Category Archives: Conference stories

What She Said

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why i’m terrified (but excited) about science online 2012

All of the pre-#scio12 chatter has picked up in recent weeks, and now that we’re entering the final countdown, I’m (thankfully) recovered enough from a nasty respiratory infection to tune in again. The problem is that tuning in at all is like a highly addictive drug: I get a taste and I want more. You people are going to make me into a junkie.

I, too have been distracted by an illness (a nasty cold) and am just emerging to deal with all the last-minute details of going to ScienceOnline2012. I’m excited because last year was a lot of fun and this year promises even more. Last year pumped me up, blogging-enthusiasm-wise, and it lasted for a few months. So I’m looking for that same kind of score this year.

Because of my cold I don’t have posts in the queue yet, and I don’t expect to have a lot of free time, so things may go quiet.

Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Episode IV: A New Hope)

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A new hope that it’s over, and yes, this is the last installment. (Thoughts from Science Online 2011) (Part I) (Part II) (Part III)

I think the session on using the history of science had a very interesting point (besides looking at history is interesting and that quote-mining to misrepresent your opponent has been going on for a looong time) — that one has to view science in the context of the time, because we always judge information through the optics of what we think is right, and it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what we know today is absolutely right, when it isn’t — we’ll keep learning more, and finding out some of what we think we know isn’t accurate. It’s easy to scoff at what people thought was true N years ago, but we have the benefit of hindsight. I am reminded of something from James Burke (from The Day the Universe Changed), when someone had made a condescending remark about people thinking the earth was the center of the solar system:

Somebody apparently once went up the the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said “What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked every morning at what’s going on behind me now, the dawn, and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the Earth, when as every schoolkid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand that.”

To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.”

Point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same.

You see what your knowledge tells you you’re seeing.
…

What you think the universe is, and how you react to that in everything you do, depends on what you know. And when that knowledge changes, for you, the universe changes. And that is as true for the whole of society as it is for the individual. We all are what we all know today. What we knew yesterday was different, and so were we.

(It’s from the first two minutes of this episode. The whole series is wonderful.)

Put another way, as an example, nobody was likely to come up with relativity as we know it as long as the notion of the ether was ensconced in everyone’s brains. The presence of a medium was the way things were interpreted, up until you couldn’t think about it that way anymore. And there could be something better than relativity out there.

Which leads me to think that perhaps it’s better to view what we know today as being less wrong than what we knew yesterday.

 

Another bit of insight came from the “It’s all Geek to me” session, where geekdom and snark were discussed. One of the moderators made the observation that geeks (in the world of geeks and non-geeks, i.e. without going into the difference between geeks, nerds, dweebs and dorks, which is shown here) is that geeks place a high value on information. And my observation, as an extension to that, was that geeks aren’t generally offended by being corrected, as opposed to the non-geek world, where pointing out errors is often considered rude. A geek doesn’t take it personally — being in error isn’t a character flaw (an honest mistake is not the same as lying), and in any discussion it’s better to proceed from the truth than from a mistake.

As far as the snark goes, I’ll just say this — I use snark (OMG, stop the internet!). But snark can’t be a substitute for an answer. I say this more in the context of forum discussions than a blog. Scoffing at someone’s ignorance isn’t productive; for any fact or concept, there was a time when each of us didn’t know it, and we all have huge areas of ignorance. So snark — as a first response — kills discussion. It sends inquisitive people away. But for someone who is proudly and willfully ignorant and shows they aren’t interested in honest discussion, I say, “Fire for effect.”

 

I also heard the science cheerleader talk, and learned about an interesting method of outreach and destroying some misconceptions; having a professional (pro-sports level) cheerleader point out that she has a technical degree shatters some old but tenacious stereotypes. I also heard about Science for Citizens, which allows average Joes and Janes to contribute to science projects (measuring precipitation where you live, taking samples from streams and ponds, and many other activities, which might be an extension of what you do for work or hobby anyway.

Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part III)

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(Thoughts from Science Online 2011) (Part I) (Part II)

One of the sessions I was really looking forward to was entitled “The Entertainment Factor – Communicating Science with Humor,” moderated by Brian Malow and Joanne Manaster. Because I am really interested in saving on my long distance incorporating humor into my posts. There was a lot of good advice in the session, up to the point of telling people how to be funny — which isn’t a shortcoming, because I don’t think you can do that. There are opportunities to do this, because we tend to use analogies to explain science concepts, and humor is often about exaggerating any kind of absurdities when making comparisons, so there’s a natural fit to do that, and even point out where the analogy fails, as it always will, in making simplifications. And telling funny stories about life in the lab is common enough, because it happens to everyone.

I think there are several “don’ts” that go along with this as well. Don’t force the joke, and this is a subset of some of the other writing tips I heard in other sessions. You may have this great line, be it a joke or some science tidbit, that you really want to include in your post, but it has to naturally flow from the writing. If you “write around the joke,” it’s usually going to end up as bad writing. It’s like laying down tile on the floor — you might have a great pattern in the center of the room, but none of the edges match up with the walls and obstacles, and ends up being a crappy job because you can’t trim all the tiles to fit. Bite the bullet and let go of the notion that the great pattern has to be exactly centered.

Another limitation is this balance between writing to your audience without excluding too many potential readers. Brian had asked be during the break preceding the session to say a bit about science cartooning, which I did when discussing this. A cartoon — especially one panel cartoons — don’t afford the opportunity for background explanation. So if you do a cartoon that relies on the readers knowing about the physics “spherical cow” joke, such as this, you are going to exclude potential readers who aren’t familiar with the joke. And the topic of your post may not lend itself to explaining the joke. I imagine the same applies to science standup comedy as well. You can’t do a couple-minute lecture just to set up a joke and be effective at it. You either have to have an audience that already has the background, or already be in a position where you are explaining the concept. Otherwise it won’t work.

Here’s another perspective on the session, at Observations of a nerd: So this biologist walks into a bar…

——

Completely unrelated to this was a session called “How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web,” and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding the appearance of bias, which means Pepsigate came up (surprise!) and other related subjects as well. I get that most responsible journalists don’t want their work tainted by the appearance that they are endorsing a product or service, which can be questioned by links or undisclosed sponsorships or targeted ads. A lot of their credibility is tied up in their objectivity. But I think there’s more to it. One thing that was mentioned only briefly was knowing what you are writing about, and from the perspective of a scientist who happens to write a blog, that’s where my credibility is. And it wasn’t clear that the writers understood this, or to what extend they understood this, because the conversation never went in that direction. Yes, it’s bad if you have taken money or some kind of favor from the target of your writing, but that really doesn’t come up much when you do a post translating a research result into a post for a wider audience. What’s important there is getting the science right. Because if the part you know and understand is wrong, you lose confidence that the author got any of the rest of the article tight.

Coupled to this is the idea that being objective means staying out of the fray and reporting both sides of a story. Not getting involved in the dispute. This comes up in stories that have a political or ideological slant to them, but what bothers me is the effort that goes into making sure both sides of the story are heard, and the lack of effort that goes into pointing out that the two sides are not equal. When the weight of evidence is heavily on one side, and the opposing arguments are weak and full of quote mining and cherry-picking, being fair means pointing this out. It’s not presenting the arguments as being equally valid — that’s giving extra weight to one side in order to balance the see-saw when the situation is inherently unbalanced. The reporter needs to stand on the fulcrum.

But the discussion didn’t afford me the chance to discuss that. Good thing I have a blog. Both are important. As one participant put it, your allegiance is to the readers. This means you have to be free from bias, or at least disclose potential sources of bias, but you also have to be correct in what you are writing about and present a story that has the least amount of distortion to it. It does no good to write a story on global warming, taking great care to avoid any appearance you’ve been influenced by big oil (or big research, if there is such a thing), only to get the science wrong and give the impression, say, that there has been no warming since 1998. It would be like implying that George Will has any idea what he’s talking about. There’s no scientific integrity there.

I think the lesson here is this: there is more than one thing that props up one’s credibility.

Part IV

Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part II)

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(Thoughts from Science Online 2011) (Part I)

I attended the “Death to Obfuscation” workshop on Friday, headed by Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer, and which is nicely summarized by the post Carl prepared when he wasn’t sure the snowstorm would let him get to the conference. Several of the points would come up again and again in the assorted “Be Better at Blogging” sessions I attended, such as not using jargon in your posts. It’s not that jargon is evil, per se, but it (like language in general) is a barrier to understanding if you aren’t familiar with it, and jargon is one of those things that’s not familiar to a wide audience. There was also a lot of discussion about writing as story-telling and the need to grab the audience from the beginning of the piece, because they can go elsewhere, and how a good hook is to make the story personal in some way. All good advice, but it left me with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, and I think I know what that was.

The advice was all coming from professional writers who blog (mostly, as far as I can tell) in the life sciences, and I wonder if the same dynamic is there for the science blogger and more specifically, a physical science blogger. It’s all well and good to try and reach a broad audience, but you don’t have to do that — it’s perfectly fine to write to a smaller audience who must know a little bit of background to appreciate your posts, if that’s what you want to do. And getting personal may be a great strategy for a medical story — Mary had a serious case of fluffy bunny syndrome — but I just don’t see it being universal. I can’t really write a story like

Deep inside Bob, a W boson was wreaking havoc, causing a quark to flip from up to down and he winced as he silently emitted a neutrino, right there at the wedding reception, which would have been most embarrassing had anyone noticed, owing to the longstanding stigma of neutrinos being left-handed. But fortune smiled on Bob, for a jar of Carbon tetrachloride and a gamma coincidence detector were mysteriously absent from the wedding registry, so nobody had brought them as gifts.

OK, maybe I could write that. But not all the time.

To get back to the narrative, hearing a few of the professional-bio-journalism-y tidbits over and over again seemed less insightful after a while. But that’s a minor nit in the overall scheme of things. Part of it was the sessions I chose to attend.

——

There was a session on Science and Scientists in Fiction, and a major topic in that discussion was whether it was more important to get the science right, or to portray scientists as scientists really are, and avoid the stereotypes (if it came down to a choice). One of the moderators was Blake Stacey, and he used the Star Trek example of the baryon sweep he had blogged about, and I concurred that his instinct was correct. Short version:

– The name is OK from a physics and logic standpoint, because while all neutrons and protons are baryons, not all baryons are just neutrons or protons. So all of the dweebs who sneered at the name can piss off.

– The name is also correct from a physicist/engineer/technician standpoint, because nobody is going to repetitively use the long, technically accurate phrase exotic metastable baryon sweep (or whatever) — it’s going to get shortened down, whether to baryon sweep or some other nickname, because we use jargon all the time. So this is geeks acting like geeks.

I don’t recall any general agreement on which was worse, since it depends on the context. I suspect that as the nit-pickiness of the detail gets smaller it’s more forgivable, since fewer science-types will notice the error. But we’re generally disappointed when scientists are portrayed as the nerdy white-coat-wearing stereotype.

I’ll continue in part III.

Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part 1)

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The title is firmly tongue-in-cheek (which does not impair my typing nearly as much as chewing gum does); the theme at ScienceOnline 2011 was quite the opposite of that, except … well, I’ll get to that. Eventually.

This was a very different kind of conference than I am used to attending. Despite costing about 1/4 to 1/3 of what I am used to seeing as a registration fee, there was an awesome amount of stuff in the swag bag we got at check-in, including a couple of books, and that doesn’t include the other book we got at the mixer on Friday night, which was held in a bar that had been rented out for the evening, with free drinks (at least for beer and wine). Not in the exhibition hall with a ticket for one free drink. The books at the giveaway were all wrapped in brown paper to mask their identity (though the authors were not, and several did short readings from their books), but I scored Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering after after a skull in the stars pointed out that, as a textbook, it was the biggest book there. It retails at more than half of the registration fee. So, score. And then then there was more swag at the conference, too; some were items that couldn’t be put in a swag bag, like t-shirts (so you could pick your size). Even the ID badges were better than I’d seen. Big, and with a 2-D scan code of your URL on it.

Dinner on Friday was novel, too. You signed up for a slot at one of several restaurants, which nicely solves the dinner diffusion problem, and each group had one or two of the authors present. I sorted on food type rather than author, and ended up at the Italian place. The waiter had an unorthodox approach; after I ordered my entrée he told me that everyone else had ordered a salad as well. Wow! Using peer pressure to move salad. I think we all had a pretty good time, up until we had to pay. We split the check, and did so according to who drank and who didn’t so we make the nondrinkers subsidize the drinkers, but despite the gratuity being included we still came up short. “Everyone pay $x” should work, but we had to get seven people to kick in an extra buck and even then, we were a nickel short. Not exactly dine-and-dash, and I hope that it’s not worth extradition so I hope its safe for me to admit it.

The varied backgrounds made things very interesting as well. Lots of biologists, writers, others in the publishing business, librarians (who all seemed to know the librarian at the Naval Observatory and her predecessor, and agree that they are both awesome) and Brian Malow, a science comedian who wanted some tips on physics to improve the accuracy of his jokes, and also traded some comedic information once I mentioned that I draw the occasional science cartoon.

Then there was the gender breakdown. I hesitate to expand on this, lest I stick my foot in my mouth, but I’ll be blunt: there aren’t many women attending the conferences I usually go to. And I had previously not been in any conference discussions that included being told that her conference nickname (to be worn on a t-shirt) could be “The Other Penis Lady.” Believe it or not, that had never happened to me before.

The “talks” themselves were not the traditional presentations of talking for 90% of the allotted time and then taking a question or two at the end. Generally the panel gave short presentations and then solicited input and discussion from the audience and in most cases spent less than half of the time on their prepared talks. One went a little over, but the presenter was basically begging for more audience input, and only one filled up as much as 75% of the time showing slides. It underscored the feeling of “nobody is really an expert at this” and that everybody could make a contribution.

Technology was a new experience, too. For all of the cutting-edge technology that gets discussed at an atomic clock talk, nobody live blogs, tweets or streams video of it. At this conference there was the background clacking of keyboards and most of it seemed to be on twitter (is that technically live blogging or is it just real-time tweeting?) I was having trouble enough taking a few notes and still listen to what was being discussed, because I’m way out of practice at that sort of thing.

I’ll have more of substance soon (I hope). Depends on how much time I can embezzle in the next few days.

Part II

The Party's Over

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ScienceOnline 2011 just finished up, and while there were some unique aspects to it (from my physics experience/perspective), there were a few things that were business as usual — I’m exhausted and my back is killing me. (I guess I shouldn’t have been attending the sessions in the Marquis de Sade salon). I finally got to meet some fellow physics bloggers, Dr. Skyskull (aka gg) and Blake Stacey, and then having gg introduce me around. It’s now a blur.

More to follow on some impressions, but for now I’m going to relax and watch some football.

Snakebit

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Travel has become difficult. Last year, a bureaucratic snafu not only denied me a trip to a conference in Hawaii, but it happened late enough that it kept me from scheduling an alternate trip to DAMOP. I spent the last week with the flu, which forced me to cancel a long-weekend trip to visit some college buddies, and now my plan to give a talk at an AAPT conference has been shot down. The government is operating under a continuing resolution, rather than an actual budget, and apparently this means there is a moratorium on this kind of travel. Not going on work-sponsored travel would essentially mean I couldn’t talk about results from work, which was going to be half of my talk. I’d be limited to talking about things that you could pick up on the streetcorner (but don’t do that … you never really know if that information is any good). Meh. Maybe this is a conspiracy.

DAMOP Summary

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OK, last things first. The UVa campus gets an overall grade of gorgeous, allowing for the construction that was going on. (There was a very New England “you can’t get there from here” theme that pretty much mandated that any travel between buildings required a detour of some sort) The weather was great; pretty much the rest of the month in Virginia has been cool and wet, but it was sunny and warm the whole week. I had tried to stay at one of the motels within walking distance, but they were all full when I called, so I ended up at the not-so-super-8 (or, from after Clark Kent went into the molecule chamber) and driving in each morning.

There was an announced crowd of over 1,000 registered participants, which explains the occasional SRO crowds for some of the talks. Holding a conference of this size in a University setting forces a certain spatial distribution of the talks, so there were six parallel session in four different buildings. Add to that the talks being located along the southern part of the campus, while the parking garage and closest concentration of restaurants along the northern part, it made for a bit of walking. Which is a good thing, because the snacks that were provided was not exactly in the health-food category. One morning there was the matrix of donuts, including chocolate-covered ones covered with mini M&Ms (yes, it was tasty). There was also free beer at all of the poster sessions. Not surprisingly, these were well-attended. Too well, perhaps — the cacophony made it hard to hold a conversation at times, and it was tough to navigate the aisles.

Since I hadn’t been to this meeting since 2000, I’ve missed out on some of the incremental progress in many of the fields, so a lot was brand-new. The hot topics of today seem to include investigations into condensed-matter physics, with experiments using paired Fermions to form Bosons, and looking at the transition between Bose-Einstein Condensates and Cooper-Pair BCS superfluids. And a lot of talks about optical lattices, which now always seem to be far off-resonant traps.

Other than the Thesis Prize session, which included an atomic clock talk, and the optical frequency comb session, there weren’t a lot of talks that held any particular work-related interest for me, so I mostly stuck to a basic strategy of attending sessions that had invited talks; the speakers tend to give a bit of an overview which provides some context for the rest of the talk. That only failed me for last session, where five minutes of prep on cold molecule formation was not going to help me decipher what was going on.

Between my long absence, and that almost all of the atomic physics people I know being in the atomic clock field and not in attendance, I didn’t really know too many people at the meeting. I did re-introduce myself to a few people whom I know I had met, and I also waylaid a fellow blogger (one guess who that was) but, in turn, I was recognized by Arjendu. And I met people giving posters and at the banquet.

I had decided that driving back on Saturday afternoon was probably a Bad Idea™ and had arranged my motel accordingly. I ended up going to a local park on Saturday afternoon, surrounding a lake near the airport, and after clearing out the four geocaches, I spent a while filming wildlife in slow-motion.

Dinner Diffusion, and Difficult Decisions

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The DAMOP conference is coming up, and that reminds me of a conference-related phenomenon related to gathering a group to go off to a meal. This doesn’t manifest itself when the conference provides meals, so it wasn’t an issue last fall; when the meals are being served you can just grab some people that you know and sit, or if you are so inclined, sit with some strangers and strike up a conversation. “What is your research” is a pretty safe way to begin. (etiquette tip: if your conversation partner has a really nice pair of research grants, do not stare at or make comments about them. It’s not polite.)

But when left on your own, you have a bit of a problem. The questions of who is going, where you are going (related to what you will eat) and when to go (less of a problem at lunch) all come into play. Usually the “when” is decided first, and you set a meeting spot. Often you’ll have a nearest-neighbor issue, where you ask someone if they want to grab something to eat, and they tell you they were going to meet up with someone else, and so on, or the reverse of that, where some of the people you’ve asked will later approach others.

People start to arrive at the meeting spot, with some distribution of arrival times probably not actually centered on the agreed-upon meeting time. Because of the aforementioned networking, the earliest ones may not know what size crowd to anticpate. People show up and mention who else is expected to arrive “soon,” and then an interesting thing happens: some people will decide that since departure is not imminent, they can run off and do something that will “only take them a few minutes” (make a phone call, drop off something in their room, change the transmission in their car) and the group size can stay roughly constant as people diffuse in and out. You’re kind of stuck if the group size is below critical mass — not really enough people for a good round of discussion or if you’re all colleagues already and there will be nothing new to talk about, so you keep waiting for that fluctuation that brings more people in than out so you can cross that threshold. (for me this is about 6 people or so). However, if the diffusion is happening with more than critical mass, you can either decide to leave for dinner en masse and abandon the people who had diffused out or are late, or some of you can fission out of the group, leaving the remainder as a nucleation site to gather a new dinner crowd.

Once you’ve sallied forth, the other decision needs to be made: where/what to eat. You can wander aimlessly from restaurant to restaurant, which is common especially early in a conference if nobody knows the town. The problem here is that someone will almost always find fault with the restaurant (price, selection, if there’s a wait involved), forcing you to keep moving on to find other eateries, which come with other sets of objections. My personal preference takes me away from seafood restaurants, and I know one or two people with honest-to-goodness seafood allergies who are good allies to have in voting against places that serve only seafood (this was especially handy when I was in New Orleans, pre-Katrina; some places seemed to have crawfish in every menu item). Generally the objections become muted as you get really hungry and/or tired of walking, and you all finally compromise on a place. The other option is to have a restaurant in mind, but if it’s later in the week and you keep gathering different sets of people, there’s the chance that someone will have just been there and will resist going again. I don’t have a real problem with resampling a restaurant if they have a variety of entrées that I like, but will back off going to the OneTrickPony Café on consecutive nights. Both of these problems get worse as the group gets larger, of course.

One thing I’ve discovered is that many people simply don’t like making the decision. They’re happy to go almost anywhere, but don’t want to be a strong advocate of anything because they don’t really have a conviction about it. If you try and form a consensus, (what do you think about Joe’s Steakhouse?) you’ll get a lot of lukewarm responses or very mild dissent, and the consensus-builder won’t get the warm mandate feeling. However, if you just announce “We’re going to Joe’s Steakhouse!” most people will go along, and be glad that someone else made the call. It’s only if someone adamantly opposes the announcement that you need to rethink things. If you can actually be so organized as to make this decision before gathering people for dinner, all the better.

Bon Appétit!