Meetings
drorzel | May 26, 2010The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space.
You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…
drorzel | May 24, 2010I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so choose only one.
drorzel | May 22, 2010The problem is "What should Chad do/ see in the evenings while he's at DAMOP next week?"
This is the major physics conference in my field, so my days will be pretty well booked up with talks and posters, but there's not much after 6pm other than food and socializing. If there's some not-to-be-missed Houston thing to do (a bar, restaurant, live music venue, etc.) in the evening, I'm open to suggestions.
The boundary values constraining this particular problem are: 1) I'll be staying in the Hyatt Regency downtown, and 2) I will not have a car.
I don't promise I'll be able to follow any and all…
drorzel | May 7, 2010The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll:
You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…
drorzel | March 25, 2010I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland
Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting:
Tuesday
In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…
drorzel | March 15, 2010I'm terrible about taking notes on conference talks, especially when I'm jet-lagged and was sleep deprived even before I got on the plane. I do jot down the occasional paper reference, though, so here are the things I wrote down, and the talks they were associated with. This should give you some vague idea of what the meeting was like on Monday.
From Joel Moore's talk on topological insulators, one of the Hot New Topics in condensed matter, a review in Nature.
From Phillip Treutlein's talk on optomechanics, a recent preprint on coupling atoms to mechanical oscillators.
From Nathaniel Brahms'…
drorzel | March 11, 2010Lots of good suggestions as to Portland activities for my trip to the March Meeting next week. There's a second, related problem that I also need help with: What should I do at the meeting itself?
My usual conference is DAMOP, which I'll be going to in May, so while DAMOP is a participating division, and offers some cool-sounding sessions, it seems a little silly to go to the March Meeting and go to DAMOP talks. The whole point of being at the gigantic meeting is to see different stuff than usual.
The problem is, the scientific program includes forty-odd parallel sessions in each time slot,…
drorzel | March 9, 2010I'm going to be attending the March Meeting of the American Physical Society next week, in Portland, OR. This will be held at the Oregon Convention Center, which is apparently on the opposite side of the river from every hotel in the city.
I have never been to Portland (or, indeed, anything in the Pacific Northwest) before, so I have no idea what there is to do there. I'm sure that at least some of my readers have been there or are from there, though, so here's your chance to clue me in: What essential Portland activities/ eateries/ whatever should I make sure not to miss while I'm there?
I…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I have to go to the Happy Fun Meeting this afternoon, which will be both Happy! and Fun! To keep things lively while I'm there, here's a question that is dorky, but not in the usual way for this blog: What superpower would you most like to have to help you deal with annoying meetings?
The most useful meeting-related superpower to have would be:(survey software)
Bonus essay question: How does the Justice League/ Legion of Doom function when all the attendees at their regular meetings have superpowers? Wouldn't that get out of hand in a hurry?
drorzel | January 21, 2010I've mentioned before that I'm going to be giving an invited talk in the LaserFest session at the APS March Meeting. I finally got around to registering for the meeting, and booking my travel. $1,500 on the college credit card-- whee!
The March Meeting program is one of the more intimidating meeting programs I've ever seen-- there are 42 parallel sessions in every time block. Yikes. I thought DAMOP was getting to be a little too big to navigate, but this is ridiculous...
Speaking of DAMOP, I'll also be going to the 2010 DAMOP Meeting in Houston. I haven't booked my travel for that, yet,…
drorzel | November 3, 2009We're going to host the New York Section meeting of the American Physical Society next spring (joint with the New England Section, which will tax our resources), with the theme of the meeting being applications of nuclear physics. We've divided up the job of finding speakers for the meeting, and I'm supposed to be inviting people who can talk about nuclear energy, either fission or fusion.
This is not exactly in my wheelhouse, but I have a couple of ideas. It occurs to me, though, that I have access to a global audience which presumably includes some people who either could give a good talk…
drorzel | May 24, 2009Friday morning at DAMOP was probably the thinnest part of the program, at least for me. Annoyingly, this was the day that my cold (or possibly allergies-- whatever it was that had my head full of goo) let go, so I was the most awake and alert I managed for the entire conference.
I watched a few talks in the ultracold molecules session, where I heard about the remarkable progress being made in producing large numbers of ultra-cold molecules, generally diatomic alkali molecules (Rb2, KRb, LiCs, etc.). This is an area where relatively standard techniques seem to work surprisingly well. This is…
drorzel | May 21, 2009Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though.
The early-morning session was the toughest call of the meeting: there was the undergraduate research session, a session on ultracold Rydberg atoms, and a session on complicated states in BEC, in widely spaced locations. I ended up skipping the undergraduate session in favor of hearing Chris Foot talk about a rotating optical lattice (which simulates some…
drorzel | May 21, 2009Technically, the meeting started Tuesday, but all that happened was a welcome reception, which I missed due to travel. The real beginning of the meeting was Wednesday morning, with the traditional unscheduled half-hour welcome from local dignitaries. That was followed by the Prize Session, featuring the frighteningly smart Misha Lukin, who was awarded the I.I. Rabi Prize for being really freaking brilliant. The abstract he sent in was kind of vague, but he mostly talked about stuff related to the quantum computing in diamond stuff that I've blogged about before.
I'm fighting a bit of a cold,…
drorzel | May 19, 2009I'm leaving this afternoon for Charlottesville, VA and the 40th annual DAMOP conference. At this meeting, we will once again be confirming the prediction of the bosonic character of interesting talks. Bosons, as you know, are quantum particles that happily occupy the same state as other bosons, and as you can see from the meeting program, the most interesting sessions are bunched together in a few time slots on Wednesday and Thursday. Thus, interesting talks are clearly bosonic in nature.
(The same basic physics has been demonstrated dozens of times previously, at other meetings and…
drorzel | May 16, 2009From Tuesday to Saturday, I will be at the 2009 DAMOP meeting at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. I have been to Charlottesville three times before, and based on that experience, I know these things:
The White Spot is worth a visit if you're a fan of greasy spoon diners.
Getting stuck in an elevator with half a rugby team kind of sucks.
It's damnably difficult to find good bagels in the South.
Getting stuck in an elevator on your way to bed after a wedding reception really sucks.
Yes, that's right, I have been stuck in an elevator in Charlottesville, VA not once, but twice…
drorzel | May 15, 2009Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Do you put your institution's logo in your talks and on your posters at conferences? If you put a logo in your talk, do you put the logo on every slide or just on the title slide? Is institutional logo-ing more common on some continents than on others?
Logos on slides are one of those things that in principle, ought to be annoying. In practice, I'm usually just grateful that they're not using one of the godawful default slide layouts that come in…
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.
drorzel | March 10, 2009The Gordon Research Conferences are a great program, if you're in a field that offers them. These are mostly in New England in the summer, and involve a lot more down time than most professional conferences, to allow for more informal interaction between attendees. At past Gordon conferences, I've played soccer with a Nobel laureate, and basketball with a number of Ivy League faculty.
I got an email announcement of the 2009 Atomic Physics Gordon Conference, to be held at the Tilton School in Tilton, NH June 28-July 3. This year's meeting is chaired by Tiku Majumder at Williams, and he's put…
drorzel | March 5, 2009I'm looking travel arrangements for this year's DAMOP meeting in Charlottesville, VA in May, and, boy, do the options suck.
Flying into Charlottesville itself involves at least one stop, and undoubtedly one of those ridiculous little prop planes that require me to spend the whole flight in something close to a fetal position. Driving would take better than eight hours, according to Google, which isn't something I'm fired up to do (it's better than a prop plane, though, and wouldn't take all that much longer once you figure in time sitting in airports).
Probably the best option is to fly into…