Thoughts after #Scio13 and #AAASmtg

I was somewhere over a whitewashed South Dakota when I popped open my laptop and stared blankly at the screen, trying desperately to distill my experience from the past three weeks into a post. I left Hawaii on January 29^th and headed to North Carolina for ScienceOnline 2013, a conference and unconference that feels more like a family reunion. I have been attending ScienceOnline for four years now, yet every year I approach the conference with a certain amount of apprehension. ScienceOnline isn’t like any other conference I go to; it’s a tight community of innovators, idea generators, influencers and instigators. In short, it can be kind of intimidating, even for seasoned veterans like me. This might sound ironic considering this year I gave a session on Impostor Syndrome, but there’s a certain doubt that creeps into the back of my mind when I’m surrounded by these brilliant people — ...