Simply Statistics A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek

25 minute seminars

Most Statistics and Biostatistics departments have weekly seminars. We usually invite outside speakers to share their knowledge via a 50 minute powerpoint (or beamer) presentation. This gives us the opportunity to meet colleagues from other Universities and pick their brains in small group meetings. This is all great. But, giving a good one hour seminar is hard. Really hard. Few people can pull it off. I propose to the statistical community that we cut the seminars to 25 minutes with 35 minutes for questions and further discussion. We can make exceptions of course. But in general, I think we would all benefit from shorter seminars.