I have given several talks for the general public, and even more for scientific audiences. Here are slides from some of these talks. They are organized into the following broad areas:

Title	Audience	Length	Description
*Ethics, public policy, politics, etc*
Ethical analysis of US health care(ppt, pdf)	general public	10 minutes	Presents a formal analysis of the ethics of the current and proposed US health care systems. The analysis method is broadly useful for public policy analysis. (full analysis here)
Biology/Bioinformatics/Bioethics/BioPhilosophy/Bio*
The data flood: we need a bigger boat (keynote, pdf)	biologically literate general public	30 minutes	next generation sequencing gives us much more data than we know how to handle. To avoid drowning, we need new techniques.
Bugs in the Arctic: how do soil bacterial communites change as glaciers retreat?	microbial ecologists, bioinformaticists, students, general public	50 minutes	techniques for data reduction of 454/FLX metagenomic study of microbial populations from soil in a transect below a receding glacier in Spitsbergen
Guide trees and alignment quality for multiple sequence alignment (in power point)	bioinformaticists, students	20 minutes	Guide trees for progressive multiple sequence alignments are correlated with alignment quality, but have only minor effect
Power versus efficiency in microbial communities (in keynote)	microbial ecologists	20 minutes	Summarizes research project testing the ability of bacterial species to coexist as a function of their protein translation strategy.
Microbial Diversity at the Marine Biology Lab (in keynote)	General public	45 minutes - 1 hour	My summer school at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole. Has lots of pretty pictures of bacterial colonies.
Philosophy meets Biology	General public	50 minutes	New biological problems that strain current philosophical assumptions.
*Evolutionary Computation*
Evolutionary computation (keynote)	evolutionary biologists, general public	30 minutes	reviews how evolution is a process, and EC can be used to answer ill formed questions with lots of data. Presented at Evolution 2009, 6/14/09.
Introduction to evolutionary computation	computer science students	50 minutes	Using simulated evolution to solve problems computationally (GA, GP, etc.)
Using evolution to build computing software and hardware	Biologists, computer scientists, or general public	15, 30 or 50 minutes	Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques, including genetic algorithms (GA) and genetic programming (GP), for building computer programs and computing circuits
EC hardness	EC researchers	50 minutes	thoughts on how to measure problem hardness in EC.
Robustness of evolved circuits	EC researchers	15 minutes	Evolved sorting networks are fail less catastrophically than hand-designed ones when subjected to point circuit failures.
Using GAs for building stock market portfolios	computer scientists	50 minutes	Solving multi-objective functions (e.g. risk, return) with subtractive constraints (e.g. long and short positions), stock market portfolio example
*Other Computer Science Stuff*
What machines can never learn	general public	50 minutes	inductive inferencing: computational limits to what machines can learn
Pseudo randomness	computer science students	50 minutes	Different techniques for generating pseudorandom number sequences, measuring their quality
DNA computing	general public	50 minutes	Computing with DNA
Quantum computing	general public	50 minutes	how to use quantum mechanics to speed up computations
*Other Stuff*
Doing proofs	computer science students	50 minutes	Strategies for doing mathematical proofs

Public Talks