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.

Tuesday Crustie: Termite of the sea

 

This squat lobster, Munida andamanica, has been in the news recently for its peculiar ability to eat wood. Picture from here.

Additional:  For more on the science behind the discovery of this animal’s diet, see this post on Deep-Sea News.

For your consideration

I am not too proud to beg.

The nomination deadline for The Open Laboratory anthology, the annual compilation of the best science writing on blogs, is in two weeks. If there’s a post from this blog that you liked, please consider nominating it for the anthology. Posts from 1 December 2008 to 30 November 2009 are eligible.

Here are some suggestions, in roughly chronological order. If there are other posts you like, by all means, submit those.

• Muscle innervation is not a connectome
• Do male crickets shorten the lives of female crickets?
• Vestigial icons
• I’m trying here
• Explanation and evangelism
• Science publishers are agents
• Is the mimic octopus misnamed?
• Island girls: Why Hawaiian female crickets aren’t very choosy
• Jellyfish nervous system myth busted
• Truth for the hard of thinking
• The small brain of the biggest fish in the world
• Fence lizards versus fire ants: Evolutionary fail?
• Evolution back and forth, from snakes to molecules
• Face it: Being a scientist can really suck
• The birth of dragons
• The princess and the perfume, a hermit crab fairy tale
• I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

Click here to submit an entry. A Blog Around the Clock regularly updates the list of entries; here’s a recent one (probably out of date by the time you read this).

In case you’re wondering why I don’t just nominate myself, I think it’s better for readers to decide what’s good than writers. And because it feels gauche to nominate a bunch of your own stuff.

How to act when you might be eaten

If you don’t have to worry about reproduction, life gets a little simpler. You have to worry about eating. You have to worry about being eaten. And with that, you’re pretty close to done.

Aspidoscelis uniparens is a parthenogenetic whiptail lizard (formerly Cnemidophorus uniparens), and Eifler and colleagues tested how they allocated their time under threat. To do they, they made six large enclosures (225 square meters) and put in six of these small lizards in. In half of these, they also included two leopard lizards, which prey on the smaller one. In fact, the leopard lizards successfully caught a couple of the subjects during the experiment. Unfortunately, the authors describe the predators in much less detail than the whiptails, which make it a bit difficult to interpret their findings.

The whiptails, not surprisingly, act differently when enclosed with the leopard lizards. They spend a less time moving when housed with leopard lizards, and they’re visible less often to human observers. The whiptails also seem to shift their activity more towards the early hours of the morning (say, 7:00 am), seemingly because the leopard lizards’ activity starts to pick up around 8:00 am.

But the whiptails didn’t change their behaviour as much as much as you might think. time spent in vegetation? Time spent digging? How fast the whiptails move? No differences between the control enclosures and the predator encloses. These are small animals, only a few centimeters long, in a very big, natural enclosure with lots of places to hide. There’s not really any way to predict how “worried” the whiptails would have to be – that is, how strong the predator cues would have to be – for them to start changing their behaviour more dramatically, or to even start changing them at all.

Reference

Eifler, D., Eifler, M., & Harris, B. (2007). Foraging under the risk of predation in desert grassland whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis uniparens) Journal of Ethology, 26 (2), 219-223 DOI: 10.1007/s10164-007-0053-0

Comments for first half of November 2009

The Byte Sized Biology blog asks questions about submission fees for Open Access journals. I point out there is a distinct lack of any rules, as far as I can see, about who gets to have their fees waived.

I point out that Canadians don’t spell like either Americans or British over at Science after Sunrise.

Speaking of home, I had to express my sympathy for Canadian Girl Postdoc in Canada, who had a run-in with the American health care system.

On Deep Sea News, I correct a description of one of my blog posts. I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t for a contest.

At Pleiotropy, which shows an ophthalmologist who pulls out the ol’ “Evolution... just a theory” argument, I note that the journal did publish a reply.

Maniactive talks about the importance of an audience to making a great presentation, which I’ve discussed here once or thrice.

A student asks Dr. Isis about authorship over at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess... I point out that there are guidelines for determining who should be an author. “Because I’m the boss” or “Because I wrote the grant that pays you” are not acceptable reasons for putting your name on a scientific paper.

Neuroethology on numb3rs

Whoa! Just had a major geek out at seeing some neuroethology research I wrote about only a few months ago show up in the opening scenes of numb3rs. Video clip and everything. Good on you, Ken Catania!

Additional:  A video clip from last night’s episode with Catania’s snake research is now up.

Hitting the target

Spotted this on Facebook...

... and I was off to the races:

Philosophy argues about the target but never takes the shot.

Math assumes the target is a perfect sphere on a frictionless surface.

Science shoots at the target, misses, and says it hit the target within an order of magnitude.

Engineering tears down the old target and builds a new, larger, easier to hit target.

Religion believes in the target.

Crazy draws the target wherever the shot lands.

Sawed-off shotgun ignores the target.

Canada fires at the target, hits it perfectly, then apologizes.

Got more? There’s a comments section!

Quitting the game

Yesterday, I talked about why an instructor should care about whether students come to class. Yesterday was also the deadline for students to drop classes, which is another reason instructors should care whether students come to class or not: not coming is a warning sign that people are just going to give up.

Like so many aspects of teaching (see here, here, and here) there are important parallels with gaming. This article talks about people who don’t finish video games, and there is so much to think about in terms of teaching. For instance, replace “player” with “student” and see how it reads:

Keeping players motivated is difficult. ... The goal is to strike the right balance between difficulty and player ability, thereby always keeping the player within arm's reach of a new achievement.

Despite these attempts to balance difficulty for a wide range of people, the players will still experience failure. More importantly, many of these folks will stop playing because of these failures. It’s rare for people to leave a restaurant because they don’t like the food, and it’s not too common for people to walk out of a movie because it's bad &ndash but game players do put down the controller and leave the game all the time.

I’m not a die hard video gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I have finished some fairly length video games, and there are a few differences between those I’ve finished, and those I haven’t finished yet.

Sudden ramp up: You’re playing the game, and then suddenly, it gets harder. Way harder. You have not opportunity to practice the skills you need to continue. If you’ve been playing a game and you need two or three tries to complete a level, then suddenly you hit a level where you’ve had at it eight times and feel no nearer success. Teaching lesson: Increase difficulty gradually.

Guides and hints: You hit a puzzle or task that is necessary to progress in the game, and you just get stuck. I loved the video game Okami because you had a guide who gave you hints. You were always pretty clear on what the task was. Teaching lesson: Give people clear goals, and give them feedback before they attempt high-stakes tasks.

Bad save points: Pointlessly replaying what you can do just to get to what you can’t do. In de Blob, to get to the final boss battle (which also has the ramp up problem), I have to start the entire level from the beginning, and it feels like it takes forever. Teaching lesson: Don’t make people keep re-proving themselves.

Also consider what both gamers and students are tempted to do when they get stuck: go online and get a walkthrough or a cheat code.

Elizabethan anti-intellectualism

Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney reminds me of another academic argument that isn’t really an argument: Who wrote Shakespeare?

While I’ve written much about denialism here, I had completely forgotten about other disciplines. Interestingly, for a movement that contradicts so much scholarship, most of the arguments I’ve read on this seem to start with, “William Shakespeare was barely literate,” or “poorly educated.” I agree with Neil Gaiman’s take on people who argue that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare:

I don't have much time for the Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare people overall, as the engine that seems to drive so many of them is snobbery. They want Shakespeare to have been an aristocrat, and not a base-born playwright.

What other “denial” fringe theories are out there in the humanities and other disciplines?

We are our brains

Raymond Tallis argues over at New Humanist that neuroscience is being oversold. He writes a lot of sensible things about overinterpreting research findings.

The fundamental assumption is that we are our brains and this, I will argue presently, is not true.

Then... what are we? Tallis appears to be a Cartesian dualist:

The brain, as understood by neuroscience, is a piece of matter tingling with electrochemical activity. There is nothing in this activity that would make the stand-alone brain capable of making the material objects around it have an appearance to it or able to have the sense of itself as the subject to whom these objects appear. ...

Some may argue that, mysterious or not, this is what the brain does. However, there are other aspects of human consciousness – the unity of the self, the formulation of intentions, the performance of voluntary actions – that are even further out of reach of neuroscientific explanation. This has led some neuroscientists and their philosophical followers to deny their existence: the self and free will belong to a pre-scientific “folk psychology”.

This gets even stronger later (emphasis added):

The human world is an entirely new realm created by all the means we have of joining attention and consciousness. It is unknown to nature, though it creates a mirror in which nature is reflected.

Tallis implies that there is a non-material, supernatural explanation for our sense of self: that humans have a soul. So chuck it all, scientists: There are things that are beyond the reach of science, that (cue lightning flash and ominous music) man was not meant to know!

Maybe organizers of the next Neuroscience meeting should add a new registration category after “Member,” “Postdoc member,” and “Student member”: “Angry villager.”

Tallis undermines his credibility on scientific issues by invoking “things not known to nature.” Soul is not a scientific concept.

Regardless of this, one does not have to be a dualist to agree with this claim:

(O)ne would like to know how it would be possible for people to formulate social policies based on neuroscience.

That’s a fair comment. One of the greatest issues of the day is how to turn scientific knowledge into public policy. Economic policies dedicated to climate change, teaching policies related to creationism, public health policies related to fear of vaccines are all examples of how difficult this is. I absolutely agree that we are not at a point where neuroscience should be strongly informing policy. But being rightfully skeptical of the relationship between science and policy does not mean that the underlying scientific premise – that our brains are responsible for our mental lives – is wrong.

Additional: Mind Hacks also responds to Tallis’s article. Thanks to Julie Dirksen for spotting it.

Why do we care if students come to class?

Last week, I wrote about why instructors might want to lecture even though we now have the ability to make good recordings and post them online exists now. One of my colleagues asked how we educate students about how to use recorded lectures to their best advantage, and not use recordings as a reason to miss scheduled class sessions. (Incidentally, Tegrity claims that the fears of students not coming to class are misplaced.)

Students have a very simple strategy, I think, for determining what we instructors think is valuable: Marks. If it's not graded, it's not important. If we want to send a message to students that their presence matters, we have to give them points towards their final grade that they can only earn by being physically present.

That said, I don't suggest points just for attendance. I much prefer giving points that are related in some way to the material and the subject that people are trying to learn. I use in-class clicker questions, so students have to be there to answer clicker questions to get the points for them.

A question worth thinking about is why do we want students to come to class? I hear my colleagues complain about students not showing up, and I’ve done my fair share of it, too. But if students are completing all their assignments, show understanding of the material, can communicate well, why do we want their bums in the seats?

One reason is that showing up to scheduled meetings on time, every time is a mark of professionalism. That’s worth encouraging.

Another line of argument to students goes. “You should show up to class because it’s good for you. Our experience as instructors is that students who show up do learn more and get higher grades.” But this is about as appealing as being told to “Eat your vegetables.”

That’s a short and unappealing list. Anyone have more?

But a nearly empty lecture hall or class room can just be damn depressing to the instructor. I have told students sometimes that if I got upset every time a student missed class, I’d never stop being upset. Which is true... to a certain degree. When there are only a quarter of the students who were there in the first day of class, yeah, it gets to you. I know that I should be trying to make my classes so amazing that people who aren't even registered for the class will just come in and listen.

Note to students: If you miss half your scheduled classes, you lose the right to complain about aloof instructors.

You smell like chicken (to a mosquito)

Although swine flu is the virus of the year, there are plenty of other viruses out there, like West Nile virus. This new paper looks at the interplay between the virus, birds, humans, and the sensory systems of mosquitoes.

Insects live in a different sensory world than humans. Insects react to molecules (smells) the way we react to photons (vision). Female mosquitoes use their sense of smell to track down larger animals so that they can get a blood meal, which they need to reproduce. Syed and Leal look at the sense of smell in a mosquito (Culex pipiens; pictured).

Because it’s already known that these mosquitoes feed on both humans and birds, the authors extracted odourants from both. Strangely, they present data from five different ethnicities... but three of them are represented by only one or two subjects. I’m not convinced that sample sizes of one or two tell us anything useful. The authors claim that there is no difference, so I would rather have just seen the pooled data and leaving ethnicity out of the picture.

The antennae has three kinds of small sensory hairs (sensilla).

• A1 sensilla (sharp trichoid sensilla), which come in long and short varieties. Each sensillum has two different sensory neurons in it, which can usually be distinguished by the size of their spikes.
• A2 sensilla (blunt trichoid sensilla), which also have two different sensory neurons in them.
• A3 sensilla (grooved pegs).

Much of the paper consists of throwing chemical after chemical on the antennae and looking for neural responses to the chemicals. Their big finding is that one of the sensory neurons in A2 sensilla is highly sensitive to a chemical called nonanal. These sensory neurons respond to nonanal at concentrations about a hundred times lower than any other chemical tested.

That matters, because they show nonanal is the major chemical in the odours of the birds they tested, and it’s a major chemical in human odours, too. That these chemical are present in things mosquitoes feed on, and that a whole class of neurons are highly tuned to that chemical, strongly suggests nonanal is used in blood-seeking behaviour. It also neatly explains why this mosquito could be a major source of viruses jumping from bird to human populations, and vice versa.

Once you know a bias, you can exploit it. Syed and Leal also baited mosquito traps, which normally use carbon dioxide to lure in the mozzies, with nonanal. Nonanal alone didn’t work as well as carbon dioxide alone... but the combination worked better than either alone. Although trapping mosquitoes probably couldn’t be used for mosquito control, it could improve mosquito monitoring.

Unfortunately, the organization of the paper is slightly disjointed. For instance, alternating the names from “thichoid sensilla” to “A2 sensilla” causes more re-reading that would otherwise be needed. The paper uses the acronym “EAD” in the figures in the Results well before they spell it what it means a few pages later in the Discussion section. (It means “electroantennographic detection,” a needlessly fancy way of saying extracellular recording.) Not cool.

Reference

Syed, Z., & Leal, W. (2009). Acute olfactory response of Culex mosquitoes to a human- and bird-derived attractant Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (44), 18803-18808 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906932106

Tuesday Crustie: Strigose

Strigose (from the New Latin strigosus, from striga row of bristles, from Latin, furrow): having appressed bristles or scales <a strigose leaf>

And you needed to know that to fully appreciate the name for this squat lobster, Galathea strigosa. (It’s the one in front, not that chordate interloper in back.)

The view from the top of the Texas uni system

One of the administrative issues I’ve been dealing with is grad student class size. Basically, we’re running into issues because our graduate classes are small. This photo caption does not fill me with hope:

Raymond A. Paredes, Commissioner of Higher Education, lays out the many challenges facing higher ed, including dismal graduation rates, a disconnect between what’s expected of high school students compared to what universities expect, the challenge of attracting Latinos to college programs, and the need to cut costs by dropping low-production courses and asking faculty members to take on heavier teaching loads.

Part of a longer article here.

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.)

ScienceOnline evolution competition

A few weeks back, I put up a post that was part of a blogging evolution competition sponsored by NESCent for the Science Online 2010 conference. The list of entries is here. Lots of fine reading!

I’d encourage you to go vote for me, but it’s not that kind of contest. So just enjoy.

Can I get this on Guitar Hero?

From a Discover Magazine contest to explain evolution in two minutes or less.

Less than a year to go for Texas State Board of Eductation vote

Ah, Texas State Board of Education member and former chair Don McLeroy has competition when he runs for re-election next year. Tom Ratliff wants to run for the Republican party, and has McLeroy pegged:

“I truly believe he (McLeroy) thinks he knows better” than educators what should be taught and how, Ratliff said. “I am one hundred and eighty degrees from that mentality.”

I would extend that. McLeroy doesn’t just think he knows better than educators: he thinks he knows better than everybody. His now imfamous, “Somebody has to stand up to these experts,” quote was proof of that.

McLeroy, as usual, makes some eyebrow raising quotes:

McLeroy makes no apologies for grafting a political agenda onto education.  “The culture war over science education, the teaching of evolution, is going to be there, no matter what,” he said. “Education is too important not to politicize.”

On the particular matter of evolution, he says:

McLeroy brushes off the controversy over science curriculum. The media, he said, seeks to pigeonhole him and his allies on the board as “religious fanatics.”

“I’m here on a social equity issue,” he said. “As a Christian with strong Christian beliefs … I know all these children are created in God’s image, and we need to help these kids. It’s a moral responsibility.”

I wonder how the media made Mr. McLeroy mention Christianity twice and God once in his answer. What social equity issues McLeroy is interested in remains a mystery.

I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

I am nearly ready to throttle the next person who mentions Carl Sagan. There seems to be a new cliché emerging in science writing: “We need more Carl Sagans.” This shows up in the books Don’t be Such a Scientist, Unscientific America, and I just spotted Erik Klemetti, who wrote on the Eruptions blog:

We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.

And it’s very likely that nobody ever will fill those roles again. Look at the names that people toss around as science communicators (with an admitted bias toward my own field of biology).

Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dragons of Eden published in 1978.

Stephen Jay Gould: Breakthrough paper on punctuated equilibrium published in 1972.

E.O. Wilson: Breakthrough book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis published in 1975.

Richard Dawkins: Breakthrough book The Selfish Gene published in 1976.

David Attenborough: Major television series Life on Earth debuted in 1979.

David Suzuki: Began as host of The Nature of Things in 1979.

See a pattern? All these people rose to prominence for their work in the 1970s or so. Forget that the internet didn’t exist. This was a world where you could count the television channels on one hand and have fingers left over. This was a time of true mass media rather than pervasive media (which is what we now have).

You see the same thing in music. U2 may be the last band to achieve true “rock star” status. You see the same thing in television. Look at the list of highest rated television shows in the U.S., and you’ve got to go down into the 30s before hitting a show from this decade. People have more choices of what they can read and watch, and people are less famous than they used to be.

How could someone today get the opportunity to talk to people about science at the level that Carl Sagan did? There are a thousand weird, intangible factors that would all have to align in a way that you could not plan or predict. Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview on This Week in Science (1 Sept 2009 episode; free on iTunes) that one reason he gets contacted by the media so much is:

My office is eight blocks north of all the new gathering headquarters of the nation. ... When the universe flinches, they just send up an action cam. So I’m an easy date for them.

Don’t get me wrong, Tyson is fantastic at what he does (great interview here), but I’d wager there are many other scientists who would be just as effective on The Daily Show as Tyson was. But not everyone can just go to multiple television studios by taking a taxi to them after work.

Plus, most of the names on that list have done significant technical work that had made them reasonably well-known among their peers. With financial support for science going down and administrative responsibilities increasing, this isn’t exactly easy, either. This means that the huge number of scientists at universities with modest research programs are right out of the picture, no matter how much they might want to do outreach and might be good at it.

The conditions that allowed Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and the others to thrive have pretty much gone away. I’m irritated when people say that scientists don’t want to come down from their ivory towers. There’s an implication that the reason we haven’t seen another Sagan or Gould is that nobody wants to do it, and that scientists could do it if they put their minds to it.

I would bloody love to have Carl Sagan’s gig. I would love to be able to tell a lot of people very cool stories, and help them understand what science is about. But it’s not going to happen, no matter how hard I work.

Note: I swear to you, I started writing this post and all but finished it before I realized today was Carl Sagan day.

From backchannel to blackboard

Back in March, I wrote:

Consider this scenario. An instructor is giving a talk. When the instructor wants a question answered, students Twitter their response instead of using clickers. Ideally, this would involve some software that could recognize some special symbol or code associated with a class, so that responses could be tallied and a graph could be generated on the fly. I’m guessing that such software isn't out of reach for good programmers. Conceptually, it seems actually pretty simple.

I’ve since learned that such technology does indeed exist, and reckoned I should report on my (tiny) experience with it.

I heard about Poll Everywhere over on Slide:ology. Basically, you can ask people to vote by phone, Twitter, or web, and it gets copiled and updated into a bar graph on the fly.

I used it to create polls (one shown at right) and make them into PowerPoint slides. Since my students don’t bring laptops to class, and apparently none of them have Twitter accounts (at least, nobody has admitted to it), I chose to set it up so that they could send a text message using their mobile phones.

It worked as advertised. Nobody had any problems sending the text messages, although the numbers they have to key in are arbitrary, so it’s not easy to do without carefully looking at the slide and double checking the digits. The animation of the bars when new information is coming in is nice and smooth. It was certainly not perfect. Importing the slide into a larger presentation was a little twitchy. And I consciously did not write that the graph updated in “real time,” because the updates were a trifle slow.

For comparison, I’ve been using a clicker system in my classes for several years now. The system is a bit more elaborate, in that it requires a dedicated clicker, receiver, and software. But if you’re doing a lot of in class questions, the difference between pushing a single button on a clicker and pushing about a dozen buttons on a mobile phone adds up. Combine that with the lag in the Poll Everywhere system, and the clicker system comes out feeling more natural and agile and less intrusive.

The clicker system does not compile results on the fly like Poll Everywhere does. Instead, it takes everyone’s answers, waits, then draws a graph. This is an important consideration in an education setting. You want people to have a chance to think on their own for a moment, and not be influenced by other people’s answers.

Poll Everywhere is great for instructors have the occasional one-off poll that they want to do in class. So far, I wouldn’t use it to replace a dedicated clicker system, but I could see how it could do so in the near future.

And, incidentally, in the little test poll shown? None of my students got the name of their own university right. It’s supposed to be the second from the bottom.

More backchannel and Twitter tools are given over at Olivia Mitchell’s blog. Watch for lots of clever ideas using these tools in the near future.