This is a guest post by Bethany Johns, a former AAS John Bahcall Public Policy Fellow. She has worked in science policy for commercial space flight companies and now works in energy, environment, and agricultural policy for the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America. [...]
If you have been using python for a few years, I suggest looking over the following tutorial: Advanced Design Patterns in Python The tutorial covers some of the basics of comprehensions, generators, decorators, context managers, descriptors, and meta classes. If you don’t know what any of these things are, the tutorial will at least give [...]
This is a guest post by Alyssa Goodman and accompanies her talk by the same name, presented at the AAS Meeting, at 11:40 AM on Monday. Talk slides will be online after the talk. Alyssa is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution. She studies interstellar gas and [...]
When I first started going to Town Hall meetings at AAS Meetings, I was very disappointed. I couldn’t understand what was going on. It felt like I had turned on an episode of a soap opera in the middle of a season. There was clearly a plot playing out, but 1) I didn’t have any [...]
Giving a talk at AAS next week? Want to blow away the audience with your eloquent oratory? This post is for you! Just ahead of the big meeting, everyone should check out an article in the Harvard Business Review by Chris Anderson, curator for TED: How to Give a Killer Presentation (Registration is free to read [...]
At all conferences, the boundary between professional and social interactions can be very blurred. While one of the best things about conferences like the AAS Meeting is hanging out with friends and meeting new people, we all need to remember that these are still primarily professional relationships and we need be very conscious about socially [...]
This is a guest post by Gus Muench (@augustmuench), an Astronomer and Data Scientist at the Harvard-CfA. Twitter is an information and networking tool that changes how many of us participate in conferences. It is a great way to keep track of interesting parallel talks, reminding you where you wish you were at any moment. [...]
This is a guest post by Jim Davenport, a grad student at University of Washington studying stellar populations. He also did an internship at Microsoft Research last summer. The original post appeared on his blog, If We Assume. Be sure to check back there for updates. If you’ll be attending the upcoming AAS 223 in [...]
Due to the big annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society coming up next week in DC (<cough>not DC), we’ll be tossing out our normal posting schedule and playing it fast and loose for the next couple weeks. So, dust off your RSS readers, tune your twitter feed, or just come check back often. [...]
This is a guest post by Scott Fleming, an Archive Scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). This is the third in a series of posts about MAST, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is pleased to announce that the first release of our Discovery Portal is now [...]