June 15, 2005

Scientific Program for Elba

The "Superunification of Active Galactic Nuclei" meeting on Elba Island, Italy last month was really great. In the past, most such meetings would issue Conference Proceedings that would come out 1+ years following the conference, with a bunch of short papers meticulously formated and devoid of signficant amounts of new information. A lot of scientists resented having to spend the extra time after the meeting writing a non-refereed paper instead of getting on with the actual journal article or new work.

Today, things are much faster and informal, both trends that help science go. What you want ideally in the form of proceedings are the talks and posters from the meeting transformed into something you can look at after the meeting (or in place of the meeting if you couldn't attend). All but two speakers at Elba used Power Point, and I haven't seen a hand-written poster since 1996 (it was by Doug Lin and was actually very nice). The presentations and posters have been posted on the web for community use. There's not 100% compliance, but most of the presentations are up.

Posted by Mike at June 15, 2005 10:39 AM