Bye, everyone, it's been fun! Thanks for reading the blog! I think maybe I got more out of this conference because I knew I had to write something interesting down... made me pay more attention, be more thoughtful about what I saw. Try it sometime!
Hope you enjoy your remaining time in SF! If you want to do something super touristy, go to Ghiradelli Square and get free chocolate when you walk into the store. And then walk out and walk in again. And again. And again...
This terms conference went well! Its finally over. I am sure you all have gotten enough hand shakes and network contacts and new thoughts and perspectives on how to approach your own work! I know I have, and I hope to see everyone again in a year, or sooner. I think highlights for me were:
Poster Session talks about science
Meeting people in between the sessions over coffee to discuss the most provocative talk of the last session
Symposium X.
Mostly I liked everything about the conference that forced me to think about or approach a problem from a new and different angle. Conferences rock! and Spring MRS is a golden standard in my book.
Thanks for checking out the blog! Peace!
I've got a backlog of photos here, might as well post them on this quiet Friday @ MRS...
Berkeley folks at the Kohn promoting his Power of the Sun video session!
Nearly empty Moscone Center, lunchtime on Friday....
Famous faces!
Today is the last day of Spring MRS. While the population of the conference has started to dwindle, there are still many who are trying to fuflill their fix of talks for the next quarter (before the next conference!). Some symposium have been combined, so if you don't quite see the talks you want in your "goto" symposium, look at some of the others that may have some overlap. You will find yourself pleasantly surprised. But in any case, Friday is a good day for exploration! Go see symposia you know nothing about! Also go explore the city!
For those of you that made it to the Symposium X talks on Wednesday by Richard Le Sar and Scott Lacy, you may be interested in seeing this New York Times article on the environmental consequences of conventional stoves in developing countries.
I've got an idea about how we could improve the MRS conferences: Day passes. There are a lot of attendees that are local and only want to go for one section of a symposium (half a day) or one or two talks. I think people right now resort to sneaking in to the MRS in order to see one research group that really pertains to what they're doing. Which is why we had to have that poor guard standing in the lobby all the time checking badges.
I think in order to address this problem, MRS should issue day passes-- charge maybe a little bit more than 1/5 of the full week price, so that if you wanted to go for 3 days you might as well get the season pass-- and maybe then people wouldn't have to sneak around in order to learn. I realize that the logistics of this might be a little difficult to figure out-- you've got to balance fairness to people from out of town, and keep the community feel of the meeting. But hey, just throwing it out there. So that students whose advisers won't pay for them to go to the full meeting can come, too!
Thought of this because my labmate N. Adelstein was reading the story from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! about going to a gravity conference a day late and describing to the cab driver what the scientists would have looked like (guys wandering around not paying attention to much and saying things like G-mu-nu! G-mu-nu!). How would you blend in at an MRS conference...? Look uncomfortable dressed in nice clothes, and get excited about anything with the word nano...?
So the slow and eventual tragic wrap up of MRS must be just around the corner, because I just saw they have posted the winners for the Science as Art competition. If you didn't vote, or didn't submit one this year, there is always the Fall or even next Spring! I don't always agree with the winners, but Art is a tough thing to judge. And since everyone views things differently, they (wisely) choose multiple winners. I think they are all kind of cool. My favorite one is the picture of the nitric acid etch of a felines tooth showing the ceramic structures!
I love MRS for bringing the materials community together!!! It makes me remember that the science world isn't as big as it seems... What brought this on? I ran into my old adviser today! Did an internship at NREL a couple of summers ago through the SULI program (it was one of the best summers of my life; you should check it out if you've got a free summer!) working with transparent conducting oxides. Xiaonan Li, my adviser that summer, gave a talk at Symposium M today! I dropped in to see her speak, and said hello to her and all of her NREL colleages, who actually remembered me!! Good times, good memories.
Talking to her made me think about the interface between basic research and industry. Xiaonan's work at NREL is really at the cusp of these areas-- you can get really high efficiency thin film solar cells that are homogeneous and well controlled when they're only 2 or 3 square centimeters in area! But when you try and scale that up to 6x6 inch panels or larger... you run into problems. So you must have people working on the scale up process. That made me wonder about where these people belong?? Are they best suited to national labs, or should they be more associated with start-ups and industry?? Because I've observed in my limited time working at LBL that there are negative views about research that has a little too much to do with industry-- and people politicking and trying to push them out to make room for more basic science. Guys, your awesome finding isn't going to help anyone unless you can scale it up for mass production! And you have to respect the people working on that!! Science for the sake of science is great, and often beautiful and satisfying... but you also want to be able to apply it to help the world, right?