Dear Conference Participants, this covers the following topics: -practical information -attendance, discussion sessions and posters -novel ideas: 'in the spirit of the Gordon Conference' -other research meetings ******Practical information****** If you have not registered yet, please do so as soon as possible. The $50 early registration discount expires three weeks before the meeting, i.e. on May 23. If your plans have changed, and you will not be attending the meeting, please notify me and the GRC organization (particularly to get a refund). We are nominally exceeding the site capacity; it would be bad if we turned away any new applicants for no good reason. Practical information concerning the site and travel has been provided in the links from the Nuclear Chemistry GRC site: http://www.nscl.msu.edu/~daniel/gor04/prog04l.htm Our Conference Coordinator is Dori Bossler, dori@grc.org You may contact her with specific practical questions. Below, I highlight the information from the GRC site and provide some supplementary information. The lecture ('SITE 2') room is equipped with an LCD (1024x768) projector, an overhead projector, as well as a blackboard. If you plan on a computer presentation, you can bring your talk on a USB drive, CD or a floppy and you can also bring your own laptop, if you want. The connector is 15-pin VGA type. Internet can be accessed using computers in the library on the site. Also, every dorm room is equipped with an Internet jack. If you plan to use it, you need to bring your own Ethernet cable. The most common way of getting to the conference site is to fly into the Boston Logan Airport. Other options include flying into the Manchester Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire, or into the Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. The GRC Organization has arrangements with the Holiday Inn 'Logan Airport', in the vicinity of the Boston Airport. The hotel offers discounted rates to the participants, which turn out to be the best deal when sharing a room. In the vicinity of the Manchester Airport, the GRC has arrangements with the Four Points Sheraton. (Before the GRC broken link gets fixed, here is the right one: http://www.fourpoints.com/manchester Note, this is only if you fly into Manchester!) The hotels can be normally called using a free courtesy phone in the airport luggage area. They then send a shuttle to pick you up. You need to know what terminal you are at, when calling. The GRC provides four busses from the Boston Holiday Inn, between 12:30 and 7:00pm on Sunday, taking participants to the conference site. At the hotel, there is a room where you can relax when waiting for the transportation. There is only one bus, at 1:30pm, taking participants from the Manchester Airport. The GRC busses must be reserved in advance. The company named Dartmouth Coach http://www.concordtrailways.com/dartmouth_coach.htm also provides transportation between the Logan Airport and New London. Their roundtrip fare is cheaper than the GRC's. When few participants travel together, renting a car may be an economic and/or convenient option. From my searches, hotwire.com has been offering best rates, but you need to buy the rental upfront, from an unknown company. The US participants, usually have their rental car insurance paid by their credit car or home car insurance. However, this will not be usually the case for the foreign participants. In my experience, the Irish Nova: http://www.rentacar-worldwide.com/ has usually offered attractive prices with insurance included. If you happen to arrive to Boston on the eve of the Conference, consider sightseeing in the morning. The most efficient way of seeing Boston is by following the so-called 'Freedom Trail', from the city center down to the trail end. The city center can be reached by underground, with a station within ~15min walk from the Holiday Inn (ask for the city and local maps at the reception). Also the terminal airport underground station can be used, in combination with the hotel shuttle. ******Attendance, discussion sessions and posters****** The GRC Organization pays real attention to the attendance. All participants are expected to stay throughout the whole duration of the Conference and attend all scheduled sessions. If there is evidence that this is ignored, the series may be put on probation or cancelled. If a participant gives a talk or leads a discussion and leaves within 24h from his session, before the end of the Conference, the GRC Organization actually cancels any possible support for that participant. The most recent program is available always on my site: http://www.nscl.msu.edu/~daniel/gor04/prog04l.htm Note that the first session starts at 7:30pm on Sunday. From Monday through Thursday, there are open discussion sessions organized. If you would like to raise some points, please contact the chairs for the respective sessions, ahead of the meeting, by email (links on my site), or during the meeting. If you are bringing a poster, please email your name and title to Piera Sapienza at sapienza@lns.infn.it If there are many posters, we will split the presenters between the two poster sessions. The poster boards are 4ft (120cm) tall. ***New ideas 'in the spirit of the Gordon Conference'*** The tradition of Gordon Conferences is to discuss new, unpublished, provocative and often speculative ideas. When you are about to present such ideas in your talk or discussion, you are encouraged to announce them by pronouncing the magic words: 'In the spirit of the Gordon Conference'. To encourage free-spirited discussions, particularly within industrial fields, the GRC Organization explicitly asks that no references are made to the discussions in any publications and that no recordings of any type are made of the presentations or discussions. ***********Other research meetings************* There are two research meetings that follow the GRC on Nuclear Chemistry and may be of your interest. One is the WCI 2 meeting (on low-energy central reactions) taking place on June 18 and 19 at the Smith College: http://cyclotron.tamu.edu/sjygroup/wci2004/ http://philippe.chomaz.free.fr/WCI/post_gordon_meeting.htm If you would like to attend that meeting, please contact Malgorzata Pfabe at mpfabe@smith.edu Another meeting is the 2004 Gordon Research Conference on Radiation Chemistry to be held June 20-25, 2004, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine (different site from ours!). You can apply for that meeting at the GRC site, http://www.grc.org That meeting is chaired by J. Belloni of Universite Paris Sud. Looking forward to seeing you at the Gordon Conference on Nuclear Chemistry, Pawel Danielewicz