I've just returned from a business trip to Dallas, TX, where my boss and I presented a completed grant project to the National Science Foundation. We did something similar in Maryland last year, but at one day in duration, this was the true business trip.

The first thing to notice about Dallas is that it was a lot colder than it should have been, in the 30s just like New York. The second thing was that the locals were not dealing with it very well. The woman who helped us get a taxi from the airport was bundled up like a Muslim. The taxi driver had the heat up so high in the taxi that even I was uncomfortable, which is to say it was comparable to the car being on fire.

The hotel was huge and pretty fancy; it had a nice art collection, and one of only three five-star restaurants in Dallas, the rather poorly named 'Nana.' Instead we chose the Mexican restaurant for dinner, and it was extremely good. The place had a strange internet setup: there was wireless but only in the public and meeting areas, and you had a buy a day of usage at the front desk. Every room had a DSL modem/router attached to the bottom of the desk, with a little connector coming out onto the desk that they wanted us to use. We couldn't imagine what this tiny thing did, but it was clearly meant to look like something other than just a connector; in fact though it didn't work at all, so instead we bypassed it by plugging the cable directly into the router. To do so we had to get around a piece of plastic attached specifically to prevent this possibility. Then we still had to pay for it.

Before bed we explored the hotel a little. There were a couple of other events, one of which was something called a "Lifetouch" seminar. There were also a large number of high school graduation pictures put up. These were incredibly involved pictures, obviously taken by professionals with plenty of soft glow. Some of them had whole sets that had been built to illustrate who this kid is; sometimes the kids were in elaborate costumes. Many of the males were holding guitars or in athletic regalia. The pictures had often embarrassing titles like "football dreams" or "lookin' hot." Ah, but a gem in this rough--one girl used the title "Oh, Inverted World." A Shins fan in Dallas!

The next morning was the conference. It felt a bit strange being the 'guy in town for the conference,' but I had plenty of company: over 500 projects were being presented here. Presented is perhaps not the best word: this was something called a poster session, in which everyone brings posters showing their project, and stands by them, and everyone circulates and chats about their projects. Since everyone is not there at the same time, it was not too crowded, but the sheer number of projects with posters was still overwhelming. Walking among them was a quick education in visual design principles: many of the posters provided a real chore in even finding the name of the project. Several were square grids of 8.5x11 printouts of Powerpoint slides. Not the way to go for at least two reasons: the grid effect is enhanced by having the same template for all the slides, and hides the information in them; and after starting on the top left slide, one doesn't know whether to go right or down! Our posters were not perfect, being so large that we could only fit two of our five into our strictly allotted space. But I can safely say that unless one has no idea what a scrub nurse or a robot is, one could look at our posters and understand the project very quickly, which is something you could say for perhaps 2% of the posters.

My boss made a sociological observation that I recognized as very accurate: if the goal is for people to pay attention to our poster, the best approach is to be nowhere near it. This is because when standing by one's poster, it is impossible not to look desperate for attention and watch people to see if they are looking at your poster. The passerby really doesn't want to get roped into a conversation, or have the representative say anything at all to them, unless they are truly interested in the project, which they know is very unlikely. The safest thing is to simply skip over the posters that have representatives by them. I did this many times.

My favorite poster was undoubtedly for a project called "Advanced Question Answering," that appeared to have no further explanation of the technical nature of the project, if there was any. Since the representative was standing in front of it, I couldn't linger on it, but noticed their list of technical objectives. "Answering specific questions" was checked off. "Response time < 1 second" was labeled "in progress."

We cut out after lunch. On the flight back, I was served a British can of coke. The measurements in Kilojoules caught my eye, then I noticed the rather vague ingredients list, including "sugar" and "flavourings." I tried to detect a difference in taste between this can and American ones, like there is between the American one (using corn syrup as a sweetener) and those from Montreal (using cane sugar). As far as I could tell, the British one was actually further along the spectrum than the American one, in terms of 'realness of sweetness' (the Montreal version being the most real). But this impression may have been affected by the slightly warm temperature of the can. I'll have to do some more research into this.