Blue Collar Scientist

The Blue Collar Scientist is Jeff Medkeff. Please feel free to email me, if you want, or contact me via Skype. If you are on Facebook, and you like what I have to say here, please friend me. I am bluecollarsci on Twitter as well.

I currently reside in Anchorage, Alaska.

Professional:

I am a lifelong amateur astronomer. In the late 1990’s, while living in Sierra Vista, Arizona, I began working in the field of astronomical technology as a systems engineer and software developer. My most notable contribution to the field was the development of high-level software for robotic telescope operation, including a suite of software that ran as part of the ASCOM platform, and specifically ran under ACP. As part of that project, I developed a model for prioritizing and scheduling astronomical observations across minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years - a difficult problem, since targets of interest are constantly entering and leaving their windows of observability. To solve it I devised a heuristic that computed an efficient Hamiltonian path between targets of interest, which accounted for and optimized instrumental overhead (such as delays caused by the download of imagery) and other physical inefficiencies, which controlled not only observation scheduling far into the future, but real-time control of the telescope. In the first incarnation of the heuristic, repeated observations of the same target were treated as iterations of the same path, but starting in 2001 each observation was treated as a separate vertex in a larger path, allowing for arbitrary numbers of observations for each target.

My solution to the problems of observation scheduling and most-efficient real-time instrument controls in astronomy turned out to be of interest to designers of biomedical and chemical analysis equipment, particularly as applied to machines that analyze multiple samples and conduct a different suite of tests on each. A version of the heuristic now runs in many such machines.

As a result of my work in astronomy, I have discovered or co-discovered with my research partner, Dave Healy, nearly 500 asteroids (as of February 2008). The discoverer of an asteroid has the privilege of proposing a name for it. Among my named discoveries are 106537 McCarthy and 106545 Colanduno, which I named in honor of the hosts of Skepticality.

I have also been honored by my colleagues in a similar way, with asteroid 41450 Medkeff. The citation for the name reads:

Jeff has provided help and distributed free software for robotic operations of observatories, telescope control, data reduction and automatic submission of results to the Minor Planet Center. In this way, he has contributed to the discovery and photometric observations of thousands of asteroids.

In addition to my work in astronomical research and supporting technology, I was for many years a contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, and am an occasional contributor to Astronomy magazine. I’ve also written for Astronomy Heute, Consumer’s Digest, and several other magazines. I’ve appeared several dozen times on radio and television news talking about astronomy and science, including several stints as a guest on various radio talk shows (my favorite experience is my first ever radio appearance, on Let’s Talk Stars). For the last few years I’ve worked as a media consultant and “on background” source, mainly supporting science writing and broadcasting.

Nonprofessional:

For the last several years, I’ve conducted science education and public outreach activities, in response to what I see as a crisis in science education in this country. I am a popular and regular speaker at the Campbell Creek Science Center and the Eagle River Nature Center, and occasionally speak at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and other area venues. Dozens of times per year, I teach short units on astronomy and physics to high-school students at the invitation of science teachers, with a concentration on scientific methodology, how we know what we know about the universe, and the consequences of uncertainty in measurement. I work hard to make my presentations informative, interesting, and funny.

I utilize the AAAS’ Benchmarks for Science Literacy to define my topics for various age groups, and when working with schools or home-schoolers, I provide suitable test questions and other information for integrating my activities into the curriculum.

I am an avid photographer and bicyclist in my free time.