Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 19:04:09 -0500 From: Robert L Jaffe To: ctp-all@mit.edu Subject: [Ctp-all] changes in seminar schedule Hi, The CTP faculty have been discussing ways to reduce the total number of seminars and to enhance the effectiveness of those that take place. The result is a set of changes that will be implemented first in the Spring semester. There will be some transitional issues and probably some glitches. But we believe it is for a good cause. Bob NEW SEMINAR PLAN: We have decided to modify the seminar structure in the CTP. The modifications we have decided on are aimed at achieving several goals: reducing the total number of seminars, improving the quality of the average seminar, removing redundancy, and increasing the communication between people working in different research areas within the CTP. The new changes are as follows: 1) The Monday particle theory and Tuesday nuclear theory seminars will be merged into a single Monday nuclear/particle theory seminar. The organizers of the previously existing Monday and Tuesday seminars will continue to organize the new Monday seminar, with Iain Stewart acting as the head organizer. 2) The Wednesday string seminar will broaden its scope to include all aspects of gravitational and Planck scale physics. The renamed string/gravity seminar will continue to be organized as it was previously, but will also include some speakers who might previously have appeared in the Monday seminar whose topics are more naturally in the areas of gravity or cosmology, including black holes, quantum gravity, large extra dimensions, etc. 3) The organizers of the Monday and Wednesday seminars will be in close contact regarding speakers near the boundary between the seminars. They will inform one another of speakers scheduled, and organizers of one seminar can suggest speakers suitable for the other seminar; the organizers should make efforts to include quality speakers suggested through this mechanism. 4) The organization of the joint theory seminar will be coordinated with the Monday and Wednesday seminars. The Monday and Wednesday seminar organizers will attempt to channel some of the highest quality speakers into the joint theory seminar, and will host the joint theory seminar speakers they invite. 5) Each semester, the seminar organizers will point out a few of the seminars in each series as "general interest" seminars. These talks should be given by good speakers, on topics of significant importance which may be of general interest to those working outside the particular area of the talk. The organizer in this case will send a short message to the full CTP describing the seminar briefly and indicating that it may be of general interest. In this case the organizer may also wish to inform the speaker that there will be non-specialists in the audience, and that the speaker might include some general introduction for these non-specialists in the first 10 minutes of the talk. We may also wish to inform some of our colleagues outside the CTP (experimental, astro, condensed matter, depending on the case) of appropriate general interest talks. 6) Speakers who cannot be scheduled for the regular seminars, particularly the overflow speakers from the Monday nuclear/particle seminar may be scheduled for an overflow talk on Tuesday. While there may be a number of these talks next semester, we expect that the number of these talks should diminish over time as we adapt to the new system. _____________________________________________________________ | Robert L. Jaffe jaffe@mit.edu | Morningstar Professor of Science and MacVicar Faculty Fellow | Director, Center for Theoretical Physics | 6-311 MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue | Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 | Phone 617 253 4858 Fax 617 253 8674 | _____________________________________________________________| _______________________________________________ Ctp-all mailing list Ctp-all@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ctp-all