Are you better than a Coin Toss?

This evening I went along to SkillsMatter to watch Richard Warbuton and John Oliver give their talk "Are you better than a Coin Toss?"

FEEDBACK

• Having a backup for the presentation platform (i.e. second laptop/iPad) is tantamount!
• Test your presentation beforehand! Fail fast!
• Keep water to hand, fizzy drinks don't help.
• Always good to adapt (i.e. basic introduction to buy boot up time)
• Er's & Um's distracting
• Use a pause before speaking to build confidence and removes need to think mid-flow.
• This goes away with practice
• Great to use examples away from the core field (like Moneyball)
• Generally great to illustrate points with concrete examples
• Beware of standing in front of the slides and blocking them!
• Try to speak slowly, looking for cues that your audience has understood you.
• Great to have humour intermixed into the presentation!
• Good to reaffirm each others points.
• P-value diagram didn't really help to illustrate the point to those who don't know about it, try something more universal? Dartboard with % probabilities of hit area?
• Beware naming things part 1, 2, 3… because it can lead to "we are only on part 2?!" syndrome
• Avoid reading off slides directly
• You say what you need to, the slide should only illustrate your point
• Throughout it felt like a few different slides or an animation could have better illustrated the point
• On the clustering slide, show actual clusters and why they are good/bad
• On the elbow slide, show a few elbows and highlight your point
• Good example is the over/underfitting, the pictures made the point perfectly!

FEELINGS

• Producing useful data analytics is really hard.
• Using hard data analysis techniques is better than using subjective expert opinions.
• Science FTW!!!
• Without concrete and unbiased measurements, algorithms may be not better than randomness.
• Holy cow how much work does jClarity do with their mad polygot skills!?