SVP 2011 - Las Vegas, NV

A week ago I was attending the annual meeting for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists. The reason this post is coming as a follow up to the meeting was because internet at the hotel and conference center was outrageously expensive, as was everything else

Pro: Despite not presenting anything this year, I felt it was a highly productive meeting for me, personally. I met some new people, got leads on projects, and caught up with collaborators who I haven't seen in a while. Russ and I put together our writing schedule, and I think we're back on track for submitting our paper. We should be ready for submission by early to mid January.

Pro: I saw some really interesting talks, in particular about the salvage project up in Snowmass, CO. One of the hypotheses for how this mammoth death assemblage formed was that animals sunk into the ground during earthquakes. It works like this:
1 - Animal is standing in lake, happy and free.
2 - The earth starts to shake, which liquefies the ground the animal is standing on.
3 - The animal sinks.
4 - The ground stops shaking, and the sediment immediately re-solidifies, trapping the animal.
5 - The animal dies a slow (on the order of months) and horrible death by starvation since it is trapped.

My friends at Eastern Tennessee are all doing really interesting projects for their master's degrees. I can't wait to see what they do for PhDs, and where they end up going. A plus for me is that they all seem to be proficient at geometric morphometrics, a technique I'm interested in using. You folks will be hearing from me in the near future.

Con: The conference was at the Paris in Las Vegas. I have a hard time imagining a more irrelevant venue for an academic conference. Las Vegas represent everything that is wrong with the world, and I argue the decision to have the meeting there was insensitive to students and particularly insensitive to women. It was insensitive to students because this conference is already expensive as hell. I roomed with 3 other people, bought food at a grocery store, and carpooled and it STILL was outrageous. More importantly, though, was that this conference was held in a place that treats women like they are objects to be bought and sold. I shouldn't have to choose between participating in my science and having pornography shoved in my face every time I step outside. No exaggeration there, folks, you go outside and people literally shove pictures of naked women at you, and these cards are all over the ground during the day. It's disgusting. If you want to know why we have problems in the world, go to Vegas. It's no place for families, and it's certainly no place for an academic conference. If anyone is interested in helping me write a formal letter of complaint to the president of the society, send me an email.

The other reason this was a less than enjoyable meeting was that the people running it seemed to think we didn't need to eat. In previous years, events that were around meal times had a fair amount of food available. Contrast that to this year, the welcome reception had... chips. And dip. That's it. I serve more than that to friends who are coming over to play board games, nevermind several hours of mingling. What was somewhat amusing, if not annoying, is that these same bowls of crappy chips kept showing up at everything. It was like an unfunny running joke for the duration of the conference. I personally want to know what my $200 registration fee paid for if 1) I'm not getting anything to eat and 2) they aren't printing us copies of the abstract book anymore. That $200 didn't even include the banquet, which I didn't go to because $75 seemed ridiculous for a single meal.

Con: My birthday overlapped the conference.

Pro: I got to hang out with some cool people that I rarely see for my birthday, which ended up being pretty great. I also discovered the one and only good thing in Las Vegas: slushy machines filled with frozen mixed drinks.I want to give a shout out to all the folks who got me birthday drinks, we sure had some fun times. So far, year 27 is pretty good.

In summary, it was a good meeting, but only if you worked to make it good for yourself. Otherwise, you didn't miss much if you skipped it this year.

SVP 2010: Personal Highlights

The annual meeting for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists is always a strange meeting for me. On the one hand, it's not even close to being my favorite meeting. On the other hand, it's good to present my research and see old friends and colleagues. On the other hand again, seeing people I really don't care to see (ever) puts a huge damper on the meeting, and by the last or second to last day, I'm sick and tired of the meeting and usually want to go home. This last part is so unfair, but life is unfair. My friend Denny told me at the onset of the meeting that it isn't my fault that other people are jerks. And she's 100% right. Maybe someday I'll be able to fully ignore the people who fully deserve to be ignored, and I'll finally have a satisfying meeting experience.

It bothers me when I have strong negative feelings toward people. I feel like I should be a better, bigger, nicer person than that. But Fred, my friend and new partner in small mammal paleoecology mayhem, has told me that nice is about how you act, not how you think. Maybe. My Catholic senses start tingling when I have unpleasant thoughts, but maybe I should stop feeling bad about feeling bad, and continue trying to act like the person I want to be.

Despite my apprehension about the last night of the meeting, the after party, and feeling the need to socialize, it went well and I ended up having a good time. Here are some of my highlights from the meeting, the stuff that I liked.

Cave field trips!

Mixer at the Carnegie.

Dinner in a dive of a Chinese take-out place with Russ and company. All 7 of us.

Chris Shaw (of the Page Museum) retirement party at the Sharp Edge. Expensive beer, but good beer.

Drinks with the former adviser, Alex (Sloth), and the ETSU folks.

Mammal talks. By far the most statistically sound science at the meeting. Also the least cocky of the talks.

My talk. I got up, did it, hid my nerves pretty well, spoke well, and got sincere compliments from some very important people: Russ, Liz, Ernie, and Larissa to name a few.

Dinner with the new adviser and lab mate. Good food, good drink. Thanks Felisa!

The auction: a rough caricature of Ernie Lundelius went for $300. Paul Sereno's went for about $40. Hilarious.

Ran into Roger Cuffey, my first paleo instructor EVER. Never got coffee with him and the PSU crew, but I did get to talk to him for a while. He's looking better than I've ever seen him before: no cane at the meeting!

Jennifer Nestler. We can commiserate on so many levels, and there are plans to maybe room together in Vegas at next year's meeting.

Really random bar downtown with an over abundance of Halloween decor. Bad karaoke, also hilarious, but we got there kind of late so no singing for me.

I also picked up some interesting looking books for excellent prices. It pays to wait until the last day of the meeting, when the vendors are getting desperate.

Alrighty, I need to make sure I'm ready to go when the Super Shuttle gets here to bring me back to the airport. I miss Matt and New Mexico.

SVP 2010 Tuesday

It's been a busy few days, hence the lack of a recap for last week and a lack of information about the meeting thusfar.

The past few days have been full of trying to connect with people I haven't seen in a while, and also meeting people I haven't met before at previous meetings. I've also been working on my talk, right up until yesterday evening. I wanted to make some changes to some figures that were confusing before. Hopefully all the work and frustration with my computer were worth it, I personally feel like the figures look better now.

I gave my talk this morning during a session that was really heavy on mammal evolution, patterns in mammal diversity, and extinction. The session was really good in general. It's weird, but I usually find that the sessions I am scheduled to talk in are usually really good, where as other sessions can be kind of lame. That really sounds much more conceited than I mean, and I don't think it's a bias towards only wanting to hear about mammals or the Pleistocene. It's just that I've sat through a few too many cocky dino talks than I care to remember, and it's nice to see talks that have rigorous science in them.

This afternoon I need to take care of some work in my room, and later I'll head down to the poster session. Fred and I are having dinner with Felisa before the SVP auction. Every year they auction off a bunch of random stuff, and some of it is really cool and/or valuable. I can't wait to see what there is this year. Come on Paleontologist Barbie, complete with bag and pink plastic dinosaur!