State of the Blog (2016-2017)

 

The members of TEPS and our guests at the Université de Montréal in June. This year saw enormous growth in our program, something very satisfying to see as an author of the proposal and as a member of the team!

It's July and that can only mean one thing, here at HTWT: time for the annual State of the Blog update! Unlike last year, I did manage more than zero posts with 8 in all. I also kicked off a new Blog for my lab over at http://york-pvl.blogspot.ca/ which has had 33 posts describing life, research and teaching amongst my students and trainees. The content over at our new location has been rather good and some of the posts have been very popular - in all we've had about 2,600 visitors over the year, not a bad start at all.

The big news over the last year will be no surprise to our regular readers. To my utter shock and amazement I published an article in Nature. If you talked to me a year ago, I would have thought you crazy to suggest that such a thing could happen. But this business is full of surprises. I won't spill much digital ink rehashing the experience (but if you want to rehash, by all means click for my description and background commentary) other than to say that I'm pleased that I can still learn new things about the business of getting science published despite having been doing planetary for 14 years. It was also very nice to be honoured by York University as a Research Leader for 2016 as a result.

A New Blog: PVL

Earlier this month I welcomed a 3rd member to the arcticsaxifrage blogging family. As some of you may already know from clicking on my profile over on the right, I've got my professional blog right here as well as a second blog where I review science fiction. To that I'm adding one more, but here's the catch - largely I won't be the author!

Instead, york-pvl.blogspot.ca will talk about the work going on in my laboratory, the Planetary Volatiles Lab (PVL) here at York. As I indicate in the introductory post, the forum will be contributed by students and trainees in order to give them experience in writing for a general audience. There's good potential here for benefits all around, I think.

If you are curious what you'll find, there will be posts about our science and engineering (though don't expect us to give away our secrets pre-publication!) as well as posts on process (What is it like to write your first paper; to give your first conference talk?) and on interesting things going on in planetary, from a student perspective (i.e. what a fantastic paper in last month's Science!)

Through this new forum I hope that you will get a taste for what it is that we do, why we do it and how we do it. You'll also get to know a whole new cast of characters. However, it will be a moderated forum in which I have reviewed and lightly edited the content - so don't expect too much drama.

I hope you'll join us, and will cheer on my students, many of whom are writing this kind of content for the first time!

A New Term with New Tools

 A new textbook of my own design awaits my Planetary Science students this fall!

I've got to say, as much as I've enjoyed the last 8 months of research, I am looking forward to the coming semester of teaching. Once again, I'll be the course director for PHYS 3070: Planets and Planetary Systems and also for PHYS 4120: Gas and Fluid Dynamics.

This will be my first time teaching a class for the second time, and that means that I have the opportunity to fine tune my course organization and lectures. While both courses went well last year, there is room for improvement which will hopefully be appreciated by the dozen or so Planetary Science and 20ish Fluids students.