They also come up when discussing ex-relationships with friends. Obvi people dont bust out their mac book pros (unless they also are bedroom djs), but the reason I say these conversations are like power points is that they take something like a 6 month or year long relationship and summarize it in a 3 minute recap. This is usually done by discursively bulleting the pros and cons of said person.

Example:

They were great, they listened to the same music and were a dynamo between sheets

BUT

They were a fucking looney toon and got mad jelly when I was out.

See what I just did? I just took a complex and long relationship and summarized it in no time.

In these power points the cons always outweigh the pros, which is understandable- cause everyone needs to justify why they are no longer together. 

A lot of forgetting happens after a breakup. You need to forget why they were great and why they made you smile. You need to focus on why they were an ass. It is part of the healing process. The powerpoint helps this. You can cut the fat and go right to the sparknotes version of your relationship. Just the facts. 

Some other things I suggest when trying to move on are:

1.) renaming their entry in your phone book. Change it from Jane Doe to "Fucking Cunt" Be creative

2.) Don't listen to alt or pop radio. Way too many songs with feelings. I suggest listening to as much crunk rap as possible. Remember what pleasure is. Remember that you don't give a shit about feelings or immature things like love. 

3.) Read the book "against love."

4.) Stay away from the Encore Love channel...again way too many feelings and way too much Freddie Prinze Jr.

5.) Obvi Remove pictures and other loaded symbols that will make you think about them...for the bad breakups unfriend them on FB.

Summer Got you Bored? Then make up a verbal power point about the person you were most recently affiliated with. What were the pros, what were the cons? What was forgotten?

1. I love my job

2. I get to learn about many things (Probably, if someone closes my eyes i can easily talk about retail - i did do a lot of projects on it)

3. It is knowledge that sells, Knowledge is definitely power.

And i definitely think that market research is here to stay as there are many businesses up coming and the research firms do a lot of homework for them which is definitely reliable!

Yes, dear reader, it's true – I made it all the way through college without seeing more than a handful of lectures delivered via PowerPoint.  I don't know if that seems strange to you.  Looking at the fact that well over 90% of the lectures I have seen in medical and graduate school have been PowerPoint slideshows, it frankly seems a little strange to me.  How did I avoid these terrible things for so long?

It's not like I was in college all that long ago (1999-2003), either.  Back then (I'll tell my kids), lectures came in three basic forms: the basic “lecture,”  in which someone stood in the front of the room and just talked about stuff; the  “chalk talk,” in which the speaker utilized a chalkboard to draw diagrams, equations, write key points, that sort of thing; and “overheads,” which were plastic sheets (either pre-printed or written on in real time) placed on a projector and displayed on a screen.  I guess I also saw a few lectures delivered via actual slides, using a slide projector.  We considered that very “old school” (pun only sort of intended).

It's not like I went to some tiny school out in the stix, either.  My beloved Alma Mater, Indiana University, is consistently rated one of the most “wired” campuses in the country (I was there during the golden age of Napster!  But that's probably a story for another time...).  We had projectors and computers in our classrooms; people just chose not to use them.

“But Peter,” you're probably saying (how do you know my name, by the way?  That's creepy), “as informative and fascinating as this little story has been so far, I don't really see the point.  PowerPoint is a fantastic presentation tool!  Aren't you glad you get to experience it now?”

No.  PowerPoint is probably the worst thing to happen to education since...I don't know, something really bad, like having to wrestle in middle school gym class.  Now, when I say this to people (the thing about hating PowerPoint, not the part about wrestling), they always say the same thing in reply, “But PowerPoint makes preparing lectures so much easier!”  And therein lies the problem.  PowerPoint is a great tool for presenters, not for audiences.  Specifically, as my undergrad research mentor used to say, “PowerPoint is a great tool for [presenters] with no personality.”  It's ridiculously easy to put together a passable PowerPoint slideshow.  Once you make your slideshow, you can then use it for several lectures before you have to whip up a new one!  And it's so reassuring to have everything you're going to say listed out in little bullet points you can read to your audience!  And Remember! four bullets with four words each!  No more!  And use lots of clip art! 

I have seen some fantastic PowerPoint-based lectures.  Some people use the multimedia capabilities to great effect.  Others use the slides solely for displaying images while delivering traditional “walk and talk” lectures.  However, for every effective PowerPoint slideshow I've seen, I've seen several dozen that are beyond awful.  My “favorite” was a lecture I sat through in medical school that consisted of 300 slides (for a one hour talk) titled “Radiology Residents Conference: January 5, 1996.  It was neither January 5, nor was it 1996, and we were decidedly not Radiology residents.  The presenter hit “next slide” until she came to something that looked appropriate for a lecture to a group of medical students, read the bullets, rambled off a few additional remarks, and sped on to the next image that looked promising.  Ugh.  Things aren't usually that bad, but they're not usually that much better, either. 

The master of information design, Edward Tufte, has a wonderful essay addressing the problems with PowerPoint presentations (see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte).  I won't relist his complaints here (they're neatly summarized in the wikipedia article). Instead, I'll add that PowerPoint makes speakers lazy, because people don't like to update their presentations once they are completed; and PowerPoint draws attention away from the gestures and “presence” of an engaging speaker.  Most importantly, PowePoint presentation makes it difficult for a speaker to tailor his presentations to the audience.  The best speakers linger over points that the audience does not understand or seems more interested in and quickly moves through information that the audience is already familiar with or finds of less interest.  This is hard to do in PowerPoint – the slides have all been made already, you can't change them or rearrange them in real time (flipping between them out of order never works very well).

This is all by way of saying that we need to bring back the chalk talk!  Students, for your next presentation, walk in, turn off the computer, and lecture with handouts and a chalk board!  I had a friend who did this in our seminar class and people were absolutely shocked! He actually had to wheel in a chalkboard from another building, as the lecture hall didn't have one (it had a dry erase board, but that is sub-optimal.  The markers are always dried out and the boards are always covered in unerasable marks from previous presentations.  If you want color, use colored chalk!)  Initial resistance (people honestly were a little taken aback) gave way to every subsequent speaker using the chalkboard, generally in combination with figures from papers displayed via PowerPoint.  We've quickly found that some things are best discussed via the chalkboard – diagrams, equations, sketches of graphs – while others work best on the computer projector – mainly high resolution structural images, actual charts and graphs, that sort of thing.  Preparing such a multiformat talk takes a little additional work, but for the audience, it makes an enormous difference.   

Check out Edward Tufte's essay (it's cheap and it's worth having a copy – it's really good), think back to the last really effective PowerPoint presentation you saw (this may be hard), and think about changing things up for your next talk.  Don't use PowerPoint just because it's convenient – use it only if it somehow makes things easier to understand.  Try making some handouts with key information or nice copies of important figures.  Try using the chalkboard.  I bet you'll give a better talk.

This little story ends on a funny note.  We've kept the chalkboard in the seminar course room.  However, after next week, we have to take it back where it came from.  The title of this essay refers to the official request we received.  I will not be attending that conference.

Peter Conrad is an MD/PhD student currently in Mayo Graduate School.  He will introduce himself in a future entry, as he got a little carried away talking about chalkboards in this entry.  His interests include Psychiatry, Receptor Biology, and antiquated presentation tools.  He does not spend all his time railing against PowerPoint.  Honest.  Sometime he talks about interesting stuff too.

If you make great PowerPoints, he probably wasn't talking about you.  You're good people.     

Click HERE
for a Power Point slide presentation on one challenge of Southwest Desert Gardening: snow!

Please be patient as the show loads.

Scott Schwertly Founder of Ethos3 writes:

Below is a tip to keep in mind the next time you start preparing for a presentation.  Trust me; you’ll be considered a nonconformist just by preparing in the right way.

A winning presentation must be well thought, brewed on, and dreamed on.  It takes time.  It takes research.  It takes patience. You can't build a memorable presentation in an instant.  Therefore, it can't be prepared in a microwave.  A great presentation must be built in a crock pot.

All the great thinkers and presenters that have come before us spent meticulous hours crafting their masterpieces.  If you want to create a legacy, you must spend the right amount of time crafting your speech.  Our nanosecond culture, where time is our most precious asset, makes it difficult to prepare accordingly.  However, there is no quick fix.  Practice is the mother of skill.  I can’t emphasize more on the concept that title or knowledge will not save you when public speaking.  Only true preparation creates the confidence that will enable you to succeed.

To learn more about Ethos3, check out their web site at http://www.ethos3.com.

Dan Zellars

TheDailyClassifieds.com

I received this power point presentation yesterday that I want to share with you:How to be happy

I sent it to 2 people at work today, and 1 called me to thank me and another relied to my email to thank me :) Their kind words made me happy.

Happily,

Me :D