Posts Tagged ‘talk’

Last week, I presented a talk as part of Leeds Anxiety Clinic’s series of events on helping people manage their anxiety. It was entitled How to be incredibly productive, even when you have anxiety.

I thought it went well. Everyone turned up for a start. We weren’t expecting that. When Anxiety Leeds ran a trial, we invited 30 people and 4 turned up on the day. Everyone who had bought a ticket (it sold out a week in advance) turned up, so we were scrambling around for extra chairs just before the start.

Last week, Leeds Anxiety Clinic held its first public talk “How to build good stress into your life to make you immune to bad stress”.

As a first event, it has been a success. It was more than sold out: we had a waiting list with people emailing us asking how they could get tickets or just stand at the back. So, it is great to see there is demand for what we do.

Chris delivered the talk with confidence and the feedback we received via Survey Monkey afterwards was generally positive. We’re looking forward to announcing more events in the near future.

This month’s talk at West Yorkshire Humanists was John ‘Compost’ Cossham talking about “The Problem with Methane”.

John gave the same talk at Leeds Skeptics a year ago, and I came away with the same gloomy feeling this time, even though I knew what was coming. We are totally fucked. If we think we have fucked up the climate this far, wait until the feedback loops kick in. Climate change causes methane release, that causes more climate change.

John however, is much more upbeat. He is confident that we can change society, reduce our carbon footprint and continue boldly on as a species. He says the world can support all 7,000,000,000 of us, as long as we live in an ecological way. This was heartwarming because in the back of my mind I always wondered whether our population could actually be sustainable in the long term.

After the talk we held our usual social in The George, which was well attended also.

For the December lecture at West Yorkshire Humanists two local Greenpeace volunteers came down to tell us about their organisation. This took the form of an interactive workshop: we were answering true or false questions, putting photos into a timeline and discussing the ethical issues surrounding the environment and protesting.

They started with a video. I think if anything that did dispel a myth as I assumed they were quite a well rounded organisation that did thinks like education and lobbying. The video just seemed to suggest they spent all their time making trouble. I’m not saying that annoying Shell is a bad thing. I suspect it is a probably a good thing. However, I did not seem as multi-faceted as I had expected. The rest of the session was more engaging though.

Alan and Joe were lovely people and delivered a very honest and open presentation. It was a pleasure to have them at the group.

Last month I presented a talk at Atheist Society entitled “Humanism and the Science of Morality”. It looked at why we have morals, how it works in an evolutionary framework, and what that knowledge tells us when constructing a moral framework in Humanism.

Most of all though, I am pleased to see A-Soc still going. A few of us thought it might have been the final year last year, but their start-of-term pub quiz showed otherwise. At my talk too there were fresh young faces, and hopefully the society will enjoy many more years.

For anyone attending my talk at Atheist Society tonight, here is the suggested reading list I will later be promising to post on my blog:

• Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain
• Duncan J. Watts – Everything Is Obvious
• Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Noreena Hurtz – Eyes Wide Open
• Nate Silver – The Signal and The Noise

Following the Atheist Society’s AGM, Hugh Clayden delivered a talk on the European Witch Hunts. You can watch the video on Worfolk Lectures. Not only was it a really interesting talk, but you have to love Hugh’s gestures.

For my fifth project in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator series, I presented a talk entitled “A Humanist Soup Kitchen?”

This referenced my open letter to David Cameron, inviting him to come and see the Humanist Action Group doing its thing, after he had suggested that no such humanist enterprises existed.

Despite the talk creeping up on me somewhat (mainly due to being ill all the previous weekend), I managed to get everything in shape and took home another Best Speaker ribbon. Good times.

This month’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub welcomed Dr Neil Cooper from the University of Bradford’s Peace Studies department to talk about arms regulation.

It certainly captured the interest of the audience as the talk itself was followed by one of the longest question and answer sessions we have ever had at Leeds Skeptics!

Last month, we announced the Worfolk Lecture 2011, as the second annual event since we established an annual public understanding of science lecture last year.

This year’s talk was delivered by Dr David Jenkins and was entitled “From Rutherford to the LHC”, looking at the last one hundred years of atomic research.