Speaking: Explaining Technical Information to a Mixed Audience
Posted: May 3, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: puppies, speaking | 11 Comments »It’s a challenge to present deeply technical material to a room of people with varying expertise levels. If you leave it out, you’re abandoning the substance of your presentation. If you focus on it exclusively, you will lose most of the room.
Instead, include the material, but plan to repeat it two (or even three!) times.
The first time you explain it, explain it for the expert audience.
The second time you explain it, walk through an example of what the system enables.
If you’re audience is on Twitter, throw in a third version — the concise and tweetable one!
Let’s say we were giving a talk about a machine learning system to classify puppies.
Slide one would have a technical diagram of the architecture of the system, and you might explain it as: “We use a naive bayesian classifier over two hundred features to discriminate between puppies and non-puppies in our data set. As you see, our system is 85% accurate and each analysis takes 300 milliseconds. We implemented the classifier in Python, using the scikits-learn toolkit…” Don’t skimp on the details, but don’t use more than one slide for this part if possible and the explanation shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Slide two would have images of puppies and non-puppies, and might be explained, “This means that we have an algorithm that can distinguish between the puppies you see on top and the other objects quite accurately and quickly using features like ear floppiness and nose size.”
Slide three would be the cutest puppy you can find, and you might say, “Yes, we’ve created the worlds fastest cuteness identifying machine!” Only include the third version if the audience is online anyway. They’re probably only paying half-attention to you as you speak and this gives them something concise to share and take away from your talk.
The technique of repeating the information at varying levels of intensity has the side effect of walking people through to understanding. They may still be puzzling through the technical material when you explain it non-technically, and this seems to help the meaning snap into focus.
Break up your technical material with layered explanations and you’ll keep the audience entertained while maximizing the amount of information that each person takes away. Win.
Et tu, Google?
Posted: April 14, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: google, search | 6 Comments »In 2008, cuil, a search engine startup, displayed my bio alongside a photo of deceased actress Hilary Mason. In January 2013, Bing confused us, this time putting my photo next to her bio (they fixed it after a suitable amount of mocking on Twitter).
Today, Google did the same thing. (live search link)
Today I win the internet?
If you zoom in on the bio section, you can clearly see that it’s her bio with a photo of me (originally from Crain’s New York 40 under Forty). Further, if you go into her filmography, you continue to see my photo.
I’m most proud of my starring role in the amazing film Robot Jox. (bottom right of the image below)
I know that entity disambiguation is a hard problem. I’ve worked on it, though never with the kind of resources that I imagine Google can bring to it. And yet, this is absurd!
Speaking: 1 Kitten per Equation
Posted: April 5, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | 2 Comments »
Use a ratio of one cute cat photo per equation in your talk.
This is a concise way of saying that a ratio of one part heavy, technical content to one part light-hearted explanation is ideal.
You may have to play with the ratio depending on the audience or the expectations, but people react best when they have the chance to learn something fundamentally hard and interesting while, at the same time, getting to smile.
And yes, DO use photos of cute things in your talks! The hack here is that people naturally smile when they look at adorableness. If they are smiling in your talk they credit you for the positive feelings. It’s an easy way to boost people’s perceived enjoyment of your talk and to get your audience into the kind of mood where it’s easier to walk them through more complex, technical material.
Data Engineering
Posted: April 1, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: bitly, data, engineering, infrastructure | 3 Comments »Data engineering is when the architecture of your system is dependent on characteristics of the data flowing through that system.
It requires a different kind of engineering process than typical systems engineering, because you have to do some work upfront to understand the nature of the data before you can effectively begin to design the infrastructure. Most data engineering systems also transform the data as they process it.
Developing these types of systems requires an initial research phase, where you do the necessary work to understand the characteristics of the data, before you design the system (and perhaps even requiring an active experimental process where you try multiple infrastructure options in the wild before making a final decision). I’ve seen numerous people run straight into walls when they ignore this research requirement.
Forget Table is one example of a data engineering project from our work at bitly. It’s a database for storing non-stationary categorical distributions. We often see streams of data and want to understand what the distributions in that data look like, knowing that they drift over time. Forget Table is designed precisely for this use, allowing you to configure the rate of change in your particular dataset (check it out on github).
Speaking: Use the Narrative Arc
Posted: March 29, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | 2 Comments »If you took a college freshman literature class, you probably remember a diagram like this:
…with the x-axis reprenting time, and the y-axis (which, for some infuriating reason, is never labeled) representing intensity.
Last week’s speaking hack was to limit yourself to 15 minutes (or less!) per idea. The hack this week is to use this gradient of intensity within each segment you present.
If you wrote it out as a linear outline, each idea in your talk might have:
- an introduction to the idea
- a high-level overview of the idea
- the technical details
- an example that brings the technical details together (this is the most exciting part!)
- a conclusion that wraps up why this is exciting, how it works, and what people learned
You can also use the narrative arc to structure the intensity of the talk as a whole. By ordering the ideas you explore by intensity and having a strong introduction and strong conclusion, you can keep people engaged throughout the entire presentation.
This article is part of my series of speaking hacks for introverts and nerds. Read about the motivation here.
Why Google Now is Awesome
Posted: March 23, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: google | 9 Comments »
Google Now is an extension to Google’s Android search app that uses all of the data that Google has about you along with what it can guess about your current context to present the information it thinks you need when it thinks you need it.
It’ll tell you to leave a bit early to make your next calendar event because of heavy traffic, or that it’s a friend’s birthday, or that there’s a cool cafe nearby where you are.
I think it’s amazing.
It’s amazing because this is the first Google product that takes ALL OF THE DATA that they have about us and actually makes it useful for us. Not for advertisers.
Finally.
Speaking: 15 Minutes Or Less Per Idea
Posted: March 23, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | 3 Comments »Let’s just admit it: very few people can pay attention to anything for more than fifteen minutes straight. Take advantage of this by never spending more than fifteen minutes on one idea during a talk.
That means that if your talk is 45 minutes long, you should break it down into at least three, perhaps four different ideas that you want to explore. I find it helpful to outline my talks this way on paper before I start putting slides together.
The ideas that you choose to explore within a talk should flow naturally together; there shouldn’t be a jarring transition. And if you find yourself belaboring the same point for more than fifteen minutes, try to break it down further.
This article is part of my series of speaking hacks for introverts and nerds. Read about the motivation here.
Speaking: Entertain, Don’t Teach
Posted: March 17, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: teaching | 6 Comments »It’s tempting to think of a talk as the opportunity to take a body of knowledge and to educate your audience about that body of knowledge. You have something in your head and you want to get it into theirs.
Making education your top priority leads to terrible talks, with an unhappy audience that won’t retain any of the information you wanted them to remember, anyway. Instead, think about how you can create a compelling narrative through your material, layering in the deep technical content so that the most attentive listeners will take away a deep understanding while the people who are only half paying attention will, at the very least, enjoy the experience.
I can’t think of any talk that demonstrates this better than Gary Bernhardt’s WAT:
Remember: you’re entertaining, not educating.
This article is part of my series of speaking hacks for introverts and nerds. Read about the motivation here.
Speaking: Title Slides + Twitter = You Win
Posted: March 8, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: slides, speaking, title, twitter | 1 Comment »Your title slide should focus on the title of the talk. It should also include your name and affiliation, your logo if you have a cute one, possibly your blog or e-mail address if you want people to get in touch, and your twitter handle.
Here’s one of mine:
I usually mention that the beginning of the talk that if people have questions they can tweet them at me. This isn’t just because Twitter is a great way to get questions from people too shy to speak up (or who don’t get an opportunity). Here’s the hack: letting people know that you’ll be reading everything they say about your talk on Twitter makes them more likely to say nice things.
Further, in a multi-track conference, people who weren’t actually in your talk (or were there but not paying a lot of attention) will judge your talk based on what people on Twitter say about it. Get a few good tweets, and you’ve created the wide perception that you’ve given a good talk.
Of course, it helps to actually give a good talk. More on that soon.
This article is part of my series of speaking hacks for introverts and nerds. Read about the motivation here.
Speaking: Pick a Vague and Specific Title for Your Talk
Posted: March 1, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: presentations, speaking, title | Leave a comment »Your title should be both vague and specific.
First, vague. You generally have to commit to give a talk months in advance of the actual event. You do not, however, generally have a talk written several months ahead of the actual event. You may also have a particular talk accepted, and then arrive at the conference and realize that what you had planned isn’t ideal for that audience. A vague title offers you a lot of flexibility in altering the content of your talk as conditions change without betraying the expectations of the audience based on the materials published earlier.
And then, specific. If your title is too vague (“Stuff and Junk”) people won’t be excited for your talk, and you’ll lack an audience entirely or won’t make it through the CFP process at all. Be specific about the frame of the talk, but leave the details vague.
For example, I recently gave a talk called “Human Behavior and the Social Web”. The title gives you a good idea what the talk will be about, but doesn’t commit me to sticking to any particular set of stories or material.
A particularly excellent example of this is Paul Graham’s PyCon 2012 keynote titled “Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas” (which was also a really fun talk). That title gives you a specific frame to get very excited about, while leaving him with complete flexibility to alter the content up until the moment he got on stage.
This article is part of my series of speaking hacks for introverts and nerds. Read about the motivation here.
