APS March Meeting 2018 Epitome notes

Here are some of the things I came across while putting together my nicely formatted versions of the Epitome and Invited Speaker list for the 2018 APS March Meeting.

The first thing is, that as of 9am on Monday, February 26th, one week before the March Meeting, Session R16 is blank. Its supposed to be an invited session, but there are no speakers, no titles, and not even a “TBD.” Considering the session title, is this supposed to be a sort of backhanded statement?

The rest of these are inconsistencies mainly of interest to someone who’s trying to parse and reformat:

I mentioned in my earlier post using a regex to find chemical formulas, because the subscripts are no longer written out as LaTeX directives and are most often printed straight out. A number of things inadvertently match as chemical formulas (the middle initial “W”), but since the typesetting only changes when there are numbers, this isn’t really a problem. The “Tc” in “High-Tc” will match, and while leaving “Tc” as is would be fine, it’s easy enough to capture this and replace with High-T_c.

There are a few titles that were wholly put in quotation marks; these are unnecessary and can be stripped, but for titles that use quotation marks to set off a phrase, they were set with straight quotes, which should be transformed into open and close quotes for typesetting.

The March Meeting has 14 schedule blocks, 3 a day Monday–Thursday and 2 on Friday; these blocks are labeled with letters. Within each block are up to 59 parallel sessions. A session will have 15 contributed 12-minute talks, 5 invited 36-minute talks, or some combination of these. Some topics have enough contributed talks that there will be multi-part sessions, which are designated with roman numerals. The most popular such session this year is Devices from 2D Materials, which has eight parts. The topic First-principles Modeling of Excited State Phenomena in Materials has seven parts.

But somehow, the (lonely?) session “Coherence and Quantum Aspects of Living Systems I” does not seem to have a second part.

Subtitles are set off both with colons and with dashes. The dashes ought to be typeset as em dashes (—) with no space between the dash and text, but in the Epitome, there are at least three ways the dashes are printed: as single or double hyphens with space surrounding (” — “, ” – “), or a space and a hyphen (” -“). I convert all these dashes to em dashes for printing, but keep the colons.

I decided to tally these with my python scripts this year. There are three ways the Roman numerals are presented: at the end of a title, with no following text; preceding a subtitle, or in parenthesies. It’s fairly easy to make a regex that matches roman numerals, but it can capture too much, so I used positive lookahead to make sure it was one of these categories. But since X-ray also has a following dash, I had to make sure it was excluded!

But I wonder about the folks planning Advances in Computational Statistical Mechanics and their Applications. They’re labeled “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and “Part 3.” Do they have something against Roman Numerals? In all the years I’ve been going to the March Meeting, this is the first time I’ve noticed Arabic numerals to designate a multipart session.