PS and EPS figures have been the bread and butter of astronomy for decades. In turn, the astronomy journals accepted the PS and EPS figures for publication. Recently, plotting packages are supporting PDF files more than the EPS and PS formats. An EPS file was originally developed as a language to tell a program how [...]

A new sociological study has been released surveying male and female scientists to find out what they say about the gender gap in sciences. A nice summary of the work is given in the blog post below (re-posts by  Women in Astronomy and  John Johnson brought it to my attention). The quotes from the interviews of [...]

An interesting post on the steps one mid-career scientist at a large public university has taken to impact his/her department’s hiring practice: Anonymous Guest-Post: One Small Step – Women in Astronomy

Catherine Neish (NASA Goddard) and David Choi (NASA Goddard) have an interesting post on NASA grant statistics, the impact on securing full-time funding, and pros and cons of the associated career choices for scientists: The Part-Time Scientist – Women in Astronomy  

Many of the points in this article resonated with me and relate to the current topic of conversation. To me the real purpose of our work [as faculty] is to mentor our students, to help them along their path to becoming thoughtful, engaged, self-aware citizens who are fully able to make choices that reflect their [...]

Dan Burger is a Computer Science graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He has been working with the Astroinformatics Group on how to dynamically handle and visualize large volumes of data. Datasets. If you work in astronomy, chances are you have them. They are hardly the romantic vision that you had when you decided to go into [...]

This email, supposedly sent to the grad students at a widely known Astronomy Dept, has been making the rounds and needs to be discussed. You can read for yourself the ten-point manifesto, but the most offensive points to me include, Not only should you work 80–100 hours a week, you should WANT to. If you [...]

Browsing the most recent postings on ArXiv, the most common information included in the “Comments” field includes the number of pages, number of figures and tables, and the status (submitted/accepted) of the paper. Many people do not include the any of the meta data. K.M. wrote to AstroBetter wondering what could be done to encourage people [...]

Do you use the emulateapj style file when submitting to astro-ph or circulating drafts to your co-authors? Or do you find it to be a nuisance? I have been informally asking this question at conferences (and otherwise) for a few months now and have encountered a mixed response.  A plurality seems to prefer papers in [...]