From the category archives:

scientific talks

Remote Presentations

by Kelle February 17, 2010

Here’s another guest post! This one is contributed by Mark Marley, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center working on modeling the atmospheres of planets and brown dwarfs.

You’ve been invited to give a talk at a workshop that will lead to a new spacecraft instrument proposal in Europe, but your spouse is leaving town the [...]

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Twitter at AAS next week #aas215

by Kelle December 30, 2009

In advance of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC next week, we need to talk about Twitter. Twitter is a great platform for sharing and navigating the craziness that will be this huge meeting. As far as I can tell, many astro outreach folks are on twitter, but not many scientists (except [...]

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Presentations are a privilege

by Jane Rigby June 3, 2009

Blogger Seth Godin reminds us that presentations are a precious opportunity to change minds. To translate his advice to a scientific context, I’d make the following two substitutions:

“emotional pictures”  —> “screen-filling, well-explained, compelling plots”
“to change minds”   —> “to educate”.

Godin partially echoes Edward Tufte’s argument that slideware is a terrible way to share information. Which is [...]

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Respond Better: Dealing with Criticism

by Kelle May 11, 2009

Zen Habits is a great blog for folks who want to be both insanely productive and ridiculously happy. He has a nice article on how to accept criticism with grace and appreciation that applies really well to fielding questions during presentations and responding to referee reports.

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