I’m chairing SPLASH/OOPSLA this year. That means that I’m like a Producer, I get to do all the work behind the scenes in order to make the conference come to life. And it’s finally coming to life. After one year and a half of “programming,” I just pressed “Run.” It’s a little crazy if you believe in agile. A whole year and a half of designing and “programming,” with no testing whatsoever, no small chunks, just a long process of envisioning, estimating, guessing, coordinating, signing contracts, making decisions; then we unleash the event during 5 days over almost 600 people and hope for the best!
So what’s involved in producing a conference like SPLASH? Read on if you want to know.
Ethics in Economics
Imagine this. You have a brilliant idea for how to reverse the effects of aging in female infertility, a wonderful combination of drugs that you have been developing in your lab with your graduate students, and that will open the possibility of motherhood to hundreds of thousands of women who waited just too long to conceive. You have done your Math, your Chemistry, you have developed the model explaining why your idea works. You have tested it in mice. You have tested it in pigs. You got 90% success. You have very little doubt that it works in humans too. If only you could test it… Now imagine that this is 1925, there are no Institutional Review Boards, no Ethics committees to go through, no clinical protocols. In order to test your ideas, you simply need to recruit women who routinely come to your medical office lamenting that they would like to have children but they are too old to conceive. You wholeheartedly believe in your cure and dream with the Nobel prize. Those women desperation is a powerful context for testing your ideas; they want it, they will gladly try anything!
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