The art of surviving an ESA Meeting

Last week I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend the 91^st ESA (Ecological Society of America) Meeting. ESA Meetings are week-long events that are held early August each year, when thousands of practicing ecologists from all over USA and several other countries descend in a city to discuss findings and exchange ideas. The biggest convention hall is often leased for the duration to house so many people at the same time, and for a while the city almost takes on a different hue - you cannot throw a brick without hitting a scientist complete with a name tag and a tote bag emblazoned with the ESA logo. Memphis Meeting was my 5^th in the last 6 years, and as in the previous occasions I came out with a sense of fulfilment, and at the same time feeling suitably overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the event. But this time I had better overall experience than before (besides the 11-hr drive from Florida to Tennessee, and back, through three other states - Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi - which was fun too), and here is how.

To give an idea of the size of this Meeting, there were a total of 1362 talks (including one by me) presented in a combined 32 hrs, and 767 posters displayed in 7-and-1/2 hrs, spread over a 5-day period that began 8AM August 7 (Monday) and ended 6:30PM August 11 (Friday). By rule one author can make only one presentation - either a talk or a poster - and therefore there were at least 2129 participants, in fact many more including ESA awardees and scientists who came for administrative and policy meetings, others who did not present anything, as well as press people covering for mass media (I do not have the exact number, but it could well exceed 3000). Each talk was allotted a very strict 20-minute slot (except a few that were 30-minute long), and so at any given time there were on average 14 simultaneous talks going on in different rooms. Because one cannot be in more than one place at the same time, an efficient plan on which talks to attend and which to miss is a must-have. Likewise, someone attempting to visit each and every poster would have only 35 seconds available per poster, which is often less than the time it takes to get past the title and abstract. And above all, there is the inevitable trade-off between the breadth of the subject matter and the depth of concentration - after a time, covering more talks/posters inversely correlates with the attention-span in each of them. (For the geeky-minded, I have a quantitative definition of an "attention-span": it is given by the natural time scale of the curve specifying the rate of intake of information versus time spent in a presentation; for example, in an exponentially falling curve the attention-span is the time taken for the rate of intake to drop by a factor of e^-1.)

Given such problem of plenty, how can one maximize the benefit of an ESA Meeting? The organizers themselves, acutely aware of the magnitude of the problem, provide an "itinerary planner" in the Meeting website every year. The planner helps a participant build a day-by-day and session-by-session list of talks and posters he plans to attend, days in advance and from the comfort of his home or office. All he has to do is take a print-out of this list to the Meeting, which can be a very useful navigational tool indeed. Talks and posters are grouped together under separate session themes based on their content; for instance, a morning session called "Disease Ecology" could contain under it a number of talks with the common theme of the dynamics of disease spread in a population or across species. Another session titled "Community Ecology", held at the same time and same day (and there are roughly 14 simultaneous sessions running at any given time!), can group together talks on the theme of community assembly and dynamics of multi-species interaction. Now, it often happens that not all talks in a session are equally interesting to me. I'd like to hop across several sessions and listen to a number of different talks. If two of them happen to coincide, I have no choice but maybe toss a coin or something. Otherwise, the itinerary planner comes to the rescue, and directs me to the appropriate floor and room number in going from one talk to another.

And this was what I used to do, running from floor to floor, and room to room, of the vast meeting hall in my quest of absorbing as much information as I humanly could. Until the Memphis Meeting, that is. What I realized later is that such session-hopping is not a very efficient way of employing my cerebral faculty. First, there is the physical aspect of so much running around, which can be quite distracting besides being tiring as well. Second, the mental hysteresis associated with context switching - it is not easy to quickly shift focus from an involved topic on community assembly to another on disease dynamics. Third, the same breadth vs. depth trade-off - my attention-span drops precipitously if I jump too much across sessions. Finally, the element of uncertainty in a talk - the author often deviates substantially from the abstract he originally submitted (5 months before the Meeting took place), and what looked interesting from the abstract may not hold up its billing in the presentation itself. Given all that, I decided for the Memphis Meeting that my best bet would be to stick to a session between breaks as much as possible, based on my interest in the broad theme rather than individual topics. For instance, I am interested in the disease dynamics in populations and communities, and this time I sat through most of the disease related sessions. As a result, there was less physical stress and context switching, and better focus on each talk - an overall improvement. Besides, this strategy yielded an unforeseen benefit - some talks in these sessions that did not look promising from their abstracts turned out to be pretty good indeed!

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cricket record=number+story

There was a cricinfo article on Jayawardene's batting prowess during his recent Test partnership record of 624 runs with Sangakkara, in which his own contribution was a mammoth 374 - highest by a Sri Lankan and only 26 runs shy of Lara's world record. I find the timing of the article interesting in the context of my last post on the fickle nature of a cricket record. Each cricket record is a sum total of two factors: a number that enters the record book, and a performance/talent that produces the number and is the stuff of the history book. Record books talk of only numbers and hide the real story behind those numbers, the performances as unique as the circumstances in which the records are made. For example, in that post I argued Graeme Pollock's career batting average of 60.97 runs - currently a record among all present and past cricketers who played at least 20 Tests (discounting Bradman's 99.94 that cannot be placed in any comparative setting) - as having benefited from his short playing career of only 23 Test matches. What I did not say, and no record book will say either, is that Bradman himself considered Pollock to be the finest left-handed batsman the game of cricket has ever produced. Or, take Kapil Dev's hurricane knock of 175 against Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup, a record then but now holds the 9^th place in record books. Consider the circumstance - top five batsmen already back in the pavilion with only 17 runs on board, and all seemed lost when Kapil stepped in and produced one of the greatest batting exhibits of all time in his 138-ball knock, a performance that played no small part in the team's eventual (and only) World Cup victory. These are the stories that separate cricket records from most other sports records. I mean, we do not get to read an article about how someone runs the fastest 100-meter or jumps the longest yard. Those are records without stories, and people do not talk about them once they are surpassed (except, maybe, Bob Beamon's long jump record of 1968 Olympics that I mentioned in my last post - we still remember it because this record stood unbeaten for 23 years, which is itself a record for track and field events). There is the cliché "form is temporary but class permanent", maybe we can adapt it for a cricket record: "number is temporary but story permanent".

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