Go here to see a slideshow on “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.” Then try to incorporate some of those tips the next time you give a presentation, especially if its a powerpoint.
(H/T Harman.)
Very few things in life are as satisfying as a highly appropriate and effectively deployed metaphor. Last month, with the start of the school year, our Materials Science program had its kickoff lunch to welcome the new students. The centerpiece of this gathering is the Sales Pitch Contest, in which current students have three minutes to inform the judges (the new students) of their research and how awesome it is.
My friend Joy Garnett, starting her second year, works on linking together nanoparticles. The motivation for this research is to have the nanoparticles serve as a conduit for light. Without getting into hardcore condensed matter physics… the discussion of periodic structures—structures with a building block that is repeated with equal spacing, such as crystal lattices or photonic crystals—is nearly ubiquitous in materials science. Unsurprisingly, Joy’s goal is to make her nanoparticles equally spaced apart and control the spacing between them.
In the three minutes allocated for her Sales Pitch, Joy did not explain the intricacies of why light behaves specially in periodic structures. (Wise move, as new students haven’t taken condensed matter class yet.) Instead, she told us about the classic video game, Super Mario Brothers. Read more…
Not an article, but an essay: Hearts and minds and nanotechnology. Nature Nanotechnology 4, 136 (2009).
The timing of this piece’s publication, a week after I started my blog, could not have been more appropriate. In my first post I wrote, “writing… about nanotechnology will be of even greater importance as the science makes its way into everyday-use devices. Think about politicians: they practically live for uninformed demagoguery in exchange for votes.”
Now, this essay by Chris Toumey asserts that people’s opinions favoring/opposing nanotechnology are shaped heavily by their existing prejudices about science/technology and by their religious intensity. While earlier surveys suggested that the more people knew about nanotech the more likely they were to support it, the amount of knowledge people have or acquire is unlikely to overcome existing biases.
For those who expect that people will embrace nanotechnology when they learn about the science, the… message… is that scientific knowledge in our minds is a weak companion to the strong values and concerns in our hearts.
If nanotechnology is to work its way into our lives and effect positive changes, we cannot afford to get bogged down in debates like those assigning scientific merit to both intelligent design and evolution, as if they were opposite sides of the same coin. So what should you, the nanotech innovator who wants to change the world with your science, do in the face of these opinion hurdles? I have three ideas.
1. Frame discussions to highlight the real-world benefits and de-emphasize the technical detail. Read more…
