Awards season February 26, 2010
Posted by sarah in: me, science . Add a comment
The first few months of the year are traditionally awards season in the film industry, and in the blogging world it’s no different. I got back from a well-deserved and fabulous holiday a few days ago to discover I’m shortlisted for a Research Blogging award in the category of Best Research Blog in Chemistry, Astronomy or Physics. Yay and thanks judges!
Well done also to all the other finalists and in particular also to Martin Robbins’ Lay Science blog, which is a contender for the Best Lay-Level Blog – I’ll take a teeny bit of credit for that too. Martin is also up for Best Blog Post, go check out the nominated post here.
All members of Research Blogging will be invited to vote for their favourites in early March and I certainly intend to cast votes for my favourite blogs. If you want to be able to vote and write about peer-reviewed research, go sign up! I’d definitely like to see some more astronomy blogs on the site.
A pretty picture of me January 7, 2010
Posted by sarah in: me . 1 comment so far
Ha! No, I’m not giving you an actual pretty picture of me – I may have a blog but I’m not that much of a narcissist. Two of my favourite online toys right now are Wordle and social bookmarking site Delicious, which I started using a couple of months ago as a way of keeping track of links and bookmarks. So far it works well for me and it integrates nicely with other applications I use, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I created a Wordle of my Delicious tags and despite having only used the site for a short while, the tags sum my science-related interests up pretty well (and it looks so attractive!). Click to see a bigger version.
Now apparently I just need to settle on how I want to spell “visualis/zation”!
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . Add a commentThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
Blogging research September 13, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . 3comments
You may have noticed the appearance of this little icon on my blog in recent weeks. I though I’d write a quick post to explain! Last month I found out about, and signed up with, ResearchBlogging.org. ResearchBlogging is a site that aggregates blog posts on academic research. When I want to write about a paper, I can use the site to generate a citation in html format that I can include in my post. ResearchBlogging then picks up these citations in blogs that are registered to the service, and collates them according to subject. Once a week or so, editors pick highlights from different subject categorie and publish them on the site’s own news blog.
IAU General Assembly: Bom Dia August 5, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy . 2comments
After a much needed and thoroughly enjoyable jaunt around Brazil, I’m now at the 27th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro. The IAU is the organisation that decides, amongst many other things, what is a planet and how we name new objects found in space. Every three years, they organise a huge astronomy jamboree where the community gets together to discuss the latest science and the state of the profession (and have a few drinks).
