culture evolves!

Garr Reynolds, at Presentation Zen (a moment for fangirling, please), has a post linking to resources for scientific presentations. Often presentation advice is geared towards commercial or creative models, and while it’s helpful to extract what works/what sucks from those sorts of domains, a Zen-approach to scientific/academic presentation couldn’t come soon enough. From the editorial “Let There Be Stoning” by J. H. Lehr, which Garr links to (available in entirety here and well worth the read) I snuck this gem:

Without exception a presentation … can and should be made extemporaneously. A scientist who cannot retain in his head the essence of his latest work can hardly be said to be enraptured by his subject. If a speaker is not excited enough by his area of expertise to weave it comfortably into the fabric of his cognitive thought processes, then how can he hope to excite an audience to an acceptable level of appreciation?

Presenting scientific work we’re constrained by the need to provide a certain base level of technical information or background, and results are generally graphical or in tables–not leaving much room to get crazy with the style. But 90% of academic talks err on the TMI (too much information) side, and by doing this, often they preclude people asking questions. I attended a talk yesterday and made a conscious effort to not look at the slides unless they had a picture, table or graph, and you know what? I didn’t miss anything important at all. Sadly, the speaker relied on looking at her laptop or reading off the screen in many cases, which is just as irritating as the philosophy-model of literally “reading a paper”.

I’m determined that the next talk I give will be pared down to the bare essentials, and that the focus will be on me and my information.

Teaching presentations are of course a different kettle of fish, but I’ll re-visit those issues when they’re pressing.

I finally updated my academic website.

• Updated CV with two publications
• Changed old diary to point here.
• Updated the Links page to point to my del.icio.us bookmarks, as keeping that kind of thing current is a time-vortex best left unvisited.

In the process, discovered that my site counter/stats tracker code was incorrect, and hasn’t been logging visits for the last three years. *headdesk* I’m really annoyed at myself for this, because part of setting up a blog was to have it point there, and now I’ve lost that tracking info. Que sera, I suppose, but if you’re reading and have visited my UCL page before, I’d be rather grateful for your catch-up click.

I dug out my PDA (a Visor Neo, in up-to-the-minute monochrome) this weekend and have just synched it all up with the Oyster¹. My mac is probably having hissy fits about being attached to such an antique piece of technology, but it’s plenty good enough for the diary and contacts function, which is what I am re-trialling it for.

I’m not having much success with the paper diary method this time around; it worked when I was working in design and had it open on my desk constantly for appointments etc. I never remember to take the diary with me though, and the PDA is a bit more bus-friendly. My scheduling is more a case of one or two “appointments” a day (if that) and then a series of tasks to complete. I’d like to track the time spent on those, so we’ll see how this goes.

I’m not really enamoured of digital diary software either; iCal is okay, the Palm Desktop is a bit mouse-intensive. My main problem is that I seem to spend more time entering things than actually doing them. Anyhow, this is the start of a new experiment.

1. My laptop is called Pearl, so it makes sense that my desktop is the Oyster. Right?