March Appearances

I've been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I'll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here:

1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I'll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff:

"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science"

Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are critically important in an era of funding cuts and global crises that demand scientific solutions. In this talk I'll offer examples and advice on the use of social media for science communication, drawn from more than a dozen years of communicating science online.

(This is basically the same talk I gave at Vanderbilt last year, updated a little. I tend to re-use titles a zillion times...)

2) A couple of weeks after that, on Wednesday the 16th, I'll be speaking at the APS March Meeting, reporting on last summer's workshop for SF writers:

Abstract: P47.00003 : The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

In July 2015, we held a workshop for 17 science fiction writers working in a variety of media at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. "The Schrödinger Sessions," funded by an outreach grant from APS, provided a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics and technology, including lectures from JQI scientists and tours of JQI labs. The goal was to better inform and inspire stories making use of quantum physics, as a means of outreach to inspire a broad audience of future scientists. We will report on the contents of the workshop, reactions from the attendees and presenters, and future plans.

This is a contributed talk, so it'll be super short, but it's a good excuse to go to the March Meeting, which was a good time the only other time I went. The program is massively intimidating, but I'm sure there'll be tons of good stuff. If you have suggestions, even if they're just "Hey, I'm going, too, we should get a beer!" you know where to find me.

Also, stay tuned for an announcement regarding our "future plans" (hint: we're going to do another workshop...).

And here, I'll send you on your way with some thematically appropriate music: