Bob says:
Back from the 8-day tour of duty in Boston. As always, I spent entirely too much time cooped up in the Mall/Convention Center complex, and not nearly enough getting out and about.
I did manage to meet up with an old friend on Friday night, and she took me here and here -- both of which proved to be groovy places. The rest of the time was spent, for the most part, working or eating or sleeping. Far too much of the first two, and not nearly enough of the third.
I don't think I've ever actually described what it is I actually do on these trips. There are two a year -- the week after Easter in San Francisco, and the week after Thanksgiving in Boston. Neither would be my choice for times to be away from home, but we get big discounts on hotel rooms and I suppose some savings on the convention centers themselves by going with those particular weeks.
Anyhoo, the organization I work for is a professional society for materials scientists. That statement itself begs two questions -- what is a professional society, and who are materials scientists?
I'll answer the second question first. "Materials Science" actually covers a broad range of scientific disciplines. If you asked a thousand scientists, you'd probably get a thousand different answers as to what it actually is -- but having worked with these people for close to four years now, I'll give you my layman's interpretation.
Materials science involves working -- at the atomic or sub-atomic level -- to understand the structure and properties of materials in order to tailor those materials to specific uses.
Remember those old BASF commercials, with the tag line that went something like "We don't make the things you use -- we make the things you use better"? That's kind of what materials science is. Our members don't make the silicon chips in your computer -- they mess around with the atomic structure of the silicon in those chips, making them smaller, better able to withstand heat, etc.
There's a whole sub-field of materials research called biomaterials. Interestingly, nature provides a wealth of materials that we're only beginning to understand. For example, the properties of spider webs -- elasticity and strength (it's been theorized that a pencil-thick strand of spider web could stop a 747 in mid-flight) are only beginning to be understood. I've seen papers come through this place on squid ink and all sorts of other topics.
Other materials science fields include nanotechnology, ceramics, metallurgy, electronic and magnetic materials, and a bunch of other stuff that I can neither understand nor pronounce.
So that's materials science. As for what a professional society is, the best way I can explain it is that, in order for all of these scientists to get the word out on what they've discovered through their work, they need to either publish it in technical journals (we publish one, the Journal of Materials Research) or present it at meetings.
Those meetings are where we come in.
Twice a year, materials scientists come from, quite literally, every corner of the globe to attend our meetings and give 15-minute-long talks about their work. Hardly seems worth it, if you ask me, but it must be -- it's not unheard of for people to literally spend everything they have to get to the meeting. I've never seen it, but long-timers in the organization describe Soviet-block scientists coming to the meetings with nothing but the clothes on their backs. It's been up to the staff to find these people rooms at the local Y -- and if you looked carefully, you could see them walking around to the various candy dishes and emptying them into their pockets. That's what they'd live on for the week.
But of course that's the exception. The vast majority of our members/attendees are firmly ensconsed in either academia, at one of the national labs such as Sandia, or in private industry. (I think the breakdown is something like 60% academic, 20% national labs or military, and 20% corporate, although I could be off with that.)
Whatever else you say about the membership, they are, without exception, smart. Really smart. Really, really, often intimidatingly smart. Occasionally lacking a little bit of common sense, perhaps, but smart. In one or two cases, Nobel-Prize-Winning smart.
So yeah, our meetings. Spring is a little smaller. We get around 3,600 attendees there. The Fall Meeting in Boston is the biggie -- over 5,000 attendees. We fill up a bunch of hotels, on a week that's traditionally pretty slow in the travel industry, so needless to say that we're pretty well-loved in Boston.
What boggles the mind, though, is the logistics of putting a meeting like that together. I'm only on the periphery (my job is to run the organization's Web site), so I don't get involved much in the planning, but it is a monumental task. It amazes me every year that we're able to pull it off with a staff of around 40 people. (I'd estimate that 3/4 of the staff travel to the meetings. The rest stay home and drink all day during meeting weeks. Or so I imagine.)
When you rent a convention center, what you get is -- a big space. A big, empty space with rooms. You provide pretty much everything else.
So, we have approximately 35 - 40 symposia going on at once. Every one of those rooms needs a certain amount of a-v equipment. Mics, speakers, projectors, that sort of thing. Does the convention center provide these things?
Oh no. For that, you need a vendor. We have a very good one, but they don't come cheap, believe me.
How about the hanging of signs? Or the placement of carpeting on the concrete floors? Or the set-up and tear-down of literally hundreds of exhibitor booths and registration booths and information desks and the like?
Again, a vendor. A very, very expensive vendor. One that owns literally hundreds of poster boards, because that's another thing that the convention center doesn't provide.
Anyway, that's what I do for two weeks a year, and that's what I'm recuperating from right now.
Oh yeah, I never answered the cost-of-the-pizza question. In part, that's because my previous information is no longer valid.
In the past, I am 100% certain that I was told that we paid either $120 or $140 per pie for our Symposium X pizzas. (Now that I think about it, that MAY have been San Francisco.) But this time, after checking with our on-site manager, I found that we were only paying $20 for a 10-slice round pizza. Not nearly as insane, although I'm told by my sources that the $20 pizzas were disgusting and inedible. I would hope that the $120/$140 pies are at least edible.
