Our first welcome session went well, despite a scheduling mixup, trying to figure out how to get a video+sound to play on a hangout, and a few audio glitches…and here it is:
Tune in in half an hour, at 6pm Central, for Sex and Skepticism.
By the way, here’s David’s book, I, Atheist: America’s Loudest Heathen Fires Back. Go buy it!
This should be the one place you can go to to follow the con. All the events are linked to there, by date and time (NOTE: all times are given in the Central time zone, UTC -5 — calibrate accordingly.) For instance, the welcoming introduction starts at 5pm Central tonight. Click on the “Welcome” link, it will take you to the Google+ event page, where I should have the youtube video set up ready to go.
And look, we’ve got stuff going on solidly from 5pm to midnight tonight. Then we start up again at 8am Saturday and don’t shut up until 11pm. Sunday you get to sleep in until 10am before we fill up the screen until 9pm. We’ve even got some hours where we’re running parallel sessions and you’ll have to choose (actually, I hope you choose anyway — you’d be nuts to stare at the screen all those hours. Even we moderators have juggled the schedule to make sure we have one hour breaks between our sessions.)
But it’s not the FINAL final schedule! We’re still adding stuff! Would you believe Roy Zimmerman will be joining the atheist music panel? We don’t care if you believe or not, because we deal with evidence and facts, and ROY ZIMMERMAN WILL BE ON THE MUSIC PANEL.
In just a few hours, we’re all going to go stark raving mad trying to pull together this new FtBCon thing. Brace yourself for glitches (we are) as we try to hammer out all the details.
If you’re looking for the schedule, it’s on FtBCON.org and also on Lanyrd. You can search Google+ for FtBCON and it’ll list us all; we’re also going to be posting youtube links to the ongoing discussions on the Google+ events, so I think you’ll even be able to watch everything just from that one page. You can join in the chat room to talk and ask questions; we’ll be watching that as we moderate the panels. You can also get there via irc.synirc.org and #pharyngula, if you’re using an IRC client.
If you’re participating in a panel or talk, please pay attention to these suggestions:
Advice to participants in FtBCon
What you’ll need:
A reasonably fast internet connection (WiFi works)
A webcam
A Google+ account
Headphones or earbuds
Good lightingThe last two are often neglected and regarded as optional. They’re not. If you just use your computer speakers to listen while you talk, you will generate annoying echoes that will reverberate between all the participants. Any kind of audio gear other than broadcasting sound that will be picked up by your microphone is necessary — but simple earbuds are adequate to prevent the problem.
Lighting isn’t difficult, either. You should be illuminated from the front: the worst case is to have a bright light source behind you, in which case you will be a dark silhouette against a light background, and no one will be able to see your face. Ideally, you’ll set up three point lighting, with two sources of light, one to your front left and the other to your front right, and a third softer light illuminating the background. But putting a lamp or two in front of you and avoiding bright sun or other bright illumination behind you will be adequate. (If you’re at all vain, though, the best thing you can do to make yourself look good is to have good lighting.)
Before the event
You will be given contact information for your facilitator, and you will have given them your Google+ ID. Get on Google+ 15 minutes before your talk/panel; your facilitator should be sending out invitations to join a hangout around that time. If you don’t get one, don’t hesitate to send urgent alerts to your facilitator!
When you’re in the hangout, you are encouraged to use the Hangout Toolbox on the left sidebar. Select Lower Third and fill it out with your name and (optionally) affiliation, and turn it on. This will put a bar on the bottom of the screen with your identifying information for anyone tuning in.
If you are using a PowerPoint presentation, set it up in the background, and switch back to the hangout.
During the event
Your facilitator will give a brief introduction, and then the time is yours or your panel’s. Allot 45 minutes or less for your talk, please — we would like to have a little time for Q&A, but if you use the full hour, that’s OK, discussions can be had in the FtbCon chat room.
If you are using PowerPoint or similar presentation software, you can display your slides instead of your face. Click on Screenshare in the hangout (it should be in the left toolbar), and when it asks which window to use, select the desktop. Then go to your presentation software, and start up the slideshow. Everyone else will see your slides and hear your voiceover.
During your session, the facilitator will be watching the chatroom and Google+ and Youtube channels for relevant and intelligent questions and comments, and will address the good subset to you during any Q&A. They will also compile those good comments/questions and email them to you, if you’d like.
Your facilitator will be present in a small window at the bottom of your screen during the entire presentation. They will work out any signals you’d like to get (for instance, waving wildly when you’ve only got 5 minutes left). If you’re using Screenshare, you won’t see them; you’ll have to get audio cues. The session will have to end promptly on the hour, since we’ll have other talks starting at that time.
I can’t emphasize enough how important using headphones or earbuds is — without them, we get echoes all over the place, which are really annoying…and the moderators will start muting you. Some kind of decent lighting is also important, because you’ll look bad if you’re all grainy and dark gray against a black background, or worse, a black silhouette against a bright white background. It’s easy to fix, too — I bought a couple of clamp lights and presto, I can illuminate myself adequately, just by sticking them up in a few places.
And you’re probably wondering how the heck to find the meeting rooms in the maze of the internet. Miri explains how.
It starts Friday evening, Central time. You can view the full FtBConscience schedule online right now — please note that all times listed are on US Central Time. This is a purely historical artifact, because I put the first draft of the schedule together, and I included a big messy table of time zones that gave the hours of events in Perth and Moscow and points in between, and everyone puked over the complexity. I think they all just said “screw it, we’ll use Myers’ time zone”.
All the sessions are organized in one hour blocks of time; most are a single hour, a few are two hour discussions. The way this is going to work is that speakers should only assume they have 45 minutes to talk, and leave 15 minutes of slack for questions.
We’re going to be strict about the times, I hope. I’m moderating lots of sessions, set up in alternating hours, so if I don’t crack the whip and close out discussions promptly on the mark, I’ll get lost and confused. The FtB facilitators who are moderating the sessions will be under orders to be disciplinarians.
We also have a chat room set up for random conversations. We moderators will be watching that, but if it gets hectic questions might fly by. I’ll be watching the youtube channel for my sessions, so that’s another place you can leave questions/comments.
As always, go to FtBCon.org for the latest information. Miri is in charge of that, I think she might have a stroke when it comes time to deal with the flood of updates that will be necessary as the con is in progress. Be patient, this is our first time.
Wired has an excellent article on why harassment policies are needed — it’s because the social dynamics of conventions can mess up people’s perspectives.
Conventions need anti-harassment policies. Not because convention attendees are disproportionately boorish or creepy–they’re really not–or because of social obliviousness. Rather, the difficulty lies in the very thing that makes conventions conventions: the social phenomena that come into play whenever humans gather in large groups.
Read the whole thing. It’s very thorough in discussing the psychology behind harassing behavior, and why it’s not just something evil psychopathic trolls do.
For you Facebookers, we now have a FtBCon page and an event page — go like them!
Many of you have been asking about the final schedule. A whole bunch of us were off at Skepchickcon this past weekend and we’re still in the throes of recovery, but this is the week we need to finalize everything, so I’m hoping we can have that complete schedule done by this weekend.
Whew — the con is over. After a long weekend of late nights, it all ended with a few last panels, lots of packing up, and the long dreary drive home…and then passing out, sleeping in, and struggling to get back into my routine.
This was my fourth day at Convergence.
The first event of the day was “Science and Religion: Friends or Foes?” with Heina Dadabhoy, Bridget Landry, Daniel Fincke, me, and Debbie Goddard moderating. You can guess which side I took. Landry was the sole theist, and even at that, she’s one of those very liberal Catholics. It was therefore a bit one-sided. I did get one woman who came up afterwards and smugly told me that we scientists are so arrogant and think we know everything and lectured me about how evolution and the Big Bang were “just a theory” and they could be proven wrong at any moment. I sort of blasted her and she went away, yelling about how rude I was.
My last panel was “Ask a Scientist”, with Laura Okagaki, Lori Fischer, Matt Lowry, Tom Mahle, Siouxsie Wiles, Indre Viskontas, Nicole Gugliucci, Bridget Landry, Bug Girl, and me — a mix of physicists, chemists, and biologists. This is an event they run every year in which a large and diverse group of scientists who are attending are put up on the stage and then the audience gets to ask questions, any questions they want, and we try to answer them. Matt Lowry moderated and made the useful suggest that every question be phrased as a tweet to keep them short and to the point…not many people were able to do that, but it helped. There was a good mix of questions, too — all the expertise on the stage got a workout.
And then we went home. It would have been good to stay for the dead dog parties, but hey, Mary and I have work to do.
Next year, CONvergence will be held on the 4th of July weekend again, 3-6 July. The theme is “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, and it’s to be a celebration of the urban fantasy genre. Skepchick and FtB will be there again! Plan ahead, mark it on your calendar, and come on out!
This was my third day at Convergence.
It’s a bit of a blur — I attended lots of panels, including Gods of Geekdom (how do the Avengers reconcile having both atheists and gods on the team?), a podcasting how-to, and various other skeptical sessions.
I recorded a live audio session with the Geeks Without God team. That will be available online in a couple of weeks; next one to be released will be the interview they recorded with Melissa Kaercher at this same event (and if you don’t know Melissa, she’s kind of the omnipresent ubergeek of Minneapolis).
I also joined the FtB and Skepchick teams on “The Real World vs. The Internet”, about this fading distinction about what part of our lives is “real”. Conclusion: the internet is just as real as the stuff we do with meat. The cleverest line is that now instead of saying “IRL” when meat-spacing, we should call it “AFK”.
Then, the party. Oy, the party. Saturday is always the most intense night of the weekend, and it also coincides with the masquerade…so everyone is showing up in their most elaborate costumes. And partying hard. I sort of passed out sometime around 1:30am-2am, and we staggered back to our hotel rooms at almost 3, all to the tune of the loudest sing-along I’ve ever heard. There were thousands of people singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” as I was going up in the elevator, and the whole hotel kind of trembled and moaned at the song.
A fragment of that colossal noise was recorded!
Today is cleanup and two more panels, then sushi for dinner, then home.
This was my second day at Convergence.
Our first event of the day was led by Mary, at the Sandbox. The sandbox is a room set aside for hands-on activities — a lot of it is for kids, but some of the events are for adults, too, and some (like this one) are for both. She explained a little bit about owl behavior: they swallow their prey whole, mostly, and digest the tasty bits, and then regurgitate the undigestible stuff (fur and bones) into a pellet they puke out onto the ground. And then people collect these things and study them. So we had about 40 people of various ages in the room, each given a disgusting owl pellet, sharp sticks and forceps, a hand lens, and a guide to identifying the remains of the victims, and they went at it. Everyone was engrossed in it — we had to actually kick people out at the end of our hour so the next event could get started.
I later sat on a panel with Brianne Bilyeu, Laura Okagaki, me, Melissa Kaercher, and Greg Laden to talk about “Grosser than fiction”. Packing the panel with people who all had a biology background was a good idea — my discipline really has the most disgusting stories to tell. We first talked about exactly what this “disgust” thing is; it’s a feeling that clearly has a biological foundation, but what we find disgusting is culturally shaped. So Greg could talk about African pygmies who’d eat a dead monkey crawling with maggots, because they live in a culture with a lot of food anxiety, in which wasting meat is considered deplorable. Each of us biologists could talk about things we do routinely that others might find revolting, while at the same time there are quite common things we find icky. And then we told stories. I’m sorry, I’m not going to repeat them here. You should have registered for Convergence.
My last panel was “Penises of the Animal Kingdom”. This is becoming a bit of a tradition: Skepchickcon always has a session on the biology of sex offered late at night which is always packed and always hilarious. This year we went with penises. Last year it was the female orgasm. Next year, I don’t know, give us some ideas. This one was moderated by Desiree Schell, with Bug Girl (You always want Bug on these panels), Sharon Stiteler, Emily Finke, and me. Note that I was the sole penis-haver; last year it was guys with only one female orgasm-haver, so I guess this is another tradition. We showed pictures. We talked about outre penises. I talked about how penises are not as necessary as you think, and many animals don’t bother with them.
These sessions are always about good teaching, too, which is what I enjoy most about them. There is a tremendous amount of audience participation — we got nonstop questions and suggestions, which is how I wish all my classes worked. An enthusiastic audience asking excited questions about biology? Professorial nirvana. I have heard some complaints from people that they go to panels to hear the experts up front, but I think the best learning experience in the world is to get a lot of intense back-and-forth between students and teachers.
OK, and then back to our party room. This partnership with the Skepchicks is working out well: they had Amanda Marcotte DJing again, their room was full of loud music and people dancing, and the FtB room was a few decibels quieter and at least 10° cooler. Get it all, right there in two rooms!
It goes on today. I only have two events this time, but often Saturday night is the wildest evening for the parties. It’s not too late, come on out!
