SciFoo writeup

Belatedly, I'm going to spend some time writing up SciFoo from my perspective. It's probably best to start off with the session I organised. As I was a newbie, I decided to go for a slot on the Sunday, to give me time to see what these 'unconference' sessions were like.

Well, they weren't "like" anything - in the sense that every session was different. Most people seemed to have some kind of slideshow, but there was an unspoken rule that it was Ok to interrupt with questions at any time. A couple of sessions were basically a free for all discussion.

Mine turned out to be a bit of both - my main problem was reigning in the vocal extroverts. I know exactly how to do that at school, but these vocal extroverts were generally older and more experienced than me. Basically, a lot of what I was saying in terms of the Head First way of doing things had already been dealt with in other sessions, for example the Jump Math session. The people there (well, the two loudest anyway) were, "yeah, we like the material, how do you get stuff like this into the education system?" As 'chair' all I could say was "if you have ideas then let me / O'Reilly know as that's exactly the question that O'Reilly are asking too."

With hindsight, I should have implemented some kind of "conch" rule (a la Lord of the Flies, where you can only speak if you have the conch) as there were a couple of quiet but passionate introverts who didn't get to contribute until I basically re-interrupted the loud people and said that it was someone else's turn now. Ironic, as we'd been talking about how every child needed an adult who believed in them - and I suppose that one of the ways I do that at school is to limit the floor-time for those who want to dominate and leave space for the quieter children, who usually have something good to contribute as they think with their brains first and mouths second. (Not that doing it the other way round is bad, it's just a shame when the 'mouth first' faction dominate.)

Before my session, I'd been at a very inreresting one reporting back on research where the hormone levels of city traders had been measured to see if there was a correlation between testosterone and risk-taking, and also cortisol and risk-adverseness. To cut a long story short it appears that there is, and though the sample of women studied was too small to draw firm conclusions it does appear that one of the factors at work in bull or bear markets is the fact that the majority of traders are men.

Working backwards, the Saturday evening was probably my favourite time. It was very laid-back, with a Foo Bar open and various things going on. Like the liquid nitrogen ice cream manufacturing, and the sodium acetate... look it's a liquid... no it's crystals demo. I'd done the latter myslf by accident in the lab once, when making up a stock solution that was too concentrated. Then the guitars came out... the centre of the large room had some tents and camp stools pitched in homage to the original Foo Camps, which were actually camps. It was basically a free-for-all with a few guitars and a djembe with people taking it in turns to suggest songs or swap instruments. As it was SciFoo, there was help at hand with the lyrics - essential for somethign like 'Halelujah' which has infinite different verses. (OK, not quite infinite, but having everyone doing the same thing helps.) I've hardly played at all for the last 18 months through fear of RSI coming back, but my hands stood up to it well. Oh, and I also won a puzzle... basically I got to that stage of tiredness where I doggedly get on with things and succeeded (with some input from a co-solver) in cracking the puzzle that had been in our goodie bags. The prize was another puzzle, which I still haven't solved.

The Saturday of SciFoo was very very long, with sessions through the morning and afternoon. I had a little break at 4pm, when I was interviewed by someone from Make magazine. Apparently the 10 minutes or so will be cut down to 2-3 minutes. They wanted to interview people talking passionately about things they were into, so focussed on the chess side of things - secretly I think they must have gone down the list of people, ranked us on weirdness, and I was one fo the lucky winners!

Sessions I went to were by someoen from Pixar discussing the physics behind their animation engines - basically they want the artists just to be able to animate and for all the physics to be done automatically. But they need to build in 'unreal' things, like in The Incredibles where some scenes see people subjected to accelerations of 100g, or else the engine goes nuts. Other things were making long hair look more than just a theoretical concept, reducing aliasing effects, and a cute story from Monsters Inc where Boo has to open a door at the end - and it turns out that she's not tall enough. So the engine had to make her grow (in engine space) as she walks away from the camera towards the door. She still gets smaller as far as the viewer is concerned, but not as small as she should - so she's able to reach the handle.

I also went to sessions on the mathematics of musicality, Ulam's role in all of the Paulo Alto stuff during WWII and then in a nuclear-powered rocket program, and a couple on science publishing / science in the media. One interesting one that I blundered into was about the Sunflower Project - which is basically to track bees. They post out sunflower seeds to participants, who plant them then count the bees that appear on them, report back and have access to a forum etc. It's a way of collecting masses of data - and the ability to post photos for identification helps to verify the identifications. You can produce all sorts of clever maps too, using postcode information from the participants, and do small educational things in fortnightly emails that you send out. It's really taken off in places like girl scouts, residential care homes and prisons, apparently, though the current project's main data collection process takes place during the school holidays.

Most of the session felt too short. Early on, it felt like everyone was just waiting for their turn to speak, without necessarily listening to what had come before, but later on people had relaxed and that happened a lot less. I think that most of the science actually took place where it does in research groups - in the coffee room. It was in between the sessions and at meal times that most of the productive discussion took place, with what was happening in the sessions more of a seed for that. It was fine to just sit down anywhere and start talking to anyone (unlike the research world, where you tend to sit with people from your group) but at the same time, with over 200 people there it meant that you didn't generally sit with the same people more than once, so it also felt 'bitty' at the same time.

All in all, kind of a cross between fresher's week and Nobel Prize Winners' Big Brother!