Rating scientific (or not so much) conferences

If you work in research, nowadays you can be sure to get swamped with "conference invitation" e-mails. A large part of these is, in effect, spam - attempts to get you (or your funders) to pay for meetings of highly questionable scientific worth.

So, let's introduce a rating scale for scientific (or not) conferences, from 0 to 10. All examples have really happened.

0 - Trash

• You ask a friend who is listed in the organizing committee, and get the response "what conference?"
  
• Advertising mostly mentions the location (Maledives!) and the proceedings (Indexed by Google Scholar!)
  
• You arrive at the location and there is no conference.
• If there is one, you can barely find it because it's in the back room of some hotel conference center.
• Instead of a conference organizer's desk you encounter a pile of badges and participation certificates.
• The "hybrid session" consists of you, the AV technician, and some poor guy on zoom talking to a non-existing audience.
• There's a talk on the "memory of water".
• A remote talk is given by someone in a car while driving.
• There are less posters than talks.
  

3 - We do this for the money, but hey, we're trying!

• The conference organizing committee contains the one or two well-known professors who are in every organizing committee. Everyone else is from countries you've never heard of.
• The meeting has taken place before and the website is somewhat professional.
• The conference secretary is called Elsa, Belle, or Jasmine and sends you an e-mail every week, offering an invited talk for a "small reduction" of the conference fee (hint, the size of the reduction can be up to negotiation!)
• Between sign-up and actual conference date, the number of days and sessions mysteriously shrinks.
  
• The conference organizer's desk is handled by a bunch of undergrads who barely speak English and have no clue.
• The welcome address is skipped since the speaker doesn't turn up. Same for the chairman of the first session. After the first regular speaker starts their talk, the chairman hurries in - "sorry, sorry, I ended up at the wrong conference..."
  
• You meet a few colleagues from home who find the situation similarly amusing as you, and have a good time at lunch.
• Eventually things become somewhat more regular, and sessions and talks take place, but you have quite some doubts about the scientific quality of some of them.
• Focus? What focus?
  

6 - Yes I'm gonna establish a conference, mark my words!

• 5th or 6th installment of a conference series, typically by the same scientific organizer or organization.
• You find the conference without problems, and there is actually a well-organized conference desk. Maybe even the scientific organizer greets you in person.
  
• The location is only moderately flashy, function starts to gain over form.
  
• Most of the participants are from serious scientific institutions and present work that can be interesting.
• Main problem is still the focus - the topics are too broad, the number of participants too small, such that it's not so likely you will meet someone whose work is really relevant to your own.
• If the main organizer has a good hand, they will accumulate a circle of regular participants and the event will grow over time.
• Can, e.g., be a professor establishing an international conference on their topic in their home country...
• Typically 2-3 companies are present trying to sell their lab supplies.
  

9 - Congratulations, it's a great scientific conference

• Either wide focus and a huge number of participants, or narrow focus and a small number of participants
• Organized by a scientific society (DPG, EPS, APS, ...) or by a group of internationally well-known experts in one specific field
• True invited talks are comparatively rare, and come with (depending on the financial situation of the host) either no reduction of fees at all, or even funding of travel expenses.
• You know nearly everyone in the organizing committee, at least from their publications.
  
• Many more poster contributions than talks.
• You can be sure to meet many of your scientific colleagues.
• Large commercial presence of companies sponsoring the meeting and advertising their high-tech equipment.
  

10 - Summa cum laude

• Small meetings organized by few top experts of a research area, or (very rare) large meetings consisting of several such high-quality sessions in combination.
  
• Organized by top level scientists in the field worldwide
  
• Participation by invitation only, true selection of conference participants (more applicants than places)
• In some cases, even free participation and accommodation
  
• Recent examples: Gordon Research Conferences, Heraeus seminars, the QuantuMatter 2024, ... 

 Thoughs?

 

Airport taxis via booking.com -- nice if it works!

So I'm a good, and normally very happy booking.com customer (Genius Level 3 if that means anything), and have spent a lot of money over the past years via that company. This year, during this trip, I tried booking airport pick-up in advance for the first time. The first pick-up failed spectacularly, and I'm still dealing with it.

Long flight(s). Frankfurt (FRA) - Bangkok (BKK), Bangkok (BKK) - Sydney (SYD). Things didn't go exactly to plan, the flight arrived late in Sydney, but hey, booking.com says the drivers are tracking the arrival schedule and adapt to that. After immigration and luggage pick-up, I leave the security area and scan the waiting crowd. Lots of drivers waiting for lots of travellers, but unfortunately noone waiting for me.

After half an hour of waiting, I get into a conversation with a driver who works for the same company that is supposed to pick me up. He asks around, can't help me either, and recommends to phone the company office. I do that, with the number given in the reservation confirmation in the booking.com app. On the phone, I get told there is no reservation on my name.

So I take a regular cab to my hotel. Works fine. 

Except that the transfer was of course already paid (and since the date is past, it can't be cancelled anymore). Clicking through the labyrinth of the booking.com website, I find out it is really difficult to file a complaint. Anyway, I manage to arrive at the proper form, state the situation and request a refund.

Nothing happens for over a week.

So I file another report again, on Sat 2/July/2022, including this time that in case of no response within three business days I will dispute the corresponding credit card booking, with them being liable for associated fees. Clock's ticking...

I like booking.com, and am otherwise a very happy customer. Also, a second pickup later worked out just fine (SGN). Nevertheless, this is somewhat annoying.

Update, 7/July/2022: With effective date 2/July/2022 the money was refunded to my credit card by booking.com. No e-mail or status change or notification on the website, but hey, the money is back. So no need for further complaints. :)

Fun with Hertz car rentals, part 2 (or how to waste more vacation time!)

If you're reading this, the last act in this drama (see the previous blog post) was that in Patras a friendly employee from Hertz picked up the rental car to bring it to a repair workshop. A bit later than planned, but nevertheless. Now the story continues.

• About 20:00 the same day I get a phone call from the same lady that my car was ready, and we could meet in about 20min next to my hotel so I can pick it up again. That sounded great to me. Some minutes later I saw the car coming.
• Of course I wanted to try out the repaired roof / window immediately, so we did that. Opened the roof, closed the roof. The passenger side window did not close; precisely the same phenomenon. Oops.
• I tried a few more times on instruction by the Hertz employee, with the result that the window got stuck at half height and did not move anymore even after shutting down and restarting the ignition. Since it was stuck on the wrong side of its rubber seal, also the passenger door did not open anymore.
• The visibly nervous Hertz employee calls her manager on the mobile, who arrives after a few minutes. The manager opens the passenger door with application of force. Afterwards, and after restarting the engine, the window slides up again.
• We have some discussion about a replacement car, where I point out that I paid a lot of money for having a convertible, and really want one. I agree to come to the office thursday morning to sort things out.
• Next morning, Thursday, at the Hertz office, I'm glad to learn that a replacement car will be sent. Of course, I'm now leaving Patras, so the car will have to be sent to a station near my next stops.
• We discuss this and agree that I will pick the car up tomorrow (Friday) afternoon in Kalamata (which is only about 80km from my Friday evening hotel in Kyparissia).

Oh well. Glad that things are somehow sorted out. I spend the rest of the day visiting a Mycenaean castle (1200 BC), a Frankish castle (1200 AD), and re-visiting Olympia, spend the night near Olympia, and then start towards Kalamata through the mountains via, e.g. the excavations of ancient Messene. Sometime on the way I realize that the Kalamata Hertz offices (according to the website) are closed 14:00 to 17:00, so I plan with arriving there around 18:00. That's ample time since they should be open 17:00 - 21:00 (search for Kalamata here).

• Arrive 18:10 at the Kalamata city office. Nobody there, and there's a sign on the door saying "We are at Kalamata Airport."
• Drive back the ~10km to the airport (which I passed on the way before). Arrive there around 18:30. The entire airport is already closed for the day. No Hertz employees in sight.
• Call the Kalamata office. First response, "We closed half an hour ago." When I start explaining my problem, the lady on the phone says "But your car has not arrived from Athens yet!" I point out that I have to go back to Kyparissia, quite some way, today. She doesnt know when it will arrive, but says something about late evening. 
• I tell her I will now get dinner here in Kalamata, and afterwards call her again.

That's where we are now. Just as a reminder, it's now Friday evening, and the problem has essentially been known to Hertz since last Sunday.

Update:

• Tried calling the Hertz Kalamata office again around 20:45. No response, after a while some mailbox text in Greek. 
• Drove back the 60km to Kyparissia, arrived at the hotel 22:00. Will call Hertz again tomorrow.

Update 2: Yes, Hertz knows my mobile phone number. It's big and fat on my contract, and I also gave it again and reconfirmed it to the employee at Patras. So, one could assume if something goes wrong they phone me...

Update 3: It ends well. See the next post.

Fun with Hertz car rentals (or how to waste vacation time)

So, I decided to get myself a rather expensive treat this summer. For travelling the Peloponnes I rented a Mini Cooper convertible. These are really cute, and driving around in the sun with the roof open felt like a very nice idea. I'm a Hertz Gold Club customer, so why not go for Hertz again.

I picked up the car in Athens, all looked fine. The first day I had some longer driving to do, and also the manual was only in Greek, so I decided to drive to my first stop and check out the convertible roof there. OK, with some fiddling I found and read a German manual on the BMW website (now I know where to find the VIN number, if anyone asks :), opened the roof, enjoyed half a day in the mountains near Kalavrita.

Afterwards the passenger side window didn't close anymore.

It turns out something was already bent or damaged inside the door, so the window was sliding up on the wrong side of its rubber seal. At some point it can't move any further, so the electronics stops and disables the window. The effect is perfectly reproducible, and scratch marks on the rubber seal and door frame indicate it's been doing that already for a while. Oh well.

• Phoned the nearest Hertz office in Patras. After some complicated discussion in English they advised me to contact the office in Athens.
• Phoned the Hertz office in Athens. I managed to explain the problem there. They said I should contact their central technical service office, since maybe they know something easy to do. 
• Phoned the central technical service office. There the problem was quickly understood; a very helpful lady explained to me that most likely the car would have to be exchanged. Since it was Sunday afternoon, they couldn't do it now, but somebody would call me back on Monday morning 9-10.
• Waited Monday morning for the call. Nothing happened. 
• Phoned the central technical service office, Monday around 13:00. They asked me where I was. After telling them I'm going to Patras the next day, they told me I should come by their office there.
• Arrived at the Patras office tuesday around 17:30. I demonstrated the problem to the lady there. She acknowledged that something's broken, and told me she'd come to my hotel the next day between 11:00 and 12:00 to pick up the car and bring it to the BMW service for repair. 
• Now I'm sitting in the bar of the hotel, it's 12:30, no one has called or come by, and slowly I'm getting seriously annoyed.

Let's see how the story continues...

• Update: 13:00, friendly lady from Hertz picked up the car. Fingers crossed. Made clear it's a long rental, so delaying makes no sense. Wants to phone me either in the afternoon or tomorrow morning.
• Update 2: The drama continues in the next blog post.

Not keeping up - DB ICE w-lan hotspots pointless

We used to be very much at the top of travel comfort, at least what network connectivity concerned. On many routes of the high speed trains within Germany, W-LAN hotspots were installed in the cars, and the network was (not free but) reliable and quite fast. (Which 3G mobile network connectivity usually is not once you're moving at 300kph.)
Now, in the age of the smartphone, unfortunately we learn firsthand what happens if supply does not follow demand... During each of my last train trips, the router was quickly out of IP adresses. Strong signal, wi-fi connection fine, no network layer. Which makes the whole thing extremely pointless. :(

Having fun with Hugin

There's as always a lot of fun stuff you can do with Gentoo; what I've discovered recently is Hugin (media-gfx/hugin) for panorama stitching. See the above image (and in particular click on it for a better view!) for one of the amazing results. The file is not really perfect yet and probably will never be, as boats tend to move with the waves. Even after removing all useless alignment points and adding many correct ones manually, if you look very closely there are some shifts. Nevertheless, I think the result is pretty neat. The image is assembled from 16 separate free-hand portrait photographs, each with resolution 3456 x 2304; after cropping the total size of the assembled image is 20227 x 1390.

Arry Potter et les Reliques de la Mort, 2e partie

This is already the second time I'm watching a new Harry Potter movie while in France, but the first time that it's in French. :) Ah well, Collioure is not Paris, but breathtakingly beautiful anyway, also now at night with the full moon over the bay and the castle... But I disgress...
As expected, not counting all the moms and dads in the audience, I was somewhere at the upper age edge. Accordingly, the movie makers had also obviously put a lot of effort into making all the killing in volume 7 more "boom bang crash" but not really that bloody. Still, the whole experience was quite some action and special effects spectacular, keeping (as far as I can remember now, having stuffed my head with all that physics in the meantime) rather close to the book. The lightheaded humour sprinkled through some of the earlier movies was mostly missing, but that was to be expected. The bad guy is finished off heroically, with quite some tragic losses and tears shed on the way, and finally all the Dumbledore / Snape connections become clear. (By the way, in the French version the name Snape has been translated... seems like some someone actually realized that JKR is good on wordplay.)
On the whole I liked this Harry Potter movie more than many of the other more recent ones, mainly because there was enough "movie time per book page" to tell a coherent story. If you have read the books a few times, that probably does not matter, but there might also be some moviegoers who have not... There even was enough time to add the cheesy "19 years later" epilogue, causing quite some sniffing in the audience. I felt that our heroes did not look old enough there, just dressed up a bit different ("adult style"). But then, maybe I'm just too old and you have to be sixteen to notice the change in makeup...
Now of course the most interesting question is, how will J. K. Rowling continue. From a financial point of view, giving up the franchise at this point would of course be sheer stupidity; even so, I understand that some sort of a break might be needed. I'm not a sufficiently enthusiastic fan to follow all the internet fandom and rumour sites, but in the long run, I believe that some more books will turn up for sure. After all, life does not end after highschool, even if you have just overcome le Seigneur des Ténèbres, right? :)

Near most-beautiful: La Seu d'Urgell cathedral

Ever since I picked a related topic for one of my highscool final exam in history, I have been a big fan of Romanesque architecture, churches and masonry in general. For those who don't know, this term denotes a period rougly 1000 A.D. to 1300 A.D.; wikipedia of course has an extensive article on the subject. The largest and most elaborate Romanesque cathedral ever unfortunately has been torn down many centuries ago and exists today only in digital reconstruction, but in spite of the age quite some buildings have survived until today. So far my clear favourite was the church of Fontevraud-l'Abbaye, an incredibly light building of clear lines, famous also because King Richard Lionheart is buried there. Since today, I have a clear runner-up: the cathedral of La Seu d'Urgell in Catalonia, whose bishop is one of the co-rulers of the Principality of Andorra. The pictures on the wikipedia page (and also my own ones) do not do the building justice. It is at the same time both beautiful with clean lines and elegant architecture and dotted with the obscure, partially bizarre or funny detail masonry that comes up on some of the more elaborate buildings of that era. Beyond describing in words!

Carcassonne, the city from another world

Carcassonne just had to be the first stop of my summer vacation. After reading about it in books both fictional and nonfictional and seeing one picture of the cite I was hooked. What a place this is... The 19th century restoration of the fortress definitively paid off, and a "medieval city/fortress spirit" is captured despite the hordes of tourists passing through the place every day. Then, of course, this is a place mostly for tourists today, albeit an amazingly beautiful one. Seen from the river Aude the ancient city seems to be floating high up in the sky... and close up the fortifications are overwhelming. Already looking forward to postprocess the photographs later at home... :)

Vacation reading: "Young Miles"

I'm on vacation... and while that often means I'm running around from romanesque monastery to roman rubble pile, this time it's also a real relaxation vacation. Including beaches and many shady cafes in beautiful old cities (have I mentioned Carassonne already?). Time to slow down, go through the recommendations from friends collected throughout the last months and grab a good book (or two, or three). I started of with "Young Miles", and what a strange start it was...

"It isn't easy, being a Vor lord..." Miles Vorkosigan, age 17, is only son of the emperor's regent and heir to an ancient title himself. Life could be perfect, were it not for that unfortunate assassination attempt on his parents years ago, which left him, err, vertically challenged for life, and with rather brittle bones. When your predestined career is the military, this does not really help... especially if you fail the entrance physical by breaking both legs at the first hurdle of the obstacle course. This, however, is where the story only starts. Our hero is gifted with ego, brains, and a not-just-slightly hyper attitude to bounce from one improbable situation into the next, collecting friends, allies, enemies, and a most crazy storyline. Of course, his adventures include all the things that real academy cadets are told never to expect (even in imperial security, you'll only ever meet ugly male spies), and the chain of command is not really a suitable concept for a little egomaniac like Miles. Kept me laughing for quite some time, and I will have a look at the many already existing sequels sometime soon.
A friend recommended the book to me with the words "like Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, with less daddy issues and prostitutes", but that comparison is missing a few points. Not as deep as Game of Thrones and not as elaborate, but very much fun relaxation reading. It's a bit like going from Lord of the Rings to the early, light-hearted Harry Potters, and mixing in a dose of Stephanie Plum... :) Oh yeah, and don't get turned off by the book cover. Other people find it strange too and have made way better suggestions...
Lois McMaster Bujold, "Young Miles". Baen Books 2003; ISBN 0-7434-3616-4. Buffo space opera, screwball sci-fi comedy. 4 out of 5 smileys in the Light Reading category :))))!

Impressive sci meeting

As you can see from the above picture, it's travelling time again for me. The weather is great, the snow as well, there are a lot more photos to prove it... :) However, not all is skiing and vacation. The real reason for the stay here in La Thuile at the top end of the Aosta Valley is a scientific conference, "Rencontres de Moriond 2011: Quantum Mesoscopic Physics". This is indeed one of the scientifically best meetings of this field, with worldwide attendance. (The excellent skiing opportunities and the great Italian food may of course help attracting people.) Talks go from 9:00 to 12:30 and from 17:00 to 20:00. (I'm writing this at ~22:00 of the last evening and don't count the coffee cups anymore.)

I met here a friend again, one of the powerusers who initially introduced me to Gentoo. As we're at a conference we got talking about doing presentations with Linux, and he showed me a really neat Python program for that. (Normally I don't touch anything Python except with a very long stick, as it would interfere with my daily prayer to Larry Wall. Just kidding, well about the prayer at least...) I found out that a previous version of it had already been available in Gentoo before as "keyjnote". Keyjnote development is not continuing, but a new project named Impressive picked it up. With its new upstream name the program also got a new ebuild name: app-office/impressive. Apart from being a pretty stylish pdf viewer, and integrating/cooperating nicely with dev-tex/latex-beamer and (open|libre)office impress, one of the great advantages of Impressive is that arbitrary python hooks can be added to each slide. Want to play a sound, a video, ...? Want to have a robot voice read out your presentation? Sure, can do! Give it a try!

Fries, FOSDEM, Delirium Tremens

And here I am now reporting from an extended weekend in Brussels. It's kind of stupid that I have to leave Regensburg just at the moment when results in the lab get really interesting. But then, I'm staying online all the time anyway, and this weekend is FOSDEM time. Definitely a great opportunity to meet with some of the other Gentoo devs face to face. We had the Gentoo developers FOSDEM dinner yesterday, finishing with good Belgian beer near the Grand Place. So far it has been a lot of fun. We even have quorums for both the Gentoo Council and the Gentoo KDE team here...

At the conference site I sometimes have this weird feeling of visiting the nerd pole. One of the events definitly freaking out the locals was the outdoor GPG keysigning. Imagine cold windy weather and 150 geeks standing in a line along the curb and swapping passports for two hours... Just now I'm listening to an interesting and very funny talk about the LibreOffice fork. ("Are you German? We need your help deciphering the code comments! What does 'Manta-Hack' mean? And, 'Wenn Sie das lesen können, haben Sie eine Waschmaschine gewonnen!'???)

The weekend is way too short anyway. Somehow I was not that much excited about visiting Brussels for the third time. Frites and mussels, bah. Now that I'm here, though, I think I should definitely come again. I barely remember the place, there are so many things to (re)visit, art nouveau buildings to discover, flea markets to stroll across, and everything related to Gaufres and Chocolat just has to be good. Cheers!

Power failure

Oh yes, and I was stupid enough to forget my UK plug adapter at the London hote

Very British

Travelling again... this time I took a small break between two meetings, and ended up in warm(!) and sunny(!) London. Main task, however, was getting a decent amount of sleep first, so I ended up being inappropriately lazy. Ah well... Saturday evening I went to see Stomp - a strange but fascinating hybrid of pantomime, percussion, and dance performance. Now I know what things you all can use to make a bang! A later highlight was an exhibition of advertisment poster art by Rene Gruaud for Dior. My personal favourite is the Flower Woman... See here for a nice review and the source for the image. unfortunately it's completely impossible to get poster prints for a reasonable price. Otherwise it was great again to wander through the City, well to be accurate mostly through the West End and surroundings. It's been such a long time, I had not even seen Millenium Bridge, Tate Modern, or the Eye yet. (Well maybe except for on Doctor Who.) It's still a vivid, beautiful, fashionable, young, and exclusive place, where something's happening all the time. When I left, at Leicester Square the red carpet was just rolled out for the gala premiere of Burlesque with Cher and Christina Aguilera. And I really started laughing when I went to see the crown jewels in the Tower, and one of the golden ceremonial maces was missing and marked not with "under restoration" as a republican foreigner might expect, but with "in use"... Monday finally was shopping day. (Not only for me but for a few million Londoners as well I guess...) Various museum shops, Waterstones, HMV, Harrods, ... I'm starting to wonder what the Lufthansa agents at the airport will tell me though. Anyway. Time to get to Britain more frequently again.

Dutch detour

We made it to the internal SFB689 spintronics workshop in Niederalteich, though barely in time. The origin of the delay is so bizarre that it just has to be reported: on the motorway, some sort of heavy duty vehicles were transporting two tram cars across the Bavarian province. That's not so strange in itself, but one of them seemed strangely familiar to me, with a logo "HTM" and a destination displayed as "Station HS". Who had the crazy idea to give a Dutch tram car from Den Haag an excursion into the Danube hinterland?!!! Anyway, see for yourself...

Picture gallery online

Grignano harbour and the
ICTP guesthouse

And just to prove how nice it is here, I've uploaded some pictures. Click on the thumbnail to see more! :)
By the way, the large building on the right edge of this photograph is the Adriatico Guesthouse of the ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical Physics).

Theoretical physics heaven

I managed to leave office and home yesterday, for a really promising conference. Deadlines are looming for a lot of paperwork, but thanks to modern computer technology work never really leaves you. So, train to München, plane to Italy... Right now I'm sitting on the terrace of the guesthouse of the local centre for theoretical physics (hosting the conference), overlooking the small yacht harbour, and watching the sun set over the Adriatic sea. I have not been to Italy for far too much time, and now it's really hard to keep typing. Though, even writing a research proposal is somehow much more pleasant here at the coast or on the terrace of a grand cafe at the piazza, sipping an espresso doppio and waching the crowd...

PS. You can buy ethernet cables here in the guesthouse 24h per day from a vending machine. Right now they are sold out though... :)