Your Assistance is needed for Bioastronomy 2007 Meeting

Many NAI members will be attending next week’s Bioastronomy meeting in San Juan Puerto Rico. As an experiment at this interdisciplinary conference, we have asked our meeting attendees to define jargon and vocabulary words that someone outside their discipline might not understand in an interdisciplinary event. We have had quite good response to this, but would like to fill out our list a bit more, and are asking you to help. Think back to your recent talks or upcoming talks and select a few words you use that could be entered into our glossary. Our hope is that this will be a continuing/ evolving resource for the whole institute.

We will be producing our final handouts for shipping on Wed 7/11, so if you could take a few moments first thing on Tues 7/10 to contribute it would be greatly appreciated! http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/UHNAI/bioast07.htm

Click on the science program button, then speaker’s glossary (you can search and add, or look at the glossary we have to date).

As an example, I gave a talk earlier this semester to a diverse group, being careful to define real jargon, but didn’t realize that while the biologists had the gist of what a “comet” was in my talk, they didn’t appreciate it well enough to fully understand the context of my talk. By the same token, I recently participated in a volcanology conference – and while many of the terms were things I’d heard before, they were not things I could define for someone, and after pestering the volcanologists during all the breaks for definitions e.g. pyroclastic flow, dykes, rootless cone etc.), I really appreciated the science presented at a much greater level and started to see how it was applicable to comet physics.

Kind regards, Karen Meech LOC Chair [Source: NAI Newsletter]