Category Archives: Social events

Social events, Transparency

Moderation In All Things

After attending the annual ScienceOnline meetings in North Carolina for many years, this time around, I won’t be going. The primary reason has nothing to do with the upsets in that community of late (oh, yes, I have thoughts, but they’re not for the sharing today). Oh, sure, not seeing the people I’d hoped to see because ongoing problems drove them away—that’s a fine secondary reason. Before and above all that, though, is the fact that I’m mid-PhD. I realized I could no longer justify the time, the stress and, indeed, the carbon footprint of traveling to attend #scio14.

What can one do? I revile air travel more every year. I don’t have time/energy to prepare for the conference beforehand, or to follow up on anything discussed there after. My proposal for the session I was to moderate was, to summarize only slightly, “hey let’s build this website”. Must I travel for that??
Continue reading Moderation In All Things →

Popularization, Social events

Science & Fiction at ScienceOnline 2011

I’ll be co-moderating a couple sessions at ScienceOnline 2011 this coming January. Here’s the abstract for one of them:

Can we stimulate a wider interest in and appreciation of scientists and what they do via the medium of mainstream fiction, whether be it novels, plays, movies or TV dramas? And how can we leverage online tools to help? Is it possible to entertain and educate without becoming too pedantic or pedagogical, and how do we define “scientific accuracy” in the context of made-up stories? This session will explore the world of imaginary science and how we can leverage its powers without compromising our scientific principles.

With Jennifer Rohn, who will bring the respectable content, while I provide my best Wesley Crusher impression.

Network theory, Plectics, Social events, University education

Colloquium on Complex Networks

I might be going to this, because it’s in the neighbourhood and I suppose I ought to see what colourful examples other people use in these situations, having given similar talks a couple times myself.

MIT Physics Department Colloquium: Jennifer Chayes

“Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Networks”

Everywhere we turn these days, we find that dynamical random networks have become increasingly appropriate descriptions of relevant interactions. In the high tech world, we see mobile networks, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of online social networks. In economics, we are increasingly experiencing both the positive and negative effects of a global networked economy. In epidemiology, we find disease spreading over our ever growing social networks, complicated by mutation of the disease agents. In problems of world health, distribution of limited resources, such as water, quickly becomes a problem of finding the optimal network for resource allocation. In biomedical research, we are beginning to understand the structure of gene regulatory networks, with the prospect of using this understanding to manage the many diseases caused by gene mis-regulation. In this talk, I look quite generally at some of the models we are using to describe these networks, and at some of the methods we are developing to indirectly infer network structure from measured data. In particular, I will discuss models and techniques which cut across many disciplinary boundaries.

9 September 2010, 16:15 o’clock, Room 10-250.