ECMI

I just got back from ECMI yesterday. I was going to come back this morning (because I had paid for a dorm room stay up through last night instead of the night before due to some bait-and-switch with respect to details of my attendance at this conference), but I was so tired that I came home early. (I was going to go to the theatre last night, as there were several things I wanted to see.) The conference had ended a couple of hours earlier and I had just finished a discussion with a couple of the speakers in the session I organized. The advantage of trains instead of planes includes the idea of a "period return", in which I can come back at any point during a one month period. So after I was done with my conversation, I was thinking that I was tired and I could just go home. The 40 pounds for the extra night (that I didn't want) was a sunk cost. The room was small and hot. The shower was aggressive---the water temperature could be adjusted, but the intensity of flow couldn't---and the room had a dank, musty smell. I was exhausted in general and didn't want to set my alarm this morning. So I just put my stuff away, went to the tube station next door, took the tube to Paddington, got on the train, and was home within 2 hours of my decision to 'fuck it' and return home. Not bad. Then I took a bath (rather than those stupid shower things), got some ice cream, read some Dungeons and Dragons, went to see Kung Fu Panda, and felt much better. I need to remember this lesson that things like that are a sunk cost and I shouldn't punish myself by the stubbornness of insisting to use the room for every day for which I paid.

Here are the top sites seen while in London:

1. Lloydies in London (Jit Kee Chin, Anatole Faykin, and David Richard --- Reza Mohsin has two young kids and is hard to track down)

2. Very bored and angry exhibitors. (In fact, this situation appears to have been an epic failure. The exhibit hall was in a different building from all the talks, so people didn't come back to visit it very often. When they did come back, the coffee was mostly in nearby hallways rather than where the exhibits were themselves. So the exhibitors didn't get many customers, and I overheard comments from some of them expressing boredom, anger, and the possibility of never coming back to ECMI again. Somebody screwed-up big time on this point.)

3. Some good talks. (There was some crap as well, but that's how it always works.)


The conference also included the Quote of the Week:

"The IMA are a bunch of parasites."

I'm obviously not going to pass along who said this, but based on what I saw with this conference, I'm inclined to think that there's at least some truth to this. (At the very least, some of the people they employ are tools.) Things with registration could have been more flexible (then I wouldn't have had to eat 40 pounds), the conference was rather expensive (we'll see after time passes whether I get my money's worth in connections I made... I have already gotten one seminar invitation from this, so I am feeling somewhat better about this than I was a couple of days ago), and I am apparently one of many minisymposium organizers whose invited speakers were annoyed about how expensive things were. (In fact, I agree with them.) Worse than that, one of the speakers I invited was insulted in an e-mail by one of the IMA staff. (I should mention that I have seen the e-mail and the tone was pretty sarcastic. It was out of line.) They were also briefly talking about me behind my back (Hey Dudes: If you're reading this, my name is "Mason", not "Manson"!) when they didn't realize I was in the room and could hear them. They weren't horribly unkind or anything, but one person wasn't entirely kind either. (I couldn't tell everything he said, but he seemed to be acting like my entirely reasonable request to upload both my .ppt and .pdf files for each of my two talks---which he seemed to think were all for one talk---was not a reasonable request. As I said, not horribly unkind, but perhaps it might have occurred to him that I might have been in the room and hearing him say this.)

I think if the conference were less expensive, I'd feel better about it. That said, it is important for me to meet more of the UK applied and industrial mathematicians and going to this conference certainly seems like an effective way to do so. Its price is quite prohibitive and may well keep me away, but we'll see how things go.