khannula | September 24, 2009Over 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 about new research in a way that's similar to traditional science journalists). We're just some people sitting in the back of a darkened room, listening to a talk... until we post publicly about it. Last summer, my SciBling Dan MacArthur unintentially ran afoul of the press policy at the Cold Spring…
khannula | September 21, 2009I 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 thing to do...) So I don't have any strong opinions about how to abbreviate lengths of time. But if you do, the Geological Society of America wants to know.
Short version: traditionally, geologists have used different abbreviations for ages (time before present) and duration (amount of time elapsing…
khannula | September 15, 2009This 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 undergraduate college? Ok, then. Let me tell you what I know.
(This is based on being on six different search committees at two different schools - one private small liberal arts college (SLAC), and one public liberal arts college. However, I haven't been part of a search in the past seven years - my…
khannula | September 7, 2009The 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 institutions.
Disclaimer: I've taught at two undergrad-only colleges: one private liberal arts college on the East Coast, and one public liberal arts college in the Rockies. (I was also a student at a private liberal arts college. That made me want to teach at one, but it didn't teach me much about…
khannula | September 2, 2009I'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 a frantic plea for good Google Earth locations to use to demonstrate tilted rock layers in my first Structural Geology lab. I should have just checked SERC first. They now have a collection of images and latitude/longitude coordinates that are both beautiful and beautifully deformed. I started my…
khannula | August 31, 2009I 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 today, I'm finally catching up.
If you're already as far behind as I am, maybe you'll be inspired by this month's Wedge, hosted at Dino Jim's Musings. The theme is "teaching out of the box," and the wedge is organized around the five senses. So if you want to know how you can use smell to teach…
khannula | August 30, 2009I'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 fact, geology terms provide a tsunami of really bad metaphors.
I think it's time to fix that. Let's suggest some geoscience terms that would make for good slang, if nothing else.
For example: Plinian, as in Pliny the Younger, Vesuvius, and Pompeii, to mean any kind of explosion.
Usage:
"My dad'…
khannula | August 27, 2009When 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 vaccine wasn't effective enough, I think). My kid's list of vaccinations has been much longer, and includes a lot of diseases I didn't recognize immediately (Hib, for instance). A lot of parents I know are skeptical of vaccinations - aren't they potentially dangerous, and maybe better when kids get…
khannula | August 26, 2009We'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 information:
Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how…
khannula | August 21, 2009I'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... things... that I can't identify.
The leaves in the picture are about a centimeter or two across, so that thing is pretty big. It moves like a hummingbird, hovering in place and then zipping to another flower. (In fact, when my kid was buzzed by one recently, he swore it had been a hummingbird.) It'…
khannula | August 20, 2009Anne Jefferson, a hydro-geomorpho-climate geologist at UNC-Charlotte, has officially joined Highly Allochthonous as Chris Rowan's co-blogger. Anne's been unofficially co-blogging there for a while, but it's great to see her role made more official. And it's especially great to see someone with expertise in water and surface processes on Sb.
(Anne and I are also working together on a survey about women geoscientists and blogs - if you haven't taken it, please check it out.)
khannula | August 19, 2009The August edition of Geological Society of America's monthly online news, GSA Connection, has just been posted. There's lots of useful news, but this one might be crucial:
Sign up now if you need childcare during the Annual Meeting!
If minimum attendance is not met, the program may be canceled, so please don't delay. KiddieCorp has provided quality care for children ages 6 months to 12 years at conventions and tradeshows since 1986.
I'm not traveling with the kid, but I know the hassle of trying to sort out childcare. So I figured this was an urgent enough message to post.
Details for…
khannula | August 18, 2009Geobloggers (and tweeters) are very social, but we often exist in our own world apart from the rest of the science bloggers. Here are some opportunities to remind the rest of the science-blogging world how cool we are:
1st: ScienceOnline 2010 is a conference devoted to science on Web 2.0 and to open-access science. This year's version will be held January 15-17, 2010, in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Some of the proposed sessions include "blogging (tweeting, sharing photos, etc) from the field," "Arctic/Antarctic blogging," and "nature blogging." I figure geobloggers do more…
khannula | August 17, 2009I've recently taken to using the magic of the internet to give my students access to readings, assignments, and images outside of class. It's great - if my sophomores lose their map, they can print another one. If a student misses class, there's no excuse not to do the homework anyway. If students can't draw their own pictures, they can print out images and study them on their own. And it's possible to go even further with online teaching materials - to have students prepare for class by doing online readings, or watching a video, or listening to a podcast, and then responding to online…
khannula | August 16, 2009Jim Lehane's comment on my last post just reminded me that it's Accretionary Wedge time again. Jim's hosting the geology carnival, and he's got a back-to-school theme:
So your mission is this: "What out of the box ideas do you use to teach people about geology or geological concepts?" No need to limit yourself on ideas you have actively used. If you have used it and you think it is good, great. Is it an idea you have worked up on and gotten ready but haven't had the chance to use it yet, also great (this is pretty much my scenario). What if it is just a theory that you think would be…
khannula | August 16, 2009I'm the department Luddite. I use Powerpoint less often than any of my colleagues, and I'm the person who argues that rooms in a new building need to be designed to allow natural light and views when desired (as well as be able to be darkened adequately). But I'm also the person in my department who plays around with our newish course management system (Moodle), experimenting with a variety of online assignments and quizzes and data-sharing. And I'm the only person to have taught a "lecture" class that met in a computer classroom. (And, of course, I blog, and Tweet, and I was on Usenet before…
khannula | August 14, 2009I've recently submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, and it's got me thinking about how I find ideas for research. The proposal was for an instrument to enable research*, and that meant that, for the first time in years**, I had to write something that could convince other people that my research is interesting, important, and worth doing. Out of all the things I do in my job, that's the thing that I find the most difficult. I love teaching - teaching is fun, and makes everything worthwhile. (Even grading isn't so bad all the time.) And doing the research itself is fine, too…
khannula | August 6, 2009Geoscientists: we (Anne Jefferson, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Franks, and me) are looking for participants in a survey about the ways in which women geoscientists use blogs (both as readers and as writers). Here's the official request:
Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how blogs serve women geoscientists. Kim recruited the rest of us and we decided…
khannula | August 4, 2009There was a mountain lion in the courtyard of a local elementary school playground today.
A mountain lion.
At the elementary school.
A neighbor called the police, who called the Department of Wildlife, who shot the mountain lion. A young male, about 75 pounds, probably recently headed out on its own. Apparently that's the age they usually are when the DOW kills them for wandering around in town.
I just finished read The Beast in the Garden, this year's common reading at the college, so the story sounds eerily familiar. The Beast in the Garden is about the mountain lions that began showing up…
khannula | July 29, 2009Earth Science Week 2009 will be October 11-17 (ending on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). This year's theme is "Understanding Climate." There are photo, visual arts, and essay contests, and Thursday is going to be the first "Women in Geosciences" day. (And then Friday will be "frantically put posters together for GSA" day. Maybe the people who prefer AGU can make this year's Earth Science Week happen...)
The Association for Women Geoscientists has a new website (at the old address). They're now collecting dues online, but the transition to a paperless world has been…