I made my first PowerPoint presentation in 1997, and actually used Microsoft’s application to prepare 35mm Kodachrome slides for a carousel projector. Since then, I’ve seen thousands of PowerPoint presentations (and a few dozen Keynotes), and had a hand in creating many, myself.
Not since a conference a decade ago have I needed to make Kodachrome slides. Yet almost everyone still uses software built around printing slides, making a linear progression of topics. The impact of this format on human thought is substantial — PowerPoint was fingered as contributing to the Columbia disaster and has spawned a lot of discussion and linkage, even here, regarding effective communication (probably all conceived of during dull PowerPoint presentations).
While compelling presentations are possible with Powerpoint (using the Lessig Method, for example) those kinds of talks require planning, and a mastery of the material. And some great stock photos. My experience in school and training is that the PowerPoint is often made as the presenter is learning the content and so is bound to lack the organization and expertise necessary for a Lessig-style presentation. People procrastinate about public speaking, and when crunch time comes it’s just too easy to flip through a a textbook, call up a Pubmed abstract, and churn out another verbose PowerPoint slide. With practice, it’s possible to whittle down the number of words and bullets per slide — but who has time for that? Much easier to read the talk from the slide itself. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Blogborygmi*
The film “The King’s Speech” won the Academy Award for Best Picture [on Sunday night.] The movie has come in for some criticism for its depiction of the political machinations surrounding the abdication of Edward VIII and Britain’s appeasement of Hitler. The British-born writer Christopher Hitchens, unsparing and deliciously eloquent as always, puts the politics of George VI in a far less favorable light than the movie does.
But “The King’s Speech” has won almost universal praise for its portrayal of the reluctant monarch’s stuttering, a speech pattern that includes involuntary repetition of sounds and syllables and “speech blocks” that cause prolonged pauses. Many young children who stutter grow out of the problem, but perhaps as many as one in every 100 adults are affected by the condition, 80 percent of whom are men. Stuttering clusters in families, so researchers have been searching for inherited genes that might cause the condition. Last year, in The New England Journal of Medicine, NIH researchers reported some success with results showing an association between three mutated genes and stuttering, although those mutations are probably responsible for a very small minority of cases.
It’s been said that “The King’s Speech” will do for stuttering what “Rain Man” did for autism: Plant a sympathetic view of a disability in the public consciousness. One danger of such a quick infusion of awareness, however, is that it can harden into a fixed, if largely favorable, stereotype. We are finding out — or are being reminded — about all the famous people who have stuttered (many of them writers). First-person accounts are popping up all over the place because of the film. The best I’ve come across is by Philip French, a British film critic, who describes vividly what it was like to listen to the radio broadcasts of the real King George VI, wondering if he would make it to the end “like a drunken waiter crossing a polished floor bearing a tray laden with wine glasses.” Read more »
Oh rotting, feeble pancreas of mine,
Won’t you be my Valentine?
Won’t you wake from your long sleep
And make some insulin, you creep?
What makes you sit, all shaped like a wiener,
Lazy and dull, with a pompous demeanor?
What makes it okay, that for your enjoyment
You’ve spent twenty plus years filing unemployment?
We need to start over; we need to be friends.
We need this whole type 1 diabetes to end.
I’m tired of shots and I’m sick of the lows,
So I think we should talk about ending this row.
I could use a break, my corn-cob-shaped friend.
I’d love to have “old age” listed as my end.
I think that your time off has drawn to a close.
I’d like working islets, and plenty of those.
How ’bout it, old pal? Care to start working?
Care to start minding duties you’ve been shirking?
I promise to be an attentive best friend,
I’ll thank you each morning and as the day ends.
I won’t take for granted the hormone you make
And I’ll forgive you for the last 24 years’ mistake.
I’ve brought you some flowers and a Border’s gift card,
In hopes that when I bring milkshakes to the yard
You’ll be so inclined to jump start all those islets
Who’ve been holding their breath for so long that they’re violet.
So what do you say, oh pancreas of mine?
Won’t you be my Valentine?
Dr. Charles Limb is an otolaryngologist, and he’s also on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Wanting to study creativity on the neurological level, he used fMRI to scan the brains of musicians while improvising along with them. Here he describes the experiment, including the building of an MRI-compatible electronic keyboard:
Google has released an awesome in-browser anatomy viewer to demo the new 3D graphics capabilities of their Chrome development version. It lets you explore the human body in all its glory in a Google Earth-like fashion. Individual anatomic layers (skin, muscles, bones, etc.) can be selected or deselected for viewing, but can also be made semi-transparent on an individual level. Labels can be displayed, and all anatomy is fully searchable.
The catch is you will need a WebGL enabled browser to try it. WebGL is a technique that enables 3D graphics within the browser without the use of plugins. Chrome 9 Dev Channel, Chrome Canary Build and Firefox 4 beta have this enabled by default. In Chrome 8 (the current stable version), you can enable it by going to about:flags (type it in the address bar), and from there enable WebGL. Below are two videos, one demonstrating the body browser, and one of a presentation by the developers.
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Google has released an awesome in-browser anatomy viewer to demo the new 3D graphics capabilities of their Chrome development version. It lets you explore the human body in all its glory in a Google Earth-like fashion. Individual anatomic layers (skin, muscles, bones, etc.) can be selected or deselected for viewing, but can also be made semi-transparent on an individual level. Labels can be displayed, and all anatomy is fully searchable.
