10 tips for improving your presentations & speeches →

Some fantastic advice here from the Presentation Zen site (which is always worth looking at). Many scientific presentations would be greatly enlivened if presenters took more effort to turn a collection of facts and observations into a story. Tip #4 is something that I frequently mention to students in our lab:

(4) Have a clear theme. 
What is your key message? What is it you REALLY want people to remember? What action do you want them to take? Details are important. Data and evidence and logical flow are important. But we must not lose sight of what is really important and what is not. Often, talks take people down a path of great detail and loads of information, most of which is completely forgotten (if it was ever understood in the first place) after the talk is finished. The more details that you include and the more complex your talk, the more you must be very clear on what it is you want your audience to hear, understand, and remember. If the audience only remembers one thing, what should it be? Write it down and stick it on the wall so it's never out of your sight. 

Sometimes students seem almost surprised by the notion that the audience should be expected to remember something from their talk.

Better Posters: A design brief for conference posters →

Zen Faulkes has a great post on the Better Posters blog, it's well worth a read if you think you will ever need to make an academic poster. This section nails it for me (emphasis mine):

Goals of a poster

Posters should get conference attendees talk to the presenter. Because attendees are busy, posters must grab attention, even if a potential reader is quite a long way from the poster. Similarly, posters should make an implicit promise to the reader that the gist of the poster can be grasped quickly.

Posters should also contain enough information that a person is able to read it and understand the main message.

Sprai: a bioinformatics software acronym that I actually like

I heard somebody mention the following tool today:

• sprai = single pass read accuracy improver

As someone who frequently heaps scorn on many bogus acronyms used for bioinformatics tools, I thought that maybe I should point out some good ones when I come across them. I like 'sprai' as a name for the following reasons:

1. It is a genuine acronym (initial letters of all words are used)
2. The name is short
3. The name is pronounceable (though I'm making an assumption that it is pronounced 'spry')
4. As a non-English word, it's pretty unique (especially in the field of bioinformatics)
5. When I search for it on Google, it shows up on the first page of results (though it has some competition from this place)

The only negative might be that it is subject to being misspelt (especially if you only hear the name verbally and don't see it written down), but otherwise it's a good name.