Productive (adj)

Back in March I took a Science Journalism workshop with Ivan Semeniuk. We learned how to write about science for the public, the 5 W's etc. and how to interview a scientist about their work. We were also assigned to write our own stories. What follows is my submission based on interviews with Mubdi and Ilana. It takes a dust buster to reveal Milky Way’s massive star clusters Eleanor Louson Our Galaxy was hiding its biggest and brightest star forming regions. A new paper for the Astrophysics Journal reveals how the authors cut through the dust and located massive clusters of stars in our own backyard. Secret clusters in our Galaxy Mubdi Rahman and coauthor Norman Murray, a professor from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, wanted to measure the rate at which stars form in our Galaxy, “one of the critical measurements about our own Galaxy that we take for granted” says Rahman. In the process of doing this, they found the massive star form...

What does productivity mean to you? Do you measure how many things you crossed off your to-do list by the end of the day? How many hours you spent reading papers? Getting your laundry done? We spend loads of time telling each other how much we've accomplished since waking up or complaining about how hard it was to even get started this morning. Those of us in grad school are getting used to working on projects that span months or even years, and it can be hard to imagine carving reasonable chunks in the short term. That's why I think we take such pride in our mundane chores: a clean load of laundry is a much more tangible accomplishment than being a few paragraphs closer to the end of your paper. These days I even feel proud of myself after an afternoon's photocopying, and based on conversations with those of you further along in the program, my battle with productivity won't be over anytime soon. That's why I've re-imagined this blog. My own productivity tends ...