July 27, 2010

Yesterday the LTC hosted a "Vortex Party" and many people came to give talks. One of the people was Dr. Kiko Galvez from Colgate University, whose talk was interesting, but as soon as he left, I ran an experiment that gave me resutlts that he could help me interpret, so I'm still amused by the irony of the situation. His talk actually gave me some project ideas and I wish we had this Vortex Party earlier in the program when I was trying to find an experiment to do. The other major speaker was Giovanni Milione from City College of New York. He talked about a device called a Radial Polarizer that utilizes liquid crystals. I was very interested in it, but disappointed that he didn't know how it worked because it sounds like something I would like to play around with. The rest of the talks were by his high school students, our Simons Fellows (high school students), a former Simons Fellow of the LTC, and our very own Jacob Chamoun and Heather Hill. I was very impressed with how well our Simons students stood up next to the other high schoolers. They did a good job presenting, although I found some flaws with their report. They really needed to include error bars on their data points and it was a very big issue with me that they weren't there and their importance wasn't stressed to them by someone else. I don't remember if I mentioned it when I saw them doing the experiments. I also liked Jacob's talk and how he explained his project, and of course since I room with Heather and she works literally next to me all day I already knew what she was going to talk about. Still, our REU students did a good job, I felt. The other students I was less impressed with, to be honest. I did not get the feeling that they completely thought about their projects and that made their talks seem, to me, a but empty. Although, that may be because Giovanni Milione's students used some of his slides from his presentation earlier, which I had personal issues with because I didn't understand why he had to use Mathematica to produce pictures he supposedly was observing. Thus, my opinion was biased.

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