As it is my personal favorite holiday and I am supposedly a member of the ‘adult’ community, I decided that this year I would do the adult thing and dish out some candy to the kids. Little did I realize what I was in for. After work I went and bought the good stuff (little Snickers and Reese’s Cups) and quickly hashed together a costume. With the help of my Russian hat that Allison procured for me in, of all places, Russia and some basic vocabulary from one of the 3 Russians that work on my floor I was able to pull it off. After donning the outfit and getting in an appropriately Russian mood, I made my way to the front door of my apartment (which was disappointingly devoid of any decorations or anyone else with candy). The sight that greeted me was beyond comprehension. I have rarely seen this many children anywhere, let alone roaming the streets in sugar crazed gangs of masked characters. My candy stores were quickly depleted so I stopped by the local market and purchased several big sized candy bars and decided I would go distribute to kids with high quality costumes. On foot I quickly learned that Hyde Park is big on Halloween and that I live just a block away from the epicenter of the festivities.

Harper St. between 57th and 58th is completely shut down on Halloween. When I arrived the street was packed and nearly every house had gone for broke on decorations. These are not tissue paper spiders and cardboard skeletons. People have lights, spiders rigged to pounce on people from trees, fog machines in such abundance that sections of the street were completely blanketed, and there must have been enough candy distributed in five minutes to choke an army of donkeys. This was also not one or two houses that stood out. Nearly every one was draped with spider web, resplendent with tombstones rising from the front lawn, blasting eerie music, and complete with actual lines of children waiting for candy while parents hovered around. Sadly, I didn’t take any pictures because I decided that young, unattached, white, males taking photos of children in costumes would cause parents to call to mind such societal elements as ’serial killers’ and ‘pedophiles.’ I decided to spare them the worry. It was a truly impressive sight.

Armed with a small bagful of kingly sized candy and the remainder of the small stuff, I set off to dispense in a way that rewarded the truly clever and dedicated children (or children coerced by parents into appearing clever). I decided that I needed at least a simple rubric for deciding who would recieve the limited and highly coveted king sized candy. Immediate disqualifications were awarded for anyone dressed as a princess, Spiderman, Superman, the Incredible Hulk, any member of the Fantastic Four, or any comic book character recently appearing in a movie (with an exception for anyone dressed as a character from Sin City… though despite a good run at the box office, Sin City costumes were conspicuosly absent from the horde of young ones), faeries, sports figures, and all costumes consisting solely of a store bought mask and/or face paint. Bonus points were awarded for any literary character created earlier than the last 10 years and most recent literary characters were immediately disqualified (most notably the small army of Harry Potters). Bonus points were also awarded for any costume that I have not previously seen or musicians that my parents would not listen to.

The big winners were:
Two twins dressed as Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (also appropriate for Hyde Park)
A kid dressed as Sherlock Holmes
A young lady dressed as a pear (I thought it ironic that she chose to become a shape that most women seem to fear with a singular terror)
The toddler dressed as Slash from Guns n’ Roses (this had to be the parents doing)
A child dressed as a Tie Fighter from Star Wars (complete with a Darth Vader action figure sitting in the cockpit on his chest… clearly hand made and totally sweet)
The best of the whole night was a kid dressed in a top hat and coat that was too large with handkerchiefs sticking out of the pockets who, when asked what he was replied with (a real) English accent that we was “Oliver Twist by golly!”

As an aside to this story I will say that Allison should be particularly pleased with her gift getting skills because I cannot even remember how many people were floored by my hat. The crazy lady from upstairs saw me coming in and made me take it off and show her. I even got a, “Yo dawg thats a muthaf—— pimp hat” from one of the local youths.

I am keeping this one short because I do not want to detract from Shollen’s incredi-article. No theme for this one. It is just your standard issue sermon. As always rtrev –at– vdov –dot– net

1) The Russian Futurists - These Seven Notes - Our Thickness
2) Zinc Finger and the Major Groove - The University of Illest Noise - Twenty Two To Tango
3) The Hidden Cameras - That When the Ceremony Starts - Missasauga Goddam
4) Clinic - Internal Wrangler - Internal Wrangler
5) The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma - Strangeways, Here We Come
6) The New Pornographers - When I Was a Baby - Letter From an Occupant (Donner Party cover)

Writing this at 35,000 feet, I’m staring down at the Earth and thinking about how we have conquered the sky. So I imagined, when the plane took off, that it might just keep going. Clearly there’s still quite a bit of atmosphere sitting on top of me right now, but looking down on clouds sure makes you feel like you’re perched on top of it all.

This second article on the LEAG conference is meant to discuss the science goals of going to the Moon and the crazy-cool gadgets that scientists are making to get us there (and sustain our presence there). Major topics of discussion on the science side of things are astrobiology, and lunar astronomy.

Astrobiology is a very important emerging field. Since life evolved for Earth’s environment, we will encounter inevitable problems when we pick up and leave. The most pressing and least obvious of these problems are radiation and nonstandard levels of gravity. I will again defer the low gravity discussion to a future post, because that is closely tied to my research. To avoid excessive exposure to radiation, we can use shielding, but the shielding currently available will put astronauts at fairly high risk if we’re leaving them in space for months at a time. Most of the discussion on radiation involved developing new and improved personal dosimeters. This is important, but is not a solution to the problem. So if anyone has any ideas, this is a good niche to crawl into.

Oh and a crazy biologist, Robert Ferl, wants to develop ways to grow plants in regolith. The plants that his group is experimenting with are arabidopsis, which are useful for studies in space because they go from seed to seedling in 5 days, making them good subjects for experiments even on shorter missions. Take a second to think of how cool this is though: could we potentially grow food on the Moon in Lunar greenhouses? This would be very handy. Part of the study would be to do gene sequencing to see if the plants start mutating to fit their environment. I can almost hear Darwin cheering from the grave; he would have loved a front row seat to watch his theory in action.

Lunar astronomy is a very cool thought initially. The Moon is seismically quiet and has no atmosphere, both huge pluses for big telescopes. However, empty space also has these characteristics, and the question becomes: do we put all our telescopes in orbit around planetary bodies? Or do we want their feet set firmly in Lunar cement? This was actually a roundtable discussion at the conference, and though no solid conclusions were reached (are they ever?), it was mutually agreed that the Moon shows no advantage over empty space for astronomy, and actually provides a disadvantage for very clean and pretty telescopes because of the troublesome lunar dust. Lunar regolith can actually be very small (nanoparticle size), is easily excited by photons, and in 1/7th Earth’s gravity forms a misty cloud that can be up to 10 m above the surface of the Moon. Not an ideal place for fancy optics. However, the one caveat (in my opinion) that justifies Lunar astronomy is if there is a need for gravity. Pete Worden among others are interested in building a deep field infrared liquid-mirror telescope. A standard (yet fairly difficult) introductory mechanics problem asks you to describe (mathematically) the profile of a spinning bucket of water. Turns out that the spinning water forms a conical parabola. Optics guys like parabolas because they have a single focal point (this is the kind of thing you build to start fires by reflecting light from the sun. Anthony did you do this with me in high school?). Okay, cutting to the chase, they want to build a structure to spin a bucket of fluid (undecided) the size of a football field…but cylindrical (20-100 m). The size of a lens determines the resolution of the image, and when you’re looking at space it determines how far back you can look—the bigger, the better. This is a very cool idea, but dust could definitely ruin it.

Please raise your hand if you’ve ever played with transformers. Most likely, so did Wei-Min Shen and Jeff Taylor (the chair of LEAG) and they haven’t stopped, just improved the concept. SuperBots are transformable robots that can potentially do just about anything. They’re made up of independent units that each have 6 different ranges of motion (degrees of freedom, if you will): forward, back, left, right, up, and down. This covers our three spatial dimensions, and we haven’t found the fourth yet, so by connecting the units together you can produce any motion conceivable (they even have a video titled “the drunkard’s gait”). The little guys are not only versatile and adorable; they’re also very smart. They are programmed to detect what motion would work best on the terrain they find themselves on and reconfigure accordingly. One goal of this team is to deploy a SuperBot on the Moon, have it walk over to a crater (as a spider-bot), then transform into a wheel to roll down to the bottom, and finally become a self-sustained sample collector and mini analyzation laboratory, as each unit can be outfitted with measurement tools and cameras that fold up into its body. Take home lesson: NEVER stop playing with toys.

If I were to vote, I would definitely name Dr. Larry Taylor as the most entertaining speaker at the conference. I really wanted to hang out with the guy afterwards, he sounds like a very quirky and hilarious individual. I will now attempt to paraphrase the beginning of his talk: “There are lots of people in the world. And some of them enjoy putting strange things in microwaves. For better or for worse, I am one of those people.” He then went on to talk about how he’s found that grapes glow because the glucose is excited to form a plasma at microwave frequencies. He also recommended experimenting with bars of soap, specifically Irish Spring. (I can hardly wait to get back to my microwave now). So this guy, as a NASA employee, happened to be in possession of some regolith simulant (moondust), and he put it in the microwave.

Surprisingly, at household microwave frequencies (2.45 GHz) the regolith melted and coalesced to form a stiff composite. One potentially useful application of this new knowledge, conceived of by Dr. Taylor, is a lunar lawnmower outfitted with microwave emitters that dawdles along paving roads out of Moondust. Other applications would be building bricks (for astroeskimos’ igloos), fashioning antenna dishes…you might even be able to use this technique for oxygen production.

Another thing we might want to be doing with the Moon is studying its geology. Above, I claimed that the Moon is seismically quiet, which is true when compared to Earth, but there actually are Moonquakes. It’s worth studying Moonquakes for a number of reasons: seismic activity can give us a lot of information about how a planetary body formed and what its insides are made of (solid, liquid, multilayered gobstopper), and we also probably don’t want to build our Lunar forts on a particularly active seismic zone. Talso Chui, who is in my group at JPL, gave a talk about a new type of seismometer he is developing that is 10 times more sensitive than the current state of the art. The sensitivity is important because the signals on the Moon are so small; most of the Apollo data is swamped by noise. The increased sensitivity also makes it possible to measure the hypothesized presence of strange quark matter in the universe. A dark matter candidate, strange quark matter (SQM) can be recognized by a linear seismic wave. I have no idea how this works, maybe I’ll do some reading, but because the wave is linear it can be easily be distinguished from a Moonquake, which would have an epicenter (so that the seismic wave propagates radially). So in addition to being useful for exploration, these gadgets could play an important role in our understanding of the universe.

I could go on forever, and this review is probably already too long. I’m going to guess that maybe 40% of readers will even get to this line. But, to conclude, the themes with gadgets and equipment for exploration are versatility and reusability. In order to make this venture feasible, we need to reuse our landers and rovers and our equipment has to serve multiple purposes. As I will discuss in the next and final LEAG review, we will also have to make use of our resources wherever we find ourselves meandering.

In keeping with the prolific posting today at vdov.net, I’d like to point out that apartment complexes are essentially a series of total morons with various self-installed-but-less-than-acceptably-understood wireless networks of dubious security floating around on every damn channel creating what can only be described as a WIRELESS HELLHOLE.

In fact, my apartment complex here down on the ‘bash (that’s Williamsburg on the Wabash) is so overloaded with rogue networks that getting ANY performance out of my relatively stable and reliable D-Link DWL-2100AP from any further away than a few feet is impossible. Seriously, I can’t sit in bed with my AP no more than 20 feet away. It’s LINE-OF-SIGHT, people. Good lord.

The other thing I feel it is my duty to complain about today is how Microsoft is making my life miserable even after I’ve stopped working as a Network/System admin. This should be no suprise to most of you who know me — however, I have been sorely disappointed with the steady interaction I’ve been forced to accept with Microsoft products even as a graduate student in chemistry. WHAT SELF RESPECTING COMPANY ONLY BUILDS SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE FOR WINDOWS. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE.

That’s enough for tonight … maybe I’ll sleep on my couch so I can get some damn connectivity …

Well kids, it’s official. The new dope hope at dopefulhopefiend.com is now fully operational. After an on-and-off effort over the last two weeks and a final push through porting over the blogger content today, it’s done! Although now that it’s all done I could probably pull it off again in an hour or so, I encountered a number of problems along the way. These included multiple wordpress instance issues and the less-than-desirable mechanism for importing blogger content to wordpress.

Here’s to, well, me … and much more importantly Evan and his music/science-lovin’ self. The dope hope has learned some new tricks. Cheers.

Today at somewhere around 11:56am EDT, smashy (the machine that runs vdov.net and the new, soon-to-be-badass dopefulhopefiend.com) hit an uptime of 150 days. Not much to say really other than this is awesome and I’m looking forward to another 150 days of uptime.

pts/0 acosta@smashy:~ $ uptime
11:57:24 up 150 days, 1 min, 1 user, load average: 0.25, 0.06, 0.02

Although given the age of the machine and the heavy use I’ve put it under in the past 3 years, the fact that it managed not to crash in 150 days is not really all that incredible. Much more so is that given the frequent power outages that plague Bowdoin, the playground (the switch environment on which this machine sits) has managed to stay up without incident. Cheers to 3x UPS Matrix battery packs. Unfortunately, reboots are definitely going to be necessary soon, as I’ll be moving to a new kernel and as I hear, Alec has a RAM upgrade for me.

This ‘cast focuses on the strange, unique, weird, and most interesting sounds that indie music has to offer. This Friday the songs range from The Fiery Furnaces to Brian Eno. In honor of weirdness I do play two songs by The Fiery Furnaces, but only because they are troubadours of strange. Hopefully everyone will enjoy. I am also looking for feedback and requests. You can email either one of these or anything else to the Rt. Rev. Fischer at the email rtrev -@- vdov.net. I will give fair warning for the week of Nov. 5th because the Monday podcast will most likely be delayed because I will be attending the wedding of two friends in Colorado. Not only will I be shell shocked by the travel, the wedding itself might leave me dazed because these are the first friends close to my age to get married. Before I begin to ramble I will lay it on you in tracklist form.

1) Architecture In Helsinki - The Owls Go - Fingers Crossed
2) The Fiery Furnaces - Inca Rag/Name Game - Gallowsbird Bark
3) The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist - Since I Left You
4) Brian Eno - Blank Frank - Here Come The Warm Jets
5) Dr. Octagon - Halfsharkalligatorhalfman - Dr. Octagonecologyst
6) The Fiery Furnaces - The Garfield El - Rehearsing My Choir

I would say “howdy,” but since I haven’t even heard a Texan say it yet, it seems that this stereotypical Southwestern phrase would be inappropriate.

So, hello, from League City, Texas where I am at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) conference with about 300 scientists and engineers whose jobs are to dream up things to do with space, and more specifically the Moon. I am going to have to split this review up into several parts, as there is no way I can do justice to the amount of information I’ve encountered in a couple of paragraphs. First, in this article, I’ll talk about NASA’s immediate plans–things that are going to happen ; then science goals and gadgets (my favorite part); and finally In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and the space economy.

Most of you probably know about NASA’s plans to build the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) by 2010 to replace the Space Shuttle. I have also been seeing a lot of discussion over the practicality and necessity of this venture; some people wonder why we need to go back to the Moon (I refuse to even address this question), others question the reasons that the whole design looks a lot like Apollo. Nobody is denying this, but there are good reasons for the similarities: the physics of spaceflight have not changed since 1970, and “we haven’t figured out warp drive yet” (John Connolly, NASA HQ). I am HAPPY to go into more detail on anything I don’t address fully here, just post questions or email me (smhollen at gmail).

NASA’s proposed exploration schedule:
1. Robotic Lunar Exploration Program (RLEP) Missions.
2. Short human missions, called Sortie Missions (up to 7 days).
3. Long-term human missions—living on and exploring the Moon for up to 6 months.
4. Mars.

There are two primary purposes of the RLEP Missions: first, to study the resources available on the Moon (water in the permanently shadowed craters, oxygen and hydrogen in the regolith, swiss cheese in the mountain caves…); and second, to build the infrastructure necessary for human presence. One of the problems with the Apollo program was that the astronauts were often performing tasks that would have been better accomplished by robots. We need to leave more time for creative human exploration that robots cannot perform. The goal is to find a balance between humans and robots in space that provides maximum efficiency for exploration.

The Sortie missions are easier to anticipate than the more long-term missions. One of the reasons for this is that we know we can bring enough stuff for a couple of days, but if we’re planning a several month long Lunar vacation, we’re going to have to learn to live (partially) off of the land. The buzzword there (an entire day was dedicated to this) is In-Situ Resource Utilization, or ISRU. For Serenity fans, this can be compared to a lesser version of “Terra-forming.” We can’t convert the Moon into a planet with Earth’s gravity and an atmosphere, but we might be able to get oxygen, water, and fuel out of the regolith. The low-gravity problems are another issue that I’ll talk about later because it has a lot more to do with what I work on.

Long-term Lunar missions are definitely in the future of our space program. As much as I hate to cite G. W. Bush, it is his speech from last February that spurred this agency into an accelerated mode to get humans back into space. Space has been thought of as the “next frontier” since the 1960s, but it is our venture. This is happening now. As Paul Spudis (Applied Physics Lab) put it, the Moon is our laboratory for learning how to explore other planets—the next in line being Mars. We don’t know how to do this yet, but we have a great backyard to experiment with.

I’ve heard so many fantastical propositions this week, and some of them are practical. I mean, I don’t know who paid an economist to spend the summer modeling the profitability of Lunar hotels, but even this sort of thinking is important because the privatization of space is going to be an essential step that could accelerate the motion to move away from home. Probably not permanently, at least in our lifetimes, but the idea is right. Several people have compared NASA and other government space programs to Lewis and Clark: first we have to go see what’s out there, what we’re going to have to face, and what resources we’ll have to work with. Then we can start our expedition. So, pack your wagons, here comes the Oregon Trail Part II.

Since most of the vdovers are nerdy enough to find the open source community exciting, I thought I would recommend this week’s issue of my favorite periodical - the Economist. There are several articles on intellectual property, particularly in the IT field. Also, there is an excellent Bill Gates quote in which he equates the open source community to a modern form of communism. I won’t paraphrase the articles, but I think both sides of the issues are presented fairly. Microsoft is referred to as the ’scariest’ pursuer of intellectual property, due to its monopolistic practices and the amount of software it produces. The authors also note the danger that open source poses to MS, and cite the necessity of working with the open source community to promote innovation. There is also a bit of speculation on the future of patent law and the intellectual property market. The latter topic is particularly interesting, particularly for those of us pursuing careers in science and technology.

As many already know the Monday ‘cast is up. I would also hope that people are following the WBOR podcast because it is hot. Since there seems to be a ton going on I will keep it short and sweet. On this show we take a little trip back in time to visit some older music (not that old really) and get a little heavy into some compilations for whatever reason. Here is the link to the Dusted Magazine review of Orange Juice. From what I hear the Spirit is moving at vdov so keep your eyes peeled. Until Friday… the Rt. Rev Fischer wishes peace unto you.

1) RZA & MFDoom - Biochemical Equations - Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture
2) Orange Juice - Satellite City - The Glasgow School
3) Man or Astro-man? - Interplanet Janet - Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks
4) Pixies - The Pixies - Live in Indianapolis, IN June 7, 2005
5) The Better Boyfriends - The Love Theme from “Moonstroker” - Twenty Two to Tango
6) Devendra Banhart - Little Yellow Spider - Nino Rojo
7) TV on the Radio - Walking the Cow - The Late Great Daniel Johnston

SEVEN songs… I need to back off. I am way too hot!

There has been much hype lately surrounding the release (or, rather, pre-release) of Flock, a Mozilla-based blogging web browser. After tinkering around with it recently on vdov.net, I’ve found it to be quite nice. It’s simple and it supports the majority of blog types out there.

All this being said it is neither robust NOR complete. Much still needs to be done. Although I cannot speak for Linux and Windows, its stability on Mac OS X leaves quite a bit to be desired. I’ve been plagued with near constant crashes and hangs. It also lacks, how to say, anything but basic functionality. Title and post body entries are as much as you’re going to get into a post with Flock right now.

However, there should be much rejoicing. Implementation of these functions should be a) quick and b) simple. Taking a look at the xmlrpc.php file native to Wordpress (which supports the Blogger, MetaWeblog and MovableType APIs), I expect a much more complete version of the software very very shortly. Why?

// MetaWeblog API (with MT extensions to structs)
'metaWeblog.newPost' => 'this:mw_newPost',
'metaWeblog.editPost' => 'this:mw_editPost',
'metaWeblog.getPost' => 'this:mw_getPost',
'metaWeblog.getRecentPosts' => 'this:mw_getRecentPosts',
'metaWeblog.getCategories' => 'this:mw_getCategories',
'metaWeblog.newMediaObject' => 'this:mw_newMediaObject',


Right now, of course, all that is supported is a minimal form of .newPost. Those of you who have used Flock so far know that support for things such as categories does not exist. But have no fear,

$catnames = $content_struct['categories'];
logIO(’O', ‘Post cats: ‘ . printr($catnames,true));
$post_category = array();

if (is_array($catnames)) {
 foreach ($catnames as $cat) {
  $post_category[] = get_cat_ID($cat);
 }
}


Such is the case with all such as-yet unsupported features of our wonderful blogging engines to which we all owe so much. So sit tight — the developers already did most of the work. All Flock needs to do now is capatalize on it.

There is a creepy atmosphere at art museums after dark. Maybe it’s just because Halloween is coming up, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) was not crowded and in the midst of changing exhibits, but I swear some of the portraits were closely watching our every move. In one wing, my friend Lea and I were innocently discussing the mauve color of a farm-scene from the 1700s when we heard a soft thunk and the lights went out. In the a nearby gallery a radio crackled, reporting the problem, which was quickly fixed. The first thing I saw when the lights came back on was a portrait of a sullen man in a black cloak on a bench in the middle of a vast taupe-colored field who appeared to be a priest. Interestingly, the piece was called “disillusioned.” It was done in the late 1800s by an artist I’d never heard of, but probably has one of the greatest names ever: Ferdinand Hodler. Honestly, say it outloud, it’s got a great ring to it.

Awesome names seemed to be the theme of our adventure. The next painting that really jumped out at me (well, not so literally this time) was by a guy named Hubert Robert. I definitely started laughing out loud disturbing the nearby analysts who were visibly angered by my ignorance to fine art. Come on though, Hubert is bad enough and someone chose it to rhyme with Robert. Okay, more seriously though, this scene was impressive for two reasons: first it was huge–at least 8′ x 6′. Second, it was called “Escalier d’une Villa Romaine” (circa 1700) and was in fact of stairs in a Roman villa, but in between these stairs was an aqueduct rushing downhill, and those ingenious Romans had diverted the pressure from the water so that the it shot up in fountains that looked (in comparison to the people in the scene) to be 20′ high. The rushing rapids dribbled out into a pool at the bottom as a result. No one would ever do something this clever today: “You want a 20′ jet of water? Give me a pump and a V8 engine.”

Finally, the most impressive piece I saw was by Baron Francois-Pascal-Simon Gerard (B. FraPSiG, to close friends). I think it was almost a fun expriment for this guy: there was a lightly painted grid in the background, and 4 very distinct styles of painting used throughout. The scene itself seemed to be in a courtroom or some such and it was called “7 of December 1792″ except that the 7th of December part might be wrong, I just remember that it was a specific date in 1792. The focus of the piece was men arguing and obviously nearing a brawl. These men were “complete,” in the sense that they had very defined features and shadowing. The scene to the imediate left was more abstract with thick outlines of several men bending over someone who’d been stabbed, and to the right was a small crowd with a document of some sort yelling at the “focal group.” These men were just oulined with thin pencil and were strangely similar to cartoons. Finally, the entire background was filled in with light strokes suggesting crowds of people, who were all oddly faceless. Standing back, you feel a lot of emotion and strong interactions. This was definitely my favorite piece, and I really wish I could show it here.

I had no luck finding any of these pieces online, which has made me reconsider the omnipotence of the internet. However, if anyone so happens to be in the LA area, I do recommend a visit to LACMA. It’s open later than most museums, usually until 8 or 9, and it is free after 5 pm (almost a trick since parking is only free after 7 pm). The King Tut exhibit is famously reigning in West LACMA for a while longer, but this is never free (and I actually heard that it is mostly hype and not that impressive). Also, coming straight from MOMA in New York, a Cezanne and Pissaro exhibit just opened up, but this is also not free. I might go back to see it, but I was bitter about the limited freeness of the “free after 5″ and pouting.

This coming week I will be exploring Houston at a NASA conference, so look for some upcoming science posts. If you’re interested, it’s the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) Conference, and you can find the program on their website.