Windowshopping at Science Conferences
Most Alaskans have never been to a science conference and wouldn't dream of going to one. Yet these meetings are a terrific source of information on what's new in research, and often have something interesting and understandable for the public.
This state hosts many meetings of scientific groups every year, from anthropology associations to zoological societies. They're a necessary part of a scientist's career, but they're accessible to non-scientists as well.
Conventions of scientists aren't like the annual gatherings of other organizations. Science meetings are mostly continuous seminars, a chance for people working in fast-changing and specialized research fields to hear what their colleagues elsewhere are doing. People are there to learn and to inform.
The procedure is called "presenting papers," but the actual paper may be little more than an outline. The rest is in the presenter's head, and perhaps on some illustrative slides. Most of the work is very new, not yet published in the professional journals, and is usually presented in fifteen- or twenty-minute lectures.
And, yes, most of it is utterly beyond the comprehension of someone who is not a specialist. That's the hazard of attending one of these banquets of information--some of the offerings can be indigestible.
Yet there are ways to sample the presentations without running the risk of being trapped in a hard chair, listening to a lecturer with a thick accent, a thin collection of slides, and a passion for bar graphs labeled in very tiny type.
Not every presentation is a lecture. Some are posters, and poster presentations offer a truly painless way for amateurs to sample the professional offerings
Such posters aren't the simple, brightly colored Uncle-Sam-Wants-You things associated with advertising. Although most scientists would balk at the comparison, they're more akin to the snapshot and word-block collages found in grammar school halls that describe how a particular class sees Valentine's Day or what the pupils did on vacation.
With a few paragraphs and a few illustrations, a poster presentation conveys the substance of a research project just as a more formal lecture does. But in a poster session, you can spend as much or as little time as you like avoiding or absorbing the information offered. You can wander past a dozen posters before stopping to read any one. You can eavesdrop on debates about a poster's content that are often more freewheeling and candid than anything said in the lecture sessions. And, best of all, you can ask questions of the presenting scientist without feeling foolish.
"Oh, I love stupid questions." This from Zygmunt Kowalik, a faculty member of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Marine Science, who presented a poster at a recent national meeting that I attended (and who knew the level of question he'd likely get from me). "They're a break from the difficult ones. When you speak in the other sessions, your colleagues only have a few minutes to give you a hard time. With a poster, you're trapped for a few hours, and they can keep after you. It's tiring." Despite his encouragement, I couldn't think of anything to ask Kowalik. His work, on buoyancy-driven unstable coastal currents, was too heavily mathematical for me.
Most of the presentations in his session on current modeling had the same emphasis on equations, which told me that I'd better not attend the lecture sessions covering that topic. That's another advantage of the poster sessions; they can give you an idea of whether the formal talks on related subjects are within your scope.
By browsing through the posters first, I had a great time at that national meeting, learning all manner of things from the simply entertaining (looks like Albert Einstein's wife did his math) to the potentially useful (marine viruses may be a natural control agent for toxic phytoplankton blooms, possibly including those causing paralytic shellfish poisoning). If you read this column often, you'll soon be seeing some of what I learned--such as one way to study an invisible animal.
But don't wait for me to report--go to science meetings on your own. Some good ones are coming, like the International Conference on the Role of the Polar Regions in Global Climate Change, to be held June 11-15 in Fairbanks. I hope to be there--at least at the poster sessions.
