I was fortunate enough to be able to attend and speak at a (beginning of October) summer school at ISTA, which is a large and growing scientific institute in Klosterneuberg, outside of Vienna, and I was also able to visit my collaborator's lab at TU Wien as well as the Vienna MicroKelvin Laboratory. I spend the following week visiting the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay, hanging out with the quantum electronics group. Many thanks to my hosts for helping to organize these trips and for making me feel so welcome.
In-person visits allow for longer, extensive, interactive conversations - standing at a whiteboard, or having coffee, or pointing at actual apparatus. It's a completely different experience than talking to someone over zoom or over the phone. I think I did a better job explaining our work, and I definitely think that I learned a lot more about diverse topics than if I'd only had brief virtual interactions. As an experimentalist, it can be very valuable to learn details about how some measurements are actually done, even including which bits of equipment and instrumentation are preferred by others. (LPS has a ton of Rohde and Schwarz equipment, which I've really not seen to that extent in the US. I'd also never heard of mycryofirm and their closed cycle cryostats.)
As an added bonus, I got to visit the Musée Curie in Paris and see Marie Curie's lab. Here is a photograph of a Geiger counter that they'd made c. 1930. Hand-soldered, uninsulated wires. The biggest tube is the actual Geiger-Müller tube which produces current pulses when ionizing radiation zips through it. The other two tubes make an amplifier to crank up the current pulses enough to turn an electric motor that drives a mechanical counter on the far right outside the box.
Hopefully I will finish up some writing and be posting more soon.
13 comments:
"In-person visits allow for longer, extensive, interactive conversations - standing at a whiteboard, or having coffee, or pointing at actual apparatus."
I agree, there's something about hashing out a scientific idea or concept with the help of a physical platform.
Although I have seen some do equally as well in digital setup.
Agreed that in-person visits are (can be) very valuable.
A downside of these "zoom-enabled times" that I don't see mentioned much is that many of the busiest people seem unable to escape their home institution duties or funding agency presentations even when traveling and attending conferences.
It's nice to see someone actually have something positive to say about travel and in-person meetings for a change. Many of the opinions on this topic I've seen basically say that travel and offices are unethical and anti-equitable and nobody should ever be forced to talk to anyone for work in-person ever again.
I am so very glad that you pointed out how important face-to-face communication is. I noticed during COVID that Zoom made students (and probably others) very passive, as if they are watching a video and not a part of it. When we resumed live group meetings it took a while for some people to come out of their shells and communicate. This delayed a lot of progress that people could have been having if they just had had the opportunity to discuss things. When COVID threatened to shut down our group meetings again I polled my students and they were absolutely adamant that we not go back to Zoom! Thank you Doug for bringing this to people's attention.
Thanks everyone. Suomynona, I do have concerns about travel and equitability. There is no question that travel is much easier for people who are well supported for research and/or by their institutions. It looks from the outside like the Aspen Center for Physics, for example, is facing a serious problem with costs, and if trends continue, I worry that only the best supported people (often from the wealthiest institutions) will be able to afford to attend programs there. It's a great place and a wonderful environment for learning, and it would be a shame if it became much less accessible. KITP has an endowment situation that absorbs much more of the participant costs.
Doug, the impression I'm getting is that there are those who believe that Aspen, KITP, etc. are inherently anti-equitable by their nature, so their funding situation is beside the point. The equitability issue I alluded to in my previous comment was more about those who think 100% WFH should be the industry standard for everything, from conferences and workshops to entire postdocs (i.e. the postdoc should never be required to actually physically appear at their workplace). The logic is that *any* kind of travel is always inherently unequitable, so therefore professional opportunities should never require it at all. Not just for those with less well endowed affiliations, but also those with e.g. medical situations or domestic responsibilities which make travel inconvenient. I personally enjoy the mobility and travel associated with academia (and is actually one of the reasons I'm in this business), but I have been fortunately relatively well-funded during my career.
When we run hybrid meetings and a remote speaker follows a series of live speakers, the live presentations are very interactive, with lots of questions and most in the audience following the speaker. Then it's the remote presenter's turn, everyone falls silent, and many in the audience who were previously paying attention go back to their laptop reading email. It's as though the audience treats the remote presentation as a "break".
In my group, there is also a 1:1 correlation between the location employees choose to work at (home or office) and their productivity. If I walk around the office/lab with a quick question for colleagues, I'll have a good conversation with whoever is around - for those who are not there, if the situation repeats itself, we'll start making jokes that they are "working" from an Airbnb in a sunnier location, and they will gradually lose any credibility.
Remote work is like "long COVID" for organizations who actually like to get things done.
Just to be contrary, or at least orthogonal: The reduced costs of participation in online meetings opens them up to lots of people otherwise excluded. I think there will always be value in in-person meetings but I also think we will evolve ways to make remote meetings more actively productive. Remember: People have been getting together in person for, literally, all of history. They've only been doing remote conferences for, like, half a decade.
Gilroy0 - To be clear, I think online participation should still be possible, but only in the restricted sense that it gives the freedom to people who would normally be "excluded" from an event to participate. The problem comes when remote attendance is used for convenience, and becomes normalized. The immediate cost benefits are obvious, and the drawbacks only start to build up over time. It's true that the remote-work era is in its infancy, and will surely evolve and improve in ways that we cannot predict.
On the whole question of exclusion, I'd like to add that a subset of conferences *should* remain small, and not necessarily "include" everyone who wants to join. It's fine to have large events such as the APS March Meeting, which have a "broadcasting" purpose, but we also need smaller events, to which only the most competent researchers should be invited. And if this mostly includes folks from more successful institutions, then sorry, but yes, some will feel excluded. Otherwise, we have too many cooks in the kitchen.
Gilroy0 is absolutely on target that these are still very early days for how remote/virtual attendance and interactions are going to work long term. Suomynona, as you allude, there is no way to ever ensure perfect equitability. That said, I am very uncomfortable with the extrapolation of anon@1:20, that the “most competent researchers” are from “more successful institutions“. Yes, there are very good smaller workshops, like Gordon Conferences, and we can’t expect everyone to be able to go to everything. I have no doubt that invitations for invited and plenary talks will continue to be dominated by high-flyers, regardless of virtual or hybrid meetings. That said, it’s not healthy if great venues are only accessible to the (research) wealthy.
Replace “most competent” with “most privileged” and “more successful” with “wealthier”, and you’ll be more accurate.
That is a seriously tone deaf paragraph.
You say "post-pandemic" as if the pandemic is actually over. The case numbers may be down, but that is due to a complete lack of testing, not due to a lack of infections. Covid-19 continues to mutate and evolve, while our vaccines and antivirals struggle to keep up, and all of our maskless and carefree in-person group meetings and conferences are only helping to fuel this evolution. I'm seeing more illness than ever before, both acute and long-term, and I'm afraid we're going to see more and more of this in the years to come as repeat infections wear down our immune systems. I don't doubt the value of in-person collaboration and discussion, but I hope the scientific community realizes sooner rather than later that covid-19 is still with us, and that we've got to start acting accordingly when traveling and gathering.
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