Speaker
Description
Conferences are where this Federation was created and what it was created for. These events, and in the wider sense the „exchange of information… among technologists and scientists“, as the statutes say, have been changing substantially over the years and are changing no less substantially in our time.
The mere chance to meet in person was anything but a given in the Federation’s first two decades. Our predecessors made a remarkable endeavour to meet in spite of the world being divided by the Iron Curtain. After it came down, international travel and meetings became so much easier and more frequent – for some years. But now the Covid-19 lockdowns and the invasion in Ukraine mark only the most recent steps of a series of growing restrictions to international meetings over the last few years.
Nothing has more revolutionized our communication and documentation than the advent of the internet. Concurrently, the computer is revolutionizing our technology in the shop and in the lab. But while these tools give us the chance to exponentially increase the pace at which we gather and share information, they also create new pitfalls and new biases we must safeguard against.
New media and information channels challenge our ability to master them and put them to our use. The ease of online communication and publishing is creating a deluge of scientific papers and technological documents which makes it hard to to separate the wheat from the chaff. The language barrier is by no means less an obstacle now than then. Automatic translation promises to overcome this but it still fails so often; only to show that guidelines are required for its further development and eventual use in science. Here, IFHTSE is providing its own modest contribution for understanding across the language barrier: the IFHTSE glossary.
| Speaker Country | Switzerland |
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