BCS1300 Presenting-1 Fundamentals

Lecture notes

Effective communication as an optimization problem

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Effective communication as an optimization problem

• Communication → exchange of a message between a speaker and an audience
  • We want an audience to pay attention, understand and act upon our message
• Difference between raw information and a message
  • What? → Raw information
  • So what? → Message
• Constraints → Time, Space, Audience
  • Hard constraints
  • Flexible constraints
• Goal of an optimization problem → maximizing an objective by tweaking variables
  • In communication → maximizing what the audience takes out from the communication
• Variables in communication
  • Slides, time, delivery, and so on

The three laws of effective communication

• Adapt to the audience → audience imposes constraints, while speaker has freedom to adapt to the situation
• Maximize signal-to-noice ration
• Use effective redaundancy → but not overdo it

Structure, hierarchies and balance

• Hierarchy
  • No more then 3 levels, and no more then 5 items per level

Key takeaways

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Lecture slides