Did you know that Corgies are from Wales, and that the Welsh apparently say that in the old days, fairies used them to ride on? And that the white spot on the back of many Corgies is hence called a “fairy saddle”?
You didn’t? Well now you know, and so do I – thanks to today’s presentation training. We’ve covered Corgies, How Shazam works (super interesting!), Sleep (and the lack thereof), Random Graphs, and How to master a new skill.

What have we learned from that?

– If you can choose a topic, pick something everybody can relate to.
Everybody likes Corgies! And everybody suffers from a lack of sleep. Also, if you can find something remotely scientific (if presenting for a lay audience) – people will love that. Science papers just look impressive. Careful with scientists though: I personally felt the urge to just look for a paper that claims the opposite of the one presented. And knew there would be one.

– Make it personal.
Somebody told his personal story today, the story of how he wanted to learn touch typing. He also told how he failed, and what made him finally succeed. A good personal drama just works.

– Be concise.
Goethe (the german Shakespeare) once wrote in a letter: “Please forgive me for sending such a long letter, I simply hat no time to write a short one.” Running overtime is annoying because it means your talk was not well planned, and you don’t value your audience’s time.

– Talk to your audience.
Don’t use the “whiteboard of death” (teacher’s words) because it’s difficult to talk and write at the same time, and you will inevitable talk to the whiteboard. Personally I don’t mind whiteboards. You just shut up while you’re writing, then turn around and get the attention back on you. No big problem at all.
Also remove obstacles between you and the audience. A stand doesn’t help you.

– Apart from that…the usual: Visually appealing, non-cluttered slides. Know how to pronounce specific terms (Poisson ≠ Poison!), don’t mumble or stutter if you’re thinking – just make a strategic pause. Be funny.

– Also (my opinion), a bit of jargon (a.k.a. buzzwords) does some good. If you only have ten minutes, you don’t want to eight of them to explain what you’re talking about. Just use the damn buzzword, even if it’s not 100% right. Chances are that your audience will not know the difference anyway – but they immediately understand your talk.

Btw: Shazam recognises songs by fourier-transforming the song (using time slots) – i.e. you end up with a function of frequency at a given time slot. This info is then converted into a (not so) gigantic hash table that can be easily compared to the existing database.