Category Archives: education

Software Carpentry Boot Camps: Software Engineering Training For Scientists

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Yes, up at 7 am for a 3 mile run, a cold shower, then a breakfast of gruel followed by a full day of software engineering techniques … well, not quite: the software engineering part is true though. The Software … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, education, information sharing, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Cloud Computing Is Not A New Idea!

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

While doing the research for a talk on cloud computing at Space Telescope next week,  my eyes were opened to the history of cloud computing. We all know, of course, of the commercial cloud offerings of the Amazon Elastic Compute … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, education, High performance computing, History of Computing!, information sharing, programming, social media, social networking, software engineering, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaching Scientific Computing With The TeraGrid

Posted on August 4, 2011 by

I have been reading a presentation by Loffler et al. (2011) given at the TeraGrid 11 conference in Salt Lake City on a Graduate Course taught at Louisiana State University during Fall 2010. The course aimed to teach high-performance computing … Continue reading →

Posted in cyberinfrastructure, education, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Kepler Mission: A Gold Mine of Variable Stars

Posted on March 26, 2011 by

The Kepler Mission was designed to find transiting, Earth-like exoplanets, by continuously observing over 100,000 stars in a field centered in the constellation of Cygnus. Two years into the mission, it is also providing an extraordinarily rich collection of time-series … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, astronomy surveys, data archives, education, exoplanets, Kepler, Time domain astronomy, time series data, Transiting exoplanets, Uncategorized, variable stars | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Scientific Programming Does Not Compute, Part 2

Posted on February 18, 2011 by

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Scientific Programming Does Not Compute?, which recommended more formal computational training for astronomers. Reader Warrick Ball pointed out a paper on the same subject by Igor Chilingarian and Ivan Zolotukhin, called … Continue reading →

Posted in cyberinfrastructure, education, High performance computing, information sharing, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Introducing the Digital Scientist

Posted on January 15, 2011 by

The International Science Grid This Week has now become the  Digital Scientist. The change reflects the modern landscape of scientific computing in this era of the “data tsunami,” where clouds, high performance clusters and grids, as well as the humble … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, education, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, social media, social networking, software engineering, software sustainability, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Resumes, interviews and getting jobs

Posted on September 6, 2010 by

I thought that this week, I might offer some tips on these two essential parts of getting jobs. I have been on both ends of resumes and interviews for many years, but I wanted to give a employer’s perspective on … Continue reading →

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Was It Hard To Return To Astronomy and Research?

Posted on August 28, 2010 by

This was the most common question I was asked about my last post. I spent several years in Earth Sciences before returning to astronomy in 2000 as the Manager of the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at IPAC, Caltech.  My position … Continue reading →

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How I Survived in Astronomy

Posted on August 22, 2010 by

The Astrobetter site has some very good posts and sane advice on getting jobs and building a career.  This week, with the job season upon us, I decided to write about how I managed to stay in astronomy. I hope … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, careers, education, jobs | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

So How Much Computing Should An Astronomer Learn?

Posted on July 18, 2010 by

I was asked this by a colleague after last week’s post on why astronomers have not taken to cloud computing. So I thought this week I would give my answer to this question.  What I think astronomers need to learn … Continue reading →

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