Yoram Bauman
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2013–2026
4:06 · 2.7M views · Feb 22, 2007
Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.
Beloved as a humor masterpiece and often cited as required viewing on what not to do in an academic talk.
14 comments from Hacker News
If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: this video . The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could almost substitute the slide decks for each other and it would have been hard to notice. It doesn't mean that they have no content necessarily, merely that there is some ground to riff on here. I particularly like the presentation as one of the few bits of humor I know where you can make a two year old laugh and you can make a veteran professor laugh, and everyone in between, yet they are all laughing about different things at incredibly different levels of intellectual sophistication. The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.
It may not be the original video, but a video presentation of it is available at this video by the original author, contrary to the link's claims. It is probably the better way to approach the paper, due to the importance of timing in comedy and the fact that paper presents so much to you in a way that it can't control the timing, though unfortunately the video resolution is quite low. Plus the Q&A is pretty good. It is an amusing combination of video that is a trenchant commentary on the excessive similarity of the vast bulk of hard science papers, and a video that my four year old enjoyed back in the day. That puts your standard "family friendly" comedy movie to shame in terms of how much comedy ground it is capable of covering.
That chicken paper always gets a chuckle from me. In case you have never seen the video[0]. Unfortunately, it appears to have been recorded on a potato. Do not miss the audience question at the end. Beautiful academic satire. [0] this video
Or one can quickly learn how to achieve clear presentations by indexing the common errata: "Chicken chicken chicken" (Yoram Bauman) this video This should be required viewing for every academic author. =3
"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: [LINK] Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: this video Best of luck =3