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What does a sequester look like?
As the U.S. heads towards budget sequestration, it dawned on me that we didn’t have an image of what that silly critter looked like. I created one starting from an 1887 Puck cartoon which originally...
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Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl?
On February 19th Laura Bergells blogged about What no one will tell you: your voice is distracting. She described a presentation where a woman speaker had a high, squeaky “Betty Boop” voice. Her...
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I read it in a book, so it must be true
What possibly could be worse than using a quote that is two-decades old, and now is a tired cliche? How about getting that quote wrong. Page 504 of Geoff Tiballs’ 2004 collection, The Mammoth Book of...
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Naked Statistics and surveys
This year Charles Wheelan, who teaches public policy and economics at Dartmouth College, wrote a book titled Naked Statistics: stripping the dread from the data. I saw a favorable review of it by...
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Finding a spicy speech topic
On March 3rd Rate Speeches issued a press release about their second-generation Public Speaking Topics Generator, which now contains a database with 7000 topics and more than 230,000 subtopics. Using...
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Is “so” the new “um”?
Yesterday, in her Knockout Presentations Blog, Diane DiResta posted that There’s a New “Um” in Town. She claimed to have recently discovered that the new filler word creeping into our presentations is...
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Lead with a Story - a brief review of Paul Smith’s book
I just finished reading his excellent book, Lead with a Story. It’s an impressive guide to storytelling for business that contains over a hundred stories for 21 situations, spread over 30 chapters....
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Is that a true story or just a fairy tale?
The last story in Chapter 16 of Paul Smith’s book Lead with a Story (on how to Build Courage) is the title story from Richard Feynman’s book What Do You Care What Other People Think? Paul did a good...
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Honestly, did Abraham Lincoln really say that?
150 years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the bill that made Idaho a territory. To celebrate that anniversary (a sesquicentennial) the Senate auditorium in the State Capitol was renamed after Lincoln. A...
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Have you met Fred?
If you met Fred Riggers, you wouldn’t forget that friendly, gray-haired, smiling little man with a white cane and dark glasses. He is is one of Boise’s memorable characters. On March 13th the Idaho...
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What is your hearing threshold? - the joy of statistics
Statistical methods can be applied to a lot of different types of experiments and data that may not seem related at all. Four decades ago over weekends I ran hearing tests on people in the Air Force...
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What is normal for your speech audience?
You won’t know if you don’t ask beforehand. How many people would you like to offend?Last Friday afternoon I was driving west on I-84 heading back home. As usual, I stopped in Twin Falls, Idaho, which...
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Brown M&Ms: early warning your presentation requirements are being ignored
Suppose that your presentation needs a complicated multimedia and lighting setup to work as designed, and you need to depend on people at the venue for getting it done. How could you quickly find out...
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Geek Squad survey showed Americans feared personal technology problems...
The survey results are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger and clearer version). On February 22, 2013 there was an article by Rick Limpert posted at Examiner.com titled Geek Squad...
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Do a quarter of Americans really suspect that President Barack Obama is the...
Nope. That’s what a page on the Coast to Coast AM web site said. But, it was just repeating a misinterpretation from an article in The Guardian with the sensational title of One in four Americans think...
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12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country (and 276 Million...
On April 2nd, at the Atlantic Wire.com, Philip Bump used the startling headline 12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country to discuss the survey on conspiracy theories released that day...
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How to confuse your audience
On the new books shelves at my local public library I recently saw and borrowed Eric Chaline’s 2012 book, Fifty Minerals That Changed the Course of History. It is a very pretty book, but also a...
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Don’t use official language!
In the March issue of The Spectator there was an article by Mark Forsyth titled Why do people talk nonsense in public. He lamented pompous cliches like use of a second, unneeded verb:“The safety...
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CST doesn’t just mean Central Standard Time
When a mass casualty event like the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings occurs, it obviously is important to quickly identify whether the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) include chemical,...
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How many basic, deadly, primary, or great fears are there? Is public speaking...
Well, that depends on which wise man you ask. In their book Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Good Life, Richard Leider and David Shapiro (3rd edition, 2012) list just Two Deadly Fears on...
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