Particle Astro Journal Club Slack
I am organizing a Slack-chat-based journal club for particle-astro experimentalists. PIs, postdocs, grad students (or national-lab-ish equivalents) are welcome. We have couple of Slack channels devoted to choosing interesting papers, then we run a "live" full-participation chat and discussion of a few papers every (preliminarily) Wednesday at 2-3 PM EST. First meeting will be 9/4/2019.To join, email astroparticle-slack@case.edu with JOIN SLACK in the subject line; introduce yourself; I'll invite you. Who is welcome? Well, the vague idea is that if you're at an institution big enough to host its own journal club, you should host your own journal club, right? But if you're a grad student, postdoc, or PI in a smaller group (one or two PIs?) this is for you. We'll try to keep it feeling like a small seminar rather than like a DUNE collaboration meeting.
- What's Slack? Go to slack.com to learn more, but it's a business/collaboration-oriented text chat program that also works very well for casual seminar-like conversations.
- We've never met, can I still join? Yes! You are the point! 😀
- Can't we do it as a telecon? Text chat is (I hypothesize) a fine medium. Text plus the ability to cut-and-paste images plus emoji responses is an even better medium. Also: I loathe telecons. 😒
- Undergrads? This thing is new so I want to see how it works with grad-students-and-up before opening it to undergrads. Follow me on Twitter and I will definitely announce if this is changing. 🧓
- Are theorists welcome? Speaking for myself I want to read experimental papers, including ugly technical ones about PMT bases and radioassays and PyCUDA; I say this because I think this audience is underserved compared to theory-discussion-groups. For now I am happy for theorists to join the discussions but not to dominate the paper selection. If there are enough theorists to want a theory/pheno journal club we can spin off a second meeting time. ✏️
- Are collider experimentalists welcome? Astronomers? See above re: theorists. To start with, I'd like the paper selection to stick to astroparticle experiment, broadly speaking---neutrinos, dark matter, axions, proton decay, cosmic rays, maybe stretching to nEDM, mu2e?---and anyone willing to chat will get to chat. We can spin off (or fold in) LHC/x-ray astronomy/RHIC discussions if it makes sense for the group on hand. 🔭
- I am in a faraway time zone, can I join? Preliminarily, yes, but I am going to pick North America-centric meeting times; if we end up with lots of overseas interest we should spin off other sessions. 🇦🇺
- What's the culture? We'll talk about it when we start up, taking a look at Community Covenant or something like it to ensure a supportive and affirming atmosphere 🌈
- Can I send Slack invitations myself? So-and-so will love this. Please share this webpage and info! (Until I know how things shake out I will do all the inviting myself.) 🙏
- Is this going to eat up all my time? Or my students' time? The all-hands-on-deck paper discussions will stick to one particular hour, just like a regular in-person seminar, so if you only subscribe to #general and #journal_club_live you'll only see that. If someone ends up creating #eurovision-cat-photoshops and chatting 24/7 that is their own business.
