On my professional society
I'm a member of the American Astronomical Society. Today, I spent a few minutes reading our latest newsletter.
In just a few pages, the newsletter managed to shock me, surprise me, and annoy me.
First, the shock. The President of the AAS said that he directly asked the new NASA Administrator why he seemed to have a negative opinion of astronomers, and Griffin told him that he had been receiving rude and profane emails from astronomers. Now I will admit that over the years I have met some astronomers with little in the way of social skills, but really, who thinks that sending email to the NASA Administrator littered with profanity would do any good? Even if you didn't think it would do any good and just wanted to vent, still, why would you email a senior federal gov't employee an obnoxious email like that? Given that our country is slowly turning into a bad parody of the USSR, I would expect after such an email a visit from agents from some agency with a TLA and to wake up the next day somewhere in Eastern Europe in a solitary confinement cell.
Now on to my surprise and annoyance.
I'm in the vast minority - I actually *like* to attend AAS meetings (at least AAS *winter* meetings -- I've been to one summer meeting and was ready to gouge my own eyes out after a few days).
The last time the meeting was in Seattle I had a fantastic time. I was very happy to go back this year. I was really looking forward to the meeting and the visit to the Pacific Southwest (as Canadian Dr. D refers to Seattle). For the most part, I did have another very good time -- I went back to a little hole in the wall bakery Shan and I found four years ago, I ate at "Steak Disneyland", and saw some of my friends I always hope to see at AAS meetings. I can't believe I didn't write anything about this after the meeting, but one of the highlights was that I saw one of my classmates from my summer REU in 1994 -- we hadn't seen each other in 12.5 years!
Well, then, the last day of the meeting happened. The posters were supposed to stay up in the exhibit hall until 4pm. At about 11am, rumors started to go around that the convention center was going to close down the exhibit hall at noon. If this doesn't seem like a big deal, remember, many students spent a lot of effort to put together a poster of their work. A poster can be an opportunity to show off your research to faculty from a grad school you've applied to or someone with a postdoc position in your field, for example. So people (including the student that has worked with me) were being told to take their posters down. When people didn't move fast enough for the staff, they started *ripping* down posters and throwing people's stuff in the corner. I know someone that went into the exhibit hall to try and ask them to stop, and was told by a guy in a forklift that if she got run over it was too bad, because she was in the way. In the end, they moved the posterboards into the hall so that people could filter through and see what was left of the posters.
This *really* brought the meeting to a pretty unfortunate end. People were walking around wondering out loud what went wrong. The security folks were being very rude, and everyone was cranky. It really felt like we got tossed out on our ear from a meeting we paid $285 to attend (not counting airfare, lodging, and meals).
I've been hoping the AAS might, among one of their 3 dozen emails since then, decide to explain what happened, apologize to the members, and say it won't happen again. When I opened the newsletter, I thought there would be something in there. To my surprise, there was an article about the meeting, to my annoyance it mentioned *nothing* about the fiasco in Seattle.
I'm not saying I blame the AAS -- I blame the Seattle Convention Center. However, it seems to me that simple etiquette requires the AAS to acknowledge the problem and promise to make sure it doesn't happen again. Instead, they seem to be pretending it never happened.
In just a few pages, the newsletter managed to shock me, surprise me, and annoy me.
First, the shock. The President of the AAS said that he directly asked the new NASA Administrator why he seemed to have a negative opinion of astronomers, and Griffin told him that he had been receiving rude and profane emails from astronomers. Now I will admit that over the years I have met some astronomers with little in the way of social skills, but really, who thinks that sending email to the NASA Administrator littered with profanity would do any good? Even if you didn't think it would do any good and just wanted to vent, still, why would you email a senior federal gov't employee an obnoxious email like that? Given that our country is slowly turning into a bad parody of the USSR, I would expect after such an email a visit from agents from some agency with a TLA and to wake up the next day somewhere in Eastern Europe in a solitary confinement cell.
Now on to my surprise and annoyance.
I'm in the vast minority - I actually *like* to attend AAS meetings (at least AAS *winter* meetings -- I've been to one summer meeting and was ready to gouge my own eyes out after a few days).
The last time the meeting was in Seattle I had a fantastic time. I was very happy to go back this year. I was really looking forward to the meeting and the visit to the Pacific Southwest (as Canadian Dr. D refers to Seattle). For the most part, I did have another very good time -- I went back to a little hole in the wall bakery Shan and I found four years ago, I ate at "Steak Disneyland", and saw some of my friends I always hope to see at AAS meetings. I can't believe I didn't write anything about this after the meeting, but one of the highlights was that I saw one of my classmates from my summer REU in 1994 -- we hadn't seen each other in 12.5 years!
Well, then, the last day of the meeting happened. The posters were supposed to stay up in the exhibit hall until 4pm. At about 11am, rumors started to go around that the convention center was going to close down the exhibit hall at noon. If this doesn't seem like a big deal, remember, many students spent a lot of effort to put together a poster of their work. A poster can be an opportunity to show off your research to faculty from a grad school you've applied to or someone with a postdoc position in your field, for example. So people (including the student that has worked with me) were being told to take their posters down. When people didn't move fast enough for the staff, they started *ripping* down posters and throwing people's stuff in the corner. I know someone that went into the exhibit hall to try and ask them to stop, and was told by a guy in a forklift that if she got run over it was too bad, because she was in the way. In the end, they moved the posterboards into the hall so that people could filter through and see what was left of the posters.
This *really* brought the meeting to a pretty unfortunate end. People were walking around wondering out loud what went wrong. The security folks were being very rude, and everyone was cranky. It really felt like we got tossed out on our ear from a meeting we paid $285 to attend (not counting airfare, lodging, and meals).
I've been hoping the AAS might, among one of their 3 dozen emails since then, decide to explain what happened, apologize to the members, and say it won't happen again. When I opened the newsletter, I thought there would be something in there. To my surprise, there was an article about the meeting, to my annoyance it mentioned *nothing* about the fiasco in Seattle.
I'm not saying I blame the AAS -- I blame the Seattle Convention Center. However, it seems to me that simple etiquette requires the AAS to acknowledge the problem and promise to make sure it doesn't happen again. Instead, they seem to be pretending it never happened.
posted by Chris at 11:05 PM
2 Comments:
You are absolutely right -- we should have received some information related to the Seattle fiasco, even if it was *not* the fault of the AAS (and I have no reason to suspect it was). I was originally hoping the AAS would send an email to people within a few days after the meeting to let us know what happened. My poster was also one of those that was given the 'heave-ho' that day. Just not the same trying to show people what you have been working on with posters hurriedly put up in the foyer in random order. Ick.
Other than that, I agree it was a very good meeting; got to see a lot of people, discuss science, and go back to Seattle for a visit! (and the JWST mock-up was quite cool, too)
- Dr. D
I also thought the AAS sending an email would be the right thing to do, but for some reason I had a feeling they weren't going to do it.
What really got me, though, was Kevin Marvel's article in the newsletter about the challenges they overcame to pull the meeting off said *nothing* about the fiasco.
Do they really pretend in that office that nothing happened?
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