Co-rejection

A grant on which I was a co-PI gt rejected this week. Another to add to the pile. But I received notice of a request for applications in April that I might try for, so it's time to line up another kick at the can.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 6: Failure is an option

The day after Crash won the best picture Oscar, Sounds Like Canada replayed an old interview with writer / director Paul Haggis. (I was aware of his work without being aware of it: he was a lead creative force on Due South.) He said something very, very, very interesting. Paraphrasing, he said, "I'm not interested in a project unless there's a real chance that I might fail."

He said he quit making television because failure wasn't a very real prospect for him any more.

Another little anecdote on ths topic of failure come from Jules Feiffer. He had a cartoon where basically, people come and take stuff away from a person, who doesn't object to this. Because, when they've found you out you're a fake, why bother objecting? He apparently said that a lot of people related to that cartoon, because they never had a significant failure in their work or life. Feiffer had many failures -- Broadway plays closing first night or some such. You move on.

I think many people are governed by fear when they have to give presentations. Performance anxiety, butterflies in the stomach, frog in the throat, or just good old fashioned stage fright. Hence, they fall back on the same back habits that they see everyone else doing. Putting up title slides. Using coloured backgrounds. Sticking in tables with teeny tiny text that nobody can read.

If you aren't risking failure, are you pushing hard enough?

As Neil Gaiman wrote, "Sometimes when you fall, you fly."

The Zen of Presentations, Part 5: Legalized insanity

In the “cosmic coincidence” category today, the cable station Bravo is showing the Inside the Actor's Studio episode with Robin Williams. Unfortunately, it’s the short version – only an hour. There's a longer, 90 minute version, and I would pay good money to see an uncut version of the whole evening, which ran over five hours, according to host James Lipton. I watch it whenever it’s on, because it inspires my presentations and lectures.


And at this point, you may be thinking, “Eh?”

“Come on, you're a scientist, you have to give technical talks on biology. Williams is... you know... funny.” And I freely admit, at first glance, the two don’t meet anywhere near as often as they should. There's several lessons I take from watching Williams.

Nobody ever complains that a talk was “too funny.” Humor is one of the most powerful tools any speaker has. Most humor involves drawing unexpected connections, anyone who laughs has to be thinking and attending and engaged. It can be a great way to check that people are following the words coming out of your mouth. For instance, when I teach protein structure, I often use a little chain of paper clips to represent a protein. Sometimes, while I'm manipulating it at the front of class, it falls apart, and I immediately say, “Whoops! Hydrolysis – did you see the water?” Now, most people reading this will probably go, “I don't get it.” Which is perfectly understandable, you don't have the context to make the connection. But in the context of the lecture, where I've explained what hydrolysis is, it can be funny. Maybe not hysterical, but funny enough that I get laughs with it. If people laugh at jokes related to the content of the talk, I know people are understanding the technical material.

A lot of people warn against trying to be funny in a technical talk, and I don't know why. People say, “Oh, the joke might bomb, and it can be awkward.” If you’ve ever watched every comedian, not everything that comes out is funny. They move on.

One caveat on using humour during a presentation. Don’t just tell a joke just to make a joke. Tell a joke to make a point. The humour should relate to the material. As always, this is particularly true when your talk is tightly timed. That’s probably the main difference between humour in a presentation versus humour in improvisational comedy: you are slightly more confined. That said, many theatre sport games revolve around restricting what you can say or do, and the joy is to find how far you can go within those barriers.

Robin Williams also demonstrates that enthusiasm is contagious. Whenever you’re presenting, you have to find passion, energy, that personal connection to the material.

Another lesson I get from watching Williams is the power of improvisation. An important part of a talk is not just putting information out to your audience, but picking up on cues from your surroundings, and running with it. As Harlan Ellison once said in an interview, “The overriding message of all art… is ‘Pay attention.’” And presentations are an art, so pay attention!

This will sound contradictory, but I think spontaneity is a skill. It can be learned. You can plan for, practice, and rehearse spontaneity.

One of the things I did as a high school student and as an undergraduate was a little bit of acting, which was very valuable to me when I got into graduate school and started giving presentations. I knew how to project my voice, for instance. Another thing that I’m sure most actors will be familiar with is that the first thing that happens is that you have to learn your lines. As you become more familiar with your lines, though, an interesting thing happens. You start to play with them, because you reach the point where you know them so well. You can veer off, try something a little different, and not lose the plot because you have rehearsed. One reason so many talks are so stilted and canned is not that people rehearse too much – talks are stilted because people don’t rehearse enough. They are rigidly following lines, like an actor beginning to learn a new play. The slightest problem throws them off course.

One easy way to “plan for spontaneity” is to have certain lines that work in several different situations. For instance, I can always get a laugh by saying about some process, particularly one that seems a little boring or obscure, “It’s a great party trick... if you're ever at a party with no chicks or booze.” (Stolen without shame from Drew Carey, who used it all the time on Whose Line Is It Anyway?) Talk’s lagging a little? Throw in the party trick line. But it’s brilliant, because it’s so multi-purpose that you can use it without deliberately planning to use it.

Another example of how you can plan to be spontaneous is to make sure your talk is shorter than the allotted time. That way, you can take an extra 30 seconds to say that cogent example that just popped into your head. If your time is 15 minutes, and your talk is always 15 minutes, you cannot deviate without going over time. Leave yourself the breathing room to allow for those fruitful deviations.

So yes, I strongly believed spontaneity is a skill that can be, if not learned, facilitated or not hindered. I believe humour is a skill that can be learned. I think I'm much funnier now than I used to be, and I think that's largely because of having to teach. As you become better prepared, the more able you are to make stuff up as you go.

For instance, a couple of days ago I gave my Brain Awareness Week talk (which went very well, thank you for asking). At the start, I introduced what Brain Awareness Week was, and, on the spot, I said something like, “This runs all this week, so if you're not aware of your brain by the end of tonight, you still have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to become aware of it.” Didn’t plan it, but it successfully got a laugh. And I was able to keep on track because I knew where I was in the talk and what I had to say next. If I didn't put in enough thought beforehand, I might have lost the plot: “Now, what was I saying?”

But preparation alone doesn’t get you to that level of performance that Robin Williams achieves, which he calls “legalized insanity.” You have to trust your creative impulses and not censor. The good news is that if you do that in a presentation, you are allowed a very large amount of leeway in behaviour that you don’t get while walking around in Wal-Mart (say). (Hence, the “legalized insanity.”) Now that I lecture a lot, one of the things I’ve realized is that it’s difficult to go too far. Forget about trying to present an “appropriate” facade. I do try to avoid being mean-spirited, but otherwise, I feel very comfortable saying whatever comes to mind.

Another talk that I find extremely, extremely inspiring is director Robert Rodriguez's commentary to Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams. Trust me, whatever you think of the movie, that DVD is worth renting just to listed to the commentary track. On it, Rodriguez talks a lot about his creative process. One of the lessons he said he learned was that his creativity never let him down. He faced problems like needing a song when no composer was available. Rather than saying, “I don’t know how to do that,” he just tackled it and trusted that he could come up with a solution.

And when all of those things start clicking, that's the best. Some people call it flow, some people call it their game face, some people call it being in the zone. And it doesn't seem to matter what the situation is -- the way you get to that is through lots of initial preparation, which gives you the freedom to pay attention and adjust to new situations.

It makes giving a talk. So. Much. Fun.

I've really come to enjoy my lectures, because I can go a little crazy. I can tell jokes. I know I will have a chance to engage in just a little of that “legalized insanity.”

Front page, baby!

My free lecture for Brain Awareness Week is on the front page of the UTPA website this morning. You can jump directly to it here.

Talks, fun; heat, not fun

I spent a good chunk of today working on a public lecture for this Thursday, whcih I'm giving as part of Brain Awareness Week. Because it's for a general public talk, I can try some things that I'd get shot if I were to try in a lecture or at a conference. I'm going to try to give a Lessig style presentation. It'll be fun to try.

Speaking of Brain Awareness Week, I'll also be having some fun on Friday. We're going to screen "the best brain movie ever made": Fiend Without a Face.

It was 36°C out today. Yuck. We are rapidly approaching the "really no fun to be outside" part of the year.

Off the “to do” list

I finally managed to check off a couple of prominent items on my “to do” list. First, a manuscript I was hoping would go out around New Year’s is sitting patiently in the outbound mailbox waiting to be picked up on its way to a scientific journal. If I can get this out by the end of this year, that would make 2006 among my most productive publishing years ever. Second, I sat down with my colleague Anita this morning and we roughed out what we want to do for our new graduate course, Evolutionary Theory, which we’re going to teach this summer. It’ll be an interesting experience. Not fifteen weeks. Twenty-four days. Twenty-four days of intense teaching action.

Meanwhile, I was actually amazed to see a crustacean making the world news! Kiwa hirsuta is a newly described deep sea decapod – if I understand right, it’s a hydrothermal vent species. It’s blind and furry. It appears to be a squat lobster, which is not a well-known group to most people. But it just goes to show how engaging one good picture of a cool animal really is.

Quotable...?

Some weeks back I was interviewed for not one, but two article in our local campus newspaper, The Pan American. You can find those articles online here (PDF format). Check out pages 4 and 7.

Third time is not the charm

Rejected by the NSF again. This is the third time we've submitted a proposal to the Research Experience for Undergraduates Sites program. It seems like every time we make revisions, the reviews come back no better or maybe even worse.

Other lousy news: Our department was vandalized over the weekend. Only one room so far, the downstairs student lounge, but yeesh.

Ah well. Time to work on a manuscript instead of a proposal. We have a pause in lectures, anyway, that gives me a little time to do such. We have arrived at that peculiarly American phenomenon known as "spring break."

Some things I've been looking at. I just discovered the Creating Passionate Users blog and love it. I particularly like the recent posts on How to be an expert and how Dignity is deadly. Also Guy Kawasaki's blog, which I was led to by his excellent talk on innovation. Although it is geared at businesses, I think there's a lot for academics to take away from it. For instance, Guy talks about the idiocy and generic nature of mission statements. Most universities have mission statements. Heck, I was asked to write one for our graduate program. But I think he's on the mark with his alternative, which is to make a three to four word mantra instead of a mission statement. My mantra as the grad coordinator in my department is, "Springboard students' careers."

Reaching your audience

There are a few things that authors live for. One is finding out that someone you actually don't know personally has read something of yours. And today, I got a very nice email from a researcher in Australia who read my recent article on shovel nosed lobsters in the Journal of Crustacean Biology. He had done his doctorate on a related species, so he was one of the few people who would actually care about the topic! It made me smile.

Meanwhile, my new manuscript is getting pretty close to ready for submission. Hopefully no later than next week. I will have no excuses after next week, because it's our break. No classes to get in the way!

The Zen of Presentations, Part 4: Titles slides are a crutch

I first became aware of this particular presentation tic at grad seminars at UVic. The symposium moderator would get up, thank the previous speaker, then introduce the next speaker and tell the audience the title of the talk. The speaker would walk to the podium and put up their first slide which, more often than not, showed the title of the talk -- the one that the moderator had just read. Not content with that, the speaker would then to look at their slide and, very earnestly and deliberately, proceed to read the title out loud.

So we get that blasted title three times over.

It drove me bonkers then, and drives me bonkers now. I really only need to know a title once. Unfortunately, title slides are emblamatic of a presentation style that is not beaten out of presenters anywhere near often enough: that is, reading directly from slides verbatim.

There are several reasons to avoid having a title slide. First, it burns up time. Particularly in science, I often have to present talks where I summararize complex information that took months or years to gather and analyze, and I have to do it in 15 minutes. Including time for questions. I have to focus on what I need to say as directly and memorably and efficiently as possible.

Second, it can be a little distancing for the audience. You get up, and barely before the audience can look at your face, the lights are going down and people don't know whether to look at the slide, or look at you. Give yourself at least a few second to get up, let people see who you are. Maybe smile, if that's appropriate (not recommended if you're giving a talk about, say, deaths in sub-Saharan Africa from AIDS).

I think people like having a title slide, because it gives them a safe and easy way to start off a talk. Instead of worrying about "What will I say?", you just have to read the title, thereby putting off the problem of whether you really have anything of substance to say by... oh... a good ten to fifteen seconds or so.

A title slide is a useful crutch to deal with that initial moment of the talk. Some people need a simple way to overcome that initial hesitation -- and that's fine. I am in no way bashing crutches here; they're useful things. But the goal should always be to get rid of the crutch, rather than relying on it.

If you want to leave a title in, there are some alternatives to the title slide. Let the moderator read your title. Or, if you feel you must have a title slide, don't read it out directly -- just talk about your subject. Alternately, if you want to tell people the title because there is no moderator, just tell them -- but don't make a text slide of it. I am convinced, though, that the best solution is to forget about introducing a title and just tell people your story in most cases. And leave the lights up for a few seconds so that your audience can see your face.

E.Q.

You Are 54% Evil

You are evil, but you haven't yet mastered the dark side. Fear not though - you are on your way to world domination.

How Evil Are You?

Unexpected linkages

Amazon.com sagely suggests that because I'd like the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire DVD, that I would probably also like a power razor with a storage case. Marvellous.

Was a bit of an odd week. Finally had some long-overdue time to work on a manuscript that has been almost ready to ship out for some months. It's getting even closer now, and another big push to get this manuscript out the door was that the editor of my upcoming paper emailed me to tell me that it should be out around May. Nothing in the publication pipeline is bad.

My editor for that article also emailed to say that the page charges was three months overdue. And why are they three months overdue? Could it possibly be because my institution is apparently nigh incapable of handling money? Nah, couldn't be.

Also had a birthday in there. Rather low key affair. Good, but not as extravagantly celebratory as I had thought.

More rejection, please

I just got word on one of my last grant applications, this one to the SOMAS program, and it was rejected. I suck.

It has been unusually chilly the last few days, and it's quite cold in my office, so I think I'm just going to go home and work there.

Professor in disguise

I went to an early morning meeting on Thursday to meet a couple of people who came to our campus to evaluate our Honor's program. It was an interesting meeting. Sometimes, it's nice to hear people from outside remind you that you're not crazy for thinking that the way certain things are set up are not functional...

Anyway, the funny part was that I came in and sat down and one of them asked if I was a student.

Heh.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 3½: Lessig is more

Over at Edward Tufte's forum, I have a post commenting on Lawrence Lessig's presentation style.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 3: Can you do it on the radio?

Late last year, science lost a real treasure: Ted Bullock died at the age of 90. He was a neurobiologist of the first water. I somewhat selfishly took it upon myself to write a short obituary for the International Society for Neuroethology, for which Ted was the founding president. I was fortunate enough to meet Ted several times. In some ways, the first meeting was the most memorable. He came to the University of Victoria to give the last seminar of the academic year, at the invitation of Dorothy Paul, my Ph.D. supervisor. There were many remarkable things about his visit. For instance, when I had just driven him to campus from the airport, he walked into Dorothy's neurobiology class just as some undergraduate students got some microelectrodes into slug brains and were recordings neurons' action potentials. After giving Dorothy a brief hug, Ted immediately doffed his coat, and grabbed a chair to sit and work with the students and talk about the recordings they were getting.

When Dorothy asked if he had any slides so that she might load up a slide carousel, Ted said he didn't have any. He said that the clearer the story was in his head, the fewer slides he needed. No slides was his definition of "nirvana."

The seminar he gave was extraordinary. I think it's still the only academic seminar I've seen where the speaker got up, talked for about 50 minutes or so, without a single slide, a single overhead, without writing a single word on a blackboard. Yet it was absolutely clear, and you never lost sight of the story he was telling. As Dorothy would later put it, "Even the plant physiologists were enthralled." (She wasn't implying that plant physiologists are a hard to please lot, but Ted was talking about neurobiology, which is rather off the beaten path for plant researchers.)

I saw Ted give talks at other meetings. A couple of other times, including the last time I saw him, at Western Nerve Net a couple of years ago, he presented it without slides, but those were much shorter talks.

I think anyone giving a talk should be ready to give a talk using the "Bullock method": be able to do the whole thing without slides.

Having said that, I have a confession to make: I've never had the guts to do an academic talk without some sort of slides. In fact, I put a lot of thought and effort into my slides. For my SICB talk in Janaury, I had started working on my PowerPoint files in mid-November. But I would like to think that I could have given the talk on the radio, if I had to, and it would hopefully be understandable. I always aspire to have the story so clear in my head that I could go right to zero slides.

There's another reason to aspire to be able to give a talk without visual aids. There are two types of speakers: those who have had slide or visual aide disasters and those who haven't had one yet. Not only does preparing give a talk on the radio force you to really think about what you're saying, it gives you valuable insurance.

While I was at the SICB meeting, there were several student paper competitions. I was in the audience for one, in which the speaker was going along reasonably well. He tried to show a video -- and froze the computer instead. Completely. During a juried presentation competition. He ultimately finished the talk, but the long pause while he tried to get the computer going was agonizing. You pretty have to think that cost him any chance he had in the competition.

My other favourite disaster story was at a Western Nerve Net meeting, where the first speaker for the regular presentations was an undergraduate giving her first talk. She was already nervous. And the slide carousel got upended, and put all her slides in a jumble.

Heck, my own seminar for my own job talk was almost derailed for lack of a cable to connect my computer to a projection system. Though because I am gutless, I was steadily filling a carousel with 35 mm film slides rather than "going Bullock" at the last second.

Science on TV

Some time ago, I mused about a television science reality show about grad students. A writer in the journal Nature expresses doubts. And the always witty Jorge Cham also weighed in on the idea over at Ph.D. Comics.

Latest work

My latest masterpiece -- er, research paper, "Digging mechanisms and substrate preferences of shovel nosed lobsters, Ibacus peronii (Decapoda: Scyllaridae)", has now been published online, and is available in Journal of Crustacean Biology. You can read the abstract here or here. If you're a subscriber to the journal, the first link will let you go whole hog and get the PDF of the paper, too. Please do. Spread among friends and enemies alike. Everyone loves lobster research papers, don't they?

The one thing I will always wonder about this paper is whether I could have got this published with the title I wanted to give it. I thought long and hard about calling it, "Do shovel nosed lobsters shovel with their noses?" I chickened out, and used for my talk on this subject at the SICB meeting last month instead.

Invertebrates and psychology

My first degree was in psychology, so when I began working with crustaceans, I was somewhat surprised to learn that Sigmund Freud worked on crayfish nervous systems early in his career, before producing the theories on the unconscious for which he would become famous. And the crayfish work was not trivial, either.

When I mentioned this to Jennifer Mather, my undergraduate supervisor, she immediately informed me that Jean Piaget, who work kick-started the field of developmental psychology, did many experiments with snails, particularly Lymnaea stagnalis, which is still widely used in neurobiology research. She like to get a rise out of her psychology colleagues by saying that they'd lost a damn fine malacologist when Piaget started studying psychology.

Today I learned, from the ABC Radio National show Ockham's Razor, that a third highly influential psychologist also worked with invertebrates: Alfred Binet. Binet's doctoral dissertation was titled, A contribution to the study of the subintestinal nervous system of insects. But if Binet's name sounds familiar, it's probably because you heard it as the second half of the name of the Stanford-Binet test. "Stanford" was a late addition to the test. Binet, with co-author Theodore Simon, developed it first, and published it as "New Methods for the diagnosis of the intellectual level of subnormals" in 1905. It was effectively the first IQ test. This was perhaps as influential as any invention (idea? concept?) in psychology. Despite horrendous misuse of IQ tests, I'm among those who count it as an important scientific advance.

So three of the most influential psychologists of all time started their careers studying inveterate behaviour and nervous systems. Coincidence? Probably. But a sweet and interesting one nevertheless.

Core values

Strange convergence of events got me thinking. The MSI conference that I've been writing about has had a lot of high powered American politicians, who, as particularly American politicians seem wont to do, go on about "American values," "core values," "the values that make America great." Considering that we've had a keynote from the secretary of the army, a big lunch sponsored by the Department of Defense, such rhetoric gets pretty thick pretty quick.

Now, as it happens, yesterday in our regular journal club meeting, we were talking about the stem cell and cloning debacle in Korea with Woo-Suk Hwang. It was an interesting conversation -- a chance to talk about ethics rather than data, exactly.

These two things together got me thinking about what the core value of a scientist are. I thought of these three. Of course, there are other virtues that are probably widespread among scientists. But those three came particularly quickly and easily to my mind.

Reason. Honesty. Equality.

Reason could be "Rationality" if you wanted all three to rhyme. Science holds as a fundamental assumption that the universe is lawful and understandable. Reason, rationality, logic are the tools we have for going about understanding things.

Honesty. You don't fake data. You admit when you are wrong. This one is probably leapt lose to the top of my list because of the discussions we've been having about scientific fraud and misconduct and such.

Equality is there because I believe science is fundamentally an enterprise conducted by peers. Anyone can have a good idea and test it and subject it to scientific scrutiny. By this I don't mean that there is nobody who can justifiably gain respect as an authority on a subject, or a particularly distinguished scholar, but that is a respect gained among peers.

From time to time, people have suggested that scientists should have an equivalent to the Hippocratic oath that doctors take. While I don't believe that the Hippocratic oath in particular deters much morally suspect behaviour in doctors, and I'm not sure that such an institution as a researcher's oath could be created now, it is interesting to consider what it might contain.