MRS Meetings Blog

Goodbye, Chongqing

The conference wrapped up yesterday, and I thought I'd post a few final remarks before leaving Chongqing.

First, I want to mention how impressed I was by the Chinese researchers, especially the students, who had to give their presentations in English.  Presenting your work at an international conference can be nerve-wracking at the best of times, but to do it in a very foreign language is something else all together. 

Also, I apologize for any strange formatting or errors in these blog posts, but I've been working blind this week.  Though I can access the typepad site, the blog itself is behind the Great Firewall and blocked from view in China.  That explains why no one stopped me to say 'hi' in the convention center. 

Many thanks to the conference organizers for their heroic efforts in putting this meeting together, and thanks to all the attendees who made it a great scientific event.  I had a great time and certainly hope this isn't my last trip to China.

For now, zai jian!

Cultural differences

There are a few things I’ve noticed at this conference that I think must be chalked up to cultural differences. One is the aggravating presence of cell phones in the meeting rooms, a topic I’ve griped about before on this blog. They are a problem at any conference, but here it is an issue of a whole different scale. During a given 15 minute talk as many as ten cell phone rings, chirps and beeps may interrupt the speaker. People here favor loud, peppy ring tones and sometimes a phone will get through a couple of ring cycles before the owner gets around to turning it off. One speaker was even interrupted three times during his talk by his own phone! It doesn’t seem to bother people much (except me) although one esteemed professor had to ask that a particularly loud, recurring ring be turned off after the second interruption.

Another annoyance is the shockingly large number of people who fail to appear for their own talks. Some sessions are almost comical as the chairperson runs down the list of scheduled speakers, trying to find someone, anyone, to give a presentation. There has been much speculation about the reason for it, but whatever the cause it must ultimately be a cultural difference as I haven’t come across the phenomenon anywhere else. (To be fair, a couple of the no-shows in sessions I attended were from the US, and one from South Africa.)

On a positive note, there is a much better gender ratio here than at the US meetings. Science appears to be a more popular career choice for young Chinese women than it is for Americans and if I had to guess I'd say that out of the Chinese students here, almost half are female. People say that China is the future, and in this case I certainly hope they are correct.

View from the river

After two long days of meetings and posters, conference attendees went out for a relaxing boat cruise on the river Tuesday evening.  Shown in the photo are a group of student volunteers from Chongqing who've been helping organize the event. The cruise included yet another luscious spread of food, the kind of thing participants are getting used to after the incredible lunch buffets offered each day.

A river cruise is really the only way to get a sense of scale for Chongqing, as the city extends along the banks of the Yangtze and the Jianling Rivers for several miles of skyscrapers, elevated roadways, and buildings that seemed to be piled on top of each other in a mad jumble.  At night many of the buildings are illuminated with brightly colored, flashing lights, and massive digital billboards light up with Chinese characters several stories tall. 

The conference kicked off this evening with registration and a welcome reception featuring a buffet and opening remarks from the organizers.  This is the first time the MRS has held a joint meeting in a foreign country and from talking to those involved it sounds like the organization has been no small feat.  Roughly 70% of the speakers are from China and the rest hail from all over the world.  Many are from the US, but glancing through the program I also see speakers from South Africa, Malaysia, India, France, UK, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Mexico, Spain and Japan.  Judging from the reception, the majority of the attendees are Chinese and most appear to be students, though that may just be the universal ability of free food to conjure up grad students. 

Earlier in the day I had a fantastic time wandering around Chongqing, getting completely lost in bustling markets and winding alleyways.  True to what I’d been led to believe, the food from street vendors is awesome and spicy.  I’ve included a photo of me with a bit of the city in the background, so if you recognize me at the conference be sure to say hello.

Anticipating Chongqing meeting

Next week China hosts the first joint MRS/China-MRS meeting in Chongqing and I'll be there blogging it and providing coverage for the MRS Meeting Scene.  I'm a graduate student in the Materials department at UC Santa Barbara, and this is my second appearance on the MRS blog.  My first run was during the Spring meeting last March and I'm happy to be back as a guest blogger.

Located next to Sichuan province in central China, Chongqing is quite close to the site of the devastating earthquake of May 11th.  Shortly after the quake the conference organizers announced that the meeting would continue as planned and that Chongqing was relatively unaffected by the disaster.  Even so, the proximity of this tragedy will surely be apparent at the conference and I imagine that many participants will be moved to donate money or assistance to the relief efforts.  For those interested, the conference website has a page on earthquake relief opportunities recommending agencies for donation.

how to be a MRS Meeting Scene reporter

Going to an MRS conference as a reporter is a little different than going as a researcher. You have to attend a wider variety of symposia, some on which you might not know anything about (read anything I wrote about quantum electrodynamics for an example of this), and you have to do it all pretty fast. Here is Strasbourg we had the benefit of being a day and 6 hours ahead of when the Meeting Scene updates would be released, so there was a little bit of breathing room. However, planning is essential to having a reasonable day. It is entirely worth your while to sit down the day before and plan out a schedule of what seems to be the best talks. These tend to be the invited talks, but sometimes if you can catch the organizers they'll give you a heads up to other interesting talks. I also found it very easy to set up Word files ahead of time that had the symposium, time, speaker, title and abstract so all I had to do was sit and write afterwards (E-MRS distributed all the abstracts on a usb key so this was a snap). If possible, I liked to schedule the talk I would attend with at least a half hour so that I could get most of the write up done as soon as I walked out. This isn't always possible, but it helps to not get backlogged. For me personally, snapping photos was one of the more awkward activities. My camera was not great enough to get good shots during a talk so I would have to stalk them afterwards either during coffee breaks or poster sessions. You can get by without having a laptop, but it would make the process much slower and a little more difficult. Lastly, get a notebook you like. My personal fave is the unruled, softcover, Moleskine
; which, coincidentally, is the perfect size--I started with a fresh one and have one page left.
Another observation I would offer to presenters is that many of the talks that are highlighted are picked nearly at random. Don't be upset if your talk was not highlighted. There were 3 of us covering 17 symposia and it is impossible to sit down through an entire session to pick the best talks without missing many others. I suppose there could be a good argument for capturing one symposium really well, but I think the variety method produces the most interesting results. Actually, probably the thing to do is to lure a graduate student who is spending a lot time in one symposium to pick one or two talks to write up every day.

I think I am beginning to wander, so I'll wrap it up here. I had a great week and I hope you enjoyed reading.

strasbourg metro catch 22

a quick note if you ever find yourself in Strasbourg:

when the weather is nice there is no particular reason to take the metro;
when it rains, the metro stops running

Américains

there is this joke I’ve heard a couple times here that goes like this:
What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? An American.

I know that everyone can speak english here and I don’t hesitate to speak to people when I need something. However, if I’m at a party or event like the MRS social gathering I sometimes feel bad about imposing english on people that would otherwise be speaking a different language. Luckily, last night in I overheard these people:

speaking Engish quite comfortably and befriended them. It turns out that it was a Canadian, an American, and an Englishman (In that order from left to right: Kevin, Heather, and Martin; that's me on the right). So, the party turned out to be pretty fun. There was a band singing American songs reworded in French; a magician; and some kind of blue drink whose composition remains a mystery.

skutterudites

I just got out of the thermoelectric symposium that was chaired by Ichiro Terasaki, who discovered thermoelectric oxides, and the invited speaker was David Singh from Oak Ridge. The session was very well attended, especially by the invited speakers from the past couple days; by happenstance one of the talks from the session was cancelled and the discussion was allowed to spillover into that time slot. The atmosphere after the talk was more akin to a (super) group meeting than a conference and there were some genuinely curious and penetrating questions. My favorite bit of info was the skutterdite crystal structure. It looks like this:

it is usually found as an n-type semiconductor and it can be further tricked out with a variety of rare earth dopants. This structure was not the focus of the talk, nor was it the best possible structure for thermoelectrics, but aesthetically, it’s a very pleasing structure.

ack!

computer troubles abounded today, especially concerning email and image upload. In the first place, the wireless internet was entirely switched off this morning and then, when it was turned on, was so swamped as to be utterly unusuable. That was okay, though, as there are several computer work stations scattered about the conference. However, at these workstations the keyboard looks like this:

It's almost the same, but not quite. Evidently, I rarely look at the keyboard when I type because I ended up attempting to go to "zzz;,qil;u,ich;edu" instead of "www.mail.umich.edu" several times. By the time I figured out what was going on I had to go to the first session of the day.

Also, i think the connection was swamped most of the day as I had a very hard time uploading anything. It's now about 5:30 here and the connection is finally usable for uploading things, such as the photo of the screwy keyboard that was essential for this post.