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7/10 |
2006/8/14-16 [Health/Disease/AIDS] UID:43993 Activity:nil 70%like:43992 |
8/14 How do big scientific conferences work? The media often mentions conferences to talk about AIDS / famine / gravity waves / whatever that involve hundreds or even thousands of scientists. How does someone get a chance to say anything? \_ Don't know how it is in other fields, but at the American Physical Society march meeting, which happens every year, there are roughly 40 parallel sessions 8 hours a day, for five days, with most talks limited to 10 minutes with two minutes for questions. There are also pretty huge poster sessions. Everyone, and I mean *everyone* gets a chance to say something. It's getting someone to listen that's the trick. But it's not quite as crazy as it sounds. The aps has software on their website that lets you hunt for talks of interest and generate a schedule for you for the week, although missing a talk because there's another interesting one at the same time is inevitable. Conferences of this scale generally suck, as far as talks go, and exist mostly for networking and informal discussions after the talks. \_ Sounds similar to my experience at American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) \- The programs for some of these are +1cm thick. Yes, "massive parallization". |
7/10 |
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