12/31/21: New Year's Eve meeting

 AGENDA AND MINUTES

1. Updates:

• MH paper. No updates. "A Table of contents should be available early January 2022".
• Women in space project. We discussed the latest set of graphs.
• VJB will send the case study portion for the next meeting. He sent the intro this morning and DB updated it and sent it out to the group again. 
• PT research. Presented query stats.
• Financials: FTC reimbursement. Finally got it! Took about 1 month.
• Any students at one of our universities wanting a project that involves automatic checks on the planet4589 data files, or makes graphs of them, would be welcome. It is a useful type of project and students should find these to be accessible, doable projects that future students can redo to provide updated graphs that also provide checks on the earlier graphs.
• DB presented some new graphs.

2. Reading and discussion:

• MH found this interesting graph: https://mobile.twitter.com/ns_whit/status/1471581216210145291
• de Alcantara and Martens 2019. We finished up to the first full paragraph on p. 132 last time, so we will start there this time.
• A background paper related to the women in space project. See SpaceTravelMetric-b6-5-16\PapersAndPresentations\femaleAstronauts\relatedArticles 
• One of McDowell's yearly reports, available on the website.
• https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optimism-for-2022
• Future possibility: https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress; Goldin et al., The Productivity Paradox, 2019.
• James Pethokoukis, https://fasterplease.substack.com/, tech foresight blog by former Jeopardy! champ; Chad Jones, https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/, writes about endogenous growth theory.

---------------------------------------Below are some ideas for future discussion-------------------

• We found that the paper at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-40896-1_3 seems like a good paper for us to read.
• MH suggests a short book called Future Spaceflight Meditations, a cosmist perspective, by Jiulio Prisco, physicist formerly with the ESA.
• MH suggests Pantelis Koutroumpis, The Productivity Paradox, a report.

3. Background literature update.

• Some interesting videos are at the Kartik Gada channel such as at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuRX67CJhaOT98Jdjh85CEQ which we discussed previously.
• For general reference here are some generic questions about articles (and videos):
• What is the source?
• What is the most significant advance in the human knowledge presented in the paper?
• Why is that advance important?
• What important questions arise from the paper for future research?
• What important questions would it be nice if the paper answered, but does not answer?
• What does the paper present that is novel (no one else has provided that before)?
• What is the relevance of the paper to our satellite research goals?
• Questions from the group?