Facing my first academic conference

Feeling rather restless here at work waiting until I set off for New Mexico tomorrow. I'll be attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists - a pretty big deal for someone in this field.

Needless to say, I'm pretty nervous - aggrivated somewhat by the fact I've been asked to chair my session of dental anthropology. I'm a bit apprehensive what will happen if I tell a big shot academic to get a move on with their poster set up or something.

I'm also, more so, excited. Being a British academic doesn't give you much chance to get a feel for the current atmosphere elsewhere in the world. And this is especially noticable with Biological Anthropology, which is massively biased towards being an American discipline more so than anywhere else. Its going to be great to be able to meet all of those people who I've read about in countless articles, and also make myself known to them. Its a chance to network, learn, and actually enjoy myself.

I have noticed that, in this country at least, there is a considerable lack of reference points for those new to academic or scientific conferences. I've never seen photos of an AAPA conference, and little things like how to hang my poster seem impossible to discover. So I'll be taking some photos while I'm at the conference, and I'll also write a diary on the event, because its not very nice to go into these things blind. I mean, I'm not even sure which buffets it is acceptable to crash!!

A floresiensis for the new decade

I doubt there is anyone who doesn't know about this news yet, but before I can write a longer post tomorrow I just thought I'd link to the actual article so you can decide for yourselves upon the classification of these specimens. I'm not entirely convinced that the degree of morphological variation warrants a new species distinction - but then no one asked me!