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Stack Exchange — A great place to get answers to questions

“There are Lupines out there.”
“This may sound like a really stupid question, but is this a problem?”
“Considering they want to kill us, um, YES!”
MacGregor and Jonathan

stackexchangeA few different people recommended Stack Exchange recently. It is a very interesting “network of 82 question and answer sites” (including cooking, statistics, photography, and yes, also personal productivity). What makes it different from typical FAQ sites and forums is that it is community driven, allows you to edit your questions (and answers), and it uses voting to get the most helpful/best answers to the top. Very useful to quickly get a good answer to a question that bugs you — I used the predecessor site StackOverflow to solve programming questions and opening up this principle to different topics when enough experts are available is a really great idea.

So, if you are learning something (or if you have acquired substantial knowledge and want to contribute), I highly recommend Stack Exchange.

Recommendation: How to Give an Academic Talk

The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe
that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
Michael Faraday

Yesterday I recommended a short text by Paul N. Edwards (School of Information University of Michigan) called How to Read a Book (v4.0). Looking on his essays page, there is also an excellent text about How to Give an Academic Talk, v4.0. It is a very good summary of the typical mistakes people make in giving academic talks. Personally, I usually recommend these books by Reynolds to my students and highly encourage them to watch some TEDtalks for brilliant examples of very good orators. I’m going to include this text as well.

BTW, he recommends at one point recording yourself — did you know that many notebooks have a built in camera that can be used for this, or that your cellphone/smartphone will probably also do a decent job in doing so? I remember a time when I took a presentation course at the local adult education center and it was something special to be recorded by a video camera (on tape!) when giving a presentation. Today we have all these tools to improve ourselves — why not use them?

Highly recommended — Edwards, P. N. (2010). How to Give an Academic Talk.

Remembering Presentations

“Do you know what these are?” [Vorna] asked him.
“No.”
“They are from the foxglove flower. A tiny amount of them can give a dying heart fresh life. Like a miracle. But just a pinch too much and they become the deadliest poison. Pride is like that. Too little and a man has no sense of self-worth. The world would wear him down to dust. Too much and he becomes arrogant, vain and boastful. But just enough and he is a man to walk the mountains with.”
“Sword in the Storm” by David Gemmell

Every now and then there’s a presentation you did that you want to remember, because it went really well, because it brings to the point what you want to achieve (e.g., research) and who you are (e.g., how you ask the questions, try to answer them, and present the results). For me, it was a presentation on how to organize a scientific work (dissertation, but also applicable to almost any other type of scientific work), the original German version is here and the English translation is here.

But it’s hard to remember such a presentation — unlike a poster you cannot print it out and hang it into your office. Well, you can’t, can you? Actually, it’s quite easy to export the slides as graphics or PDF files and create a poster from the slides (here: made with InDesign, you can import a PDF and if you check the import options, you can say that each page of the PDF should be imported — if you have already drawn the placeholders for the images, it’s just a click per slide, some resizing (with select all done in 3 seconds) and that’s it):

poster_vortrag

It’s a bit vain, but on the other side, I want to remember it, especially in an environment where the pressure goes in a rather … different direction. And yes, the slides look better with the original graphics (which I had to gray out due to lack of copyright).

The Images That Didn’t Make It

A Physician can bury his mistakes,
an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s easy to see artists as perfect, because the works you see — especially the works from commercially very successful artists — are only the refined and selected ‘best works’. You do not see the sketches, the mishaps, the blunders — or even all the slight variations that dot the way to each successful artwork.

So it’s nice to see that Slate shows “Contact Sheets” today as a topic, allowing you to have a look at the contact sheets photographers made and the pictures that were finally selected. And some of them are classic photographs most people would recognize.

If you ever wondered whether you are the only one who has to go through hundred of photos to get the one exceptional one, don’t despair. Whereas professional and well-known photographers might produce less “trash-bin material”, many of their brilliant photos were that one exceptional photo in a row. That is was there is exceptional enough.

What Art Should Do: Touching You Emotionally

Important: I did NOT create this video, I just stumbled upon it, and as linking was enabled on YouTube, I linked it here. The creator (Ryan J. Woodward) and team involved is shown at the end of the video. Just, just, just brilliant!

Just a quick intermezzo as I stumbled over a video that … well, look for yourself:

Ryan J. Woodward, the artist who did the video, gives some background information on:

Highly Recommended!

Note: After watching the interviews … that’s a hell of a way to deal with a midlife crisis — other people would have bought a Porsche. ;-)

Steve Jobs

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
Steve Jobs

It’s been a little more than two weeks since Steve Jobs died. Apple did what it does best and gave him an Apple-style simple but beautiful obituary notice on their home page (well, until the next product was unveiled, which probably would have made him smile). It’s sad when someone like him dies … he shaped the future.

I can highly recommend his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:

and this page about a few inspirational quotes of Steve Jobs.

Farewell, Steve Jobs.

Poster: How to Organize Your Creativity?

I have translated the poster I did for the MinD-Akademie 2011 in English. I love it — it shows on one (very large) page the whole concept that I try to convey with “Organizing Creativity”. If you prefer it in German find the German version here.

I will probably do a similar version for the second version of the Organizing Creativity Book (still working on it) and use it as navigation help for the Organizing Creativity Wiki (likewise still working on it). But until both are ready, have fun with this poster (note: due to the size — DIN A0 — it is about 7 MB).

oc-poster-englishThe poster shows the different steps that are necessary in organizing creativity. While the process goes top down (yellow arrow in the horizontal center), each step is also another occupation with the topic (yellow arrows upwards to occupation with the topic), which leads to further ideas. I have left the footer for the moment — in case you are wondering it translates as “MinD-Academy 2011 — Future and Research”.

Presentation: How to Organize a Scientific Work [German]

Kurz gesagt: Ihr seid hochqualifizierte Leute, die man nicht auf der falschen Stelle verschwenden sollte. Ihr seid ehrgeizig, im Sinne von ihr wollt etwas erreichen, gefördert werden, weiter kommen. Sucht euch das passende Umfeld genau aus wenn ihr könnt. Promotionsstellen sind Qualifikationsstellen — es reicht nicht, dass ihr die Arbeit für die Stelle gut macht, die Arbeit auf der Stelle muss euch weiterbringen und euch selbst weiter qualifizieren.
Vortragsnotiz aus “Die Zukunft deiner Forschung — Wie organisiert man eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit?”

Note: The following presentation (PDF with Notes, which contains the script) is about ways to organize a scientific work. I did this presentation at the MinD-Akademie 2011 in Hannover and thus it is in German. It was my best presentation ever. Loved the audience :-) . Regarding an English version, I’ll be doing a translation soon. [Update: Translation is online in this posting.]

mind-akademie-2011-vortrag-graubilder-mit-skript-cover-2Auf das Bild klicken um die PDF angezeigt zu bekommen (ca. 5 MB). Ein Teil der Bilder in der Präsentation sind ausgegraut, weil ich leider nicht das Copyright für diese Bilder besitze. Das mindert die Qualität der Präsentation, auch wenn sie nur zur Illustration eingesetzt wurden. Auf der anderen Seite sind alle wichtigen Informationen in den Notizen vorhanden. Das Design der Folien beruht zum einen auf ein Template von Apple’s Keynote (Cover), wobei die Seiten von den Aperture/iPhoto Photobüchern inspiriert sind. Die Angaben zur empfohlenen Literatur ist hier als eigener Eintrag verfügbar.

An Extraordinary Private Creative Project

fallout_monopoly

Image/Boardgame by *PinkAxolotl / Elisabeth Redel

I just stumbled upon this Monopoly-boardgame in the style of Fallout by Elisabeth Redel. It looks incredibly well done and, according to Spiegel.de (German) and the page at deviantART, it was a gift from her (she’s a designer) to her boyfriend.

I mean, I’ve created books as gifts, for example songbooks and books of quotations, but this is an entirely different league. I’m breathless, it’s very cool and very inspirational. :-)