BCRA Cave Technology Symposium

18-20 April 2008, Mendips

Presentations of short topics on cave surveying, electronics, computing, lighting, photography, cave radio, radio-location and other aspects of caving "technology". Abstracts are required by 5 April 2008.

This one-day symposium (on 19 April) is being hosted by members of BCRA's special interest groups: the Cave Surveying Group (CSG), the Cave Radio & Electronics Group (CREG) and the Explosives Users Group (EUG). Technical facilities will be provided by the Hidden Earth technical team.

The event will co-incide with a weekend CSG field meeting. The symposium lecture secretary is David Gibson d.gibson[at]bcra.... Enquiries about the CSG field meeting or accommodation for the weekend should be sent to Allan Richardson csg-meetings[at]bcra....

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DETAIL:

In outline, the symposium will consist of a number of lectures, poster papers and practical demonstrations. It is hoped that abstracts of talks will be available in advance, and that papers based on the lectures will be available for publication by BCRA or one of its SIGs. In other words, this event has a slightly more formal basis than a mere 'field meeting' and is aiming to be similar to BCRA's Science Symposium in concept. Initially, we're envisaging the following types of presentation...

• Theoretical Lectures: supported by PowerPoint, Impress or your favourite means of getting the point across. You will have 25-40 minutes to do this, with an opportunity for questions in 'extra time'
• Practical: As above, 25-40 minutes, but less emphasis on theory and more on field reports
• Demonstrations: e.g. of equipment or techniques. Again, 25-40 minutes in length but, depending on what is offered, we may run several of these in parallel, in small groups.
• Poster Papers: 10 minutes to describe the contents of your poster or cave survey.

The idea is to provide a forum for discussion of cave technology topics, with a particular emphasis on cave surveying, computing and electronics. However, the event could be extended to include discussions on other Special Interest Group topics, and so members of BCRA's EUG and the UK Cave Photography Group are welcome to contribute, or even to organise their own weekend field meetings to coincide with this classroom session.