GLBIO 2012 Wrap-Up: I am not Tony Stark

Science conferences as I want them to be.

GLBIO 2012 has come and gone. I came, I ate the food my registration fees paid for, I presented. In case you're curious, the slides and relevant materials I presented are here.

And here is what I learned:

Tutorials need to go easy on figures and formulas. Audience retention was terrible in the tutorials I witnessed, and I suspect part of it was due to presenters translating a paper to Powerpoint too literally. Bioinformatics is a very broad discipline; it's likely that the only person in the audience that understands enough about your paper to follow a presentation on it is you.

Your presentation needs a punchline. Mine, sadly, didn't have one. I spent an hour discussing the ins and outs of a visualization workflow, only to have my example of that workflow... not be spectacular. Not that I think I needed a pyrotechnics display, but having a definite conclusion instead of just stopping dead and thanking your sponsors would have been the icing on the cake.

Pictured: Not the end of my tutorial.

Be open to criticism. I swear some people go to presentations just to be assholes. There's nothing worse than listening to two eggheads prattle on about the third variable someone chose in part 4 of their 18 part analysis for ten minutes. However, sometimes criticism comes from a place of shared interest, which means you meet the coolest people by listening to what they have to say.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

In less than a week, I'll be journeying to Ann Arbor for GLBIO to run a tutorial on graph visualization for biologists.

Right now, this is Slide 1:

I may have to dial down the haranguing I had originally intended to occupy 119 of my presentation's 120 minutes. It's not like biologists are dangerous, even in large numbers, but exposing them to my rants about data representation and standardization might drive them back into the wet-lab and away from the computer desk.

The Anthropocene

Here's a fantastic example of visualization done right. This video does some panning and dancing (plus the obligatory "we stand at the edge of a new era" speech) around a very well done map of earth's urban centers and transport networks.

More views, and the sources that were used to generate them are available via Globaia here.

Hat tip: TechEBlog