the other, other program running in parallel with the clusters09 program at KITP is "Low Dimensional Electron Systems", which seems intensely worried about the supply of pencils, or some such - at least graphene seems to be their buzzword du jour.
They, also, are having lots of talks, most all of which are also online video and podcast.
Monday they had their "Director's Seminar", to explain what the big deal is to the rest of us, and themselves:
Sankar Das Sarma "Low Dimensional Electron Systems: A Landscape of Graphene, Quantum Hall Effects, MOSFET, Luttinger Liquid, and Beyond"
most interesting, and with a title even longer than mine...
More like this
A big step in improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells in on the horizon. A paper published over the weekend in Nature Physics describes the ability of a substance called Graphene to convert a high percentage of the energy from sunlight into electricity.
Last week's Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I'll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off.
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on.
There are fewer of them this time, so I'll keep them above the fold.