ChemBark

My apologies for the lack of posting this week. My plan was to attend the ACS National Meeting in San Diego—for the first time with official media credentials. Unfortunately, my girlfriend took a shortcut down a flight of stairs this Saturday and broke her leg in two places. So, instead of playing intrepid reporter this week, I’ve been playing unregistered nurse. It’s not so bad; I have a fetish for crutches and find people who walk with them to be incredibly sexy.

In the run up to the meeting, C&EN has been running the following advertisement for an opportunity to meet 2012 Priestley Medalist Bob Langer in San Diego:

Is anyone else amused when they see an established professor photographed performing lab work? Langer has an army of students and postdocs; I sincerely doubt he spends much time in lab contemplating the blue color of solutions in round-bottomed flasks. Perhaps these photos can offer some value with respect to attracting public interest to a desk-based scientist, but the advertisement run by ACS Publications was obviously not intended for such an audience—the only people who subscribe to C&EN are chemists.

A quick search of the Internet reveals other examples of profs photographed at work in the lab. As a service to the media, I have included sample captions for use in future press releases.

• Nocera shows off an unwired H-cell in front of a mess of unrelated vacuum lines
• MacMillan adroitly mans an HPLC at Princeton.
• Doyle insists on dressing to impress when it’s time to evaporate solvent.
• Sir Fraser demonstrates how to properly rest one’s arm inside a fume hood.
• Fréchet chills out by a drying rack.
• Lieber prepares his submersible for another dive into the Mariana Trench.

There are plenty of other examples online—feel free to share your favorites. I am particularly fond of Nocera’s. Professors who desire high-powered non-lab portraits should consider taking the advice of these astute Stanford students.

Going to an ACS national meeting is like going to Applebee’s—there’s an extensive menu that seems great at first glance, but when you’re actually inside, the experience is distinctly mediocre.  And if national meetings are the Applebee’s of conferences, then Thursdays at the ACS are like the 30 minutes before closing when the waitresses are vacuuming the carpet and giving you the stinkeye to leave.

Last week in Denver, I had the “pleasure” of giving a talk on Thursday at 3:30 PM.  There might have been ten people in the room; the tears welling in my eyes hindered my ability to get an accurate count.  Some of the previous speakers in the session didn’t bother sticking around, and I was so pathetic that the session chair couldn’t even muster a charity question.  Basically, thousands more people will read this blog post that is only tangentially about the talk than actually attended it.

So, I’m done with giving talks at ACS meetings.  They’re more trouble than they’re worth.  On the other hand, I had a great time giving a poster at Monday’s Sci Mix session.  This disparity seems strange, since I might have “only” talked to something like 15–20 people during the two-hour session, but those interactions were of much higher quality—actual conversations about science—than lecturing a sparsely populated room of seated cadavers.

Like many things in chemistry, I think poster presentations are undervalued (see also: non-Science/Nature/JACS/ACIE papers, public outreach, and IR spectroscopy).  There are more than a few people who believe that giving a poster instead of a talk is a sign of weakness or copping out, and when was the last time you saw a big-named chemist giving a poster at ACS?  I think it’s time to spit in the face of the establishment and make posters cool again.  Who’s with me?!

So, it’s time we get organized.  I’ll start by providing my set of tips for getting your poster printed at Kinko’s/FexEdOffice:

1. Don’t wait until the last minute.   I have never had an experience printing a poster at Kinko’s where everything went 100% right.  Either the plotter was broken and I had to drive 15 miles to a different store, or they were out of paper, or an image didn’t render, or the people on duty just had no idea what they were doing.  Give yourself at least a two-day buffer just in case you have to deal with some drama.

2. Don’t go during the graveyard shift.  Kinko’s has saved me many times by its virtue of never closing.  In high school, I recall several late night/early morning runs to make color printouts on their fancy $5/page printer.  I am a night owl, and I generally prefer going to 24-hour stores like gas stations and groceries late at night when there are no crowds.  Do not do this for printing your poster.  I find that the people on staff during the graveyard shift are often severely incompetent and/or stoned.  Go during the daytime when the best staff members are on duty.

3. Bring a CD or USB with two files: your source file and a high-resolution PDF.  Ideally, you want to print your poster from the source file, which is usually an Illustrator or PowerPoint file.  The people at Kinko’s should be able to open these files.  Where you get into trouble is if the staffers try to modify them, even a tiny amount.  If they do and you have something like a ChemDraw image embedded within the document, there is a good chance it will get messed up.  I’ve also seen staffers make a PDF from the source file and then print the PDF.  This is unnecessary and can create all sorts of problems, most commonly reduced resolution or uneven scaling of the poster’s dimensions.  Bottom line: get them to print the source file directly, without any modification.  If that doesn’t work, get them to print your hi-res PDF. 

4. Bring a printout of your poster on 8½×11″ paper.  Give the staffer a printed copy of your poster so she knows what it should look like.  Make sure the poster is printed to scale (and not stretched to fit the paper).  Write the dimensions of the poster in the margins so the staffer knows how big it should be.  If they mess up, you can then point to the printout and say “No…it should look like this.”

5. Go with the glossy paper instead of the matte.  As far as the paper goes, you’ve got two options: glossy or matte.  The glossy finish looks so much more professional: the way it reflects fluorescent lighting will make your poster seem radiant.  It is truly a thing of beauty.  The resolution also seems to be marginally higher than with the matte finish.  That said, the matte option is usually much cheaper—about two-thirds of the cost of the glossy.  But if you can afford it, go glossy.

6. Inspect the poster closely before paying for it.  Kinko’s is going to charge you ~$100 for the poster—you deserve a good product.  I have seen all sorts of printing errors, from messed up ChemDraw structures, to garbled jpgs, to stretched dimensions, to random lines from misfed paper, to odd patterns from the plotter’s running out of ink.  When it comes to approving the final product, don’t let the staffer hold the poster up from 10 feet away behind the counter.  Get up close and quickly inspect it. 

7. Get a plastic poster tube and bring it to the store.  Kinko’s gives you your poster in a plastic bag that neither protects the paper from physical bumps nor damage from rain.  If you’re travelling somewhere, you’re going to want to put the poster in a proper tube anyway, so why not just bring it to the store in the first place?  I recommend buying a hard plastic Ice Tube, as I have heard a couple of sad stories regarding air travel and “regular” cardboard mailing tubes.  And nothing says “cool scientist” like walking around an airport with a neon orange poster tube.

I’m here in Denver for the 2,745,456th national meeting of the American Chemical Society.  Denver is a great city: very compact and walkable, especially without any snow.

Anyway, I’m told that the Sames–Sezen story was a major focus of Bob Bergman‘s HIST 005 presentation titled “Irreproducibility in the scientific literature: How often do scientists tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”  I’m also told that he and Ron Breslow had an exchange in the question-and-answer period.

Does anyone know what, exactly, was discussed?

Oh, and I’m giving a talk tomorrow at 3:30 in CCC 108.  If you are one of the three people who stays at national meetings past Wednesday, please come!

I jotted down a couple of things from the recent ACS conference in Anaheim, where on the whole, I had a good—but not great—time.  I think there is one big thing that is missing from ACS conferences, but that will be the subject of a future post.  In the meantime…

Giving Total Synthesis a Fair Shake

I decided the program was a good opportunity to reassess my disdain of total synthesis.  There is good total synthesis, and there is bad total synthesis; both were on display in Anaheim.  Baran gave an excellent talk on palau’amine and some interesting chemistry that followed.  At a later session, I sat through a 45-minute talk (by a huge name in synthesis) that was easily the most dull presentation (on insipid work) that I experienced during the entire conference.  The student talks in total synthesis did a good job of framing the common trials and tribulations associated with the sport…in which I have no desire (or ability) to compete.

Dreadful Attendance

I attended most of a session on reaction methodology that comprised talks from grad students and postdocs.  At one point, the room contained 14 people—yes, I counted.  Why pay hundreds of dollars to travel to California when more people would hear your talk if you opened your office door and shouted down the hallway?  And it’s not like this was one of those late Thursday sessions…it was on Monday afternoon.  Yes yes, these students are gaining valuable experience in public speaking and they get to attend the other talks at the conference, but still…14 people?  That is just sad.

Nomadic Professors

Aside from the science he presented, Stephen Buchwald‘s talk contained two interesting tidbits of information which were not necessarily new, but were new to me.  First, I was unaware that his ligand RuPhos was named after his cat Rufus.  Second, Buchwald casually mentioned during his talk that John Hartwig is moving from Illinois to Berkeley.  That struck me as peculiar, since it seems just like yesterday that Hartwig moved from Yale to Illinois.  Perhaps it was fitting that Buchwald’s talk was in a symposium honoring David MacMillan, whose career saw him move from Berkeley to Caltech to Princeton in a span of 7 years.  On one hand, you can’t fault someone for working his way up in the world (Illinois is an upgrade over Yale, Berkeley is an upgrade over Urbana-Champaign).  Also, sometimes tenure, promotions, and lab upgrades play a role.  On the other hand, such rapid movement has got to wreak havoc on all of the students/postdocs/families caught in the wave.  I imagine there could also be frayed nerves among the faculties of the spurned schools, who probably went to great lengths to recruit the jumpy professors in the first place.  When you live by the sword, you die by the sword, I suppose.  Perhaps the most interesting case of professorial movement is that of Jonas Peters, who moved from Caltech to MIT in 2007, then back to Caltech again in 2010.  And yes, I know of at least one student who made *both* moves.

Hi there.  Sorry for ignoring the blog of late; I’ve been swamped.  What’s new?

Well, this week, I’ll be commuting daily to the ACS conference in sunny Anaheim, California—a city that my undergrad advisor has dubbed the “armpit of America.”

Monday and Tuesday nights, I’ll be presenting the same poster at the Sci-Mix and Organic Division poster sessions.  Stop by the convention center from 8-10 pm!  We can talk science.  We can gossip.  We can sing Disney songs.  It’s going to be grand.

For bite-sized updates, check out the @ChemBark Twitter feed and everyone else using the #acsanaheim hashtag.