Last week, I attended LabPhon online and co-hosted a satellite workshop with my co-author Paul De Decker on "Challenges for Change." We discussed 9 methodological challenges our presenters have faced during the pandemic, and we brainstormed solutions going forward. We had a very good discussion about what circumstances, types of studies, and populations benefit from online participation, compared to those that benefit from in-person work. The conference also had pre-recorded talks and flash talks (replacing posters) plus live streaming, live Q&A, and asynchronous chat. It was organized on the Whova platform with live interaction streamed through Zoom, which was a winning combination lacking the technical catastrophes of some recent online conferences. Overall, good!

After over two years of online conferences, I attended the Acoustical Society of America in Denver. It was great to catch up with old friends and see posters in person. The posters were very spread out, which was great for the acoustics -- we could hear each other without yelling, and we weren't bumping into each other. It would be nice if we could do it that way forever!

My second master's student, Molly Landers, completed her thesis and graduated today! Her thesis examined rootedness, or attachment to hometown, as an explanatory factor for variation in back pre-lateral vowel mergers. She is one of two in her class -- a first in departmental memory -- to be going on for a PhD. She'll be headed to Michigan to study fluency this fall.

Thanks to some hybrid programming, I was able to attend the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society annual meetings. LSA was planned as hybrid, but many people canceled their trips due to COVID, and ADS pivoted from all in-person to all-online in about a week!  I'm glad I could attend from home on short notice. The Word of the Year was just as lively over Zoom as in person, with 400 people participating and a Twitch-worthy chat scrolling speed!