However, if you were one of my students, I would give a couple of metaphorical slaps on the wrist. In the first couple of minutes you say “a bacteria”, which is a grammatical howler—it’s “a bacterium” or “several bacteria”. For an old pedant like me (but I am not alone) hearing “a bacteria” or “a flagella” or seeing “flagella” (plural of the noun) when someone means “flagellar” (the adjective) all evoke a wince, similar to that produced in response to the screech of chalk dragged across a blackboard.

Similarly, throughout your talk, and on the cover of your book, you use the Linnaean Latin binomial “E. coli” without italicizing it. As with the grammatical howlers, this doesn’t influence the ability of the reader to infer what you mean, but for any professional biologist it jumps out as an error and does influence the overall impression you give. It is perhaps equivalent to someone addressing a letter to you as “Karl Zimmar”–you know exactly what is meant, but it jars!

Another problem is that you use a lot of images without crediting their creators, let alone seeking permission. In particular, I was rather shocked to see an image of a type III secretion system that was created by my student Chris Bailey. Now, I would be a hypocrite to say that I do not ever borrow images gleaned from the net in my own Powerpoint presentations, whether for research presentations or teaching. But I think one can cut allow a little latitude if the talk is not actually published and remains something ephemeral.

But once you publish it on the web, this makes manifest the whole issue of copyright theft. Again, the era of YouTube and BitTorrent, I am probable rather old fashioned in worrying about such things, but the advice I would give to one of my students is always to credit the source.

But, aside from all this pedantry, I think you have done an excellent job here and in the book in making the many facets of E. coli the model organism accessible to a general audience! Keep up the good work!

Well, since you ask!

Sound quality doesn’t bother me. It’s fine.

What follows are thoughts on a couple of habits or verbal tics which are worth working on, but which seem to me to be much more intrusive on playback than they would be live. (I think I’ve seen at least one study which backs this up, but I can’t find it.)

You have a bit of a tendency to signal the beginning of a section or a paragraph with “Um … ah …” as a sort of “holding action.” Or perhaps it’s a fear of a couple of seconds of dead air. I’ve found it helpful to deliberately pause and say nothing at all between sections. Take a breath or two.

Also, quite a number of sentences begin with “So …”. Some listeners aren’t sensitive to verbal tics such as this … but some are.

Based on my own experience, folks listening to a talk live typically rate the quality/coherence/smoothness higher than those listening to a recording of the exact same talk.

Mind you, interesting content helps! And all I’m doing is to suggest a couple of things to help move the recording up from the merely excellent to the nearly perfect.