The Transportationist

I just attended NetSci 2006 , which was an interesting conference with physicists and social networks people claiming the title "Network Science" (I believe I was the sole representative of physical networks: transportation, electricity, telecommunications, etc.).

What was most remarkable about the conference was the especially large number of audience members who used laptops while someone was speaking, especially if the speaker was not a "name" or an especially experienced. Why bother showing up if you are going to pay more attention to your computer screen than the speaker?

One can understand the next speaker reviewing their powerpoint perhaps, but I think for something like this more communications channels (free wireless) is less, diminishing the effectiveness of the conference by having less common ground among the audience to discuss common issues (i.e. the presentations in the last session).

-- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I will be at NetSci 2006 in Bloomington, Indiana over the next few days. This should be an interesting interdisciplinary conference. I will be presenting The Evolution of Transportation Networks written with my former student Lei Zhang.

Posted by David Levinson at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I will be attending the MeshForum conference in San Francisco May 7th and 8th.

This will be an interesting combination of random people from social networking, futurists, and Web 2.0, and me, apparently representing physical networks. I will be talking about the evolution of transportation networks. The conference also has a wiki. The conference is organized by Shannon Clark of JigZaw.

I saw a reference on a social networks message board, which is how I found out about it, and then saw that Professor Anna Nagurney carried the flag for transportation networks last year. Her talk is available at IT Conversations.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)