conferences
drorzel | February 22, 2011I grew up in Broome County, NY, down by the PA border, and my parents still live in scenic Whitney Point. Broome County is one of the areas affected by a huge environmental controversy, because it sits on top of the northern bit of the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains huge amounts of natural gas. For years, this has been deemed too difficult and expensive to extract, but gas prices and drilling technology, specifically hydraulic fracture drilling where they pump large amounts of water down the hole to break up the rock and let the gas escape, have moved to a place where it's…
drorzel | February 20, 2011My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on... But that's not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker giveaway from AAAS, which is a combination laser pointer and 1GB USB drive.
"Big deal," you say. Those are cheap." And, yeah, they are, but when you think about it, that's really kind of amazing.
50 years ago, the laser had barely been invented, and was still in search of a problem. Nobody had yet had the idea…
drorzel | February 19, 2011Since I had to have the slides for my AAAS talk ready well in advance, I might as well let you look at them more or less as I give the talk. So, courtesy of SlideShare, here's the presentation I'll be giving right around the time this is scheduled to post:
What Physics Knowledge Is Assessed in TIMSS Advanced 2008?
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
the question I was asked to talk about is whether the released questions from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey test from 2008 do a reasonable job of covering what we want physics students to know coming in. The…
drorzel | February 13, 2011As I've mentioned in passing before, I'll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I'm an idiot, and didn't submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract there, but I must've imagined it), but I'll be talking about how the physics questions on the test line up with standard curricula and conceptual tests and that sort of thing. The three-hour symposium format is not what I'm used to (presentations at physics meetings are…
drorzel | January 19, 2011I'm giving a talk at the AAAS meeting next month on international physics tests, and they have asked me to provide information that they will duplicate and distribute to the media. Items requested include:
-- A one-paragraph biographical sketch (not a C.V.)
-- A lay-language summary of your talk, beyond the abstract.
-- The full text of your talk or a related (ideally recent) technical
paper, either as a Word file or a PDF. PowerPoint presentations are
acceptable, but a full text will better serve reporters' needs.
The first two are no big deal, but the third is kind of weird. I don't…
drorzel | January 16, 2011I was at a meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public of the American Physical Society at the tail end of last week, so it seems appropriate to post a couple of APS-related announcements here on my return:
1) The APS has just created a Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. You may have read about this in the monthly APS News, but in case you missed it, there is a new organization with APS to bring people interested in outreach together:
"The forum provides a venue for people to congregate, provide best practice manuals...and disseminate things that work so people don't have to…
drorzel | January 6, 2011Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year:
I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to a AAAS meeting before, the whole thing appears to be organized in a different manner than any meeting I have been to. I'm doing a bit of a drive-by for this-- coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday evening-- but I have classes to teach.
I've been invited to give a Saturday Morning Science…
drorzel | July 27, 2010We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty.
The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall on whether to provide an outline at the start of the talk or not. About half of the students put up a slide listing the component parts of their talk ("First, I'll give some motivation for the experiment, then I'll talk about the apparatus, then..."), and about half jump right into the talk,…
drorzel | July 13, 2010we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good-- our students are, by and large, very good public speakers.
One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the students end up sounding just like their advisors. It's not just the content of the talks-- which obviously is approved by the advisor before the talk is given-- but also the style. Some students even pick up the mannerisms of their advisors-- verbal tics, hand gestures, etc. You see the same thing…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2010One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful.
The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2010As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like "get out of the silos" and "think outside the box", my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
The panelists included Jean-Claude Bradley, who spoke…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I'll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for "Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship", and the program is described thusly:
IGERT is the National Science…
drorzel | June 1, 2010While I mostly restricted myself to watching invited talks at DAMOP last week, I did check out a few ten-minute talks, one of which ended up being just about the coolest thing I saw at the meeting. Specifically, the Friday afternoon talk on observing relativity with atomic clocks by Chin-Wen Chou of the Time and Frequency Division at NIST in Boulder.
The real technical advance is in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters (available for free via the Time and Frequency Publications Database, because government research isn't subject to copyright): they have made improvements to their atomic…
drorzel | May 30, 2010Some late nights and wireless problems conspired to keep me from posting anything Friday or Saturday, but I was still at the meeting, and saw some cool talks on coherent X-ray production with lasers, opto-mechanics, and ridiculously good atomic clocks, some of which I hope to talk about later. For the moment, I'm just enjoying being home with Kate and SteelyKid and Emmy, so a real wrap-up post with physics content will have to wait a bit.
I will put up a quick note that I'll be signing books one week from today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival. More on that…
drorzel | May 27, 2010Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here's a look at Thursday's DAMOP program:
Thursday Morning, 8am (yes, they start having talks at 8am. It's a great trial.)
Session J1 Novel Probes of Ultracold Atom Gases
Chair: David Weiss, Pennsylvania State University Room: Imperial East
Invited Speakers: Cheng Chin, Markus Greiner, Kaden Hazzard, Tin-Lun Ho
Session J2 Coherent Control with Optical Frequency Combs
Chair: Linda Young, Argonne National Laboratory Room: Imperial Center
Invited Speakers: J. Ye, Moshe Shapiro, W. Campbell, …
drorzel | May 27, 2010I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days.
In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline Earth Quantum Fluids and Quantum Computation. Tom Killian of Rice opened with a nice talk on work his group has done on trapping and Bose condensing several isotopes of strontium; somebody near me pooh-poohed it as just a technical talk on evaporative cooling issues, but I thought Tom did a nice job…
drorzel | May 26, 2010The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space.
You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…
drorzel | May 25, 2010I'm going to be spending the bulk of today in transit between Albany and Houston, with a layover in Orlando (whee!), so here's a pair of related poll questions for you to consider:
The most enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:customer surveys
The least enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:Market Research
I think the answers are pretty clear, but I'm interested to see what other people think about the subject.
cpikas | May 24, 2010Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is being held right now in DC. Use both twitter hash tags: #icwsm2010 and #icwsm.
The papers are online at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/schedConf/presentations.
drorzel | May 24, 2010I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so choose only one.