TALKS AND PRESENTATIONS

During the course of my life (boy, that sounds a bit pompous. Maybe I am. Pompous, that is. I firmly believe that I am. I'm not so sure that I believe you are, but I guess that's more of a philosophical question. I'm fairly happy as long as the counter on my main page increments when you load it.) I've presented a fair number of talks. Some of them relate to academic or technical topics, others are more general speeches or presentations.

I enjoy giving them, and fancy myself fairly good at it. On the other hand, I also like to write a speech and see someone else succeed with it. Back in high school I was involved in JCL, the Junior Classical League. At the annual Georgia convention we held elections for state office. During my junior year I was state parliamentarian, but knew that I was leaving for university and thus wasn't running for a higher office. On the other hand, my chemistry lab partner, Erin Burke (now White), was. So during lab one day we set about writing her speech. It was pretty good, and had a cliched punch line about a team needing a captain and so on and so forth. Needless to say, Erin won the election (although she probably would have won even with a crap speech, so I'm not claiming any credit. Well, much credit.). Two years later I was back at the convention, this time as a chaperone. One of the candidates, was Joslyn Diramio, a friend and protege, so to speak, of Erin. She was a charmer, and was well on her way to winning, even before the speeches. But since we were from the same school, and chaperones should be supportive, and I like politics at any level, I went to hear her speech. The funny thing was, I knew it! She gave the same exact speech that I had helped write two years earlier and that Erin had won an election with. I'm sure not many people noticed, but I was a bit bemused. And a tad flattered.

In any case, here are a few of the talks I have online. Unfortunately, I don't have that twice successful JCL election speech.

• Sometime in the 1994-95 academic year I gave a talk during the Ethnic Diversity week at Tulane University. I was representing the Hillel Student Activities Board, as we were officially know at that time, and spoke on Jewish Responses to the Crisis in Bosnia. What I have online are my notes for that talk. Unfortunately, all of the articles and documents that I quoted from have been lost, and I don't even have citations from them. They may exist in some file either in my attic or in the Hillel Center at Tulane, but I doubt it.
  • speech notes
• The next year I participated in the computer science senior seminar and we focused on ethical issues in CS. My talk dealt with the Therac-25 incidents, in which several people were killed because of defective systems (although even phrasing it that way incites arguments -- the systems did just what they were told to do, at some level). These notes are quite sketchy, because they were accompanied by slides and hand written details.
  • seminar notes
• Later in the 1995-96 academic year I was asked to deliver the student address at the honors banquet. It may have been because I had received a Marshall Scholarship, or it may have been because... No, that was probably it. There was a bit of a controversy raging in the Tulane community about a recent budget/organisation plan called Tulane2000. As a result of the plan, several departments were cut, funding for others was slashed, and, of course, funding for some was increased a tad. My talk was going to make reference to that, and that's what these notes are for. But that's not the speech I delivered, as you can read from the top of the talk. No matter -- these notes are the entirety of my undelivered talk.
  • honors speech
• Once at Edinburgh, I eventually summoned the courage to give a talk at a LabLunch. These are supposed to be informal talks of 20 minutes or so, not too technical, and on a topic that at least the speaker is interested in. I met the last objective! The talk was about the C++ Standard Template Library, or the STL. The notes are pretty large, because they contain both the slides that I presented and the notes I used to comment on the slides. I wound up skipping many of the slides to save time. There's a bibliography in the notes, but below are some links to other sites for more details.
  • My notes in PS and DVI
  • A Byte article from October 1995
  • STL Programmer's Guide from SGI
  • Mumit's STL Newbie guide
  • This should be enough, but there are many more links in my bookmarks file.
• I gave another Lablunch talk on 7 April 1998. This one was to broach the idea of LFCS participating in the Macmillan Cancer Relief fund raiser know as Macmillan Miles. As promised, I stopped talking in ten minutes (almost) and then facilitated (kind of) a discussion.
  • The abstract for the talk.
  • My notes in PS and DVI