Week 8: Good public speaking

Slide from Greig Roulston's Kiwi Pycon talk: Find All The Books
Credit: Greig Roulston

Last year I attended a Kiwi PyCon in Wellington. A PyCon is a conference where people get together to discuss what they're doing with the Python programming language. As Python is used for such a broad range of applications, this can make for some really interesting talks on some diverse topics over the two days of the conference.

Some of the talks are better than others. As you can imagine, when you talk about your own niche corner of programming for up to an hour you run the risk of boring your audience to sleep. Interestingly though, the talks which were most engaging at the time are also the talks where I can still remember many of the technical details.

Credit: Greig Roulston

So what makes some of these talks so much more interesting and memorable than others? In many cases the speakers were just great, and obviously get invited to many conferences, but one thing the best talks all had in common was the effective use of humour.

One of the best talks last year was by Greig Roulston from the digitisation team at National Library of New Zealand. On the face of it his topic was rather dry: How, as a programming newcomer he gradually acquired the skills and technology to analyse an arcane metadata format, and cross reference his data sets to blah blah blah zzzzzz. However, thanks to his clever use of humour, and a speaker deck which was a work of art, this was widely considered one of the top talks of the conference.

Credit: Greig Rouston

The problem is that I'm not sure how easy it is to replicate this success in a formulaic way. I think you would either need to be a naturally funny and sociable person, or have built up your confidence through doing a lot of public speaking. I can see the potential for attempts at humour to backfire if you were under-confident or if it seemed forced.

Greig's entire talk can be viewed below:

Week 7: To infinity, and beyond!

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This week I've been thinking about space things, and how these are interesting times indeed for space exploration and technology. In addition to robot probes beaming back never before seen sights from unexplored corners of the solar system, advances in rocket technology promise to make it cheaper (and cooler) to launch satellites and spacecraft from Earth.

In August 2014 Rosetta became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet. Since then we have been treated to astounding photos of the comet's truly alien landscape.

The cliffs of comet 67P
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

This year we will be getting close up images of two more mysterious rocks, the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, both of which were previously only glimpsed in blurry images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Dawn probe has already returned the best images yet of Ceres. and will arrive on March 6 2015, where it will become the first spacecraft to study a dwarf planet at close range. We may finally figure out what that white dot is for!

Dawn approaches the dwarf planet Ceres.Credit: NASA / JPL / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Emily Lakdawalla

Four months later New Horizons will perform the first flyby of ex-planet Pluto, finally revealing the secrets of this mysterious ball of ice and rock.

Currently our best map of dwarf planet Pluto
Credit: Aineias, NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)

Meanwhile, back on Earth, SpaceX are revolutionising launch technology. This is a particularly interesting time to follow SpaceX's progress, as with every launch they gradually perfect the techniques to recover the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage -- The giant lower portion of the rocket which usually crashes back down to Earth once its job of lifting the rest of the rocket is complete.

The way that they plan to recover the lower stage is straight out of science fiction: landing vertically under computer controlled rocket power. The eventual goal is to return the rocket to it's launch pad, but the interim goal involves landing on a floating drone platform in the ocean.

The great benefit of recovering the first rocket stage is that it can then be reused for only the cost of the refurbishment and refuelling. SpaceX anticipate that this could reduce the cost of launching into space by a hundredfold.

The above video show their latest (and closest) attempt yet. A shortage of hydraulic fluid for the aerodynamic fins brought about RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) at the last moment. With two launches scheduled for February 2015, a successful recovery could be only weeks away.

This generation may not have our own Apollo mission to follow (yet), but there is more than enough amazing stuff going on to keep me interested.

Week 6: Leadership

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For the group assignment there are two important positions to be filled: Team leader, and editor. I think the leadership role would have been very interesting, but I have not put my hand up for this role for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there is a time commitment to fulfilling leadership duties properly. I think a being good leader requires a sustained effort, regularly taking stock of where the project is up to. The leader should make sure the team is on an even keel. This is not to say that they should "micro-manage" the team members-- if someone is getting on with their task then let them!

Secondly, Cara is already doing a great job of steering our team into the starting box, and I'm sure she'll do just as good of a job when we formalise this role. I have instead opted to be the team's editor. An intensive effort at the end of the project seems more like my style!