working on getting them on the Wiki as well, especially the Rumor Mill (which, warranted or not, receives by far the most traffic). While the ads are not a huge source of revenue, I figure every little bit helps. Please consider clicking on ads that you think are relevant to you and other AstroBetter readers. If we get enough donations to cover the annual cost of the site, we’ll take the ads off.

Something we’ve been doing for awhile is participating in the Amazon Associates program. When we send you to Amazon, we get a small percentage of anything you buy. We’ve even compiled our highly recommended books and accessories into our very own Amazon Store. You could start all your shopping trips by clicking on the below button and we’d really rake it in:

We also participate in several other referral programs:

• Sign up for DropBox‘s file syncing service and AstroBetter contributors get more free space.
  
• Sign up with Bluehost to host your website and AstroBetter gets $65.
  
• Purchase the Thesis Theme for you WordPress site and AstroBetter gets a 33% commission.
  

Thanks so much for making the AstroBetter blog and wiki a success and please continue to tell your students and colleagues about the site! And of course, thanks in advance for your generous financial support!

The wiki and rumor mill have been restored after several performance enhancements. If you have issues with accessing the wiki, logging in, etc., please email us or comment below. Thanks for your patience!

As many of you have noticed, the wiki (including the Rumor Mill) have been inaccessible. Unfortunately, this was a necessary step in order for us to troubleshoot some performance issues we are experiencing. We still have all the content and fully plan to bring back up the wiki as soon as possible. We understand that the content and the rumor mill are essential resources and having them unavailable is causing anxiety. We will keep you posted.

Wiki Upgrade

Shows a main-sequence isochrone and several evolutionary tracks for stars of a specific mass. Click on image to see references at Wikipedia.

Some of you may have noticed that the wiki appearance has changed. This is because we have upgraded the wiki to the latest and greatest version of TikiWiki (6.2). Some of the functionality, especially wiki editing, should be greatly improved. We are still in the process of importing all of our stylistic customizations so the look and feel will improve with time.

We are also aware that the site has been generally slow and sometimes the wiki is inaccessible. Our hosting service is throttling our performance due to excess CPU usage. We are still in the process of tracking down why this is happening.

New Wiki Page on Stellar Evolution and Atmosphere Models

In the meantime, I have put together a collection of links and papers useful for modeling stars or stellar populations on a new Data Modeling page. It is thorough, but not yet complete, so please add your favorite evolution and atmosphere models and codes. Listing and linking to these models is the easy part. A more difficult proposition is deciding when to use different sets of models (mass range, age range, metallicity range, etc.). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one code for stellar evolution or atmospheres that is applicable over an entire mass range of stars (0.08 Msun – 150 Msun) even at a fixed age (I work with young populations). What are your favorite models and when do you use them? Are there libraries of synthetic spectra for atmospheres that I am missing (especially extending beyond the optical wavelengths)?

With the migration of the Rumor Mill to the AstroBetter wiki, a new feature was added, comments. Some of the comments have been useful questions, updates, and clarifications about jobs and fellowships while other threads have evolved to become (not completely unjustified) rants about the job market. These threads elicited this comment,

Perhaps comments should rather be associated with the blog webpage or another webpage for discussion (maybe with a separate link from the mill)? I postulate that recent threads may have had a negative impact to the wiki, and potentially affect peoples’ use of the rumor page. I pose this as a question to the community.

and one response,

As someone whose name is a few places on this list, the comments have made me not post other (new) offers I have received since it only seems to make people angry.

What do you think?

Twitter is useful to astronomers for many things, but one thing that stands out to me is information sharing at conferences. You don’t have to tweet or even register on twitter to follow the action, just search for #aas217: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#aas217

Twitter at conferences works best if there’s a critical mass of people tweeting useful info and if those tweets are easy to find. (Although I was the only one tweeting from Cool Stars 16 and it resulted in several useful conversations and thanks from people not at the meeting #cs16.)

On the first point about useful tweets, I’ll quote myself from last year,

Examples of useful tweets would be: a talk your looking forward to, along with a time and room; big results you just found out about; and posters that should not be missed, along with landmarks (e.g., back right corner, across from the Spitzer booth). Other useful things for talk hoppers would be letting people know about schedule changes and how many minutes behind a session is.

On the second, please use the hashtag #aas217. Even though #aas won last year and #aas217 is three characters longer, #aas217 is more specific and is officially endorsed by the AAS Press Office. Also, there’s a fair amount of noise with the #aas tag…not sure what it is since most of it is not in english…maybe football/soccer?

Also, AstroBetter will have a poster on Monday (145.03). Want to meet the contributors or curious about our stats or the demographics of our readers? Come find us! I’ll be busy with organizing the professional development workshops (which still have room!) but will try to spend time as much at the poster as possible. There might even be some extra special AstroBetter swag for our loyal readers and new recruits!

Looking forward to seeing you and reading your tweets from Seattle!

We’ve recently added a couple widgets to make spreading the word about AstroBetter easier.

Become a Fan

“Like” the AstroBetter Facebook Page. I’ve added a widget at the top of the right sidebar. As of 9am PT, 186 people like us…I’m sure there are more of you than that!

Like

At the end of each post, you can “Like” the post. When you do that, a link to the post will show up on your FaceBook profile and your name will be listed as someone who likes it.

Share

There are also buttons to easily share articles with your preferred method. If your favorite site is missing, let me know in the comments.

Follow

We now have a dedicated Twitter account for AstroBetter. If you’re following me, new AstroBetter posts will no longer be tweeted there. Follow AstroBetter instead.

Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting! Together, we can AstroBetter!

Thanks to Kelle, despite my leaving astronomy for the glorious world of public policy, and shutting down my web host account, the archives of Macsingularity live on.  We’re not 100% sure what to do with the home page, the IRAF installers (which are out of date), and other things, but for now pretty much all hold content and links to the site should continue to work and visitors to the site will simply notice the change of the title.

Long term, someone out there could step up and learn how to package up the IRAF files for installation.  Though, the email I received on installing IRAF had slowed to a trickle so I just assumed everyone was using scisoft or perhaps the IRAF team had streamlined the official installation process.

Also, someone suggested I put out the source of the IRAF button, which I plan to do at some point soon.  So, thanks again to Kelle for helping me migrate the archives.  Macsingularity is dead, long live Macsingularity.