Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

A new semester...

Long time, no writing -- it's the start of a new semester (my last semester!) and I've been busy with a number of different things:

• The VC Women's Fencing team. We're in full competition mode. We conquered in Cleveland recently, vanquished difficult foes at Brown University, and are gearing up for a big match at Wellesley next Sunday, which will decide whether we claim the Northeast Conference Championship this year!

• My undergraduate cognitive science thesis. I'm looking at the emergent behavior of a group of simulated prey robots that can communicate with each other about the presence of a predator. I have questions about communication, environment, and motivation. Being a year-long project, I'm supposedly halfway through, though in reality, it's not so clear-cut. I spent all summer reading papers and doing background research, filled last semester with hypotheses, possible architectures, and more background research, wrote up a first draft this winter break, and am now hard at work on the simulation itself.

• Taking photos of the weather. An unusually large amount of snow has fallen at Vassar -- what better to do than document it with a camera? (Click for larger versions.)

Sunset Lake II

Snow Forest

Winter picnic in Cleveland

• Figuring out my post-graduation life. On the advice of many folks, I'm not heading immediately to grad school. My enthusiasm for learning, research, and knowledge hasn't vanished -- quite the contrary. I'm going to spend at least a year exploring the places outside the classroom, longer depending on where I end up. Academia-land? The wide world beyond? Still up in the air.

A soundtrack for writing papers

Through force of habit, a particular set of Goo Goo Dolls albums has become my paper-writing music. It was by chance at first: tunes I was familiar with and could mostly ignore while working on a final draft freshman year. I happened to listen to those couple albums on repeat for a good six or seven hours. I was fairly productive.

Later that year, utterly unfocused and unproductively poking at another paper, feeling entirely unmotivated to synthesize information and string useful arguments out of the sets of research articles I had collected, I remembered that music. I decided to give it a try -- perhaps, I thought, if I gave myself the right soundtrack, I'd get something done. (I was running out of other homework to do, anyway.) And hey. It worked.

I continue to pick the same albums when it comes time to resolutely sit down and pound out pages of words. I have to wonder how much is a placebo effect: I think the songs will help focus my attention on writing a good paper, so I listen to the songs and focus better. (Perhaps I shouldn't think about that too much just in case the effect disappears when I do.) Do recall what I've said previously about the importance of expectations! Perhaps I could, if I tried, decide that "okay, now it's work-on-paper time" and then crack down and work. But the motivational kick from the music -- "this is working music, so if I'm listening to it, I should be working" -- keeps me going.

Given that I'm certainly motivated to keep my productivity-enhancing paper-writing albums solidly in the category of music that'll make my homework happen, perhaps I don't need to worry about the effect slipping. Part of my productivity may be a result of not wanting to prove that it's mostly a placebo!

And a question for you

Do you have similar soundtracks? Particular songs you use for warm-ups before a sports game, albums for homework, tracks you save for the last sprint at the gym? I'm curious, so do share.

During one of the brief moments I was in my room yesterday afternoon, I was struck by the view out my window.

A bare-limbed tree, autumn decor already a crunching carpet on the lawn, stood silhouetted before its bright red-orange neighbor. I've been watching these trees change all semester. Add in a backdrop of dramatic slate storm clouds, and how could I resist?

Here's the relatively quick sketch I did to capture the scene (black pen, colored pencil- click for larger version):

View from my room III

Which is your favorite season?

Usually, I can't decide. But when my Hudson valley campus is decked out in full-blown autumn colors, my vote swings in favor of chill fall air, feet crunching through drifts of leaves, and myriad shades of red, brown, orange, and yellow.

Yes, I do, on occasion, meander across campus with my camera. Click for the larger versions!

Sunset Lake

View from the room

Branch of doom

Red glow tree

Panels & presentations

One more about the Grace Hopper conference! This one's a critical look at presentations, since I attended a bunch of panels and some speakers were better than others.

The right way

One of the keynote speakers, Duy-Loan T. Le, was a brilliant orator. She held the audience captive. She had no powerpoint, no slides, nothing but a microphone. Her speech reminded me that far too often, presentations of one's work or ideas are focused on the text and images lit up on the screen. The right way to do it: focus on you, explaining and selling your work. A display is great for diagrams and supporting pictures. It's a bonus for clarifying points. But that's all it should be: support. Not the focus.

The wrong way: what not to do & how to fix it

The general approach to presentations these days assumes that the focus is on the slides, not the person talking. Personally, I watch the speaker. I'll glance over at the screen now and then. If I can't understand the talk because I'm not reading along on the slides, there's a serious problem.

1. Never, ever read sentences directly off the slides. If you do, it means you have too much text on your slides. You can read directly from your notes. Your notes should not be posted on your slides.

2. Talk slower than you think you should. Everyone in the audience appreciates an intelligible speaker.

3. Make clean slides, both in terms of amount of content on any one slide and the content's format. This topic could fill a book; I've touched on it before. Use a font large enough for people to read from the back row. Use easy-to-read colors. Don't cram text and graphics into every empty space. If you're just going to gloss over a topic, you don't need paragraphs about it on your slides - particularly when you flip through your slides more quickly than people can read your paragraphs. What's the point of having so many words if no one is going to read them?

4. Don't have paragraphs on your slides, period. If I want the novel, I'll email you for it, thanks. A presentation involves you and it involves you, presenting. I once sat through a presentation in which the speaker used a gimmick of little cartoon fishies with whom she "conversed" and who "helped explain" her topic. The fishies even made noise - yup, she found a garbled, irritating bubbling audio track. Multiple times, she told the audience, "I'll let my fish friends explain," and proceeded to stand quietly on the side of the stage as the audio track played. We, as the audience, were expected to sit there reading the slides.

5. Proof-read your slides. At GHC, I saw the phrase "If you don't, know one else will."

6. Unless you specifically know your audience will be full of programmers, don't put huge chunks of Java pseudocode in your slides. Even if you're giving a talk for an audience that is mostly technical women, your presentation needs to understandable by the non-programmers, at least on a general level. Similarly, if you're going to include technical details, don't gloss over them using unexplained technical terminology to "give the flavor," because all the audience learns is that they don't know the jargon.

7. Insist on a mobile microphone and/or a laser pointer. Sometimes you don't have a choice, such as at GHC this year. Tied to a specific location on the stage, you're unable to gesture at your slides or point to them except in a vague, flailing manner, and unable to be heard unless you're rigidly standing in one spot. A laser pointer and and a mobile mic add flexibility and allow you to more easily incorporate your slides into your talk.