Some Tips on How to Present Science

Previously I had written a list of The Do's and Don'ts of a Professional Meeting that went over pretty well. Now, even though I don't plan on rehashing a lot of the material there (although I might someday) I wanted to add to it. The primary purpose of this post is to try and help people become BETTER presenters, or at least point them in the right direction to learn how.

More people should take time out of their busy schedules to become better at communicating. Without communication anything you do is just for yourself (which is fine in some instances). But if you can't communicate what you have done (in science, in your job, in a relationship) things are likely not going to go over well for you.

For Christmas I received 2 things that I hope can help me (and others) be better communicators. The first one is Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson. Randy goes on to talk about the 4 main points of communication hangups for scientists (which were being "cerebral", being literal minded, being a poor storyteller, and being unlikeable). He explains that scientists are bred to be boring and dispel just the facts in their papers, but nobody wants to talk to or listen to such a person.

Being Cerebral:
The book makes several comments on not just communicating with your brain (like in a scientific article). You can do this through various parts of your anatomy: The brain (being cerebral), the heart (talking with passion and getting other people's passions fired up), the guts (feel it in your gut), and the loins (sex sells). Basically if you love what you study, let that come through. Get other people as fired up as you are.

Being Literal Minded:
Try to think a little outside the box as I have always been an advocate for. Don't just say what you mean but be clever.

Being a Poor Storyteller: 

He offers some suggestions on becoming a better communicator but I think the greatest point that he made was:

"Tell a good story"

All of science can be broken down into stories. It is the stories that people remember and it is these that people should be telling. Mix your facts and your numbers into a cohesive story, leaving out all of the ancillary stuff, to make one cohesive story. I told someone just last semester when preparing for his thesis defense: "Get rid of anything that doesn't fit into one story. The other stuff only detracts from it. You don't need to tell the audience everything you ever did for this project. Just the main points."

One of the points that was made in Don't be Such a Scientist was to loose the jargon. Not everyone understands what you are saying and often it just makes you appear pompous. I wish I had saved an email I received long ago when I was a member of the Vert Paleo Mailing List. Some scientist sent out a message that was so over the top with "fancy words" that people spent the next few days posting what they think he was trying to say. That may be an isolated case but it illustrates that scientists have a habit of speaking above people. I am reminded of a quote I heard in Real Genius (love that movie):

"You will rue the day!"

"Rue the day? Who talks like that?"

Randy also mentioned another project he had worked on in the book called "Talking Science: The elusive art of the science talk" (posted below).

 I recommend watching this. It is only 18 minutes and may give you some tips that you didn't realize (I figured out my pacing while I give talks may be a distraction). But I do have some criticisms of the video. My main criticism was that one person said "You can't over practice a presentation". I strongly disagree with this. If you practice too much you are bound to sound robotic as you are presenting. You need to practice enough in order for it to feel natural but also you want to remember the next thing you are going to say. Once you have that down, I recommend stopping and let it feel natural as you give the talk.

Even though I did love the book, one of my main problems with Don't be Such a Scientist was that it often felt like an advertisement for one of his movies Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The only problem with that is it ISN'T AVAILABLE TO RENT, BUY, or even SEE ANYWHERE (except a couple of campus viewings and by a couple I mean 2). Quite obnoxious.

Being Unlikeable:
My other Christmas gift was one of Randy's other documentaries (which is actually available), Flock of Dodos. This is about the evolution vs. creationism debates of the recent decade.

A fun watch and most informative about just being able to convey your scientific message. What is the best way to get your point across? Maybe being likeable is better than being knowledgeable.

Another way to be liked falls under my Don'ts at a Scientific Meeting. I went to the GSA (Geological Society of America) annual meeting last year (November, 2012) and I took some pictures to emphasize my point while I was presenting my poster.

#1. Know how to freaking use the damn sticky Velcro tabs. If everyone in the place (>500 posters) does it one way, they most likely know what they are doing. The Velcro tabs are meant to stick to the back of your poster and then the Velcro portion sticks to the board. They are not fancy pieces of tape as illustrated by this person:

Velcro sticky tabs used as basic tape

Close up of said sticky tabs

Really, if you don't take the time to learn how to use the Velcro tabs, why would I want to know about your scientific research?

#2. Your poster is not a "hang out" place for your friends. Nobody wants to look at your poster if there are a group of people sitting in front of it. This was literally what I witnessed as a group of at least 6 people gathered around the poster with no interest in the poster, they were only there because the presenter was their professor (or something like that). And they sat there for over an hour. Move on people.

Blocking the whole poster? Why would you say that?

That is all I have this time. I hope I have dispelled some knowledge and maybe made at least one person consider their communication skills and say "Hey, I can do this better".

Misleading Science

This isn't a post about a specific topic but more of something I have been thinking about for a while. I recently came across this one graph (directly below) and no matter what the article said (because what I initially thought is NOT what the article said) I had one opinion on the subject:

The graph above (Veron, 2008) illustrates the growth of large reefs and their relationships to extinction events. If you add on the current extinction event to the far right side of the graph, I think it will be plainly obvious that reefs are the cause of mass extinction. What? No? How could that be??? Well, it's not. And that is not what the paper was trying to say, but that is how it looks upon first viewing of the graph (at least, to me). The point of the paper was to show that reefs are good places to study mass extinctions because they build up then dissapear across an extinction event. But, again, that is not how it looks to me as I scan across the article.

And this is the problem with science. Both as people doing the science and those reading the science. Sometimes, your first impression is wrong. Step back. Reanalyse what you are seeing, and try to think what else it could be. Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. Sometimes it isn't.

Another case is that of people misreading data. This is from the perspective of someone reading the paper but I think the writers missed something. The below graph (Hoffmeister and Kowalewski, 2001) is my case in point:


The authors stated this about the graph (as well as some other associated graphs):

"Spearman rank correlation shows a significant positive correlation in ..." (emphasis added by me)

Now , I don't know about you but I don't see significant, I don't even really see positive, I see a whole lot of random dots with a line that shouldn't have been place through the data. This is my point. Sometimes there is no correlation. Step back. Look at the data with new eyes, what you see is not always what is there. Take your time.

Science is a slow process. It takes a lot of man hours to do even simple experiments. Don't mess it up by throwing bad or missinterpreted data out there, because that is all people are going to see. They aren't going to notice your 100's of hours in the lab or the countless field hours. They are going to see one bad dataset and assume the rest of the information is junk as well. Don't let that happen to you.

----------------------------------------------------

Hoffmeister, A.P., & Kowalewski, M., 2001, Spatial and Environmental Variation in the Fossil Record of Drilling Predation: A Case Study from the Miocene of Central Europe: Palaios, v. 16, p. 566-579.

Veron, J., 2008, Mass extinctions and ocean acidification: biological constraints on geological dilemmas: Coral Reefs, v. 27, p. 459-472.

A Scientist Can't be an Atheist

After some recent conversations I have had with some fellow scientists I have come to the conclusion that a good scientist cannot be an atheist. Now before you go jumping down my throat about how this can't possibly be correct or start cheering me on as a religious fanatic, hear me out. 

The way I view science and the way that it was taught to me was that you can't prove anything. Even if something has happened 100% of times in the past does not mean it will happen again in the future. If I hold up an apple and then drop it, I am fairly certain it will fall to the ground. But science dictates that there is a small amount of uncertainty that it might not actually do that. In science, you can't prove, you can only disprove.

So how could a good scientist be a "true" atheist? By being a "true" atheist I mean a person who is 100% convinced there is no God or anything of the sort. That, in my opinion, goes against what science is really about, which is questioning things. To be 100% convinced of something insinuates more like faith than science. Science is about being a skeptic, to be unsure of things. Now this analogy also applies to religious fanatics, like those who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old. They ignore tons of scientific data to the contrary just to fill their belief system.

As a qualifier to my post, here are the definitions I am using. Definitions differ, so yours may be different than mine:

atheism:  Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god 

agnostic: One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.

 Source - Oxford English Dictionary

Scientists should fit somewhere in the middle based on their way of thinking. I think that the majority of scientists if they are religious, view religion as a moral compass and not as a "this is the way things are" sort of thing and if they aren't religious then they are most likely agnostic. Although, agnostic usually gets lumped into the Atheist category on most questionnaires. Agnostic is not the same thing as atheist, contrary to what public media tends to make it out as.

I feel agnostic is the perfect "belief system" for scientists because it is basically what we study. It is uncertainty. You can't know one way or the other what is right. And that is how I feel a scientist should feel. Now I don't intend to inflame criticism with this post as to more incite conversation. This has also extended from a previous conversation with someone about whether it was even right to use the word believe as a scientist.