The Business of Astronomy
sb admin | September 8, 2007Hello from England! Last night was the award ceremony for the 2007 Gruber Prizer in Cosmology. It was good to meet up with the members of the SCP again, many of whom I haven't seen in several years. Picture below is the members of the collaboration who were present, underneath one of the many trees labelled as "Newton's Apple Tree" in the UK; this one is at Trinity college, and apparently is a descendant of the original tree from the apocryphal story about the apple falling on Newton's head. Here we are all looking for apples of our own, but evidently these apples are made of dark energy…
sb admin | August 18, 2007This is mostly just an MLP ("Mindless Link Post"), and it's nearly two weeks late, but there's a post by Julianne over at Cosmic Variance that I think is of crucial importance. People who are outside the field of science very often lose sight of the huge amount of important science that is done, but doesn't produce the "amazingly sexy discovery" news headlines, or, say, the Gruber prize. Also, people working in one field of science often don't appreciate the value of other fields of science when it doesn't obviously overlap theirs... even though, as Julianne points out, all of that other "…
sb admin | July 26, 2007A 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 practical upshot for me, at least, was to ratchet up the tenure stress another notch or two, as well as add to the growing sense of despair I had about the whole thing.
Today, Chad points to an article in Inside Higher Ed about the size of university endowments. You know, those universities that have been increasing student tuitions at rates much faster than the rate of…
sb admin | July 16, 2007Loved 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 Second Life. I will be an engineer or ops/developer or something... wait, hang on. Here we go, "Productions Operations Engineer" is the title listed in the offer letter. I will write more about this in the near future, and probably a lot more in the ongoing future. Let me say, though, that I'm very excited to be going to work for Linden. A lot of the rest of…
sb admin | July 6, 2007Before I say this, let me preface my remarks with the statement that I understand the reasoning of the Time Allocation Committtee (TAC), and it's not an insane decision. It's as I predicted; they're worried that the observations are too hard because the targets are faint. My collaborator and I knew this going into the proposal, but thought it was worth a shot.
I just got back the NOAO TAC report for a proposal I wrote for 5 nights on the WIYN 3.5m telescope this year. I know form inside information that this semester, the telescope was not very oversubscribed-- the number of nights…
sb admin | July 2, 2007The current way we fund astronomy research in this country is
horribly flawed. There must be a better way. Let me suggest one that I
believe that we should consider.
Now, yes, you are all going to be cynical and say, "Rob thinks it's
flawed because he's had trouble getting funding, and the main flaw is
that he doesn't have any funding." While it is true that I have been
burned by the system, and am admittedly bitter about that, I think that
there are rational arguments for my case.
Let us consider the boundary conditions. Let's assume that there is
some drive to continue to perform…
sb admin | June 21, 2007In a recent post, I expressed frustration with the observation that those who sometimes question the tactics and language of some fighting for gender-equality then get lumped in with "everybody else who is clueless and oppressive," even if we care deeply about the issue. One of my complaints was irritation with the word "privilege," which generated a lot of hostility and confusion which, unfortunately, ended up obscuring my core point.
I would like to thank Annie (commenter in the previous thread, who continued the conversation with me in e-mail) for her calm and reasoned and non-attacking e…
sb admin | June 19, 2007In 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 as something you have to grind through in order to get the faculty job you covet, don't go. Your chances of getting that faculty job are too low.
If you want the faculty job, you have to go to grad school. But you should believe that when you come out the other side, you will find grad school to have been a worthwhile experience even if you don't get the faculty job, and end up doing…
sb admin | June 13, 2007Anybody who's been reading my blog for a while knows that I'm aware of, very concerned about, and even active in the plight of women and minorities in science. See, for example:
"Be nice to Shelly! She's cute and she likes birds!"
The Myth of the Meritocracy
A tale of egregious scientific male misbehavior
Intrinsic ability and women in science
Unconscious bias... even when we're conscious of it
Women in Physics : why do people do nothing? (This post was taken down at the request of my chair. You can find excerpts of the original post here and here. If you're clever, you might even be able…
sb admin | May 25, 2007Chad 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 advice. You should also take my advice with a grain of salt. Be aware that it comes from somebody who has been beaten into being very cynical about the system. On the other hand, you can learn from my mistakes.
My advice here is specifically for faculty at a research University, most specifically Vanderbilt. It's primarily for physics and astronomy (indeed, primarily the…
sb admin | May 19, 2007Excerpts from the individual and panel reviews on my latest proposal:
The proposed work is very well motivated, well organized, with clear plans and goals.
There is also:
Guaranteed access to the CTIO 1.5 m, and an established track record with WIYN 3.5 m observations, add to the strength of the proposal. Preliminary work from both telescopes are presented, indicating that the proposed aims for the project are achievable.
And, indeed, in another one:
This is a well written proposal (though I found unnecessary details in places such as section 4).
I should note that the stuff I put in…
sb admin | May 16, 2007I'm in an interesting position. Having so recently posted my own bitch and whine about how my tenure case is in trouble, suddenly we learn that Intelligent Design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez-- somebody who, frankly, has been viewed as a thorn in the side of astronomy by a large fraction of astronomers-- has been denied tenure.
I'm in no position to comment, but will do so anyway, because that's my way.
My own whine and rant suggests (or, anyway, states) that I think that the reasons my tenure case is on the rocks aren't the greatest of reasons. I know I'm a good teacher, and I know that I'm…
sb admin | May 8, 2007I'd love to write something about the biggest-ass supernova ever observed, confirmed to be "something new" based on Chandra observations. There is a press release about it here.
Alas, my web-fu has not been good enough yet to turn up an actual preprint or scientific article. The press release says that the paper will appear in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ, pronounced "ap jay", to those of us in the biz). That generally means the paper is accepted. Alas, I could not find the preprint on the arxiv.org preprint server. I hope that it's just a timing issue, and that the preprint will show…
sb admin | May 8, 2007Whether or not that's the message that is intended to be sent, that is the message that is sent.
Here's my deal. Vanderbilt has made it 100% clear that without funding at the level of an NSF grant, I will not get tenure, regardless of anything else. Indeed, my chair has told me that funding is the only issue he sees as being a serious question with my tenure case. (And, by the way, to the two new astronomers who are coming: I know that some dean told you it's a "myth" that tenure is dependent on funding. Unless I have been lied to, you were lied to during your interview.)
For what I do,…
sb admin | May 1, 2007Scientific papers, like all other sorts of writing or creative expression, are covered by copyright. And, this is potentially a very bad thing.
Copyright grants a lot of sweeping rights to the writers of a paper, or the producers of any creative work. Often, those rights get signed away to a publisher or a distributor, but they are still there and enforceable by law. Among those rights is the right the term "copyright" is named after: the right to make copies of the work, but more significantly, the right to prevent anybody else from making a copy. There's another right that goes even…
sb admin | April 19, 2007Simon White has written a treatise published on astro-ph (arXiv:0704.2291v1) where he argues that Dark Energy, or, more specifically, the current bandwagon of interest in Dark Energy, is potentially harmful for astronomy.
Despite the fact that I'm deeply interested in cosmology and Dark Energy, despite the fact that those subjects are my favorite topics for public-outreach lectures, and despite the fact that I was there as one of the major contributors tot he 1998 discovery of the acceleration of the Universe's expansion and hence Dark Energy, I agree with almost everything Simon White has to…
sb admin | April 16, 2007Anybody who reads this blog is probably familiar with Bad Astronomy. If you're not— if you know my blog and not his— then you live in a really bizarre alternate Earth. Just in case that's you, go and read it. He's probably the web's most popular astronomy blogger, but he's been a blogger longer than he's been a blogger. (Huh?) His "Bad Astronomy" site is loaded with all sorts of goodness. The names comes from the fact that he's long dedicated himself to debunking bad astronomy in the popular media. Indeed, he has a book of the same title. If anybody ever gives you crap about the Moon…
sb admin | February 26, 2007I don't know if it was intended for me, but somebody printed out and stacked with my airline reservations a scan of a letter by Smith & Smith (from Arlington, Virginia), from the 2006 issue of Physics Today (letters to the editor). The scan also included a number of penned comments written by a highly cynical and annoyed person commenting on the letter.
The letter is objecting to an earlier article about the "pipeline problem" in physics, where at higher and higher levels, women represent a smaller and smaller fraction of physicists. The conclusion of their letter reads:
Once society…