GRITS II Announcement

The producers of GRITS II (see below) will begin an IPAC-wide 
casting search to fill twenty new roles for the latest season 
of GRITS, the Greater IPAC Technology Symposium. It's scheduled 
to "air" on June 10th, and we're looking for people to talk for 
fifteen minutes each (with five minutes of questions at the end) 
about any subject relevant to IPAC. As an equal opportunity 
production, we'd like to have at least one person from each 
of the projects (IRSA, WISE, Planck, Herschel, NED, Spitzer, 
LSST, TPF, SIM, Kepler, NStED, ISG) to talk about some of the 
neat things they're working on. Also, techniques for 
storing large amounts of data, visualizing information 
graphically, optimizing pipeline processing and, in the case 
of flight projects, just bragging about the pretty pictures 
they've taken, would be most welcome.

This season, we're also planning on having a one-day tutorial 
performance on June 10th. This will likely be two 
half-day or one full day mini-course designed to cover a 
technical topic in more depth than a 15 minute talk can hope 
to address. Suggested topics have included really large 
databases, a primer on clusters, building websites with Ruby on 
Rails or an introduction to Python. If you have suggestions for 
topics (and, especially, if you can recommend someone who could 
present the topic --- even if they're non-IPAC and need to be 
flown here as an "unpaid consultant"), the producers 
would like to hear from you.

To give you some idea of what we're looking for, last season's 
highlight reel is available at 


http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/grits/2009/ 

Once again, refreshments will be provided, though unlike last 
year, we won't be launching two telescopes earlier that morning 
(yes, GRITS I opened the same day as the Herschel/Planck blockbuster).

If you're interested in presenting or have suggestions for the tutorials, 
please contact any of the GRITS producers (i.e. organizing committee) 
listed here:

Bruce Berriman
Rick Ebert 
Tom Handley 
Jake Llamas 
Ben Rusholme 
Steve Schurr 
Elena Scire 
Helene Seibly 
David Shupe 
Xiuqin Wu  

Knock 'em dead; break a leg. Y'all come back now, y'hear?