Leaving Science: Occupational Exit from Scientific Careers
Anne E. Preston, Russell Sade Foundation, New York, 2004, 201 pages.
ISBN: 0-87154-694-9

Reviewed by Michael Reed

Anne E. Preston is associate professor of economics at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. In Leaving Science, Prof. Preston describes some of the reasons why people leave their careers and majors in science for other fields, such as medicine and law.

Update and Comments about An Experiment to Measure The Absolute Motion of the Earth

Lance Osadchey

I was asked to respond to reader inquiries and to provide more details on the velador setup described in An Experiment to Measure The Absolute Motion of the Earth (The Citizen Scientist, 2 March 2007).

First, I wish to caution everyone to be careful with the components. A responsible adult should be in charge of the construction and use of the velador. In particular, the laser and camera are potentially hazardous.

Paul MacCready: A Powerful Champion for Citizen Science

Shawn Carlson, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director
Society for Amateur Scientists


A giant has fallen and the citizen scientist community has lost a very great friend.

I met Paul MacCready while fighting against pseudoscience through several skeptics societies back in the mid 1980s. At the time, he was a world-famous aeronautical engineer, and I was just a graduate student with but a single peer-reviewed publication to my name.

Poorman's Space Program

Paul Verhage
Paul.Verhage@boiseschools.org

As Captain Kirk says, space is the final frontier. And what amateur scientist wouldn't want to explore this final frontier? Just seeing earth from space would be pretty neat by itself. But it's not just a pretty view up there. There's atmospheric science, astronomy, resource monitoring, and physics to explore (and that's just for starters).

Bob Townsend

The lunar eclipse images shown here were both made with my 200 mm F4 Takahashi astrograph and homemade German equatorial driven mount from my backyard observatory at an altitude of about 850 meters (2,800) feet near Placerville, California. The camera was a Canon 350D DSLR.

This Week at Hilton Pond

Bill Hilton Jr.
Executive Director
Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History
York, South Carolina 29745 USA

Water, Water Everywhere (15-21 July 2007)

In the 25 years we've been at Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History, we've often wondered about the water quality of the pond itself and how that quality might affect local birds and other wildlife. "This Week at Hilton Pond" we finally had opportunity to get answers to some of our questions as an environmental class from York Technical College came out to conduct a thorough water analysis.