Last Thursday, we welcomed Professor Philip Mellor to Second Nature, where he gave a very interesting talk all about Bluetongue disease, and whether climate change was affecting its spread.

Due to technical hitches (more below the break), the audio wasn’t completely recorded, I’m afraid, but Professor Mellor’s slides give a very comprehensive view, so definitely worth reading. They’re available here:

Professor Mellor’s slides

Thanks very much to Philip for an excellent talk at short notice, and to everyone else for coming – hope to see you on Thursday!

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Some technical thoughts for anyone interested.

This was the first event we had attempted using entirely voice, and I think it went surprisingly well considering my constant expectation of disaster.

There were a few people in the audience who hadn’t activated voice – thanks very much to Troy McLuhan for helping them out. I think by 10 minutes in or so, there were only a couple of people who couldn’t hear. Anyone who had problems, by all means get in touch and I can help you set it up before the next event. The voice itself was OK, I think – I listened to it afterwards, and after initially being 95% crackle, we moved the microphone away and it seemed much better, although still occasionally crackly. Memo to self: put microphone much further away from speaker in future!

The recording also worked fine – until 30 mins in when the computer went into sleep mood and cut it off! So I’m afraid no recording this week, but next week we will be wise to this.

I think the biggest lesson for me this week is about the slides. I don’t think they really work – I hear from people who can see perfectly, and people who can’t see them at all. From now on, I’m going to ask the speakers to keep slides minimilistic, with nice large text and graphics only.

Lastly, with regards the voice/text issue. I’ve had several people say they don’t want/can’t understand voice and lots of people say voice is infinitely superior. So I thought the obvious solution was simultaneous voice and text. Oh, no! I’ve now had quite a few people say that this is over-whelming and makes it difficult to follow the voice. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I do sympathise with anyone who for whatever reason isn’t keen on voice. But I really feel that voice is really a much more interactive experience and those who can hear it get much more out of it. So I’m afraid we’re going to stick with the voice. This week as a trial, we will provide the text in notecard form: anyone who wants it, may have the notecard with the full text and follow it in their own time. I hope this will prove satisfactory – as always, feedback welcome.

Anyone who would like help setting up voice, turn up 15 minutes early, and we will run through it then.

This week, I will be leaving the speaker alone with another helper, and I will be free to help people in the audience, take pictures, that kind of thing. If anyone has any questions or problems, please do drop me a line – as Joanna Wombat or by email. Hopefully that will make things easier – this week is a really interesting talk on making cheap, ethical drugs for the developing world, so please do come along!