scientific talks

Talks: Fewer words, more understanding

by Jane Rigby April 12, 2010

When a speaker switches to a new, wordy slide, what happens?  The audience reads the words. They can’t help it.  This is what my wife calls the “Cereal Box effect”: if a cereal box is on the kitchen table, you’ll read the words printed on it.  In all of human history, nothing interesting has ever been printed on a [...]

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Remote Presentations

by Guest 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 [...]

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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 those [...]

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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 [...]

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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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