A Reminder

My Office Wall

On the wall of my office is a framed piece of paper that I often think of removing because it may just seem too ostentatious. I keep it there for me – not for anyone else no matter what they may think. It is a just a flattened out table name-card like you get at a con, but the name, on it is Senator John Glenn, and on the empty half of the piece of paper is this message: “To Pam – with best regards. You made a very powerful statement that more people in Congress need to hear and act on – Best Regards – John Glenn”. I keep that sign on the wall to remind of that day, June 19, 1996, when at the end of a long day in a Capitol Conference Room, I gave the following speech before “The Democratic Forum on Science and Technology Research.”

“Science is in my blood, passed to me with love from my father. My earliest memories include looking at the moon through his telescope and running between our California living room and backyard to compare a fuzzy speck in the sky with the zoomed in image of an inbound space shuttle on TV. As a high schooler at space Camp I pretended to fix the Hubble, and designed award-winning space stations. Back then my greatest fear was that by the time I earned my Ph.D. it would be too late to work on a US space station, that I would be too young to help build it, too young to design experiments, I feared that my astronomy questions would all be solved before I even finished school.

“My love and knowledge of astronomy has opened many doors for me. In 1990, I participated in the international youth science Olympics, and won this gold-medal in astrophysics. The following year I spent eight months studying astronomy in the USSR at what was then the world’s largest telescope. While in college I spent four years performing publishable research, and thanks to the National Science Foundation I have worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, I attended a meeting of the American Astronomical Society and I am working on a project that will utilize the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Now, I stand before you, a 22-year-old graduate from Michigan State University. I have my bachelors in astrophysics, and in the fall I will begin a doctorate program at the University of Texas. I no longer fear that I will be too young to work on a US space station, but rather that I will be too old. Knowledge has tempered my dreams, and as I look ahead, I hope to someday work as a professor at a research university. I’ve been lucky to have advisors who involved me in research, and I want to provide future astronomers with the same chances I was given. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the resources my advisors had will be available to me.

“I was lucky enough to be paid to work at MIT’s Haystack Observatory while in high school, however, even in 1992, money was scarce enough that I could only be paid during the school year. As the years have passed, finding funding has become harder. At MSU I worked a year before money to pay me became available. Now, as I enter graduate school, I’m considering moonlighting as a programmer because the researcher I want to work for may not have funding to pay me.

“Without the ability to allow students to taste the thrill of discovery young, as I did, many will never learn an appreciation of science, and good students will enter nontechnical fields. Without continued funding now, current college students will leave research for the more lucrative field of computer science and finance. With the forecasted 50% of current professors retiring by 2010, it is dangerous to lessen our efforts to recruit people into research fields. If too many are lost, who will be left to carry science into the next millennium?”

I went on a hunt for this talk after my “I shall write Congress” moment last Friday. I didn’t feel like my letters had any meaning, and all I wanted to do was speak just one more time before the men and women who have the power to decide my future. I’m so glad that I kept these words. They are no less true today then they were then. We I spoke those words so many years ago, Sen. Glenn responded by telling me – telling everyone – in his closing remarks that it was important for all of us to remember to speak from the heart because all the facts and figures and foam boards of charts would be forgotten/ignored while passion would leave an impression. After the forum was over, Glenn wrote the message above to me and I have kept it on my wall at work – the place where it is easiest to lose heart and to think of going into high tech. It hangs there so I see it the moment I walk through my door so that maybe, on the days I most want to give up, it will remind me too keep fighting and to use my message to try and make a difference.

That last paragraph of that speech… What I didn’t know at 22 was that when 2010 came the economy would have collapsed; that many faculty would put off retirements and many universities would suffer hiring freezes. This has led to increased class sizes, and terrible space and infrastructure crunches that make effective work more difficult than I imagined it would be. The difficulty we face is two-fold. On one hand, there is a shortage of technologically trained masses for the commercial markets and tech companies must lobby for increases in the number of H1b visa so they can hire foreign nationals with the tech educations they can’t find domestically. On the other hand, as I look at the job market for those of us with the most advanced degrees seeking to work in basic research and academia … there are job market of at most a few tens of openings every year in my field.

On May 21-23, I’ll be Washington, DC. The legislature will be in session. Today, rather than writing the legislatures I’ll be seeing what I can do to set up some congressional visits. I don’t know where to start but I know how to Google. I feel that it’s important to at least try to speak truth to power.

And, at 38, I am perhaps still to young to be an astronaut… Chris Hadfield is 53.

The notes for the speech I gave June 19, 1996

Cover of the report produced by the forum.

TL;DR version – Will join me Friday in writing & calling our legislatures to argue for science and science education?

There are days that are rotten, and weeks that need a reset button. Sometimes moments of too much wrongness extend across months or even years. From health issues to job problems, at some point in life we all face these issues.

Right now it seems like shit is raining down on all of us who love science and learning.

This afternoon I reached a point where the realities in my twitter stream drove me to walk away from my desk, and go to the barn to muck stalls. I needed to take the metaphor of the day and turn it into literal throwing of shit in a useful manner where I could see solid results.

I didn’t find any answers at the barn, but at least I channeled my anger into something useful.

At the end of the day, the only thing I really know is that when I see a pile of shit, I need to find the manure fork and start shoveling.

I wish it was as easy to deal with the shit of life as it is to deal with the shit at the barn. It should be. We live in a democratic nation, and (in theory at least) we can affect change through our actions.

From concerns over the new budget, to fears about possible new legislation that could destroy peer review as we know it… We should be able prevent things that enough of us – a majority of us who participate in the share governance that is America – just speak out.

This Friday I’m going to set aside time to write to my representatives and I’m also going to pick up the phone and make some phone calls. Will you join me? While I’m not sure a pen is mightier than a pitchfork, I’m willing to give it a try. If I don’t try (and if you don’t try), I have no credibility to complain (and you none either).

Can we work together to make Friday a day to try and engender positive change, one written word at a time?

Here are the issues that weigh on me:

Shit Storm 1: The Segregation of Scientists and Educators

I’ve written about this a number of times. Put simply, the president’s proposed budget eliminates and/or consolidates dozens of science education programs scattered through out many different science agencies and by and large moves the money to the  Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian. A full list of programs affected can be found here. If what this list says comes to be, all the funding I currently have – that in some cases I thought I’d have for several years – is going away. I’m going to fight to find new funding, but I’ll acknowledge I’m scared for both myself and my staff. Beyond the perils this has for my own future, I find it highly concerning that this new way of budgeting science education means that the education specialists and the scientists are largely segregated.

Shit Storm 2: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) Seeks to End Peer Review & Replication of Research

In a further attempt to curtail duplication, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is drafting legislation that would essentially give congressional oversight to the funding of grants, and would forbid the funding of research that doesn’t meet criteria focused on advancing society (as opposed to knowledge), national defense, and aren’t replications or duplications of prior work (which means competing science teams can’t confirm or deny one another’s research). A summary of the draft legislation can be found here, and Phil Plait discusses it here.

As much as politics and personal bias does intrude into science – we are humans and act like it now and then – we try to judge things using a peer review system that allows science to by funded based on the intellectual merit of the work and the potential broader impacts the work will have on other sciences and on society. (A summary of the standards for NSF peer review can be found here.) The proposed legislation would radical change this system we trust and that the world holds in esteem.

Shit Storm 3: The Gutting of Planetary Science Funding

Last year $300 million was cut from the Planetary Science budget at NASA and this year’s budget largely maintains this cut, but also has earmarks asteroid recognizance, including $20million for near earth object detection to to $105 million to explore what would be necessary to potentially capture an asteroid. That is a whole lot of money going to asteroids. I’m not a planetary scientist, but I recognize that for science to be healthy we need a diversity of different research programs, and to maintain a continuity in training and the growth of knowledge, we can’t afford to starve any one area of science such that the young – our students – die off from lack of support. You can read an analysis of the budget by Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society. I’m worried not just for tomorrow’s research but also for the fate of the next generation of planetary science.

This isn’t just a democrat vs. republican thing 

Politically I am very much an independent. I voted for governor Romney and president Obama. When I think of America, I see it through the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville and oscillate between the idealism of the rise of the individual, and a constant worry that materialism will lead to the selfishness of individualism dominating society. I want freedom: freedom of religion, freedom of gender identity and sexual orientation, freedom to move between social classes, and freedom to speak, think, and believe or not believe as we work toward building a progressive and educated culture. I also recognize that as humans we tend toward lazy and my ideals do not fit the nature of the human animal, and the reality of our nation will always fall short of the dreams it might strive for.

It took many elections and many years to get to the government that we have. Our government – by design – can’t do anything quickly, and can’t be changed quickly. Passing new laws is designed to be hard to do.

What can be done quickly, is it can be stopped from passing new laws / budgets / resolutions with just a few changed votes.

If we want to stop the above measures from taking effect we need to find our manure forks pens and start shoveling writing.

Will join me this Friday in making it a day for democratic action? Will you write letters, make phone calls, and make your voice heard? Together maybe we can sway minds and help make this nation safer for science.

You can look up the contact information for your legislators here: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Leah and me in 2004

A few months ago on Twitter (or maybe it was only weeks?) I remember reading about Neil Gaiman losing his beloved dog. A few days ago, JC Hutchins spoke of the death of Lap Kitteh. I haven’t lost a pet in many years, but when my first horse died in 2003 the anguish was crippling, and I still have to blink back tears when I think of that horrible horrible night.

This morning Kyle, who got up before me, came flying in to wake me, saying something was wrong with Leah.

Leah is a pitt bull – catahoula hound dog mix. She is my best friend of 13 years. This dog saw me through my dissertation. She was beside my bed through a broken off engagement, 1 serious relationship’s beginning, middle  & ending, and a 2nd serious relationship complete with marriage . She has been along for the ride on 3 cross-country moves, and has dealt with the boxes that came with 6 changes of address. She has caught frisbees and balls. She has nabbed blue jays out of the air (and they were wet angry and unharmed when I took them from her). She has caught snakes in the grass (it was, err, harmed when I took it from her… but it slithered away). She has caught minnows in the water (and eaten them whole). She barks to keep me safe (or because she’s bored). And she’ll curl up in bed with me if I’m alone to keep me warm (but hop down with a sad whine/snort if a man comes into the bedroom).

Leah has been there. For all the parts of my adult life that matter, she has been there.

She turned 13 on Valentine’s day.

And this morning Kyle woke me up because something was wrong. She kept falling over. She was shaking. I feared it was a stroke (but her strength was even in both sides – she just had no balance). The vet thinks it is her inner ear – an old dog problem that makes their eyes twitch, and makes them feel like the world is spinning. There is medicine. She may get well. She is somewhat better tonight… but she is broken. She can’t stand without help. She can’t go up the stairs. Her brain is there. If you ask her to “high five” she knows she can’t lift her paw, so she rolls to paw up while laying on her back. She is alert. She is just… broken.

It is a lesson in morality – What do I do to provide the right hospice care? At what point do I say no more? That question wasn’t asked today, but I know it is coming. I had hoped that she might pass quietly, asleep on the patio watching the ground hog. She loves it there, wind bringing her the smells and the sun warming her fur. I can still have that hope. But today at least… she can’t get there alone. The dog door is too hard. The stairs to the grass – those three small stairs – are too much to do without help. The second story of our house… it is gone to her, at least today. I can hope she’ll heal. I can hope she will follow me up the stairs the next time she decides my lunch needs to be shared.

But tonight I am on the sofa, my best friend at my side. She is asleep on her bed in the living room, and when I’m done with my work I will sleep at her side. She has always been there for me, and I will always be there for her.

Leah versus Ball (full Album on G+)

UPDATE (5/16/2013): Leah, my 13 year old mutt, is starting to do better. We still have her wearing a harness that allows us to help her up and down the stairs, but she’s able to go out and bask in a sunbeam on our porch at her leisure.

The diagnosis was vestibular disease. If you want to learn more so you can help your old guy or gal when they are in need, read up about the problem here.

My View at Harvard

I am a child of Massachusetts. My high school weekends were spent roaming MIT, taking classes with their Educational Studies Program. My summer days were punctuated with afternoons running around the Boston Museum of Science as my friends and I escaped the summer heat. We’d walk from MIT to the Museum, sometimes taking the long way, walking all the way to Newbury Street so we could check out the comics at Newbury Comics. Sometimes we’d duck through Copley Square, watching the rich ladies with their little dogs looking ever so pleased with themselves as they sashayed past the kids who practiced skate board tricks off of benches and railings. I have walked from the Harbor – from the North End and its Italian District, all the way across Boston and Cambridge to my home in Sommerville, all because it was a nice day and my music player had a full battery. I walked because it was safe. I can see in my mind that place where Vasser meets Main at MIT. I can see that Lord & Taylors across from where the bombs exploded. These are the places where I grew up and became who I am, and I feel like a part of the scaffolding of my youth has all to literally been blown away.

It has been with great heart break that I’ve watched the horrors of the explosions and shooting that have rocked Boston.

And now, it is with a new kind of horror that I listen to news reports that fixate on these two college-age kids refugee status, and fixate on their Muslim religion, and fixate on the idea that maybe these kids, who by all accounts were just kids who played sports and did ok in school – maybe these kids are (were) radicalized Muslims who made homemade explosives because of some religious crusade. These are ideas without origins, and I want to scream at my radio, to scream at these sage pundits – to scream at them to stop assuming because these kids are brown haired and brown eyed and light olive skinned that they are terrorists with a religious motive.

Where are the parallels to Columbine? Where are the fears that this is what happens when potential high school / college shooters think a little bigger? Where is the worry that our society is so broken that maybe these two kids – described over and over as nice kids – maybe they simply decided to foolishly see what would happen if they planted a couple bombs and walked away?

If these two boys had been white – had been catholics whose families went to mass every Sunday – no one would be calling this a crusade. If these were kids described as nerds who played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, wouldn’t everyone blame the role playing game while we waited to hear a real motive?

We know nothing. There is no letter of explanation. There is no manifesto explaining these murders.

We know nothing about their motives.

So why are people pulling the monsters out from under the bed a sleeping America has been dozing on, and presenting us with these imaginary monsters and calling it a possible reality. Yes, there sometimes is a rapist or murderer under the bed, and yes, these could have been radicalized muslim young men, but… there is no proof to think that.

These are (were) two brothers – one of them not even old enough to drink – who made bombs because they could – hasn’t blowing things up become the American way?  I know plenty of farm kids who’ve blown up their fair share of gopher holes, and I remember seeing a friend’s uncle throw a grenade into a field one 4th of July. Driving through the midwest you can buy fireworks anywhere in the summer and drive into the sunset with terrifying articles of light and fire and that aren’t labeled for, but can bring, mass destruction.

We have easy access to death in this nation – easy access to guns and explosive making materials. Most people just choose to shot deer instead of one another, and to blow up varmints instead of crowds.

These are (were) two brothers who did something amazingly wrong. This should not have happened. This was an act of terror. I’m not sure what makes something terrorism, but I know these boys instilled fear.

But until someone finds evidence that this was politically motivated or driven by a false belief that these boys falsely labeled as Islamic (even though the Koran is a book of peace)… until we have that evidence … please stop using racial profiling to assign your terrorist motivations.

We may never know why this happened. That is hard to live with. But our society will be even harder to live in if in our ignorance we opt to believe in racially/theologically driven hate.

Columbine, Newtown, the Texas Sharp Shooter, the Virginia Tech massacre… so many different killers across so many years. … They each had their own broken reasons for lashing out in violence. They weren’t all American born. They weren’t all Christian. They were all broken.

This is a secular nation, comprised of people of all races and religions who are trying to find a way to celebrate our differences while we build a healthy society. Don’t let this one horrible moment in time fragment our nation. We can be better than this. We can be great.

Disclaimer: I am writing this post as a private individual. The views in this post are strictly my own, and no approval of an outside entity should be assumed.

I have spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how to write this post. Sometimes emotions are so raw that they don’t readily shape themselves into words: They manifest themselves as a face that can’t smile, a head that throbs with a stress migraine, and with an exhaustion driven not by lack of sleep but rather deriving from the emotional exhaustion that just makes a person want to hide in a dark room locked away from the world. My head hurts. I am exhausted. My emotions are raw. I am writing now because there is a very real possibility that the proposed restructuring the US education system may eliminate the NASA funding I and my staff rely on to pay our salaries. In the worst case, everyone I employ at my university will become unemployed – including me – when FY2014 begins. In the expected case – if no new funding is found – I will lose half the funding I use for salary, and I will need to decide who among my staff I will have to fire. I don’t plan to let funding cuts put us down; I will not die like a dog abandoned at the city shelter. We will fight our way free to continue… but we need your ideas and help.

TL;DR. You can help brainstorm solutions by emailing brainstorm at starstryder dot com or by donating here.

Here are the Facts

In late February, as the possibility of US Governmental Sequestration of budgets began to look like it would become a reality, many of us started to hear rumors that NASA education funding may be getting drastic cuts. This rumor dovetailed with whispered tales I’ve been hearing for almost a year that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget may be seeking to reorganize educational funding in the US to be wholly run through the Department of Education and (for research in learning) the National Science Foundation.

In the second week of March, we learned that all NASA travel is suspended pending a waiver unless it is funded through a grant that specifically requires travel (travel money may be part of a grant, contract, or a general budget at a NASA facility).

In the 3rd week in March we learned that all NASA EPO events/activities not funded through a NASA grant were to cease immediately, pending waiver, due to Sequestration. (see this and this)

In the second week of April we learned that NASA has been asked to plan to transition all educational activities. The White House budget proposes to restructure education in the US effective FY2014 . Under the proposed changes, education programs will be consolidated through the Department of Education (formal education), the National Science Foundation (education research), and the Smithsonian (outreach). From New Science Policy: “the budget proposes to reduce duplication in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education programs by consolidating them from 11 federal agencies into just three (NSF, Department of Education, and the Smithsonian Institution).”

My entire staff at SIUE is paid through NASA derived funding.

The second week of April I learned my university, like most universities in the State of Illinois, has been asked to plan for a 25% budget cut over the next 3 years.

A forthcoming State of Illinois hiring freeze will prevent me from hiring new people, even if I am hiring them off of Federal grant funds. (I should be able to contract people through LLCs and other private companies, and hirer temporary help). This means that if I lose a position, I may not be able to get that position back in the future.

My salary is often (but not always) paid at the 5-10% level by State of Illinois funding, at the 50-70% level through grant funding, and the remainder of my salary comes from outside the university through writing and voice work. (My speaker fees are split between paying my business manager and donations to fund CosmoQuest).

Here is what this means to me and the programs I love (e.g. CosmoQuest)

There is a very real chance that if I can not find new funding sources, this summer I will need to lay off many members of my staff (and I may never be able to get those positions back, even if things improve in the future). I have already had to retract my offer to a summer intern due to not being sure the funding would be there to fund him. This will mean that CosmoQuest, a project designed to engage the public in doing science and that is actively generating new results being used by scientists to write research papers, will lose the SIUE staffing it needs to effectively continue to grow and move forward. We have partners – we can keep the project going somehow – but things will have to change and the core team that has become family will become scattered to the winds.

Let me state that with more specifics: I will have to reduce my salary, and I will need to fire the equivalent of 1.5 – 2 additional people if we only lose NASA mission funding. In the worst case – if NASA education grants are also zeroed – I will need to fire all my staff working on citizen science and formal education if I don’t find replacement funding.

Editorial

The creation of new science education programs (formal and informal) in the United States has long been distributed across multiple governmental agencies so that those generating the science content and the people translating that science into education content can work hand in hand. Across NASA, the Department of Energy, DARPA, the Department of Agriculture, and many other agencies and bureaus; we can find funding set aside to allow new science to be effectively, and in a timely manner, communicated out. These agencies fund the creation of classroom programs (including often free teacher training programs), after school programs, museum programs, NPR and PBS programming, web content, and more. If all these programs are consolidated under the Department of Education and the Smithsonian, existing partnerships will be shattered and networks of educators and scientists who have worked together for years (and sometimes decades) will go away. Entire professions will face massive layoffs, and due to lack of jobs, the experts in these fields – and this may include me – will have to find new career paths.

Overtime, something new may grow up, but… opportunities for  researchers like me to split our time between science and research will likely go away as walls are built between the agencies that create science and those that create education.

It would be very easy for me to simply tell my staff, as I heard John Grunsfeld Leland Melvin tell a woman on a telecon last week, (paraphrase) “You don’t have to start looking for a job, but if you see one, don’t turn it down.” It would be easy for me to give up and prepare to turn off our servers at the end of the fiscal year. It would be so easy to just stay in bed each day, hiding from the never ending deluge of worsening information as I give up and switch fields and leave astronomy behind. I could be a voice actress. I could be a writer. I would even be happy just being a horse groomer, and earning my income mucking stalls. Few things are quite as satisfying as hurling literal shit – it is certainly much more productive then the shit throwing I sometimes see in my inbox.

It would be easy to give up and close up shop, but I’m not one to ever take the easy route.

Our initial plan to survive

We are trying very hard to find ways to survive, and we are thinking both inside and outside of the box. I have to admit – I’m the type of academic who has no good understanding of commercial finance (or, in fact, finance in general). I like to think that if you do something good, people will be willing to donate to keep it going, and word will spread organically. I know from experience, that is generally true. Right now though, we don’t have the time to wait for grass roots fundraising to be successful. If you ideas on how we can raise money, please let me know. I have set up a special email account to discuss new ideas: brainstorming at starstryder dot com.

Here is what we’re doing:

1) We are cutting all unnecessary expenses. I’m turning off various cellular accounts, reducing server sizes (which admittedly means things are a little sluggish at the moment), and evaluating how many people are slated to go on trips where we may be able to get local volunteers to take the place of the second person we might normally send on a trip. We want to use volunteers for more work in general, but I have to admit, we’re so overwhelmed with Sequestration related paperwork, that just corresponding with possible volunteers is proving challenging.

2) We are working to try and raise donations both from individuals and corporations. Every $20 donation pays for a graduate and all of their equipment (prorated) for 1 hour.  Every $100 donation allows us to purchase the supplies and printed goods for a teacher training event or an outreach event for the public. Every $500 covers all of our servers and software for 1 month.  You can make a difference. Due to university constraints, I’m not allowed to cold call corporate representatives and ask if they would be interested in sponsoring us. In the past, individuals who like what they see, hear, and can do through our programs have gone to their employers and encouraged their employers to support us. This has also been a huge help.

3) We are looking for new funding sources that are non-governmental. I will be looking to numerous foundations for new grants to apply for.

4) We are currently formulating a program to try and crowd fund. Due to the need for the university to formulate policies to allow this, it will likely be June before we can actually initiate a crowd funding program. Since we may start to run out of funding in June… This isn’t exactly ideal, but it is something we will be doing once policies are in place.

Several people have asked why I don’t set up an endowment. An endowment of $15 million would fund CosmoQuest’s core costs forever (assuming a 4% draw and historic inflation rates). The State of Illinois spends this much money every 13.4 hours*. The reason we are not trying to raise an endowment is simple: none of us have a permanent position or tenure at SIUE, and setting up an endowment somewhere where I only sign a 12 month contract doesn’t make sense. Until I have a permanent position somewhere (something that very likely won’t happen**), it doesn’t make sense to raise an endowment. This does make everything much harder, but it is the reality we face.

I’m going to fight this the only ways I know how: I’m going to spend every waking moment I can (and some moments when I really should be asleep), fighting to find the funding we need to keep going.

What’s more, when (not if) we find the money to keep going, we will keep beating the bushes for ways to grow, and to contract those who will lose their jobs due to the upcoming budget cuts. Let me be clear: In the field of NASA astronomy education there will be layoffs, and if I and my team can raise enough money, we will try and contract (as university rules allow) amazing individuals laid off so that they can keep doing the same type of impressive work they have already been doing, but now within the context of CosmoQuest.

I’m going to fight, not just to keep CosmoQuest going, but to keep space science and astronomy education going. I may lose, but I’m going to fight until hope is lost. My head does ache, I am exhausted, and it may take gloves on a horse’s ears to make me smile, but I am going to keep fighting.

Will you help?

You can donate via paypal by following the links at this site: http://cosmoquest.org/Donate. You can contact me with ideas for raising funds through the email address brainstorm AT starstryder DOT com.

* Based on the 2013 fiscal budget found here, and by combining the budgets for educational labor relations, the Illinois Board of Education, and the Illinois Board of Higher Education. This total is $9,807,033,600 per year.

** Illinois has a hiring freeze, and in the 2 past years, I didn’t see any permanent/tenure track positions advertised for people who do what I do. At the same time, my husband and I own a house and my salary is not the primary salary in my house hold; thus the idea of moving for anything other than a job that lets me keep doing these things that matter to me really doesn’t make any sense.

For most people my age, there is only one answer: Carl Sagan. For people in their 30s and older, he was the man of science that filled their heads while he filled their small screens.

The things is, for a combination of reasons (including a kind of lousy TV antennae) I never watched COSMOS growing up. I read Contact in high school (and loved it), but other than that one book, I wasn’t really exposed to Carl Sagan and his work until grad school, at which point … I wasn’t totally impressed with his Apple Pie metaphor (likely due to having watched the movie “American Pie”) So…yeah.

For me, inspiration had to come from else where, and growing up in Massachusetts, I didn’t have to look very far to find women role models in astronomy.

In the 9th grade, my aunt and uncle gave me a copy of the book “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” for Christmas. During that spring of 1989, while prepping to go to the USSR to study astronomy  as part of a People-to-People exchange, I read that book while driving my parents drove me to Harvard from training workshops. As we drove from Westford to Cambridge, I read about Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Jump Canon and their roles working as human calculators at Harvard College observatory.

It was Henrietta Leavitt’s work that fascinated my 15 year old mind the most. This woman looked through images of stars in the Large Magellanic Clouds (a nearby irregular galaxy visible in the southern hemisphere) and realized that there was a relationship between how frequently a Cepheid variable stars luminosity varies and its average luminosity. In general, more luminous stars vary more slowly than fainter Cepheids. She simply just realized this while recording numbers and making tables, and this realization allowed Edwin Hubble, a few years latter, to observe Cepheids in nearby galaxies and determine that the universe is expanding.

As a young girl who loved to solve puzzles, the idea that finding a pattern hiding in data could produce such an amazing discovery… well, it inspired me. And as a teen growing up near Harvard, I felt like I could walk in her literal footsteps as we continued to use variable stars to understand our universe. When I got to college, I was actually able to study variable stars, and they are, and always will be, my first scientific love.

In 2006, I was able to interview one of the last women to work as a calculator at Harvard: Dorrit Hoflitt. Rather than summarize what she said, I’d encourage you to simply watch the video below.

So no, Carl Sagan never inspired me (sorry). As a young woman going into science, I just wanted my variable stars, and I wanted to see what details Henrietta Levitts stars might have left to tell.

All joking aside, it is the season of giving: both of giving gifts to friends and loved ones because you care, and giving financial donations to organizations you believe in because you want tax deductions.

Several organizations I really love were lucky enough to be picked to get financial grants from the Uwingu project: Astronomers Without Borders and the Galileo Teacher Training Program were among the first 4 organizations picked to receive funding. Initial checks (I’m not sure I’m allowed to say how much, but it is significant) will go out before the end of the year, and they’ll get additional funding in the New Year. How much they get is in part up to you. If you go to uwingu.com and spend a few dollars nominating names for planets, or voting on your favorite planet name (mine is Fraggle Rock), you can help. Uwingu hopes that the proceeds from at least half of all purchases will go to funding space science, exploration, and education. This is a hedged statement because there could be unexpected costs (like a tax hike) that come in at the same time there is a lull in sales, and Uwingu won’t be able give as much as they plan. If you want to give Uwingu gift certificates as a digital last minute gift, you can.

Now I understand that this kind of giving doesn’t fit the bill for those of you wanting to get a last minute tax deduction instead if a last minute gift. Here is where I remind you, you can support CosmoQuest Citizen Science, Astronomy Cast, and all our media projects like 365 Days of Astronomy and our Virtual Star Parties.

We’ve got your gift giving and donation giving covered.

(TL;DR version:  *The internet has its own valuable culture. Those of you who only see online media as a way to promote your projects to people who are wasting time online … please get off my lawn –  solicitors aren’t welcome.)

To this audience this idea probably seems like stating the obvious, but I had this moment of clarity while talking to a colleague who works with “diverse” audiences; people working with people of a visibly different culture (skin tone, apparel, socioeconomic class) are careful to learn their audiences needs, but people who suddenly decide social media is important don’t make the same attempt to understand the online audience.

Okay, that was a stupidly long sentence. Nonetheless, think about all the times different employers have created cultural sensitivity programs. Think about all of the concern that goes into keeping track of whether it’s correct to say black or African-American. Think of all of the public events that you scheduled after double checking that it wasn’t a religious holiday (okay maybe not everyone does that one, but I lived in Boston long enough to keep track of the Jewish calendar). In the real world, when we want to engage with diverse audiences, we’ve been taught that we need to take time to understand these diverse audience’s cultures.

But those of us who spend more of our time in virtual environments than in real environments have our own culture too. We speak it memes, and in some cases have our own grammar (“because pants” is a valid statement in my circles), and there’s a shared understanding communicated thru the T-shirts we wear and in the toasts we make (to science!)

I often have people complain to me that the Internet is dumbing down America, that they don’t understand why they should waste their time among people who can’t even bother to write out all the letters in CU L8R, and that the time necessary to become part of the Internet community is time they can’t waste because they have real friends. These same people then ask me, how is it that my programs can be successful online when their best efforts only bring in 10 to 20 people. The difference is that this is my culture and I don’t assume my culture is the culture of idiots wasting their time online. I recognize in the shorthand abbreviations the need to dash off an idea, the need to not irritate carpal tunnel of little bit more today, and the easy slang that is no different than saying bye-bye to a friend.  The Internet does have its own dumb corners, but currently so too does the History Channel. And… some of my “real”est friends are people I mostly communicate to through my screen.

I fundamentally don’t understand why it is a waste of time to try and understand Internet cultures but not a waste of time to understand the culture of inner-city kids that are in our classrooms.

If you are going to try and engage online audiences, immerse yourself in our world first. Come to the dark side – we have cookies.

I haven’t tried to sort which (or which combo) or 3 possible people wrote these @AsteroidMappers tweets, and in a way I don’t want to know because that will erase the magic.

All I know is that if you aren’t following this account you may not have giggled as much as I did this morning.

My job let’s me do some of the most awesome things. One of those things is narrating planetarium shows. My 2nd planetarium show is premiering Oct. 4 at the Ward Beecher Planetarium in Youngstown, OH on the YSU campus. We’re taking advantage of this event to also host a fundraising dinner with proceeds going to the creation of more shows just like this one.

Get your tickets now!

Every other night this show is shown, admission will be completely free! This show was produced using funds from the National Science Foundation, and Ward Beecher keeps it’s doors open thanks to an endowment and thanks to donations and grants like the one that produced this show. I love this idea: Raise money to pay the costs associated with producing content, and then give it away.

It is our hope that we’ll be able to keep producing more planetarium shows, and that we’ll also be able to get this show and others like it out to a broader audience by allowing the show to be used at no cost by other planetariums around the world. Yes, you read that right: the show will be distributed at no cost so that your local planetarium can use it to help teach you about Cosmic Castaways.

If you’ve never heard of a cosmic castaway, don’t worry you’re not alone (if you were, we wouldn’t have needed to produce this show!) Cosmic Castaways are the stars that are torn our of galaxies through the gravitational interactions of systems that are either merging or passing near one another. If you want to learn more, you’re just going to have to go see the show (or wait for it to be available on our new website, Science on the Half Sphere on CosmoQuest.

View your Cosmic Castaways Invitation [PDF]

In fleeing, I found myself in a session on how to use astronomy to develop the developing world. I sat my privileged white self down and pulled out my iPad and listened as delegates from nations as far ranging as Mozambique, Mexico, Nepal, and the Philippines presented talk after talk on how they are building a more educated future for our globe by building astronomy learning and capacity.

I was sufficiently sucked in that I didn’t remember to take the notes I should have, so I apologize that I’m about to be more vague than I would like. One presenter showed how globally the number of astronomers per nation is pretty typically one in one-million people. There are exceptions: Peru is about 4 times lower, while its near neighbor, Chile, is a little bit above average. And then there are countries like the Philippines where you can count all the astronomers on one hand. In these developing nations, it is a regular fight to try and explain the science behind things like eclipses, the lunar calendar (which is really important in Muslim countries), and a lot of misconceptions that derive from local folklore and religion.

And they’re regularly fighting.

There are just 8 universities in the country of Nepal. This means there are more places to get a higher education in Boston then in this mountain country. But in Nepal, as in so many other places in the developing world, they’re working to get more people learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and they’re doing it by adding astronomy at all levels to their schools and colleges. From South America to Southeast Asia, they have mobile astronomy vans, trucks, and even camels that bring hands on astronomy to the countryside. From Nigeria and out across the many nations of Africa, nations are working to take astronomy content off the web to put it on DVDs and other physical media that teachers can use to educate when the Internet isn’t accessible to the curious. The goal of these projects isn’t to inspire more people to become astronomers (although that may be a side effect); the goal is to build all these nations’ intellectual capacities.

I got sucked into these inspiring talks that detailed things I’d never thought about. For instance, building an observatory, like the planned SKA, in remote locations in Africa brings to that region things they may not have like clean water, electricity, and even high speed Internet.

Let me say that again: building an observatory in a remote site may bring clean running water to a place that doesn’t have it today.

A representative from South Africa put his nation’s astronomy budget in interesting terms. In his nation (a nation I loved visiting), starvation is still a very real side-effect of poverty. It is hard to consider funding a national astronomy program when hunger is real. But… He pointed out that the entire yearly astronomy budget in South Africa is enough to feed everyone one meal, but astronomy is a way to feed the future while today it is creating jobs, and providing infrastructure where it never existed before.

Last night, I went to bed with things undone on my todo list that I could have done, but I decided I wanted 8 hours sleep. Listening to these talks, i suddenly felt like my choice to sleep was selfous and greedy because I didn’t do everything i could do. Listening to this global group of men and women who don’t sleep very much because they are too busy doing, too busy working with their nation’s governments building new things – listening to them I wanted to find ways to help more and do more.

And all through the day I heard the same thing: we are doing everything we can, stretching every dollar, euro, yuan, and yen as far as we can, but if we can just get another $1000, we could…. If only we had $10,000, we will…. And the IAU is listening. At the end of the month there is a deadline for proposals for low cost, high impact projects to help grow astronomy in the developing world.

But the IAU, like NASA, ESA and everyone else, isn’t rich. I find myself more desperately hungry for Uwingu to succeed. We can make a real impact, one small (and sometimes large) grant at a time. We can help advance global learning, one astronomy experience at a time.

The legacy of IYA2009 is alive. The universe is being discovered in the developing world.

I long ago recognized that institutional bias against women – a bias that is often unconscious and unintentional – is something that is almost universal. Some institutions, when they recognize there is a problem, respond by working to positively change the institution. This occurred at MIT when it was realized that women were systematically given less workspace and were less often given matching offers when other universities tried to recruit them. In other instances, the recognition that there are too few women in science leads to university officials essentially saying women aren’t meant for science. This happened at Harvard, where former university president Larry Sumners blamed the scarcity of women in the sciences in part on innate differences in women. Problems are everywhere, and in a land of broken toys sometimes the best you can ask for is something that doesn’t have too many sharp edges. If you’ve found someplace that doesn’t hurt too much… well, that’s sometimes good enough.

A woman enters a basically no-win situation when she reports issues that are detrimental either to her ability to do her job or to her emotional well being. Within the tenure system, a woman who is silent about what she deals with has the option of entering a shared lie of pretending there are no problems, and hoping that over time things might get better as departmental and administrative constituencies change. By admitting there are issues, she has to spend the rest of her time at that institution sitting in meetings, sharing hallways, and otherwise having to confront the people who have made her miserable, knowing the entire time that because they have tenure they aren’t going anywhere, and knowing it is public that she has been hurt.

In giving my talk at TAM 2012, what I wanted to do was articulate that if you are a woman in science and you find yourself dealing with things that hurt your self esteem, you aren’t alone. I wanted to say that when this happens you need to be strong and keep trying to make the world better, even when you get punished for it. I know from the outpouring of messages that I’ve received that my message has been received. My talk, because it touched so many people, is something I am glad I found the courage to give. That day is one I can be proud of.

And I also needed to say, you must have power to stop harassment, and those of us living in it, can’t necessarily stop it.

If I could change anything about the workplace environment of women, I would change the reality of academia (and industry) such that no woman is ever again cautioned, “don’t waste your time with so-and-so, he’s biased against women,” and make it such that no woman ever again is told, “It’s not your fault – it’s the fact that you’re a woman.” I have to recognize, however, that all the people who I have been cautioned about at every institution I’ve been at have had tenure and aren’t going anywhere for a long time. This means that all the things I was warned of are things that women will continue to be warned of over time. One of the side-effects of tenure is that it becomes exceedingly difficult to fire people for anything short of a felony crime.

I support tenure as a way to free people to do research that is risky, but it is also used as a tool to create an old boys club that continues to maintain an environment with so many sharp-edges that many women are prevented from finding a truly comfortable place to work. But often, we settle for comfortable enough, and we get our work done.

And, we coat our wounds in silence, maintaining the shared lie that prevents others from knowing we hurt. It may not be right, but it’s survival in an environment where change may not be possible.

You must have power to stop harassment. Can those of you with power change what we can’t by paying attention and noticing, and working to change all the small things (and sometimes large things) that create a workplace where women struggle to thrive? Will you be like Bryan Gaensler?

I’m going to try and close the door on talking about gender issues for a while and hope that nothing triggers me into needing to say something more. It’s time to just focus on science.

I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about this a lot. Here at the IAU meeting, several activities have been designed around generating dialogue about women’s issues and helping to provide mentoring and networking opportunities for the women who are here.

During the “Women in Science” lunch, we all sat down with our bento boxes and found our conversation shaped by a pamphlet of statistics and questions that sat in front of us.

Let’s frame this conversation with some numbers (I’ll add tables later). Globally, the IAU membership is 15.04% women, and in the US – the largest single nation in the IAU – we are 12.48% women. IAU membership is restricted to people who have made significant contributions to the field and membership is for life. In general, it is safe to say that IAU members are more senior members of our community, and these numbers represent the number of women who made it all the way through the academic pipeline.

While we ate, Brian Gaensler fed our discussion with a series of comments about things he, as a center director, has worked hard to do to fundamentally change the situation of women at his research center. Listening, I felt awed by this insight into what a difference can be made by having a male leader who is an activist feminist.

Here are my quick notes from his rapid fire talk:

• Too often, women are given what he called Pink Tasks, tasks that they may enjoy, may find purpose in, but that will never advance their careers. For instance, many committee assignments, and communications tasks fall into this category. Women are more often asked to advice students, rewrite class listings, be on recruitment committees, and such. These time consuming assignments take away from research, and don’t have the same positive career impact as other committees.
• We need to restrict introductions to CV related information. Too often men are introduced by their research, awards, and other academic contributions, while women are introduced as beautiful, as mothers, as jugglers of the work-life balance (“isn’t it amazing she still accomplishes so much research” is too often said). This imbalance in what is used to introduce people is wrong, and Brian made a point of saying that at his Center, only CV appropriate information is allowed in the introductions.
• He also pointed out that we must be consistent in how we address people. If you use last names to refer to men, do the same with women. Too often men are addressed and referred to by their last name while women are addressed by their first name (my example: I’m usually referred to as Pamela but Neil deGrasse Tyson is Tyson or NGT. … I’m not sure what this says about Phil).
• It’s also important not to bias a system against people who may want or need to work part time for any of many reasons (many parents would appreciate part time options, and, for instance, I work part time at my university so I can also run Astrosphere and still have time to write and sometimes ride my horse). Brian’s center thus advertises every position as having a part-time option (no questions asked).
• It’s also important not to bias the system against people with day care concerns. Meetings that run past 5pm say to folks with kids in day care “your input isn’t valuable.” Brian requires all meetings and seminars to occur between10am and 2pm.

He said a lot more, and I’m going to ask for his talk. Astronomy needs more leaders like Brian. He is both a great scientist and a thoughtful and compassionate leader.

After Brian’s inspiring talk, we were asked to discuss around our table a number of discussion questions (will be added later).

Our table had 4 graduate students, 3 post docs, 1 person so senior that I was awed, and 2 of us who are generic junior faculty (not tenure track). We were more EU based than US based, and no other nations/nation clusters were represented. Here is the a summary if our thoughts as a diverse group:

• When people think of women’s issues, they think of child care and child related issues. That isn’t right: we deal with a lot more and need to solve a lot more.
• After child care, people think of two-body problems, and this one is relevant. Trying to advance our careers when we aren’t single is really hard. Men earn more, so we often move where they can get work (can’t believe it’s still so universally seen that women earn less, often due to fewer and smaller pay raises). Further, men are (in many cultures) typically older than the women in couples, and following the more senior career also makes sense. In the end, this is a personal issue and there is no right solution. That said, people need to stop judging based on where people work instead of what they do. A spouse who followed their partner’s career may end up in an unexpected career location. We hurt women’s and (less often, but still true) men’s esteem when we ask things like ”why are you at a university like that.”
• It is harder for women to fight for themselves. Men and women have different speech habits, and women need to interrupt and be loud with the same verve as men. Men are trained to negotiate and fight for stuff, and this leads to them getting better labs and better salary, and women need to fight for themselves the same way. Bottom line: we need to be loud and fight for our right to be treated as equals by learning to communicate and negotiate more like men.
• It is hard for women to fight to be heard. In meetings, the input of women is often ignored or degraded, but when a man, a few minutes later, says the same it is considered wise. When a man is assertive, he’s a leader. When a woman is assertive, she’s a bitch.
• When a woman gets a job / award / etc, it’s perceived that it’s because she’s a woman, not because she’s good.
• Women are given different tasks. Less tech. Less instrumentation. One woman said, “I was given things considered more appropriate for women… More communications things.” In other words, pink tasks.
• And of course, when a women is noticed, she becomes the lone woman asked to be the token woman on every committee. Success is punishable with committee work.

For about 30min, our multi-national group of women from the developed world talked about the BS we face.

The senior woman in the group asked, “Does this effect your self-esteem?” Amazingly, the junior women all said some form of no, with one post doc saying. “No, those guys are just being tools.” But… When asked instead, how do we fix things and be heard and be successful, the answers were harder to come by. How do you end up able to talk? A real solution is unclear. One possibility is you have to be excellent, but that’s exhausting. Maybe you can play by their rules, and cut them off and keep talking, but that’s exhausting and you’re labeled a bitch. You can try and talk to make people aware of the issues…. But to succeed you have to have a sympathetic group leader.

This lead to the question, why do women remain so often stay silent or leave instead of fighting it?

And at that will be my next blog post….

This morning I woke up in Beijing in the Holiday Inn Express in the Olympic Park area in the north of the city center and I made my way on foot to the Chinese National Convention Center. I am here to attend the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU & #IAUGA). This is the biggest meeting in astronomy yet we take up so little of this vast building (see images) that we are sharing the center with at least 1 other conference and there is still left over emptiness. I have already been lost within these walls, and I expect much of this week will include moments of finding a window, looking outside, and using the outside points of reverence to identify where I am.

IAU, I am lost within you.

Well, I’ve been lost, at least, and expect to be lost again. I’m currently sitting tucked away in the 4th floor press room, trying to sort myself out before the Women in Astronomy lunch. Later on I’ll be hearing the session on Communicating Astronomy to Pubic Audiences, and I’ll begin catching up with old friends.

There are roughly 350 women among the few thousand attendees, and I look forward to hearing how things do and don’t differ in other nations for our minority group. Admittedly, when it comes to non-white, non-Asian/non-Southeast Asian groups groups, there are probably even fewer than 350 and those stories are harder to hear. Actually, looking at a map, it seems that this meeting is dominated by people of northern hemisphere heritage. Gone are the Africans. Missing are the people from the mid-Americas and South America. The sky belongs to all of us, but educational opportunities are more geographically biased. The IAU sees this problem and has opened an office for Astronomy in the Developing world in Cape Town, South Africa, and this body will be working to change the face of our field.

The IAU is many things, but at its core it’s the defining body of the astronomical world. I could say governing body, but that’s like saying someone is a herder of cats. They may try and do it, but the cats resist. The IAU might try to govern astronomers, but we tend to resist. More realistically, this is that organization that puts up rules (Moons of Jupiter will be named after the liaisons of Jupiter), defines things (like Pluto not being a planet), and inspires things (like IYA2009). They have funding to try and move ideas forward, and they provide a venue every three years for all of us to share science, pass resolutions, in a very very slow dance, work to move our community forward as a whole. This is my second IAU (I also attended the 2009 General Assembly in Rio), and I’ll be giving a talk on Friday on using social media to disseminate science results and collaborate.

In case it wasn’t obvious from the last paragraph, the IAU is not where you go to do a big reveal on some new science discovery. That said, all the best in the world are giving review talks on things that’s are recent. This is a place where folks like me, who aren’t at large institutions with lots of seminars and colloquium, can catch up on all the science we might have missed in the constant rain of new papers (sometimes tens of new papers a day!) I’ll be catching up on Kepler results tomorrow, and I’m still trying to decide which of the too many other options I’ll take advantage of on other days.

As I can, I’ll try and blog as much as I can. And… There will be at least one post on all the cute signs I keep finding.

So expect science and silliness in the coming days.

A Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation artist’s concept depicting mankind’s first walk on another celestial body.

When I heard Neil Armstrong had died, my first reaction was to stop walking and reread the text, curse once, and realize I had no more words. He is a hero who lived an amazing life, a long life, and will remain an inspiration as so many past heros have remained. Its *sucks* that we lost his input on our future, but we don’t live forever and he didn’t linger in suffering has so many people do.

As I walked on, I did find myself pissed off by one thing: We are sooooo close to getting back to the Moon. The Google Lunar X-Prize will get rovers walking, roving, or (in my fantasy world) dancing a happy robot dance across the surface of the moon in the not too distant future. (1 or 2 years I’m guessing). Humans won’t be too far behind once the Falcon Heavy is complete. I only wish that Neil could have lived to see it – lived long enough to know the door he opened on off-world human exploration had re-opened with a new generation of explorers getting out and going farther then ever before.

What ever you believe in terms of after life / no after life, I’d ask you to do one simple thing: *Please raise a glass to Neil Armstrong and thank him for opening the sky for all the tomorrows’ explorers.”

Thank you, Neil.

The 2 constant questions about IAU are “Will Pluto get back its planethood?” and “what new objects might get named?”

Well, no one is rumoring that the dwarf planet issue will come back up, so I think we’re going to have to go with “Dwarf Planet” or “Planet Classic” for a few more years. On the naming front, I see Pluto’s new moons possibly getting a few new titles, and it’s possible a few more objects might get approved.

The issue of naming things is more complicated in some ways and not complicated in others than most people realize. On one hand, there are rules about naming moons (e.g. Neptune’s moons are water gods). On the other hand asteroids’ names can be submitted by anyone and can be just about anything (Fraser Cain and Philip Plait both have asteroids named after them!) Large craters on Mars are named after dead scientists and writers who have contributed to the body of works about Mars, while features at the scale that matters to rovers (think street level maps here) are named by anyone who can catch the attention of the scientist writing up the paper. This means we have a bunch of boulders on Mars named after famous icons, including Yogi Rock, because that’s what the team wanted to do.

In astronomy and space science there is also a long history of just having names stick. Hanny’s Voorwerp can be used to look up papers and even coordinates of a large green cloud of ionized gas found by a citizen scientist (Hanny) and observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. In other cases, like the Bullet cluster, someone just called an object something in a journal article, and that became its name. (It is also named IE 0657-56, and that is more of an IAU kind of thing to do, but… really, it is the Bullet Cluster because that’s the name that gets used in the literature.)

And if you’re an astronomer like me, with a name like mine, it might make sense to pre-emptively  name any cool object you find! If I go back to observational astronomy (instead of using images from missions and surveys), and actually have good weather (the reason I prefer images from missions and surveys!), and if I find something amazing (which, with my history is only slightly less probable then getting good weather) I run the risk of it becoming the “Gay variable star” or “The Gay Galaxy Effect.” Admit it, no matter your orientation, and no matter how much you embrace homosexuality as being normal, saying “The Gay Galaxy Effect” without giggling…. yeah. If I find something cool, I’m naming that sucker before anyone else gets the chance.

And that’s one of the cool things about being a scientist; the IAU is too busy to care about most of space. When I publish that next science paper… well, it will probably be on a variable star that’s already named… but when someone like Bill Keel publishes his next paper on one particularly awesome pair of overlapping galaxies, he has the option to add “The Kissing Beetles” or something equally odd to our existing lexicon of “The Mice”, “The Tadpole” and so many other interacting and peculiar galaxies.

All that said…. I do hope IAU lets us see a better name for Pluto’s moons. This whole P5 thing needs an update.

Mars (Credit: NASA / USGS)

The month of August is named after Augustus Ceasar, the Roman Emperor who oversaw the expansion of the Roman Empire in the years after Julius Ceasar’s death on the Ides of March, and even Jesus Christ is said historically to have reminded people to render unto this particular Emperor what is his. This means that August might should stay Augustus’ month… but Mars keeps trying to leave it’s mark on this particular arc of Earth’s orbit.

In August 1975, Viking 1 launched toward Mars, marking the beginning of the Viking missions. In August 1976, Viking 2 entered orbit of Mars, marking the safe arrival of the both spacecraft. In August 1980, after 1400 orbits, the longer living Viking 1 orbiter was finally shut down.

In August 2003, we saw Mars make it’s closest approach in 60,000 years.

In August 2005, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off on a mission that keeps going today.

In August 2007, the Phoenix lander set off toward Mars on a mission that would find water and become a social media sweetheart.

Sure, lots and lots of Mars stuff happens in other months of the year,* but there is something special about August – especially to all the spammers who year after year try and convince us that Mars will appear as big as the full Moon (it won’t).

All joking aside, I haven’t forgotten where I was in 2003 when Mars had that particularly close opposition (on the top of the Boston Museum of Science with several 1000 others, and no where near enough telescopes), and I don’t think I’ll ever forget where I’m going to be tomorrow for the Mars Science Laboratory Landing.

Tomorrow evening, Fraser Cain, Scott Lewis, Phil Plait, myself, and many others will be joining together to host a Google Hangout on Air that will provide coverage starting at 8pm Pacific (11pm Eastern, all times here). We’re going to keep going until confirmation of life or death, or confirmation there will be a prolonged lack of information. In other words, expect us to be on air at least 4 marathon hours as we bring you background on the mission, and live commentary on events as they unfold.

Now, what I’m about to say is probably heresy, but I have to admit I’m not a big fan of Mars. Sure, it’s a pretty nifty rust colored planet, and it might support life and all that, but if I had to pick a world to go explore, it would probably be Europa (yes, I know we’re supposed to go to any world but that one), or Titan. They are less explored, have more active environs (and non debatable liquid!), and could also have life. So, yeah… not a Mars kind of girl. Normally, with a mission like this, I’d keep an eye on it, be curious, follow along, but not be all that emotionally invested. Let’s face it: Mars is a 1 in 3 chance of success, and it’s not necessarily emotionally healthy to invest in a mission that has a pretty good chance of not quite landing. (I don’t know how the mission teams manage the stress!)

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to “Stress” check out this video!

This is a terrifying landing proposal, and normally I wouldn’t invest in this missions survival until data returned home to be learned from, but …. normal pre-landing apathy doesn’t apply in this case. Even though I’m not a Mars scientist, this mission could effect my life or at least my livelihood.

For the past several years, the development and construction has consumed a major portion of NASA’s science mission budget. At this point the mission has an estimated cost of $2.5 billion, and it’s FY2013 budget is $65 million. This is fully 30% of the total Mars budget, and 5.5% of the entire planetary science budget for NASA. Crashing this amount of money into the red planet would have 3 major consequences: all the individuals who rely on the mission for funding and data would be out of funding and out of research in part or in whole (this is 100s of people in fields ranging from engineering to science to education), it would be another chance for the media to mock NASA (think of the Mars Polar Lander failure) and make people question if this is a wise way too spend tax dollars, and finally, I hate to repeat gossip but, many high-level folks are saying that a failed MSL would mean further devastating budget cuts to NASA.

Currently all my external funding** for myself and my team at SIUE comes from two sources: NASA missions and grants, and donations from individuals like you. While I love all of you dearly for all your help,  your donations are only a few to a dozen percent of my yearly budget (depending on the year). If NASA’s budgets are cut, this could have very real impact on me.

This year, when the FY2013 budget cuts came in, the NASA Education and Public Outreach supplemental funding grants and the Research Opportunity in Space and Earth Science EPOSS grant were both put on hold. This means I lost a year to try and request funding. Actually, it means I and everyone in my field lost a year. This announcement was particularly harsh for programs like APOD, which had funding that came up for renewal this year. We’re all getting pretty good at turning over ever smaller (yet harder to move) rocks to try and find funding… but when they take away your rocks… (Well, this is why I’m helping Alan Stern with Uwingu. We need more rocks, and I’m willing to start digging to find them)

If the NASA budget is cut further, it is reasonable to imagine budgets will worsen, and the programs I rely on won’t come back at past levels… and maybe the won’t come back at all.

There are a lot of good, scientific reasons to want MSL to succeed: there is so much left to learn about the chemistry and geology of this rust bucket of a world and MSL has the imaging, sampling, and processing equipment to help us increase our understanding. Heck, while it’s not entirely likely, it is possible that MSL will finally be able to say, there was life on Mars.

MSL is good science. It was worth the investment. And the reality is, if it succeeds as engineered, it will cost about the same per day of scientific return as the two Mars Exploration Rovers were originally scoped out to cost. I didn’t know the details until they were pointed on Google+ by Scott Maxwell:

When we landed, we used to figure MER cost about $4 million per sol (that is, per Martian day) — roughly, the mission had cost $800 million, and we expected about 200 sols of combined operations for the two rovers. If you blew a sol, you were wiping out roughly as much money as you’d make in your lifetime; it was one of many reasons we were very, very careful never to do that.

Coincidentally, the initial per-sol cost for MSL is around the same as MER! Figure a $2.5 billion cost for MSL and an expected Martian year (about 669 sols) of operations, and you get about $3.7 million per sol.

By the way, MER has been on the Martian surface for so long that the amortized per-sol cost is under $200,000 now, even including ongoing ops costs. For MSL to reach the same point, it will have to rove the Martian surface for something like 35 years! (And that’s assuming MSL has zero ops costs — I don’t know what MSL’s actual ops costs will be, or I’d do the math.)

Yes, MSL is expensive, but its cost per day of science return isn’t unheard of. We are going to Mars to do science, and … if it succeeds… wow.

There is even a silly reason to watch it succeed – I want to see if the superstition and hatred of calling MSL by it’s given name, Curiosity, goes away with time. This isn’t the most informative reason to want to see MSL succeed, but it is a reason.

In about 24 hours, we’ll know. Until then- Remember to breath.

* Other stuff includes the landings of Spirit and Opportunity in January 2004. At the time I was working at Harvard, and I remember noting it was warmer on Mars then in Boston!

** A small portion of my salary comes from SIUE, and SIUE pays my graduate students’ tuition, while I pay their salary with grants.

Last week I looked at our budget for Astrosphere (the non-profit that supports 365 Days of Astronomy, and along with SIUE Astronomy Cast, and CosmoQuest) and realized we have about 2 months operating costs in the bank. Last month I found out a grant I needed (but never had good odds of getting) was rejected, effecting how I’ll continue to fund my team building citizen science projects and educational resources at SIUE. 5 months ago NASA canceled the grant lines I rely on.

This all adds up to something I’ve mentioned several times in talks: NASA cut backs could cut me, and deeply hurt my team unless I find other means of funding us. With the National Science Foundation also cutting back… The traditional funding mechanisms aren’t a modern day solution.

I’m not the only one to realize that there is a problem, and I’m proud to say that people I deeply respect are working hard to define a solution for all of us who are struggling to keep space science not just growing, but thriving in this economic drought.

This morning, a new Indiegogo campaign was launched by a group of folks who want to create a new set of projects that are marketed to directly fund space exploration, space research, and space education. Called Uwingu, this new project wants to help bridge the space industry into the future by providing alternative funding sources that keep researchers going when NASA resources run dry. I’ve been helping this campaign on the tech side, and have seen their plans. Put simply: They have an awesome, commercially viable business plan that they will implement and then use a large portion of the proceeds from that business plan to fund folks working in the space industry through competitive grants.

The team is really impressive: Alan Stern, Geoff Marcy, David Grinspoon, Andy Chaikin, Emily CoBabe-Ammann… These are folks who have dedicated their careers to many different aspects of space science and who together have a big picture understanding of NASA, and why going to congress and asking for the NASA budget to be increased isn’t a fast enough solution for helping all the folks – folks like me – who aren’t sure how they’re going to keep going into the budget year.

Their ideas are so elegant that I can’t believe they haven’t already been done, and because it would take about a week for someone with very modest venture capitol (that part they are missing) to implement the idea … well… This is where the campaign is asking for your trust and your donations to allow us to setup a new model for funding space, but we can’t give you the details, because if we do the idea is going to get built by someone else and the profit will go somewhere other than to researchers.

I’m doing what I can to help them by lending them my voice and my social media / tech expertise to help their campaign succeed.

Can you help too? Can you contribute at just the $10 level and become part of a first wave of space exploration backers who help us continue to push out into our solar system and beyond.

P.S. The solution above is the “Teach a man to fish” long-term solution. If you have the extra resources to “Give a man a fish” so he isn’t hungry while he learns, please also consider donating to Astrosphere New Media and helping me feed my staff (they do like fish) as we work to continue to produce podcasts and Google Hangouts on Air to feed your minds. If you’d rather support our citizen science and formal education initiatives, please consider donating to CosmoQuest via SIUE.

In order to call attention this issue I had printed (with personal funds) a set of t-shirts that simply say, “Stopping Harassment Starts Here.” The shirts are in purple, a color used to symbolize the need to stop domestic violence, stop animal cruelty, support religious (and non-religious) tolerance, and stop bullying of members of the LGBTQ community. These are all issues that matter to me, and I hope that at least some of them matter to you.

I’m now offering them here on starstryder. All proceeds from sale of the shirts will go to the AAUW Legal Advocacy fund, which pays for legal fees for women dealing with discrimination in education and the workplace. If you could please buy a shirt (or shirts), I and the women the AAUW helps support would be very grateful.

Mens’ cut shirts ($25, shipping starts July 24)
Small, Medium, Large, X-Large, XX-Large

This talk build on a post from a while ago, in which I wrote:

Discrimination, harassment, and rape all share one rather awful thing in common: They occur when one person or group is able to act in a hurtful way to another person or group without anyone stopping what´s going on. This does not have to be men against women: I´ve seen barns filled with middle-aged women swarm on the lone equestrian male, doing everything from landing the friendly slap on the ass, to cat calling him in his riding attire. It also doesn’t have to be purposely hurtful: I´ve watched as male grad students, at the beginning of the semester and before social groups have formed, thoughtlessly walk around asking all the other men if they want to head out [for lunch / to go to the gym /to get a drink] while they left the women behind. Sometimes people in power don´t even realize what´s going on as they do it, the sexual discrimination that happened to women at MIT is an example of this. Over years women weren’t given the same job advantages as men, and it was entirely without thought. When the problem was pointed out, measures were taken to fix the problem. (This study is mentioned in the forthcoming National Academies report, “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.” )

And here is where I´m going to ask all of you to listen to me really closely: Anytime anyone with the power to help is aware of any form of discrimination and they do nothing to fix it, they are just as much to blame as the perpetrators.

Throughout my adult life I have over and over had some well-meaning man watch me get frustrated in some work situation or academic situation, and they´ve said with the intention of comforting me: “It’s not you, he´s an [expletive] to all women.” Okay, nice try. I appreciate the attempt, but – Could you maybe offer a girl a little help?

I want to be clear: If you are in a position of power, and you see a problem, telling the victim they are being victimized is not a solution. Finding a way to stop the perpetrator is the only a solution.

Will you be someone who says “Stopping Harassment Starts Here”?

update 08/17/2012
My talk was posted by the JREF on YouTube. It’s now embedded below.

Presented at Saturday, July 14, 2012

This is the forth time I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at TAM. Each year I’ve written a new speech and work to write something that is relevant to the moment. This year I’ve struggled with my talk more than I’ve ever because I’m not entirely sure how to say what I want to say.

The past few weeks leading into TAM have been absolutely insane. Looking around the internet there have been terrible sadnesses and awe inspiring goodness. We live in a world that sometimes seems like nothing but extremes.

We saw a school bus driver bullied by out of control teens (link), and we saw the internet respond by starting out planning to raise money to send her on vacation and instead changing her life. (link)

We saw a New York 5th grader forbidden to give his winning speech on same-sex marriage, a speech that says “Who are we to judge… We must learn to accept all differences” … well he was judged by a close minded principal who tried to silence his ideals. But then, in response to a massive internet outcry, that principle felt compelled to allow that child to speak his heart in a special assembly. In his speech, he went on to say, “If we judge people like this, this is a form of prejudice. We must learn to accept all differences. … ?In conclusion, I hope that everyone understands how important ?it is to respect everyone for who they are.” (link)

We live in a society that in many ways is broken, but sometimes, remarkable humans decide they are just going to do what they can to make the world better, and they do this because they can, and ask if anyone minds only later.

Two weeks ago, Google high-lighted the Virtual Star Parties that my dear friend Fraser Cain hosts and that I and many others participate in. Here’s the video.

I work with some of the best people in the world.

In reaction Tim Farley wrote: “Fraser didn’t ask permission from anyone to do this. He didn’t conduct any focus groups or conduct a study. He just saw an opportunity and took it.”

This is powerful.

Fraser is one of those remarkable humans who has decided he is just going to do what he can to make the world better, and he does this because he can, and asks if anyone minds only later.

Doing what he does isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to do nothing… easier to lose hope that anything can even be done. And there are people out there who would encourage despair.

If, like me, you’re a child of the 80s, you may remember a movie called “Neverending Story”. It came out when I was a dorky little kid. This movie contained a certain giant wolf who totally understands trolls and their effect of creating their own great nothing in the world. (link) When asked why he is helping the great nothing destroy their world, this wolf responds, “It’s like a despair, destroying this world. … people who have no hopes are easy to control.”

Looking around the internets, I see a lot of people sitting around trolling, and a lot people experiencing despair. There are YouTube videos of people complaining, and blog posts of people expressing their hurt, and in many cases there are legitimate reasons for people to be upset. There are people dying because we’ve lost herd immunity (link). There are lesbian teens in texas being killed for falling in love (link). There are so many cases of abuse that it hurts to read the news. There are lots of real reasons to be frustrated about the world we live in and it is easy to complain… and it is easy to lose hope.

It is dreaming that is hard.

The Neverending story, in its childhood tale of morality, addresses this too. Through the voice of the Childlike Empress, the boy outside the story is asked, “Why don’t you do what you dream, Bastian?” Bastian replies the way I think so many of us reply when when asked why we don’t follow our wildest dreams, “But I can’t, I have to keep my feet on the ground!” (link)

Dreaming is hard. It requires risks. It requires you to own the fact that you are capable of something great.

A few years ago, I came across a powerful quote that was attributed to anonymous.

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? ” (link to old blog post on this quote)

I’d challenge you to let your feet fly off the ground and I’d challenge you to dream big and let your light push away the darkness of dispair in the world.

I challenge you to change the world.

Now I recognize that is a pretty big challenge. How many different inspirational posters have you seen encouraging you to just be the change you want to see in the world.

It’s kind of demotivating, and let’s face it, in reality, it often seems that no good deed goes unpunished. But don’t let that stop you. Do good, but know you may get punished – that’s reality.

I’m an astronomer. For the past 10 years I’ve been listening to folks bitch and moan about how people have stopped dreaming, about how NASA is failing, about “Oh whoa is space exploration, where’s my jetpack.” Tied in with these complaints was a blame game of the public saying NASA was boring, NASA saying “We’re not boring, but we can only do so much with our funding – Congress needs to give us funding,” and Congress… well congress says a lot of things. You can look around the internet – Heck you can look at past talks from this conference! – and you can see people complaining.

But complaining doesn’t build our jet plane future. We build our jet plane future.

Last winter I had the opportunity to attend The Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference. In attendance where NASA superstars and heroes of the past. Neil Armstrong – First Man in Space. THAT Neil Armstrong – gave the opening address! In attendance were the leaders of tomorrow – the entrenpenuers behind Virgin Galactic, Blue Orbit, Xcor, and a myriad of other commercial space corporations. These were men and women who dreamed of a rocket planes and having made their money online, they decided to make their dreams reality by hiring the engineers who could build the rocket planes, build the space suits, and build their future.

While not at that sub-orbital conference, the greatest role model of this future building ideal is Elon Musk. This South African born engineer made his start in Paypal. Energy and aerospace are two of his passions, and today he is channelling his talents into SpaceX and Tesla Motors. When I stood on this stage last year, I spoke about how we were just one week past the last flight of the Space Shuttle. Today, as I stand here, because one man decided to do something, I can tell you that we are well on our way to regaining US manned space exploration, and with tomorrow’s rockets we will go farther than we have ever gone before.

SpaceX is truly an awesome thing. Commercial space flight is opening up a new barnstorming style of innovations, but todays test craft aren’t soaring grannies over cornfields, they are preparing to fly grannies and grandpas over the Earth’s atmosphere.

Society is in the process of undergoing radical change as we in many ways return to a less centralized way of doing things. Great minds of all ages are innovating a new reality.

Nicolas Negroponte saw a digital divide, so he worked on the One Laptop per Child program. He never got the systems he dreamed of, but his ideas lead to today’s netbooks, and to low cost computers that do start to narrow the chasm between the connected and the offline.

Mohammad Yunus recognized the ability of microfinacing to change the world and worked to define micro lending programs that make very small loans to individuals – often women – to seed new businesses. Today this same idea is behind Kickstarter and Indiegogo and many other websites where individuals can propose products and projects and seek community funding. Through these projects people are building their dreams, and the community is funding that construction. Through social media this is becoming a shared experience as we virally reshape our world one idea and one donation at a time.

I am one of those people who just wants to do something. And I like working with other people who just want to do something, and through this community I’ve gotten to know and respect, and often befriend other doers. The JREF is named after a man who fought to debunk charlatans and fakers. I don’t need to tell you Randi’s story, you can watch in the movie “red lights”. Following in his footsteps are successive generations of magicians. Fighting new fights are people like Eugenie Scott who is fighting to keep real science in schools and the false doctrine of young earth creationism out. Faced with a vaccination crisis Elyse Anders and others started raising money to get people vaccinated, and today we have the “Hug me, I’m vaccinated” campaign. These are doers.

And in astronomy, all through history, every day people have risen to the challenge and become the doers who innovate how we understand our universe. In 1781, composer and concert director William Herschel discovered Uranus. Through the 1870s, sanitation worker Andrew Ainslie Commons pioneered the field of astrophotography. The early twentieth century saw radio engineer Grote Reber take his commercial radio skills and turn them skyward as he built a backyard 9-m radio dish to map the radio sky. Over the past century, advances in optics and technology have allowed amateurs to add larger telescopes and ever more advanced equipment to their scientific arsenal. This has allowed amateur astronomers to see more and do more, and has also led to a flourishing of research opportunities both as observers and online research assistants.

For a while now, several of us – specifically myself, Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer and Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today – have randomly talked about how to better make astronomy and science in general accessible to everyone, and how to engage anyone who wants to spend their spare time doing science… well, doing science. Our project, CosmoQuest, launched in January

CosmoQuest seeks to build an online research center for the public that engages people in interesting science problems while providing them opportunities parallel to what they’d experience at a research institution.  I’d like to introduce you to a project that we are demoing at our booth in the Lobby: MoonMappers.

The universe truly is your to be discovered.

Our goal with CosmoQuest is to create a community of people bent on together helping scientists do science; a community of people who can explain why what they do matters, and what questions they are helping to answer. We want to create a community, and here is where I invite all of you to be a part of what we’re doing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, as much as I try to be a doer, I’ve had plenty of my own “Rant on the internet” moments. But at the end of the day, I try really hard to remind myself not to feed the trolls.

But sometimes you can’t avoid the trolls, and they seem to be demanding food.

When I started this talk I highlighted places where something had gone wrong in the world, but the goodness of people like you working on the internet made it right. In my perfect world, that is the way things work. Things go well, and when they don’t, people step forward and fix.

Unfortunately, the internet is filled with trolls who sometimes work overtime to break what is right with the world.

Back in June Anita Sarkeesian tried to raise just $6000 to do a web series on how women are portrayed in video games. To look at things like, why is it always some guy rescuing the princess, instead of some female warrior rescuing the captured king. The internet responded by helping her raise more than 26x what she’d asked for. It was awesome. (link)

But then the trolls responded.

Here I’m going to read an excerpt from the NewsStatesman, which in turn quotes Anita.

Even if you don’t like the idea – or don’t believe that women are poorly represented in games … then isn’t it fine for other people to give money to something they believe in?

Except some kind of Bastard Klaxon went off somewhere in the dank, moist depths of the internet. An angry misogynist Bat Signal, if you will.

In Sarkeesian’s own words:
“The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape. ”

Anita tried to do good. Because of this, folks have labeled her a terrorist.

This is not okay. You can make a difference though. You can be the one to not feed the trolls by arguing with them, but instead, simply hit that report button, hit the block button – get them banned. Work to send them the message that what they are doing is wrong and will not be tolerated.

Imagine a world in which all the time, all the energy and and all the bandwidth that goes into cyber bullying and trolling instead goes into building good things.

I have built the place to do astronomy. Others have built spaces to do art, to participate in wildlife studies, to work on story telling, to test and debunk false consumer products, and and so many other awesome projects. Find what you are passionate about and build.

This talk is one I struggled to write. To finish this talk I have to step out of my comfort zone and give an honest acknowledgement that trolling isn’t something that just happens in nebulous random places on the internet and it isn’t just people being verbal in their close-mindedness. Sometimes things are more physical and more scary. As an astronomer, at professional conferences, I’ve randomly had my tits and ass grabbed and slapped by men in positions of power and by creeps who drank too much. This is part of what it means to be a woman in science. With the creeps I generally hold my own and get them to back off like I would with any asshole in a bar. With the people in power… I commiserate with the other women as we share stories of what has been grabbed by whom. I know as I say this that it sounds unbelievable – and how can we report the unbelievable and expect to be believed?

This isn’t to say women shouldn’t go into astronomy. It is just to say that in the after hours events, you sometimes need to keep your butt to the wall and your arms crossed over your chest.

Some of you have to have power to stop discrimination and harassment. It pisses me off to know that as strong as I am, I know I’m not powerful enough to name names and be confident that I’ll still have a career.

But some of you are people with power who can change things.

It’s often hard for women and minorities to rise to positions of power – to break through that glass ceiling. This is in someways a self-efficacy issue, where the constant down pouring of belittling comments and jokes plays a destructive role in self confidence. At my university, I’ve heard tenured faculty laugh that there is a policy not to hire women into tenure track physics positions. They do this in front of the junior faculty.  I’ve heard people joke that the reason I’m in a research center rather than in Physics is because I have boobs. It’s all said with a laugh. So far, its been nothing actionable or against the law. But it hurts, because I know the women who work for me, strong awesome powerful women like the Noisy Astronomer Nicole Gugiliucci and like Georgia Bracey are going to be hearing this, and it is going to effect their self esteem as they look to build their own carreers. I know it hurts my self esteem. And I know there is nothing I can do to change the reality I am in.  I could move to another university – I could change which reality I’m in – but that would leave behind a university devoid of women role models who are capable in physics and computer science, the two fields that my students come from. I stay, and I try to be the example of a woman doing things that matter. I try to say Brains, Body, Both – it is possible even in computational astrophysics.

Here in the skeptics community, we, like every other segment of society, have our share of individuals who, given the right combination of alcohol and proximity will grab tits and ass. I’ve had both body parts randomly and unexpectedly grabbed at in public places by people who attend this conference – not at this conference, but by people at this conference. Just like in astronomy, it’s a combination of the inebriated guys going too far – guys I can handle -  and of men in power being asses.

I know that there has been a lot of internet buzz over the last two years about these issues. This community is filled with strong women. A Kovacs and MsInformation are two ballsy women I draw inspiration from. These are just two of the many SkepChicks, and many of the Skeptical and scientific podcasts have female hosts. When they see something wrong, they ask for ways to protect people from being hurt. And they do like Surly Amy did and raise money to get women here – women who together can support one another so that when we go home we have a network of women to turn to to support us even at a distance. These are women who react to  problems with a sharp word and a needed call to action that is designed to fix the problems

I know this is an uncomfortable topic. An I know that my talk is going to provoke some of you who don’t think I should air dirty laundry. But I see a problem and I can’t change it alone.

 Changing our society takes all of us. Doing something is being that guy, and I’ve had two different guys be that guy for me, who jumps between the girl and the boob grabber and intervenes. Doing something is donating to get more women here, and to get more minorities here, and making a point to admit, we’ve got problems – we’re humans – and saying Stopping Harressment Starts with me. (see endnote 2, below)

We can make TAM a place that is focused on inspiring skeptical and scientific activism – that is focused on how each of us can in our own way make the world better. We can put this bullshit behind us, and we can try to rise above the problems that plague so many conferences in every field. We can be the better example.

The skeptics community is filled with strong people who are advocates of education, of building a more equitable society, and of protecting the uneducated from the charlatans and the quacks. There are times and places to fight. James Randi’s work has often exemplified the best ways to use evidence to fight the leaders of woo. The Dover case was an example of the right place to fight – taking on the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement in the courts. We do need to fight to build a better world.

Say that creating a more educated future is something you’ll fight for, and find something to help educate people about.

Use your social media to advocate for those who are doing good. When you see a problem that pisses you off, find out who is already fighting the fight, and support them. Highlight the issues, and then support the solution. And when something pisses you off, and you don’t see that fighter to support, do like Elyse did and start your own grass roots movement that fights to fix the problems and ignorances that plague our society.

That exhaustingly used statement , “Be the change you want to see in the world” … well, dammit be that change by doing something.

And if you don’t know what to do, support science! Together, we can understand our universe.

—————–

Two additional end notes:

1. CosmoQuest is a project that can only succeed through your support. Please consider donating time or money to this project. All proceeds raised through this donation link will go to creating new citizen science projects and toward generating educational materials for classroom teachers to use the citizen science with their students.

2. The “Stopping Harassment Starts Here” T-shirts at TAM (image of graphic above) are shirts I had printed with my own money to sell to raise money for the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund, which pays for legal aid for women facing gender discrimination in education and the workplace. These shirts are in purple, which is the color of domestic violence awareness, animal cruelty prevention, and LGBTQ Awareness. These are all issues I care about. If you’re at TAM and you’d consider raising your own voice against harassment in all its forms through the purchase of a shirt, I’d be vary grateful. Shirt’s not sold at TAM I’ll sell to people in the US for $25 (including shipping). Just email me at pamela@starstryder.com with [Stops Here T-Shirt] in the subject line.