More Astronomy Data Mining: It’s Word-Matrix Time!

I have been exploring the terms used in the astronomical literature (see previous post), and have turned my attention to terms that seem to correlate with each other in astronomy publications. I thought it would at least be interesting to see how often one word is mention alongside another. To do this I take terms […]

Mining the Astronomical Literature

At .Astronomy 4 in Heidelberg, I began hacking on some natural language processing of the astronomical literature as part of my Hack Day project with Sarah Kendrew and Karen Masters. It began as a version of BrainScanr for astronomy – which it can still become – however it also provides an interesting database to explore, […]

ITER: A Thermonuclear Reactor That Scientists Will Tidy Up When It’s Done

Yesterday I toured the site of ITER, the nuclear fusion plant under construction near Cadarache, France. A multinational collaboration is pumping 150 billion Euros into this experimental fusion reactor, which aims to create 500 mega-watts of power, for every 50 that are pumped into. ITER, which sort of means International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor but is […]

.Astronomy 4

In 2008, in the midst of my PhD, I ran a conference called .Astronomy. The idea was to bring together all the other astronomers who were into the web and networks. It might not seem very long ago, but 2008 was before Twitter went mainstream and before everyone’s gran was on Facebook – to use […]