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Galactic Interactions

Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.

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Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)

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The contents of each Galactic Interactions post are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Academia:

Fine. The post is deleted already.

Commenters convinced me to think twice, and they're right. Our system is screwed up. Never shed light on anything, because you're small and it could hurt you. If a festering wound exists somewhere, just try to get away. Don't try...

A Career and a Life, Episode 2 : Career Strikes Back

A while back at this blog's former site, I wrote a post entitled A Career and a Life. Now that my career is on the precipice of undergoing a tremendous change, I thought it might be interesting to revisit that post.

On Universities, Wealth, and Research Funding

A couple of years ago, I went to a meeting for junior faculty at Vanderbilt about the tenure process. The ostensible goal of the meeting was to help us feel more comfortable by letting us better understand the process. The...

A farewell to academia

Loved the teaching. Loved the science. Couldn't take the politics. Couldn't take the tenure stress. That about sums it up. I am sending off today a signed offer letter for employment with Linden Lab, the folks who create and run...

A better model for funding astronomy?

I suggest that perhaps the way we fund ground-baesd astronomy right now is inefficient, in addition to other flaws it has. I suggest an alternate model that would have a number of advantages.

Why go to grad school in science? Nod to R. Ford Denison

In this post at the blog "This Week in Evolution", R. Ford Denison hits the nail squarely on the head. Why should you go to grad school? Because you want to do grad school. If you are viewing grad school...

If you aren't a part of the witch hunt, you're a part of the problem

On being attacked from all sides.

Advice for junior faculty at a research university

Chad just posted a bit of pre-tenure advice, including the very important advice to take all advice with a grain of salt. I would say that also applies to the rest of his advice, because I'm about to post contradictory...

It does help to have the entire blogosphere on your side

I guess we should excuse Wiley now, because they've backed down from pointing their lawyers at Shelly Potential cynic that I am, I have several residual thoughts on the issue. Thought #1: I really want to believe what was in...

Blogging at Lawyerpoint : Intellectual Property Maximalism is Bad for Science

Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an...

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