At the GSA annual meeting in Portland

I arrived in Portland late Sunday night and headed out to the conference monday morning. Now it's Tuesday evening and I am done for the day. Tomorrow will be the last day of conference activity for me, unless I can get onto a field trip. I am still hoping for an opening, but I haven't heard back from anyone on that yet. Monday was interesting. Started out with a morning session on Geoscience in Community Colleges which could turn out to be very helpful. When I cam in the talk was on Project Teach, which is a interdisciplinary (IDS) multi-"quarter" (that particular school operates with four quarters a year instead of two semesters) program using inquiry teaching with Education Program students. The next talk was on a program that was a two year collaboration with various K-12 institutions. On that campus that had worked out Transfer Agreement Guarantees (TAGs) with other colleges in their state, and their program is actually a STEM initiative. Seems like STEM initiatives are operating in practically every school. Per the lecturer, they want to "Prime the Pump" of a cycle where the University System gets inputs of students from the High School System, and outputs Science Instructors to the High School System. The people there had actually managed to develop an "Earth Systems" course for high school students that, while not specifically required in their state, is one from a list of options that meet graduation requirements. Thats state wide. Thats pretty darned impressive. They also were able to coordinate with their high schools because their state apparently has "county science coordinators', I don't believe NY has anything like that. It would've made the logistics of running out summer grant much easier.

Some more notes on talks, with quick paraphrases of titles that were written as the talk was starting, so they might not even be recognizable in some cases. One thing I noticed that happens here is that the session director announces the title of the talk as an intro, which I don't recall happening too often in other conferences, but maybe my memory is just faulty.

• Promoting Success w/o a Geoscience Program - just had 3 science students last year. "[We're] not preparing future geoscientists". She also noted that ~98% of community colleges do not have a geoscience program. A later speaker in session remarked that that doesn't sound right and that their college doesn't have a geoscience degree, but that they still consider themselves to have a program. I think that the original speaker is quite correct to say that not having a degree, and at a community college we're "only" talking about an associate's degree, means that you don't have a program. We have Earth and Planetary Sciences courses, and we even have an Earth and Planetary Science coordinator, but we can't say that we have a program.
• Comparison of two effective com. coll. science programs - comparing Arizon and Minnesota, with a speaker for each splitting the talk. What define's strength? Function of the Served Community / College Mission / Place in statewide higher education / number and interests of geoscience faculty / student enrollment and interest. I think that that was well worth enumerating, if you think of 'strong' programs, they're going to be hitting the mark on all of those, with the served community condition perhaps being met after meeting the other conditions, or springing up naturally out of having met those other conditions. So how to get students interested? Well they offer a "low stakes" field course. By that they mean that its only worth two credits. Which seems odd at first, why do all that work for only two credits, BUT the advantage is that it then doesn't carry as much weight in GPA calculation, it won't 'ruin' your GPA if you mess it up. Which, if the students realize that, is a pretty clever recruitment tool I think. They directed their program at Title 1 schools (apparently those that receive funds, or some level of funds or some such) for lunch programs, w/ Educational outreach programs using college student teachers as their teachers.
• Field Trips as a tool for recruitment/retainment - Exploration can attract people. Post trip, they students meet and are given strips of paper with observations and interpretations, and told to put them in order, based on what they saw during their exploration. Students also wirte a paper. They tried student (peer) review w/blackboard, but had troubles getting people to take that part seriously. I seem to recall at anoth meeting, at the Ocean Science Diversity Workshop in Seattle infact, that one of the speakers there was doing, something, I forget what right now, to make sure that people participated. I think that their own grade was modified in part by how much a paper that they had reviewed had been improved (so grade once by a prof, send for review, grade again, and modify the reviewers grade by some proportion, and they better hope it doesn't go down!). They've been running one trip a semester, but are now considering/starting to do two, three, etc. This was in northern Virginia.
• Field Experience - This is in California. At this com. coll. they offer lots of field courses, w/ some as a capstone type. Their intro courses have individual optional field courses associated with them, so you can take oceanography and also sign up for Oceanography field Trips, or physical geology, and physical geology field trips, etc. These were all 4 day trips, but that might be a one day trip, and then later a 3 day overnight trip, or 4 sep trips, etc. They're also having 2-3 hour field trips incorporated into the mainline course. They're doing sediment sampling and sorting analyses, mapping structures, using compasses, etc. The capstone courses are in the intersession and are 2-3 week courses. I recall the speaker saying that when she hears from profs. who receive their students after they transfer, that they are super duper prepared for their intro field courses. She was happy about that. But I am thinking, jesus, these kids are doing a heckuva lot of field work, for an associate level degree, and THEN they still have to take introductory field courses?
• Watershed Monitoring Program - Shoreline City, WA. Site has lots of erosion upstream with a wide depositional zone/floodplain downstream. Glacial till and sand with some clay beds. They monitor deposition/flooding events, which is easy for them because its on their campus, or super close or whatever and they can just stroll out to it. Students in 100, 200 level courses (2 courses) do the monitoring, to give the infor to the watershed authorities eventually and also for the college's own need to monitor their own impact on the watershed. They're going to start using GPS tech to measure out the main channel thalweg (had to think for a minute what that was, for some reason I was thinking of geode(c)t(ic)) position to measure change over time.
• Pedagogical Shift in Field Geology Courses - normally I hate it when people make their titles sound crazy impressive when they're not. But here they didn't mean that they've discovered some tremendous, Kuhn like paradigm shift in the way every teaches, but rather that they had shifted their own pedagogy after a while. They started with Cram and Jam type field courses, with students setting camp, then starting with lectures in camp, covering the basics of earth science, even bringing, ironically, rock sample kits to the camp, and then going out to the field. But this made people feel overwhelmed. The speaker related that it was to the point that one student called her husband and told him to book a flight home for her now cause she was gonna loose it. But the speaker said that by the end she ended up loving the course. Actually what he said at first but then corrected himself on was that by the end of the day she loved the course. I was thinking, if that were true, they this person'd be nuts to flip flop between such extremes. So their shift was to just let the students go out directly into the field on the first day, to explore on their own, just telling them to be observant. And they'd do this for like an hour or a few and come back and then they'd start going over what they saw, and gradually build up to c.f. the level you'd want in that introductory talk. They felt that this worked very well. These are students with, often, zero experience, and apparently it works better this way. They repeat the process at subsequent stops, with the students writting up their observations. Observe and Report. Then in the evenings, thats when they break out the kits and the lectures. The crazy thing is, these guys are running field trips outta WA, but to Montana, Arizona, Hawaii and the Galapagos. And again, thats with what, 1st, 2nd year students with no geo background.
• Earthquake Preparation and Preparedeness - Also a Shoreline Com. Coll. This is a Service Learning (SL) program; ties classroom to serving the community. They got an Americorps Vista volunteer Coordinator, this person determines the needs and interests of the community and coordinates with the program instructors. They also have a Fellowship Program for faculty to develop SL courses. They may even makde SL a graduation requirement. Speaker notes 2 models (1) a 15-hour commitment on thet part of students where they go out and find non-profits to work with. (2) project-model; centered around specific project outcome for the community group (ie watershed monitoring, hazards education, etc). The project they did was Earthquake preparedness to educate local community about hazards and increase preparedness, in groups of 3-4. So the students had to work within that framework. This is done in a quarter (so 6 weeks I think). Example activities, powerpoint presentation, posters, it depends on the needs of the non-profit org. At a YMCA afterschool program, they asked that it not be a lecture for the kids, so the students made a trivia game on hazard preparedness. Another did emergency plan revisions for retirement homes, child care centers, including their com. coll. campus' child care center. This fufils the college mission 'to serve' the community. So the project is of course just a part of the class,so the students are being taught, and they're basically being tested on their learning of the material by seeing how they can teach it or communicate it to the community.
• Earth Science or Geo-Science - the last talk was a general discussion on which it best, with earth science covering astro, geo, ocean, meteo. The speaker I think nwas in a position to be able to give such a general talk, imho, I beleive, because he had been brought on by a college to revamp their geoscience program, so he's speaking from a position of 'authority' in a sense.

And that was Monday morning. Got a quick breakfast at the starbucks in the convention center (of course there's one in the convention center). Pumpkin latte was better than I thought'd've been.

Getting Ready For GEOPORT

Getting ready today for the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. My flight leaves tonight; I'll show up late tonight and start hitting up the presentations Monday morning. I had hoped to attend a post meeting field trip, exploring the Terroir of the Columbia gorge, however that trip is full. I emailed the trip leader, a professor at Portland University, in the hopes that there is a wait list for openings, so I will have to see how that goes. Pretty busty weekend actually, since I just got back from a trip to the Poconos. It was a friend's birthday, so we went up Friday to stay the weekend. My attendance at this meeting is being sponsored through I small grant I obtained through our Union Professional Development fund.

Matthew/Thomas Wedding in PA

Went to a wedding for Baby Uncle and Lela Aunty's daughter yesterday. The groom isn't syro-malabar catholic, but the mass and ceremony were extremely similar. THe only difference I noticed anyway was that, at the reception, the boys gathered around the couple when they were introduced and shouted something a few times while all pointing one finger in the air and then swinging their hands down. Not sure what its supposed to mean though.

It was a nice service at a large church, Dad estimated around 500 people at the reception. They had hired a drummer for the reception (along with a dj of course). Overall it was a nice wedding. We had planned the next day to go into Philly, because the whole thing was just outside of it, however we just weren't feeling up to it and wanted to get some shopping done while we were in a relatively lower tax area. Ended up buying, after a good amount of searching, a Nintendo Wii. So that's fun. Now we have something to use the Wii Guitar Hero game we bought with!

AMS Ocean Studies Diversity Project, Hotel and Flights

Just got off the phone with Fortune Travel, s/w Nanette to book flight to Seattle for the AMS workshop.

Leaving on a Delta flight DL 0627 leaving from JFK @820 on 2/15 and landing in Seattle at noon.
Returning on a Delta flight DL 0162 at 1240 and arriving at JFK around 915.


I also spoke w/ Mz. Mills at AMS about the hotel. She confirmed that there is a room set aside, the actual room will be assigned on arrival. They just have a block for attendees.Confirmed that the hotel is:
Universtiy Inn
4140 Roosevelt Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
(800)733-3855

Still going to need to book a hotel for the night of the 21st and 22nd, somewhere in downtown Seattle.

NAGT part deux

"Caffeine and Carbs" breakfast at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in their new science building, the Gary Comer building. Apparently Mr. Comer is a businessman who sailed through the northwest passage on a bet, that he wouldn't be able to do it. After completing it, he was apparently so impressed by the lack of ice blocking the passage, that he became very interested in climate. One of the results of that is then this new research facility. Most of the researchers haven't moved in yet, at least it looked like that to me, but there were several that were doing work while the conference was going on. I beleive that Dr. deMenocal's lab is going to be in this building also. Out of the blue, Dr. Green from the department showed up and we talked for a while. Then, possibly out of the same blue, Dr. Coke from Adelphi showed up. We talked for a while too. That was especially fortunate for me, because I didn't have the car for that trip and he offered me a ride on the Iron Mine trail trip, which I had been planning on going on. Dr. Green was attending a different trip. NAGT had prepared box lunches for the trip, but you had to pay for them, which is unusual, but probably a result of having to plan the whole thing on two month's notice.

After breakfast, Dr. Wally Broecker from LDEO gave a talk. Infact, it was the same talk he had given at the OSM 2008 meeting in Orlando, "Warning from the world's tiny Oceans (closed lake basins)." He started by considering Held's (Issac Held, Princeton) prediction that in a warming world, the tropics get wetter and the drylands get drier. Dr. Broecker reasoned that if thats what happens in a warming world, then should, in a cooling world, the tropics get drier and the drylands get wetter? He tested this by looking at the sizes of various pluvial (closed basin) lakes through the ages. He decided that the following equation applies:

A(basin)* hRfr = A(lake)hE (hR rainfall rate, fr runoff fraction, hE lake evaporation)

and that from this,

A(lake)/A(basin) = fr (hR/hE)

He refered to a 'mystery interval' between just before 18kya and 14kya where climate acts strangely. In this interval, the Southern ocean is warming, while ice coverage in the Northern hemisphere grows. He also stated that there was an increase in CO2, probably caused by the retreat of seaice in the Southern Hemisphere.

The ITCZ shifts southwards, because it follows heat across the globe (this is what it normally does in austral summers). This incidentally results in a weakening of monsoons. The biggest southwards push of the ITCZ is during the Mystery Interval.

Dry lakes are largest during the mystery interval, and large at the LGM. Dr. Broecker concluded that the ice volumes that existed during the ice ages do NOT obviate Held's prediction, and that drylands will infact get much dryer as the world warms.

He also, interestingly, stated that he wasn't too concerned anymore with shutdown of global thermohaline circulation, especially not by influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic. The Younger Dryas cooling that may have resulted from just such an effect would've required a great amount of water. Since there aren't giant reserves of ice today, Dr. Broecker observed, we're probably not going to have a massive influx of freshwater, even with melting at the poles, and shutting down THC. He also felt that the recent papers that claimed to have observed a shutdown of the Gulf Stream were just too short in duration to be able to call 'abnormal'. He figured you'd need a 30 year record or something like that on that level of detail to be able to rule of 'normal' cycles.


There was a break after the talk, and then we met for the saturday field trips. I went on a trip to the Iron Mine trail at the Sterling Forest Visitors center in NY. Dr. Gates of Rutgers lead the trip and passed out a trip guide booklet. The trail included a pre-revolution Iron Furnance which had been shut down in the 1760s, but then, at the command of none less than Washington himself was rebuilt and reopened to aid in the war. Afterwards, it was shutdown again. It reopened again much later, and ceased operations in the 1920s. Originally ore rock, charcoal, and limestone was carted to the Furnace, dumped into it, and then it was tapped at the bottom to release molten iron. In the closer to modern period, magnetite ore was actualy mined on location. Apparently the people that built the Furnace didn't know that there was in fact a large reserve of ore so close by. The remains of the more modern that shutdown in the 1920s are still there. Cables for the cable cars are strewn all around the cable house. We walked off the path and behind those remains and a little ways and came upon a small strip mine, with an entrance to another underground mine nearby in a depression of rocks, the organization had sealed a gate over the entrance to prevent anyone from entering, the interior of the mine if of course flooded anyway.
The magnetite in this location, Dr. Gates explained and pointed out, did not, as is usual, form by deposition within fractures of the surrounding rock. Rather, the source water leached into the surrounding carbonate rocks, and slowly replaced them such that now the magnetite has the relict structures of the carbonate.
The visitors center had very nice dioramas of the furnance and mine and the park in general. We also watched a short video wherein Dr. Gates, and a cartoon cave man (Dr. Gates was equally bewildered as the rest of us), described the geological history of the park. We started in the visitors center and ended there. One of the park rangers had relatively recently been able to acquire and trace back to the more modern mine an ore cart (apparently the person who had previously found it had been using it as a bbq), and also a part of the pre-revolutionary Furnace, some sort of iron flange that they thought was slotted into a beam as part of the Furnance, which was powered by a waterwheel.

NAGT Trip

Friday
Apparently the meeting was supposed to be in the Hamptons, but 2 months ago that all fell through. Within that time, the group managed to set up a meeting at LDEO and some field trips. Unfortunately, the hotel is terrible. I called up to make reservations and could hear that there was construction going on. Some hallways in the hotel are metal rafters for the ceiling and carpeted floors. Its been raining so the whole place stinks of mold, and the floors in some hallways are sopping wet. The lady at the front desk when I showed up was sitting at a fold out table with a hardhat on. After checking in she lifted up a plastic tarp that was covering one of the doors and let me go through a torn apart hallway with equipment lying everywhere to get the side of the hotel my room was on. We're also going to have to pay admission for some of the trips.

Field Trip to Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, NJ to a former Zinc mine w/fluorescent minerals. Collected ~9lbs worth of material from their tailings pile. Calcite fluoresces red, willemite green, and I managed to get a small sample with a little bit of hydrozincite, which glows a pale blue. All of this apparently a result of just one element in the form of impurities in the mineral, Manganese. In different crystals, forming different bonds, the bonding electrons which are participating in the fluorescence fluoresce different colors. The museum also gives a tour of the mine where the walls of the mine, of course, are made up of these brilliantly fluorescing minerals. The museum also has a great mineral collection on display, apparently obtained by the Oreck vacuum family.


I spoke with Earl Verbeek, the field geologist at the Sterling Hill Mining Museum regarding their teacher education program, which seems like an interesting program. They have on site training and also videoconferencing, which is good because we have that ability too.

I gave a presentation before the group on our MSS-OST program. Most people seemed interested. At least we were able to get the word out about the program. Other presentations included evaluating teaching techniques with reference to certification level, using GIS in the class room (specificallty ArcGis and ArcExplorer) and the Einstein Program.

I spoke with a Ms. Kathy Prichinello from New Utrecht HS (1601-80 St Brooklyn NY 11214) during the group dinner. She was curious to see our Introduction to Earth Science Lab Manual, I told her I would find out if it is permited to sent it out. She said she is allways looking for new ways of running her labs.

Poster for NAGT

Completed and printed out a 24 inch wide poster for NAGT on the MSS-OST program. Created file in Adobe InDesgin, which does not export as a tiff. KCATT, where the poster was printed by Brian (Dr. Rosen was out)works in tiff format. They also allways seem to work in MS Publisher. I will have to remember to try to prepare the next poster in Publisher. I thought I entered the size into Adobe InDesign as 24 inches, but apparently it was smaller. Brian was able to easily resize to 24 wide.

Trip encumberment

I spoke with Natasha Roth regarding trip reimbursement / encumberment. She stated that I can apply for a trip reimbursement through the Procurement System, and that whenever she does so prior to the trip occuring, she is called by the final approver and told to instead re-do it once the trip is completed. I still will need to fill out an "Application to Attend a Conference" form and have it signed by the Chair. But then afterwards, upon return, I will apply for reimbursement.

NAGT Meeting

Prof. Christensen told me about this National Association of Geoscience Teachers meeting up at Lamont-Doherty in Pallisades.

http://stevekluge.com/nagt/

http://www.nagt.org/

Sounds like it will be useful. I will present our KBCC Summer Program results as a poster there. Prof. Christensen noted that the field trips look the most promising. There is one to a location where you can collect flourescent minerals, and another to an old mine where you can collect magnetite from the tailings. There will also be a talk by Wally Broecker, a wisened one who gave a talk at The Oralando OSM 2008. Should be plenty good. Prof. Christensen said that she will be at Lamont running samples that weekened anyway. I will apply for trip expenses through the department.

AMS Ocean Studies Diversity Project

This is a project open to schools that serve large minority populations, it provides training for implementing the American Meteorological Society's Ocean Studies Course. AMS covers the full cost of attending this workshop in Seattle, travel, food, lodging, registration, etc, in exchange for an agreement to implement the course at least for one semester. It was easy to get support to attend, especially since there is little to no cost.

http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/online/oceaninfo/diversity.html

Ocean Sciences Meeting 2008

OSM 2008 is going well. My talk was early, 8 in the morning on Monday. There was decent attendance. Dr. Christensen said that she thought it went well. The talk that was scheduled to go after me had been canceled, so the section moderators said that there was time for questions. Wahoo. There were some good questions though.

One person asked if we knew how many women had attended compared to boys. I did not. We didn't keep that kind of data, though it might be a good idea to do that in the future. I explained in the talk that our demographics for the program were basically the same as the demographics in Brooklyn in general and had a slide showing those demographics for Brooklyn. Another person asked if we had worked with any HS teachers, no we did not. But that might also be a good idea to try out next time. Indeed, some of the other talks in the session did just that, in order to get the HS teachers better prepared for teaching ocean science. Another person thought that we needed to explain why some of our students had scores as high as 39 out of 50 on their first try. I really couldn't explain why, in fact I don't see a reason for us to have to explain that. One student got a 50 out of 50 on the first pass. The test should 'capture' a wide range of abilities, and that should be reflected by low score and high scores.

I spoke with a Dr. Ingram from the Rose-Hulman institute of technology at the end of the session (she had given an interesting talk about a project where students monitored the conditions of a local pond). And she had lots of ideas about what I could do in terms of statistical analysis of our score results. I will have to look into the methods she mentioned and try to work them out when I get back. I also spoke with Dr. Christensen and she suggested getting someone from our sociology department (do we even have one, I assume we do?) and working with them to create our own evaluation and to work with the results of it, which could be interesting.

From the other talks, I am thinking that we can have a 'HS wide Science Challenge", which is an attention getting event that is 'fun', so in one case the students worked in pairs as pretend helicopters searching for a lost ship and sailors, this was done as a sort of mystery addendum to their normal program, which involved understanding shipping and the like. If we could have some sort of student presentation at all then that would be excellent. I am also thinking that it might be of use to bring in HS teachers in the role of our normal office assistants, that way they can get some work on advancing their science education during the school year.

Bruker Training

Bruker training went well. I was able to confirm that we can trust the results we're getting for Dr. Li's silicon spheres; they're not too rough of a surface. Though I should sample from the side facing the x-ray detector just as an issue of general practice.

They also recommended shutting the PC running the detector each night, or at least every once in a while, to 'purge' the memory, that might undo our scale bar problem, where the scale bar is correct in the first image, but that first bar is carried through to all other images. They also suggested making sure that a particular checkbox for communication between computers was checked. Indeed it was.

I got to see a lot more of the features that we have with the machine, especially the reports writing feature, which looks like it could be useful, and the quantification feature, which looks pretty powerful, much more so that I suspected before. I had really thought of the machine as especially useful for mapping and qualitative analysis. So this was a real eye-opener.
The course of course also was very informative on the physics of x-ray analysis. It combined lecture and lab work. There was an interesting set of people attending the program, one guy who is an art preservator from the Smithsonian, two guys who work for Bosch out in Michigan I think, and a researcher from VA Tech. Interesting range of jobs that are using x-ray analysis and the SEMs that they operate along with.

The class was in Ewing, NJ, which apparently was right next to Princeton, but I didn't get out to see the campus. The other people did and they seemed to have enjoyed it. I ended up in Trenton one or two nights, but the area I was in one night looked pretty sketchy, so I had to bail out on dinner there that night.

I did get to eat some good indian food (chicken tikka masala and somosas) for takeout one night, and some good hungarian/polish (chicken paprikash and perogies) food another night too. The weird thing is that my GPS device sent me to two different locations for indian food where there weren't any restaurants at all, before I finally got to one.

Funding Came through

Funding came through for the Bruker training and the OSM, Dean DiLorenzo's office had the funding and was able to give permit its use for those trips.

So I will be attending the Bruker X-ray analysis training in Ewing NJ, this month.

I am also attending the 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) in Orlando Fl, this year. I will be giving a presentation on our Middle School Students Ocean Science and Technology program, our Oceanography Summer camp program. The meeting looks like it will have many other talks about outreach and education in addition to plenty of research talks.

Prof. Christensen and Cathi are doing a poster on the Deep Earth Academy (formerly Joint Oceanographic Institutes) classroom activities.

Mulitple Events

Funding for a Bruker training session in Feb and the OSM in March may not be available, which is disconcerting since I've spent $400 to register for OSM. I had been told that it would be acceptable by the department chair, and at the same time was going for SEM training from JEOL. For that training, I filled out an expense report and applied to have it refunded. Apparently I should have applied to encumber funds before doing anything. So I didn't encumber funds for OSM, thinking I would apply for reimbursement, and now there are no more funds available in the department.
Fortunately, there are external funds (from the college still), that had been encumbered for another person to use, however they were unable to use them. There was enough in that deal to cover both of my trips, IF it can be switched over to them. Hopefully it can. They are checking with Dean DiLorenzo to find out of this is workable.

Earlier in the day I received a phone call regarding CollegeNow. They were checking to see if I could be ready for a Meteorology class on Thursday. The problem was that I hadn't talked to my Chair about it, and it seems to me that any instructions regarding something like that need to come to me through him, since this is his department. I didn't think that there would be any problem, but still, I'd need to talk to him before actually starting it. Especially since we're in a wintersession, and the college class wouldn't start until afterwards, in the spring session. However, the Chair asked if I'd like to do the class when I met with him today, so that clears all that up. They're going to get off to an odd start however, since I have those two trips to go on in the beginning.

I also made contact with Mr. Li. He had originally be one of the candidates for the position that I have. He know works for a plastics company. They have some material, apparently its a plastic with silica grains embedded in it that they'd like to look at using the SEM. I was able to speak with him today and he'll be stopping by at around 11 on Thursday.


As a further note, I just started receiving payment in the last two weeks for the KECSS Astronomy class that ended last year. At least they are coming through now.

Cherry Limeades and Italian Cheesecake

After the conference I went down to North Carolina to meet up with my brother and his wife. They live in Fayetteville, but apparently Ft. Bragg, which is located within it, is bigger than Fayetteville. Didn't go onto Ft. Bragg though. The whole town is very much orientated torwards the military. Most of the restaurants had military discounts, for example. It also seemed like the town was broken up into smaller sections, groups of blocks or developments would have shopping centers that had restaurants, laundromats, bars, etc, bound up with them, like smaller little towns. Apparently, most of these centers have buffet style restaurants in them also.

There are Sonics out there, which was great, because I got to have a cherry lime-ade, the first in a long while. The Sonic one's seem to be a little bit sweeter than I've had before, and they are red, I suppose that that is from cherry syrup that is added to them.

The military life seems to be treating them well. They have a great little house with an inground pool, central air, gas fireplace, cable, even a digital video recording system. And to top it off, a dog. A little beagle that was lost and that they brought home. It seems like its a hunting dog of some sort. Apparently, a week or so before they came across the thing runnning around the street, some one at a flea market had been trying to sell a couple of beagles. They figure that this was one of them, that the person just let them loose after not being able to sell them.
He's probably going to get sent to Iraq this summer, he seems pretty ok with it. Possibly to the northern portion of the Sunni Triangle, thought it looks like other elements of his group are in Ramadi(at the south west corner) and Mosul (outside of the triangle). The northern point of the Sunni Triangle is Tikrit, which is famously where Hussein's tribe lives. Interestingly, the triangle itself is to the West of and slightly overlapping with a region inhabited by arabic speaking pagans, the Yarsan, who might be a group related to the Yezidi. I know that the Yezidi of Iraq hate the colour Blue, its a symbol of extreme bad luck or something along those lines; an ill omen. It will be interesting to see if he runs into any Yarsan people and if they dislike the colour blue also, or if they even stick out at all from the arab muslim population. I'd doubt it, if they could spend centuries hiding themselves from prostelytizing muslims, they'll sure as heck be able to remain invisible to mid-20's Americans for a tour.

Its hotter in North Carolina than in Baltimore, but it was a heckuva lot more humid in Baltimore. By the end of the conference it was hazy with humidity, and starting to rain. Luckily for NC it was great weather for the whole time we were there. Except the ride down, it didn't rain much onto us, but in the distance there was apparently a lightening storm for most of the trip down. Since it was so nice out, we were able to have a BBQ on Saturday with some of his local friends. Most of them are into this "Ultimate Fighting Championship" stuff, which I'm not too into. After spending most of the afternoon drinking beer, that kind of thing can seem pretty interesting !

After the long drive home, I walk in a bunch of my aunts and uncles are there, having dinner for the holiday, which was a surprise. Everyone ended up leaving pretty quickly, it was the end of the night for them, so at least I got to see them all for a bit. And I walked in just in time for a slice of Italian Cheesecake that someone had brought. A tasty little weekend!

Presenting at a conference

The reserach has been turned into a poster, and the presentation of it has gone fairly well. Attendance at the meeting is lower than expected, but I've still been able to get a few people who have shown some interest in the research. Interstingly, a professor of one of my co-authors strolled by and talked with me about the research. That was intruiging. Lots of people have had some good comments and what to follow up with and the like.

At the moment I am typing out this entry from one of the free access computers at the conference, mostly everyone has left the poster session. Whats absolutely hysterical is that right now there seems to be some other meeting at the conference center. I had thought that someoen was just singing in the hallway next to me, not realizing that they could be heard. But now they've worked up to a crescendo, seems to be a preacher of some sort. Every other sentence is 'in the name of jesus'.