There’s a discussion going on now on AASWomen (the newsletter of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy) that is worthy of everyone’s attention. The reason why I think this is important is because so many people know someone who has had to deal with unwanted sexual advances from someone senior to them (e.g., PhD adviser, close collaborator). I believe this situation is more common than we’d like to admit and we need to get the problem out into the open so it can be eradicated. Below, I’ve linked to the relevant bits of the newsletter; Serial Offenders especially deserves to be read.

• Anon’s request for advice
• Serial Offenders — an excellent rant that makes an apt comparison between the blind eye that the Catholic church hierarchy turned toward serial sexually abusive priests, and the blind eye that many academic departments turn toward serial sexual harassers on the faculty. “How can we get the chairs of university departments or directors of observatories to take this problem seriously?”
• Advice and More Advice — some ideas for those who find themselves is this situation.

Here is a guest post by Ian Crossfield, a third-year graduate student at UCLA working on the infrared characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, and Nate Ross, a first-year graduate student working on various projects relating to the history of star formation in the universe.

Like many astro groups, UCLA has had an informal astro-coffee discussion for years where people discuss the latest preprints hot off the arxiv.org presses. However, a barrier for some participants has been the unpredictability of the topics presented, especially for new graduate students. With an eye toward giving advance notice of what papers might be of particular interest (and in the spirit of entering the 21st century) we wrote up a PHP/Python package to automatically allow web submission of articles and generate this website. Read on to find out how to implement this at your institution.

Image Credit: Rick Harrison, OSU Alumni Magazine

In the hope that other departments might find this a useful tool, we’ve made all the code for the site available here, along with installation instructions and a bit of basic commentary. Briefly: a PHP-enabled web site lists submitted articles, has an input form for submitting additional articles of interest, and upon submission the site automatically updates the HTML/PHP code. Items can be subsequently deleted from the list using a password-protected PHP text editor. If you try it out, let us know how it goes and what improvements could be made!

The implementation isn’t the most elegant (or, probably, the most secure), and sites like those at UC Santa Cruz and Ohio State show that there’s no shortage of ways to design these tools. Nonetheless, in the few weeks since implementing this new setup we’ve already seen a substantial increase in grad student participation, so we’re quite satisfied thus far.

Any other good ideas for organizing the astro-coffee discussion? Let’s here them in the comments.

The .astronomy (dot astronomy) conference will begin tomorrow in Leiden at the Lorentz Center. There are fifty attendants and we’ll be covering outreach, web-based research, citizen science, and visualization in astronomy.

Tonight about twenty of the attendees got together and went out for dinner at a delectable pizza restaurant. Throughout the evening we introduced ourselves to one another. The surprising bit was how people went “ahhh, I know you!” after you told them your twitter name. A slightly strange experience, but I look at it in good light  .

Among the buzz of chatting, sharing stories, swapping expertise in geeky subjects we all had astronomy in common. Some are outreach specialists, others are programmers, in the middle are astronomers, and then a mix of everything. For the coming week we’ll share our ideas, projects, and expertise on various facets in the astronomy domain. Tomorrow we will begin with citizen science  in conference format and then break out to “unconference” style in the afternoon.

Four of the five days will follow the conference and unconference format and the exception, Wednesday, will be where everyone contribute their efforts to hack day. There we’ll pool our time to jump start interesting projects that lay in the vicinity of .astronomy’s theme.

If you’re curious about the conference and want to know more check out the conference site: http://dotastronomy.com.

I’m going to buy a MacBook Air today. Yes, I have money burning a hole in my pocket and yes, I want a laptop that will fit in my purse. I’m surprised it took me this long to get one. At one point, I thought my iPhone could satisfy my need for an ultra-portable, but it turns out, I need both.

I do all my CPU intensive work (e.g., IRAF, IDL) remotely and just use the laptop as a dumb terminal. I expect the Air will be similar in performance to my current 2 year-old MacBook, which I am quite happy with as long as I don’t have Firefox and Parallels (running XP) open at the same time. I’m hoping slimming down my Windows virtual machine will make it not so much of a RAM hog.

Also, I’ll be moving back to New York this summer and will be carrying stuff a lot more than I do here in Los Angeles. I want a machine that I’ll decide to take with me based on what I want to get done, not on how much neck and shoulder pain I’m willing to tolerate.

Here are the reviews that helped me make my decision: Macworld, Gizmodo

Anybody else have an Air? or thinking of getting one?