conferences
drorzel | March 19, 2009I'm giving an exam this morning, then taking the afternoon off for my annual hoops overdose, so there won't be much physics commentary here for the next few days. If you want hot physics news, though, there are a bunch of bloggers at the March Meeting, providing summaries on the Internet:
Doug Natelson has two reports, plus scattered other commentary.
His Holiness is putting everything in one post
Ian Durham has a summary of the first couple of days
Andre at BioCurious has highlights of the biophysics talks
If I'm missing anything, leave a link in the comments.
jstemwedel | January 15, 2009Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create…
jstemwedel | December 9, 2008Back in November, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh, I heard a really interesting talk by Jeremy Howick of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about the challenges of double-blind trials in medical research. I'm not going to reconstruct his talk here (since it's his research, not mine), but I wanted to give him the credit for bringing some tantalizing details to my attention before I share them with you here.
First, he noted that "blinding" might not be as apt a description of what actually happens in medical trials as "masking". A double…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn't really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from "digital media". (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
Take…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what's at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:
I am not the only academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
However, it is possible that I am the youngest academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
Apparently, using Powerpoint marks me as nearly as tremendous a Luddite as using actual overheads. Keynote is where it's at. (But I may be unwilling to actually invest the time necessary to make the transition, especially seeing as how I like hand-drawn slides.)
A "coffee breaks" in the conference schedule…
drorzel | September 19, 2008It was not a great night for helpless mammals in Chateau Steelypips last night. SteelyKid was a little colicky, and the Queen of Niskayuna has developed some problem with her paw necessitating a vet visit today, which led to some late-night whining. Kate ended up spending several hours soothing SteelyKid, while I wound up going downstairs to comfort the dog, and falling asleep on the couch for a couple hours.
The resulting mental fog is not really conducive to posting Deep Thoughts today, so instead you get a few funny anecdotes from last week's conference.
The first is more of a vignette: in…
drorzel | September 17, 2008I have never been a huge proponent of the Open Access and Open Data movements in science publishing, because they've always struck me as wasted effort. I've never really seen what value is supposed to be added by either project.
When I think about the experiments that I've been involved with (see, for example, the Metastable Xenon Project blogging), and what the data for those experiments looked like, I doubt that anybody not directly associated with the experiments could do anything useful with the data. It's not just that many of the analysis steps required tacit knowledge of the set-up,…
drorzel | September 9, 2008I've seen a lot of neat stuff discussed at the Science in the 21st Century meeting, some of which I'll talk about in more detail later, when I have more time to think. One of the most interesting experiences of the meeting, though, has been using FriendFeed to sort of collaboratively live-blog the talks, along with a bunch of other people.
You can get some of the flavor from looking at the comments on Timo Hannay's talk (PIRSA video link, which is worth a look). Not only are there several people making notes as the talk goes along, there are links to things mentioned in the talk, for easy…
jstemwedel | September 5, 2008In a comment on another post, Blatnoi asks for my take on a recent news item in Nature:
An Italian-led research group's closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.
For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on 'dark matter' from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences ... but beyond a quick flash of a…
evolgen | July 28, 2008
The University of Iowa is hosting next year's meeting of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, SMBE 2009. I usually go to the annual SMBE conference, and I was probably going to attend SMBE 2009. Now I'm definitely going. Why? Because John Logsdon just announced that they'll be hosting a pre-conference meeting on the Evolution of Sex and Recombination.
The Sex & Recombination meeting was supposed to happen this summer, and it was scheduled for the week prior to the Evolution 2008 conference in Minnesota. But mother nature interrupted, and the flooded campus was in no state to…
evolgen | July 26, 2008So, I'm just hanging out here by the side of the water waiting for my lunch. Sure, I could go in the water and get my lunch. But that's not how I roll. I wait patiently for my prey to get within striking distance, and then I attack. So, here I am just hanging out by the side of the water.
Click to enlarge.
There they are. Just a bunch of cichlids waiting to be eaten. By me. Lunch would be good right now. But they won't get close enough. So I'll just hang out here with my jaw agape.
And I can see them. They're not too far away. Maybe one of them will swim close enough to the shore. And then I'…
evolgen | July 25, 2008Last month I mentioned that I had been in Barcelona at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference. I arrived in Spain early in the morning, and, after I got checked in to my hotel, I went with a couple friends to the Barcelona Zoo. This zoo is famous for housing Snowflake, the albino gorilla who lived at the zoo from the mid-1960s until he died in 2003. They still have an impressive collection of primates despite the loss of the zoo's icon.
Additionally, the zoo has a roaming band of peafowl. The peacocks and peahens have free reign of the grounds, and you'll often see them…
evolgen | June 15, 2008
If you check the archives of this blog (which I know all of you do on a fairly regular basis), you'll see that I haven't posted anything in over two weeks. Those kind of blog hiatuses can't be good for traffic, but I have a legitimate excuse: I was out of the country. Readers with a keen eye for international architecture will recognize the picture attached to this post. Those without, may not. Either way, I figure I should tell you that it's one of the facades of Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi's best known unfinished church.
Why post a picture of this famous tourist spot? Because I was in…
evolgen | April 14, 2008I think I'm cursed. Or I have bad luck. Or conference organizers think I'm a morning person. Alright, so maybe I really am a morning person. But that's besides the point. Because it sucks to give a talk on a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings should be reserved for things like Belgian waffles, homemade hash browns, made to order omelets, and mimosas. Not for 12 minute talks about my research. How much can you fit into a 12 minute talk? Not much. And you end up speeding up at the end when you realize you've got about 1 minute to make it through four slides. It's either that or go over 12…
evolgen | February 12, 2008Jonathan Eisen's been blogging the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting in Marco Island. Here's what he's written so far:
Advances in Genome Biology and Technology Meeting - First Post
AGBT Marco Usland Update - Long Live Sequencing
Marco Island Evening One - The Strange and the Good
More notes from Marco Island/ AGBT
Coolest Thing at Marco Island - The Polonator
Marco Island sequencing frenzy - are we getting lost in all the data?
Marco Island - Saving Some of the Best for Last
The second to last post is the best, in my opinion. But there's some interesting points about…
jstemwedel | February 11, 2008I'm passing on information about a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation for graduate students. The program, organized by the University of Montana Center for Ethics, is called Debating Science 2008, and here's how it's described on the announcement:
We are looking for graduate students who are inspired by their own research, but who are also interested in exploring the social, political, and philosophical context of that work, and who are committed to sharing science with nonscientists, in a genuine hope for a better world...
To solve the toughest problems of the modern…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008It's been pretty quiet here. Not only have I been engrossed in preparations for the Spring semester (classes start today), but I also went to the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference. So it seems like a good time to ruminate a bit on how conferences fit into the patterns of (my) academic life.
The official reasons academics go to conferences include presenting their work to others in their field and finding out what other people in the field are working on. In the "scholarly communication" hierarchy, giving a talk or presenting a poster is less valued than getting a peer-reviewed…
jstemwedel | December 31, 2007Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the "convention interview" in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates -- those who make the "long list" of applicants still in the running for the position -- at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there's some…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007At the upcoming North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008, I'll be leading a discussion on the ethics of science blogging (not about blogging about ethics in science). If you attend the conference (and if you're not sucked in by one of the other attractive discussions scheduled for the same time-slot), you'll be able to take part in the conversation in real time.
But even if you won't be able to come to North Carolina for the conference, you can help set the agenda for our discussion by editing the wiki page for the session.
Here's what I've posted to get things going:…
clock | October 26, 2007There are 85 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 106 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time.
Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD student studying hearing (more precisely hair cell regeneration in the cochlea) at the…