January 2012
15 posts
How to Build a Search Engine →
David Evans and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity claim they can teach you how to build a search engine in seven weeks. And there are no fees. This sounds almost too good to be true.
“Delivering a presentation without the audience in mind is like writing a love...”
– Simon Morton
How should we address the contradiction of people reading less but communicating in written form more?
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Carl Zimmer at the NYAS on Science Ink
Like Mr. Zimmer himself, I don’t have any tattoos. He joked about not being fond of needles. For me it’s more about how distracted I get by bright shiny ideas. I don’t know that I could come up with something I’d always want or I’d have to keep adding and end up with a mishmash of stuff. But I find great beauty in many tattoos, so science plus tattoos, I was there.
...
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“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.”
– Woodrow Wilson (via thoughtsdetained)
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Laser pointers are for cats
I recently attended a lecture where the presenter used a laser pointer. And about halfway through I wanted to wrestle it away from him. I was starting to twitch and suddenly sensed some connection to my feline friends. He had two screens with his slides showing but at times he would wave the pointer about on one of the screens.
It was utterly distracting and added absolutely nothing to my...
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Another thing we could learn from the journalists
A few weeks ago I wrote about using effective subject lines, taking a page from the newspaper editors’ playbook. Today I’m borrowing another page. Don’t bury the lead in your emails. There may be reasons to build suspense in a novel or even in some types of presentations, but emails, not so much.
Put the lead front and center. People don’t read whole emails. They read the...
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
– H. G. Wells
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most...”
– Walt Disney
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Rosling Presents with IKEA Props →
I much prefer his 3D container bar charts to ones in PowerPoint. This is one of the best uses of props I’ve seen recently.
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Don't Present Like a T-Rex
I was visiting the natural history museum this weekend and made a stop at the T-Rex exhibit, among others. Of course, one of the first things you notice about dino boy is how small and seemingly ineffectual his arms are.
But he’s in good company. I’ve seen a series of speakers recently who are trying very hard to get past the “I don’t know what to do with my...
“When it comes to customers, feelings are facts.”
– Simon Cooper, President & COO, Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 112) | Manner of... →
“He is one of those orators of whom it is well said, ‘Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.’” — Sir Winston Churchill
“Commit to being great, and you will be. If you commit to change the world, you...”
– Scott Schwertly, How to be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate!
Redefining the Cheap - Fast - Good Triangle
There’s the old idea that among cheap, fast, and good you can only pick two when working on a project. But what if we redefined the points on the triangle to cheap, fast, and short? That might work. Maybe every training initiative or presentation package doesn’t need to be a big deal. Maybe you just need a job aid or a 15 minute presentation instead of an hour.
Attention spans and...
