The primary goals of the workshop are to provide young female scientists with information and skills development necessary for a successful bid for a tenured professorship in the planetary sciences. Workshop activities will focus on developing mentoring and networking connections, techniques for more successful writing, acquiring grant funding, sharing of classroom ideas and materials, maintaining work-life balance, and challenges for dual career couples.

Invited participants include finishing doctoral students, postdocs, scientists in a career break after a PhD or postdoc, in the early stages of a tenure-track position or employed outside academia. Though this conference is aimed specifically at maintaining female scientists in the tenure-track pipeline, we encourage all underrepresented minorities in the planetary sciences to apply. Dual career couples are encouraged to apply as well.

The motivation for this workshop came out of a collaboration developed at another workshop for early career scientists. The planetary scientists attending the workshop realized that we all shared some common difficulties: in particular, most of us were the only planetary scientist at our respective universities. We would like to give others the same opportunity to develop collaborations and connections by providing a way to network with others in similar situations.

Applications to attend the workshop will be available on March 7, 2012. Please send an e-mail to planetary<at>temple.edu if you would like to receive an application when it is available or if you would like additional information about the meeting. We expect to invite 30-35 attendees to the workshop – and will have some funds available to help cover hotel costs for those who request them (via a separate application).

This conference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation via the FORWARD to Professorship Program.

More information will be posted on the workshop webpage .

Like so many today, the author being interviewed (David Weinberger, senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who has just published Too Big to Know) questions the changes in learning over the last 10-100 years and contemplates how our inventions are changing us – even the way we think.  The discussion is pretty standard until Weinberger is asked about Darwin and the claim that his science would be done very differently today:

[Darwin] was so reluctant to write; he remained relatively private about his theory for decades and published only when somebody else, Wallace, was on the verge of beating him to it….  Darwin today would not be operating this way. He would very likely be tweeting from the Beagle. He would be announcing his findings and initial ideas online, and people would be arguing with him all along, taking his ideas, applying them elsewhere, pushing back, criticizing him deeply — all of the things we do on the Web. That work has revolutionary, incredible value, but put into the Web, it gets teased out, amplified, corrected, as well as misunderstood and degraded. Nevertheless, that Web itself has more value than the individual content, so I would expect that Darwin today would be gathering his data from clouds of linked data, trying out ideas on the Web, and drawing those ideas in the tussle. The old rhythm of knowledge and science not coincidentally is the rhythm of publishing. The Web has completely broken that rhythm.

This surprises me.  Does it surprise you?  Has your way of doing science changed in the past decade (other than the typical maturation path)?

Why or why not?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/lego-is-for-girls-12142011.html?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories#

What do you think about this?  Is this great news for girls, that it might encourage them to build and create more? 

These toys won’t be out until after the holidays in the US, and roll out on Dec 26th in the U.K. but should be on the shelves already in France.

Happy holidays everyone!