The UCSC campus was hit by a power outage tonight, taking down Vox Charta for about an hour. More power outages in the next few hours are possible, so access may be a bit intermittent. Apologies for the inconvenience!

Hi all, I have added the option to have different discussion times and durations on different days. If you are an institution liaison, visit the institution settings page to make any desired scheduling changes. There may be a few bugs introduced with this change, so please let me know if anything isn’t working. Also, I have fixed a number of the pages accessible through the links at the top of the page, which had been broken for a couple weeks.

It was brought to my attention that none of the links on the recommended papers page were working. These links have now been fixed. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if anything isn’t working!

A few tweaks have been made to Vox Charta over the past couple weeks:

• PDF links for each paper appear in the agenda when a discussion has begun.
• Search feature finally fixed (I think). You can now search for astro-ph postings by keyword, author, or ID number using the search box in the upper right corner.
• Option to construct agenda e-mail from top voted papers across all institutions when the agenda for your institution is empty. Liaisons can find this option in the institution settings, I’ve enabled it by default.

There appears to be a critical bug related to special events that is leading to the accidental deletion of events from time to time. I think the bug is related to a naming conflict, but I am having trouble tracking the bug down. If you are an institution liaison, please e-mail me and let me know if you have been having any problems with the events system. Thanks!

It appears the e-mail recommendations were not sent out the past two weeks due to a bug, which I have now fixed. As a reminder, you can adjust your recommendation settings here.

I have also discovered that agenda e-mails were not being sent out to CEA Saclay, CU Boulder, and UW Milwaukee. This bug has been fixed as well. Sorry for any inconvenience!

Astro-ph’s listing was slightly delayed this evening. The new listings are now available. Sorry for any inconvenience.

After this evening’s listing (December 23rd 26th), there will not be any new astro-ph listings until Wednesday, December 29th. There will then be another break in the listings lasting until January 3rd. More details on the holiday schedule are available here. As a reminder to institution liaisons, you can cancel discussions occurring during the holiday break by visiting the institution settings.

Happy holidays everyone!

UPDATE: It seems I misunderstood the holiday schedule, and there actually was a new listing released on Sunday, December 26th. This listing is now available. Sorry for the mix-up.

Today’s listing did not parse yet. I am looking into the issue and will hopefully resolve it in a couple hours. Sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: After investigating, I have found that astro-ph’s official RSS feed never updated today, so I loaded the listing from an alternative feed. Sorry for the recent string of technical difficulties!

The switch that is connected to Vox Charta was shut down unexpectedly for about 2 hours. Service was restored at approximately 11:45am PST. Sorry for any inconvenience!

The machine that is hosting Vox Charta needs to be moved from one rack to another in the server room it resides in. This means that Vox Charta will be down for an hour or two while we make the move. Sorry for any inconvenience!

UPDATE: The move is complete. Thanks for your understanding!

I am currently tweaking the site’s interface, so some elements of the site might not render correctly. Sorry for any inconvenience!

All,

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties in adding today’s astro-ph postings. They should be posted within the next half hour. Sorry for the inconvenience!

EDIT: Today’s postings are now available.

Hi everyone! I’ve been tinkering a bit recently, and I’ve added a few more features/optimized a few things. Here’s a brief summary of what has been added:

• Ability to mark papers as “not discussed” after a discussion has ended. Return to a previous day and any papers that were not talked about can be marked as such. All users can do this for their institution’s own agenda.
• Sorting of daily listings by institution votes/total votes. If you click on the drop-down menu next to “sort by” you will see two new options for sorting astro-ph. Vote counts now also show total votes to the right of the institution votes.
• Improved back-end algorithms. I’ve cleaned up the database so things will load a little quicker.

At this point, the site is in “polish” mode, and most future work will focus on improving documentation, loading speed, adding more journals to the daily updates, and bug fixes. Don’t hesitate to e-mail me if you encounter any issues.

Today’s postings didn’t appear until a few hours after 24:00 GMT because of a site bug. I think I have squashed it. Sorry for the inconvenience!

ArXiv seems to be having some server issues and their RSS feed never updated today, which unfortunately means today’s listings are not available (yet). I have sent them an email alerting them to the problem, so hopefully they fix the issue soon.

If the issue isn’t fixed before your discussions, an agenda can still be created by posting “special topics” with links to any papers that were posted today. Please visit the posting instructions page and read the special topics section to learn how to create a special topic. And of course papers from previous days can still be voted on by using the calendar on the right side of the page.

UPDATE: The issue has been fixed.

If you made a mistake voting on a paper, or if you know you will be unable to attend a discussion, you now have the option to “unvote.” After voting on a paper, the voting thumbs will be replaced with an “unvote” link on subsequent visits to that page. Unvoting is only possible before the discussion associated with the next agenda is over; afterwards the unvote link is replaced with the bump link. Happy voting!

I have been spending some of my free time this weekend changing the design of this page, and adding a few more features.

The biggest new feature is the ability to sort the day’s posting based on your voting record. This uses the recommendation system that was already in place. I have also tweaked the interface slightly by adding collapsible regions and adding visual cues to help the page flow a little better.

Let me know if you guys encounter any issues.

Thanks to a generous donation from Shawfeng, we have a brand new server for Vox Charta! Again, not everything may be working at the current time, so please let me know if anything seems to be broken.

Update: Not unexpectedly, the astro-ph RSS scraper is not working quite properly. The new posts should be available shortly.

Update 2: Things seem to be fixed. Happy voting!

The UCSC Coffee Website is now Vox Charta! With our added support for multiple institutions, the time was right to give this website a more universal name. “Vox Charta” roughly translates to “the voice of the paper,” and my hope is that we can make this site central to the astro-ph discussions of many astronomy and astrophysics departments.

The only change that regular UCSC users should notice is our address, UCSC’s portal is now found at http://ucsc.voxcharta.org. Likewise, other institutions will have their portals on their own sub-domains. Our old address will automatically forward to the new one, but please update your bookmarks! I had to alter quite a bit of code to add support for multiple institutions, so if anything does not appear to be working, please e-mail me.

If you belong to another astronomy or astrophysics department and would like to use Vox Charta to help run your regular astro-ph discussions, please send me an e-mail: jfg@ucolick.org.

Cargo has been having some server issues, which led to some downtime last night and this morning. I am trying to track down the cause, please bear with me.
Update: I believe the problem that led to the downtime has been fixed.

As the first and second years do not have a class that ends at 10:40 this quarter, I have moved coffee back to its original time, 10:30. This will probably remain our regular meeting time until the start of Fall quarter.

I’ve optimized a number of bits of code on the website, so hopefully things should run a little more smoothly. I have also improved our archive system by making the club posts appear on the day of the club instead of when they are originally posted. Recommendations will now also appear on the archive pages. Also, our e-mail recommendations were broken for a few days, they should now be fixed.

On tonight’s late update: Astro-ph itself updated late this evening. The new postings are now available.

All,

I’m making some minor repairs to the website. The new postings will be available shortly.

Due to the campus closure, there will be no coffee discussion on Thursday or Friday. There will still of course be new astro-ph postings on those days, so there will be 200+ new papers to choose from for our Tuesday discussion.

Remember: To vote for a paper, you are only obligated to read the abstract! Voting for a paper does not force you to be able to describe the results of a paper in tremendous detail, as might be expected at colloquium/journal club. The idea behind this website is to know which papers are going to be discussed beforehand, not to assign homework. So please, vote!

The ArXiv website has been down for more than an hour now, delaying the posting of today’s new papers. The mirrors still seem to be functioning: http://aps.arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/new

Unfortunately, the RSS feed is only available on the main ArXiv server, so today’s posting will happen as soon as the main ArXiv server returns. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update (9pm Thursday): The main server is back up now, but the RSS feed has yet to update.

Update (9am Friday): The RSS feed still hasn’t updated, and so it is unlikely the new papers will be available for this morning’s coffee. If you have a paper in mind that you’d like to discuss that appeared on astro-ph yesterday, please post it as a special topic.

Update (3pm Friday): The RSS feed finally updated, so Friday’s postings are now available.

Due to the prospective visit, journal club will be on the 3rd floor of ISB tomorrow.

I’m pleased to announce a major new feature: Personalized paper recommendations, which can now be found as a link at the top of the page. This page shows a list of recently posted papers based on your voting record sorted by relevance. The page will hopefully help you find papers you might have missed when they were first posted to astro-ph.

Additionally, brand new papers that are a particularly good match to your voting record will appear with a “Recommended for you!” badge to the right of the paper title. You must be logged in for these recommendations to appear.

Lastly, the site will now periodically send out automated e-mails with each person’s top recommendations for a user-specified length of time (the default is 28 days). These e-mails will only be sent if you have not voted for a paper in that time. The e-mails can be disabled through your recommendation settings.

Because the system works by comparing your votes to the database, you must have voted on at least one paper in order for the recommendation system to work for you! Hopefully, the addition of these features will promote the use of this website as a tool to improve our morning discussions. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

We have been told to not take the CfAO coffee during our morning coffee discussion so that the people in the front office don’t have to make extra coffee in the morning. I have asked Cathy to make an extra pot for our morning discussion, please use our coffee instead.

I have added a drop-down menu with a list of all registered users which appears below the title of all posts. Users can use this list to suggest papers to other users who might be interested in them. A link to the paper will be sent as an e-mail to the selected user, with a gentle reminder to vote for the paper if they feel comfortable discussing it at coffee.

Suggesting a paper does not affect the agenda, so you don’t have to worry about putting people on the spot.

A request for all users: Please visit your user profile and enter in your name (at least your first name). Otherwise, you are listed on the site under your account name, and other users may not know who you are.

I’ve added a new category to the page: Special Topics. Any registered user of the site can post to this category, and its purpose is to share things such as press releases or interesting astro-related news to discuss at coffee. I have posted the LCROSS results as an example.

I have also added a page with detailed posting instructions for Colloquium/Journal Club and the new Special Topics category. Please consult this page before posting!

One last thing: The virtual server this site is hosted on was upgraded, so things should hopefully be a bit snappier.

I’ve added a feature to “bump” a paper back into agenda that you have previously voted for. This is useful if you want to add a paper to the agenda that you previously voted on but were unable to discuss at coffee because there was not enough time or you were unable to attend the discussion.

The “Bump” link will replace the “Voted” text if you previously voted for a paper and it is not already in the next discussion agenda. Bumping only resets the voting time for a paper, and does not change the vote count.

To accommodate the 1st and 2nd year grads taking Greg’s class, the coffee discussion time is officially changing to 10:45 for at least this quarter. The reminder e-mail will now be sent out at 10:35, so be sure to cast your votes before this time for your vote to be included in the reminder e-mail!

The astro-ph postings should display again for everyone. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I finally have added the Comments and Journal sections to each posting! Additionally, multiple categories should now display correctly on a paper if it belongs to more than one. Finally, all links will now automatically spawn new windows, which should make the page slowness a bit more bearable.

I’ve re-written the feed parsing code to use astro-ph’s RSS feed directly. As a result, this page will now update around 5:30pm, only 30 minutes after astro-ph itself updates.

EDIT: Sorry about the late update time today, it took a while to get the new code working. I’ve also now included the astro-ph sub-categories in our copy.

The automatic feed parser is having issues. Please bear with me.

Some new features are now available:

Under the “About” tab at the top of the page are two new links: User Statistics and Previous Agendas, which show…user statistics, and previous agendas. If you are logged in, a new tab appears called “My Voting Record,” which shows papers you voted on. Also, the archives will now show the agenda for a given day.

Hopefully these features will make it easier for you guys/gals to refer back to papers that were discussed at a previous coffee hour. Enjoy!

All,

Since many people unaffiliated with our department are voting for papers on the page, voting for guests has been disabled. You must now have an account to vote on papers. You can register by clicking here. If you are not logged in and you try voting on a paper, a login window should pop up on the screen.

All,

Due to robotic spam, commenting on a paper now requires logging in. Voting can still be done anonymously.

The discussion agenda will now display the names of the users who have voted for a particular paper to the right of the paper’s name. If you don’t have a user account, your vote will show up as a “guest” vote.

I encourage everyone to register so that we know who voted for each paper! This will help make the discussion smoother by allowing us to skip papers voted on by people who aren’t present. If you’re shy, don’t worry, voting can still be done anonymously. If you have an account and wish to register an anonymous vote, just log out before voting.