The Zen of Presentations, Part 37: What makes a good speaker?

When I teach a seminar class, I start off by asking the students to name a speaker they have seen who gave a great presentation, and describe what made it memorable. As they go, I write down the things they mention as why this presentation was so good.

I might not end up with exactly the same words every time, but the concepts listed are consistent. The last time I did this, this was written on the board at the end of the class:

• Empathy.
• Simplicity.
• Humour.
• Feeling like the speaker was talking to you specifically.
• Confidence.
• Mastery of the material.
• Energy.
• Engagement.
• Emotional.
• Credible.
• Stories.
• Surprise.
• Sincere.
• Different perspective.
• Passionate.

What I find interesting is that people are so reluctant to do the things as a speaker that they themselves just told me that they enjoy as an audience member.

Humour is the most obvious example. My students consistently bring it up as something good speakers do. But I’ve sat through an uncounted number of student talks without any hint of an attempt at humour.

I suppose that the reason people don’t do these things is that underlying many of the concepts on that list are risk and hard work.

You take a risk when you tell a joke. People might not laugh.

You take a risk when you try to get people to empathize. You have to expose what you think and feel.

And there are no short cuts to mastering the material or establishing credibility.

This time, a few specific talks got mentioned, including Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s conversation with Richard Dawkins on The Poetry of Science (not really a presentation in the usual sense). One person mentioned Isabelle Allende. You can see her here on TED, though I don’t think this was the particular talk the student had seen. Garr Reynolds comments on her talk here. So it’s getting easier and easier for these best presentations to spread now that online video is finally ubiquitous.

Still, many people mentioned people they knew personally; preachers or pastors came up several times this session. Good presenters are everywhere, and don’t need a million hits on YouTube to make an impression and make a difference.

Talk postponed

The talk I planned to give this weekend is postponed.

South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center: free talk!

Update, 18 January 2011: This talk is postponed until a later date.

I am scheduled to give a talk at the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center next Saturday, 22 January 2010 at 10:00 am. It’s not up yet on their calendar of events, but this is the first of a series that will be running over the next few weeks in February and early March.

The title of the talk is:

“Signals for survival in the lives of fiddler crabs”

The presentation will be free, non-technical, and hopefully a lot of fun for all. Please come and join me!

The Zen of Presentations, Part 36: Prezi

“I only have about six months where this will be really cool, and then everyone else will discover it.”

I thought that about Prezi over a year ago.

This summer, I went to two conferences in three weeks. And I was somewhat appalled by the complete dominance of PowerPoint – for posters as well as presentations. Of all the talks I saw at two conferences, the talk I gave at the International Association of Astacology meeting was the only one that didn’t use PowerPoint.

I used Prezi instead. It was only the second time I’d done so. But like the first time, people were slightly in awe. “How did you get PowerPoint to do all that zooming?” they asked.

I’d smile and reply, “Simple. I didn’t use PowerPoint.”

PowerPoint emulates 35 mm slides: a series of individual images, one after another. PowerPoint has allowed animation of the images, but you’re still basically using the computer as a fancy slide carousel.

Prezi emulates a whiteboard: you get one surface to play on. But it escapes some of the limitations of the medium by combining the whiteboard with a magnifying glass, allowing you to zoom in and out to particular locations at your pleasure.

Why have I only used Prezi twice, when I’ve gotten such a “Wow” response? Because it’s not right for every job. Even experts like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte (replying to Garr on Facebook) seem to be trying to figure whether or not there are any real advantages to using Prezi over other media. There is, as far as I know, just one book about using Prezi – and it’s in Dutch. (Which is great for them, but not so hot for me.)

What sets Prezi apart from PowerPoint (or most other techniques) is the zooming. I’ve seen zooming used two ways.

Some use zooming as a fancy transition that PowerPoint doesn’t have. It’s a wasted opportunity, and such presentations are often called “dizzying.”

Where Prezi starts to rock is when you use it to show whole / part relationships. In other words, you’re zooming in and out of a single thing as though you had a physical camera that zooms in on a part of a larger object, or pulls back and reveals something is just a piece in a larger puzzle.

Here’s one we did earlier, as they used to say on the cooking shows.

Prezi demo 1: Zen’s journey on Prezi

This kind of story works extremely well in Prezi. The map ties it all together, and gives everything a spatial context. You can see how big a move going to McGill in eastern Canada was compared to going to grad school, for instance. I couldn’t tell the story as effectively in PowerPoint.

I’ve learned, though, to try to make each individual step rather small. If you go from a long way out to a long way in in one step, you will rightfully earn the “dizzying” label. Here’s another version that zooms straight from one place to another.

Prezi demo 2: Zen's dizzy on Prezi

I don’t think it’s as effective as the one above it. Of course, both could be improved if I had higher resolution maps, but as “proof of concept” demos, they work well enough.

In the first example, notice that I don’t jump from Lethbridge to Killarney to the University of Victoria. I pull out from one some distance, in steps, before I start to zoom in to the other. In the second, I go straight from one location to the next. You don’t get as strong a sense of the context as the first one. (I think Prezi may have been optimizing their zooming rates; this one doesn’t seem to race from location to location as fast as I thought I have seen before. But maybe I’m imagining things.)

In biology, I can think of lots of different examples where Prezi would be fantastic at showing whole / part relationships.

• Starting from a whole organism, zoom down to tissues, then specific cells, then maybe even molecules. (We biologists are always obsessing about “levels of analysis.”)
• Showing relationships between organisms in phylogenetic trees. You can show the entire tree, then look at particular clades, and individual species within a clade.
• Timelines. I could imagine some very cool things you could do with geological time.
• Ecosystems and food webs.

Prezi is not a PowerPoint killer. There are many kinds of stories that don’t have any spatial relationships, and Prezi’s only advantage is novelty. As more people discover Prezi, that advantage will wear off. But for cases where you have a story that does have some spatial elements, Prezi is unmatched.

Related posts

No more slidesters, interlude: Making presentations more like posters

Rhett Allain has a nice list of Prezi pros and cons. Ed Yong mentions that the lack of slides allow him to change things on the fly more than PowerPoint. And Ted Curator Chris Anderson does a great talk using Prezi.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 35: Another presentation book you must own

Almost two years ago, I gushed over Nancy Duarte’s book, Slide:ology. She has now written her first book, Resonate.

Yes, you read right. Her second book came out two years ago. Sort of like how the first Star Wars movies came out a couple of decades after the later films.

Duarte describes Resonate as the prequel to Slide:ology. And she’s right. Resonate is the one to read first, because it is about the reason for giving a presentation: to change people’s minds, to persuade, to take action. In contrast, Slide:ology is more about design of visuals: the things that you work on once you’ve know what you want to talk about.

At the core of Resonate is her thesis that all good presentations have a common structure. Great presentations start with “the way it is.” Then, they make repeated contrasts between “the way it is” and “the way it could be.” Finally, great presentations end with a call to action, and a promise that new, greater things are possible.

It’s simple, but don’t dare think for a second that it’s stupid. Scientists will probably appreciate the repeated analysis that Duarte has done to show that this structure is variable and rich. It’s similar to how stories can follow the same basic plot structure, but differ profoundly in almost every other way.

Another unexpected inversion is in how Duarte conceives of the importance of story. She has something more in mind than anecdotes or telling a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The presenter’s role is not to be someone like Sherlock Holmes, who unravels the plot and explains it to Inspector Lestrade (the audience). If I may jump genres...

The presenter’s role is to be Ben Kenobi. ^*

It takes a little while to get used to this view. At first, it’s somewhat paradoxical to think of the person given a presentation as a supporting character. After all, this sort of character is not usually the most popular one in the movie. Everyone wants to be the central character. You are not.

These short summaries do not to the justice to the richness of these concepts, and there are many more besides. She talks at length about her work process for developing presentations, and how to persuade people (taking some cues from Randy Olson along the way), for instance.

Duarte has again written a deep book. Wonderful.

Related pages

Book website

^* Duarte herself uses a different example from the Star Wars series, but I think Ben is a little closer to the part of the presenter than the example she uses.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 33: PowerParody

Making fun of PowerPoint has gotten too easy, frankly. Too many people have written too much about how many people use it badly.

But this one made me laugh hard.

It’s coming out of this much forwarded New York Times article about the use of PowerPoint by the military.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Afghanistan Stability Chart
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I suspect this bit was partly inspired by Peter Norvig’s famous Gettysburg address parody, but this one has a Star Wars clip. And that automatically makes everything better.

Science on the island (South Padre Island, that is)

Yesterday, I gave a talk at this new wonderful new building, the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center.

I went in and chatted about something I hadn’t talked about in a good long while, which was mostly some of my doctoral work on sand crabs as examples of things that have been able to make a living on beaches. I also got in a little bit about mud shrimp and Donax. People seemed to enjoy it. They laughed at the right bits and tolerated a little bit of geekiness about motor coordination.

After the talk, it was a lovely day to walk around the walkways to see some of the vertebrates the area is famous for...

Even got to see some aquatic vertebrates...

And even a few more crustaceans: fiddler crabs out displaying to each other.

I’d like to thank the people who were willing to sit in a dark room for about an hour listening all the ways a sign can be wrong.

Chittin’ and chattin’ on South Padre Island next month

If you happen to be around South Padre Island in a month or so, please come see my talk about things that live in the beach. It will be Saturday, 20 February 2010, 11:00 am at the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center.

There are several other presentations by my colleagues in January through March; a list is here.

They’re free and non-technical.

Shameless cross-promotion

I normally don’t cross-promote my other blogs. But I was pretty pleased with how the Better Posters checklist came out, and thought it might be worth mentioning here, in case a few of you missed it over the new year. There’s a PDF version here.

I was also pleasantly surprised to get a very positive response to yesterday’s post on the “arm’s length” test. So you might want to check that out, too.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 32: If it bleeds...

You have a big presentation coming up, and you need something to help get yourself in the right mental zone. Something to bring up your “Grrrrrrr!” factor.

Buy or rent Predator.

The movie has a track record of making people achieve.

Case study #1. Two of the film’s stars have gone on to govern American states. Schwarzenegger in California, Ventura in Minnesota.

Case study #2. In 2000, the Essendon Bombers had the sort of year that sports teams dream about. They went an entire season all but undefeated, losing only one game and taking home the premiership. In 2001, they were having another fantastic start to their season and were widely tipped to go all the way to a second premiership.

Then, half-way through the season, they played the Brisbane Lions. The Bombers lost that game, the rest of the season was weakened, and they lost to the Lions again in the Grand Final. The advice coach Leigh Matthews gave to his players before the crucial first meeting?

He showed his team Predator and told them, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”



Case study #3. In the back of the role-playing game supplement by Way of the Crab by author Rob Vaux wrote, “This book would never have been finished without the last 20 minutes of Predator.”

That’s one advantage of using a full laptop instead of a netbook: DVD drive so you can watch that last reel of Predator in the break before your talk.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 31: Redundant and repetitive

In our previous installment, commenter Sproglet mentioned some very common advice:

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them.
• Tell them.
• Tell them what you just told them.

I’ve never been crazy about that advice, particularly for a typical academic conference talk. Most conference presentations are 15 minutes. Given that the usual problem is managing to cram the complexity of research into a 12 minute presentation (so you have time for questions), every second is valuable.

Writer Michael Crighton once described how one of Jurassic Park’s scientific advisors (Jack Horner, maybe?) bemoaned that the paleontology scene in the opening of the movie wasn’t as realistic as it could be. The advisor had even suggested to Steven Spielberg a scene that was a little more accurate. Crighton asked how much longer the scene would be than what was in the movie. “About a minute.” Crighton replied it was no wonder it wasn’t used, because a minute is a long time in a movie.

If you’re the sort of person who watches the bonus features on DVDs, you’ll recognize this as one of the main reasons that scenes are cut. You will often hear a director saying, “This was a really nice character beat, but it didn’t provide us with any new information,” or, “We just wanted to get the plot going as fast as possible.”

That economy of storytelling is something many presenters would do well to imitate.

Few movies lay out what’s going to happen in the first act of the film. (Exceptions: Caper movies, where the whole idea is to lay out a plan in detail, then watch where it goes wrong.) Likewise, movies usually don’t end with a series of flashbacks or dialogue recapping the plot the characters have just gone through.

Yet I frequently see people using “Outline” slides (some of my colleagues require their students to have them), with a series of bullet points that are often almost identical to the list of standard sections in a scientific paper. I do not find this valuable in a short talk, particularly given that many technical talks do not have enough introductory material.

I do think repetition is good, particularly in a teaching context, where you want people to retain information for long periods. But there are more natural ways to do it than having a bland outline at the start or an instant replay at the end.

Taming the backchannel beast

Over at Speaking About Presenting, Olivia Mitchell has written a free ebook about working with Twitter and similar online tools during presentations. It’s a great snapshot of a fairly fast-moving aspect of presentations, and has many good, practical ideas. And it documents some of the harshtag horror shows that have been happening in the last few months.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 29: The shirt on your back

Steve Jobs is good at presentations. Garr Reynolds has written about this a lot over on his Presentation Zen blog. Now, a whole new book has been written about him. This slideshow says:

Steve Jobs can wear a black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and running shoes because, quite simply, he has earned the right to dress anyway he wants. For most communicators, it’s best to dress a little better than everyone in your audience.

I can’t help but find the rationalization funny. Author Carmine Gallo spends the book looking at what makes one person a great speaker, but shies away from the possibility that maybe he is great partly because of how he dresses, not in spite of how he dresses.

Maybe people are responding to seeing someone they can relate to. Maybe people are responding to someone who is not relying on artifice. Maybe people are responding to seeing someone who is genuine.

Audiences crave authenticity. It’s a driver behind the success of so-called “reality” shows or YouTube videos: people are looking for the unscripted, the immediate.

With too many presenters, you can tell their dress for their presentation is an act. A total put on. A sham. It’s not real, it’s not who they are, and they’re not comfortable.

Soon after, I spotted this post by Kathy Reiffenstein on what to wear during a presentation. This also struck me as greatly over-stressing formality and business wear, but I appreciated Chris Atherton’s response to it:

Love how much of this is really about attention (yours and audience's).

Right. Be worried not so much about how you look as whether that look will distract you or the audience.

I spelled out my own take over on dressing for presentations on Better Posters.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 28: Sour notes

One of my classes is also used for a student seminar class. This morning, I found a set of abandoned note cards. This one filled me with disappointment:

No. Please, no.

(In fairness, most of the other 28 note cards were better.)

The Zen of Presentations, Part 27: Coping with anxiety

I had a student in my office this week for advising, and I noted that she hadn’t taken Biology Seminar, a required class for all our majors. She said she had been putting it off, and putting it off, and was deliberately taking it at the last possible time. She was absolutely terrified of giving a talk. Even as I was talking to her, I could see her getting wound up at the prospect of something that might be weeks, if not months, away.

Before getting to the advice, let me preface what I’m about to say with a general principle:

There is no virtue in suffering.

We often tend to treat that people who are genuinely anxious about presentation with little sympathy. People are told to keep suck it up and keep practicing. There is more than a little “You should suffer for your art” attitude out there.

If you are truly frantic about the prospect of speaking in public, why not make an appointment with your physician and see about getting a prescription drug to help with the anxiety?

I don’t say this lightly. There’s a reason that some drugs are only available by prescription, and only recommend this is as a last resort for extreme cases.

I know one person who had to give a lot of presentations, and hated every second. The stress was quite debilitating, so this individual got a prescription for a beta blocker, and took a pill before giving a talk. The talk I saw this person give was fine, and I’m convinced the audience wouldn’t have known this person was dealing with high anxiety.

In most cases, you’re better off practicing and learning the skill of presentation that getting medication. But not everyone is the same, and some people may need more help than practice and preparation alone can give.

Earning it versus enforcing it

I wonder if students realize how deflating it is for their instructor when, in a class with 20 registered students, only three students show up on time for the start of the class after a couple of months.

Some would say that I haven’t earned the student’s attention, and that I haven’t put in enough effort to make the class so completely engaging that my students couldn’t imagine being any place else three days a week at 8:45 am besides my classroom.

But you know, I can only juggle chainsaws for so long.

Laura Bergalls, over at More Than PowerPoint, talked about the need to earn attention:

A modern audience uses modern tools. As a presenter, I need to learn to adapt my style to fit their needs. Why should the audience have to pacify my selfish needs for their attention? Why should I force my audience to stop using tools that let them learn and share information?

Indeed, Olivia Mitchell encourages presenters to embrace things like Twitter.

As a presenter, I agree. As an educator, I am torn over this.

On the one hand, I do try to make a talk something that is enjoyable rather than painful, and I do want to earn that attention.

On the other hand... What if I have evidence that laptop use in class hurts student performance? (There is.) That multitasking hurts learning? Should I just let them have their laptops running (and let everyone fight over the two or three seats in the room near a power outlet)?

I think doing nothing in that case is irresponsible of me as an educator. It makes me feel that I have given in to the wasteful “sink or swim” teaching technique, where absolutely everyone is on their own for everything at all times. As an educator, I don’t think it’s selfish of me to make a student aware of behaviours that are not productive to their learning. “I notice you haven’t been in class much” or reminding students to turn off their phones or even banning laptops are ways to try enforcing attention. I wonder if they are occasionally necessary to use in an educational setting, even as I try my damnedest to earn their attention.

Reading Week panel on Darwin

Last night, I had the fun of participating in a panel discussion at a local community college for their reading week. The organizer had picked evolution as the theme, because we are nearing the 150^th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

To my surprise and delight, the auditorium was packed.

This did cause us to start quite a bit late, as the organizer was fretting about the possibility of us violating a fire code, and set off to find more chairs. But spirits were so good! In his introduction, organizer Jerry Freeman mentioned some video on the net* where people were singing “Happy Birthday” on Darwin Day, and somebody started singing it, and the audience joined in for an impromptu birthday song to Charles Darwin.

I was the first speaker, and I talked a bit about all the fantastic transitional fossils that have been found in the last 150 years, how we’ve got a much better handle on genetics and heredity and DNA, and how we’ve developed methods to assemble and test phylogenetic trees, which have allowed us to make trees like this.

Because this was Reading Week, I was asked to read a little evolutionary writing, and I though reading something from Origin was too obvious. Instead, I picked a favourite paragraph from the last page of Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, about what evolutionary biology would be like if Darwin had not existed:

(W)e would have experienced the same biological revolution without the stunning clarity, illustrated by wonderfully apposite metaphors, of a complex central logic so brilliantly formulated, and so bristling with implications extending nearly forever outward, at least well past our current reckoning. In this alternate world, we would probably be honoring a different and far less compelling founder by occasional visits to a statue in a musty pantheon, and not by constant dialogue with a man whose ideas live, breath, challenge, taunt, and inspire us every day of our lives, more than a century after his bones came to rest on a cathedral floor at the foot of whatever persists in the material being of Isaac Newton.

I was followed by a talk on evolutionary thinking as related to human sex and aggression, and a philosophical one on how Darwin’s ideas had changed our sense of telos, or purpose.

The audience made it awesome on a stick. Awesome on a stick dipped in chocolate.

Thanks to all who attended.

* I think he might have been thinking of this one.

Review: Don’t Be Such a Scientist

Let me try to apply one of the suggestions in Don’t Be Such a Scientist and practice a little concision:

I love this book. I devoured it in one evening.

Whew. Now, I can go back to my normal science mode.

Randy Olson has been working in Hollywood for over a decade, but he’s still one of us. He gets what being an academic scientist does to you: you become literal, critical, and absolutely focused on destroying error – and it never goes away. He gets us. But he also gets how other people see us, and Olson has a message for us, his former colleagues: For other people, it’s not just about the data, guys.

Olson isn’t the first person to say that persuading non-scientists about the truth of things requires more persuasion than just evidence. This has not been a popular message, particularly among a lot of my fellow science bloggers.^* These kinds of messages get characterized as weak-kneed capitulation, compromising the truth.

For that reason, Olson will probably face his strongest criticism for suggesting that scientists not be unlikeable. It sounds a lot like admonitions of other writers never to offend, which has generated a growling response that there are some people that we scientists want to offend: the people who deal out lies, errors, and untruths.

Olson has not cracked that hard problem: how to communicate with those nice people who are just like you and me, except for a few beliefs that are divorced from reality. You know the ones: the creationists, the climate change deniers, the anti-vaccine campaigners, the moon landing conspiracy theorists, the birthers, and so on. Olson’s tips and suggestions won’t matter when dealing with those people, but that’s not Olson’s book. It’s a book that somebody needs to write – badly – but Olson’s approach shouldn’t be dismissed because of that. He’s pointing out that when you launch a full out assault on your enemies, you risk inflicting a lot of casualties on people who might have been on side.

Part of what convinced that Olson is on the right track were uncomfortable moments reading this book when you recognize yourself, and think, “Oh, damn, he’s right.”

For instance, Olson talks about how being an academic means being critical. We academics forget that even honest and correct criticism can be very deflating.

Have you ever walked out of a movie that you loved, and you’re replaying some of those favourite moments and lines in your head... and one of the people you’re with points out something that’s completely illogical? Do you happily respond to that honest and correct criticism, “Wow, I’m so glad you pointed that out!” If so, you’re a better person than me, because my response was an irritated, “That’s not the point.” ^**

And yet, we scientists are routinely praised for pointing out those annoying little untruths. On the very day I received my copy of Olson’s book, one of my blog posts was picked as an editor’s choice specifically because it was critical.

On that note, I don’t think it’s any accident that the words highlighted in the blurbs on the back are the ones that say how critical this book is. After all, this book is aimed at scientists and academics, so if you want their respect, you’ve got to show them that you’re criticizing! In fact, the tone here is very amiable and affable. The most critical sections of the book seem more exasperated than stinging.

On a similar note, Olson also talks about how scientists are extremely literal. Here again, you don’t have to look further than recent stuff on the blogosphere. The new film Creation is starting to get reviews, and here’s Eugenie Scott’s review on Panda’s Thumb.

As someone with a stake in how the public understands evolution and it’s most famous proponent, the bottom line for me was that the science be presented accurately. The second was that the story of Darwin’s life be presented accurately.

Her bottom line is not whether the movie has a good story, is emotionally powerful, well acted, or any of the other dozens of things that most people look for in a movie. Her bottom line is accuracy. Such a scientist. For many, looking for that first is missing the point of why they watch a movie.

Finally, Olson has something in common with Adam Savage. It’s not just that they do science-y stuff on film. MythBusters host Savage was quoted as saying recently:

I realized that my humiliation and good TV go hand in hand.

Olson is not afraid to make a point at his own expense. Don’t Be Such a Scientist starts with Olson on the receiving end of a truly terrifying bawling out by an acting teacher. Those four pages alone are near worth the price of admission, but it’s not the lowest or most embarrassing moment for Olson in the book. This is self deprecation taken to a new high, and it’s an illustration of one of Olson’s key tactics for communication: don’t “rise above,” as he puts it. In other words, don’t be high and mighty. Audiences tend not to like such people.^*** I’ve tried to avoid righteous indignation on this blog, there are occasions where I bet someone reading it thought, “Boy, is he full of himself.”

There is more about this book that I’d like to comment on and explore, but I’ll leave them for later. I’m teaching a class on biological writing this semester, and I hope I can bring some of the issues Olson raises into the class. Don’t Be Such a Scientist is a rich source of ideas, and I’ll be riffing off them for some time to come.

Reference

Olson, R. (2009). Don't Be Such a Scientist. Island Press, 1-216 ISBN: 9781597265638

* That Olson mentions the tenor at scienceblogs.com as something damaging rather than helpful... let’s say I’ll be interested to read the response.

** For me, the movie was Edward Scissorhands.

*** I do have to wonder what Olson makes of the success of House, a show that has a character that seems to violate almost single suggestion that Olson has. The character is unlikeable, always rising above...

Robert Ballard in conversation

Dr. Robert Ballard was in town yesterday for out university's distinguished speaker series. I'd seen his TED talk (below), which is pretty good, but his talk last night was really superb. If I were to characterize his presentation approach, it would be, "Take the best stuff from 50 years of work and be funny." (Ballard went on his first expedition as a high school student a the age of 17.)

Echoing a recent theme in this blog about being inspired by fiction (here and here), he talked about how he wanted to be Captain Nemo when he grew up.

He talked about the discovery of hydrothermal vent communities, and how they almost blundered into a vent plume that could have turned their submarine into a molten heap of slag. He talked about his finding the wreck of the Titanic, and -- actually more interestingly -- his search for more ancient shipwrecks, looking for the "empties" of sailors in the Mediterranean Sea. He talked about how they found even better preservation in the Black Sea. All this with wry humour and a kid's enthusiasm.

During questions, he'd just said that he was most proud of his discovery of hydrothermal vent communities, because they were really new forms of life. Shortly after, he spotted a large cockroach and joked, "I've discovered another new form of life. It's got it's hand up. I'll take your question in a minute."

He indulged the audience and took quite a few questions. He talked about how a huge amount of wrangling he did to get an expedition associated with the Jason Project in the Galapagos Islands going after a barge with almost all the equipment sunk... It was perfectly clear that he could have talked a lot longer and not run out of material for a long time.

My one concern was that during his talk, he mentioned exploiting the ocean's resources a couple of times. During the reception afterwards, I asked him about that, pointing out that management of ocean resources has an abysmal track record. Being Canadian, the example that comes to mind is the collapsed cod fishery, which looks like it may not come back for a very long time, if ever. He gave a much more nuanced answer, saying, "You can't turn 72% of the planet into a park." He also talked about the importance of knowing what is out there so it can be sensibly managed.

If you have a chance to hear this guy speak, don't miss it.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 20: The presentation book you must own

I like to think that I do not suck at presentations. I like to think that I've thought reasonably hard about them. I like to think I've got a better understanding of presentations than most people.

Then a book like Slide:ology comes out.

Wow.

Suddenly I realize how much more there is to think about and how much more there is to learn.

This is a deep book. From concept to final execution, from typesetting to data to missions to colour palettes, it's all in there. And all with a careful attention to craft and detail.

It shouldn't be surprising, considering that author Nancy Duarte is one of the people behind the slides in the acclaimed Oscar and Nobel winning film An Inconvenient Truth (which I wrote about here). Given her track record, how highly her work is regarded, I knew it this book would be good, but this completely exceeded any expectations. Indeed, reading this book made me upset at how low my expectations were. It expands horizons, on par with books like Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information or Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.

To say this book "raises the bar" would be unfair, because raising the bar doesn't catch how dramatically and substantially this book surpasses everything else. It's far beyond anything else that I've seen on the subject. Other books on presentations raised the bar. This one goes into high Earth orbit.

I would love to see this book in a hardcover edition, perhaps with larger pages or larger text. Because I know this book is going to get re-read, referred to, handled, browsed, passed to students in my lab, and get beat up and worn out through constant use.

Check out the book website.