Earlier Highlights (10)

In August 2007, I attended a Summer Institute on Immersive Collaboration, organized by Media X at Stanford University. I gave a talk titled From Facilitating to Creating Collaborations, I met many interesting individuals using virtual worlds for remote collaborations, and I learned about many new software and hardware systems enabling such collaborations.


Also in August, I chaired the Modest-7a workshop, titled A Software Framework for Simulating Stellar Systems, in Split, Croatia. This meeting formed a mile stone, in providing a working set of connected codes for simulations of the stellar evolution, dynamics, and hydrodynamics of star clusters, using the MUSE framework.


In July 2007, on the Seeds of Unfolding website of the Cafh organization, an interview of me appeared, Deep Questions, that was conducted half a year earlier by Bob Magrisso, a physician at Northwestern University with a deep interest in practical approaches to contemplative exporations.


Also in July, we released ACS 1.3.2, a new version of our Art of Computational Science project. Our main addition is a time symmetric block time step code with fourth order and sixth order Hermite implementations.


<- In June 2007, we came up to speed in using a great new collaboration tool, Qwaq Forums, in the form of a virtual world. It allowed me to conduct research remotely with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. See the Virtual Reality Explorations page on our WoK web site, and in particular our summaries of weekly talks given there by a number of speakers with very different backgrounds.


In May 2007, my answer to the question What is the greatest innovation in your field? appeared in the spiked/Pfizer survey. I argued that virtual laboratories have made astronomy into a real science, based not only on observations, but also on experiments.


<- In April 2007, I attended the Media X Conference, where I learned a lot about new types of research and collaboration tools, including ways to meet colleagues from around the world to do joint research in virtual worlds.


In March 2007, I started a six-week series of Sunday afternoon lectures near the pond at the Trees in the virtual reality world of Videoranch, on the general topic of science in a wider context.


<- In February 2007, I gave a talk in the virtual reality world Videoranch, with the title Ways of Knowing. I also joined Ed Lu, astronaut and astrophysicist, in his talk in videoranch titled The Asteroid Tugboat.


Also in February, I participated in a Roundtable discussion on Modern Cosmology, in New York City at the Philoctetes Center, established to foster and promote an integrated multidisciplinary approach to the understanding of creativity and the imaginative process.


<- In January 2007, I participated in a workshop on Calibration and Confrontation of Models and Observations, at Drexel University, where we actively participated in extending the MUSE framework for Multi-scale, Multi-physics simulations in astrophysics.


Also in January, I wrote a short invited note on The Real Purity of Pure Science at the web site of the World Question Center, in response to the questions ``What are you optimistic about? Why?''