Friday, April 22, 2016

KITP seminars online

A wonderful thing about the web is that now there is so much material online. A pioneer in putting all their seminars and colloquia online is the KITP at Santa Barbara. I know some people who regularly watch seminars (both old and recent). Others do not know it exist. This is a particularly valuable resource for students and those of us in distant countries.

I have to confess that until yesterday I have never actually watched a talk; just occasionally skimmed some slides. Generally I find I don't have the patience to watch talks online. I just seem to prefer to look at papers. However, yesterday I was forced to do this because at the weekly UQ condensed matter theory group meeting we watched a nice talk by Antoine Georges on Hund's metals. Although, I have read and blogged about some of the relevant papers, I really found it helpful seeing what was highlighted and going through the material at a "slow pace". Hopefully, I will do this more often.

What do you think about online talks or lectures? How often do you watch them? Are there any that you would particularly recommend?

1 comment:

  1. I think they are an extremely valuable resource. Unfortunately, I can't usually summon up the energy or patience to systematically keep track of them/watch them, even if they are in my field. I suspect this may be a generation thing and that graduate students may be better attuned to picking up information and ideas this way, provided they get into the habit early enough. One of our graduate students here arranges for a webcast of a number of Perimeter Institute Quantum Information theory seminars, for instance.

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