Software and soft skills
Our astronomer adds some comments on the meeting he attended this month.
We mentioned that our astronomer had recently attended the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, this year held not far away. One of his correspondents was struck by two features of the program (which was, of course, available online to anyone): the number of sessions dedicated to Python software, and the number of sessions devoted to (for want of a better term) people-practices. Indeed, if you were expecting astronomers to concentrate on astronomy, these might seem a bit off-topic. And these kinds of session was not at all prominent when our astronomer first attended AAS meetings, some years ago. But they say something about how the science actually works nowadays.
Our astronomer had to learn about programming in his grad school days, of course. Even back then all telescopes were run by some sort of command-line interface, and data were all digital. It was more or less expected that a scientist would be competent, if not fluent, in something like FORTRAN or C, at least enough to figure out how someone else’s program actually worked. Nowadays the science has migrated to Python, so some mention of it at an AAS meeting is not unexpected. But the structure has changed. Most astronomers do not write their own programs; these sessions were mostly on how to use code that had already been produced by someone else. This makes sense for two primary reasons. First, it’s a waste of time to write a (possibly long, complicated and difficult) program when someone else has already solved the problem. Second, data sets are vastly larger and more complicated than in the Old Days. It is now rare for each single image from an observing run to be processed and examined individually. There must be a software pipeline to take the stream of raw data and turn them into results. And learning how to use the pipeline is not trivial. Hence the AAS software sessions.
Less predictable and explicable (though no less welcome) are the people-skills sessions. Most astronomers make their base pay by teaching, but have the briefest formal instruction in classroom work; more emphasis and help here is very welcome. Sessions on managing one’s career have certainly multiplied, though we are cynical about their effectiveness: the basic ratio of three PhDs to every permanent job in the field doesn’t seem to have shifted significantly. Discussions on how to do peer-review properly and effectively are certainly welcome and perhaps overdue. We’re not sure, however, why these have become prominent nowadays. Certainly each could have been usefully addressed a century ago.
Perhaps it’s that astronomy has become so big an operation that astronomers have realized they need to pay attention to the operation. That is, the supply of assistants and funding is as important as understanding the evolution of high-mass stars.
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