Re: Please review my OSCON presentation

I skimmed over your slides, and here are my collected random thoughts:

Very interesting
You need more graphics. I know it's sooo tempting to do much with text, but it's much nicer to look at if you include more graphics. (Update: much better now).
I don't know how good the math-fu of your audience is, but you try to assume as little as possible. For example when you define Var(X), show some graphs from curves with high and low variance. Much easier to imagine for a non-math-geek
Since you declared your talk to be a tutorial, I'd suggest picking one example, and apply the various techniques against that same example. Give the people something familiar to cling to if they feel lost
3 hours is much. Very much. Perhaps too much. My usual lectures (as a student) are 1.5h, and I'm nearly alway glad when they're over. So whatever you do, don't talk for three hours. Do something else in the mean time (show some graphs and shut up for a few minutes, or whatever; I don't really have a good idea what to do, just what not to do)

Comment on Re: Please review my OSCON presentation

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Re^2: Please review my OSCON presentation by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 17, 2008 at 00:30 UTC
Graphics is something I've heard consistently, and I'm going to improve that. My audience have self-selected themselves to go to a 3 hour tutorial about how to use statistics to optimize their website. I'm going to assume that they are at least comfortable with math. That said, I've pushed most of the heavy math off to the last third of the talk, and I've made it clear that they don't have to understand that material to run successful A/B tests. So I'm hoping that my audience will divide into three groups there. People for whom it is review and for which rushing is fine. People who want to learn who can go back and read it again. People who realize they can skip that and therefore don't mind being lost. In the talk I'll be reinforcing that by making it clear that this is a deeper look and is not strictly necessary. The schedule is by O'Reilly. There is a half-hour break in the middle. I don't have resources to do any real exercises. Yes, I'm painfully aware that this will be hard on the audience. It is unfortunately worse on me. :-(	[reply]

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Re^2: Please review my OSCON presentation
by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 17, 2008 at 00:30 UTC

My audience have self-selected themselves to go to a 3 hour tutorial about how to use statistics to optimize their website. I'm going to assume that they are at least comfortable with math. That said, I've pushed most of the heavy math off to the last third of the talk, and I've made it clear that they don't have to understand that material to run successful A/B tests. So I'm hoping that my audience will divide into three groups there. People for whom it is review and for which rushing is fine. People who want to learn who can go back and read it again. People who realize they can skip that and therefore don't mind being lost.

In the talk I'll be reinforcing that by making it clear that this is a deeper look and is not strictly necessary.

The schedule is by O'Reilly. There is a half-hour break in the middle. I don't have resources to do any real exercises. Yes, I'm painfully aware that this will be hard on the audience. It is unfortunately worse on me. :-(

[reply]