Presentations

I have been a busy little beaver. I have made a number of presentations this year.

1. Presented Why-R? to the Department of Health SAS Users Group . . . and survived!
2. Presented a Titanic Introduction to R to a group of SUNY Comp-Sci majors.
3. Presented a Introduction to Git for Research Scientists at DOH.
4. Presented my first SQL Survival Guide presentation to a group of co-workers.
5. Presented an improved version of Why-R to the Albany Chapter of the American Statistics Association.

I think that qualifies as rather busy! #1 and #4 were mostly the same presentation. I re-ordered/re-thought a few things for the second presentation, but the basic premise was unchanged. It was very well received by the SAS Users Group. I was actually surprised. I was expecting tomatoes! I don’t thini the ASA was as impressed. Perhaps it was the audience. Maybe it was me. Dunno.

The Titanic Introduction to R was a bit of a flop. I had wanted the “presentation” to be a workshop. To do this, I had published instructions for students to bring laptops setup with R and a few useful packages.

One student showed up with a pre-configured laptop. The other 10, just wanted to listen. So much for that plan. I was disapointed, but that’s life. I used my slides as a presentation. Wasn’t as interesting, but there’s not much I can do about that. I am going to rewrite that presentation into something for the Department of Health. Perhaps I’ll work on it this weekend. Probably need to move it from HTML to Beamer, to be more compliant with DOH capabilities . . . which are ridiculously limited.

The Intro to Git was a complete disaster. I was sick as a dog. So sick that I went home early after I was done presenting and didn’t come back until the next week. More to the point, the presentation didn’t go over well. DOH security prevented me from accessing GitLab, which meant I could not really demonstrate anything.

FAIL!

We recorded the presentation. In the middle of me talking, the computer started talking. Apparently we were doing more than Cisco can handle. Funny, but disruptive to have to deal with the recording software, which I am not very familiar with, in the middle of a presentation.

Fortunately, my SQL Survival Guide (part 4) and Why-R at the ASA went better than Git. My co-workers told me that the SQL presentation was great. I thought it was a little dry, but people repeatedly told me they learned a lot, which is good.

I’ve already discussed my presentation at the ASA. Nice group of people, although it is an older group. I’m not sure how many of them are still really practicing applied research/statistics. Dunno. Good presentation practice though.

Busy Little Beaver!