Tips and tricks for a good oral presentation by Daniele Penna

 It is self-explanatory, I guess. First minutes are a joke. 

Proietti's lesson to hydrologists

 Below is an excerpt from the memories of Gigi Proietti (the book is from 2013) brought to my attention by the colleague Giovanni Pascuzzi. 

"When I began to take my first steps on stage, I did nothing but devote myself to the technical aspect of acting. Gassman said I was manic. And I thought: "from which pulpit the sermon comes".

Like someone who plays a scale after another maybe even quickly but without putting into it the warmth of invention, "er core" as the jazz musicians in Rome say.

I lacked the humility of those who put themselves at the service of the public, of those who are able to look at themselves with the eyes of another without hiding behind pure technique.

I had to get naked and instead I insisted on excessive virtuosity that covered every exchange, broke all communication. I continued with that attitude until I made my big discovery, the closest thing to an epiphany I have ever experienced: “I am fucking unsympathetic". Excessive technique made me unbearable. Today I notice it when I see some footage of that time.

Too many times, in the cinema world, I had heard myself say: "you are too good" which is different from "You are very good, outstanding". It hides the fact that you are unpleasant. When you overdo it, you get the opposite result: you do not pop on. And getting out of that trap that you  have set for yourself is not easy. You are confused and you ask yourself: "Should I do less?". But for someone who wants to give the best of himself, doing less is very difficult. Even on television the "experts" said I didn’t pop on camera. Then when I did Marshal Rocca they were silent." 

While this has to do with teaching and research ?  Both of them require possessing techniques (the standards, they would say a jazz musician) but you do not have to be possessed by the technique. The technique is a tool not the topic (unless your topic is the technique). 

Math3ma

Since quite a while, I read, enjoyed and indexed in AboutHydrology the Math3ma  ("Mathema") blog by Tai-Danae Bradley. I enjoyed for the choice of the topics that I found stimulating and connected to my own research on hydrological networks and the way the material was presented. She graduated recently and produced one of the best ever non-technical introduction to scientific work I have seen.
I guess that any Ph.D. student should be motivated to produce similar products because the habits to expose their own research in widely understood concepts helps them to focalize what is important in their research and it is simply good for science in any case.

By clicking on the figure, you will be redirected to the you Tube video. The original blog-post is instead here.  The dissertation can be found on arXiv. The topic is generically a reflection on how to connect subsystems and which mathematics ca be useful to this scope. But certainly watching the ten minutes video gives a much better information.