Over at Biocurious, Phillip has a post on the generic science seminar outline:
1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from “well, not THAT long ago” is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh).
2. Esteemed Speaker takes over, and begins with a bunch of overly broad introductory slides. Naive audience members might think cancer was about to be cured, or a theory of everything (or at least, everything the speaker is interested in) is near discovery.
It’s not applicable to every seminar– I have fond memories of the Atomic Physics colloquia at NIST, which were about as far from the unchallenged and uninformative talks that Phillip describes (I continue to have a deep fear of Bill Phillips’s signature “Before you leave that slide…” which was ineivtably a prelude to a question I couldn’t answer). The basic elements should certainly be familiar to anybody who has spent time in academic science, though.
(Via Phillip, YoungFemaleScientist is also down on seminars, though not in a way I agree with.)
Which brings us to the audience participation part of the program:
What’s the single worst example of misbehavior by a seminar speaker or introducer that you’ve seen?
It’s tough to narrow it down to just one, but my answer is below the fold.
I saw lots of egregiously stupid things done in seminars while I was in graduate school– a speaker giving a talk that was so hyper-specific that the seminar organizer walked out in disgust, a speaker whose talk amounted to forty-five minutes of technical discussion of a calculation followed by “…and it gives the wrong answer. We don’t know why. Questions?”, an introducer offering a prayer for the soul of Carl Sagan, a ten-minute introduction of the person giving the introduction of the speaker– but the kicker was probably in one of the required seminar series for my program at Maryland, in which the person introducing the speaker gave his talk for him.
When I say that, I don’t mean that the introducer gave a short summary that spoiled the main point of the talk. I mean that he gave the talk for the speaker– he brought his own overheads, put up a copy of the key graph of the presentation to come, and explained all the important features of the graph. It was truly astonishing– when he finally stood up to speak, the speaker had a look on his face like “Dude, WTF?”
So what’s the worst thing you’ve seen done at a seminar or colloquium?
Well, it’s not exactly bad behaviour, but I once saw a presenter at Microsoft’s TechEd having to log back on to the presentation machine (still connected to the projection screen) – with the username “Administrator” and a blank password. Cue much oohing and tutting from the audience, and a few mutters of “anybody got a wireless connection?” (This was in the days when WiFi was just coming in and was a “luxury” feature.)
(Un)fortunately, it wasn’t a presentation on security. 😉
Mid-1970s university chemistry seminar. Terrifically old fart speaker had his slide show decorated with the occasional cheesecake pin-up. OTOH it was poorly received by the Women’s Lip/feminazi contingent. OTOH, not a single person in the SRO darkened large room fell asleep.
We’ve lost our way.
…an introducer offering a prayer for the soul of Carl Sagan…
I dunno — for an Apple zealot, that’s pretty forgiving.
Anyway, since I don’t consider being boring or self-absorbed to rise to the level of “misbehavior”, I can’t say I’ve ever seen such from either speakers or introducers. Audience members, on the other hand, I’ve seen behave pretty disgracefully. My favorite was the person who used a question period to lay into a speaker from the previous day for that guy’s (ludicrously wrong, admittedly) attack on his own work!
When I was in grad school, my department was trying to hire some additional faculty to get ahead of a forthcoming wave of retirements. This led to a period of a couple of years where the weekly department seminar was often from a possible future professor. Some of these applicants were fresh from their postdocs, and their talks tended to be tight, well-structured, a bit overly technical, and as dull as unbuttered toast. The senior applicants were a more diverse crew, and as a rule, they were worse.
By far the most egregious offender was a professor from a respectable, but slightly less well-regarded, university who wanted to trade up. Said professor had a lot results to share, and he presented them with a great deal of energy and an astonishing torrent of pointless detail and self-aggrandizement. (“This is a really outstanding result here…”) Our seminars were supposed to last for one hour, and a very large lecture class was scheduled to use the room ten minutes later. This particular professor went on for one hour and fifteen minutes before even asking for questions (or pausing for breath, really), leaving a room full of decidedly impatient grad students (many of whom had started to walk out) and hallway containing a hundred-person undergrad lecture section waiting for their class to begin.
Of course, he got the job anyway, demonstrating that the ability to communicate effectively under time constraints was absolutely not part of the job description for professors in this particular department. Sadly, I wasn’t particularly surprised.
The worst was a “1 hour” theory talk, but the speaker went for 90 minutes (and nobody stopped him or even pressured him to wrap up), and the entire talk was one long incredibly technical calculation in functional analysis. I don’t know if there were any actual written words, or if it was all just equations.
My colleagues wonder why I have such a high tolerance for bad talks … after sitting through that and similar uber-technical presentations, ordinary run-of-the-mill bad talks just don’t seem that bad.
Then there was departmental colloquium by a Nobel laureate (who shall remain nameless), who brought 20 year old, yellowing, illegible transparencies, and proceeded to ramble about something for an hour with no background or motivation. I still don’t know what the talk was about. It might have been comprehensible (though still not particularly coherent) to the few specialists in the audience, but was probably meaningless to the other 90% of the audience.
More recently, I went to an interdisciplinary talk on the relevance of field X to subject Y, to an audience of Y specialists. The talk was highly technical in field X, and didn’t actually discuss subject Y at all, but sneakily tried to connect X to related subject Z which nobody was interested in. The faculty member who invited that speaker was privately embarrassed and apologetic later. (To be fair, the speaker was very junior faculty and perhaps hadn’t had experience switching from research group talks to cross-disciplinary seminars.)
Then there was the guy who talked about a model he’d invented, which might have been interesting by itself. However, he spent most of his time discussing the model details, and almost no time comparing the model to data (despite having lots of useful data!) to convince us whether his model was any good. He really loved that model. Worse, he had a habit of making factually incorrect statements about minor side points. I don’t think they affected his main argument, but as a colleague pointed out, “His very first sentence and his very last sentence were both wrong.” Not the way to make a good impression.
CC,
If we’re bringing up audience misbehavior, how about this one: our department once had a crackpot from the local community who would come to all our seminars and would occasionally ask a deranged question or two. (I remember once when he was trying to ask how quantum mechanics allowed him to touch things, or something … I think he thought that the uncertainty principle meant that objects would disappear if you tried to interact with them, or something.)
This was tolerated until a Nobel laureate came to speak, and said crackpot proceeded to congratulate the speaker on his beautiful but sadly wrong theory. He went on at some length, philosophizing about the nature of science. The speaker didn’t immediately catch on that this guy was a nut, and spluttered a little, reviewing some graphs that showed good data-theory agreement. The colloquium host — known for being short tempered — ended up yelling at the crackpot (literally, yelling, across the lecture hall) for him to sit down and stop harassing the speaker. I never saw the guy again after that.
Is using too many buzzwords a crime? To avoid outward laughter at empty buzzwords, our grad students have developed a randomized set of Colloquium Bingo cards. “Praise for school/campus” shows up every week, and is an effective “free” square.
On the part of the speakers, the worst was from UMW (I won’t name names, but how many physics profs could there be there?), who had the audacity to spend an hour and a half making bizarre/woo claims about the Golden Ratio and pimping his book on the subject. The grad students spent 10 minutes afterward with a meterstick debunking the claim that the ratio of your height to the height of your bellybutton is Phi. Bollocks.
This applies to students, Professors and Business Associates:
Any and ALL presenters who have Power Point slides with small print that cannot be read from the back row without optical magnification of some type.
A Plague on all their houses!
I second J-Dog’s comments about people who use undersized print on PowerPoint slides. I’ve noticed that the default font sizes in PowerPoint are 28 point for bullets and 24 point for text boxes. There is a reason for that: You (usually) want your audience to be able to read your slides.
That goes double for figures. From experience, I have found that any published figure that is wider than single column width (typically 8.5 cm for the journals I am familiar with) will contain text that is too small when the figure is expanded to presentation size. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues (including more than a few experimentalists) have not caught on to this fact. Whenever I need to use such a figure that a colleague has produced, I invariably add in the annotation myself. And this is the reason I prefer to create single-column figures even in journals which allow double column width: there is some chance that I can simply scale up the figure for my talk or poster presentation.
This is mildly related.
I work at a National Park (actually, a National Historic Site, but we’re part of the NPS). During the winter, to increase visitation, we bring in guest speakers.
One of our guest speakers was a man we all have known for as long as we have worked here. He volunteers at the site. He wanted to do a talk. Why not?
We told him in advance that, if he’s doing a PowerPoint, be sure it is optimized for screen graphics and send it to us one week in advance so we can be sure it works with our one or two year old laptops. We did not get the PowerPoint ahead of time (warning sign #1). We also tell all our presenters to be here 90 minutes prior.
He shows up the day of the program 30-minutes in advance (warning sign #2). He has a portable hard drive with him (warning sign #3). He states that he has no idea what optimizing is, but his file wouldn’t fit on a CD (warning sign #4).
I was able to hook his hard drive up to my desktop computer. I looked at the file: 4,751MB (warning sign #5, 6 & 7). Please note, that is a comma, not a decimal. He actually had a 4.7 Gigabyte Powerpoint. I loaded it onto my computer (I tried, it crashed. Twice (warning sing #8)).
We took his hard drive to the laptop in the theater and hooked it up. I tried to help. He said, “I’ve been working with computers for thirty years, you work for the government. Which one of us do YOU think can make it work?” I said, “Me,” and he laughed at me (not with me, at me) (Warning sign #9).
His program consisted of hundreds of photographs of accounting papers with a few actual pictures thrown in interspersed with bullet point pages. During the program, he kept saying, “What you should see here is a picture of X document, but because the government pays too much for crappy computers and the rangers know nothing about computers, you can’t see the graphic,” and then describes what cannot be seen.
His talk brought in about 50 visitors. Ten were still there two hours later when he wound up the talk. After his conclusion about why the company he was talking about went bankrupt, he said, “Odd. The government (especially the NPS) is run far worse than this company was run. Look at what they did to my program. Yet the idiots still work for the NPS, and this company went bankrupt. The world is not fair.”
Although he still volunteers at the park, he is no longer allowed to speak or give programs.
I think that qualifies as a rude speaker, even if it is a liberal arts setting.
A few years ago, we had a talk at our university that featured Nobel prize winners Dr. Sidney Altman and Dr. Sydney Brenner speaking back-to-back. When the second talk was finshed, the ‘mc’ of this event asked the audience to “join in thanking Dr. Altman and, uh, the other guy who spoke.” I was pretty embarrassed that this was a representative of our university.
I studied history and philosophy of science at a German university where one of the professors (already retired) was a world famous mathematician and logician who had founded a new form of constructive logic. Once a young professor from Switzerland came to hold a guest lecture on an application of this logic that he had developed. The room was packed and not to put too fine a point on it, it soon became obvious that the guest speaker was an idiot who really didn’t know what he was talking about. The world famous professor then raised his hand and proceeded to make mince meat out of the guest in front of the entire audience as if he were a drill sergeant demolishing a particularly stupid raw recruit. It was without exception the most embarrassing scene that I have ever witnessed at a university and I have witnessed more than a few. When the world famous professor was finished the guest was incapable of uttering a single tone and the seminar was over!
I didn’t actually witness this, but I’ve heard of a seminar speaker who answered their cell phone in the middle of a seminar. I have been witness to an audience member answering their cell phone during the seminar, however.
The Disgruntled Chemist recently described a good one, http://thedisgruntled.blogspot.com/2008/01/long-time-readers-will-know-that-bad.html
Aaron, someone we both know has the habit of occasionally getting a phone call, scheduled precisely for the end of his lecture, and thus ending the lecture in a quick “gotta run”…always gets a good laugh actually.
In grad school I saw a presentation on music cognition in which the lecturer tried to show about 100 slides in 50 minutes. Some of the slides were on screen for 5 seconds, with him mumbling about needing to continue on so he could finish on time. The professor who had invited him was rather incensed afterward, and used him as a “con” example at the next symposium on how to give a presentation.
I cannot answer this question, as my ability to recall things that happen while I am asleep is poor.
Can’t recall right now anything that I’ve personally seen that’s that much out of the ordinary.
I did hear of a presentation several decades ago where the speaker spent the first few minutes writing one long equation on the blackboard. Then walked back to the other end of the blackboard and started drawing a line under the equation.
Supposedly the professor who organized the seminar stopped the talk before the speaker wrote the denominator.
I saw Feynman appear to nod off at a seminar, sitting in the front row. Everyone felt sorry for the tired old man.
Then he woke up at the end, as if by the loud applause.
It became clear that if he had fallen asleep, it was after already debugging the visitor’s presentation.
“Not bad,” he said. “But I think you went wrong back at equation #17. Look here…” and he came up to the blackboard, made a sign change, pursued it in three quick steps, got a significantly different result.
“Other than that, which makes the little difference of whether or not one agrees with ther experimental data of X__, Y__, and Z__ at Brookhaven, not bad at all.”
Sorry I can’t give name of visitor, talk title, or date. But he did this more than once. I have another version of this that I witnessed, but have exceeded my 2008 quota of namedropping already. I went to many seminars at Caltech, both in 1968-1973 and again when I’d moved back to Pasadena and lived a block from campus. This was far from the only time he did something remarkable at someone else’s talk.
I saw Feynman appear to nod off at a seminar, sitting in the front row….
I’ve heard a similar story about Lord Kelvin. I once saw (and, again, this didn’t seem to rise to the level of “misbehavior” on either person’s part) a grad student fall so soundly asleep that the speaker stopped and marveled at it. The student then woke up at the end and asked a fairly cogent question. In any case, the student was coming right off a Nature paper, so a) he had immunity and b) everyone figured he hadn’t slept much.
I have another version of this that I witnessed, but have exceeded my 2008 quota of namedropping already.
Please share! For what science sucks out of us, the opportunity to namedrop is small compensation, and I’m already going to run around retelling your first story.
No thread about bad talks can be complete without a reference to the classic “Guidelines for Giving a Truly Terrible Talk.” When I was a grad student, the American Geophysical Union used to distribute these guidelines (or the companion piece “How to Prepare a Perfectly Putrid Poster”, depending on the format assigned for your presentation) with the abstract acceptance letters.
If you’ve never seen them before, click on my name to see them reproduced. The first sentence presumably credits the original authors (I’m not sure since I don’t read Norwegian).
Yes, it is I. The one who can’t stay on topic but rather just brush against it.
I have been fairly fortunate as any seminar I’ve gone to, while usually a bit cheesy or a blatant plug for some new fancy machine/device/software, have stayed mostly on topic. But speeches at military events wow.
While still in the 82nd Airborne I was participating in what is called a Division Review. It takes place during All-American week, which falls during late May, sometimes early June. In North Carolina that means it is normally about 150+ F and about 3,000% humidity. We had a guest speaker who, quite literally, discussed every single campaign the 82nd participated in. So after a marvelous 45 minutes of standing in blazing sun while holding rifles with fixed bayonets he said “45 years ago..” Standing in the group of Soldiers I could hear people wishing for his death, some seemed to be offering to make that event occur if they would be given ammunition.
Afterwards a friend of mine, who had watched from the stands, said the Soldiers could be heard saying things like “Oh God” and “Give me a round.” It also explains why his speech seemed to have a very badly put together ending if he could hear those remarks as it seemed to wrap up at that same point.
So while not strictly misbehavior it most definitely showed a lack of concern to prepare what was probably a one hour speech knowing your audience would be standing in the middle of the sweltering heat for the entire duration of it.
I saw a creationist presentation once.
It was given by an undergraduate member of the Christian Union who may or may not have been a creationist. The talk was about two hours worth of powerpoint slides ripped from every creationist or ID page that exists on the internet, including those that contradict each other, or themselves. Obviously slapped together in about an hour by a group who had no idea what they were doing.
The talk was supposed to be to a general audience, but was advertised in the physics and biology departments.
The actual talk lasted about a hour and a half. Questions were included.
When I say that, I mean they were fired at him before he could even finish his sentence. People were correcting his statements before they left his lips. Entire slides were skipped without his participation when someone in the audience explained the subject to him before he could start to read it himself. In the end he tried to jump past several Hovind ripped pages without people noticing, dismissing them as ‘a joke’.
A research group from our biology department who were doing a project on LUCA invited him into their labs after the talk was over. I grabbed several Hovind DVD’s they were giving away for free for my friends.
In actual serious talks, I did attend a session where there were four speakers who each had 45 minutes, with a break in the middle and questions at the end. During that break someone from maintainance came along to repair the projector, which had just been working fine for an hour and a half. When we went back into the room, it was dead. Another tech came back and actually fixed it half an hour into the next guys talk.
From http://www.imechanica.org/node/197
This is the approximate midpoint of my talk and it reminds me of a workshop chaired by L. C. Young, a great mathematician and the originator of Young measures, a mathematical tool central to the study of phase transitions. Young, then approximately 80 years of age, was asleep at the front of the room. The speaker was midway through the talk and a question from someone in the audience resulted in an animated discussion with the speaker. The discussion woke up Young who sat quietly listening and when the discussion ended Young stood up and said: “Well, if there is no further discussion, let’s give our speaker a great big hand and retire for lunch.”
Re: #20, since you ask, CC:
Distinguished speaker at the blackboard at a Caltech seminar. Feynman in front row, looking bored. Suddenly Feynman whips out a vintage slide rule. He wiggles the slide rule around for 5 minutes. He calls out, interrupting the speaker.
I paraphrase Feynman (not having written down his exact words):
“You screwed up that differential equation. You went off the tracks when you got the cylindrically axisymmetric boundary condition, which you then assumed for the next equation. What you have no longer makes any sense, either mathematically or physically. The actual solution is as follows…”
Feynman writes an equation and solution on the board. Speaker shuts up. Long, long pause. Speaker wraps up in a hurry, takes questions, and not many of those. Flees the room, scowling.
Later I ask Feynman. “What were you doing with that slide rule? I don’t know how to solve a differential equation with a slide rule.”
Feynman grins. “I solved the Diff EQ in my head. I just used the slide rule to store intermediate values of my computation.”
Without further detailing my elsewhere-blogged relationship
with Feynman, let me provide a related “urban myth” —
also described as true during my undergrad days at
Caltech (1968-1973).
Student: “Will this exam be open book?”
Professor: “Yes, this exam will be open book.”
Student: “Will this exam be open homework?”
Professor: “Yes, this exam will be open homework.”
Student: “Will this exam be open notes?”
Professor: “Yes, this exam will be open notes.”
Student: “Can I bring my slide-rule?”
Professor: “Yes, of course you may bring your
slide-rule.”
Student: “Can I bring an electronic calculator?”
Professor: “Yes, you may bring an electronic
calculator.”
Student: “Can I bring the Feynman Lecture Notes in
Physics?”
Professor: “Yes, you may bring the Feynman Lecture
Notes in Physics.”
Student: “Can I bring — ?”
Professor: “For god’s sake, man. Anything you can
carry yourself in one load, you can bring into the
exam.”
So the student came to the exam with a post-doc riding
on his shoulders.