Mahalo.ne.Trash

Joyful white guys finish ahead of struggling woman and black man in this university’s catalog Image in the brochure for the University of North Georgia. In this accurate analogy for the hiring and tenure process at most HWCUs, we can see a white male, in this case Bill, winning. Those diversity hires never seem to come in first. The reasons are...complicated. From an article describing the brouhaha around the image above, via the Facebook Diversity in Astronomy and Physics page: The University of North Georgia apologized and agreed to stop distributing a course catalog that shows white men winning a race while a woman and black man lag behind. Because...because of course. Because white, male privilege. Because this is the most honest take on University policy ever distributed by a Historically White College or University (HWCUs as I all them). I hear a picture of the starting line was considered for the brochure, but removed simply because the development office "neede...

Today's blog post is by Juliette Becker, a first-year astrophysics graduate student at the University of Michigan working with Prof. Fred Adams on exoplanet dynamics, among other topics. While her work is mostly focused on theoretical astrophysics at the moment, Juliette has extensive experience as an observational astrophysicist from her time as an undergraduate at Caltech (see e.g.  Muirhead, Becker et al. 2014 ). At Caltech, Juliette was also the captain of the track and cross-country teams, setting school records in the 3000 steeple chase, as well as the 6k and 10k distance events. In today's post, she describes her latest paper, which summarizes the work she started with me as an undergrad and saw through to completion, with her paper accepted to ApJS last week. Like reaching the finish line in a 10K event, publishing cutting-edge research requires pacing, endurance and patience! When I was a sophomore at Caltech, I took the introductory astronomy class, Ay20, with ...

"If we can work out out how to climb into metal birds, slip the bonds of this Earth and soar through the air to visit these territories, we should be able to figure out how the 4 million people who live there can be adequately heard." So why is it that US citizens in Puerto Rico and Guam can't vote?