Taking Off for the Great White North

I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last fall, and they've got a great program lined up for the festival.

I'm most likely going to attend tonight's tv broadcast, and tomorrow's "Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes" lecture (I have a professional interest in seeing how the competition does things), but I'm making the trip in order to appear on tomorrow's panel on science communication:

Communicating Science in the 21st Century

Kathryn O'Hara, Ivan Semeniuk, Nadia El-Awady, Véronique Morin, Chad Orzel

Saturday Oct 24, 2009 @ 8:00 pm

Science journalism is the essential glue connecting science to society. Looking around the world, how is science journalism changing? Is science journalism even essential to good science communication? How else might scientists come to understand the relationship between new technologies and the products of research and the public who will ultimately use them?

I'm the blogging scientist representative for the panel; the others are all distinguished science writers and journalists. So, what am I going to say? I'm still not sure, but that's okay, because it's a panel discussion.

If you'd like to see what I say, but can't make it to Waterloo, the panel (like every other event at the festival) will be streaming live, and the video will be archived on the festival website. Or, if you're in Canada, it will be broadcast live on TV Ontario. So, you know, set your DVR, eh?