AAS Meeting - Entry 1
Published on Jan 7, 2007 at 3:24 pm.
4 Comments.
Filed under conference blogging.
Well, I am in Seattle! The meeting is underway. We have things scheduled all day, every day from early morning to late night. I really love these meetings, learning new things, seeing new stuff, talking with colleagues, etc. However, I do NOT like the fact that there is overload going on. We have about a dozen sessions going on at once. You pick the talks that you want to hear, and you can’t hear them all. There is a short break for lunch, but the food places are so crowded that I decided to bypass lunch and get online. I’ve been to several interesting talks so far, and I’ll be posting summaries of some things later. I’m just giving my first impressions of the meeting here.
In typical meeting fashion, I showed up to register. But, the folks at the convention center said that I couldn’t enter the conference area until I had my conference badge. Where do you get the conference badge? At the registrtion desk inside the conference area. Hmm. Well, at a specified time, they did let non badged people in to register. We went to a computer, entered our information, and then walked across to the registration desk to pick up our badge, receipt, and conference packet. Well, with everyone suddenly being allowed in at once, we all sent jobs to the printers at once, and so several dozen of us stood around waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Finally, we did it again. Oh, and this was all after walking eight blocks in the cold rain to get here (it’s Seattle). Then they gave us a two books, about an inch think each, full on conference proceedings. Yeah, right. Like anyone could take all that in. Oh, and after walking eight blocks in the cold rain, they gave us all an umbrella. Hmm.
But, hey. It is fun. Just before the break, there was a very good talk about neutron stars and magnetars (unusually magnetic neutron stars). I’ll say more on that later. Also, I heard a very nice talk on things from teh Sardust mission to Comet Wild 2. It was the one that returned samples to Earth. As I had heard in earlier reports, some of the samples show evidence that they formed in high heat environments. In fact, some material seems to have only been able to have been formed within 13 solar radii of the young Sun!!!! This material then was blasted out into the outermost parts of the Solar System, where it combined with ices to form comets. Perhaps the protosolar wind did that? At any rate, this shows that the early solar system underwent quite a bit of mixing — far more than had first been suspected.
Not all of the information is presented in talks. More common are poster sessions. For those in disciplines where that is less common, when you submit your paper, you select either oral or poster. The oral talk is limited to five minutes. Really, if you have a lot to talk about, five minutes doesn’t do it. But, if you pick a poster session, then they group you with other people presenting in similar areas, and you then are allowed a certain space. You can then hang things in that space or print out a poster. You can have images, text, etc. You can have a lot more text than would fit in talks, and best of all, people can stand there and read whay you’ve got, look at graphs and data, and take it in at their leisure. Really, a lot more information can be transmitted this way. And, often the presenter stays near their poster, so you can ask them questions if you want, and find out FAR more than if they’d given a talk. I think that I really like the poster sessions best. But, now I’m back to learning more stuff.
More blogging later!
Astroprof
Brian on January 7, 2007 at 5:07 pm: 1
Have fun! Despite working (part time) for a company IN Seattle I’ve not been to Seattle for years and years. I miss the Northwest.
Astroprof on January 8, 2007 at 1:01 am: 2
It is really beautiful country up here! I’ve never been here before, and I love it.
Brian on January 8, 2007 at 7:35 am: 3
My son had lived his whole life in Texas. We flew into Portland and his comment as we drove out of the city was “look at all those trees” …
Astroprof’s Page » Another semester starting. on January 16, 2007 at 9:11 pm: 4
[…] Well, another semester is now underway. Today was the first day of class for the Spring semester here. Some of my friends, like Profgrrrrl, have apparently already gotten going. For some reason, though, here in Texas we are a bit later getting started. Well, that’s fine with me, because it gave me the chance to go to the American Astronomical Society Meeting last week. That was way more interesting, enlightening, and useful than the stupid and pointless faculty meetings that the rest of my colleagues here at my college had to go to last week. I learned far more that I can use to better my teaching going to the conference than I ever would have here. And it was more fun, too! Now, if only it hadn’t rained the whole time that I was there … […]