Every department seems to do their seminar calendar in a slightly different way, but it looks like most places are still using an old-fashioned HTML table. While that works, it can be done so much better!

With the HTML table, everybody needs to actually visit the webpage in order to get the information. In this day and age, information should come to you, not you to it. Specifically, people should be able to “subscribe” to the seminar calendar in their calendar program of choice so that the events and changes just show up effortlessly. There are several ways to “publish” a calendar, but the easiest, cheapest, and most versatile way I’ve found is using Google Calendar.

Google calendar does everything you need it to do:

• Update events in just one place (not on both published calendar and on webpage)
• Multiple people can have editing privileges
• Calendar or agenda (list) view for webpage
• Calendar can be published for people to subscribe to
• Hyperlinks can be included in event title and description

Before I describe how to set it all up, I’ll show the final product! Example pages are at AMNH and IPAC. Below, I’ve shown events from AMNH, IPAC, NYU, and Caltech in two different views. (Use the arrows in the upper left to navigate to May when there were tons of events.) When you embed the calendar, you can choose the default view (Week, Month, or Agenda) but the user can switch between them. I’m partial to Agenda but Month is also nice. Click on the event to see the abstract and location. Click the arrow next to ‘Agenda’ in the upper right corner to show/hide calendars.

Month View

Agenda View

Setting this up is an easy, but multi-step process. I’ll walk you through it. It looks like a lot, but it really isn’t, I promise! I estimate it will take about 30 minutes to do the one-time initial set up.

Create Google Account and Calendar

• Create a Google account specifically for the seminar calendar.

I recommend choosing an account name that could also be the permanent email address for the seminar series. When the seminar organizer changes, you just forward the mail to a different address.

• Create a new calendar with a descriptive name.

Click ‘Add’ under My Calendars in the left sidebar. The calendar name should include the name of the institution, the broad area (e.g., Astro or Physics), and the series name (Colloquia, Seminar). Example: Caltech Astro Tea Talks. Just ‘Caltech Talks’ could be confused with Biology talks or public talks.

• Make the calendar public.

In order for people to be able to subscribe to it, it needs to be public.

• Share the calendar with your personal Google account and with other seminar organizers.
• Give them the appropriate permissions, most likely edit events and manage sharing.

Once this is done, there is really no reason to ever log into the seminar account again since everything can be done from the organizers’ personal accounts.

Create Events

WHAT: This is the event title. I think the talk title should be first since that contains the most relevant info needed to decide to attend. Also include the the speaker’s name and their affiliation. Example: Brown Dwarfs. Kelle Cruz (Hunter College/AMNH). If the title is TBA, just state the name and affiliation…no need to waste space by actually stating ‘Title TBA.’ Hyperlinks can be included, e.g.,
[code lang="html"]
Brown Dwarfs, Kelle Cruz, (Hunter College/AMNH)
[/code]

WHERE: Building and Room Number. It should be obvious from the Calendar title what campus.

WHAT: Abstract. Just the abstract. No need to repeat the information given in the other parts of the event.

Customize the Calendar(s) for the Seminar Webpage

• Create the HTML that will be used to display (“embed”) the calendar on the seminar webpage.

There are lots of customization options here. I would deselect ‘Time Zone.’ If you’re only displaying one calendar, then also deselect ‘Calendar List.’ Choose Month or Agenda as the default view. For reference, the calendars above are 600 px wide by 500 px high. And my week begins on Monday, but that’s another personal preference.

Share Subscribe Link

• In the Calendar Settings, get the “iCal” address for your calendar.
• Post this link on the seminar calendar.

This step is crucial. The idea is to let people see the events in their own calendar without ever having to visit the webpage. In order to do that, you have to give the link to subscribe to! The “iCal” link points to the standard .ics format and will work in other calendar programs, not just iCal. (The XML is if someone wanted to see the events in a feed reader, like Google Reader. And the HTML is a link to a generic version of the embedded calendar we created above.)

Phew! But once this is setup, updating calendars and changing seminar organizers will be a breeze!

Got any other other seminar calendar ideas? Let’s here it in the comments.

MarcoPolo is a very cool (free) application for MacOS X that uses information about the current state of your computer, or evidence, to automatically perform actions.

For example, one can use MarcoPolo to automatically change the Network Location if an ethernet cable is plugged in or a specific Wi-Fi network is present (useful if you need a different network location at home and at the office), automatically open up an application if a USB device is plugged in, or shut down certain applications and mute the computer if a projector is plugged in (useful if you want to avoid that embarrassing IM message in the middle of a talk).

MarcoPolo can use many different sources of evidence:

• Attached Audio Output devices (headphones/internal speakers)
• Discoverable Bluetooth devices
• Advertised Bonjour (Zeroconf) services
• Attached FireWire devices
• Assigned IP addresses
• Ambient Light level
• Attached Monitors
• Active Network Links
• Power source (power adapter/battery)
• Running Applications
• Current Time Of Day
• Attached USB devices
• Visible WiFi networks

and can perform the following actions:

• Set your default printer
• Change your desktop background
• Enable or disable particular firewall rules
• Set iChat status message
• Set the default IMAP or SMTP server for Mail.app
• Mount network shares (smb://, afp://, etc.)
• Mute or Unmute system audio
• Change OS X network location
• Open a file (an application, a document, etc.)
• Quit an application
• Enable or disable screen saver password
• Start/stop screen saver
• Change screen saver idle timeout
• Run a shell script
• Turn on or off Bluetooth
• Turn on or off WiFi (AirPort)
• Establish or disconnect VPN

that can be grouped into contexts, such as Work or Home.

But the key strength of MarcoPolo, which makes all this a lot of fun, is that you can assign different probabilities to different sources of evidence. So for example, you can use a specific level of lighting as a 60% chance that you are at home, and the fact that an ethernet cable is plugged in as an 80% chance that you are at work. All the weighted sources of evidence are added up, and the final context is automatically chosen!

Have you used MarcoPolo before? If so, what cool uses have you found for it? And if you are a Linux or Windows user, have you found an equivalent application?

I recently spent four days on a writing retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii with three of my closest friends/collaborators. A writing retreat is basically where you abscond from your office to some resort-like place for a several days (or weeks) to concentrate on a specific task, ideally a paper. I think it’s particularly useful to retreat with collaborators who are usually not in the same place at the same time. You could call it a working holiday or a collaboration meeting (this one is best for the expense report), but since it’s publish or perish, I like the goal of writing front and center. Theorists have the Aspen Center for Physics, but the rest of us need to make it happen on our own.

This was my fourth retreat and it was the best so far. In this post, I’ve compiled a list of what I think makes a successful writing retreat but everybody works differently so be sure to tweak these suggestions for your own group’s needs and preferences.

The Group

• People who have a desire and commitment to work. It’s going to be fun, but it’s not a vacation. As long as everybody is committed and adult, there will be no need for anybody to be in charge or babysit.
• Complimentary scientific expertise and experiences covering a range of pay grades. A mix of grad students, postdocs, and senior researchers works well. Ideally, coauthors on the publications being worked on.
• Plays well together. Since you’re going to be sharing a living space and cooking together, ideally, every participant should agree on the other members. Usually, I know of 1-2 people that I really want to retreat with and then I consult with them on the other invitees.
• I’ve had good experience with both small (4 ppl) and large (8 ppl) groups. Four is a good number. I think the main problem with larger groups is finding a big enough condo. I’ve considered spreading out into two nearby condos but I haven’t tried that out yet.

The Place

• A condo or house with a kitchen, ideally in a resort. Cooking meals is more time and cost efficient than dining out.
• Walking distance to pool/jogging path/beach/ski slope. Breaks are crucial for encouraging “ah-ha” moments, especially during times of intense focus. Individuals should be able to take breaks at their leisure and without requiring the consensus of the group.
• Big enough to support your group size comfortably. Enough beds and rooms to accommodate sleeping preferences. Enough chairs, tables, couches, and recliners that are comfortable enough to work in for several hours. Finding a place with the right furniture turned out to be the most time consuming part of identifying a location.
• Air conditioning. Even if they say there’s a nice breeze in the afternoon.
• Internet access, obviously.

My favorite place (I’ve been there twice) is Hali’i Kai 6G in the Waikola resort (next to the Hilton). Conveniently located for pre- or post- Mauna Kea observing retreats. It’s nearly perfectly furnished for four people in the living room and the upstairs lanai. There is both wifi and comfortable tables and lounges poolside (but not enough power outlets). There’s also a workout room and tennis courts. Grocery store, restaurants, and A-Bay are all only a short drive away.

Before the retreat

• What seems to work best is when each person has one, at most two, tasks or specific goals to focus on during the retreat. The task should not have a deadline (because you’ll get that done anyway) and ideally be directly related to progress on a publication. No telescope/grant proposals, job apps, etc. I think the best time for a writing retreat is when there’s a paper that has been a week away from submission for months and where one big concentrated push is needed.
• Become as independent as possible of printers and internet. Try to get everything to work locally on your laptop and print out anything you’ll be referring to often or will want to show people.
• Do as much analysis beforehand and be ready to write on the retreat. Put effort into getting into the right mindset.

Anybody else have good writing retreat experiences? Or locations to suggest?

This is a tip that sounds stupid, until you really need it.

Say you’re applying for a job, and have several PDF files:  a CV, a research statement, a cover letter.   Files are supposed to be emailed to an office assistant.   You can send separate files, but they may get confused, lost, only some get printed, etc.

Or, you can string the PDFs together into one file.  I tried doing this by dragging & dropping files into Preview and saving as a new file, or by using a shareware program.  Results included corrupted figures, and unintentional palimpsests (three pages of “page 1″ overtyped on 1 page).  Then I learned the command of wonder:
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=joined.pdf  cover.pdf  CV.pdf research.pdf

One simple command, to join PDF files in their natural tongue of postscript.

PS — Does anyone know of a program that will verify a PDF file, by which I mean, will ensure that it’s readable on different platforms?  I’ve had cases of a PDF file displaying different on a linux machine than a PC, than a mac.

I’ve been to 4 winter AAS meetings.  Twice, I came back with the “AAS Ick”, a nasty cold that lingered and certainly did NOT make my Astro Better.

It’s understandable: the big meeting is right after the holidays — children are home from daycare & school, relatives have traveled from afar, and germs are zinging overhead like bullets in South Tucson on New Year’s.  Once the microfauna are sufficiently diverse, everyone hops onto a plane, spreads the new germs, picks up new ones, and travels to the conference.  Then we shake hands for several days and pass on our newly-acquired germs.

So, in the interest of post-AAS meeting productivity, what can we all do to avoid the AAS Ick?

Our department just had free flu shots (1 nurse, 1 conference room, 2 hours, very popular.)  If you can talk your department into doing it, it’s a GREAT idea, and builds herd immunity.  Else, both pharmacies on my walk to work have ~$30 shots.

And, I learned from NPR that I’ve been sneezing wrong all my life — I should sneeze into my elbow, not my hand.

What else?  Not to be too Howard Hughes-ian, but the AAS Ick is a productivity-killer.

UPDATE (Oct 18): The capacity limit for the writing workshop has been raised. If want to attend the workshop but have already registered, complete and fax the Workshop form: http://aas.org/files/AAS215_Workshop_Form.pdf

In the spirit of doing astronomy better, I have helped to expand the professional development offerings at the upcoming meeting of the American Astronomical Society. In particular, workshops on leadership, negotiating, and writing productivity are being offered this January at AAS 215 for $50 each. You can sign up for them online via the meeting registration page.

REMINDER: Early registration ends on Wed, Sept 30.

The intention is that these types of workshops become a regular part of the meeting and I’m very interested in your ideas for future workshop topics! Descriptions and the details for the three new workshops are after the jump.

• Emerging Leadership: Development of leadership skills in problem-solving and leading change

Tues morning (Jan 5, 8:30am – 12:30pm)
Facilitators: Jane Tucker and Barbara Butterfield
Intended Audience: Early-career scientists who are or wish to be in a leadership position (Post-Docs, Junior Faculty, and Staff). Limited to 25 participants.

Do you guide other people’s research projects? Do you plan to be or are you currently the Principal Investigator on projects with several collaborators? Are you frequently in committee meetings, and sometimes chairing them? Do you want to eventually be a team lead, department chair or dean? This workshop will focus on some of the leadership skills that are necessary to perform effectively in these roles. Participants will increase their leadership skills by understanding effective and ineffective leadership characteristics, personal leadership strengths and development needs, leadership negotiation and problem-solving, how to lead change, among other topics. Attendees will select a case to practice in a role-play exercise. Participants will practice leadership skills; get feedback from coaches; and discuss best techniques for leading successfully.

• Basic Negotiations, Problem Solving and Conflict Resolution

Tues Afternoon (Jan 5, 2 – 6pm)
Facilitators: Jane Tucker and Barbara Butterfield
Intended Audience: Graduate students and Post-Docs. Limited to 25 participants.

This seminar is designed to build understanding of mutual interest based negotiations or solution finding by developing understanding of the parties’ interests and developing alternatives that enhance the possibility of reaching agreement. Participants will evaluate their personal conflict resolution styles. Case studies will reinforce the use of effective styles in negotiating and problem-solving. Case practice will include a competitive job offer, committee service, salary increase and assuring research resources. These cases help define patterns of negotiations when choice and stress are factors. Development of supporting data, options and packaging solutions are examined relative to these cases. Several methods of responding to difficult tactics will be demonstrated and discussed.

• Not Another Scientific Presentation: How to maximize your productivity on long-term writing projects

Wed afternoon (Jan 6, 2 – 4pm)
Facilitator: Dr. Gina Hiatt, Academic Writing Club
Intended Audience: Anyone who would like to increase their writing productivity.

Do you have research that has gone unpublished because you can’t make yourself finish the manuscript? Do you sometimes suffer from writer’s block? Do you wait for that elusive free morning in order to concentrate on your writing, but find that the time is never available? Or do you just plain procrastinate on writing? This seminar will present simple, doable action steps that you can take to increase and maintain your writing productivity over the course of a long-term writing project. If you’ve been unhappy with your writing output, the strategies presented here can help you turn around your writing habits, while dispelling common myths about writing that impede productivity.

Many thanks to a grant from COACh that is helping support these workshops. COACh is funded by National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences

Planning on registering? Problems registering? What workshop topics would you like to see offered at future AAS meetings? Let me know in the comments.

A while back, I wrote a primer on RSS feeds for astronomers. In my opinion, RSS is ideal for browsing and managing the daily astro-ph listings and is far superior to the one big daily email most people get. In particular, I like the feed provided by myADS because it sorts the articles based on user defined keywords. When I wrote the RSS primer, the one drawback to myADS was that the abstracts weren’t included in the feed…you only got the title and had to click through to read the abstract. Well that, my friends, has been fixed! Read on to find out more about the new and improved myADS preprint RSS feed options.

Now that the feed includes the abstracts, in addition the first author and title, the myADS RSS feed is, in my mind, the most efficient way to browse astro-ph. Not only are the articles sorted based on your interest, there is also one article per item (as opposed to many articles in one email), making them much easier to manage. I “star” articles in Google Reader that I want to come back to later. With the daily big email, I would go back through and not have any idea why I saved that particular day’s listing. Now, there’s no re-figuring out what I thought was interesting. (Full disclosure: While I only have 29 emails in my inbox, I have 231 starred items in GReader.)

In addition to the abstracts, there are now two RSS feeds to choose from: a short list of 5–10 articles that match your keywords or a sorted list of all of the articles. I prefer the full list so that I can keep up with what everybody else is doing. But if you’re really into decluttering, than the shorter list might be just right.

Admittedly, myADS is bit awkward to setup, but it really is worth a little bit of struggle to get it working for you. To make it a easier, here’s a step-by-step to getting astro-ph, the so-called daily notification, setup.

1. Login or create account
2. Click “Daily Notifications”
3. Set “Daily notification status” to Disabled to just use the RSS feed. If Enabled, you’ll get a daily email.
4. Define keywords. Here’s the gist of mine: ‘brown dwarfs’ ‘L dwarfs’ ‘T dwarfs’ -cosmology
5. Check “astro-ph”
6. Click “RSS feed”
7. Click “Partial” to get fed just the top hits or “Full” to get all of the articles. If you have a feed reader setup, clicking these should prompt you with subscribe options.

There is also a weekly notification that queries all abstracts included in ADS, not just astro-ph. I’ll leave it to you to mess around with that all on your own.

Many thanks to NASA, Harvard/CfA, Alberto Accomazzi and the ADS team for providing this crazy useful resource! We astronomers are really very privileged to have it.

The New York Times (of all places) wrote about the chore of keeping track of all the scientific papers on your desktop:  all those PDF files cryptically named 1998A+A__338_781M.pdf and fulltext.pdf .  Or worse, 0903(4).3037v1, because it’s faster to re-download the PDF each time you need it, than to find it in your download folder.   Mac’s Searchlight tool is useless for finding PDF papers, because it doesn’t understand that titles and author lists of PDFs are most important.  So a search for “Arnett” will find papers citing Arnett, not the actual paper by Arnett.

Astronomers describe elaborate schemes for keeping track of papers:  renaming each file with an author name and year; sorting PDFs in descriptive directories; printing out hundreds of papers per year and filing them in a cabinet.

I’ve been trying Papers for OS X ($43, free 30-day trial), an application that searches for scientific papers (through ADS), then organizes those papers for you.

The best part of Papers are “Collections”, which are like iTunes playlists.  Say I want to write a new proposal, so I’m reviewing the literature on the topic of…  the hard X-ray luminosities of ultraluminous IR galaxies.  I make a new collection, “ULIRGs in the X-ray”, then drag in the papers I’ve found.  Some papers I’ll drag to several collections.  Now, a year later, when I start writing a paper on that subject,  I simply open the Papers collection (screenshot below), review my old literature search, add new papers, and quickly grab citations.  Pretty cool.

If you search ADS from within Papers, the program keeps track of the metadata (author, ADS link, bibcode) and associates them with the PDF file.  However, this requires using Papers’ ADS interface.  Searching for Rigby et al. 2008 would be Rigby[1AU] 2008[yr], or maybe Rigby[AU] Papovich[AU] 2008[yr].  The syntax isn’t hard to learn, but you have to learn a new syntax.

You can also import papers that are cluttering your desktop.   However, most PDFs lack metadata, so Papers doesn’t know what they are.  (ADS, CAN THIS BE FIXED?)  As a result, for every “Unknown” paper, you have to type in the author name and date, have Papers search ADS, find the right paper, and hit “Match” to link the metadata to the paper.  This is a pain, and is why I’ve been slow to switch to Papers.

Also, I’ve heard good things about Zotero — maybe an AstroBetter reader could review it, and/or compare it to Papers?

Today APLpy 0.9.3 is out! It is a Python plotting package made to generate publication-quality plots in multiple formats such as EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG.

APLpy was created by Thomas Robitaille and Eli Bressert, who come from a Fortran and IDL background. With Python’s ease of use, portability, and programming they decided to make a plotting package for astronomers. APLpy’s objective is easy usage with great looking publication plots. In other words, more bang for the buck. Here’s an example of what an APLpy plot looks like:

A color generated APLpy plot from FITS files with grid lines.

To see more examples and how to make the plots in Python check out this link.

APLpy has quite a few features (some listed below – from the APLpy site) and is continuing to expand. Fortunately, there’s good documentation to accompany the features.

• Make plots interactively or using scripts
• Show grayscale, colorscale, and 3-color RGB images of FITS files
• Generate co-aligned FITS cubes to make 3-color RGB images
• Overlay any number of contour sets
• Overlay markers with fully customizable symbol
• Plot customizable shapes like circles, ellipses, and rectangles
• Overlay coordinate grids
• Customize the appearance of labels and ticks
• Hide, show, and remove different contour and marker layers
• Pan, zoom, and save any view as a full publication-quality plot
• Save plots as EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG

The plotting package is under active development and there has been extensive interaction between the users and developers. We should be seeing some exciting features added to APLpy in the next few releases.

Since the Chromium project started releasing builds of their browser I have been testing it from time to time. The latest build for OS X, 20223, has significant improvements from just a month ago. After using it for a day I found some nifty features and the one that really caught my eye is devtools. If you right click on a link on a web page, as seen in the first image, you can choose the “Inspect element” option.

Inspect elements

Like other browsers you can inspect elements and actions of a web page, but Chromium takes the devtools a step further than other browsers. like Safari. They are both Webkit based browsers and use the Webkit devtools.

As a techie, I have found myself building websites frequently for astronomy related projects. Researching ways to make websites more snappy and reducing web page overhead on browsers is a challenge. Especially when you’re not sure what’s slowing down the browser rendering.

Chromium Webkit devtools lets you see the load time of web page, in itemized components: code, documents, scripts, and graphics (the second image). It’s not the first time that a devtool does this, but how it’s been done is impressive. You can easily browse and find the components slowing down a page load time. This makes optimizing a website much easier and enjoyable. 

If you have Chromium for OS X, check it out. It’s a great Internet browser and web developer tool. If you want a stable browser at the moment with the devtools check out Safari.

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