 Today is Kelly Cruz, Professor from New York, from the CUNY. Is it CUNY? CUNY. CUNY. CUNY system. Who I have been an admirer of for many years. We work in these similar, broadly similar, low-mass star-ish kinds of things. And also, I think we both care a lot about the practice of being a scientist and how astronomy is done and taught and computed. So we wanted to sit and talk about Astro Better, your website that started almost 10 years ago. Yeah, 10 years ago. The way I remember it is that it's the only thing that's ever happened to me where I was in bed and I had an idea and I got out of bed and worked on it all night. I love that it's not like you had this thought about general relativity and you got up to your whiteboard or your chalkboard and stood it all night. Instead, it was a thing about astronomy. It was like the meta-science thing going on. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it was an important moment for me also to recognize that something about brown dwarf atmospheres or spectroscopic data reduction never came to me in a flash of inspiration. But something about helping scientists be better scientists and facilitating information sharing is the thing which literally got me out of bed. On a 10,000-foot level, do you think in 10 years things have gotten Astro Better? Do you think things are Astro Better? I do. Yeah, I absolutely do. I mean, if nothing other than people use different fonts and their figures now, bigger font size and their figures now than they used to, I think that astronomy in particular is a field which is small enough where this concept of best practices and what it is that astronomers do and what you need to do in order to be respected as an astronomer, it changes pretty quickly. I think that information transfers pretty quickly and our cultural norms change pretty quickly. The bar is higher for communication, for graphical presentation, for putting your work in context rather than for sounding, someone who sounds unintelligible, who uses a lot of acronyms is the smart person. That is not a norm in astronomy. One thing that I think I have seen improvement though I don't think we can call it like monumental improvement is the accessibility of presentations as well. Some of the things about fonts and colors are decorative and stylistic and do help in the communication, but they may not actually, things like I have seen a huge improvement in terms of color usage for color blindness is like a really friendly, easy one. Probably I think this is one reason that's easily adopted is because it affects men and so men tend to care about it, but in the rest of the realm of accessible science and accessible communication, I think there's still a lot of room to grow there. So many avenues, but I think that speaking as a community, we are a community that everybody may have the different things that they think about, but thinking about them and working on improving and communicating, being more accessible to someone is something which we talk about on a regular basis. And I have to admit thinking about color blindness is not high on my list. I am much more interested in undergraduates or early graduate students who might be experts on cosmology or high redshift stuff but may not have as much experience with stars and I want to be sure. So me putting up an HR diagram, you can assume everybody knows what's going on in this HR diagram and so one may have had it in the class or like me, I never had an HR diagram in a class and so I really don't want to make assumptions about people's background knowledge. Journalistic integrity here, can I ask you about the Rural Mill? Oh yes. I mean, so this is something that existed before AstroVeter. On several different hosts. Right. And then came to AstroVeter as a place, at least a stable place, at least a quasi-moderated and safe place where these garbage wasn't hosted constantly. But it still has a contentious reputation of being something that is like not as special, I'll just say for my own experience, not as special healthy for my own mental health when previously on the job market. Also full disclosure. So the Rural Mill was started when I was a postdoc and then time has passed and I eventually became, got on the Employment Committee of the American Astronomical Society and then Chair of the Employment Committee and so the American Astronomical Society runs the job register. Right. Which is the primary place where astronomers go to find jobs. Exactly. And now I'm on the board of the American Astronomical Society and so the understandably the leadership of the WAS is also not a big fan of the Rural Mill and my stance is essentially as soon as the job register provides all the functionality that the Rural Mill does, I will take the Rural Mill down. There remains a huge problem with employers communicating with their applicants. Yeah. There also remains some problems with the job register regarding timing and the ability to get jobs which may have a short application window advertised soon enough. But something which is a real challenge, which I think there are technical solutions to but the job register hasn't implemented yet, is a way to communicate with all the applicants that interviews have been, you know, that you're probably no longer in the running for this job. And so while I absolutely understand and I'm sympathetic to the stress which the Rural Mill riles up, I think it also just does a really important service of also just informing people about the timeline of other positions. That's a completely reasonable and principled answer. Thank you. The piece that resonates really strong with me, both as somebody who's been on the job market in the last few years and in interviews and been on the other side of hiring people in the last couple of years, is the communicating back to applicants. Like UC Santa Cruz just still hasn't gotten back to me about my grad school application, right? Yeah. You know, there's just like basic communications and it just doesn't happen. Right. Like, sorry, Santa Cruz. It just never came through. I still go look at it even though I'm not on the job market because it's actually sometimes an easier way to view the state of the field for jobs. Yeah. Because there are jobs posted to the remote that don't get posted to the AWS job researchers. Absolutely. Things are posted there first and there is a level of interaction. Those are very journalistic, excellent questions. So the other arena that I interact with you on a now annual basis is the AAAS meetings, which I'm a big advocate for our professional society as well and for the journals and all those affiliated things, but also the hack days, which is like the thing that keeps me coming back to the AAAS meetings at this point. Excellent. Did you hear that AAAS? He comes to the meetings because of the hack day. Yeah. You pay the registration fee. Yeah. And it's been great. Thank you very much for your help in making those continue to run. For me, one of the trickle-downs of the hack days is an inspiration to run other kinds of Absolutely. Unconference events. One of the things that I'm trying to advocate for. So there's now a new position within the AAAS. It's such a fancy title. It's like the director of innovation. Peter Williams is in this position. And so I've been advocating for a while that the AAAS as an organization actually isn't taking enough advantage of the hack days. So AAAS could say like, hey, we want to implement this change in the job register. Let's make that a hack day project and see if we can get the community to implement this change for us. If there are little projects, which don't make it, which aren't high priority for the full-time IT staff, but could be fun projects for the community to give a go. And so I'm hoping that now with this position, Peter could sort of be paying attention and bringing more hack ideas to the hack day, which actually go back and benefit the entire society. There are a lot of things that we do at meetings that we do because it's what we've always done. Absolutely. Yeah. And one thing that springs to mind is the five to seven minute contributed talk. Yeah. So thank you so much for inviting me on your show and asking me this question, Jim. Yeah. So if I were to run for vice president of the American Astronomical Society, that would be the platform on which I would run. Kill the talks. Something which many people don't know is that the vice presidents are the ones in charge of running the meeting. So the role of the AAAS, like they could be called the VPs in charge of meetings. There's three VPs and their role is to run the meeting. There was recently, relatively recently, you know, institutionally speaking recently, a task force on meetings. I don't necessarily think the surveys and the questions were prompted in a way that would have gotten out that people want on conference sessions. And so many people also have never done an on conference session to know that they want it. Right. So just because the meetings on task force didn't say that people wanted to get rid of the five to seven minute talks and that we want on conference sessions doesn't mean it's not necessarily the right direction to go. That, however, would be a huge haul. It's a very big meeting. It's a really big change. Yeah. I think there's some basic questions of scale, too, right? Yeah. Like there are things that we get away with at small scale. Right. Yeah. That become less tenable with 2,000 people at play. But I do think that the society and the staff that run the meetings are definitely very open to innovative ideas. Cool. And they're trying to make things more interactive. And so now there's iPosters, which I think is a great innovation. And I think they just announced yesterday that now there's going to be some version of a poster pop anyway. But it is one of the things that's on my list that I'm interested in trying to figure out how we could make the winter meetings more dynamic. And it does seem like that there is a consensus that the five to seven minute talks, nobody wins. Like the speakers are unhappy, the audience is unhappy. And to see if there's some other thing which we could be doing. But I don't think the answer is obvious. Thank you for helping create some of these institutions and these meetings and these frameworks which have started to lead to credit. So that hopefully people, my age or a little bit younger, are benefiting from spending time caring about how we do astronomy and making it better. Because that seems like that's part of the academic journey as well. Yeah, I hope so. Thank you. It's been my pleasure.