Here are outlines of some short talks that I give from time to time.
They can be done in 45 minutes or can fill 1.5 hours with a question or
two.
Helicopter Aerodynamics
This talk is designed for people with at least a bit of airplane
experience.
- What is interesting about helicopters
- How a wing flies
- Helicopter flight controls
- Helicopter maneuvers
- Autorotations: how to land a helicopter with no engine
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
What Every Airplane Pilot Should Know about Helicopters
This talk is designed for people with at least a bit of airplane
experience.
- How to co-exist with helicopters at a busy fixed-wing airport
- How do helicopters operate in Boston Class B airspace
- What is interesting about helicopters
- How helicopters fly
- Adding a helicopter rating
- Show and Tell with a Robinson helicopter
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
Aeronautical Charts
For K-12 students who want to learn about how cartography (mapmaking) is applied in
the aviation context.
- Map Design for a Different Audience
- The importance of scale
- You can't show everything
- Practical example: a flight from BED to BDL
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
Online Communities (Non-Tech)
This talk is designed for anyone who is involved in the conception,
design, implementation, or operation of an Internet application.
- online communities are at the heart of most successful applications
of the Internet: amazon.com, AOL, eBay
- the mournful history of applying technology to education:
amplifying existing teachers
- the beauty of online communities: expanding the number of teachers
- the six required elements for a successful online community
- the first large-scale online communities: USENET discussion forums
- scaling from 100 participants to 100,000: adapting ideas from the
sociology of physical communities
- could Weblogs be the future infrastructure supporting online
communities?
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
Nuts and Bolts of High Quality Internet Applications
This talk is designed for people who have to hire and manage software
developers.
- how an Internet server communicates with the rest of the world:
HTML, VoiceXML, SOAP, WSDL
- how an Internet server handles simultaneous updates from 1000 users
at the same time: the relational database management system (RDBMS) and
the Structured Query Language (SQL)
- effective page design: screen space, time, words, color, standard
controls
- effective interaction design: navigation, user testing
- two-tiered versus three-tiered architectures
- the most productive software development styles
- can you start with an open-source toolkit?
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
photo.net
The rise and fall (and rise) of the Internet's most popular online
learning community for photographers.
Materials:
slides |
handout |
speaker notes
Building a Successful Enterprise Software Company in the Microsoft Age
- The bad news: It would be nice to collect money from thousands of
customers in exchange for shrink-wrapped closed-source software,
packaged by prison labor. Sadly this niche is occupied by Microsoft.
Don't be fooled by survivorship bias into thinking that your company has
a chance of ascending to this privileged position.
- The big question: "Why would a customer want to adopt software from
any supplier other than Microsoft?"
- You can't be richer than Microsoft or smarter than its thousands of
brilliant employees; you can attack a problem that Microsoft is not
attacking (and the first company to deliver a solution to a customer is
the first company that can learn from watching users)
- If the problem area is new, and it probably is if Microsoft hasn't
been there already, requirements will be evolving rapidly; open-source
is the best way of ensuring that requirements are met (note that "open
source" need not mean "free")
- Achieving critical mass before Microsoft kills you, Part I:
educational marketing via high-level papers and books, one-day
high-level courses, and multi-day bootcamps
- Achieving critical mass before Microsoft kills you, Part II: freely
downloadable software, easy-to-understand software architecture, clear
(not voluminous) documentation
- Key to supra-normal return on investment in a free open-source
world: you control what gets added to the next version of the software,
i.e., you control which customers are running a standard version of the
software and can upgrade painlessly and which customers are forced into
ownership of customizations.
- Consider releasing the product from a running system with real users
(instead of the usual loop of users talk to marketing, marketing talks
to product management, product management talks to programmers, new
version gets released after 2 years and the cycle starts anew)
philg@mit.edu
