Sex and Lectures about Computers

July 12, 2009 | etbe

I previously wrote about the appropriate references to porn in lectures about Computer Science [1]. It seemed that by providing a short list of all the appropriate ways that porn could be mentioned in a lecture some people might get the idea that the infinite variety of other potential ways that porn could be mentioned are mostly wrong.

In a separate response to the same incident Matt Bottrell wrote a list of the reasons why he thinks that porn is inappropriate for a conference [2]. One of Matt’s weaker points in that post was “As a parent, I would be outraged if my teenage child attended such a conference to be subjected to pornographic images“. I considered writing a post in response to that pointing out that I believe that the social pressures on teenagers to perform various sex acts appears to be a much greater problem than the risk of occasionally seeing porn. But apart from rumors I heard at one conference regarding a distasteful incident at a party I couldn’t tie that issue to a free software conference, and I was not well enough connected into the gossip network to determine the facts of the party in question.

The free software community seems much more enlightened than the proprietary software community. The conference environment sets higher standards, I believe that the general reaction to the incidents of porn demonstrates the character of the community. But surely no-one would give a lecture at a conference and advocate “relieving people of their virginity“. If such a thing was to happen then surely it would come from someone who is little known and who lacks experience in giving public lectures.

But it turns out that my expectations were not correct, Richard Stallman (RMS) seriously offended many people by such antics [3]. It’s even more disappointing that people who admire him can’t admit to the fact that he stuffed up. I personally have great admiration for all the good work that RMS has done over the course of decades. But I have to say that he’s gone too far this time.

Matthew Garrett suggests either not inviting RMS to give a keynote speech or giving an apology to the audience beforehand [4]. I don’t think it’s a viable option to give an apology for allowing someone to speak at a conference, so I take Matthew’s post as a call to stop inviting RMS to speak at conferences.

Update: Matthew has updated his post to explain that he meant that RMS should give an apology before he is offered any future invitations – not that the conference organisers should apologise to the audience for any offense that he might cause. But as it seems extremely unlikely that RMS will ever back down I don’t think this makes a difference in the end.

I think that this is a very strong measure to take, refraining from inviting someone so influential who has contributed so much is unheard of. But one thing we know about RMS is that he is particularly stubborn. The positive side of this is that he has done a huge amount of work over 30+ years that has benefited many people. The negative side of his obstinacy is that it seems extremely unlikely that he will apologise or agree to amend his behavior. So it seems that there is no reasonable option other than to refrain from inviting him.

A major benefit that a keynote speaker provides to a conference is prestige. It seems to me that many people now regard RMS as a negative reference for the value of a conference. So even conference organisers who don’t think that RMS did anything wrong will probably be less likely to invite him.

I don’t think that I will ever attend another lecture by RMS.

PS If we are going to mention teenagers in regard to such issues, it would be best to mention the age – there is a huge difference between a 13yo and a 19yo, both socially and legally.

Appropriate Talks about Porn

May 17, 2009 | etbe

There is currently some discussion about a talk which used pornographic imagery and jokes to illustrate points about Ruby programming [1]. A similar event happened in 2006 here is the description of the event from the author – which includes an unreserved apology [2].

It seems to me that the current discussion focusing on what is inappropriate for a public lecture is the wrong way to do it as there is a vast range of inappropriate material. I suggest that instead a white-list of appropriate references to porn in lectures will be more effective – if nothing else it makes for a much smaller list. Here is a first draft of such a list:

Pornographic web sites handle a lot of traffic. There are significant technical problems that need to be solved. A lecture from an employee of an Internet porn company which covers the solutions to those technical problems would be of interest to many system administrators. Of course such a lecture should not promote the Internet porn company or show any samples of their products.
Digital processing of images is an interesting topic. Having a digital editor from a magazine such as Vogue describe in detail how they do their job would be really interesting. There is a lot of overlap between the range of pictures displayed in Vogue and those displayed on porn sites. Having an employee of a porn company demonstrate how they touch up the picture of a fully clothed model would be an interesting technical topic, but of course it would be totally inappropriate to make any specific mentions of how the parts of the picture which are not PG-13 rated are edited. Even showing a picture of a porn star might be controversial, but I’m sure that the same work could be reproduced with a photo of someone who has a more respectable career. Touching up a picture of RMS to make him look like a politician would make for a challenge for the presenter and an interesting lecture.
The image known as Lenna is a photograph of a Playboy model named Lena that is widely used to test image compression [3]. While the image remains controversial, it seems to me that it would be impossible to give a complete and factual account of the history of image compression without mentioning it.
The police have great discretionary powers to determine which crimes should be actively investigated. Senior police decide how many resources to assign to each case. I believe that in many jurisdictions the police will assign a much lower priority to a hacking case if the victim is running a porn service. Rumor has it that porn sites put a lot more effort into system security than most Internet services, partly due to not having as much protection from the police as other industries and partly because their customers don’t want to be identified. I would be very interested in attending a presentation about practical computer security by a system administrator from a porn site. As an aside I’m always interested in talking to people who do security work, so I would like to have a chat with someone who does such work for a porn site.
A few years ago I attended a lecture about the security implications of porn surfing. It had some scary statistics on the number of porn sites that try to deploy malware on the computers of the people who view porn, and it made a good business case for banning porn at work without reference to HR issues (which is very relevant for the jurisdictions where viewing porn at work is not considered to be a social problem). I would like to see a new version of that talk with statistics based on more recent research, my theory is that modern porn sites are more toxic than the old ones due to the general increase in criminal activity on the net – but I have no evidence to support it.

Of course in all cases jokes about porn are not acceptable, mentions of porn need to be strictly on the basis of historical analysis or the description of technical and legal issues which are relevant to the audience. Delivering a talk about porn without inappropriate jokes would take a great deal of effort, but it can be done (and I’ve seen it done once). For these five cases (and the few others that will probably be suggested in comments) it would probably be best if the conference organisers viewed the talk first to ensure that there was no misunderstanding about what is appropriate.

I think that comparing a short list of specific cases where porn can reasonably be mentioned in a public lecture with the vast number of potential inappropriate references illustrates the probability of a random porn reference being acceptable. The probability of making a random porn reference that is appropriate is probably slightly less than that of winning the lottery.

Talking Fast

January 30, 2008 | etbe

My previous post about my LCA mini-conf talk received an interesting comment from Christopher Neugebauer.

He said that he had some trouble understanding me because I speak quickly, he wasn’t the first person to make that complaint (it’s the most common complaint I receive). If a talk goes well then I have a lot to say and little time to say it and end up speaking quickly if I don’t concentrate enough on speaking slowly. If a talk doesn’t go well then I get nervous and speak quickly.

When a speaker talks too quickly it is appropriate to call out a request for them to speak more slowly. I know I’m not the only person who has difficulty in speaking slowly enough and I expect that others also wouldn’t mind such requests from the audience.

Chris suggested giving a talk with a small number of words used on the projector, it’s an interesting idea and may be worth a try. However I have recently watched Lawrence Lessig’s talk published on TED.com [1] which used that technique, I was disappointed in the result. His talk appeared to be very well received by the audience, I’m not sure whether that is because the audience was less familiar with his ideas than I am or whether it’s a technique that works better for an audience than for a video.

I would appreciate further suggestions in this regard.

Update: It’s interesting to note that Bruce Schneier’s keynote for LCA had no presentation material, he spoke from written notes.

[1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/187

Finishing a Presentation too soon

October 20, 2007 | etbe

In my previous post about Advice for Speakers [1] I referred to the common problem of going through presentation materiel too quickly due to being nervous. In extreme cases (which tend to happen when giving a presentation for an unusually large audience) the materiel for an hour long presentation may be covered in 10 minutes or less. This is a problem that most speakers have at least once in their career.

I recently heard an interesting (and in retrospect obvious) way of dealing with this problem. That is to label each note card with the estimated time through the presentation when it should be presented. If you are reading from the 10 minute card at 2 minutes into the presentation then you need to slow down.

Of course this doesn’t work as well if you follow the “strict powerpoint” method of presenting where the only notes are the slides. It would be good if a presentation program supported having windows on two displays so you could have one full-screen window on an external video device for the audience to see and one window that’s not full-screen on the built-in display in the laptop for the speaker. The built-in display could have speaker notes, a time clock, and other useful things.

I have just filed Debian bug report 447207 [2] requesting that this feature be added to Open Office. It was closed before this post was even published due to Unstable apparently having some degree of support for this and the rest being already on the planned feature list (see the bug report for details). I found the complaint about a feature request being against Etch interesting as Debian doesn’t have bugs tracked against different releases, so it’s not as if a bug reported against Etch will get any different treatment than a bug reported against Unstable.

Questions During Lectures

July 11, 2007 | etbe

An issue that causes some discussion and debate is the number and type of questions that may be asked during a lecture. In a previous post giving advice for speakers I suggested that questions can be used as a mechanism for getting a talk back on track if a nervous speaker starts presenting the material too quickly (a common mistake). This mechanism can be used by the speaker if they realise that things aren’t going to plan or by audience members who are experienced speakers and who recognise a problem. Due to this a blanket ban on questions during a talk will only work with experienced speakers who have planned their talk well.

There are different styles of presentation favoured by different speakers. Some are determined by the nature of the topic (an example that I have seen cited is topics that are very contentious which would lead to a debate if questions were permitted during the talk), but for computer science I think that questions during the talk can always work well. To a certain extent the fact that code either works or doesn’t limits the scope for debate.

Probably the major factor that determines the utility of questions is the size of the audience. If you have an audience of less than 50 people then a conversational approach can work, if you have less than 200 people then a reasonable number of questions can be accepted. But as the audience size increases above 300 the utility of questions approaches zero. If the majority of people who might want to ask questions are unable to do so due to lack of time then the value of allowing any questions diminishes. For the largest audiences there probably isn’t any point in having question time.

Another major factor determining which style works best is where the speaker has had experience speaking. Most of my speaking experience is with less formal meetings (such as local LUGs) and in countries with an informal attitude towards such things (Australia, the US, and The Netherlands). A speaker who has primarily spoken for universities such as Cambridge or Oxford (which seem to have a very formal style and questions strictly reserved for the end) or who has come from a country such as Japan(*) where it’s reported that the audience are obliged to show respect for the speaker by being quiet will probably expect questions only at the end and may flatly reject questions during the talk. A speaker who has a background speaking for less formal audiences will expect a certain number of questions during the course of the talk and may plan the timing of their talk with this in mind. When I plan a talk for a one hour slot I plan at most 30 minutes of scheduled talking (IE covering my notes) expecting that there will be 15 minutes of questions along the way and another 15 minutes of questions at the end. Often with such plans my talks run over-time. Of course this means that people who have mostly had experience speaking to smaller and less formal audiences will find it exceedingly difficult to give talks to larger audiences. This may be an incentive for having more formal arrangements for LUG talks to increase the skills of speakers.

The next issue is what level of contentious questions is acceptable. I believe that if you have a disagreement with points that the speaker is making (and have some experience in the field in question) and the audience is not particularly large then one hostile question is acceptable – as a speaker it’s reasonable to refuse to take any further questions from an audience member who has asked one hostile question. Another category of question is the challenging question (not to be confused with a hostile question), for example describing in one sentence what your business requirements are and asking how the topic being discussed will apply to that business requirement. One of the most useful questions I have been asked during a SE Linux talk was concerning the issue of backups of file security contexts, it was presented in a challenging way and the answer that I gave was not nearly as good as I could give now (the code base has improved over the last few years in this regard) – but I think that everyone learned something so that validated the question.

In smaller groups there may be some heckling when the speaker is a well known member of the group, I don’t think that this is a problem either as long as it only consumes a tiny fraction of the time (maybe 20-30 seconds at the start). For larger audiences or for speakers who don’t know the audience well heckling is generally a bad idea.

(*) When speaking in Japan I had a lot of audience interaction. I’m not sure if this is an indication of the Japanese culture changing in this regard, the fact that translation problems forced some interaction, or the audience was showing respect for the Australian culture by asking questions.

submissions for LCA and other conferences

June 10, 2007 | etbe

In this post I recommended that job seekers not publish their CV. In a comment Gunnar suggested having a special CV for conferences. I think that Gunnar’s idea is good and have started writing my conference CV at http://etbe.coker.com.au/conferences. When I complete it I will make it part of every submission for speaking at a conference.

The LCA 2008 call for presentations is now open. One of the most interesting, noteworthy, and slightly controversial items is the suggestion that people submit a video. I think that the video submission is a great idea, either a video or testimony from audience members from past presentations should be required for all submissions (NB I’m not involved with organising LCA2008 so my opinion means little in this regard). The reason is that I have attended many presentations which fell far short of their potential due to poor speaking skills. I’ve been to great presentations by people with strong accents, by people with speech impediments, by people who are incredibly shy, and by people who just don’t have a clue about public speaking. However my observation is that if a speaker has more than one of these disadvantages then the presentation is likely to fail. I have previously written at length about how to give a good presentation to a technical audience (such as is found at LCA).

Dave Hall blogs about Should I do a presentation at LCA 2008. He mentions lack of a web-cam as a disincentive, but I am happy to lend him my digital camera (which makes really high quality movies) to solve this problem. In fact I have considered recording some short Linux talks at the SGI office during lunch breaks (Dave and I both work for SGI).

Dave also mentions a nightmare scenario about a laptop not working with presentation hardware. My post about getting laptops working for presentations will hopefully help some people in this regard.

I’m not sure if I’ll make an offer for LCA this year, I haven’t been doing much cutting-edge work recently. Maybe I’ll just offer some talks for mini-confs, I could probably get several offers accepted by mini-conf organisers if I try.

what is a BOF?

April 10, 2007 | etbe

BOF stands for Birds Of a Feather, it’s an informal session run at a conference usually without any formal approval by the people who run the conference.

Often conferences have a white-board, wiki, or other place where conference delegates can leave notes for any reason. It is used for many purposes including arranging BOFs. To arrange a BOF you will usually write the title for the BOF and the name of the convenor (usually yourself if it’s your idea) and leave a space for interested people to sign their names. Even though there is usually no formal involvement of the conference organizers they will generally reserve some time for BOFs. Depending on the expected interest they will usually offer one or two slots of either 45 minutes or one hour. They will also often assist in allocating BOFs to rooms. But none of this is needed. All that you need to do is find a notice-board, state your intention to have a BOF at a time when not much else is happening and play it by ear!

My observation is that about half the ideas for BOFs actually happen, the rest don’t get enough interest. This is OK, one of the reasons for a BOF is to have a discussion about an area of technology that has an unknown level of interest. If no-one is interested then you offer the same thing the next year. If only a few people are interested then you discuss it over dinner. But sometimes you get 30+ people, you never know what to expect as many people don’t sign up – or have their first choice canceled and attend the next on the list!

To run a BOF you firstly need some level of expert knowledge in the field. I believe that the best plan is for a BOF to be a panel discussion where you have a significant portion of the people in the audience (between 5 and 15 people) speaking their opinions on the topic and the convener moderating the discussion. If things work in an ideal manner then the convener will merely be one member of the panel. However it’s generally expected that the person running the BOF can give an improvised lecture on the topic in case things don’t happen in an ideal manner. It’s also expected that the convener will have an agenda for a discussion drawn up so that if the panel method occurs they can ask a series of questions for members of the BOF to answer. My experience is that 8 simple questions will cover most of an hour.

One requirement for convening a BOF is that you be confident in speaking to an audience of unknown size, knowledge, and temperament. Although I haven’t seen it done it would be possible to have two people acting as joint conveners of a BOF. One person with the confidence to handle the audience and manage the agenda and another with the technical skills needed to speak authoritatively on the topic.

Some of the BOFs I have attended have had casual discussions, some have had heated arguments, and some ended up as lectures with the convener just talking about the topic. Each of these outcomes can work in terms of entertaining and educating the delegates.

But don’t feel afraid, one of the advantages of a BOF is that it’s a very casual affair, not only because of the nature of the event but also because it usually happens at the end of a long conference day. People will want to relax not have a high-intensity lecture. One problem that you can have when giving a formal lecture to an audience is nervous problems such as hyper-ventilating. This has happened to me before and it was really difficult to recover while continuing the lecture. If that happens during a BOF then you can just throw a question to the audience such as “could everyone in the room please give their opinion on X“, that will give you time for your nerves to recover while also allowing the audience to get to know each other a bit – it’s probably best to have at least one such question on your agenda in case it’s needed.

Note that the above is my personal opinion based on my own experience. I’m sure that lots of other people will disagree with me and write blog posts saying so. ;)

The facts which I expect no-one to dispute are:

BOFs are informal
Anyone can run one
You need an agenda
You need some level of expert knowledge of the topic

presentations and background color

March 5, 2007 | etbe

In response to my last post about using laptops for presentations it has been suggested to me that using white (or a very bright color) as the background color can help some displays synchronise with the signal. I haven’t had an opportunity to test this but it seems likely that as most computers are configured with a white background nowadays the display hardware is optimised for this case.

Another benefit of a light background is that it provides more ambient lighting to the room where the presentation is held. If all the lights are turned off (sometimes there is no dimmer switch) then the radiant light from the screen is the only form of illumination for the room.

Finally with the way the current generation of beamers work there is less heat trapped in the beamer if there is mostly white on the screen. This will hopefully decrease the incidence of hardware failures during lectures (which unfortunately are not uncommon in my observation).

Update:

Based on a comment on this blog entry I did a quick survey of the color scemes, black on white, yellow on blue, and white on green. Black on white got the most votes with some people saying that yellow on blue was most aesthetic while black on white was easiest to read (“clear and boring” was one comment).

One person pointed out that the light diverges slightly so black on white makes the letters look smaller while white on black makes them look bigger. My response to this is to use a slightly larger font.

licence for lecture notes

January 19, 2007 | etbe

While attending LCA it occurred to me that the lecture notes from all the talks that I have given lack a copyright notice. So I now retrospectively license my lecture notes in the manner that probably matches what everyone was already doing. The Creative Commons web site has a form to allow you to easily choose a license. So I have chosen the below license, it applies to all lecture notes currently on my web site and all that I publish in future unless they contain special notice of different license conditions.

Update: From now on I am releasing all lecture notes under a non-commercial share-alike license. I had previously not given a specific license to the content on my blog – now I am specifically licensing it under a non-commercial share-alike license. This means (among other things) that you may not put my content on a web page that contains Google AdWords or any other similar advertising.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Advice for speakers

September 7, 2006 | etbe

I am not an expert at public speaking. Attending Toastmasters to improve my speaking skills is on my todo list. However having given hundreds of talks over the course of about 14 years and being paid for giving talks (the minimum criteria to claim to be a professional speaker) I think I can offer some useful advice, at least in regard to giving talks for free sofware audiences. I will cover some really basic things in this post, so experience speakers will find some of them obvious.

The most important thing of course is to know your topic really well. You can skip every other piece of advice and still do reasonably well at any Linux Users Group meeting if you know your topic well enough. Of course if you want to talk at a conference then taking some of the following advice would be useful.

Record your talk, it is useful to review the recording to learn from mistakes. Don’t worry too much about saying “um” or other common speaking mistakes – it takes a lot of practice and effort to avoid such things. When recording your talk record it from the start of the introduction (you never know when the person introducing you will say something particularly flattering ;) until after you have left the podium. It’s not uncommon to have question time, to thank the audience for their attention after the questions, and to then have another round of 15 minutes of questions afterwards. The only time when you can confidently stop recording at the scheduled end of your talk is when there’s someone scheduled next.

For recording a talk an iRiver is a good device to use. An iRiver will create and play MP3 files, and it’s not particularly expensive nowadays. Apparently some of the newer iRivers are polluted by DRM, I haven’t verified this myself though.

After your talk review the MP3 you made as soon as possible. You will always find mistakes in such a review, don’t be concerned about minor ones (everyone makes small mistakes when on a podium, unless you are famous enough to get media interest a few small slips don’t matter). If you make a significant mistake or if you were unable to answer some questions then you can send email or make a blog post about it later. You probably won’t remember most of what happens during your talk so your recording is the only way to follow up on questions (if you tell someone in the audience to ask you a hard question via email they won’t do it).

Summarise all questions during the Q/A part of the talk. This means that everyone in the audience will know what was asked, and also your recording of the talk will have a copy (usually an iRiver mic doesn’t cover the audience).

Before giving a talk learn as much about the audience as possible, and feel free to ask for advice from people who know something about the audience and people who are experts on the topic. The most important thing to learn is the expected skill level of the audience including the range of skills. Often when giving a talk about a technical topic it’s impossible to make all people in the audience happy. You will have a choice between making things too simple and boring the most experienced people or explaining the technical details and having the less experienced people be unable to understand. Sometimes due to the combination of topic and audience you will get 10% of the audience walk out regardless of which choice you make. You can’t please everyone.

Caffeine can help you stay alert enough for a talk. In email and even in IRC there is time to stop and think. When giving a lecture to an audience answers are expected immediately. In the space of about 5 seconds you want to compose an answer for any question that gets thrown at you or determine that it’s something that needs more consideration and has to be answered via email.

One of the problems you face when giving a talk is going through the material too quickly because of being nervous. If you feel that happening to you then drinking some water or your favourite fizzy drink is a socially acceptable way of taking a few seconds to compose yourself. Asking for questions from the audience is another way of getting a talk back on track if you have started going through the material too fast. Also if you are in the audience and observe this happening then try and interject some questions to get things back on track, it doesn’t matter what the questions are, ask lame questions if necessary, anything to stop the talk from finishing too soon. I was once in the audience for a talk that was scheduled for 60 minutes and ended up taking about 5, it finished before I could even think of a question to ask. :(

I find that questions help to estimate how well the audience is following the presentation, and I prefer to take questions during my talk. Some people prefer to give a talk to a silent room and then take questions at the end. I think that preferences in that regard are determined by whether your speaking experience is based in universities that strictly enforce a code of conduct for lectures, or whether your speaking experience is based in LUGs where heckling from the audience is common.

Go to the toilet before giving a talk. Speaking for an audience is stressful and you never know when you might feel more nervous than usual. If consuming a caffeinated drink then you will have even more reason to go to the toilet before the talk. This is not a joke!

Having a copy of your presentation notes on a USB device (preferrably in multiple formats) is handy. It’s also convenient to have the device formatted with the VFAT filesystem. One time I had a lot of hassle from a Linux conference (that I won’t identify) due to the fact that the organizers only used Linux for servers. They wanted to print my lecture notes for all members of the audience and were unable to get a Windows machine to read my ext3 formatted USB device and then had problems with the OpenOffice file.

All my advice in this post is based on personal experience. Don’t feel afraid about public speaking because of these things. Everyone makes mistakes when starting out and even experienced speakers have talks go wrong on occasion. Also keep in mind that a talk which seems to have failed when you are on the podium might get great reviews from the audience. The aim of a technical lecture is to impart information about the technology, you can achieve that aim even if you make some mistakes in the presentation.

PS Please give talks for your local LUG. They need speakers and it’s a good way of gaining speaking experience in a friendly environment. Remember, they heckle you because they like you. ;)

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Speech