Hello Maine!
I’m at a Gordon Conference. The thing about Gordon Conferences is that they’re totally confidential – I’m not allowed to publish any data from anyone else. So I can’t tell you plebes about it in anything more than broad generalities.
What I can do is have a bit of a whinge.
You’ve got these amazingly bright scientists, right? Top of the game, right? Sharpening their steel against similarly-brained scientists. Right.
So you have to wonder if they realize what they’re actually saying — or how they say it. Nearly every speaker has turned their side to the assembled brainiacs, looked at the screen, and read the words that were there. Usually while pointing out the word they were reading at the time like that little bouncing dot you get on the words in Playschool. Each slide has about 30 gels and 500 words. No wonder the evening sessions are hard work for me, jet-lagged as I am.
The things people say. We had one talk in which we had a ‘strikingly’, followed two sentences later by an “even more strikingly”. Every lab, it appears, has a “really terrific graduate student” or an army of “very talented postdoc”s — sometimes both. I was longing for someone to say “Yeah, this guy was all right, I guess.”
Apparently, “bulging is not required”. “tRNA has a crucial role in translation”, which wins my nomination for the Most Useless Slide Title Ever. And whoever thought that blue cells on a black background were ever going to be visible from the back of a lecture theatre, at 9 at night?
Just had one talk that gladdened this cynical heart, though. She got up, stood in front of the screen, faced the audience and treated us to a delightful and enthusiastic treatise on the release of calcium from intracellular stores. Fantastic, clear slides, positively contagious enthusiasm and very, very well informed. Almost makes me wish I worked in this field.
Ah, presentation karaoke (in the comments – I forgot to add it to the post itself.)
Sounds like fun. Speaking of fun, I am presently very academia-tired especially of all that talk giving. So my this year’s talk is a rather cynical bashing of other people’s work. Comes with citing people who first published A and that turned around and claimed they always said not-A when the data came in, and summing up nonsense that people work on for the sake of citation-collecting. I was afraid I’d come off as negative but turns out the audience finds it interesting not to get the usual self-advertisement, who’d have thought? And oh, the grad students, they were all I right I guess 😉
I do think many academics have a lot to learn from professional trainers when it comes to presentations. The aim should be to get information across, not to make it as difficult as possible to absorb. If they applied the same approach to experiments as they did to public speaking, they’d try to do them all with their eyes shut, facing in the opposite direction…
She got up, stood in front of the screen, faced the audience and treated us to a delightful and enthusiastic treatise on the release of calcium from intracellular stores.
Really? You’re not kidding?
The most frustrating experiences I’ve had in lecture halls is when the lecture really ought to be very interesting, but the lecturer robs it of all joy. I was once at an academic society in London whose seats are the most uncomfortable ever devised, but upon which I have succeeded in falling asleep, on two separate occasions.
One was on an exegesis on the history and taxonomy of the potato, by a noted expert in the field. Now, it doesn’t sound very hopeful, does it? But the history of the potato could offer us dramatic South American landscapes, conquistadores, Sir Francis Drake, verlaization, variation in day length, starch content … zzz… zzz…
@Richard: Every lab, it appears, has a “really terrific graduate student” or an army of “very talented postdoc”s — sometimes both. I was longing for someone to say “Yeah, this guy was all right, I guess.”
Is that an American tendency do you think? For a dose of good old British modest ambition, this piece in Science might provide some light relief…
bq. Really? You’re not kidding?
yes, I am. I can’t say what she was really talking about.
If the karaoke gets boring, you could always try seminar bingo.
I’m going to meetings next week and the week after, and you’ve just reminded me of what I’ve got to look forward to. Only I’ll have equations to deal with.
My personal pet peeve is speakers who indulge in lots of name-dropping when discussing the work of American and European colleagues but then attribute another piece of work to “a Japanese group”. Jaw-droppingly rude.
Hello Maine!
Hello Richard!
What always gets me are that people who fall asleep (clearly asleep – nodding/drooling/listing to one side) and then wake up just in time and ask a perfectly legitimate and insightful question about the talk. How do they do that? I can sit there with all eyes and ears open and still come up with nothing remotely intelligent to say.
I’ll see your “middle of nowhere” and raise you one.
Yes, Anna, I remember when doing my PhD how the “Prof” (J. W. S. Pringle) always did exactly that. Amazing!