On Talks
Last sunday I presented my very first research paper in a scientific conference. That's an intimidating experience but I survived and I was able to expose our work properly, if I can trust the comments on my performance.
This is an aspect of scientific research that is completely skipped from science classes: how peer review works and why is it effective at separating science and religion? One first point to clear up is that there is absolutely no consensus. You often read non sense like "scientists believe foo and blah". Scientists don't believe anything and what explanation they use for natural facts is not the same for everyone. As an example, since it was a conference on comparative genomic, probably everyone in the room would agree that saying that a super being created all life as we know it around 10k years ago isn't a useful model to explain what we see. Even though the general idea that there is some evolution going on is considered reasonable, we had a presentation on how a tree of life don't make sense and the speaker wasn't torched as an heretic. He revised the model of the tree of life to include lateral gene transfer: something that we observe. This is exactly how science differ from religion. A dogma must be accepted or you are anathema. A scientific theory is exactly that: a theory. Everyone know that it is likely to miss some details and it's part of its goal to be revised.
But lets forget about evolution since it's just a theory and lets talk about the peer review process. Scientists, most of them working in universities and doing research to avoid students, do experiments and observe stuff. I use those terms loosely since doing experiment can be to benchmark a garbage collector or to attack the Riemann Hypothesis with differential geometry. Once in a while they publish what they found so they write a paper on it. It doesn't need to be a major breakthrough, just a little "hey look, making a bitmap of the memory heap allows us to collect garbage 3.8% faster." That way the common knowledge is documented and someone else working one garbage collectors will know that he should make bitmaps.
So far so good, but why can't you write a paper on how you can explain the whole universe with the action of an invisible pink unicorn? Hiding in labs isn't an efficient way to avoid students. They eventually learn that waiting at your office door won't work and then they find your lab and start to wait for you there. Some scientists studied the problem and found a better approach: just leave the city! So scientists organize scientific conferences in foreign cities. They gather there for a few days and enjoy free coffee and talk about how bad jet lag is. There is even an funny city selection algorithm that ensure that a conference on a given topic won't be in the same country the following year.
Scientists publish their papers in those conference, that way they have some excuse to have someone else to pay for the plane ticket (that someone is usually tax payers). But they don't want students to wait for them at the conference, so there is a selection committee. The selection committee is a bunch of scientists who published papers on the topic of the conference and who have the ungrateful task of reading all the papers and to: 1)reject anything that talks about unicorns, 2)tell which are the best so you don't have too much people. Yes there is another catch, if your paper is selected, you have to go on the stage and tell everyone what you did. Obviously you need to limit the number of presenters if you don't want your conference to last a whole month.
The conference organizers have a really good trick to motivate the selection committee: they publish who they are. Each paper is assigned a few anonymous reviewers but the whole selection committee is known. So if someone climb on the stage and talk about pink equidae, they all go down with him. And thats pretty much it. I mean, there is nothing else to prevent you to publish anything you want, you have to convince two of your tree reviewer that you don't talk about unicorns. An alternative approach is to bore them to death so they don't finish to read your paper but that's tricky since you more of less need to bore the audience to death during your presentation too.
"How about the presentation?" you may ask at this point. Well, once your paper is selected you are going to be published in the proceedings, the presentation is seen as a simple formality by many so they just send some random student on the stage (the rare students who discovered the research lab) while they enjoy free coffee. I think that in principle the presentation is supposed to expose in simple term what you found so people will want to read your paper or ask more questions during lunch break. In practice the schedule is extremely tight: 25 minutes for the talk and 5 minutes for questions. This is too short for anything but the most trivial work and without hope to have the message passed clearly the presenters just slam definitions and theorems on the screen while the audience nod pensively. Ok this isn't fair since a few presenters manage to distillate their results and to show just a few key aspects but clearly. There is also another path to publish your results: peer reviewed papers. Those are more of less like conferences but you don't have to do the talk. There is a selection committee and everything else. But since I'm writing about presentations I won't elaborate on those.
Learning is hard, its even harder when you don't control the pace. A lecture is inefficient to transfer knowledge. It achieves parallelism but the pace must be set too slow or too fast for most people. Good books are much more efficient, they let you go fast in the easy parts and slow in the hard parts. Unfortunately books are often written by lecturers and they have an implicit pace that will prevent the reader to adapt effectively. The Stanley books on combinatorics are so dense that you can't read more than a few pages per hour. Other books use so many words to describe simple stuff that you can read only the longs words without loosing much. When a book is longer than 700 pages, you should be suspicious. A really fat book on economics by Mankiw comes to mind. A talk in a conference is the worst you can expect: you have 25 minutes and you can't clarify botched aspects at the lecture the following week.
To pass the content as efficiently as possible a lot of time must be invested in preparation. I don't know if you get used to it but it seems that I spent nearly as much time preparing this 25 minutes talk than I spend looking for results. This sound quite inefficient to me. Just imagine all the stuff that we could find if all the people in the audience had twice as much time to do actual research. There isn't much that I can do to fix how we do science so lets talk about talks.
To be a natural orator must be a rare talent, otherwise Powerpoint wouldn't be as pervasive as it is. Peter Norgiv has an eloquent example of how bad it can get. But still, people come on the stage, they load a colorful set of slides and flip them at the audience. Now all presentation systems are created equals. Most of them offer a linear view of the slides, that is, they present the sideshow as a sequence of loosely related slides. With some discipline a user can forge a plan insert a few key slide to tell the audience where are are in the talk and where we are going.
For my slides I used Beamer. This nice LaTeX package let you start with an outline where you define the sections of you talk. You then insert the slides where they should go and you have a nice navigation. The output is in PDF with internal links everywhere. You can click on a section name in the outline to go there and your can use the top navigation bar to achieve the same effect. Since you are in LaTeX you can typeset math properly and have a good separation of content and style.
But, I still support the idea that all presentation software suck. Since you are in LaTeX you have baroque (I love this word) restrictions on the image formats that you can use. Why can't I use SVG? Why won't pdflatex handle EPS? Why do latex+dvipdfm produces artefacts in my rasters? Using LaTeX is as easy as changing the spark plugs on a Ford Astro (yeah you don't get it but trust me is was painful). LaTeX produces extremely high quality typeset and does a not to bad job at separating content end presentation. But using it is such a pain. What is this crap about compiling twice to get the cross references? Can't you just do it until its OK? Where is the option --with-toc-please? The LaTeX markup looks like line noise but what to say about the output while you compile your document? Now, lets talk about documentation. No LaTeX, or even TeX, packages come with online doc. All what they have is LaTeX, or TeX, doc that is compiled into PDF. But Computer Modern, the default TeX font, has extremely fine serifs that makes it utterly unreadable on a computer screen. No one bother to make man pages or HTML doc, how dare I suggest to use such a crude typesetting system? Will I complain about the poor unicode support? Probably not, you've had enough already.
Lets sum up: Conferences are an effective way to avoid students.
The selection committee is good at filtering papers on invisible
pink stuff. Short talks are really bad so you'd better present only
a few key aspects and have a good plan. If you have to use a
presentation software, use Beamer because it sucks less. Once we
have our non-baroque Lisp we need to write a non-baroque typesetting
system. And finally I survived my first talk!
: D