One of the best parts of student-run conferences is that they often put new faces in front of the audience. SkepTech was particularly good at this.
Brendan Murphy isn’t a stranger to secular students, but many of us haven’t had a chance to see him show his stuff on stage. For this talk, he chose an unusual topic that is still appropropriate to a skeptical activist conference: Are we doing the right thing when we tell people to hang in their and keep trying?
I’ve never felt much need to tell people to stick with something myself, but I’m not huge on the Puritan work ethic, even if you can’t tell from how I’m running my own life these days.
I do realize that the sound quality isn’t great for these talks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to pull the sound directly from the room’s audio system.
Stephanie Zvan is one of the hosts for the Minnesota Atheists' radio show and podcast, Atheists Talk. She serves on the board of Secular Woman. She speaks on science and skepticism in a number of venues, including science fiction and fantasy conventions.
Stephanie has been called a science blogger and a sex blogger, but if it means she has to choose just one thing to be or blog about, she's decided she's never going to grow up. In addition to science and sex and the science of sex, you'll find quite a bit of politics here, some economics, a regular short fiction feature, and the occasional bit of concentrated weird.
Oh, and arguments. She sometimes indulges in those as well. But I'm sure everything will be just fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
A quick technical tip for giving talks with good audio, even though you have very little equipment:
Get an application like iRig for your iPhone, and leave the iPhone upside down and recording in a breast pocket. The audio is surprisingly good, filters out the audience, and follows you if you walk around the room.
A quick technical tip for giving talks with good audio, even though you have very little equipment:
Get an application like iRig for your iPhone, and leave the iPhone upside down and recording in a breast pocket. The audio is surprisingly good, filters out the audience, and follows you if you walk around the room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkr0oCw94G0 I tried it myself this Sunday, you can hear the result in this video.