This week, spreadsheets hit the news again, when data for a book written by economist Pikkety turned out to contain spreadsheet errors. On this, Daniele Lemire wrote a blog post warning people not to use spreadsheets for serious work. This is useless advice, let me explain why. 1) Only a fool blames their tool Heathcare.gov is built in […]
Why give great presentations at conferences when you can get away with less?
In a few months, I’ll give my previous presentation tutorial at ICSE, but in this post I want to answer the question, why? Why should I read all your stuff about giving a good conference talk, my paper is accepted anyway? I can just copy-paste the outline and graphs from my paper and prepare in 10 minutes, […]
Open letter to NWO
Background NWO is the Dutch funding agency, comparable to the NSF in the US. One of their funding categories is the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. This scheme consists of three grants for creative talented researchers, called veni, vidi and vici, for researchers 3, 5 and 10 years away from their getting their PhD. These three grants are […]
The role of Social Media Chair
Several people have asked me about some advice on how to be a social media chair at a conference, as I have filled this position at ICSE, ICSM and WCRE this year. Instead of emailing those people, I have promised them all a blog post, so here goes What is a social media chair anyway? A […]
Presentation techniques – Overview
Recently, I gave a tutorial on presentation techniques at the SNT institute in Luxembourg City. The material for this tutorial is organized in three themes: structure, story and support. The three themes I will detail each of these topics in a separate blog post later, but for now, I’ll detail the general idea of the tutorial. Structure […]
