Show HN: Cassyni – Relaunching Academic Seminars Hi, this is Andrew (arhpreston) and Ben (benjyk) from Cassyni ( https://cassyni.com ). We both completed PhDs in physics before going on to found Publons and Kopernio, companies that were acquired by -- and became a part of -- Web of Science, a product researchers on HN may be familiar with. It is well known how important academic seminars are for networking, promoting your research, and keeping up with latest developments. But the scale is under-appreciated: by our estimates more than 1 million academic seminars were happening every year. And then Covid came along... As a result many seminar series are now online and recorded using solutions that cobble together tools like Zoom, Google Sites and Sheets. This all more or less works but is painful and time consuming to operate. Our co-founders, researchers at Imperial College London and Texas A&M, experienced this firsthand. With their input we set out to build a tool to take the pain out of organising a seminar series. The idea is that in just a few minutes you can set up a professional looking seminar series and begin inviting researchers. We take care of the tedious process of setting up an online presence and working with speakers to find a time slot that works for them, collect their bio, abstract, promotion and more. We’ve been operating in beta for several months now. You can see some of the seminar series that are up and running on our homepage. These range from your standard departmental series (ABI Tuesday Seminars: https://ift.tt/3mi7RL0 ), to a series about a specific tool for scientific simulations (PyFR: https://ift.tt/3zbj2ZS ) through to a journal that brings in authors to talk about influential papers (J. Comp Phys.: https://ift.tt/2UDmk98 ). Note that you can click on the archive tab of each series to watch recordings of previous seminars. As you can see, these are not just standard departmental seminars; the shift to online has removed geographics barriers, enabling different types of seminar series to develop. What they all have in common is that they are helping communities to form around different kinds of research topics, and they all give you information and nuance you wouldn’t find by reading the related publications alone. On the attendee side, we’ve done some nifty work to integrate with Zoom so the live experience is better (instead of a name in a Zoom meeting you can see the profile of people in the room and participate in a live Q&A: https://ift.tt/3ml5G9t ). In the longer term we think Cassyni can help to make seminars and their recordings a searchable (e.g., check out the slides we’ve automatically extracted from the video and search for “flux” here: https://ift.tt/3D5RkA3 ) and citable (as you can see from the previous link public seminars on Cassyni get a DOI and are indexed in CrossRef) part of the sphere of human knowledge -- a complement to the published literature. We thought we’d share what we’ve built with HN in the hope of getting some feedback about what we can improve. If you are a researcher please do take a look and let us know what you think. And if you’re interested in setting up a seminar series drop us a line (help@cassyni.com) to let us know where you came from and we’ll organise an HN discount for you. August 20, 2021 at 09:03PM
Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
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