Just gave a talk

I just gave a talk in Milan. Actually I was sitting at my desk, it was a g+ hangout which was a bit more convenient for me. The audience was a bunch of astronomers so I figured they could handle a satellite link. . . .

Anyway, the talk didn’t go so well. Two reasons: first, it’s just hard to get the connection with the audience without being able to see their faces. Next time I think I’ll try to get several people in the audience to open up their laptops and connect to the hangout, so that I can see a mosaic of faces instead of just a single image from the front of the room.

The second problem with the talk was the topic. I asked the people who invited me to choose a topic, and they picked Can we use Bayesian methods to resolve the current crisis of statistically-significant research findings that don’t hold up? But I don’t think this was right for this audience. I think that it would’ve been better to give them the Stan talk or the little data talk or the statistical graphics talk.

The moral of the story: I can solicit people’s input on what to speak on, but ultimately the choice is my responsibility.

3 thoughts on “Just gave a talk

  1. FWIW, I would have preferred to hear the Stan talk more than anything else. As someone working in astro-statistics, primarily with open-source python code, am always on the hunt for new tools for parameter estimation and posterior prediction problems. Though I can see the appeal of a talk on “the crisis of hypothesis testing” when research groups putting out papers like http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.6703, which claims a 40-sigma “statistical preference” for a more complicated model for gamma-rays from the galactic center.

    Did the group give any reason for their selected topic? Would be curious if there was one.

  2. Pingback: Webinaring Bayes | theoretical ecology

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