conferences
drorzel | May 22, 2010The problem is "What should Chad do/ see in the evenings while he's at DAMOP next week?"
This is the major physics conference in my field, so my days will be pretty well booked up with talks and posters, but there's not much after 6pm other than food and socializing. If there's some not-to-be-missed Houston thing to do (a bar, restaurant, live music venue, etc.) in the evening, I'm open to suggestions.
The boundary values constraining this particular problem are: 1) I'll be staying in the Hyatt Regency downtown, and 2) I will not have a car.
I don't promise I'll be able to follow any and all…
drorzel | May 7, 2010The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll:
You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…
drorzel | May 6, 2010Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow.
Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving a research talk to a fairly sympathetic audience, here's a poll about scary things:
Which of these things frightens you the most?Market Research
So, you see, it could be a lot worse...
drorzel | April 29, 2010A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations:
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.
Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the…
drorzel | April 9, 2010There's no rest for the wicked, as last weekend's hectic running around is followed by another busy weekend, with some on-campus stuff on Sunday as part of our annual Accepted Students Days. More importantly, though, I will be on a panel at the Empire State book Festival on Saturday from 12:45-1:30 pm:
BLOOK: Going from Blog to Book
Empire State Convention Center, Meeting Room 4
Books derived from blogs are a publishing phenomenon of the past few years. Why is there an audience for previously digital content in analog form, and what does this say about the future of the book? Hear from a…
cpikas | March 30, 2010I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series.
(stream of consciousness)
Dr John L Schnase, NASA - Science and technology challenges of eco-informatics
Workshop 10 years ago about research directions in biodiversity and ecosystem informatics. Summary and paper in Information Systems (maybe this: doi:10.1007/s10844-006-0027-7). Stream of logic: striking feature of planet is its life, striking feature of life is its biodiversity. More…
cpikas | March 30, 2010I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series.
(stream of consciousness)
Annette Williams, Vanderbilt U Med Ctr - Integrating best evidence into patient care
Essentially seemed to be 3 pieces. Within their order set something or other, their internally developed electronic med records some messaging and stuff, and consumer health site linked to icd-9 codes and lab test explanations.
Dr. Medha Bhagwat, Bioinformatics Trainer, NIH…
cpikas | March 30, 2010I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series.
(these are stream of consciousness)
Tonna - VP North Am, Academic & Gov't. Research productivity metrics more important for funding decisions. Data for institute and gov't research funding decisions. Their goals: increase productivity (doing science & getting grants), provide data for making funding decisions. Increased use of ejournals correlates with increased publication and…
drorzel | March 25, 2010I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland
Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting:
Tuesday
In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…
drorzel | March 15, 2010I'm terrible about taking notes on conference talks, especially when I'm jet-lagged and was sleep deprived even before I got on the plane. I do jot down the occasional paper reference, though, so here are the things I wrote down, and the talks they were associated with. This should give you some vague idea of what the meeting was like on Monday.
From Joel Moore's talk on topological insulators, one of the Hot New Topics in condensed matter, a review in Nature.
From Phillip Treutlein's talk on optomechanics, a recent preprint on coupling atoms to mechanical oscillators.
From Nathaniel Brahms's…
drorzel | March 11, 2010Lots of good suggestions as to Portland activities for my trip to the March Meeting next week. There's a second, related problem that I also need help with: What should I do at the meeting itself?
My usual conference is DAMOP, which I'll be going to in May, so while DAMOP is a participating division, and offers some cool-sounding sessions, it seems a little silly to go to the March Meeting and go to DAMOP talks. The whole point of being at the gigantic meeting is to see different stuff than usual.
The problem is, the scientific program includes forty-odd parallel sessions in each time slot,…
drorzel | March 9, 2010I'm going to be attending the March Meeting of the American Physical Society next week, in Portland, OR. This will be held at the Oregon Convention Center, which is apparently on the opposite side of the river from every hotel in the city.
I have never been to Portland (or, indeed, anything in the Pacific Northwest) before, so I have no idea what there is to do there. I'm sure that at least some of my readers have been there or are from there, though, so here's your chance to clue me in: What essential Portland activities/ eateries/ whatever should I make sure not to miss while I'm there?
I…
pontiff | February 18, 2010The twelfth annual SqUINt conference is being held this week and unfortunately I'm missing my favorite conference (though a gaggle of grad students have been sent Santa Fe bound.) The schedule looks really good this year including a great list of invited speakers (Scott Aaronson (MIT), Rainer Blatt (Innsbruck), Matt Hastings (Station Q), Dieter Meschede (Bonn), Keith Schwab (Caltech), and John Watrous (Waterloo)). Notice the awesome mix of theory and experiment...good stuff. Hope everyone who is attending is having a fantastic time: have some green chiles for me please.
cpikas | February 3, 2010These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.
Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project
She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty…
cpikas | February 3, 2010I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010.
I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.
Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press
Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining. Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had 13k sales, but…
jstemwedel | January 27, 2010It's true that I recently returned from a fairly geeky conference, but I just found out about one happening practically in my backyard. And, given that I don't yet have any papers to grade, I figured I should check it out.
(Today is the last day to register without paying the late registration fee, in case that helps you make up your mind.)
From the web page:
She's Geeky's 5th unconference, the third in the Bay Area, is coming up the last weekend in January at the Computer History Museum [Map] in Mountain View. Register now to receive regular pricing.Who is invited?
Are you a woman? Are…
drorzel | January 21, 2010I've mentioned before that I'm going to be giving an invited talk in the LaserFest session at the APS March Meeting. I finally got around to registering for the meeting, and booking my travel. $1,500 on the college credit card-- whee!
The March Meeting program is one of the more intimidating meeting programs I've ever seen-- there are 42 parallel sessions in every time block. Yikes. I thought DAMOP was getting to be a little too big to navigate, but this is ridiculous...
Speaking of DAMOP, I'll also be going to the 2010 DAMOP Meeting in Houston. I haven't booked my travel for that, yet,…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time -- so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.)
However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by "Tweeting" my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist
SK â definition of civility at your site â if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about.
F-r - politeness or is it being a decent human â in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language â so itâs not just being polite. Itâs more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome.*
Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome â…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Led by Maria Droujkova and Blake Stacey.
We started with a pretty basic discussion of how to show math on the web. I use the math sandbox on mediawiki and use a png. B recommends replacemath.js http://mathcache.appspot.com/static/docs.html â it also provides an alt tag that has the LaTeX in it. Sitmo â LaTeX equation editor is one M has had some success with.
Example â Radiometer â the very simple thing- requires very complex analysis using kinetic theory of gases⦠so visualization from Greg Egan.
B took a bunch of computers they bought for some unsuccessful physics education initiative and…