Being a MOND Skeptic for the Naked Astronomy Podcast

Here's me being a MOND skeptic and debating MOND proponents on the Naked Astronomy Podcast. Interesting experience.

Link to podcast (MOD debate starts 08.40)

Talking Galaxy Zoo with the Naked Scientists

Way back in the spring, I talked about Galaxy Zoo with the Naked Scientists (at the UK National Astronomy Meeting). You can now listen to this interview on the Naked Astronomy Podcast for July 2012. 

(PS. Thanks to @halfastro for pointing this out to me on Twitter!).

Fun with Twitter Visualizations for NAM2012

I seem to be becoming an advocate of the use of Twitter for researchers (more on that after this year's dotAstro). So it might surprise you to learn I was a massive skeptic at first and only signed up under protest! ;) But the more time I spend on Twitter the more I appreciate the tool it provides to connect people (which in my case are generally astronomers).

 Anyway, one of the fun things about Twitter is the archive/visualizations you can make of a given search term. I did some of this with tweets from the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester last week, which were tweeted with the hashtag #NAM2012.

 By it's nature Twitter is transitory, so some of these visualizations won't last - for example the Graph of People Recently Tweeting #NAM2012 will be blank soon, but you can visit the link and put in the search term of your choosing.

This archive will remain, but I set it up late, so it only represents the last couple of days of NAM - and note to self, to set up such archives early for the next meeting. This service can only collect the last 500 tweets of a hashtag.

(And I should do a shoutout to Doug_Burke, a British astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics for sending me the links to these services which he has previously used to collect AAS tweets).

Because of that limitation I was tempted to get a bit more technical and tried downloading all Tweets with #NAM2012 before they disappeared. Thanks to dotastro I am confident/crazy enough to give this a go. I Googled for help, and found these instructions: Twitter: How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation which I followed to set up a Google spreadsheet collecting #NAM2012 tweets. This could get the last 1500 (which is Twitters limit, nothing to do with the code), which on Thursday meant tweets back to about Tuesday night at NAM (so not all, but most of them). I then set it up to display them in a NAM2012 visualization at TAGSexplorer. I think this will keep updating until I turn it off which I will do in a couple of days once all the NAM news stories are gone. 


 Hope you enjoy them. Try exploring the tweet timeline for a given users in the last one - hit play for a fun movie. :)

Visiting Jodrell Bank as part of the UK National Astronomy Meeting

I'm in Manchester this week at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. As part of this, yesterday evening I went on a visit to the Jodrell Bank Observatory, with 120 other astronomers.

NAM Astronomers at JBO

It was a gorgeous spring evening, and the disk looked lovely as a contrast to the beauty of spring around it.

Jodrell Bank and a sheep

The Sun through the dish

Jodrell Bank and some daffodils

Jodell Bank and spring blossom

Jodrell Bank and a hedge of forsythia

We got to walk under the dish too. Here we are crossing the track which the telescope uses to rotate in azimuth.

Jodrell Bank azimuth track

And we stood under the dead centre of the dish.

Looking up at the base of Jodrell Bank

That's me directly under the centre of the dish

The sky was clear, and the crescent Moon was prominent, see if you can spot it through the dish below.

Required picture of me with the dish

We also got a tour of the control room - and the set of BBC Stargazing LIVE of course. 

And we're astronomers, so we like the details - this is some of the computers which run Jodrell Bank when it works with the eMerlin network of UK radio telescopes.

It need as "Totally Accurate Clock" to do this (actually that's totally true).

Our visit ended with a dinner in the cafe. We sat outside with the above view of the sky, and I saw Venus in the daytime finally. :) I think it's in the below image, but I haven't spotted it yet!

Moon and Venus in daytime, 28th March 2012

Practical Tips for Scientists Interacting with the Media (from Will Gater at NAM)

In my opinion one of the best sessions at the UK National Astronomy Meeting held in Llandudno this April was a "Meet the Press" session aimed at giving scientists information on how the press works, what will help them.

 In that session Will Gater presented a list of practical tips for scientists who want to/have to interact with the media. I thought it might be useful to reproduce them here (based on the notes I took in April, so my apologies to Will if I'm misrepresenting what he actually said!).

1. Have a person webpage (my comment about this is that it always surprises me when scientists don't have this as it's so easy to do in a university setting). Will's advice for the website was that it should (a) be kept fresh; (b) list your specialisms/research interests; (c) give clear contact details; (d) have a list of your recent papers; (e) contain information about your career path/biography.

2. Have a head shot ready (should be high resolution).

3. Understand the lead times on publications when thinking about making press releases. For example magazines plan issues 4-5 weeks in advance, while newspapers work on much shorter timescales.

4. Understand how the media find information about science stories. Will listed (a) press releases; (b) tip offs; (c) reading papers on the arXiV; (d) twitter (and he said that this last one was really useful to see the whole process of science, and get a sense of what researchers are talking about).

Will then went on to give some advice on the contents of a good press release. Which from my notes were:

1. Give clear contact details.

2. List the names of people involved in the research.

3. Put the main result in the first paragraph along with who has done it.

4. Have a clear headline (try to write it like an article - since, rightly or wrongly, many online articles will be a verbatim copy of the press release).

5. Clearly list the wider implications.

6. Provide a high resolution image (300 dpi).

For interviewing, he advised that you think about in advance what the questions might be (what do you worry about the most). He suggested that if you talk about how it felt to do the research that will add a lot.

 You can follow Will on Twitter.

Asking questions at NAM

In this month's A&G (the magazine members of the Royal Astronomical Society get sent) there is a review of the hi-lights of the recent National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) held in Llandudno, which I attended (in part because of my work for LOFAR-UK).

Image 9 from "NAM in North Wales", June 2011 edition of Astronomy & Geophysics.

I was a bit surprised to see as part of that article a picture of myself waiting to ask a question at the end of Mark Thompson's plenary talk on "Einstein at Teatime - the popularisation of Astronomy" (I'm the one in pink!), particularly as there's actually no mention of the many excellent talks and discussion on science communication which happened at NAM2011 (spearheaded by this interesting plenary discussion). For me those sessions were one of the major hi-lights of NAM2011.

On a practical matter, I've been contacted by people at "The Observatory" (where reviews of the talks, and transcripts of the questions are published) who are looking to identify the other question asker (in blue above). If anyone can help let me know and I'll pass it on.

Talking about LOFAR with the Naked Scientists

I discussed LOFAR and LOFAR-UK with Andrew Pontzen on the special National Astronomy Meeting edition of the Astronomy podcast for the Naked Scientists.

MP3 of just my LOFAR segment.

Link to the whole podcast (including a transcript).

LOFAR-UK at the UK National Astronomy Meeting

This week I've been in Llandudno, Wales for the UK National Astronomy Meeting. One of the things I've been doing here is representing LOFAR-UK with an exhibit stand (and giving several interviews). I blogged about it earlier on the LOFAR-UK blog - link.

I also gave a talk about my recent work with SDSS3. More on that soon I hope when the paper is in press. 

It's been a great meeting, with just tomorrow morning left. Lots of really interesting talks and discussions.