conferences
drorzel | September 2, 2014I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash.
Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…
drorzel | August 28, 2014The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.
So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the…
drorzel | August 27, 2014Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow...
I'm at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending writers have referred to online as boot camp, though in an affectionate way. The idea is to provide a short crash course on cool quantum physics, so as to give writers a bit more background in subjects they might need to cover.
The first talk was from Rainer Kaltenbaek (whose name I…
drorzel | July 19, 2014Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian' has become a commonplace descriptor in SF reviews, but what do we mean by it? What are the characteristics we associate with Iain M Banks' work? How far has his influence travelled? Who is writing Banksian SF today?/>
Chad Orzel (M), Michael Cobley, Jaine Fenn, Paul Kincaid, Ruth O'Reilly
We…
pharyngula | June 23, 2014We've heard so much about bad behavior at conferences, and how sexist attitudes can suppress the contributions of women. And it doesn't seem to matter what the conference is about: tech, gaming, atheism, skepticism, philosophy, you name it. Now Prof-Like Substance describes the scene at evolutionary biology conferences, explaining how many women are hesitant to participate in important events because of the predatory behavior of some men. And she gives a little advice.
So dudes, pull this apart a little bit. First off, the frequency with which inappropriate advances occur is causing some…
drorzel | May 13, 2014I've been setting up schedules with my summer research students lately, and the main constraint we're facing with that is that I'm going to spend most of August in Europe. Part of this is pure vacation-- Kate and I are going to the UK for a couple of weeks. Part of it is the World Science Fiction Convention in London, in the middle of that trip, where both Kate and I expect to be on programming (though there aren't any set items this far out). And the last bit has just been officially announced: I'm speaking at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers organized by Sabine Hossenfelder from…
drorzel | April 8, 2014We took a week off last week because Rhett was away on a Secret Mission, but we're back and better than ever this week. More uncertain! More dotty! Or something!
Topics for this week include oblique references to Rhett's mission, some discussion of the Geocentric Janeway debacle, good and bad places to have a conference, why you shouldn't eat conference center food, why more physicists aren't on Twitter, and blogger gatherings.
Here's a link to the Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis story I alluded to. It's from 2007, after the blogging dinosaurs but before the blogging armored sloths.
pharyngula | March 24, 2014
The featured speaker at this year's National Science Teacher Association conference in Boston is…Mayim Bialik.
The lucky ones among you are saying right now, "who?". Others may know her from her television work, but maybe don't know the full story behind her 'science' activism.
She's an actor who plays Sheldon's girlfriend on Big Bang Theory. Right there, as far as I'm concerned, we have a major strike against her: I detest that show. It's the equivalent of a minstrel show for scientists, where scientists are portrayed as gross caricatures of the real thing — socially inept, egotistical…
drorzel | October 21, 2013I was pleasantly surprised at how well the What does Science Online Want to Be? post was received-- I kind of expected that to cause more anger than it did. It did prompt a lot of discussion, most of it during the dinner hour in Chateau Steelypips, so it was really hard for me to keep up. Given the volume of stuff and my inability to respond promptly, I thought I'd try to round up a few things here:
1) Kelly Hills's post on cons vs. conferences is very good. This is something I said myself after Science Online this past year-- it felt very much like a SF convention. In ways both good and bad…
drorzel | October 20, 2013The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic's harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the "What is to be done now?" phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I've also seen the edges of more ephemeral discussions on Twitter. Much of this has focused on formal organizational changes, stripping Bora of power and titles and banning him from the conference. These are entirely appropriate, though partly moot given that he's resigned from both Scientific American and…
drorzel | October 10, 2013On Monday afternoon, I walked into the TED offices in lower Manhattan just as Zak Ebrahim was starting his practice talk, a powerful story about being raised by a father who subscribed to an extreme form of Islam and eventually assassinated a rabbi and took part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And I said "What the hell am I doing here?" My science-is-awesome shtick seemed pretty weak tea compared to that.
I managed to get past that pretty quickly, without anyone noticing, but the first hour or so I was there was another Impostor Syndrome: Activate! moment. It was a pretty amazing…
drorzel | October 2, 2013We had a faculty meeting yesterday, at which one colleague suggested that in addition to our "Writing Across the Curriculum" requirement, we should have a "Speaking Across the Curriculum" requirement to teach students oral presentation skills. This provoked a bit of tittering about the possible acronym, but it's not an obviously awful idea. The basic problem is the same as with the WAC requirement: there isn't actually all that much that really crosses the curriculum. Presentation standards and styles are dramatically different between disciplines, whether you're talking about oral or written…
drorzel | September 26, 2013As I alluded to a while back, I've been accepted to speak at TED@NYC, which serves as a "talent search" for TED-- the top talks from the event a week from Monday in The City will get a spot talking at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver. I've got six minutes to wow them with a story about quantum physics and crossword puzzles.
I submitted my original application in response to a blog post back in July, more or less as a lark. I didn't notice at that time that the image they had with that post was a talk at a previous talent search event by John McWhorter-- I only spotted that this week, when…
drorzel | September 20, 2013The JCC day care is closed today for one of the fall cluster of Jewish holidays, which means I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift so I can teach my class. Thus, this is more of a tab clearance sort of exercise than a thoughtful examination of the underlying issues. But having spent a bunch of time in the recent past on gender gaps of various sorts, these are some recent links that struck me as interesting enough to pass along.
-- Via Crooked Timber, Anca Gheaus offers cheers for being the "token" woman at academic conferences. This is mostly…
drorzel | July 19, 2013The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both, though the Tenure She Wrote poster seems to be in a field whose conferences run on a different model than that used for most meetings I go to.
The Physics Focus post was particularly interesting to me, though, because I spent last weekend as the portable conference day-care while Kate…
drorzel | June 25, 2013Kate had to leave at 7am this morning to go to a "retreat" for her office, so I took the kids to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. That got us all out the door at the same time, avoiding the freakout from The Pip if he saw Mommy leave without him. Kate will be late getting home tonight, as well, so I've got dinner with the kids as well, and SteelyKid has already declared that she wants to go to the Irish pub downtown for sweet potato fries and fish & chips.
I mention this not because I want to fill the blog with trivial details of my personal life-- that's what Twitter is for-- but because it…
drorzel | June 11, 2013As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said "I bet this guy hasn't given a lot of these before." What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never said "Um."
To the dismay of many students entering science majors, public speaking is a very significant part of being a professional scientist. Scientists are expected to give talks of a variety of different lengths-- 10-15 minute "contributed" talks at big meetings, 25-30 minute "invited" conference talks, 45-60 minute…
drorzel | May 31, 2013I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking of proposing a Science Online program item about the professionalization of blogging, throwing in a link to post from a couple months ago. That included a link to this SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel
And that was re-tweeted by Chris Chabris, kicking off a gigantic conversation about the whole idea of scientists communicating directly with the public (most of which took place after I went to bed last night, so I only saw it in my Twitter…
pharyngula | March 31, 2013I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here's what I've been up to.
On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on "Moving Atheism Beyond Science". I argued that modern atheism is built on the twin pillars of anti-religion and science, and not that there's anything wrong with either of those, but that we have to have a wider foundation. In particular, I defied the recent trend to broaden science to encompass morality — I see that more as a conservative…
drorzel | February 11, 2013Last Friday, when I didn't have any time to blog, Zen Faulkes wrote an interesting wrap-up post on Science Online 2013 in which he declared he won't be back. Not because it was a bad time, but because other people would benefit from it more, and his not going frees up a spot for somebody else.
I recognize a lot of his reaction, though there were a couple of things that I got out of it that I think made it worthwhile, beyond just the socialization. On the whole, though, it wasn't really a transformative experience for me. I like to think, though, that I was able to provide a few things that…