khannula | January 18, 2010My 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.
Have a good winter and spring, everyone. May it be less geologically tragic than 2010 has been so far.
khannula | December 30, 2009I'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 Recruitment, Retention, and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences," I asked Anne Jefferson (who blogs with Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous) whether she would be interested in submitting an abstract with me. We didn't know whether blogs were really useful or not, though, so (with the help…
khannula | December 16, 2009If 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 Science Blogs is there, either. But there are plenty of other bloggers there.
The American Geophysical Union has its own blog. It's staffed, not by AGU employees (for the most part), but by Science Communication grad students from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Columbia University. And…
khannula | December 13, 2009I 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 while ago, I was asked to be a reviewer for a journal article. That's a more common experience for people at research universities than for someone like me, but it's still something that's part of my job. I turned down the request because I didn't feel qualified to review the paper. That wouldn't have…
khannula | December 8, 2009From 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.)
khannula | December 5, 2009I'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 state-mandated changes to our general education program, students now have to take more outside-the-discipline writing courses (and the disciplinary writing courses are disappearing). We're not getting rid of the course completely, because we've also been using it to prepare students for their…
khannula | November 27, 2009Anyone 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. Instead, they gave each individual donor a Donors Choose giving card. That means you get to decide how HP's donation gets used.
If you want help finding projects dealing with the Earth Sciences, I added a bunch of new projects to the Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth. (Most of the projects that we…
khannula | November 16, 2009No, 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 just a socializing event -- no panel discussion has been arranged.
Also, we might have a special guest speaker via videoconference, but we still have to confirm this event.
Please RSVP for this lunch to mjvinas@agu.org by Tues. Dec 1. Feel free to let other geobloggers know about this event, but…
khannula | November 15, 2009DN 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, so you can browse the articles for yourself. (Especially if you are thinking about submitting a proposal to NSF's Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences program, which was just brought to my attention by Anne Jefferson's blog post.)
Before designing a program to increase the…
khannula | November 9, 2009There'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 Wenchuan quake, and concludes that the weight of the water, combined with its penetration into the fault zone, might have made the difference.
There have been a number of studies in the past decade or so that suggest that earthquakes can be triggered by little things, such as the passage of…
khannula | November 1, 2009Go 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 home of Alferd Packer) and Creede (former home of Doc Holliday), and I think it's got the coolest name of any landslide (and possibly the coolest name of any geological feature). It's a strange landslide for its slow movement, and it's being monitored in excruciating detail by the US Geological…
khannula | October 30, 2009Jess 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 Geological Society of America meeting, so I teamed up with Highly Allochthonous and Eruptions in the hope that, between the three blogs, we'd be able to scare up some support for K-12 geoscience education.
October's over tomorrow, and the geobloggers' challenge has raised more money than any other…
khannula | October 24, 2009The 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 total, HP would donate another $2000 towards the projects that we suggest. As of tonight, the Geobloggers challenge has raised $2215. The total amount raised, amongst all the bloggers and tweeters and others, is $282,116. So we're $600 short of giving a lot more money to engage kids in the Earth…
khannula | October 22, 2009I'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 perspectives, from information on the state of diversity in the geosciences today to suggestions for where we need to go to specific programs that have been developed to... well, to my talk, at the very end.
The session began with a personal perspective from Pamela Hallock-Muller, a marine scientist from…
khannula | October 20, 2009I'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 at depth into detachment systems: shear zones that separate hot, ductilely deforming rocks from shallower, brittly deforming rocks. These systems have been discussed since the 1980s, but the focus in this session was a little different than in past discussions I've witnessed. Detachments bring…
khannula | October 18, 2009So 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 talk and 2) blog.
I spent a lot of yesterday morning looking through the program, making plans for the rest of the week. (And no, I haven't followed through on all of them. That would have been impossible unless I could clone myself, unfortunately.) But although I am terrible about making plans and…
khannula | October 14, 2009There'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 might crawl under my desk tomorrow morning just to be part of the action. Because there's a big anniversary coming up on Saturday, and I'll be busy in Portland, Oregon, without the time to post.
At 5 pm on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, I was just settling down to do my Chinese homework. (Yes, I had…
khannula | October 12, 2009It'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 printed. (He's graduated and currently fighting forest fires, and he put the draft poster together by himself, so I guess I can wrestle with the dreaded plotter.) So I'm probably not going to try to help you understand climate myself. However, I can be a cheerleader for this week's events!
Tuesday…
khannula | October 4, 2009My 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 for busting rocks, they can easily be repurposed to bust zombies.
Advantages: Combines all the best qualities of the 1911A1 and the pump-action shotgun.
Disadvantages: None. Anyone who suggests otherwise eats babies.
The e-mail reminded me about one of the projects from the Geobloggers…
khannula | September 30, 2009There'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 landslides. And... well, you get the picture. So outreach is important.
But the best outreach might be the stuff that goes on every day in schools. My kid's lucky - he lives in a college town, with all sorts of students and professors providing opportunities to learn cool stuff. But a lot of kids don't…