Society for Neuroscience 2006
purepedantry | October 19, 2006This Synapse features a special Society for Neuroscience line-up with Shelley, Evil Monkey, Nick the Neurocontrarian, and myself attending.
I arrived and faced a moral quandry of whether to drag my ass out of bed to see stuff. Having decided to have a look, I attended a Workshop on Teaching, a Workshop on Open Access publishing, nearly lost my mind, and a neurogenesis/gliogenesis slide session. Shelley summarizes some interesting work on oxytocin and vassopresin and critiques the lecture by Frank Gehry. Nick and Evil Monkey (here and here) have their sparse summaries here.
As you may have…
purepedantry | October 16, 2006If you have never been to Neuroscience, one of the things they do is have slide sessions. These sessions are sort of like short talks -- a slide of data or two presented by many people. It is sort of a good summary of what people are working on.
Considering that I work in a lab that studies oligodendrocyte development, the one of these I chose to attend was the Neurogenesis/Gliogenesis.
The big highlight for me was Bruce Appel from Vanderbilt. He found a way using GFP and time lapse photography to watch oligodendrocyte myelination in zebrafish. Showed some absolutely crazy videos that I…
purepedantry | October 16, 2006My head hurts. I am sitting in a crappy slide session of limited personal relevance, trying vainly to find something fascinating in the injection of morpholino oligos into Xenopus. Two complete yo-yos are talking really loudly behind me.
Let's have a little humanities moment, so that I don't lose it.
I really love the poetry of ee cummings. He always captures a little bundle of emotion in life that is lost on most people. This moment reminded me of this poem:
since feeling is firstby ee cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly…
purepedantry | October 16, 2006I attended a panel discussion chaired by David van Essen entitled (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How will it Affect You? It was focused on what the implications of the Open Access movement in science are, and what scientists should expect from that. For those of you who don't know, the Open Access movement is a push to make all journal articles published freely available to the public. This while a very laudable goal raises some issues, not the least of which is who is going to pay for publishing if all the articles are free. Nick Anthis from The Scientific Activist and I debated…
purepedantry | October 15, 2006I TA'd a bunch in college and I am currently the TA for the medical school Neurology course, so I am always looking for good ways to make teaching better.
However, the moderator made a good point during the workshop that SfN -- in spite of the fact that majority of members do teach or are themselves students -- has always focused on research rather than teaching. This issue exceeds SfN; I would argue it applies to academia as a whole. It seems to me that teaching is viewed as something that you do because you have to and research is something that you do because you want to.
Anyway, that…
purepedantry | October 15, 2006Last night, we also met Nick from Neurocontrarian. He is also liveblogging the proceedings, and maybe doing some audio interviews. Check out his site for his coverage.
purepedantry | October 15, 2006There are a bagillion people here -- a bagillion. No other word appropriately conveys how many neuroscientists are in this building.
That being the case and there being so many exhibits and lectures and craziness going on absolutely simultaneously, it has become an issue about how to break down the problem of seeing everything without becoming overwhelmed and starting to babble incoherently in the corner about NRG1 signaling.
There is to my mind two ways of dealing with this
1) You can run around like a head with your chicken cut off, and lose your mind.
or
2) You can just go with the…
purepedantry | October 15, 2006I got here late night after a plane flight filled with people accidentally clubbing each other with long cyclinders filled with posters. The baggage checkers probably thought we were a horde of terrorists.
"Sir, what is in that long skinny package?" she asks as her hand moves to the alarm. "Science, my dear. Science."
There is simply no way to elegantly carry a poster case, particularly in coach.
There are these pretzel vendors in the airport, and I got to thinking that under the new rules food related liquids probably have to be thoroughly inspected before entering the concourse. Are…
purepedantry | October 14, 2006Hi everyone,
For the next 5 days, I -- like fellow Sciencebloggers Shelley and Evil Monkey -- will be blogging up a storm from the Society for Neuroscience convention in Atlanta. Check in regularly for updates as to the proceedings. And remember to check in next Thursday for a very special issue of The Synapse that will summarize all the convention related goodness.
Jake
UPDATED: Incidentally, if you are going to SfN and you read this blog, email me. I would love to meet people there -- particularly at the Neuroscience Official Superswanky Sponsored Socials or NOSSSs.