Tag: neuro bureau

Many (most?) regular readers of this blog have probably been to at least one academic conference. Some of you even have the misfortune of attending conferences regularly. And a still-smaller fraction of you scholarly deviants might conceivably even enjoy the freakish experience. You know, that whole thing where you get to roam around the streets of some fancy city for a few days seeing old friends, learning about exciting new scientific findings, and completely ignoring the manuscripts and reviews piling up on your desk in your absence. It’s a loathsome, soul-scorching experience. Unfortunately it’s part of the job description for most scientists, so we shoulder the burden without complaining too loudly to the government agencies that force us to go to these things.

This post, thankfully, isn’t about a conference. In fact, it’s about the opposite of a conference, which is… an UNCONFERENCE. An unconference is a social event type of thing that strips away all of the unpleasant features of a regular conference–you know, the fancy dinners, free drinks, and stimulating conversation–and replaces them with a much more authentic academic experience. An authentic experience in which you spend the bulk of your time situated in a 10′ x 10′ room (3 m x 3 m for non-Imperialists) with 10 – 12 other academics, and no one’s allowed to leave the room, eat anything, or take bathroom breaks until someone in the room comes up with a brilliant discovery and wins a Nobel prize. This lasts for 3 days (plus however long it takes for the Nobel to be awarded), and you pay $1200 for the privilege ($1160 if you’re a post-doc or graduate student). Believe me when I tell you that it’s a life-changing experience.

Okay, I exaggerate a bit. Most of those things aren’t true. Here’s one explanation of what an unconference actually is:

An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization. For example, in 2006, CNNMoney applied the term to diverse events including Foo Camp, BarCamp, Bloggercon, and Mashup Camp.

So basically, my description was accurate up until the part where I said there were no bathroom breaks.

Anyway, I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. Specifically, I’m going to Leipzig, Germany! In September! And you should come too!

The happy occasion is Brainhack 2012, an unconference organized by the creative minds over at the Neuro Bureau–coordinators of such fine projects as the Brain Art Competition at OHBM (2012 incarnation going on in Beijing right now!) and the admittedly less memorable CNS 2007 Surplus Brain Yard Sale (guess what–turns out selling human brains out of the back of an unmarked van violates all kinds of New York City ordinances!).

Okay, as you can probably tell, I don’t quite have this event promotion thing down yet. So in the interest of ensuring that more than 3 people actually attend this thing, I’ll just shut up now and paste the official description from the Brainhack website:

The Neuro Bureau is proud to announce the 2012 Brainhack, to be held from September 1-4 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

Brainhack 2012 is a unique workshop with the goals of fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and open neuroscience. The structure builds from the concepts of an unconference and a hackathon: The term “unconference” refers to the fact that most of the content will be dynamically created by the participants — a hackathon is an event where participants collaborate intensively on science-related projects.

Participants from all disciplines related to neuroimaging are welcome. Ideal participants span in range from graduate students to professors across any disciplines willing to contribute (e.g., mathematics, computer science, engineering, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, medicine, art, etc“¦). The primary requirement is a desire to work in close collaborations with researchers outside of your specialization in order to address neuroscience questions that are beyond the expertise of a single discipline.

In all seriousness though, I think this will be a blast, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m contributing the full Neurosynth dataset as one of the resources participants will have access to (more on that in a later post), and I’m excited to see what we collectively come up with. I bet it’ll be at least three times as awesome as the Surplus Brain Yard Sale–though maybe not quite as lucrative.

 

 

p.s. I’ll probably also be in Amsterdam, Paris, and Geneva in late August/early September; if you live in one of these fine places and want to show me around, drop me an email. I’ll buy you lunch! Well, except in Geneva. If you live in Geneva, I won’t buy you lunch, because I can’t afford lunch in Geneva. You’ll buy yourself a nice Swiss lunch made of clockwork and gold, and then maybe I’ll buy you a toothpick.