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发信人: kuangshui ((▄︻┻┳═一)), 信区: Postgraduate
标题: How to Build an Economic Model in Spare Time 8
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Sat Mar 25 23:11:09 2006), 站内

8. Giving a seminar

After you've bored your friends, relatives and pets to death, you should
give seminar. This is a really important phase: the more you can talk about
your work, the better the final paper will be. This is because a talk forces
you to get to the point. If you want your audience to listen to you, you've
got to make your idea clear, concise, and organized-and the experience
that you gain by doing this is extremely useful for writing your paper.
I listen to a lot of stupid ideas---but that's what I'm paid to do. Lots of
people listen to stupid ideas from me, too: my colleagues get paid to do it,
and the students get examined on it. But most people don't have to listen
to you. They don't have to read your paper. They won't even have to glance
at the abstract unless they have a reason to.

This comes as a big shock to most graduate students. They think that just
because they've put a lot of work and a lot of thought into their paper that
the rest of the world is obliged to pay attention to them. Alas, it isn't so.
Herb Simon once said that the fundamental scarcity in the modern world

was scarcity of attention---and brother, is that the truth. There are demands
for everybody's attention, and if you want someone to pay attention to you,
you have to give them a reason to do so. A seminar is a way to get them to
pay attention, so be sure to exploit this opportunity to get people to listen
to you. The useful thing about a seminar is that you get immediate feedback
from the audience. An audience won't put up with a lot of the things that
authors try to write in papers:
turgid prose, complex notation, and tedious details. And, believe it or not,
readers won't put up with these things either! The trick is to use the seminar

to get all those things out of your paper---that way, it may actually get
read.

Controlling the audience
I've seen it claimed that one of the greatest fears that most people have is
speaking before a group. I imagine that most assistant professors have this
problem, but after many years of giving lectures before several hundred
students it goes away.

In fact, lecturing can become downright addictive (as my family often
reminds me.) As the mathematician R. H. Bing once said: ``When I was
young, I would rather give a lecture on mathematics than listen to one.
Now that I am older and more mature I would rather give two lectures

on mathematics than listen to one.'' Giving lectures is a bit like eating
oysters. Your first one requires some courage, but after you develop a taste
for them, it can be hard to stop.

There are three parts to a seminar: the introduction, the content, and the
conclusion. My advice about introductions is simple: don't have one. I
have seen many seminars ruined by long, pretentious, contentless
introductions.

My advise: say a few sentences about the big picture and then get down to
business: show them what you've got and why it's important. The primary
reason to get down to business right away is that your audience will only
remember about twenty minutes of your talk---and that is usually the first
twenty minutes. So make sure that you get some useful information into that
first twenty minutes.

As for conclusions, the most common problem is letting the seminar trail
off into silence. This can ruin a good talk. I always like to spend the last
couple of minutes summarizing what I accomplished and why the audience
should care. After all, this is what they will walk away with, so you might
as well tell them what they should remember rather than make them figure
this out for themselves.

Nowadays everyone seems to use overheads for their lectures. The downside
of this is that the seminar isn't very spontaneous---but the upside is that
the seminar is usually better organized. My advice is to limit yourself to
one or two slides for a introduction and one for a conclusion. That way you
will be forced to get to your contribution sooner rather than later. And
make your overheads big; use large type and don't try to say too much
on each one.

There are two things to avoid in your presentation: don't let your audience

go to sleep, and don't let them get too lively. You want the audience
to hear what you have to say. They won't hear your message if they are
sleeping, and they won't hear your message if they are talking more than you
are. So don't loose control of your seminar!

The key to maintaining control is to establish credibility early on. The way
to do is to go into great detail in the presentation of your first result
---a theorem, a regression, a diagram, whatever. Spell out each aspect of
your result in excruciating detail so no one can possibly misunderstand.
When you do this you will certainly get questions like ``Will this
generalize to n agents?'' or ``Have you corrected for heteroskedasticity?''
If you know the answer to the question, go ahead and answer it. If you don't

know the answer---or the questions is totally off the wall---say ``That's
a good question; let me come back to that at the end of the seminar.'' (Of
course you never will.)

Don't get sidetracked: the point of going through the initial result in
great detail is to establish credibility.

Once you've presented your result and you see that the audience has
understood the point---their heads are nodding but not nodding off---you can
go on to the generalizations and elaborations. If you've done a good job
at establishing your credibility initially now the audience will believe
anything you say! Of course you shouldn't abuse this trust, but it is useful
to exploit it in the rest of your presentation.

This is the fundamental reason for starting simple: if you start out with a
delicate argument, it will be hard for the audience to understand and you
will never establish trust. When you are done with your talk you should take
a few minutes to jot down some notes: what was difficult for people
to understand? what questions did they ask? What suggestions did they make?
what references did they give you? You may think that you will remember
these points, but quite often you won't. The audience is a very
useful resource for clarifying your thoughts---make sure you use it well.

--
又一村102

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