khannula
Posts by this author
January 18, 2010
My mother noticed that I hadn't been blogging much lately. That's true - in fact, I made a New Year's Resolution to stop blogging, at least for the semester. I've got additional responsibilities this semester which are keeping me extra busy, so I'm putting the blog aside for the next few months.…
December 30, 2009
I've been reading both geoblogs and women-in-science blogs for a while, and watching the support networks grow around them. So when I looked through the Geological Society of America's list of session topics for the 2009 annual meeting and saw one about "Techniques and Tools for Effective…
December 16, 2009
If you're like me, and you're currently not in San Francisco, listening to people discuss rapid coastal erosion in the Arctic or argue about whether or not an impact caused the Younger Dryas or show off cool imaging techniques to monitor active volcanoes... well, none of the geoscientists at…
December 13, 2009
I had a weird experience dealing with journals and peer review a little while ago. Recent discussions of the CRU e-mail hack (especially Janet's) has made me think more about it, and wonder about how the scientific community ought to think about expertise when it comes to peer review.
A little…
December 8, 2009
From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ):
Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org
(I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
December 5, 2009
I'm not quite done with this semester, but I'm also starting to think about the courses that I'm teaching in the winter. In particular, I'm thinking about our department writing course. The course is in transition right now - in the past, it's been a writing-in-the-discipline course, but because of…
November 27, 2009
Anyone who donated to the Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth challenge should have received a "giving card" via e-mail in the past few days. If you're confused about it, here's the explanation:
HP made a huge donation to all the social media challenges, but didn't donate money to specific projects.…
November 16, 2009
No, I'm not going to AGU this year. But if you are, AGU has activities for bloggers. From Maria-José Viñas, AGU's public affairs coordinator:
1) We have scheduled a free geobloggers' lunch for Wednesday, from 12:30 to 1:30 PM at the San Francisco Marriott, Pacific H Room. Right now, it's…
November 15, 2009
DN Lee of Urban Science Adventures is hosting this month's Diversity in Science carnival, on the topic of pipeline programs that can increase the diversity of science. Two years ago, there was a special issue of the Journal of Geoscience Education devoted to that very topic. JGE is now open-access…
November 9, 2009
There's a great, new online news article by Science's Richard Kerr about the role of the Zipingpu Dam in last year's Wenchuan earthquake. A new article in Geophysical Research Letters (which I haven't read - my library doesn't have access to GRL) tests the plausibility of water as a trigger for the…
November 1, 2009
Go to Dave's Landslide Blog for full details about this. I don't have access to the paper.
According to Dave Petley, there's a new paper in Nature Geoscience about the Slumgullion landslide. Slumgullion is in my greater neighborhood - it's in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, between Lake City (former…
October 30, 2009
Jess is looking for posts about outreach that we've done. I'd like to talk about outreach that other people have done.
This month, many of the bloggers here at Sb have been participating in Donors Choose, a campaign to raise money for schools. October is a crazy month for anyone who goes to the…
October 24, 2009
The DonorsChoose social media challenge ends tomorrow at the end of next week. Rumor has it that HP has a large pot of money (like $200,000) to split amongst the groups that raised at least 1% of the total... and they'll split the money at the end of the day tomorrow. If we raised that 1% of the…
October 22, 2009
I'm back from the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I promised to blog about my session. So... here it is.Techniques and tools for effective recruitment, retention, and promotion of women and minorities in the geosciences. It's a mouthful, and included a lot of different…
October 20, 2009
I'm heading home tomorrow, and I've finally got a little time to blog. Here's quick summary of the sessions I went to on Sunday (the first day of the meeting).Detachment Dynamics: heat, deformation, and fluids in extensional systems: Where continental crust stretches apart, steep normal faults join…
October 18, 2009
So I've been at the Geological Society of America annual meeting for a day and a half. The main part of the meeting just began this morning; yesterday I went to a short course about science education research. And now, after half a morning of talks, I'm taking a break to 1) revise things in my own…
October 14, 2009
There's a lot going on the online geo-world tomorrow. It's Blog Action Day, and the subject is Climate Change. It's Earth Science Week's first Women in Geoscience day. And, at 10:15 am Pacific time, it's California's second annual earthquake drill - the Shake Out.
I don't live in California, but I…
October 12, 2009
It's ! It's also the week before the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I'm going to be spending this week running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything graded, an exam written, a post written about my talk (Tuesday afternoon), and my student's poster…
October 4, 2009
My other half sent me this link on Friday: from Wired, rating weapons used to kill zombies (in Zombieland, and elsewhere). Their number 13:
13. Rock hammers
Not to be confused with tremendous mallets, these things are faster to wield and don't leave you exhausted after two or three swings. Used…
September 30, 2009
There's an issue of Eos sitting on my desk at work with a front-page article about how to manage outreach. Earth scientists know stuff that's important - this week's huge earthquakes (covered all over the geoblogosphere) are just one example. Water's another. And climate. And volcanoes. And…
September 24, 2009
Over the past year, as live-blogging and live-tweeting conferences have become more common, scientific societies have had to figure out what to do about bloggers. What are we? We don't usually wear press badges (although there are professional journalists who blog, and there are bloggers who write…
September 21, 2009
I confess that I didn't know the geological conventions for abbreviating time until I started teaching the geology writing class and looked them up. (That's despite having published a paper on argon-argon geochronology. Sometimes, just doing whatever the co-authors and reviewers say is the right…
September 15, 2009
This is a repost from my old blog, from a year and a half ago. But it's time for academic positions to be advertised - if they haven't been frozen due to budget cuts. So, some old advice on getting a job, while my own job is keeping me especially busy.
So. You want a job, do you? At an…
September 7, 2009
The economy might be scary, but I've seen ads for academic jobs already. And for geoscience grad students, the first conference is only a little more than a month away. So I'm going to revise and repost a series that I wrote on my old blog, about getting a job at a predominantly undergrad…
September 2, 2009
I've spent 15 hours in the classroom teaching in the past three days, and several more meeting with students to sort out schedules and brainstorm ideas for senior thesis projects. My brain is fried, but I'm going to try to share some interesting stuff I've run into:
- Early this afternoon, I posted…
August 31, 2009
I almost missed the lastest Accretionary Wedge! In my defense, I was doing work related to the Wedge's theme - I was frantically getting ready for classes to start today, and I swore not to go through the accumulation in my RSS reader until I was ready to go. So, 13 hours after my first class began…
August 30, 2009
I'm already on the record as being highly amused by the use of "set in stone" to imply permanence. I find "tectonic shift" and "glacial pace" equally hilarious, given that glaciers can move faster than plates. (Fast tectonic plates move at cm per year; fast glaciers can move at miles per year.)
In…
August 27, 2009
When I was little, I was vaccinated for the things that were recommended at the time: polio, measles, German measles (rubella), diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis). I had the mumps and chicken pox when I was little, and was re-vaccinated for measles before college (because the late 60's…
August 26, 2009
We've gotten a lot of responses to our survey about women in geoscience and blogs, and we're going to wrap it up soon, so we'll have time to analyze the data before the Geological Society of America meeting in October. If you haven't participated in the survey yet and you want to, here's the…
August 21, 2009
I've been trying to get some xeriscaping established this summer, and I've been very pleased with the plants that are growing. This one, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, is supposed to become a groundcover, and it's spreading quite well. But with the flowers have come some interesting pollinating...…