With the increasing reliance on computer technology, speakers at any conference these days get fewer blank innocent stares from the audience and a free diverse display of laptop lids. On an average morning talk at the SLAC Summer Institute, one could count about 80-100 people in the audience, roughly 20-25% of them either have their laptops opened, and are actively typing, or have them on the desk for occasional connection to the world outside the conference room. Nothing personal against the speaker on stage, and the amount of laptops opened is not an indication of how well the speaker is presenting the topic, as Roger Blandford, one of the best speakers, could still see the back of various Macs and PCs instead of the faces behind them. With or without connection to a power outlet, the audience is rarely deterred from computer usage, and the amount of laptops remains fairly constant. Why, you may ask, do they focus on their laptop screens, if they bother coming to the talks?
- It’s not that they don’t care about the talks. Waking up early to go to talks at 9 am every day does take some devotion. Conferences are held on merit of voluntary interest on the topic, so everyone here is interested in the talks. But the body does not always allow the spirit to rise. More often it drags the spirit down to a dormant state where your eyelids just want to close. (Simply put, talks are the miracle sleeping pills, with no side effects). So you have to open the laptop lid to counterstrike.
- Another reason is most attendants at these conferences are busy. Busy students, busy researchers, busy professors. Everyone has multiple projects going on, so sitting idly triggers some sense of guilt for abandoning the work. Hence the computer comes to rescue.
- The last reason is debatable, as it may apply to Physics conferences only. Embarrassingly we must admit that not all physicists know every field of physics. Many are knowledgeable of what they are working on and are just about as clueless as an undergraduate about stuff they are not working on. Naturally, one would prefer looking at something they understand, regardless if it is a chat window or a freshly generated graph from ROOT, to hearing something they do not understand.
So how can one give an attractive talk that can lift the audience eyes from the laptop screen?
- Use simple, familiar terms. Jargons make one appear knowledgeable, but they quickly drain the listeners’ attention. Better yet, talk with familiar terms. One is more likely to lift their eyes when they hear a keyword in their research topic. If the talk is aimed at a general audience, the keywords are those that appear in popular bestsellers from Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Steven Weinberg, etc. A few terms of sort are “quantum,” “dark matter,” “dark energy,” and “dark chocolate”. 🙂 Footnote: The wonder of Astrophysics is that you can hear a string of words, all of which are familiar English terms, they flow like the Milky Way but leave you clueless of what the whole string actually means. The wonder of Particle Physics is that you can hear a string of words, none of which appears anywhere else or makes any sense to you.
- Talk loud. Speakers with accents have an advantage: accents draw attention, at least in the first one minute. Your job is take advantage of your accent and extend that attention to the entire talk. A strong accent may cause difficulty in understanding, and makes the speaker less confident in his presentation, but a strong accent spoken quietly causes even more difficulty for the audience.
- Make it light. Go easy on the equations, and go easy on the mood. The female speakers quite often have the tendency to smile or laugh lightly while they talk. Even when they debate, Laura D. Tyson and Nancy Pfotenhauer keep a constant smile (sarcastic smile it could have been, but a smile draws more attention than a straight face). An occasional subtle joking remark wakes many from their daydream and disrupts the monotony of an hour long science chant.
- Tell stories. An interesting story, however unrelated to the subject, is most likely to be the one thing that the audience will take home. It also awakens the audience. So make the story related to the subject, and the audience will feel that they have learned something from your talk.
If the talk is given in PowerPoint slides or some equivalent form, the audience does not feel obligated to paying attention, as most talks are saved online for later access. So how can one make the PowerPoint slides more attractive? Well, the usual advice:
- Simple font
- BIG letters
- Short phrases/sentences
- Colors (not too much like a chameleon, of course, but keep in mind that color movie is indeed more favorable than B&W movie)
- Short videos are great attractors. Spinning black holes collide, supernova explosion, star formations, etc. Astrophysics has so many pictures to show. If we talk about dark energy for example, we have no picture. I digress.
If the talk is given with chalk on the board, as Eli Waxman did today (yes, this post was started yesterday), we see the following advantages of old school style:
- More people moved toward the front, so that they could see stuff on the board. This inadvertently separated those with laptops and those without, as in the Panofsky Auditorium there ain’t no power outlet anywhere except the very back wall, so those with laptops stood their ground and held on to the power outlet.
- No wissy wassy business with fonts and colors and the like. It is as simple as it can get. The speaker’s style and tone, and the talk’s content are the sole players that can make or break the talk.
- Attention. Could be good or bad, though. Good case: the audience tries to hear every word because there are no slides to be saved and read again at leisure. Bad case: some in the audience curse their bad eyesight and poor transcribing skill, secretly praise the invention of PowerPoint, and dub the talk hard to follow. Either way, in the age of technology, any speaker who gives a conference talk with chalk will be remembered as the speaker who gives a talk with chalk.
- Interaction. Not between the speaker and the audience, but between the speaker and the talk. You know how everyone emphasizes that a good talk is presented with excitement? Well, you can’t show excitement if you don’t seem connected to your talk, no matter how well it’s presented on the screen. So writing on the board essentially forces you to connect with your talk. Anyone can read off a slide. You can write out something and speak of it at the same time only if you know it well. An occasional pause to organize your words or recatch your train of thought disrupts the monotony. If you could make the chalk screech on the board, do it. Anything to disrupt the monotony, if your voice can’t do so already.
- No misprint, and if there is a mistake, easily corrected. The downside to this is all the presentation would be erased at the end of the talk. But really, how often does one go back to read the slides?
Good luck to me with my talk on Friday of next week. Guess what, it’ll be chalk on the board. 🙂
