Comments | dr_bob: Almost Famous

dr_bob

Almost Famous

Feb 25, 2006 11:10

I had a first in my academic life yesterday. One of the lecturers at the mini-conference I was at looked at my badge, and asked 'Do I recognise your name?'. I shrugged but turns out he'd read a paper with my name on it. And remembered the name. He then made a half hearted attempt to find out if I wanted a postdoc position in Manchester. It's nice ( Read more... )

Comments 8

purplecthulhu February 25 2006, 12:17:20 UTC

Make sure you mention evolution in your talk... You might also want to try to see how many are creationists first. There were some scary statistics out recently!

dr_bob February 26 2006, 10:18:57 UTC

I've been specifically warned against this, as it's a Roman Catholic school. Not by the school but by the Imperial person organising the visit. Specifically she said to avoid getting drawn into ethical arguments with the kids. Which is tough when the subject is GM crops. I guess I'll see how it goes....

purplecthulhu February 26 2006, 10:24:03 UTC

Interesting... I would have thought getting into those discussions could be a very good way of engaging the kids and getting them to think. It would have to be done the right way of course...

Who at Imperial is arranging this?

dr_bob February 27 2006, 11:55:26 UTC

At the moment it's run by the 'INSPIRE' co-ordinator (INSPIRE is a project funding a 3 year joint research and teacher training programme for postdocs). But I believe that the schools liason office will then be taking over to offer postdocs opportunities to visit schools, and offer schools a chance to ask scientists to visit.

And I agree that an ethical discussion would probably be rewarding for the kids. But they are apparently masters at subverting such things.

bateleur February 26 2006, 17:49:56 UTC

Very cool to be recognised - at the start of the anecdote I was going to guess he'd mistaken you for your dad !

dr_bob February 27 2006, 11:57:08 UTC

Fortunately we work in sufficiently different fields that it's unlikely. And our surname is common, so people are unlikely to even guess we're related. Unless I ditch the excessive hair, I suppose.

undyingking February 27 2006, 09:45:45 UTC

For a start, they don't display as animated in the normal working views, only in slideshow view. Also they don't animate in the standalone Powerpoint Viewer, I think. Also I think they only work at all in versions more recent than 2000. And also again, different versions of Powerpoint interpret the animation's loop parameter differently, which sometimes ends up with an unexpected zero loop.

Apart from that it's straightforward ;-)

You might like to think about converting them to AVI before embedding them -- there are free converters, and that's a lot better supported by Powerpoint...

dr_bob February 27 2006, 11:58:49 UTC

Actually, I tried at home, and it seemed to work, although the animation was too slow and jerky. Maybe a result of a slow pooter. But I may try the avi conversion. Cheers!