In Physics Lab, a 200-person lecture, on Tuesday:

Professor: If someone came to me and said that there is an invisible dragon in my garage, what can i do to prove it doesn’t exist?
Student: You can have a knight in shining armor enter the garage and the dragon by its very nature will be forced to fight it.

Duck Tape definitely was not requirement for high school history class. Oh Dan.

Another note: one thing that bothered me about the IBM Privacy and Security day set up was that the chair of the day asked everyone to hold their questions to the end of the speaker’s timeslot, when a few minutes have been explicitly allotted to Q&A.

This is a bad idea in general. Questions are a speaker’s way of figuring out what the audience likes or dislikes, is stuck on or understands. Questions allow for a dynamic presenter to tune his presentation to his audience. They allow the audience to ask richer, more useful questions with the relevant information fresh in their minds.

The good thing about holding questions until the end of the talk is that the chair has a better mechanism for making the talks and the session end on time. If the speaker ends on time, take a few questions, otherwise only take one. Given a mid-session question, a good speaker will be able to adjust the length of his delivery appropriately. But let’s face it: there are more bad speakers than good speakers.

I think mid-talk Q&A is worth it if the chair of the session is bold enough to warn speakers of the time remaining (through some visual cue, like a soccer warning card) and to cut the speaker off when time elapses.

I attended last week’s IBM Privacy and Security Day where a bunch of IBMers and area security researchers got together to talk about the research they are doing to protect our identities and our systems.

One short session of the day, just before lunch, as a poster talk where several grad student researchers are given five minutes each to present their work and convince people to visit them at the poster session after lunch. Columbia’s representatives presented some interesting researchers, but were the worst five minute presenters.

Talking points for a five-minute, non-math pitch:

1. Do: Give the audience, in 75 words, what the topic is, without moving past your title slide.
2. Do Not: Reference any diagrams or equations during those 75 words.
3. Do: Give the audience a small sense of how your work is novel compared to previous work, just to show you’ve done some reading.
4. Do Not: List papers by other authors and describe the research they presented there.
5. Do: Tell the audience what the topic is again, using a simple diagram.
6. Do Not: Reference any equations.
7. Do: Allow the diagram to reinforce what you tell them
8. Do Not: Let what you tell them reinforce the diagram.

Plan your talk as if you were only given three minutes. That’s more or less the amount of substance you’ll probably be able to cover in five come delivery time. The five-minute poster talk is supposed to entice the audience to come look at your poster, not bore them before they even see it. It’s your time to have the explicit attention of your audience.

Dale Carnegie’s “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking” is a fantastic resource for this. I bought it a long time ago when I was somewhat fearful of public speaking; it didn’t help, but it helped me understand what an audience wants and needs to hear. (In fact, I need to reread that book to refresh my memory of the particulars).

I just found a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in my mother’s cleaning closet and became interested in it. The product is pretty cool: it’s a hard foam that is composed of interconnected stands of the hardest commercially-available plastic: melamine. Melamine is interesting in this application because it is traditionally known as the main ingredient in formica as well as the stuff that make up a whiteboard.

The Magic Eraser, marketed by Proctor and Gamble, is actually a product from BASF called Basotect. Apparently, it also has good sound insulation properties.

One report mentioned that the substance is execelent at removing the polish from glossy paint. I performed a quick experiment by very lightly dragging a dry Magic Eraser on the surface of a glossy photograph. The photograph had very obviously lost its finish in the area with really tiny scratches. I then wet a tip of the Magic Eraser and gave a quick back and forth on a different area of the photograph: the eraser removed the gloss and the pigment of the photograph. It is pretty incredible how sharp the microfiber must be.

I was just watching Letterman when this advertisement came on the tele:

I hope people don’t really think this is what Chinese schools are like. The girl is cute though.

Edit: Yes, it’s supposed to be China and not North Korea. The characters are Chinese and the map on the wall is of China.