conferences
khannula | October 22, 2009I'm back from the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I promised to blog about my session. So... here it is.Techniques and tools for effective recruitment, retention, and promotion of women and minorities in the geosciences. It's a mouthful, and included a lot of different perspectives, from information on the state of diversity in the geosciences today to suggestions for where we need to go to specific programs that have been developed to... well, to my talk, at the very end.
The session began with a personal perspective from Pamela Hallock-Muller, a marine scientist from the…
khannula | October 20, 2009I'm heading home tomorrow, and I've finally got a little time to blog. Here's quick summary of the sessions I went to on Sunday (the first day of the meeting).Detachment Dynamics: heat, deformation, and fluids in extensional systems: Where continental crust stretches apart, steep normal faults join at depth into detachment systems: shear zones that separate hot, ductilely deforming rocks from shallower, brittly deforming rocks. These systems have been discussed since the 1980s, but the focus in this session was a little different than in past discussions I've witnessed. Detachments bring hot…
khannula | October 18, 2009So I've been at the Geological Society of America annual meeting for a day and a half. The main part of the meeting just began this morning; yesterday I went to a short course about science education research. And now, after half a morning of talks, I'm taking a break to 1) revise things in my own talk and 2) blog.
I spent a lot of yesterday morning looking through the program, making plans for the rest of the week. (And no, I haven't followed through on all of them. That would have been impossible unless I could clone myself, unfortunately.) But although I am terrible about making plans and…
khannula | October 12, 2009It's ! It's also the week before the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I'm going to be spending this week running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything graded, an exam written, a post written about my talk (Tuesday afternoon), and my student's poster printed. (He's graduated and currently fighting forest fires, and he put the draft poster together by himself, so I guess I can wrestle with the dreaded plotter.) So I'm probably not going to try to help you understand climate myself. However, I can be a cheerleader for this week's events!
Tuesday is…
drorzel | October 10, 2009In the last couple of weeks, I have suddenly acquired a rather full travel schedule for the coming months. The odd thing is that none of these trips are book-publicity junkets-- they're all basically professional-type appearances, several of them taking place before How to Teach Physics to Your Dog hits stores on December 22. My schedule so far:
October 24, Waterloo, Ontario: I'm a late addition the Quantum to Cosmos Festival, as a panelist for a discussion on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century." This will also be webcast and recorded for television (my itinerary includes a "Speaker…
khannula | September 24, 2009Over the past year, as live-blogging and live-tweeting conferences have become more common, scientific societies have had to figure out what to do about bloggers. What are we? We don't usually wear press badges (although there are professional journalists who blog, and there are bloggers who write about new research in a way that's similar to traditional science journalists). We're just some people sitting in the back of a darkened room, listening to a talk... until we post publicly about it. Last summer, my SciBling Dan MacArthur unintentially ran afoul of the press policy at the Cold Spring…
khannula | August 19, 2009The August edition of Geological Society of America's monthly online news, GSA Connection, has just been posted. There's lots of useful news, but this one might be crucial:
Sign up now if you need childcare during the Annual Meeting!
If minimum attendance is not met, the program may be canceled, so please don't delay. KiddieCorp has provided quality care for children ages 6 months to 12 years at conventions and tradeshows since 1986.
I'm not traveling with the kid, but I know the hassle of trying to sort out childcare. So I figured this was an urgent enough message to post.
Details for…
khannula | August 18, 2009Geobloggers (and tweeters) are very social, but we often exist in our own world apart from the rest of the science bloggers. Here are some opportunities to remind the rest of the science-blogging world how cool we are:
1st: ScienceOnline 2010 is a conference devoted to science on Web 2.0 and to open-access science. This year's version will be held January 15-17, 2010, in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Some of the proposed sessions include "blogging (tweeting, sharing photos, etc) from the field," "Arctic/Antarctic blogging," and "nature blogging." I figure geobloggers do more…
khannula | August 6, 2009Geoscientists: we (Anne Jefferson, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Franks, and me) are looking for participants in a survey about the ways in which women geoscientists use blogs (both as readers and as writers). Here's the official request:
Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how blogs serve women geoscientists. Kim recruited the rest of us and we decided to…
drorzel | August 3, 2009Last weekend, I was talking with Ethan Zuckerman at a party, and we talked a little bit about the TED conferences and similar things. A few days later, there was an editorial in Nature suggesting that scientists could learn a lot from TED:
[P]erhaps the most critical key to success is the style of the talks. And here, those scientists wishing to inspire public audiences could take a few tips from the speakers in Oxford who addressed themes as various as biomimicry (Janine Benyus), the neuroscience of other people's rational and moral judgements (Rebecca Saxe) and supermassive black holes (…
khannula | July 29, 2009Earth Science Week 2009 will be October 11-17 (ending on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). This year's theme is "Understanding Climate." There are photo, visual arts, and essay contests, and Thursday is going to be the first "Women in Geosciences" day. (And then Friday will be "frantically put posters together for GSA" day. Maybe the people who prefer AGU can make this year's Earth Science Week happen...)
The Association for Women Geoscientists has a new website (at the old address). They're now collecting dues online, but the transition to a paperless world has been…
cpikas | June 22, 2009One of the main reasons I go to SLA is to catch up on what all of the journals, databases, and research tool providers are up to. Sometimes they save the big announcements for ALA and sometimes they make them at SLA.
Other years I've spent a ton of time at the exhibits, but this year it was a bit truncated. I also didn't go to any breakfasts (even free food doesn't get me into downtown DC at 7am!) and only a couple of other things put on by the vendors.
Here are a few things that I remember:
Springer's bringing out an image database which seems to combine some medical image database they…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2009I thought I'd share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it.
The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I'm not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know.
The speaker is going to apply the principles of abductive reasoning to see what can be concluded about the assassination of JFK.
Evidence -- all the available, relevant…
cpikas | June 18, 2009Bummer. Apparently Windows Live Writer doesn't automatically save drafts. So here are my foggy recollections of this session.
The session was a bit different this year. In previous years we've mostly discussed providing services (collection development and reference to computer science researchers. This year, we had three speakers on a theme: "Data Curation and Special Libraries: Education, Trends, and Developments"
The first speaker was Bryan Heidorn from UIUC. He teaches bioinformatics and information retrieval stuff, but he primarily works now as a Program Manager in the Division of…
cpikas | June 16, 2009(came in late because the speaker I initially chose to see failed to show up)
A speaker from Serials Solutionâs Summon reviewed various pieces of research done recently both by LIS researchers and by big libraries. Summed up pretty well by Tenopir (he copied her graph), increasing costs, decreasing importance as a gateway for research creates a value gap for the library. Scholars view the library and its resources as reliable and authoritative, but painful to use. So they start with google, because itâs easy and then link out to our subscriptions and my never know theyâre using library…
cpikas | June 7, 2009SLA is the Special Libraries Association - it's really my home
professional organization.
I often go to basically 3 conferences in my profession: SLA,
ASIS&T, and Computers In Libraries. You come back
from SLA and you want to buy
something. You come back from ASIS&T and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">study something or
just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">build something. So
they all have purposes. By far, though, SLA is the most
important to what I do for a living.
This year should be really exciting - lots…
cpikas | May 29, 2009Seems like I was at the wrong session at the wrong time - I missed
Bilder's comments and others that have traveled widely on twitter.
Search for #ssp09.
The opening keynote today was by the current head of
href="http://www.arl.org">ARL, the Association of
Research Libraries, Dr Charles B. Lowry. ARL includes123
major research libraries from the US and Canada - members are the
libraries, not individual librarians. Note, too that I think he said
that 113 of these were universities. There are research
libraries that are not in universities, btw. You can read
about their mission on their…
cpikas | May 28, 2009I wasn't complete sure what to expect with this conference. There were some old acquaintances from the society publishers who spend a lot of time with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division at the Special Libraries Association (Hi Tony! Hi Terry!). I also spoke with a representative of IMLS, some other librarians, and Victor from Mendeley.
Some sessions had some people spouting marketing BS about impressions and conversions and librarians as checkbooks, but the majority were friendly and looking to better scholarly communication.
In the morning after the keynote, I went to We Have…
cpikas | May 28, 2009Re-architecting Science:
A Vision for STM in the 21st Century
by Adam Bly
Opening Keynote, May 28, 2009 - this is live blogged, basically notes
on what he said... analysis to follow.
Where the world is today,
where science is, at a high level.. Need to solve problems using a
systems approach. Study of epidemics requires understanding
of climate change, need to study growth, need to study demographics and
the future of society, etc.
These are tough times, need science more than ever, but they are
optimistic times because what we know and what we can know.
Exciting things happening high energy…
cpikas | May 27, 2009It's right up the street, there are discounts for librarians, several sessions talk about collaborations between libraries and publishers (we'll see), and lots of interesting stuff. This page has the program.
I probably won't live blog, but I'll certainly post some summaries and wrap up information. No doubt I'll be tweeting, too (@cpikas, #ssp09)