Sociology Today

[droege@snapmail.us]

I have spent the day at Fermilab attending a design meeting on the
Electronics for what turns out to be the current largest CCD camera under
design.

In the past, my group (26 people) built the electronics for the CDF
detector (discoveror of the top quark) without having a conference room. 
I just spent part of the day walking around and talking to everyone and
passing around the information that was needed.  That way almost everyone
(but me) spent the whole day doing useful work. I would collect the
problems that prevented my people from getting their job done and then
spend the rest of the day solving them.

I have noticed that over the last twenty years that people at Fermilab
(and probably everywhere else) were spending more and more time in
meetings.  One can do what our former director did at today's meeting and
sleep, but there is the risk of falling off one's chair. We seemed to have
reached saturation where most people spend most of their time in meetings.

***BUT MANKIND IS STRIKING BACK***

We are nothing if not creatures that can adapt to our environment. 
Everyone at the meeting save me came with a laptop. For the most part,
even though we were connected by video to several countries, no one was
paying attention to the talks.  Well, possibly they looked up
occcasionally when something new came up.  People at Fermilab sit in
meetings and answer their e-mail, shop for whatever, and write papers. 
There are so many meetings that the same talks are repeated over and over.
 I was sitting next to one of the speakers.  Most of the time he was
working on software for a web site.  During the talk before his, he
started preparing the slides for his talk.

Some pretty startling things came up.  I was listening to the technical
details.  They seemed to be saying that the camera could not be made to
work to specification.  My reading of the data presented is that the
survey will only cover about 1/3 to 1/4 of the coverage required for the
survey.  This did not seem to bother anyone but me.  They are like
zombies.  They just sit there staring at their labtops.

It was really pretty surreal.

This is a very difficult design.  I think it will be nearly  impossible to
make it work to the specifications for which the Physicist next to me was
making slides.  I keep wanting to corner people to talk about the
difficult technical problems and to try to work out compromise solutions. 
 For example, I think we can either meet the noise spec or the read out
speed spec but I don't see how we can possibly do both.  But no one seems
to want to exchange technical ideas.

I cancelled the talk I was going to give.  I can't even get interested in
it.  tass has spoiled me.

Tom Droege