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Will McLean found an error in the detailed tables for the ORB survey. The tables indicated that 60% of the Baghdad sample was Christian, which doesn't seem plausible. They've now released corrected tables. It looks like the religion of some of those surveyed was entered incorrectly. Also at the…
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I don't think I've posted yet about Andrew Chase's graceful articulated metal sculptures. His cheetah is particularly stunning.
Click the image to watch it run!
Chase's mechanical sculptures have way more personality than metal should. The soulful eyes of his elephants and giraffes could reflect…
That is an absolute classic and one I shall be sharing with my data vis team this morning!
I'm proud to say that I just gave my upteenth powerpointless talk on Newton as cop at Fermilab -- got some raised eyebrows but post-talk props; no kittens killed and the rhythm of story and argument allowed to unfold without the sudden halts and lurches evoked by slides that are more makeable than potent.
I'll readily admit slides can be effective - Larry Lessig certainly uses them well. And in some fields (developmental biology, etc.) it's really hard to teach without any slides (you need to show complex figures that would take too long to draw out). But i'm a huge fan of the chalk talk - and if it saves kittens too, well then, no contest. :)
powerpointless
The first time through I parsed this Power{Pointless}, rather than the intended (and less snarky) {PowerPoint}less. The former is a too apt description of many presentations that would have been better off as the latter.
Of course it's possible to give a good presentation with PowerPoint. The problem with PowerPoint is that it's so easy to give a bad presentation. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky: Good PowerPoints are all alike; every bad PowerPoint is bad in its own way.
I do quite a bit of lecturing (I'm not a teacher), and for years I refused to use the computer in my lectures because the equipment never worked reliably. However, I had an epiphany after watching Scott McCloud's talk at TED, and now I use Keynote (Mac for "PowerPoint") heavily in my presentations. But I adhere to an iron rule:
All language comes out of my mouth. Keynote solely for images.
After I read Tufte, my Powerpoint presentations became awesome. If I do say so myself. It takes work, though.
Does Tufte spank his monkey every time someone gives a talk without Powerpoint?
Tufte WOULD TOO kill kittens, if it clearly, concisely, and with a minimum of 'window dressing', conveyed the point he was intending to make.
Oh, and if he could sell posters of it from his store, that might help too! :-)
Eric Lund, that's Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky (Anna Karenina).