Starship Asterisk*

The AAS 223rd meeting starts this evening outside Washington, DC; pre-meeting sessions started yesterday and continue during the day today. For those interested, you can follow the meeting in various ways even from a distance.

The science program is available online and as a PDF.

Each presentation, whether poster or oral, has an "AAS Extras" page. The basic URL for these pages is http://extras.aas.org/meeting/aas223/. Specific sessions and presentations can be brought up by appending the session/presentation number to that URL. For example, the astro code sharing session is session # 225; to see all of the talks in that session, the URL is http://extras.aas.org/meeting/aas223/225/. Appending the presentation number of the first talk in that session to that URL will take you to the Extras page for that talk: http://extras.aas.org/meeting/aas223/225/225.01

The Extras pages are new this meeting (so far as I know, anyway; they were news to everyone I've talked to) so some may not be populated with additional material, but I do know some presenters have been adding their extras. This can include links to various resources, PDFs of posters, and slides used in a talk.

Additional ways to follow:

• https://twitter.com/search?q=%23aas223& ... f=realtime (You do not need a Twitter account to follow along, and fair warning: watching this feed can be addicting!)
  or this tweet meta page (so cool!): http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~dburke/aas223/overview.html
  
  Press conferences
  
  Blogs. There are many, but here are two good ones that will be carrying posts from the meeting:
  AstroBetter
  Astrobites

I dipped into the tweet meta page and read this:
'Astronomy is the gateway drug to an addiction to science" (#aas223 #astroamb2014)

Isn't that great!?

By the way, the AstroBetter site (which I only know of via an earlier post by Owlice) is extremely interesting, even if one is not a professional astronomer.

M

Margarita, that quote got retweet and commented on quite a bit, and then someone asked for a source/confirmation.

It's nigh hero-worship of Neil Tyson at the Twitter feed tonight. I know he's a great guy but sometimes that's a little unnerving to me.

Looking again, he seems to have upset certain people. Good for him.

owlice wrote:Margarita, that quote got retweet and commented on quite a bit, and then someone asked for a source/confirmation.

I'm totally outside the world of tweeting, so don't actually know how twitter works. I just thought it was an neat comment : do I gather that it (possibly) originated with Tyson? Although it echoes something I've heard so many scientists say (Brian Cox is an example): that an initial fascination with the night sky led them into being scientists.

BTW, The astrobites synopses of presentations is good, isn't it?
M

Margarita, I haven't had the time to read astrobites yet, I'm afraid! I have had no time here to go to sessions myself (alas); it's been almost solid work (meetings meetings meetings and presentations presentations presentations) so far. At the moment, I'm taking a break from typing up an agenda for tomorrow's lunchtime meeting; brain is mostly mush!

I did go to the (first, possibly to become annual) Open Mike event tonight, just over an hour long. It was great -- music, slam poetry (amazing piece amazingly performed, goosebumps wanting to cry kind of amazing), yoyos (not kidding!), a two-person comedic sketch (hilarious) -- and then a video shot mostly at last year's AAS; I think I have posted this before, but it's good enough to post again:
I love astronomers. This is an amazing community.

Do you know, Owlice, I hadn't realised that you are actually AT the conference? I've only just noticed that you live in Washington, DC, and that that is near Maryland. (I think that "Duh...!" is appropriate here. To be fair to myself, my knowledge of the States is limited to one month spent in California twenty years ago.)

I would so love to be with you! Just for the conference - I prefer the weather here in Tenerife.

The video is splendid! Very funny - and heart felt. It brings back my husband's years of constantly juggling trying to do the science on one hand with trying to get funding to continue to do the science on the other. Retirement was a bit of a relief.

I'll keep reading the astrobites and try not to be too envious of you actually being there with all those marvellous people!
Margarita

I thought this astrobite from Tuesday afternoon would be of especial interest to you, Owlice. Not only the subject, but the fact that the session was standing-room only.

http://astrobites.org/2014/01/07/astrob ... -at-aas223

Astrophysics Code Sharing
Meredith Rawls

There were two standing-room-only afternoon sessions: code sharing and a workshop on education and public outreach. It was hard to choose one or the other, but code sharing was something I knew little about. There were four short talks followed by nearly an hour for Q&A and discussion. The overarching themes of this hugely popular session included…

• Virtually all astronomers write code on a regular basis, but we tend to reinvent the wheel each time we need to accomplish some basic task. How can we do this better?

• Should we have policies that mandate code release in conjunction with publication or receipt of Federal funds? There was general support for this idea, though the NSF panelist suggested it was impractical for NSF/NASA to police this, and it would instead need to be a standard enforced by the community.

• Examples of great projects like astropy that uses a grassroots “self-herding cats” model to develop and mainain code collaboratively.

• Debunking perceived “cons” of sharing your code. Common ones were “my code sucks,” “I might be scooped,” “I don’t want to have to answer questions about my code.” Of these, only the last one is really legitimate. Rebuttals for the first two: if you’re not embarrassed by the code you released, you released it too late; we know of zero examples where somebody was scooped because they shared their code. On the contrary—sharing code sends the message that you have your act together (even if you may feel otherwise) and it wouldn’t be worth someone’s time to scoop you.

There was also a lively “meta-session” on twitter in real time, that I participated in (I’m @merrdiff). Be sure to search #astroCodeShare on twitter for more thoughts on the future of code sharing in astrophysics.

M

Margarita, thanks for that! Yes, I'm here at AAS. I organized that code sharing session. It was not only standing-room only, people who wanted in couldn't get in. There were actually six short presentations (6 minutes each, with each of the three code case studies being allotted an additional 2 minutes for Q&A); nearly half the 90-minute session was open discussion, so questions for the more general talks were held for the general discussion.

This is the fourth such session on code sharing I've organized; there was one at last year's winter AAS, too, and then two at each of the past two ADASS conferences. The panel was top-notch; I was very happy with the session, and a lot of good stuff came out of this! Many excellent points made, good discussion, and heh, the Twitter stream for AAS was completely dominated by the code sharing session for that time period.

I could use a nap!

Back to today's posters...

Well! Congratulations for organising a superlatively successful session, which looks as though it will bear useful fruit.

And you certainly deserve that nap, when you can find time to take it.
M

MargaritaMc wrote: Well! Congratulations for organising a superlatively successful session, which looks as though it will bear useful fruit.

Thanks!

MargaritaMc wrote:And you certainly deserve that nap, when you can find time to take it.
M

Probably a week from today...

I've worked for a few commercial software companies, which never share their code (though it is a common joke to threaten to release truly crap source code, so as to set your competitors back a few years) and in my experience, they tend not to bother competing with free and/or open source software, so perhaps that is another reason for people to share their code (depending on your point of view, as it is a very contentious topic).

Blue stragglers at the 223rd AAS meeting

http://astrobites.org/2014/01/09/astrob ... -at-aas223

Natalie Gosnell (U. Wisconsin – Madison) presented a dissertation talk with exciting new results about an exotic class of stars known as blue stragglers. Blue stragglers are stars that have taken on additional mass at some point during their lives. Several formation mechanisms — Kozai-induced stellar mergers in triple systems, stellar collisions, and mass transfer from an evolved companion — have been suggested, but which one(s) actually operate(s) is still debated. Gosnell’s work follows directly on an earlier study from the Wisconsin group that suggested the presence of binary companions of approximately white dwarf mass in blue straggler systems in the open star cluster NGC 188 (see this astrobite http://astrobites.org/2011/10/27/its-no ... eing-blue/) . This lends support to the mass transfer mechanism, as such transfer occurs during the red giant phase, the evolutionary phase just prior to the white dwarf phase. Gosnell presented new Hubble Space Telescope observations of the NGC 188 blue stragglers. Three of these stars have significant ultraviolet emission only explainable by the presence of a white dwarf in the system. This is now direct evidence in support of mass transfer formation. Why didn’t they detect ultraviolet emission in all 15 or so blue stragglers? White dwarfs cool (and thus their emission becomes redder) over time, and thus evolution of the companion from red giant to white dwarf must have taken place within the last 500 million years or so for them to be detectable with these Hubble observations. In fact, exactly the expected number of blue stragglers had detectable white dwarf companions in this cluster, based on the cluster’s several Gyr age.

Blue stragglers fascinate me, which is why I've posted this astrobite from amongst the riches that these helpful AstroBiters prepare for us.

M

And I, of course, am interested in anything that is blue! Thank you for calling my attention to this interesting study, Margarita!

Ann

With a lovely reception in the Cherry Blossom ballroom, the 223rd meeting of the AAS came to a close. Favorite event? Often, the one someone just came from.

The exhibit hall closed at 2 PM yesterday. I missed the morning (emergency vet visit; cat is home but might be going back tonight), and of course there were two sessions in the morning I had particularly wanted to attend (and that I could actually make), the plenary by David Hogg, and the Astronomy in Africa talks after that. I was disappointed to miss them.

Once I got to the meeting, I spent a good bit of time yesterday perusing posters (as I always do), though I did not get to all of them; yesterday's posters included outreach and astronomy education efforts. And I talked more with a few exhibitors, some of whom were trying to unload hand out the last of their giveaways. (As I was walking around the exhibit hall handing out pens to everyone and leaving five or ten at unattended booths, I know just how they feel!) So I have a few more calendars than I started out with, and a box of refracting telescope kits, too, useful for outreach.

The past few meetings have included a "Hack Day," which has astronomers gathered in a room from 10 AM on to hack things; these range from new social sites for astronomers (i.e., a twitter feed, a shared blog) to such things as a new video, very cool additions to plotting software, an analysis of various stats by gender (Do men ask more questions than women? Present more sessions?), and a guide for those moving from one programming language to another. Oh, one of the hacks was to help one determine an "optimal path" through an AAS meeting! The hackers have two minutes to present their hacks near (not at) the end of the day (this was great fun, sometimes hilarious), and can if they wish continue working through the closing reception.

It was a great meeting!

I was just going to ask Owlice to explain, but Googled first, and this site both posed and answered my query!

http://rewiredstate.org/hack-days

WHAT IS A HACK DAY?

Now and then, developers like to get together, get creative and build cool stuff. We call this a Hack Day, because developers are hacking stuff around, experimenting, improvising, creating and playing. This kind of hacking has nothing to do with trying to access high security computers in Moscow or Langley, because this is about hacking for good.

Hack days can be used:

• to solve problems
• as a part of research and development
• to allow developers to explore and create with new data
• to encourage wider take-up of existing data

Hack Days, or modding (modification) days, typically last one to two days and can involve any number of developers; a minimum of 10 gives an event enough buzz, and more than 20 gets very exciting. At the start, devs are given a subject, a challenge and a rich dataset to work with. Then they code/design/engineer/make and break for 24 hours, building their own prototype solutions or ideas. Much beer and pizza is consumed. At the end of the hack, each dev does a short presentation of their work to the group of fellow devs, sponsors, judges and press. And then prizes are given.

So, now I know!
M

PS. I thought that Ann might like the blue stragglers...

I was going to provide a timeline for the code sharing session as a bit of behind-the-scenes take on the meeting -- discussions for it started in April of last year, with a proposal deadline of May 15 and numerous other deadlines along the way -- but got tired before even halfway through with it.

So let me tell you instead how fun the weather was. You may have noticed that the weather in much of the US recently has been Not.Normal and Very.Disruptive. One speaker (someone I'd never met) was supposed to fly out Monday morning; we were going to meet at lunch because he had a few questions, but that didn't happen because of travel delays, including the airport shutting down (!), and when he did finally get on a flight, his plane sitting on the tarmac for two hours at his intermediate stop because there was no gate available for deplaning (which meant he missed his connecting flight). He finally arrived at the hotel at 2:40 AM the (very early) morning (the day of the session, please note); we met 30 minutes before the session.

Another speaker sent me email the morning of the session to let me know he was stuck on a train; he sent his slides to one of his grad students, who was already at AAS, who loaded them for him (this is centralized) and who, if the speaker didn't arrive in time, would present the talk in his stead. Before the session started, the grad student took a seat at the front of the room with the other speakers; sometime after the session started, the original speaker arrived and traded places with him. How's that for the nick of time?! I didn't see that speaker arrive; just noticed when I looked up one time that there he was.

Many people encountered travel delays and some didn't make it at all, alas. And I know that some people who might ordinarily venture out of the megaplex that is the hotel and convention center for food didn't, because I was among them. Way too cold!!

Hack Day hacks: http://hoggresearch.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... k-day.html

Press conference webcasts: http://aas.org/media-press/archived-aas ... e-webcasts

I liked the title - Care and feeding of black holes Sounds rather , IF it could be done. But where would one keep a black hole

AAS224 started yesterday in Boston and can be followed on Twitter with the hashtag @aas224.

(I'm not at the meeting.)

(Darn it.)