How to save the world and make everyone happy - one powerpoint presentation at a time
July 9th, 2007Computers and the Internet have made things great for scientists, particularly for us, since our jobs are sitting in front of them analysing data all day. Imagine being a bioinformatician without a computer, multivariate statistics is more of a pain than usual, genome sequence alignments need large pieces of paper. There would however be an upside to this analog dystopia - no more powerpoint presentations. Computers have arguably had a detrimental effect on the presentation of research, they allow the easy creation of big, text heavy slide sets. The emphasis of a talk leans towards the slides, and not the speaker.
Being asked to give a talk is viewed as a dull task: time taken away from research plus the discomfort of public speaking. If you’ve already decided beforehand that it’s going to be a dull, pointless exercise then don’t bother, not only will you be wasting your own time but also the time of everyone watching. It’s true that this is a very critical attitude to express; boring presentations are symptom of our scientific culture rather than the fault of the individual, but how many times have you been sat in conference and thought that you could have been using your time much more usefully? Now imagine, for a second time, a world where we have both computers and great presentations. The chance to give a presentation is greeted with enthusiasm, as an opportunity to teach the world about what you commit most of your time to, and to get valuable feedback on it. But we don’t need to imagine this place, we’re the generation of scientists coming through: the professors and PI of the next 30 years, we can start this revolution now.
