Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general. Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers: walk into a big-city convention center; find Session 425B which is in a narrow, fluorescent-lit room with sliding walls, little chairs in rows, a podium, and a screen; sit down; the speaker opens the power point; the room darkens; a heavy fogbank of boredom moves over your brain; you pass out cold and fall off your chair – it’s professionally embarassing.
I like the smaller meetings, maybe 100 astronomers all together in an academic auditorium, nice lighting, comfortable movie-house chairs, and by the third day, everyone has de facto assigned seating. Small meetings are personal. Anyway, Christie asked readers to share experiences so I am. In the first place, power-points can be entertainment: in the meeting I just came back from, one projector went black in the middle of a talk on advanced technologies. Oh, the irony.
Which reminds me of another meeting — during a talk on a survey called APOGEE — at which the projector went out. Someone from the audience told the speaker to continue, just use the blackboard; and other parts of the audience began asking the speaker questions, so the speaker answered; and the talk proceeded via conversation and low tech. Meanwhile still other parts of the audience, PhD astronomers, scurried around trying to swap out projectors, crawled on the floor trying to connect cables; and one astronomer with a Blackberry found the projector’s help page and announced that you have to clean the filter or it’ll keep dying. Finally the projector came on but the image on the screen was tiny, barely big enough to read; it said APOGEE: The Big Picture. The audience burst into laughter.
I digress. The meeting I just went to was at the Space Telescope Science Institute and was about the new crop of enormous surveys of the sky, triggered by new technologies and the outrageous usefulness of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Two of these new surveys – the $463 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the $1.6 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) — were recommended by the whole astronomical community, in the person of the National Academy of Sciences, as its highest priorities. A dozen other surveys either have been partly funded (as is LSST), or are being planned (as is WFIRST), or are, as they say, aspirational. All funding for all surveys is either private (foundations and very rich people) or public (NASA for space surveys; NSF for surveys from the ground) and in any case, isn’t infinite. So the point of the meeting was, how to beat a closed system.
First, all parties applying for finite funding presented their best and most competitive cases. Second, after competing, they cooperated. They needed to decide how to get the most science out of the money, the biggest bang out of the buck. Getting the most science implied figuring out how to follow up the surveys. Most of the surveys would be done with cameras — pictures of wide swaths of sky which can then be broken up into images of discrete objects. Images are useful, but the best science needs spectra. The spectrum of a galaxy shows its inner workings, its physics: what elements it’s made of, how fast it’s rotating, how hot it is, and how old it is. Images and spectra together tell you everything about an object that’s possible to know. So the astronomers’ problem was how to get spectra on these survey’s million gazillion images.
They discussed every possible ramification and aspect. Could you use fancy spectrographs that could take hundreds of spectra at once but at lowish resolution? Or spectrographs that did a few at a time at high resolution? And in either case, how to fund these multi-million dollar spectrographs? And when you compare the number of images out of LSST with the number of spectra from the fanciest spectrograph, how depressed do you get? And in general, what to do about maxing out on the data, given that LSST will get roughly the same amount of data that the Sloan got in 10 years, but every single night?
And always, always money. The people from both NASA and NSF who actually give out the money gave talks and then stayed around. An astronomer working on LSST said that start-up by the fall of 2013 was “not out of the realm of possibility.” The NSF guy interrupted from the audience: “It may snow tomorrow as well.” The day before had been 87 degrees.
They give talks, they interrupt, they ask questions, they answer, they argue. Between 9:00 and 6:00, they have two coffee breaks and a lunch, and during every minute they keep talking. There are many more men than women, and many more young women than older women. They’re speaking English with every possible accent; both the NSF and NASA representatives had British accents. Surprisingly few of these talkers are gas-bags and when one does start up, the rest of them glaze over, fool with their laptops, and suffer in silence. By 4:00, in spite of finger-numbing air conditioning, the room smells a little ripe, not bad, just excessively human. Afterward they go out to dinner and talk.
I don’t think they solved the problem. But I think they’re going to. The reason they will, Christie, is in the set-up of that meeting. Get a bunch of smart, highly educated, intensely interested people together; ask them a question whose answer will open the glories of the universe; stick them in a room for the better part of a week; give them insufficient funds at the best of times and then when times are bad, cut the insufficiency; then 1) they get creative; and 2) they get organized, aligned, and aimed. Competitive cooperation always wins.
Credits: old-time projector – Berthold Werner; simulation of a single LSST image – Andy Connolly and the LSST Simulation Group
I remember conferences like those, albeit in a totally different sphere. And yes, when ‘smart’ and ‘intense interest’ came together, you only had to chuck in that seed question and the process of crystallisation would kick in without anybody even realising.
As always, you have brought the human factor into science. Super post!
I’m happy you liked it, Tim. In return, I like your seed crystal metaphor a LOT.
Great insights. Sounds like what Seth Godin had in mind when he wrote, “Working side by side doing something that matters under adverse conditions… that’s what we need.” This meeting is proof that this approach works.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/intentionally-building-communities.html
Well shoot, somebody beat me to the idea? By two years? Who is this Seth Godin person anyway?
@ Ann – Seth Godin started Squidoo and has written 12 books. He is a predominant figure in starting web 2.0. I think he is a pedantic and arrogant, but that’s just me :).
Well thank you, Christine. I knew I’d heard his name. I appreciate you educating the pre-internet generation (me) — somebody has to do it. I’ll take your opinion on faith, though I do like what Christie said he said.