True Conference Stories

Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent.

In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me of one of my favorite physics conference anecdotes, reproduced after the cut:

At DAMOP a few years back, a certain guy who we'll call B., just to have a convenient name, was giving a talk in a session chaired by C., a guy from NIST (not me). The talk was..., well, let's just say it wasn't as well-organized as it could've been.

B. was running way behind, and C. started signalling him that it was time to wrap it up. B. sped up a little, but didn't show any signs of stopping, so C. stood up, and moved over next to the overhead projector. C. is a pretty large guy, so he looms fairly effectively, and B. is fairly short.

B. sort of hunched down over his slides, almost cowering, looked up at C., and said, "Can I just show one more slide?"

"No," said C., and started clapping.

Then, for reasons beyond my comprehension, C. took a question from the audience. S., also from NIST, asked "What was the one more slide going to be?"

More like this

Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Several people in the geekout thread asked me to explain how a sliderule works, and I've been meaning to write a couple of article about manual computing devices. So I thought I'd do it.
Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better pr
Bad teaching is one of my pet peeves, but I go back and forth on PowerPoint. I think its egregious abuse most of its users shouldn't necessarily bring a cloud on the whole program -- sometimes it is used effectively.

That is the sort of question I am always tempted to plant one of my friends in the audience to ask.

Someone recently told me about one session chair who had a dimmer switch on the projector. So when a speaker started running long he would just slowly dim the projector until it was switched off. At least one speaker then ran to the whiteboard in a desperate attempt to continue his talk.

At one conference I attended, one speaker's talk went a bit long. When he was done, he said "I'll take any questions you may have." The moderator replied, "No, you won't." It was all in the timing.