Imagery can take us to the frontiers of science - via scissors, generals and sentinels

People sometimes tell me that it's all very well to bang on about the power of using imagery to get messages across (as in 'Painting Pictures with Words', Lend Me Your Ears, Ch. 7 and various other posts on this blog), but that it won't help much if you're speaking about technical subjects, let alone taking an audience to the frontiers of science.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as can be seen in this clip from a TED talk by Professor Peter Donnelly, FRS, telling us about "chemical scissors which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns":


A few days ago BBC Radio 4's Material World (listen again HERE) included a discussion of the contribution made by Professor Ralph Steinman who died just before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology. In this sequence, we're told that T cells act "as the generals of the army" and dendritic cells which "instruct T cells who to attack".

Interviewer Quentin Cooper picks up on "the generals in the army" analogy and suggests that dendritic cells are "almost like military intelligence". "Precisely", agrees the interviewee, before dubbing them as "sentinels for the immune system" and developing the point further...

at 1 comment:

50 years of Private Eye: a story of retail, rejection and recognition

It's supposed to be a sure sign of growing older when you start thinking that police officers and doctors are getting younger. Another is when you realise that more and more significant anniversaries are taking place of events you think of as recent memories.

For me, the latest reminder of this is the news that it's 50 years since the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye was first published.

Not only do I remember it well, but I was also an early salesman and have been a subscriber and (very occasional) contributor ever since.

Retail
Selling the Eye outside university cafeterias was my first serious business venture. Lord Gnome had rightly seen students as a promising source of potential readers and had invited volunteers to join his sales force.

Once a fortnight, all I had to do was to go down to the station and collect my 6o copies of the latest edition, then priced at 1/6d (one shilling and sixpence, or 7.5 pence in new money) - for which I had to pay 1/- (one shilling, or 5 pence in new money) each, leaving a net profit of 30 shillings (£1.50 in new money) per fortnight.

These days, 75 pence a week may sound like a pittance. But when pubs sold a pint of beer for the equivalent of 7.5 pence, it was riches indeed.

Rejection
For years, I tried unsuccessfully to get Private Eye to publish my hilariously funny (?) cartoons, only to be bombarded with rejection slips suggesting that I should send them to Punch magazine (now coming up to the 10th anniversary of its demise in 2002).

I also rather regret that nothing I've written has ever made it into Pseuds' Corner, even though I know that such acclaim can have embarrassing consequences. Someone (and we haven't forgotten who you are) had successfully submitted a sentence from article about conversational turn-taking that one of my best friends had published in a learned journal.

When I told him that I was rather envious because nothing of mine had ever got into Pseuds' Corner, he warned of the dire consequences such recognition can have. It had been published a few days before he was due in Cambridge to serve as external examiner in a PhD viva. As he put it "they already think we're mad enough to be doing conversation analysis in the first place, without being able to rub it in by waving Private Eye at me before the meeting started."

Recognition
It wasn't until the mid-1980s that I finally managed to extract a cheque from Lord Gnome for a photograph that I'd taken of the village sign outside a village in Northamptonshire that bore the legend "Silverstone - please drive slowly."

Even then, it had seemed like another rejection for the many months it failed to appear in the I Spy feature, making me grumpier by the fortnight. Then, to give them their due, it turned out that they hadn't binned it after all, but had merely been waiting, with the journalistic flair we expect from Private Eye, to publish it the week before that year's British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

More recently, the Eye published another photograph I'd taken of a fly-posted planning notice from Mendip District Council - at a time when they were wasting unspecified amounts of council-tax payers' money on a campaign against fly-posting notices of forthcoming village events on 'items of street furniture', i.e. MDC jobsworthy jargon for telephone and electricity posts... (continued on p. 94).

Listen again: Lord Gnome aged 49 and 3 quarters - Michael Crick, BBC Radio 4 (8th October - for another 6 days).
at 1 comment:

The End of Summer - with thanks to Steve Jobs & Flipron


At this time last year, I posted a video clip of audiences clapping out the conference season (HERE).

This year, I've produced a compilation of members of a conference audience listening in rapt attention (?) with musical backing from Flipron's The End of Summer (from their album Biscuits for Cerberus). Much admired for Jesse Budd's lyrics and Joe Atkinson's brilliance on the keyboards, this particular sequence neatly catches a suitable mood for marking the end of the party conference season.

And thanks to Steve Jobs - without whom...
When I bought my first computer in 1985, I came very close to buying an Apple Macintosh but chickened out and bought an Apricot (with two slots for 750K floppy disks).

About twenty years later, while staying with John Heritage in Los Angeles, I found myself being marched into the student shop at UCLA, where he made me buy my first MacBook.

Since then, I quickly upgraded to a MacBook Pro, have acquired a desktop MacPro and have been using an iPhone since the first week of its launch in the UK.

To expand on all the many virtues of being liberated from the familiar nightmares of using a Windows computer would be to risk a very long and boring blogpost. So suffice it to say that the incredible reliability and ease of using the iMovie program that's built into Macs has saved me thousands of hours in preparing demo clips both for lectures and courses and for posting as examples on this blog.

For example, preparing this particular movie - including retrieval of the music, selecting and editing the clips and aligning them with the backing - took less than half an hour.

And, as if that's not enough to be grateful to Steve Jobs for, he also stood out among CEOs as an extremely effective presenter from whom there was much that other business leaders could and should learn.

More from Steve Jobs:
at No comments:

Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap

A couple of years ago, I posted some video clips showing how Margaret Thatcher's speech-making became less effective when she stopped using hard copy scripts and started reading speeches from teleprompter screens (HERE).

A few months later, I realised that I'd been mistaken in thinking that David Cameron was having problems reading from screens - as it turned out that he wasn't using an Autocue or any other form of teleprompter at that time (HERE).

Cameron follows Thatcher down the same hill
But yesterday Mr Cameron had not only taken to using a teleprompter for his leader's speech, but was also encountering the same kinds of difficulties that diminished Mrs Thatcher's effectiveness all those years ago.

When using a script on a lectern, she would return her eyes to the text, clear her throat and close her mouth after making an applaudable point, leaving no one in any doubt that the time had come for them to get their hands apart. But, when reading from teleprompter screens, her head stayed up gazing into space, with the result that her applause rate fell dramatically (video examples HERE)

And there were some rather long sections in Mr Cameron's speech yesterday where the lack of applause was noticeably absent

Here you can see see two examples of him falling into the same trap as Mrs Thatcher . In both cases, he sets up what's coming as an applaudable point. But in both cases, nothing happens for so long (2-3 seconds) that he's already carried on again by the time it finally does - at which point he has to break off.

Also in both cases he seems to acknowledge the glitch with a slight nod, indicating, perhaps: "yes, it is your turn and you should jolly well have started a bit sooner than that"?.


Given that Cameron is more effective than most of his contemporaries at speaking from scripts on a lectern, I'd advise him to ditch the teleprompter forthwith.

Or, if his aides have cooked up some reason that's convinced him it's a good idea, they should also convince him that he's going to need a lot more practice if he's to get anywhere near his effectiveness with old-fashioned scripts (or, for that matter, with no script at all, as in the 10 minute speech that clinched the leadership for him at the beauty parade in 2005).

at 2 comments:

Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission


Preparing for speechwriting course in Brussels this week, I thought it would be nice to include an example of a 'local' using some of the main rhetorical techniques in one of my demo tapes.

Such are the wonders of YouTube that it took less than a minute to find this little gem from the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, which had been singled out for replaying in a news report on his 'state of the union' speech:

REPORTER: He said Europe has to move forward towards matching its monetary union with a real economic union among its member states:

PUZZLE: This is Europe's moment of truth.

SOLUTION: Europe must show that its more than 37 different national solutions.

CONTRAST (with swimming metaphor + alliteration): We either swim together or sink separately.

Not surprisingly, this selection of key rhetorical techniques worked well enough for it to be singled out by the media as a sound bite - but it didn't impress everyone.

Guess who doesn't want to be seen clapping
British readers may be interested to see that, of the five MEPs shown just before Mr Barroso starts speaking, the only one who doesn't join in with the applause is none other than Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party).

Whether or not you're one of his supporters or opponents, it has to be admitted that his behaviour here is admirably consistent with his long-standing antipathy towards the EU.
at No comments:

Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than they were a year ago








A recurring observation on this blog during last year's party conference season was that audiences at the Liberal Democrat and Conservative party conferences were rather lukewarm about the coalition government they had just formed (see below). This was indicated by the fact that applause for mentions of it tended to be either delayed or failed to reach the 'normal' 8 seconds burst (or both) - e.g. HERE and HERE.

But in George Osborne's speech earlier today, there was evidence of a greater willingness among Conservative party activists to show their approval of the coalition than they were at this time a year ago.

When the Chancellor commended the Liberal Democrats for "working as a coalition together in the national interest" (about 30 seconds into the above clip) the audience not only started clapping more or less straight away, but they also managed to keep it going for a healthy 10 seconds.

P.S. Blimey!
Since posting the above, I've just discovered that the whole speech can now be embedded from the BBC website - so serious anoraks can now watch it from beginning to end:









Conference season 2011 blogging update:
Last year's conference season posts:
at No comments:

The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation and the ladder (speech) that had saved it



The Frost-Nixon interview as the ultimate snake
Was it, I wonder, pure coincidence that BBC2's schedule last night included some archive footage of the original Frost-Nixon interview (including the above), followed by the film version of the events surrounding and leading up to it?

After all, the party conference season, with its mix of extended interviews with politicians, very short clips from their speeches and much longer clips from media commentators telling us what they're talking about, has yet to grind to a close.

From my point of view, having started the season by asking why our politicians are so willing to play snakes and ladders under media rules that give them little chance of landing on anything but a snake (HERE), the chance to see the Frost-Nixon film could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.

Here was a disgraced American president who thought himself smart enough to run rings around a talk-show host and salvage his reputation - only to be lured into landing on about as damaging a snake as David Frost and his media colleagues could ever have dreamt of.

The Checkers speech as the ladder that saved his career
A quarter of a century earlier, claims that vice-presidential candidate Nixon might have misappropriated campaign funds almost forced his withdrawal as President Eisenhower's running mate.

What saved him was not an interview, but the carefully crafted 'Checkers speech' (still ranked as the 6th greatest political speech on the American Rhetoric website).

Interestingly, both the name it became known by and much of its powerful impact derived from a simple anecdote about his children and a little cocker spaniel dog.

I think our current politicians could do worse than to watch both - and reflect on what a single interview and a single speech did for Nixon's political reputation.

Were they to do so, they might think again about what, if anything, they are gaining from their tacit collusion with broadcasters about the relative merits of interviews and speeches as alternative ways of communicating their messages (and conveying positive/negative images of themselves) to a wider public.

(You may have to put up with a 15 seconds commercial before this starts).




at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)