My Year of Meets

[Note: the title is a subtle reference to the book "My Year of Meats" by Ruth Ozeki, but not for any particular reason, though I did like the book.]

Somehow I ended up going to a lot of meetings again this year. What is "a lot"? This year, for me, "a lot" = 6. There might be some years in which 6 is a good number and other years in which 6 is excessive, so the concept of "a lot" is flexible.

I do not regret going to any of the 6 -- each one was interesting in its own way, and very useful for discussions with colleagues and prospective colleagues/postdocs/students. Some of the 6 meetings were large, some were small, one was less than 500 miles from my home, the others were more than 500 miles from my home.

As I was musing about my Year of Meet(ing)s, I decided to try to think of the Most Strange meeting-related experience that I had in 2013. It will not surprise any regular reader of this blog when I say that my Most Strange meeting-related experiences (MRE) involved gender-directed weirdness.

There were several contenders for Most Strange MRE.

There was the incident when a colleague I have seldom met in person (although we have corresponded extensively by e-mail for years and written several papers together) came up to me and gave me a startlingly emphatic and prolonged hug in the presence of his wife (who walked away). ick.

There was the potential postdoc who had corresponded with me and who had supposedly done extensive investigating of a large project I am directing and that he wanted to join but who somehow thought that one of my male colleagues must be the lead investigator despite massive documentary evidence to the contrary.

And there were numerous small incidents in which men went out of their way to explain to me that they supported women scientists -- some of them had even worked with women and the experience had been surprisingly good. etc.

But the "winner" was when a scientist with whom I have only a passing acquaintance came up to me after a session that I co-organized and congratulated me on putting together such a "diverse" session. I don't mean to be thick, but my first thought was that he was referring to the subjects covered in the talks.

He said, "You must have worked really hard to have such a diverse session."

I said, "No, the session easily fell into place, given the general theme. We were all very pleased that there was such a diversity of approaches." [note: we = my male co-organizers and I]

He said, "I meant diversity of the speakers."

I said, "Oh, right, yes, well, we did deliberately invite two early-career speakers and two more established speakers, but it was mostly good luck that the session ended up with such broad representation from across Europe, Asia, and North America."

He said, "No, I mean that there were so many women in your session. I congratulate you on finding so many women." (FSP note: "so many" in this case: ~ 35% of total speakers, 50% of invited speakers)

I said, "That was not deliberate." I paused and thought about it for a moment, then said, "but maybe this was a good example of how a session can easily be naturally diverse."

He said, "It made me think that we are spending too much time focusing on the problem of women in science."

I said, "That does not follow."

That was depressing. It seems that at least one person assumed that those women speakers were selected because they are women, not because they are doing interesting work (even the one who is a hot-shot professor at a Top-Two institution?).

What has been your Most Strange MRE of 2013? Please share.

Man Boy(cott) 2011

This is a repeat topic, but it's something that keeps happening, so here it is again.

There is a conference that is of some interest to me. It's not a super-major conference and it is not urgent for me to attend, but it will be an interesting group of people, and I expect the level of intellectually stimulating conversation and exchange of ideas to be high, making the trip worthwhile. I think that I will go to the conference.

And then I look at the list of keynote speakers: all men, no women. I won't specify the exact number of speakers, but let's just say it is in the vicinity of 10, so it's not as if there's just one or two.

The conference topic is one that involves many women researchers worldwide. I can easily think of several without even trying. By "without even trying", I mean that without specifically trying to think of women researchers -- when I just think of people doing interesting research in this field -- many of these people are women.

[Note: I am rather peripheral to this topic, so am not implying that I think I should have been invited; I do not think this.]

Sometimes when I encounter these all-men slates of keynotes for a conference that I'm not sure I want to attend, that fact tips the balance for me and I do not go. If, however, I think the conference will be overall worthwhile anyway, I may go, and I will likely speak with the conference organizer, asking about the lack of women speakers.

Last time I wrote about this, I asked for comments on whether an all-men slate of keynote speakers would be a non-issue, a maybe-issue, or a deal-breaker for readers in their decisions to attend conferences. There were many interesting comments, with of course the usual wide range of opinions. Today I am asking the same question, but in poll form. This tends to increase the number of responses, but of course we lose a bit of the nuance, so feel free to leave a new or repeat comment on the topic in addition to voting. 

Does an all-men speaker slate influence your decision about whether to attend a conference?
	No, it is always a non-issue for me.
	It can be a deciding factor.
	Yes, it is a deal-breaker for me.
pollcode.com free polls

Get A (Different) Room

To the young couple snuggling in the meeting room during the afternoon session on Awesome Science at the X Conference:

ick

You were sitting in the approximate middle of the room, and there were lots of us cranky old professors sitting behind you, thinking you were being unprofessional and disrespectful of the speaker to have your arms wrapped around each other and to be basically sharing one seat during the session. Although the session was quite well attended, there were plenty of seats for all, so you could have each had your own.

Even some of us who think that academia should be more flexible with respect to work-life balance -- for example, that it's great that parents bring their young children to conferences and that grad students should (occasionally) be allowed to take a vacation or even sleep -- thought that your behavior was inappropriate.

Sincerely,

FSP

But that's just what I think. Let's ask the readers of FSP:

If you were sitting in a conference session trying to listen to Professor Z present her latest research results and to Dr. Postdoc's inspiring attempt to impress potential employers, and you saw a couple of entwined twentysomethings sitting in front of you, snuggling and sniffing each other's hair and necks, would you:

A. Think it was cute, sigh at the romance, and say "Young love, how special!"?

B. Avert your gaze and focus on the talks?

C. Snort in disgust and be very grateful that these young people were not from your institution?

D. Poke them and/or ask them to go somewhere else? (alternatives: toss something at them or do something else unobtrusive but possibly effective, without disturbing the session)

E. Other.

I went for the gaze-aversion approach, and was mostly successful, particularly during interesting talks. I found it difficult to ignore the snuggling couple completely, though, so as soon as I could, I changed my seat to be on the other side of the room and unable to see them when I was watching the presentations.

Before I could move to another seat, I saw a colleague glance in the direction of the couple and then, when he realized what he was seeing, he looked around and caught my eye. The expression on his face -- amusement, disgust, surprise, all of the above? -- made me laugh, so at least the snuggling couple provided some entertainment.

You're Invited

Speaking of talks, I am reminded of an invited talk that was given by an early-career scientist at a conference in the past year or so. I was very happy to see this talk on the schedule. I am a big fan of giving invited talk slots to the youngsters, as they might actually have something new to say, and I admire this particular person's work.

Invited talks by senior scientists can be quite interesting and useful as well, even if they are mostly a review of published work. But, as I've discussed before, there is a difference between giving a thoughtful review talk that integrates a lot of information and gives some perspective gained through time and a review talk that consists entirely of recycled, old material, resulting in a talk that could have been given at any time in the last 28 years and be exactly the same except for the number of wrinkles on the speaker's face.

The aforementioned invited talk by the early-career scientist was a big disappointment to me for the same reasons I have criticized talks by more senior people. It turned out to be a 'review talk', except that the amount of time represented by the work being reviewed was of course much less. The talk I saw could have been given 4-5 years ago. The figures were all excerpted from published work, none of the information was new, and there was no attempt to synthesize or reflect.

I wondered if my opinion of this nothing-new talk was so negative because I had higher expectations of the speaker than I would for a more senior scientist. That is, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if certain senior scientists gave a recycled talk, but I wasn't expecting it from this younger person, so I was even more critical than I would otherwise have been. Maybe.

So then I tried to think of reasons why this early-career scientist might have given a nothing-new, recycled talk. My purpose is not to criticize this individual (more) but to discuss the general issues raised (at least, in my own mind) by this incident.

I should note that the individual in question does not have a tenure-track job (yet) but is searching for one. This is one obvious reason why it's not a good idea for an early-career person to give a lame conference talk, invited or not, whereas a more senior person might not be harmed at all. But perhaps I am being too negative (again). Let's consider:

Reasons why such a talk may not have harmed the early-career person's chances of employment, with parenthetical statements undermining my attempts to come up with such reasons:

1. No one with any role, however indirect, in hiring decisions that could affect this person was in the audience (I consider this unlikely, but I don't know);

2. Even if there were potential future colleagues in the audience, they may not have been familiar with this work and so didn't know just how recycled the talk was (maybe.. but the speaker gave correct attribution to all the figures, and it was clear that they were all from a publication from > 4 years ago);

3. The main thing is that he was invited to give a talk, demonstrating the esteem in which he is held (I share this esteem -- even now -- but note that the conference session organizer is a friend/colleague of his);

4. It was just one talk; give the guy a break (OK, but I saw some excellent talks by other early-career scientists competing for the same jobs; to the extent that these conference-impressions are important, it's clearly better to give an awesome talk than a boring recycled one);

5. Maybe he was asked to give a review of his old work? Maybe that's what fit best with the theme of that session and he reluctantly agreed, although he has lots of cool new work he would rather have presented. (Sure, that happens, but I think if I were in that position I would be certain to explain the situation at the beginning of the talk. I'd say something like "I've been asked to talk about my work on xxxx, although most of that dates from a few years ago now", and then I would try to add something new -- make some new figures, synthesize some old and new results and ideas..)

If the individual in question was a tenure-track professor, being asked to give an invited talk, however boring it turned out to be, might outweigh any negative effects of having given a lame talk. Invited talks can be listed on the CV as such, and, aside from the possibility that a cranky letter-writer might have sat through the dismal talk, the most people reading the CV and making an evaluation won't know anything about the content of the talk beyond its title.

I don't have a problem with that. If the recycled talk was a one-time thing, it shouldn't harm anyone's career if things are otherwise going well. And if the recycled talk was yet another sign that an individual has not had any new ideas or results in 5 years, then there will be other evidence of that.

But: If someone who is still applying for jobs is given the opportunity to give a talk at a high-profile conference, whether or not the talk is invited or is one of many selected from submitted abstracts, if at all possible, don't blow the chance to say something new and interesting.

Out of Practice

Do you practice your conference presentations before giving them? What is your career stage?

In my case, I used to practice my conference talks, but now I never do, so for me, the answer was yes but is now no, and the change is definitely related to career-stage. I do not think this is unusual. Whether it is a good, neutral, or bad thing is another question.

If you used to practice talks but now you don't, do you remember when you stopped? I don't, but I am certain that I practiced my talks through my postdoc and perhaps for a while as an assistant professor. I just don't remember if I stopped practicing talks before or after tenure; I think it was before, but I am not sure.

Although I don't remember when exactly it was, I do remember having an anxious thought, just before giving one of the first talks I had not practiced, "Maybe I should have practiced this talk..", but I only felt that way the first few times I gave a talk I had not practiced. The feeling went away either because (1) I was satisfied with how the unpracticed talks went (i.e., I never felt after a talk, "OMG, I should have practiced that talk."), and/or (2) I am delusional about the quality of my talks.

I hasten to add that I typically finish my talks well within the time limit, so my lack of practice does not have negative consequences in terms of talk duration. Whether my talks are less coherent as a result of not-practicing: I'm not the one to ask.

I am certainly not advocating not practicing, particularly for early-career people. For those inexperienced at giving talks, I have seen very-not-good talks (on the first or second practice) turn into awesome talks with practice.

I am also not saying that I don't put much preparation into my talks. I think about them quite a lot, and I run through various options for the intro in my head, in some cases jotting notes. I just don't do a practice run of the whole talk in advance.

For some people, practicing (and practicing) before a talk provides a sense of greater confidence about the talk. Each practice run might be slightly (or very) different, but by giving the talk in advance (to a friendly group, to your cat, to yourself), perhaps many times, you know how to pace it and you know how to deal with the all-important talk introduction and transitions between topics. There is no question that this is useful (and I think people presenting posters should also have a few introductory lines prepared). It's just that, at some point, some of us decide (for better or worse) that we don't need to do this.

Ending It

What do you do when you are giving a talk at a conference and you have a lot more to say but not enough time to say it all as you had hoped?:

Behavior 1a. Ignore the almost-out-of-time signal and even the totally-out-of-time signal and plow on to the very end as if there is enough time to go through every slide, including a text-rich conclusions slide (or two!), which for some reason has to be read, word-for-word, all the way through.

Behavior 1b. Acknowledge the almost-out-of-time signal but continue to the very end anyway, not skipping any slides, not even the conclusions slides. This type of person apparently speeds up, and perhaps occasionally interjects "I know I'm out of time, but..", and then they keep going. The fact that they are out of time does not motivate them to skip a slide, not even the conclusions.

Behavior 2. Don't skip any of the research info slides, but skip reading the conclusions slide(s). May show the conclusions slide, but say "I'm out of time, so I'll just stop here."

Behavior 3. Skip some or all of the remaining research slides, and go right to the conclusions slide(s) and read them aloud. (opposite strategy of Behavior 2)

Behavior 4. When warned of approaching the time limit, say "I'm just about out of time, so I'll stop right there", thereby possibly leaving time for questions and discussion.

Note that I am only considering the types of people who reach the time limit when giving a talk. Some people finish on time, and this post is not about them.

It is my considered but perhaps unreasonable opinion that it is the rare talk of 10-15 minutes duration that needs detailed text-filled conclusions slides. I typically find these boring and a waste of talk-time. Conclusions slides can be useful if the talk topic was very complex (owing to the topic or the lack of skill of the presenter) or if the presenter is not entirely comfortable speaking English, or whatever the primary conference language is. In those cases, a conclusions slide or two can be helpful for summarizing what was just presented. If, however, the text-filled conclusions slide(s) are just a summary of what the speaker said 2 minutes ago, it's a waste of time for a speaker to read them to the audience, particularly if there isn't time for this.

At the various conferences I have attended this year, I have seen all of these behaviors (and more? did I leave any out?). I always wonder what someone is thinking by going (way) over the allotted time, especially if they are given abundant warning, by automated signals and session leaders, that the time is almost up, and then up, and then more than up. There is one person I know who commonly talks for 20-30 minutes for a 12-15 minute talk, ignoring all of the increasingly urgent but apparently ineffectual pleas for him to stop. [If I were convening a session in which this person wanted to give a presentation, I would assign him a poster, not a talk.]

I am reasonably sure that it is rare for the audience to be thinking "Oh no! Time is up already?! I wish that person could on speaking for much much longer!"

For me, anyway, the main interest and appeal of conferences is not so much the details of what is presented in talks but getting a general sense for what is going on, having informal conversations with people I wouldn't otherwise interact with or even meet, introducing my students and postdocs to the wider Science World, and all that kind of thing.

It doesn't punch a hole in my conference experience if some speakers talk for a few extra minutes, but life would be a tiny bit better if fewer people did this, and especially if they don't read their text-filled conclusions slides, word-for-word, all the way through.

Question 1: Is it mostly the more senior people who go beyond the allotted time for a conference talk? I have seen people of all ages and talk-experience level go beyond their allotted time, but I think it is more common for more senior researchers. This may be in part because students and other early-career people actually practice their talks and therefore know how long their talks are likely to be, whereas we older people are more likely to wing it a bit more and/or to think that our every word is a precious pearl of wisdom.

Question 2: Are the professors who speak longer than the allotted time for a conference talk also the ones whose classes go beyond their scheduled time?

You may find yourself in another part of the world

Same as it ever was, or at least how it has been for the past 3.5 months, I am going to be spending a lot of time up at 10,668 meters this week. For this final onslaught of busyness before a (relative) respite, I am taking a blog-break this week -- or, at the very least, things will get very sporadic around here for a while.

While I am suspended over various oceans and continents of the world and doing in-seat exercises to avoid deep vein thrombosis, I think it would be entertaining if the readers of FSP would share stories of

THE STRANGEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU AT A CONFERENCE.*

* or workshop or other types of professional meetings.**

** It's sort of cheating if you tell a story of something that happened to someone else, but if it's a really good story, go ahead and tell it anyway.***

***My apologies in advance for delays in comment moderation.

Opposites

A colleague of mine was recently asked to help organize part of the program of a conference, and was asked to recruit someone to work with him on this. This colleague was specifically asked to find their "opposite".

THIS INTRIGUED ME.

It intrigued me for several reasons, not the least of which were the opportunities for making jokes like "So you're supposed to find someone who is very organized and answers their e-mail but is not very smart?". And so on.

Let's consider what the relevant variables are in finding one's opposite. In this case, owing to the specialized nature of the conference, field of expertise is not a major variable, although there is room for considering different researchers who use different primary research methods.

Gender? Should one program organizer be male and the other female? I know this is not actually as simple as it may seem, but for a start, should there be one of each?

Age? The colleague in question is middle-aged, so this leads to the options of finding someone who is very young or very old. Or is your opposite definitely a much younger person because, after a certain career stage (tenure), we are all old?

Geography? Is your opposite someone from a different continent (or at the very least, a different country)? This raises the question of whether one's home institution's location is the relevant variable or one's country of origin, or both.

Primary Research Method/Subfield? If you are a theoretician, should you get a lab person as your opposite co-organizer? And so on?

What else? If you were asked to find your "opposite" (in a professional context, but within your general research field), what would you consider?

Responses need not be entirely serious.

But, if you do consider only serious variables and come up with a list of people who fit the description of your opposite, how many possibilities are there? Many? A few? None?

Pathological

A surreal experience, of the conference kind:

A colleague, with whom I used to work, many years ago, but with whom I stopped working because he was so uncommunicative and because he sat on data for YEARS (so that in most cases I had to redo his work to have any hope of moving forward with the research) and because he did not comment on manuscripts (much less write anything himself) and because he was therefore a major and annoying obstacle to any progress with our collaborative research, recently complained to me about another colleague who behaves the exact same way to him as my ex-colleague did to me back when we worked together. He complained bitterly to me about this other person's lack of communication (!) and refusal to share collaborative data (!) or comment on manuscripts (!), much less write anything himself (!).

Does my ex-colleague's brain consist of compartments that are totally impermeable to each other so that he can act one way and complain about the exact same behavior in someone else? I am sure that it is fairly common to be annoyed by unsavory behaviors of which we ourselves are guilty, and perhaps this was just an extreme example.

Or did my ex-colleague know that he was complaining about his own behavior (in someone else) and was in some twisted way apologizing to me? I doubt it, but I suppose it is possible.

In any case, I just said "Omigod, what a jerk" and walked away. It was too weird, even for me.

Uninvited Speaker

Imagine this scenario:

You are organizing a conference session and thinking about possible invited speakers. You want a mix of old(er) superstars and dynamic early-career people.

One of the early-career candidates for an invited talk has told you that she plans to drop out of academia soon because she is moving to the city where her husband got a job. She might teach a bit but has no plans to continue as an active researcher, despite getting a PhD in a high-profile program and doing excellent and significant work.

Do you invite her anyway because her research is interesting, or do you give the invited talk slot to someone whose career prospects would benefit from the invitation and visibility?

Should a person's stated lack of interest in a future career involving research be a factor in this decision, assuming that there are other possible candidates whose research is as interesting and as compatible with the theme of the conference session? Or is the only thing that matters the research topic (and maybe also the individual's speaking ability)?

I think I would invite the quitting-research person anyway if she is clearly the best person for the session, no matter what her stated career goals. Even if the invited talk slot wouldn't benefit her career, it might benefit others in the audience (e.g., students or others who would learn something from her talk) or it might benefit the session overall to have a diverse group of invited speakers ("diverse" could refer to research topic, methods, career stage, gender etc.).

If, however, there were other excellent candidates who would give a similarly excellent and useful talk and who would also personally benefit from the invitation, I might well tilt towards inviting one of them instead.

One of my colleagues has been in this decision-making situation recently, so I was thinking about this type of scenario.

What would you do? (and why?)

Re-Recycle

At an international conference not so long ago, I saw a talk by a Distinguished Professor. The talk consisted of figures that he cut and pasted from papers he published decades ago when he was a hot young scientist doing cutting edge work. There was nothing new in the talk: not the images, not the science, even though this was not supposed to be a review talk. I suppose it was accepted as a talk at the conference because of the Distinguishedness of the professor, in honor of the contributions he made to his field in his academic youth.

OK.. I thought, as I listened to the boring talk, this is weird, and there are several possible explanations, some of which could probably be eliminated if I knew the Distinguished Professor personally (but I do not):

Hypothesis #1. He does have new results to present, but he just didn't have time to write them up by the abstract deadline, and between the time his abstract was accepted and the conference, he also didn't have time to prepare a new talk, so he thought he'd present his 'classic' work (which is indeed classic and much-cited) because it remains the best work he has done to date and he figured the audience wouldn't mind seeing it again.

Hypothesis #2. Similar to Hypothesis #1, but with the additional factor that he didn't think it was worth spending the time because most of the scientists in the audience were not native English speakers and he figured his old work was good enough for this particular conference venue.

Hypothesis #3. He actually hasn't done much that is worth speaking about since his classic work. He didn't want to present the results of his recent work because that would definitely be boring. So he had an idea! He decided to relive the glory days of his best work.

Hypothesis #4. Although by no means ancient, the DP has lost his mind, has impaired judgment, has been ill, or has some other tragic reason, beyond his control, for being unable to prepare a presentation of new (or at least more recent) results.

Whatever the reason, if it related to hypotheses #1, 2 or 3, it was a miscalculation. Oh, I am sure that his distinguishedness has not lost much, if any, of its luster, but there was quite a bit of murmuring at the conference about the boring, recycled talk, and some people were a bit insulted that he would present something so completely old for a non-review talk.

I kind of forgot about this recycled talk incident for a while, but a colleague (who was not at the international conference) recently told me that he went to a US conference and heard a talk by this same DP. My colleague was dismayed that the talk had consisted of nothing but recycled slides and description of old work.

This colleague knew nothing about the previous conference, and spontaneously mentioned his opinion when we were discussing what we might want to present at a future conference. My colleague had joked "We could just show the figures from our 1993 paper." What?? Then he explained, and I was amazed that the DP had re-recycled his talk.

But: At least I could eliminate Hypothesis #2 based on this new data point. The DP was equally willing to bore people at home and abroad.

It's impossible to know what motivated the re-recycling, or to know whether the DP was at all aware that his audience might not be fascinated by these presentations, but this incident relates to the general issue of how much 'old' material we can/should present in our conference talks.

When presenting new results from a long-term project, I sometimes worry about how much of the 'old' work to present as context for the new -- when you only have a short time to present complex results, every minute counts and you (should) want to highlight the new, but perhaps the new can't be understood without also presenting some of the old results. At the same time, perhaps a significant fraction of the audience isn't aware of the old work, and it would be a mistake to assume otherwise. (Note: A couple of years ago, I discussed a similar issue regarding invited non-conference talks and the eerie similarity between professors and rock stars).

From now on, I will probably have this DP re-recycling incident circling my head whenever I prepare a talk that consists of at least some old material. Getting the balance right can be challenging, but it is well worth thinking about during talk preparation.

Man Boy(cott)?

At various times in this blog, I have described professional events such as conference sessions, workshops, and speaker series in which there are no invited women speakers. The audience might consist of 30-50% women, especially if students and postdocs are in attendance, but every invited speaker is male. It is easier to explain the occurrence of such situations if there are a limited number of invited speaker slots in a field with few women researchers; it becomes more difficult when there are a dozen or more invited speaker slots and more than a few women researchers in that field.

There are a number of possible explanations for the absence of women as invited speakers at these events: e.g., deliberate exclusion because the organizers don't respect women researchers, accidental/unthinking exclusion because the organizers just didn't think of any 'qualified' women, or despite-best-efforts exclusion when all invited women decline an invitation. In today's post, I don't want to discuss which of these explanations is most likely, as the answer to that will vary from event to event and from field to field. I would, however, like to discuss the question:

Does an all-men speaker slate influence your decision about whether to attend these events?

Let's assume that there are women doing interesting research in the fields relevant to these events and "there are no women" is not a valid reason for the absence of invited speakers who are women. So: If you saw that there was, say, a small conference or workshop on a topic of interest to you and/or others in your research group, but every organizer and every invited speaker was male, is the absence of women:

(1) a total non-issue? The only thing that matters is whether the topic is relevant and interesting, and whether you and/or your advisees will benefit from attending or otherwise participating in the event.

(2) disappointing, but what can you do? You can't avoid all such events or you would severely limit your professional interactions, and you don't really know why there are no women speakers. You therefore attend anyway, despite feeling uncomfortable about being at yet another event in which a group of men expound on their research to an audience consisting of women who supposedly will one day start populating the higher faculty ranks of academia, even though it is taking an extremely long time for this to happen.

(3) a reason for boycotting the event? What kind of message does it send to your advisees if they go to an event on Interesting Topic X and get the impression that no women are doing interesting research on this topic, even though it's not difficult for you to think of some? If you make a decision to avoid such an event, would you tell the organizers why you decided not to attend?

The gender of invited speakers should not matter. It does not matter to the research, and it does not matter to the quality of an invited talk. It does matter, however, when there is a systematic imbalance that doesn't have a good explanation.

If men-only speaker slates bother you, what can you do about this other than boycott such workshops and sessions?

You can organize workshops and sessions and think broadly about who would give an interesting talk, focusing not just on your impression of how famous someone is, but on what their research contributions are.

I believe that if decisions about invited speakers are made based on a person's research contributions and ideas and not on perception of prestige, then there will naturally be women included in any group in most fields. There would be no need to go out and find a token women just to have one in the list of speakers for the sake of diversity. Women speakers would be invited because they have interesting things to say.

That doesn't seem like such a radical goal, but, based on the last few session/workshop advertisements I have read, it seems to be a very difficult thing to achieve.

Self-Relegated?

A reader sent me this link and wonders if there is a (reasonable) explanation for the last item in this alphabetical list of categories for abstracts:

• Astrophysics
• Atomic, molecular and optical physics (AMO)
• Condensed matter physics
• Nanophysics and nanomaterials
• Nuclear and elementary particle physics
• Physics and Climate
• Women in physics (KIF)

If you only saw the headings, you might assume that the last category involved discussion of topics relevant to recruiting or retaining women in physics (for example). But no, these are research abstracts, just like the others, although there are only three:

C. Fox Maule(1)
Comparing regional standardised precipitation indices from climate models and observations

Henriette Skourup
A study of Arctic sea ice freeboard heights from ICESat measurements

Karina L. Gottlieb Ph.D.1
Investigation of respiration induced intra- and inter-fractional tumour motion using a standard Cone Beam CT


I looked up the "Network for Women in Physics in Denmark" (KIF) and I can see that they are a section of the Danish Physical Society. It is therefore likely that each category of the conference is organized/sponsored by a different section.

I can definitely see the purpose of having such a section as part of the overall society, but I can't see why there would be Physics research talks, on topics ranging from tumors to climate, in a Women in Physics session.

So I am wondering: What is the practical or philosophical reasoning for having a separate session of talks or posters on such varied scientific topics? Why would someone submit a research abstract to the Women in Physics section rather than the relevant scientific section?

It's Not About You

At a conference earlier this year, I went to some talks on a research topic that is only sort of related to what I do. That is, I am not directly involved in any of the research presented, nor are any of my close colleagues, but I'm moderately interested in research in this field and I wanted to see what was new and interesting.

The strongest impression that I took away from the talks was not about any new or interesting results, but about how the research was presented. The research topic is one that involves many different research groups from all over the world. These groups, some of which do not have very collegial relationships with each other, have been working on this research topic for a long time. There is a long long history of research and debate on this topic.

At the conference, the talks I attended were dominated by the history of the research groups: who did what when, who said what when, who was right, who was wrong (in the opinion of the speaker), and who was redoing the flawed work of others using a new and better approach.

This made me think. Certainly we should not ignore the relevant work of others when talking about a particular topic, but there's a difference between presenting research as if it is motivated by the personalities involved (who is right/wrong) and presenting research that is driven by fundamental questions and new ideas about how to make progress understanding them. The former seems more appropriate for a review of the history of a particular scientific endeavor, and the latter for a conference presentation on new research results.

If you think it is important to place your work in its historical context (relative to other research on that topic) and/or if you really want to distinguish your own work from those of others and/or settle scores, you may well be able to do this in a more effective way if you focus on the questions, ideas, and results, giving due credit (or criticism) in a way that does not dominate the substance of the presentation.

Of course, if your presentation is titled "I Am Right and Everyone Else is Wrong About Z", then go ahead and make it personal. You could even (as was done in a recent talk) include photos of the people who (unlike you) got it wrong. Maybe, if you are feeling like being very dramatic, you could have a big red X appear across the faces of those who (unlike you) have stumbled in their research endeavors.

I am certainly not implying that research is the work of faceless, nameless people whose identities are inconsequential to the progress of Science. If, however, you only have 10-20 minutes to present the latest results of your exciting work to a general audience that consists mostly of people who are not personally invested in the research itself, I bet many in the audience will want to hear your recent results and ideas and not see a presentation dominated by a graphic display of intra-research group animosity and/or boasting.

Or am I being boring and cranky/middle-aged, somehow not appreciating that research is a Sport and conferences are tournaments of some sort?

On Record, continued

If you know well in advance that your conference/workshop/seminar talk will be recorded and distributed widely, does this influence the content of your talk?

For example:

Would you be more likely to present old (published) work than the latest (unpublished) results and ideas?

• Would you work harder to ensure that any images you project are either entirely of your own construction or, if borrowed from another source, properly credited?
• Would you spin your talk in a different way, in recognition of a possibly wider audience beyond those present during the initial recording?
• Would you do anything different about your dress, mannerisms, voice, piercings etc. knowing that you are being recorded vs. just speaking to those you can see sitting rapt in their seats in front of you?

Before a recorded talk, I would have to think long and hard about the first issue: i.e., how much new stuff to present. I am not a raging paranoiac about having my research ideas "stolen", although thefts certainly do occur, but I'm not sure I'd want to lose control of some of my newest work by having a presentation of this work flung about on the internet. I think I might tend to leave out some of the crazier ideas that can be fun to explore in a talk, thereby making my talks a bit more conservative.

Maybe that makes for a better, more focused talk. Maybe that makes for a more boring talk. I don't know, but although recording and distributing talks has many positive consequences, recording a talk and making it available for a wider audience is not a neutral activity and would certainly have some impact on talk content and perhaps also style.

On the Record

On a few occasions in recent years, talks I gave at a conference or workshop were recorded. I would have preferred not to be recorded, but I didn't mind enough to refuse to be recorded, and I knew in advance that I would be recorded. I could have opted out via a webpage form, but I did not do so.

At least one of the recordings was of a talk that turned out well, so I don't mind that this video exists. But somewhere out there on the internet is a video of me standing at a podium and reacting to the news that my talk does not exist in the symposium computer system. Somewhere out there on the internet in the same video there is a dramatic scene in which a tall scientist from a Slavic country stands up and loudly proclaims that he knows for a fact that my talk was uploaded to the system the day before. Then there is an action scene in which I rush to the place where I had left a briefcase containing a memory stick, which I then give to the A/V person to upload (again). Then I start giving the talk without any images until they miraculously appear and eventually I get caught up. For some reason I have never wanted to watch this video. The actual memory is still quite vivid enough for me.

In any case, I am OK with certain talks and lectures being preserved for educational purposes or for logistically necessary reasons, but for routine talks, I'd rather the experience be a fleeting one for both the audience and me. If someone wants to know more about anything I present, wants a copy of a slide, wants a reference or a pdf, they can let me know.

And now I have some questions for my readers about the general topic of being recorded while giving a professional talk.

Have you ever been recorded (video and audio) when giving:

- a conference presentation (either an invited one or a regular contribution);
- an invited talk at a university or college; and/or
- an interview talk?

If so, did you know about the recording well in advance? (i.e., not 5-10 minutes before you started talking, as happened to one of my correspondents).

What happened to the video of your talk? Was it put on the internet to reside forever for all to see, was it put on the internet so that a specified group of people could view it (e.g., members of a professional society, registrants at a conference), or was it for the private and temporary use of (for example) hiring committee members who could not be present for an interview talk?

Was it OK with you to be recorded? Were you asked permission? If you did not want to be recorded, did you feel comfortable about saying no? (Did you say no?)

Reruns

Not long ago I listened to a Famous Scientist give the exact same talk that I had heard him give at a conference a few years ago. The talk was not an invited review in which it would be reasonable to expect a summarizing of previous work. He was speaking in a session in which it was reasonable to expect to hear results of new research, not a rerun.

When is giving the same talk OK and when is it not OK?

From what I've seen, a common scenario for talk repetition is when the talk is first given at a small conference, then repeated at a large conference, especially if the two conferences are not separated by a substantial amount of time (delta t < 1 year?). If you happen to have been at the small conference, you see the talk twice, but most of the people in the audience at the big conference are hearing the talk for the first time. I suppose that is acceptable, although if the speaker anticipates quite a bit of overlap in audience (i.e. most people from the small conference are also at the big conference), it would be good to make the second talk a bit different.

What is less acceptable is to give the exact same talk in different years at the same annual conference. In the most recent example of this that I saw/heard, the Famous Scientist was also the former professor of the conference session convener. So I suppose the decision to let him talk about the same old stuff was based on sentiment and/or on the desire to have a Famous Scientist speak in a session.

If, however, the session convener had reason to know in advance that Famous Scientist would present the same old stuff, would it be so bad to give him a poster and give a talk slot to some up-and-coming scientist with new results? I am sure not every single person in the audience had seen the talk before, but does that justify a rerun talk of research published a few years ago; research to which nothing new had been added?

If there are plenty of talk slots to go around, maybe; if talk slots are in short supply and highly desirable, I'd rather hear something new, even is the speaker is a not-famous professor, postdoc, or student. I would be less harsh on Famous Scientist (who is actually a colleague I admire and like quite a lot) if he had been asked to give a review talk or some kind of overview of his work or a particular topic. It bothered me that he gave a total rerun talk as a regular research talk.

It can be good to have Famous Scientists in a session if it attracts an audience for the less Famous Scientists (as long as there isn't a mass exodus after the FS talk), and of course some (many?) Famous Scientists have interesting new things to say. And some people may want to hear the old classic work in a talk. I suppose I got annoyed in this particular case because there were some interesting early-career scientists who did not get to give talks at that conference.

Sometimes I give similar talks at conferences that are not too far apart in time. Talk 1 will focus on a research project at whatever stage it is at during Conference 1, and Talk 2 will be an update, presenting the newest results of that project. Ideally, there will be substantial new results, but some updates are more significant than others, depending on how the research progresses. In that case, even those of us who intended to give different talks might find ourselves giving talks that are more similar than we wanted.

Some of that is to be expected when you are working on a long-term project in which amazing data and discoveries are not ideally spaced relative to conferences, but typically you can say something new about what you've done and where you're going with the work.

Or at the very least you can change the background designs of your slides.

What do you think? When is it OK to give the same talk at different conferences with similar audiences and when is this proof that you are a slacker-scholar who just wants to justify a desire to jet around to different conferences?

If you have nothing new to say and are invited to give a talk, do you agree to give the talk (assuming that people will be fascinated to hear about your old, published work) or do you decline because you don't have anything new to say?

Do You Always Give the Same Talk?

My mother, who is not a scientist and not an academic and who therefore understandably doesn't really know what my professor job entails, recently asked me the question in the title of this post. She knew that I have given talks at different conferences this year, and she was wondering if I gave the same talk at each conference.

Just to clarify what she meant by the question, I asked her:

"Are you wondering if I give the exact same talk each time, or whether each talk is on a similar topic, but with updates of ongoing research?"

It turns out that she was asking whether I give the exact same talk each time. For example, when I went to a conference in City X/Country Y to give a talk last fall, and to a conference in City A/Country B to give a talk this spring, did I give the same talk?

I said no, I didn't give the same talk.

Then she said "But why not? The people who live in A/B weren't at your talk in X/Y, so you could give the same talk."

It turns out that she thought that only people who lived in the immediate vicinity and/or the same country as the conference site would have been at my talk in each place. She didn't realize (and why should she?) that these conferences were international and attended by thousands upon thousands of scientists (not all of whom attended my talks).

The fact that I traveled some distance from My City, USA, to go to these conferences might have been a clue that people came from all over the world to attend these conferences, but for whatever reason, this was not a clue.

I have been going to conferences and giving talks for decades, but it never occurred to me to explain to my mother what these conferences are like in terms of size or people or themes or what we even talk about when we give a talk.

I should have known. A few times over the years I have been invited to give talks at colleges and universities in the state of my ancestral home. Each time my mother asks "Did they invite you because you are from here?" So I did have some inkling about the depths of her misunderstanding, but I never really explained how these things work (talks, conferences etc.).

I always think it is a little weird when I see someone's parents attending their conference presentation (unless, of course, one or both parents are scientists or the offspring is getting an award), but I guess one way to show our non-scientific/non-academic relatives what our world is like is to bring them along to our conferences.

I think I will skip this particular mother-daughter experience and attempt instead to do a better job of explaining more about my work.

Tomorrow's topic: more on giving the same/similar talks at conferences.

Remotely There

How much has Skype/teleconferencing etc. reduced the need for professional academic travel? For me, not at all. These things have reduced the number of traditional phone calls to a very low number, but there has been no decrease in conference travel or travel to other universities to give talks, just to mention two common reasons for professional travel.

For some committees involving geographically dispersed people, we can do some or all of our committee business by email instead of meeting in person, but when we used to meet in person, it was before or during a conference. We still go to the conference, we just don't do committee meetings there.

Technology has not affected my need to travel a lot, but it has increased the level and style of participation of geographically remote colleagues in some of my research group's activities. At some research group meetings, we have had the face and voice of a colleague (typically an international colleague) transmitted via a laptop sitting on a table. It is great fun to rotate the laptop around so that the colleague's head can be facing the person who is speaking.

I can't imagine anything reducing the need to be at a conference in person or to travel to another university to give a talk and meet people. I can, however, imagine having less money for these things, thus reducing the opportunities for travel, but the benefits of in-person interactions in different professional settings is much greater than what can be accomplished via technological methods for transmitting voices and images.

Meeting of the Laptops

From the comments on a conference-themed post last week, it is clear that there are various opinions, some of them fierce, about the use of laptops by audience members during a talk. I wonder if one's opinion for or against syn-talk laptop use by the audience depends on the specific situation. For example:

Does it matter whether the laptop is being used to take notes about what the speaker is saying or whether it is being used for activities unrelated to the talk being given at the time?

Does it matter whether the talk is interesting or extraordinarily dull and/or poorly presented, or is it always impolite?

Is the issue the distraction of the type type type sound of a keyboard or the flashing graphics of some websites or would it be OK if someone just stared silently at a screen of unmoving text?

Does it matter where the laptopper is sitting? Even if you think that laptop use by someone sitting in a prominent place at the front of the room would pose a distraction, but would it be OK if someone sitting at the back of a large-ish room quietly read something on their laptop?

I personally prefer to take notes on paper, so I don't use my laptop for taking notes during talks, and I don't take out my laptop if I am sitting in a crowded room or near the front of a room. If I am in a long session and can't zip in and out of the room easily, however, I have been known to sit in the back, take out of my laptop during a talk of little interest to me, and do some quiet work, mostly reading and perhaps some editing, in what I hope is a non-obtrusive way.

During one conference this year, two of my grad students who were not at the conference sent me frequent emails and things to read for a looming deadline. During spare moments, I read, edited, and sent comments back to them so that I would not delay their progress despite being away. Some of these spare moments were during conference sessions.

In each case, I was sitting near the back of the room and did not have people sitting next to me. Perhaps any form of lack of attention is disrespectful to a speaker, but at a big meeting in a large room, the audience will be composed of individuals whose attention will wax and wane depending on the specific topic of each talk. It is unreasonable to expect that there won't be some people flipping through the schedule (if there is one..), closing their eyes, making brief whispered comments, and, as long as it is done reasonably quietly so as not to disturb the speaker or others in the audience, I think this is acceptable behavior. You cannot expect every member of an audience to give every talk their full attention; you can, however, expect a respectful and reasonably quiet audience in which speakers and listeners are not disturbed by ancillary activities.