Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Snapshot: Classroom

Tap tap tap. That's your pencil hitting the edge of your desk, one rhythmic note at a time. The wood of the pencil has a little indent now from all the tapping (unless you use a mechanical pencil), but at least you're still awake. The kid next to you has been slumped over his notebook for the past half hour. You're pretty sure he's snoring. He has every reason to be, though; the professor has a fantastically monotone voice. Bullet point after bullet point, slide after slide. It's not like you have to pay attention, either--everything the professor is saying is in the lecture notes handed out at the start of class. But you feel obligated to try to stay awake.

Death by Power Point

Is this at all familiar? Most of us, at some point or another, have experienced the ultimate Boring Lecture: A droning, not-quite-loud-enough voice, reading sentences one by one off a set of elaborate PowerPoint slides. The slides look pretty, sure, but fancy formatting can't overcome the serious lack of anything remotely engaging.

Fortunately, most lecturers aren't that bad. But as my friend Carolyn points out, a lot of professors still rely too heavily on PowerPoint. The primary instruction, she says, needs to come from the professors, not from the text slopped across their slides.

And it's true. A lecture is a performance, and Hubert Knoblauch's (2008) analysis of PowerPoint presentations suggests that the use of PowerPoint serves to amplify the performance aspect. Slides should complement rather than replace the presenter's speech. They should be used to emphasize points and help explain difficult concepts with diagrams and photos; after all, a separate sheet of lecture notes with all the text of the bullet points can be handed out later. This may sound obvious, but in practice, most of us conform to convention of cluttering up our slides with too many words and too much visual noise.

Keep it simple, stupid

How do we fix this problem and avoid death by PowerPoint? Garr Reynolds recommends a highly minimalist approach (he's got a handout[pdf] summarizing his suggestions). Instead of lists and summaries, put just a few key words boldly in the middle of the slide. Use large images and diagrams. Turn off the projector entirely when you happen to digress from the slides. Remove excess logos and irrelevant graphics--they're just visual noise that detract from your message.

It may take some effort to get the hang of the minimalist presentation (I certainly haven't gotten it down, though I try), and it will certainly take some guts to be the nonconformist who doesn't use bullet points. One of my professors at the University of Sydney told a story about a student who went minimalist and was marked down as a result: It wasn't a proper presentation! (The audience, however, said it was one of the best presentations they had seen in a long time.)

A place for everything

That said, bullet points occasionally have their place: e.g., when the goal is to memorize facts (Kinchin & Cabot, 2007). But if the aim is to make links between concepts and gain a deeper understanding of the subject, other methods of presenting information may fare better. I'll open up the floor. What tips and tricks do you keep up your sleeve for making a PowerPoint engaging? Do you adhere to minimalism? Obviously, it's not all about the slides--it's also about delivery. Feel free to share thoughts on that, too.

References:

Knoblauch, H. (2008). The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations. Cultural Sociology, 2(75):75-97. [PDF]

Kinchin, I., & Cabot, L. (2007). Using concept mapping principles in PowerPoint. Eur J Dent Educ, 11: 194-199. [PDF].

We're in the dark

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background (radiation leftover from the universe's early hot and dense state) support the hypothesis that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence.

But what's the matter?

Isn't it fascinating and mind-boggling that we have almost no idea what the majority of the stuff in our universe is? There are dark matter and dark energy are not rather than explain what these mysterious stuffs are. E.g., dark matter is not just dark clouds of normal matter (called baryonic matter); it is not antimatter; it is not huge black holes. But it is 25% of the universe.

Current research on dark energy hasn't faired better: Is it a property of space, as suggested by Einstein's cosmological constant? Perhaps it's a result of the quantum mechanics of space; maybe it's a new kind of energy field. It's also possible that Einstein was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time a seemingly brilliant solution, explaining everything known at the time, was later replaced. Think "ether." Think "animal spirits." Think "caloric fluid." That said, there's nothing better to replace it yet. At least this time we're acknowledging the fact that the names "dark energy" and "dark matter" refer to stuff we don't yet understand.

The quest goes on

The Joint Dark Energy Mission, a space probe designed to study dark energy, has been in the works for a while now. The mission is currently in a tight spot as NASA, the Department of Energy, and the European Space Agency tussle over who's in charge of which parts of the probe and who's paying for what. Don't you love international politics? A lot of people, such as the folks at the Cosmic Variance blog are up in arms about the disagreements--can't we all just get along and do science?

"I got these pictures off the Internet."

This is not a sentence that should ever be uttered when one is giving a presentation, yet last week, a fellow student said those exact words.

"The Internet" is not a reference.

Chapters of books, articles in journals, and individual web pages can be references. The Internet, instead, is like a library: A place to find references. You don't cite your library in presentations.

Perhaps some of the confusion arises because all the content on the Internet is accessed through the same program (your web browser of choice). Because it is all seen in the same window on your monitor screen, it must all originate in the same place, right? Intelligent people know better, yet it is still easy to fall into the trap of assuming that images in particular and digital media in general belong not to one author, but to the vast, amorphous sea of information floating around cyberspace. If it shows up in a Google search, it's free for the taking, right?

I'm not going to lecture you on copyright laws or on how to properly cite images. But for the curious, here is a long and detailed explanation of copyright and digital images. If that's too long, pop a couple words such as "digital images" and "copyright" into Google and I'm sure you'll find a summary. I'll also recommend Chris Chesher's article on blogs and the crisis of authorship, a related but not identical topic.

References:

The Internet. Accessed November 3, 2009.

"What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea." -- Sol LeWitt

I took a sculpture class this semester on a whim. I enjoy art, but I've never done much sculpture, and I haven't taken an art class in years--so why not?

The first project I did was an exploration of mass. I sculpted a head from clay (the professor modeled, because he couldn't get an actual model), made a plaster waste-mold from it, then did a plaster casting. Everyone else in the class did essentially the same thing--sure, there were variations in the way the heads were sculpted, but we all made heads.

The second project, however, was open-ended. We were given an introduction to a selection of sheet metals, wire, and tools; we were told to think about space rather than mass, and that we should include repetition and variation in the work. And that was it.

Do you want to know what I created? Take a look! I titled it "Selves." I think it turned out pretty darn cool. (But I wouldn't have created it if I thought otherwise.)

I am not special.

I am human, and there is nothing that makes me special. I am composed of the same atoms as every other thing in existence in this universe. I am no more special than the Jacaranda trees blooming outside my window, than the magpies cawing from their perches on the roof, than the strangers whose eyes catch mine on the street.

And yet I am unique: There is exactly one organization of atoms that is me. There is exactly one set of events that could have given rise to the person I am, because if any other events had occurred, I would not be exactly the same as I am right now. It's almost so obvious it isn't worth stating. Almost.

Copernicus and Galileo weren't special, either

Humans have always held a biased view of their existence. We placed ourselves in a geocentric, Ptolemaic universe, with the stars and planets revolving around us. We were reluctant to abandon our pedestal: When Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the universe, supporters of the theory were condemned for heresy. Galileo was lucky: He was just placed under permanent house arrest. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Fast-forward through a few hundred years of debate and you reach today, when it is accepted that our planet does not sit in a privileged location in the universe, but most people are still uncomfortable with the idea that we might just be here by chance.

In a universe of 70 sextillion stars (and that's just the observable universe, according to a 2003 estimate), it is nearly inevitable that at least one planet would form in the habitable range around a star, and that the right combination of elements would be present for some form of life to develop and evolve enough for beings conscious of their own existence to arise (Argyle, 1977; Ellis & Brundit, 1979; Hoyle & Wickramasinghe, 1999). Our Earth happens to be one such planet.

It's all physical

I'm going to propose something radical: The universe is a purely physical place. If this is true, it follows that everything in it is also physical, including the mind and mental states. This tends to be a huge point of contention, as the majority of the people in the world adhere to a dualist theory of mind, in which the body is physical but the mind is made of a corporeal substance, unexplainable in physical terms and irreducible to physical states of the brain. (More specifically, most world religions adhere to some form of dualism, e.g., the belief that one has a soul, and the majority of the people in the world adhere to one of these religions.)

There are a number of problems with this approach, most notably the fact that the dualist perspective cannot satisfactorily answer the question of how the mind and body can interact if they have no causal properties in common. Descartes proposed a substance he called animal spirits as a go-between, which merely begged the question (Churchland, 1988); 17th century philosopher Arnold Geulincx suggested the interaction was merely an illusion and that the brain and mind don't actually affect each other at all (Livingston, 2002). The seemingly plausible suggestion that the mind and brain are connected through a form of energy not yet understood is a logical argument from ignorance. Dualists argue that the mental domain is not lawful, that concepts such as truth, love, and beauty are forever beyond reduction--and yet biologists have found ways to reduce life, which was also once said to be irreducible and magical (Churchland, 1988). Why can't the mind be a similar case?

Another problem to solve was that of consciousness: If the mind is not made of a special substance, then how does matter organized into a brain give rise to consciousness when matter organized in other ways does not? Various theories suggest that it is exactly this--the particular organization of the brain and the sheer number of connections between neurons--that is responsible for consciousness (see, e.g., Edelman & Tononi, 2000; Hofstadter, 2007). The details of these theories I'll leave for a later date.

Science says

If you are inclined to believe scientific evidence, the theories that win out reduce the mind to matter. I could easily spend a few thousand more words explaining why this is the case, but I'll move on for the sake of finishing my explanation of the site name.

In a physical world, people (along with all other living things on Earth) originate from DNA in a purely physical process. You may have heard of the "nature versus nurture" debate: Are we just our genes? Is everything we are predetermined by our DNA, or does the environment in which we grow up and live play some role? I've never understood why it's a debate. Studies of twins have shown that possessing identical DNA will not give rise to identical people (Harris, 2007), which disproves the "we are just our genes" hypothesis. DNA obviously has some affect, and Harris cites evidence that genes account for about 45% of personality, but what makes people and creatures (otherwise known as agents) who or what they are is the interaction of their genes and their environment. Every agent is the sum of everything internal to it and its interactions with everything external to it. Humans are no exception. I am no exception.

Thus the title.

References:

Argyle, E. (1977). Change and the Origin of Life. Origin of Life, 8: 287-298.

Churchland, Paul. (1988). Matter & Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Edelman, G., & Tononi, G. (2000). Consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. Penguin Books, London, England.

Ellis, F., & Brundrit, G. (1979). Life in the Infinite Universe. Royal Astronomical Society, 20: 37-41.

Harris, J. (2007). No Two Alike. W.W. Norton & Co.

Hofstadter, D. (2007). I Am a Strange Loop. Basic Books.

Hoyle, F., & Wickramasinghe, N. (1999). The Universe and Life: Deductions from the Weak Anthropic Principle. Astrophysics and Space Science, 268: 89–102

Livingston, K. Integrating the Sciences of Mind. Chapter 2.