Starship Asterisk*

I'm currently participating in .Astronomy ("dot astronomy"), a three-day very interactive gathering of ~ 60 astronomers + a few others. This is the sixth .Astronomy event; this one is being held at the Alder Planetarium in Chicago.

The morning had one one-hour session, three 20-minute sessions and then ten three-minute one-slide "lightning talks." Three minutes goes by very quickly when you're the speaker; though I had run through my lightning talk several times to ensure it would fit the three minutes, I ran out of time. During the morning coffee break, participants had the opportunity to propose afternoon sessions; these were voted on (by gatehatching), and then during the latter part of the lunch break, the sessions with the most votes became the afternoon agenda. Up to four concurrent sessions, one in each of four rooms, and four time periods, 45 minutes each, so a possible 16 sessions could be held. At 5 PM, everyone reconvened, and then each of these afternoon sessions were summarized in two minutes. Yes, two minutes goes by even faster than three minutes...

I know someone was live-blogging today's events, but I don't know where; will post a link when I do. The hashtag #dotastro is being used on Twitter (only 1249 tweets so far.... !), and there is an Eventifier here: http://eventifier.com/event/dtastro/

Tomorrow is Hack Day. Hacks (which could be anything... cleaning up a resource, writing text, creating a video, coding, etc.) are pitched first thing, then those that find willing participants go off to work. Groups are typically small, just a few people. People can move from group to group. We reconvene at the half-way point -- 5 PM (!) -- for progress reports, and continue on, some into the wee hours of the night, apparently.

Very interesting, Owlice. Can you tell me what your presentation, and perhaps the presentations of a few other people, were about?

Ann

Ann,

My lightning talk was about the Astrophysics Source Code Library. I had proposed a session for the afternoon on improving credit for research software that had a good number of people in it, so moderated that and did the two-minute summary for it at the end of the day. Too tired to say more, but a couple of others perhaps can stand in with their blog posts:

http://boolesrings.org/krautzberger/201 ... astro-ftw/
http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2014/12/as ... log-day-1/

More rain in the windy city today (and snow tonight), but that didn't dampen anyone's enthusiasm; nearly every attendee had at least one hack to pitch. After a start on similar hacks for APOD and ASCL, a team of three of us changed gears and worked on compiling some APOD data to analyze for image popularity, trends, correlations, etc. This small dataset (four months, one from each quarter of this year) is available online and was tweeted out to all unconference participants, who were invited to do their own analyses. Other hacks included sonification of Kepler data, a site that asks you to select which you think is the most-cited research between two random research paper titles, a query system for Snapshot Serengeti, improving the Astrobites site, improving AstroBetter, building a game, building another game, and for at least one participant, working on a couple of hacks others had proposed but then sitting down in the afternoon to tidy up a bit of work she had just never had time to finish.

At 4 PM, some took a break to watch (either well or while typing) an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", after which there was a panel discussion (not kidding) about the episode. I caught part of the panel discussion (because it was running long), and though I was typing throughout, heard some pretty amusing comments. At 5:30, the 45-second summaries of hacking progress were presented.

After the check-in on progress, most of the participants had dinner upstairs and then continued hacking. I had dinner and then had a great meeting with a couple of people; we had planned to talk while here, and that was the time we had so we took it. Hacking continues in the conference hotel and possibly other places even now; I don't know whether anyone is still left at the planetarium. So many hacks, so little time.

Day 2 live blog post:

http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2014/12/as ... log-day-2/

Trying to figure out why I feel so tired and sleepy now when I didn't at 4 this morning...

Day 3 got off to a bracing start with a walk to the Adler, nearly 3 miles from the hotel. Given the late night some people had -- which went into the early morning hours for some -- our start time on Wednesday was a comfortable-for-enough 9:30 AM. The first hour was devoted to an update on hacks; a crowd favorite was the sonification of Kepler data, which you can play with here; this was also put to a pop song, which is here. Don't know how useful it is, but they definitely had fun doing it. There's also a parody video now on the loose that came out of hack day. One hack was a survey involving the use/creation of software in astronomy; that had 901 respondents by the time of that hack's morning update. That same team did data analysis on career paths of those who have earned PhDs in astronomy which was very interesting. Work on both of these will be continued. Someone else had analyzed the APOD data we had compiled yesterday and reported on that. After the updates, which ran a little over time (or maybe we started late), we had coffee and confusion; the flipcharts we had expected to use to propose the afternoon sessions had not made it back from the dome, so a Google doc was quickly created, the link shouted out (an email address had been set up for just this purpose, so anyone could shout to the entire group; that and Twitter were used to move information to/from participants), and then we reconvened.

We had three 20-minute sessions (Super Planet Crash/Engaging Young People with Astronomy and Tech/How to Destroy Science Publishing) and some of the planned lightning talks, as we were running a bit behind schedule. After lunch, the unconference sessions were set up the same as Mondays: four concurrent sessions, four time slots. There were fewer sessions proposed this time, so all proposed were assigned a time/room, and a few #astronap sessions were made available, too. When we reconvened, we had the rest of the lightning talks planned for the day, a wrap-up, much applause and many thank yous to those who worked so hard to put this event together, and then we walked together to a restaurant about a mile away, shedding a person or two as we went (as they had flights to catch) for the conference dinner, prizes, and much fun when one participant who'd won a Makey Makey opened it immediately and used it to make pizza the arrow keys by which one could play PacMan on his computer. Pizza not working very well, he then recruited four people to be the arrow keys. People gathered to watch.

Day 3 live blog post:

http://dotastronomy.com/blog/2014/12/as ... log-day-3/