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 ...

Welcome to my new blog. I've noticed that lots of grad students start a blog describing their research interests and impressions at the beginning of their first year. It reminded me of the fresh new diaries I used to resolve to write in diligently every year, with entries that grew fewer and further-between as enthusiasm invariably waned. Since this, my grad school blog, is 18 months late, I hope it will have a different fate. This is not an official website, although you can find out about my work here and here and about my awesome department where I've been for the last 3 semesters, after my lengthy stretch here . This blog will be a space for the ups and downs (mostly ups so far) of my time at the IHPST and links to exciting things happening in philosophy of biology (like this big-deal conference where I gave my first paper) and HPS generally. Since I spend (waste) lots of time online putting off my work, you'll also see the coolest things I find. This way, you can p...