I went to a toastmasters meeting, and found some interesting tricks to improve presentations. For example, they count the "ahhs", "hmm" etc. Since then I’m surprised at how many scientific talks are filled with those. A minor thing, but very effective. I didn’t keep going to meetings because it looked to me that the presentation style they use is not very compatible with the academic one (e.g., practicing improvisation). But it got me thinking… what alternative talk styles are out there? Is the ‘standard’ one the best? In a way, flying people all around the world to ‘see’ the talk is a bit of a lost cause, because body language doesn’t weight as much as in other communication styles. Of course, the networking and face-to-face time, to work on ideas on napkins, may make up for it, but still…

What follows is a walk through alternative talk styles that you may want to try in your next conference. Some require you to be the organizer, and enforce certain rules. Others, you can try just being the speaker. On with the show!

Pecha Kucha is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event designed for that purpose. Under the format, a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds. They took the name Pecha Kucha from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit-chat"). It was being aimed primarily at creative industries professionals.

A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers. This has actually being already adopted by academics (I’ve been to one!) and in my experience, it’s adored by the audience and well attended.

Ignite is a style of presentation where participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced.

Last we have the TED talk. The motto of TED is ‘Ideas worth spreading’. If you are an academic, you should ask yourself, ‘is any of my ideas worth spreading?’. So if someone invited you to give a TED talk, what would you talk about? What if you make your next invited talk a TED-like talk?

Feel free to report your experiences with alternative talk styles in the comments…

Hilarious visualization here:

Reminds me why, after sacrificing it to the washing machine twice, I decided not to have a mobile phone.

(credit: informationisbeautiful.net)

We want anyone to be able to contribute to ap.com. One way to do this is to leave blog posts open (but with a review queue). We proposed this method here, but not many people seem to be making use of it.

Maybe writing a blog post is too time consuming, and the barrier of entry is too high. An easy solution is microblogging: services like twitter let you share a tiny bit of something interesting you found (with a link), and anyone following you will receive it.

The thing with microblogging is that it doesn’t take much effort to share. Many people (including me) thought it was silly at first, but now it’s mainstream.

Since twitter provides real-time search you can find what people talk about right now. If you want to monitor a special topic, chances are someone came up with a unique way of identify the topic. A spontaneous way of organizing information outside the ‘follows’ structure emerged: the hashtag. These are terms that start with #, example: #iranelection. We have set up #AcaProd for academicproductivity. If you have an idea, or read something outstanding that you would like to share with us, just tweet about it and add #AcaProd somewhere in the 140 characters. Your tweet then is easily found by anyone interested in the topic. We will display all tweets in our front page too.

I found myself sharing a lot of interesting stuff over twitter, and much more often than through a blog, so I have a good feeling about this.

Of course, you should keep sending ideas/suggestions/complaints using our email, blog@academicproductivity.com

If you are interested in scientific blogging and collaborative tools for research and happen to be in the UK this summer, here’s an event not to be missed:

Science Online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The event is cohosted by Mendeley and Nature Network. More information available here:

• www.scienceonlinelondon.org
• twitter.com/soloconf

This is an exciting release.

In a single stroke, Zotero may have added the most important feature of online apps such as citeUlike (collaboration) and the best feature of Mendeley (metadata extraction). I have no idea how well these work, as I have just moved to zotero recently and don’t want to risk trying the beta this soon, but if they work well, this is a quantum leap.

Here’s a  list of the new features:

Automatic synchronization of collections across multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.

Free automatic backup of your library data at Zotero.org.

Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a server of your choice (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

Recover recently deleted items with Zotero’s trash can.

Rich-text notes

New style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats

Automatic detection of PDF metadata (author, title, etc.)

Automatic detection and support for proxy servers

New Website Features

Browse through your library online.

New user profiles tied to Zotero accounts.

Preliminary support for following other Zotero users: In the future this will generate a twitter-like feed of users public research activity.

WYSIWYG CV creator, with the ability to dynamically generate all or part of your CV from Zotero collections.

Search for friends, colleagues, and other users by institutional affiliation, username, email address, or field of interest.

I’ve been using endNote for about 6 years now, so I have experience a hard case of vendor lock-in (I have plenty of text with references in the endNote format. This is giving me a really bad feeling about endNote makers, and the money I have invested in a clearly inferior product doesn’t make me happy either. Suing Zotero was the last drop. I finally moved to Zotero out of principle. What I find funny is that zotero uses less memory with the same database size, even building on top of Firefox. And Word integration is as good, if not better, than endNote’s.

I found a (badly scanned) paper on how to concentrate. It’s a so-so article, but there is at least one gem in it:

remember that solitude has always been, in all the history of mental achievement, a requisite for great work. (…) The great poems written in lonely garrets—the masterpiece paintings conceived by the artist amid the fields—the divine harmonies first heard by the musician communing with the stars—the sublime oration which first stirred the soul of the orator as he tramped in the forest—all attest that the best comes to man when he is alone.

This is interesting. I always found that some people complained I spent too much time in front of the computer… maybe that is what it means to be lonely. The funny thing is that nowadays it is a lot harder to be alone. Maybe alone is just a romantic surrogate for ‘uninterrupted’ I don’t think the mood implications of lonely help in any way, unless you are producing poetry, music or plastic arts… but certainly not papers.

So, do you feel lonely? Do you seek time apart from ‘the world’? It’s true that most academics’ social lives suck (not mine ). But what is the right causal path here? Do we kill our social lives so we can get ‘in the state’ more often and be productive? Or is it the other way around: we are ‘in the state’ so often that social relationships just die off?

One thing is true: having an internet connection provides constant, second-class (in the sense that it’s not as rich as real-life interaction) social stimulation; being in front of the computer is not a certain way to achieve ‘the state’ (lonely or not). But maybe a good solution is to concentrate a lot (no surrogate activities, like me writing this blog post while I should finishing up my paper), and then get a lot of first-class, ‘live person’ social action.

Is there a simple explanation for why some people pick up demanding activities (such a career in science) while some others are happy watching television most of their spare time?

Maybe it’s as simple as this: boredom is aversive to everyone, but people differ on when they get so bored they need to do something about it or their head will explode. Let’s call this the boredom threshold. So let’s play with the naive theory that people with a low boredom threshold do science (or art, or some other complex, demanding activities). And let’s assume that mainstream jobs (i. e. those that apply existing knowledge instead of living at the bleeding edge) can get away doing the same things over and over again. This is a caricature, but bear with me.  

Some job descriptions value resistance to boredom. Of course, that’s not in the contract, but it’s implicit. And the humility it takes to take such a job is not only accepted, but encouraged in Western society. It’s almost getting to a point where the trait could suffer natural selection (if our standards lasted a few million years ). There are more boring jobs than interesting jobs (i.e., interesting jobs are in the ‘long tail’ of a power-law distribution). People willing to accept a boring job have thus more chances of being employed. More so, most jobs have some boring part, so a caricature of a person that would only take non-boring jobs and would quit as soon as something boring comes up would be kicked out of the gene pool.

One could think that the industrial revolution (i.e., letting machines do the repetitive work) should have taken away some boring jobs and shifted the distribution… but the fact is that the industrial revolution seems to shift the

Thus conformists have a clear advantage here. It shows in the proportion of people who keep a job compared to those who build a company (assume here, for simplicity’s shake that all companies are perceived by their founders as non-boring; this doesn’t have to be the case).

But what shocked me was to realize that this high valuation of resistance to boredom has permeated to the academic world. 

Our culture values scientific exploration highly and readily concedes that it takes unusual mental capabilities to engage in such activities at a high level. But does it? I argue that modern society rewards the careerist and not the risk-taking explorer. The academic system rewards papers, not ideas. And often, the peer review process makes reviewing and revising a paper excruciatingly slow. That biases the selection criteria towards submissive, conformist science.

As Demonfreaker says:

The ‘publish or perish’ culture, and the sinister ‘peer review’ stranglehold on thinking in universities, has cut down on the number of interesting thinkers produced by these higher places of learning. What good thinkers need is freedom and, like a plant, the right ‘soil’ to flourish in (nice facilities, steady funding, lots of debate). But today’s universities are stifling dens of political correctness.

So, to reiterate my point: far from the romantic idea of the creative genius, Today’s science values a lot more people who can survive in extremely boring conditions. The above article mentions that Ludwig Wittgenstein might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book, so he will habe been kicked out in the current system.

When boredom is necessary

Some activities that can  be excellent sources of joy come surrounded by an unavoidable barrier of boredom. For example, learning a new language or a new instrument both involve an initial phase of rote learning in which one is not proficient enough to actually have fun! Could science (or scholarship) be like this?

In scholarship, there is of course a ‘learning the ropes’ period that may be cataloged by some as ‘boring’.

But what I’m talking about here is not that. Sometimes the intrinsic activities of doing science are repetitive and boring beyond words. I just finished watching ‘Kinsey‘. There, the main character spends most of his career collecting and cataloging wasps (Of course, he changes his main topic to sex at some point, and everyone loves him ) .

But again, I’m not arguing that some topics rely on methods that are boring; what I think happens in modern academia is that it forces people to do gray, boring, and conservative work. Once, while I was working on my PhD. I attended a party where someone said to me: “So… you do research. That’s just pushing paper (i.e., meaningless red tape)”. At that time, I was so excited doing my research that his statement sounded deeply out of touch with reality. I would sleep in my office just to get to see the results on time. Now, time has passed, and I’m almost agreeing with him in this article (!).

How can you take advantage of the current craze about social media?

The fact is that many people use social media to  build a powerful reputation In any Industry. This article will focus on professional social sites (i.e., linkedIn, biznik) and not on the more leisure-based social sites (mySpace, facebook). Having said that, do not discard the more traditional forums and blogs; making posts in these can get you the same benefits than professional social sites, and they are often more targeted.

1 – Benefits are not immediate

Social networks will look like a supreme waste of time in the short term; the benefits are cumulative and slow. Andy Erickson (linkedIn) says:

For me, it’s sort of like having done all the preparation work for an emergency (fire drills in school, CPR certification) and then being grateful that you did when you finally need it.

This is also true for other forms of name-branding and visibility such as blogging. Having the attention of some people is a great currency that you never know when you are going to need.

2- Reputation can be built fast, but destroyed faster

In the net, bad news travel fast. If you did something questionable, or simple upset an influential member of a community, your online reputation may suffer. This could be good news: we live in a hypercritical society; any product that you want to buy has online reviews. Somehow, people you have to deal with will have reviews too. Companies can go into bankruptcy with a single post by a disgruntled user. For example: “I have an old kryptonite motorcycle disc lock. I walked out to the garage. Yanked apart my bic, and about 4 minutes later it was open” is all it took to get kryptonite out of business.

Currently it is not easy to assess online reputation of a person, but this is changing fast. A way to establish a person’s reputation (which in a way, is a problem that we academics have solved with peer review) was the number one problem listed by techCrunch when they polled their users. LinkedIn has a recommendations system that goes a long way to solve this issue. Unfortunately, your reputation won’t follow you to your other online activities (e.g., to book reviews in amazon). Google’s opensocial may help changing this (Dario will talk about opensocial soon).

3 – Not all social networks are created equal

LinkedIn is a business-only networks. You won’t have to defend yourself from zombie attacks or fend invitations from your friend to do a compatibility test. MySpace is the place to be in if you have a band.

LinkedIn is a great way to connect to business. Since business and academics rarely attend the same meetings or read the same publications, connecting with someone ‘on the other side’ is difficult. Apart from writing pop-sci books and blogging about your ideas in an accessible language, you can link your profile with people as far from your close group as possible. Simply by diversifying your connections you may be able to attract interest in your work.

4 – Social media will help diversifying your interests

If you can attend at least one meeting a year on an applied neighboring field, you will get a healthy exposure to alternative ways of thinking about the problems you work on. Who knows, you may find a ‘market’ for a solution you already have… sometimes you may be lucky enough to land on a field where they have a big problem that, in your eyes, is already solved!

5 – Getting the attention of a public you won’t reach otherwise

Sometimes a small media stunt like getting your lab mentioned in a local newspaper may help you gaining support that you can use to leverage a second round of grant funding. Since the press probably won’t read the specialized articles you write for journals, having a notable profile in a social network or a blog will make you easier to find for journalists.

6 – Extend your network, then take it off-line

There’s a pure ‘social’ value in social networking. You will be surprised by some of the opportunities that will surface when you reconnect with colleagues and start comparing notes of what you’re currently working on. Of course, face-to-face works too… but these encounters that were reserved to yearly meetings at conferences can now be accelerated by your online presence. The ‘rec letter’ approach works in social media too. You can see who the ‘ancestors’ of a future grad student are by looking at his online social network if he cared enough to cultivate one. It’s also useful to do ‘background checks’ and weed off people who you wouldn’t want to spend time with after knowing some of their tastes or extra curriculum activities.

However, try to take the relationship off-line as soon as you can if that is possible. Jason Alba points out that

… LinkedIn “isn’t the place to nurture a relationship. It’s a place to find and be found. But once you find them, go outside the system.” Meet up in person to complain about coworkers … and you build face-to-face relationships that are stronger than any virtual connection

Summary

Social media are an important resource to develop maximal visibility, build connections and learn how to manipulate publicity for attention.

I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.

A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.

Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:

And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:

Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.

So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog

We are proud to announce the birth of Academic Productivity 2.0. Over the last months we have been brainstorming on how to improve the blog and we are happy to announce a number of important news.

New look

We have redesigned the blog and created a new logo: a delicate metaphor on how the academia transforms raw ideas into… more mundane, consumable things.

It took quite a lot of work to get the current look working (and we ended up making very conservative decisions!). Load times should have improved as we have removed some plugins that were slowing things down.

Open contributions

We thought it’s ok to write our own ramblings, but we’d like to read yours too.

Academic Productivity 2.0 introduces an open registration system (default role: “Contributor”). This will allow to open up the blog for contributions from our readers. Other blogs have done this, and since we have been receiving a lot of valuable suggestions from our readers, we think it’s time to create a community of contributors. If you have ideas/hacks you want to share, sign up as a contributor or log in < ?php wp_loginout(); ?>(see link on the right side).

Once you are logged in as a contributor, you will have several advantages.

1. You will never again have to write name/mail to post/comment. Ap.com will remember you.
2. You can fill-in some data, upoload a picture, and write bio blurb. This description will show up when one of your posts gets approved.
3. Submit your post. This is the best part. You can write a post! It will be sent to us as a draft, and if the editors approve it, your posts will be featured on the blog.

We encourage each collaborator to write a short paragraph with what you consider is your most powerful productivity tip. Of all the things you do to keep your research going, what is the one that gets you more bang for the buck? You can tell the world (and us) and be admired for your hacking skill. This is fun, and we will create a page with a collection of usernames (pictures if you have a gravatar) and productivity power tips!

Once you are signed in, you can change your information, and write posts. We will post later on how to go about it; it’s really easy.

Note: even though you signed up with your email, this email will never be used other than to send you a confirmation link. We have implemented capcha and math tests to prevent robots from signing in automatically. This will speed up things considerably on our side and will let you roam free on the blog writing posts and comments with less hassles.

We will create a page with the picture and blurbs of people who contribute content (an ap.com hall-of-fame of sorts). You can say something about you in the blurb, but we’d like you to condense into one paragraph

Comments

There are some new features about comments too; they are here to make conversations a lot easier and make everyone feel like they can talk back at any time.

1. Users must be registered and logged in to comment. This has several advantages for everyone. When you post, your comment will be visible immediately; this makes easy for people to have real-time conversations. For us, it saves a lot of time not to have to moderate the comments! Plus, if you signed up, you must be a human. Periodically, we will review comments to see if any spammer is making inroads (even having to do it by hand!).
2. If you have a gravatar account, your picture will show up. We highly encourage you to get an account, because it’s better when you can assign an actual image to some writer/commentator that you like. You can skim content a lot faster that way. Of course, when you find the same commentator anywhere else on the net, their gravatar will be the same so you will recognize them.
3. Now links you post in your comments carry pagerank (the default for wordpress is NOT to give out pagerank). That means that you can use your comments to take people to your site and make Google like it more.
4. You can also Subscribe to Comments (by mail reminders, or RSS). That means that you will receive i.e. a mail when someone posts a comment addressing one of yours.

Newsletter

Although you can access all posts in full text using RSS, we want to create a newsletter. You can receive notifications for each new post by mail. You can subscribe to a monthly digest of what we discussed. People in the mailing list will get extra content that will not be posted on the blog, such as time-sensitive information.

The newsletter will strengthen the community. We want to think of ap.com as a future hub of early-stage researchers, where we can talk about the challenges of doing research in the 21st century in terms of productivity strategies. Our dream would be to organize a workshop or small conference on this topic, should this idea receive some support from our readers.

If you are a contributor and you wish to receive the newsletter too, you will need to sign in separately.

What do you want us to post about?

We want to encourage people not only to comment more but to post their own stuff. Still, if that was not sufficient, you can steer us to the content you want. What do you want us to post about? Is there any underdeveloped topic that you want to see featured more prominently? What do you like the most about what we do? What do you not like?

More things to come

We have more things coming. For example, audio interviews and original ap.com productivity software.Of course, it’s up to you too. If you want to grab a microphone and interview someone that has a good insight on what it takes to be productive (inside  and outside the academia), feel free to submit your interview too. You may be blessed with an advisor/peer who is not only a productivity monster, but an altruistic soul who likes to share. If so, we want to hear those conversations. You could submit audio content. If you can record one of your ‘cafeteria conversations’ to share with the world, that’d be ideal. The easiest way to do this -without buying any equipment- is to recreate the conversation using Skype. As simple as this is (just like a phone conversation), Skype offers recording. Then you can submit the mp3 of the call as an attachment in your post to ap.com.

In summary, we want to give our readers as much control as possible and make ap.com not a simple blog that people read when they should be writing a paper… but a collaborative effort (a community) to make everyone more productive.