Judith Chow's Session
Right after David Pui's plenary lecture (L1) I attended
platform session 1-A, chaired by Judith Chow. Unfortunately, three of the six
speakers failed to show. To fill the three slots, Judith first talked for a
while on the Taiwanese journal Aerosol and Air Quality Research, for
which she is an editor. When she ran out of things to say about that, she came
down and asked me to talk about my scientific experiences in China. I was happy
to oblige, and used about 15 minutes to recount how I started in China and to
offer some humorous anecdotes about my recent work in Tsinghua University. I
ended with a quick summary of my schedule talk for the next day, on the
predictive experiment for aerosol in Beijing that I had just come from. After a
schedule speaker, Judith filled another slot with a PowerPoint presentation on
organic aerosol that she happened to have with her.
I don't think we should view such improvisations negatively.
On the one hand, there should be room at every scientific conference for
last-minute reports, at least in my opinion. On the other hand, I think that
every scientist should be prepared to stand up and give an impromptu talk on his
field at any moment. I also think that he should be prepared to do it without
visual aids. The reason, of course, is that we all need to know how to express
our ideas purely in words. We often think that we must have visual aids, but
they too frequently turn into crutches.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun.
Here is Mikhail Titov giving his scheduled talk during the session.
A question to Dr. Titov (seen in the reflection to the left).
Judith Chow giving her unscheduled talk on organic aerosol (see next slide).
S.S. Park of Korea speaking on carbonaceous aerosol in Korea.