(no subject)

The 3 categories of questions that get asked after talks at a scientific symposium:

1) The nitty-gritty: "What strain of mice did you use in your experiment?"

2) The mildly speculative: "Would you expect to see similar results if you did such an experiment in primates?"

3) The wildly tangential: "What do you think your results on UPR expression in BiP-knockout mice say about the alienation we all feel in modern life?"

(no subject)

Note to self: Poster sessions are the absolute best part of the conference! First off, the constraint on the presenters, that they have to fit all the information about their study into the size of a poster, enforces a lot of focus on them. Secondly, the constraint that you as the viewer have, that you have to triage what posters out of hundreds to look at within a short time, enforces a lot of focus. Thus, I don't get bogged down in a room of posters, as I do with a pile of journals... Third, you see all kinds of crazy things that don't make it into the journals: null findings, unexplainable findings, etc. It's all the result of everybody's grad students' efforts, rather unfiltered, whether it worked or not. Maybe the process of science should be more about the posters, less about the journal articles, because there sure is a lot of publication bias out there. Best thing of all: you get to talk to everybody. Well, nearly everybody (some people don't show up to stand next to their poster when they are supposed to). Best conversation opportunity of the year. So much more efficient to ask all the "what do you mean by this?" and "why did you do it that way?" questions in person than to try to puzzle out the answers to these questions from the publication.