Talking the Talk

And here's another post that I'm stealing from Of Two Minds: How to Give a Bad Science Presentation.

Of course, the advice they give applies to presentations given to fellow scientists, with the objective of introducing your work to them. And in that particular scenario, I probably agree with everything they say.

However, what if the aim of the presentation is not to inform, but to educate? In other words, what if you're giving a lecture? This is very topical for me, as I've just finished a course where students were giving presentations on papers, and I've had to do one of the presentations myself. We disregarded most of the rule they came up with. Were we right to do so? Well, let's look at the rules:

- Be able to give the presentation without support of the slides.

That one's a tricky one, because we were explaining a technique. In my part, I was heavily relying on examples to explain what was happening, and those examples were all on the slides. Could I have done it on the blackboard? Probably, but not without taking considerably more time. Still, we did rehearse a few times, so I think we could have brought the point across even without the slides. Overall, this rule holds.

- No outlines on the slides

Now this I can't completely agree with. Sure, giving an outline is slightly superfluous when you're repeating what it says on the slides. But if you're trying to get an unfamiliar topic across to an audience, reinforcement helps. During the presentations by other groups, I often found myself referring back to the slides when I hadn't caught what they were saying. I think outlines have their place in lecture slides.

- The less text the better

Two problems with this one: The first is the point that I just raised that it helps to refer back to the slide if you missed or were confused by what the speaker was saying. The second is that sometimes, the slides are made available to the audience as a study help before or after the talk. They effectively double as lecture notes, and so it is helpful if they contain enough detail so that you can understand them without the help of the speaker.

On the other hand, too much text can indeed be distracting during the presentation. So I'd advocate a compromise solution here: Keep the slides sparse, but provide detailed lecture notes at the end. Unless you're confident that your speaking ability is good enough to allow your audience to follow along easily and take notes while they do.

- Let us see the data

No argument there: Figures should be clear and big enough so that the audience can get a sense of what it is you're trying to show.

Injustice in Open Source

Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions has an article about misogyny in open source development.

Whereas the number of women in biology and chemistry has improved a lot in recent decades, the number of women in Physics creeps up much more slowly. Meanwhile, in computer science, the number of women has actually be declining. As for the absolute values of those numbers, one need only look at a picture of a Linux Kernel Developers' Summit to realize that within statistical uncertainty, the number of Y chromosomes is the same as the number of people in the picture.

Knop attributes this to the misguided belief of men in these fields that they are somehow smarter than the rest of the populace, and hence also smarter than women. It must be that way, because you don't see many women computer scientists, do you? It never occurs so them that their attitude might be the reason that many women don't try for a career in computer science.

While I've never worked in open source, I tend to agree with Knop's assessment. Now here's the million-dollar (or million-women working in computer science) question: How change this state of affairs?

Sure, it would be nice if open source developers would be more welcoming to women, but let's just assume that they're not that cooperative for a moment. There's certainly no way to force them, after all, these projects are their own to do with as they please. So how can women fight back?

What I would like to see is more open source projects started by women, with a quota of 50% or more women developers. Maybe a little community could spring up around it. Think of it as Sourceforge with more X chromosomes. There could be discussion forums for female software developers, and maybe a blog collecting instances of misogyny and of female successes. All it takes is a few women developers getting together, buying a couple of servers, coming up with a light-weight content management system, and you're off. No males required.

Breasts on Facebook?

Brace yourselves. What I say next may shock you. Ready? Okay:

There were breasts on Facebook.

Don't panic! Breathe. Stay with me. The good news is, Facebook acted decisively and removed ALL of the...

Wait, hang on.

Okay, I'm being told they didn't remove all of the pictures of breasts. Apparently, they removed pictures of a woman breast-feeding and banned the woman in question from Facebook.

Now, even most prudes would find it hard to condemn breast-feeding as obscene. See, contrary to popular (read, male) opinion, breasts actually serve another purpose besides being sexually arousing. In deleting the pictures, Facebook was focusing on the nudity of said breasts, and many commentators are making the same mistake. Instead of saying "Facebook deletes pictures of woman's breasts", how about "Facebook deletes pictures of woman feeding her baby". That's all that that picture was about, a baby being fed. How much more innocuous can you get?