#STFC in tweets January 3, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, politics, science . 1 comment so far
My twitter feed in the last weeks of the decade was often dominated by reactions to and discussions of the funding cuts to physics and astronomy research in the UK announced on 16 December. On the day of this announcement I created a permanent archive for all tweets hashtagged #stfc to keep a record of all that was said on the issue – as regular twitter searches only go back around 10 days. On the last day of the year I exported all the tweets going back to 10 December and I’ve been playing around with visualising them. Here are a few samples.
Here’s a plot of the number of tweets in the 12 days from 15 December to 16 December, binned per hour. The red lines indicate the approximate time of the announcements of the funding cuts on 16 December, and of the postdoctoral fellowships cancellation on 21 December. Click on the chart for a closer look and get the data here. At the height of the buzz, there were almost 120 tweets in one hour, and on the 16th around 500 tweets were tagged #stfc. And while the traffic has quieted somewhat now, the STFC crisis is still an active topic of discussion.
If you thought it was only a small group of people making a lot of noise, think again. Over 330 people tweeted about STFC in the whole 3-week period, and even the busiest tweeters contributed no more than 4% of the total. Click on each pie segment to see the usernames and numbers.
The archive is accessible to anyone and continues to aggregate #stfc tweets at the same location. I’ve placed the data file with the tweets I used to generate these images in a public location, as well as the idl script I wrote to process the data and generate the timeline (the script uses a few functions from the idl astronomy library). The pie chart was created using the Google Pie Chart gadget in Google docs. The word cloud was generated by Wordle, removing common English words plus “rt” and “stfc”.
LookUP on Twitter August 26, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, astronomy, dotastronomy, science . Add a comment
Remember LookUP, the nifty little search tool for astronomical objects I wrote about some time ago? It was written by Stuart, blogger and astronomer at Jodrell Bank observatory in the UK. Fellow astronomer and Astro-2.0 enthusiast Rob has now written a twitter functionality for the service using the XML output.
So if you send a tweet to @lookupastro with the name of an astronomical object, it will tweet you back the details you need to point your telescope at the target and a link to more information.
Stuart has more here – leave comments or suggestions for LookUP on his blog.
IAU Rio tweetup: Details & Map August 6, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, science . Add a commentAn IAU astronomy tweetup is taking place tonight in Rio de Janeiro after the end of the conference. I already announced this on twitter but I thought I’d add a few more details here for those who’d like to attend.
Venue: Bar Manoel e Joaquim, on the corner of Rua Barao de Torres and Rua Farme de Amoedo, in Ipanema. It’s a cosy looking place that serves food as well as drinks. I imagine most people will have a bite to eat but I’m not expecting to have a proper sit-down dinner. Check out the menu on their website. Note that this bar is part of a chain with several locations in Rio – so make sure you’re in the right place!
Date: today, 6 August
Time: A discussion session is running until 19:00, so let’s meet between 19:30 and 20:00.
Who: Bring a pal. Try hard to get them to join twitter beforehand though.
Transport: The Rio MetroBus (the shiny ones labelled Metro Na Superficie) from metro station Siqueira Campos stops at the Praca General Osorio (the second stop from Campos), which is just one block from the bar. You could of course also share a taxi with the pals you’re bringing.
View IAU Tweetup, Rio de Janeiro (6 August, 8 pm) in a larger map
… and you can watch the ISS! June 27, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a comment
Don’t freak out that the ISS is watching you – just wave back! A new service called Twisst has just been launched on Twitter to send users alerts of ISS passes at their location, based on the location information they have listed on their profile*. ISS twitter feeds already existed of course, from the OverTwitter project, which has twitter feeds for satellite passes over many world cities. An aside to OverTwitter is OverRSS, which allows users to sign up to an RSS feed of satellite passes for any location of your choice. Twisst combines the two by converting the location registered to the Twitter profile to co-ordinates, and automatically sends the alert at the right time for the right place. All you need to do is follow @twisst. (more…)
Tweeting Arxiv June 9, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, science . Add a comment
Fellow astronomer, blogger and developer Rob (@orbitingfrog) has put together a great new site in recent months that makes the most of two of my favourite places on the web, arxiv and Twitter. Arxiv on Twitter, or Tweprints for short, tracks all tweets about publications listed on arxiv, the online preprint service where many scientists post their new papers in a variety of sciences, including astronomy. Authors often post their work to arxiv before they are officially published by the journals, so it’s an excellent way to disseminate new results to the community more quickly than the time it takes a journal to publish (months sometimes).
