A Lean Month for Blogging

Until I meet a few deadlines, this will be a lean month for personal blogging.

I'm hitting the road for the ARRS meeting next week, followed by a few days of visiting professorships around the country. This means putting 7 new lectures together over the next 2 weeks.

Good thing I enjoy show biz...

Tomographic View of Every Single Presidential Inaugural Address

Again, hats off to the New York Times, who posted yet another great interactive graphic. This one allows you to scroll through every U. S. presidential inaugural address since George Washington and see the most-used words in that speech.

This view of these speeches gives me the same feeling I get when I "slice" up a patient with CT or MR, and take a real-time stroll through their body from different angles. This Times chart gives a fascinating overview of the events of the times faced by each president, as echoed in their address. It also lets one to instantly dive down into the context of a given speech to see how a particular word was used.

For example, the word "women" was used more than twice in only 4 of the inaugural addresses in the past 100 years: by presidents Wilson, FDR, Bush-1 and Obama.

Wilson, FDR and Obama used the word respectively 4, 3 and 4 times, and then only in the context of the phrase "men and women". Bush-1 used "women" four times, and is the only president to have singled out the word "women" twice:

...There are young women to be helped who are about to become mothers of children they can't care for and might not love.

... who will throw a salute by himself when the flag goes by, and the women who will tell her sons the words of the battle hymns.

It must have taken the graphics gremlins at the Times a ton of time to create this Flash-based graphic. However, it seems like the process should lend itself to automation.

I'd love to have a generalized software tool that would allow me to grab multiple text and images sources and create an instant interactive concordance like this excellent Times graphic. Such a program could be an amazing tool for education. Any developers listening out there?

RSNA Survival Kit No. 6

I'm flying off to the RSNA meeting in 2 days. Besides the usual clothes and anti-boredom gear, I'll be taking along the two presentations I'll be giving there.

After working like a slave on these presentations for the past two months, I'm taking extra measures to insure that they make it safely to Chicago with me. This is a whole lot easier than it was in the days of academic yore, when 35 mm slides ruled the earth.

I'll be putting digital backups of each talk on my laptop, several USB memory sticks, a university SFTP server and in my shiny new Dropbox account. To my computer, Dropbox looks like a 2 GB memory stick, but resides out somewhere in Amazon's S3 server cloud. The clever gnomes at Dropbox have created versions for Mac, Windows and Linux that all work the same way.

I've been storing stuff in clouds (servers) of my own for many years, so this is no new concept for me. What is new is the extreme ease of use and the deep intelligence that the Dropbox dudes have rolled into their product.

Since I'm a radiologist, I'll use a visual metaphor. Suppose you want to make a cup of coffee:

Alas, most network storage solutions look like this:


You know you want a cup of coffee, but how the hell do you get this thing to make it?

By contrast, Dropbox works like this:

The other thing I like about Dropbox is the several intelligent things it does to quietly keep me from fubaring my files. I can't improve on Rands' well-written account of this: Dumbing Down the Cloud.

(via Daring Fireball)

RSNA Looms

The giant, annual intergalactic conclave of radiologists known as the RSNA moves relentlessly towards us. This juggernaut transpires November 30 - December 5, and I have to go.

Every year after Thanksgiving, hapless planetary radiologists fly off to Chicago to spend a week wandering around an overpacked convention center, sweating in overheated buses, and eating overpriced food. Then there's the weather -- even the Chicago tourist board can't say much good about this time of year there. Good times.

Then, there are the technical exhibits. These last two words don't well convey the huge radiology bazaar that unfolds in McCormick Center. Imagine a double-sized warehouse store, packed with imaging gear and populated by the denizens of a Star Wars bar. These alien creatures will dress in three piece suits and lie in wait on every aisle, all ready to buy your soul. Looking for bargains? Guess again. This is medical equipment, so think CostMo, not CostCo. First-timers tips: read this book, know your escape routes, don't make eye contact and keep moving.

On the plus side, it will be a chance to see a lot of old friends, learn what's new in my field, and visit some of the great Chicago museums and restaurants.

I'm giving two RSNA presentations this year, which explains much of my silent running on this blog for this month. In preparing these talks, I am handicapped by wanting to do a really good job. Sadly, greatness requires a lot more work than mere competence, so I've been focused pretty intently for the past few weeks. However, a little work-avoidance behavior is good for the soul. I've therefore resurfaced briefly for a few posts, and then it's back to the PowerPoint mill for me.

Two Minute Presentation Workshop

The UBC Terry Project has a swell idea: bring 8 of UBC's most fascinating and engaging students together for a day, where they can give the talk of their lives to 350 of their peers.

If this sounds familiar, it's because the conference is intentionally modeled on the wonderful TED conferences. Unlike TED, you don't have to be a Nobel laureate, write a best-seller or cure cancer -- you just have to be a UBC student willing to go for it.

Even for us non-UBCers, the following short (1:49) promo video from the Terry Project provides a great presentation workshop all by itself on Things to Avoid When Speaking Publicly.



(via Pharyngula)

Grand Rounds - Vol 4, No. 50

This week's edition of Grand Rounds just went online, hosted this week by Laurie at her blog: A Chronic Dose.

My addition to this carnival bridges two of my favorite worlds: medicine and music.  

As an ivory tower radiologist, I give and receive a lot of presentations. Over the years, I've really learned to really, really hate presentations that suck.  

My post on Jazz and the Art of Medical Presentations shares some of the things I've learned from the jazz world on how to avoid presentation suckage in my own talks.

Jazz and the Art of Medical Presentations

As an ivory tower radiologist, I give and receive a lot of presentations. Over the years, I've really learned to really, really hate presentations that suck. For inspiration and tips on how to avoid presentation suckage myself, I frequently visit Garr Reynolds' excellent Presentation Zen site. Being a musician myself, I found his posting on Jazz and the Art of Connecting particularly interesting. In this post, Reynolds (who paid his way through college playing jazz) shares quotes from jazz greats that are relevant to non-musical presentations. Here's one:

Dizzy Gillespie: It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Amen. I'm frequently asked to cram way too much information into way too little time, e.g. 4 years of radiology residency into a 75 minute talk. Instead, I spend the time giving my audience a handful of concepts that they can then apply to many different situations.

Leonard Bernstein, on making jazz interesting:

In his book, The Joy of Music, Bernstein maintains that predictability is a key to making jazz interesting. Consider these two extremes:

1. if the audience can predict every note that you're going to play, it will be boring.

2. if they can't predict a single note, it will also be boring because the music now appears completely random.

A good lecture avoids these extremes. We've all seen way too many lectures read verbatim from a stack of PowerPoint bullet-point slides. (Tip: learn how to set off your own pager to help escape this special circle of PowerPoint hell.)

Handouts can be a similar pitfall if they follow the lecture too closely. Most performers instinctively avoid this like the plague. As a musician, I've learned to love the limelight, and am loath to share any of it with any handout -- even one of the excellent ones I create. My personal tactic is to put my handout on the web, and give the audience a URL to download it at the end of my talk.

Sign on wall in Preservation Hall, New Orleans jazz club:

• Traditional request: $2
  
• Others: $5
  
• The Saints: $10

It's easy to overdo even a great tune. I know how this feels -- at some meetings, I'm asked give the same freaking presentation to 9 different audiences. Viewing this as a jazz gig helps to keep me from going nuts. Even though I play the same tune (i.e same concepts and slide set) for each group, I do my best to customize the talk for each group in real-time, based on audience interaction.

Customizing a talk on the fly can be challenging, especially with large groups. Therefore, I use straw polls and audience response systems (ARS) as often as I can. For non-threatening questions, I use the flesh histogram technique, i.e. have them raise their hands. For other questions, I use the ARS, and their replies are summarized anonymously on-screen in a large graph. I find these graphs to be a great diagnostic tool for gauging their comprehension of a topic. Rather than rolling along monolithically through a slide set, I can add or subtract riffs until the ARS shows me that the audience understands a concept.

Charlie Parker: Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.

It took me a while to learn to speak at large radiology meetings with an unclenched sphincter. The key, as usual, was lots and lots of practice. In this respect, music gave me a huge advantage over fellow faculty. Weekly musical gigs quickly gave me an order of magnitude more experience working in front of crowds. It has also helped me to practice many different variations of a tune, a talk or a topic. Once you've done that, the appropriate notes or words seem to pop out just when you need them on stage. At that point, as Bird said, you really can forget all that bullshit and just play.

A Tale of Two Brains

One of my lifelong quests is to learn to give presentations that don't suck.

One tactic in this quest is to learn from people who give exceptional talks. A great source for awesome presentations is the TED conference, which hosts the best speakers in the world and shares them on the web.

In the following TED video, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor gives a play by play account of her own stroke. There's a lot to learn here. Her insights from this devastating event are quite compelling. Equally compelling are the techniques she uses to tell this gripping tale of two brains.

One-Buttock Playing

I have always been a big fan of buttocks and of musical performances. However, their intersection had not occurred to me until I heard the following TED talk by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander.

Zander's "one-buttock" metaphor is something I'll try hard to remember during my next musical gig or medical lecture.



(via Presentation Zen)