Mailund on the Internet

Hi readers.  Sorry I’ve been very slow in posting the last two months.  My RSI kicked in badly early January and I chose to limit my computer usage to the absolute minimum for a while.  That, combined with a lot of work on various projects means that I haven’t been able to blog since around Christmas…

It will probably be another few months before I’m up to speed again.  I still haven’t recovered fully, but at least it is getting better…

Anyway, enough excuses!  I’m posting now just to share this nice list of talks I got by email today: Evolution in Health and Medicine.

I like the talks there, at least, and I hope you will also.

Stay tuned.  While the posting is at a very low rate right now, I do plan to pick up the speed over the coming weeks…

Hi there, dear reader. Sorry I haven’t updated the blog lately, but I’ve been lazy and haven’t really had anything to say.

However, I’ve just had a chat with some guys about this and, slightly drunk as I am on a Saturday evening, I feel like venting some steam.

I’ve attended some talks this week that I found extremely boring.

Why? Does science have to be boring?

Fuck no! It is very exciting, but lately I find that reading papers is a lot more interesting than attending talks.  Talks are a complete waste of time.

Why is that? I really don’t undestand it.

If you have something exciting to say, why turn it into an academic boring lecture where all the emotions have been completly removed? Are you afraid of offending anyone? Why? If your science is good, then why be afraid?

Talks are supposed to get me interested in the topic. The effect they have is getting me to sleep.

I would love to start a movement against this.  If you don’t like the talk, then leave, noisily.  Teach those fuckers that you they should prepare a talk, before they open their mouth.

Damn it!

I just saw this one on on scienceblogs.

It is a bit bold of me to put it up here after I’ve just recently put up two of my presentations here, but still…

I don’t think I’m that bad at presenting, but I do tend to put too much on my slides — and too much text — when I am in a hurry with them. When I have plenty of time, I try to rely solely on figures, but as the deadline draws nearer, I get stressed and I use text instead of figures (’cause text is so much faster to put on the slides).

To the advice given in the video, I’d like to add one of my own: when you prepare a presentation, start by thinking about the story you want to tell. You need to have a story to tell, otherwise you won’t be able to structure the talk, and you certainly wont give an interesting talk. Just listing results gets boring fast. If you have a story to tell, the presentation almost prepares itself. You don’t have to prepare so much, because you can easily remember your story (but not as easily remember a lot of key points) and if you have the story in mind when you give the presentation you feel the flow of it and you are less likely to get nervous.

At least, that is how I feel it.

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk on the Faculty of Health about my association mapping work. The slides can be seen below:

The topic is essentially the same as what I am covering in my series on “association mapping through local genealogies“, so you can get the details there, if you don’t get it all from the slides without the accompanying talk. Well, you can read it when I get around to writing it, right now there is only the introduction, so you can think of the slides as a teaser.

These are the first slides I’ve made in Keynote (since I only recently got myself a Mac). It took a little getting used to, and of course I wasted a lot of time porting slides from OpenOffice (compared to just making the slides in OpenOffice), but all in all I am impressed with Keynote and like the result here.

Now let’s see how it will be received tomorrow…