About NSCL Blogs
About
NSCL Blogs is an experiment in science communication and dialogue. The goal is to provide a window into the laboratory, which is the largest university campus-based nuclear science facility in the United States. Our bloggers are mostly graduate students, though also include the outreach manager and in-house science writer. NSCL is home to the world's first superconducting cyclotron and to much else in the way of cutting-edge technology for producing and studying rare isotopes. However, our most significant assets are the talented people who spent their days (and often nights and weekends, too, when an experiment is running) at NSCL. Among these people are the graduate students who are choosing to train for their career in physics here in East Lansing. Sure, many of them chose MSU because it has the No. 2 program in nuclear physics in the United States, behind only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But perhaps another draw is the culture of open innovation and hands-on experimentation that embodies best of National Science Foundation-funded, university-style research. And if we do this right, maybe some of that culture will be reflected here.
Comments
The blogosphere is about dialogue and discourse, an important aspect of which is the ability to make comments to the authors. Please do so! We're doing our best to keep the bar to posting comments low -- we don't require folks to register, for example -- but these means we're counting on you to use good judgment and keep things polite Of course, the field of physics is famous for tough questions, and we welcome those here. But cross the line into ad hominen attack or crude rant and we'll surely delete your comment. We're aiming for what our friend, Bill Pearson at Intel, calls the "living room." Pearson, who manages all the Web 2.0 activity for the Intel Software Network, the the tone of the discussion should stay at the level of what would be appropriate to share with a group of friends acquaintances in your living room, which makes sense to us. So while you should feel free to put your feet up on the metaphorical coffee table, please also keep things clean.
Disclaimer
Opinions expressed here from those blogging and posting comments are solely those of the individual author. It should go without saying, but these views do not reflect those of our funders, which primarily are the National Science Foundation and Michigan State University.
Technology
NSCL Blogs, and indeed the entire NSCL Web site, is powered by the Drupal open source content management platform, which we've found to be darn flexible and handy.
Contact
Geoff Koch (koch at nscl.msu.edu) or any of the bloggers directly.
Operation of NSCL as a national user facility is supported by the Experimental Nuclear Physics Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation.