Teaching, Training, and Advising for the Harvard Mathematics Department. Oh, and some computer stuff.
I have left Harvard as of July 1, 2008 to take a position at
NYU.
This website has been cached and left static. Feel free to browse
my new website,
aka "What the heck is a Clinical Associate Professor?"
If you had to guess when the Rangers scored their runs over 9 innings (the game was in Baltimore, so Texas batted in the top of the 9th), how would you distribute the runs? If I had to do it, my linescore would probably look about like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
4 3 1 0 5 6 3 5 3
But here is the actual linescore:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 0 0 5 0 9 0 10 6
The Rangers scored 30 runs in just 4 innings! It’s a good reminder, once again, that the way data plays out in real life is often nowhere near as orderly, predictable, or consistent as you might imagine it to be.
“In four slides or less,” the online instructions say, “please provide readers with content that captures who you are.”
Is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Neither, I guess. PowerPoint is a tool, and it can be used for evil as well as good. I hope these applicants read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte. He’s a master of visual expression and has many good points of advice and examples of bad slideshow usage.
The article goes on to say that things may not be as bad as they seem. Applicants are still retaining creativity by submitting poetry, photos, even a play. And the admissions committee says it’s more fun than reading essays.
Bad slideshows aren’t limited to business or government, though. I’ve been to many talks where sitting in the back of the room I couldn’t see the slides because the speaker had crammed so much text onto the page. When that happens, the slideshow becomes distracting.
Instead, I try to put no more than three bullet points on a page. Bullet points shouldn’t be too long; they should only give the next few topics I’m going to talk about. The actual text I want to say goes in a separate document–my notes–which I keep with me (PowerPoint does this for you in the notes pane). If I need to show my audience something more complicated, I put it in a third document–a handout–which I copy and hand out.
I use the excellent beamer class for LaTeX to produce slideshows for my classes. My students love them–it’s a nice resource to have to supplement class notes. I can’t use PowerPoint because of all the equations and mathematical notation I need to put into my slides (don’t you dare say “Equation Editor”), but with beamer I get a nice PDF that I can page through. Hyperlinks in the PDF allow me to jump back and forth, and I can even embed media (not that I have a lot of other media).