Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Reason to get into conference: Join the collaborations everyone else did, and job searching.

Whether I get into the conference or not, I can use my place out in front to promote my job search. I want it to be a job search that everyone watches, because unless my job search is well known, there is no way to overcome that I was kept from getting a good record of finishing the important research I started at LCOGT.

So I made new flyers today to emphasize both helping me with my job search but also helping me get back into joining the groups such as TESS and Kepler that the others at LCOGT had the chance to join, but that the first astronomer was kept out by LCOGT keeping me from accessing our data and stopping talking with me. The Science Director effectively told me to leave trying to enter exoplanet astronomy. So now with good results on exoplanet distributions, I am challenging being kept out of working with these groups.

I now have a more memorable “redirect” link to my long Indiegogo crowdfunding site to get me funded to go inside the IAU conference: http://tinyurl.com/letmeinside . “Let Me Inside” is easy enough to remember, as long as people can also remember tinyurl. I also have a new link for this blog: http://tinyurl.com/letmeparticipate drives home the point that I was working for many years to be a part of the Kepler to TESS program, and also sought out other groups as well, so I am due the same chance as everyone else that provided LCOGT photometry to Kepler and TESS papers. The message to TESS and Kepler is that the LCOGT work that Tim Brown and those under him claimed to provide also came from Stuart F. Taylor, and the *only* reason I was not sending it them with Tim Brown and postdocs was that Tim Brown was hiding the data from me. I was the one who had worked on the FTN telescope the longest, so normal scientific practice was for him to share LCOGT data with me. TESS and Kepler can find another way for me to contribute if they're uncomfortable asking LCOGT why they're keeping out their first astronomer, but all of the other groups should not simply follow LCOGT's black list.

Why am I seeking to have my job search watched online? It has been because I was put into having to make a lose-lose decision when applying for jobs: say nothing and let people think I didn't finish on my own, or explain that the observatory created a situation that made it impossible for me to finish. Both choices have not worked, so it's better to beg for social media attention to get many people watching whether the astronomy community will support me having a reasonable chance at being employed again.

I have missed the experience of working with the groups that I persuaded the Director of LCOGT that his new observatory should work with. I had discussed openly with him that I was new to exoplanet photometry, so he knew that since I had done other projects in the past, that I did not have a previous photometry job to fall back on when he took away my participation in photometry.

So this is why I am stuck outside the meeting doing an "outside the door" poster presentation: without papers has meant being without a job which has meant I have had no way to support paying the costs of an astronomy meeting. Now I hope that having a job search that is more public, that when collaborating groups of LCOGT write papers, they will be encouraged to keep no one out.

Coming blog posts:
- Feedback from attendees that the conference is much too expensive -- including a video from an attendee.
- The anti-TMT "protectors" had what I would say was their first day that they interacted with astronomers, since the Convention Center security kept them away from the front of the Center (I don't know how the Center could keep them off public property).
- The Convention Center tried to stop me from handing out flyers "without a permit." Not even a business card. They do not understand freedom of speech on public property means people can hand out information. That is unbelievable. They can call the police on someone handing out flyers, but it will make them look bad. I'm looking for reporters to record them try to stop flyers. I've researched this point, and it turns out that Honolulu has a history of previously stopping passing out of "handbills," but they have lost cases in court, so now citizens are free to exercise their freedom of speech to hand out flyers.

Let me inside!
Link to crowdfunding site on Indiegogo now has a shorter redirect:  http://tinyurl.com/letmeinside

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