Wrap-up session in Warsaw

Thursday, May 29 — For the past three years, the organizers of SETAC Europe have held a final session of concluding remarks. They select several people, some of them from the meeting’s organizing committee, to follow different disciplines, and at the end, they mention the talks they thought were particularly good, or identify new directions for particular fields.

Of course, for me, this is like Cliff Notes for the SETAC meeting—what will be the big stories in the coming year? Who should I watch?

Notes from a Revolution?

Wednesday, May 28 – So, yesterday at noon I attended the traditional Women in SETAC lunch, for attendees interested in women’s issues in the sciences. It’s not just for women, I should note! I had a conversation with one man who thought he and other men were banned from the proceedings, but they certainly are not. In fact every year that I’ve been to the women’s lunch, (the last three were at SETAC Europe meetings), at least two men showed up, and the first year, I think about a dozen were there, but my memory is not clear on that point!

The luncheon this year was a bit of a disappointment. There was no speaker and no discussion, but rather some videos on businesswomen working in the technology and manufacturing sectors in Germany and Bulgaria. It was interesting, but not quite right for this group—and like a lot of the venues at this meeting, the sound in the room was awful.

I was disappointed. So I sought out Tinka Murk of Wageningen University (The Netherlands).

Up on the Roof

Here are some of the photos I promised of the roof garden at the University of Warsaw Library.

Second-Day Sensory Overload

Tuesday, May 27 — I’m looking at a stack of poster reprints that I collected Monday and today, and wondering how I’m going to assimilate all this information. And it’s only the second day of the meeting!

Well, I guess I could say it’s almost the third day. Eight parallel sessions on extremely different topics, with four talks every hour and a half or so… and the organizers said they cut back a bit !

But I’m not complaining!

Proceedings at the Palace

Tuesday morning, May 27 — I have about 10 minutes to write before I run off to catch my tram to the meeting — just a few thoughts to record from yesterday, Monday.

John Sumpter and I had a quick chat in the hall. For some reason we got onto the topic of print versus online. He mentioned that he gets the print edition of ES&T and ends up reading the TOCs more than his students do. They tend to go just for keyword searches online. They seem to be missing the whole picture that way, he says, and I agree–I know how I read the paper copy of today’s news versus how I read it online. I’m also wondering: is the big picture also receeding because of the incredible onslaught of papers published? It’s hard to keep track of all this data…

Beautiful Old World

Sunday, May 25 — Tonight’s opening speeches for the SETAC-Europe meeting took place on a stage in the Kongresawa concert hall, which has a beautiful dome and golden brocade shields mounted on the ceiling.

The building we were in once stood as the Communist government’s headquarters, built in the early 1950s, but has since been turned into an immense entertainment center and office building, with restaurants, movie theaters, stages and more. You can see it from all over town—its height makes the immense blocks, some of them football fields long, seem tiny. I kept seeing its clock tower from afar, and it has played tricks on me for the past two days, making me think that I’m closer than I am to my destinations. (The picture here is from Wikipedia Commons.)

 

The hall is on the same kind of scale inside, but SETAC attendees filled at least half of it (I’m guessing that several hundred of the more than 1300 people giving abstracts were there). The organizers wanted to fill the hall not just with science but with culture too—after all, the venue is the Palace of Culture and Science, or Pałac Kultury i Nauki in Polish. So they invited a pianist, Ireneusz Boczek, who recently won the Palma d’Oro in competition in Italy (2006). He played (beautifully!) several passages, including some Chopin, interspersed with a teaser for the upcoming SETAC World meeting in August, awards for best student papers, and more.

 

Wandering Through Warsaw

Saturday, May 24 — I spent today trying to stay awake, after getting very little sleep on a red-eye that took me through Amsterdam before arriving in Warsaw. I’m sitting here in my hotel room, yawning, after wandering through the city on a cold gray afternoon. Luckily, I had the good fortune to stumble upon the new library at the university here.

The building is beautiful. A bright chartreuse sculpture of old library shelves (right) stands outside the light green, oxidized copper-trimmed building. The structure could have looked like an ungainly ship stuck on land, with its curved steel and glass shell, deck rails, and looming prow. But it is transformed by the garden that grows on its roof and sprawls over its sides.

Land of 10,000 Lakes

I’ve been reading up a bit on Poland, before I head off to the annual European meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC Europe), to be held in Warsaw from May 25 to 29.

Glaciers shaped the country way back in the Pleistocene, a quick Wikipedia search shows. The ice extended and retreated again and again over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving moraines and glacial lakes sitting on low-lying plains split by rivers. The land seems to have been perfect for agriculture—the CIA World Factbook tells me that half the country is put to agricultural uses, and about a third is forest.