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Showing posts from February, 2011

A word on visuals: Where to start?

The preparation of slides is a task for graphical designers not for scientists. Scientists who prepare their own visuals should develop a sensibility for this art. I show examples of bad and good slides, some issues you should focus on, and some resources.   The preparation of a presentation's visuals is work of design, and unless a scientist has some basic knowledge in the discipline of graphic design, he or she should  not prepare visuals. Now, the ruling culture of Powerpoint  forces most presenters to prepare a "presentation", so it would be unreasonable to ask scientist not to prepare slides for their presentations. What I'm asking is that you prepare your visuals with a basic element of graphic design taste. Bullet point list are to presentation visuals, what junk food is to a person's diet. Take a look a this presentation I found at slideshare.net Stochastic Optimization: Solvers and Tools and compare it to this one I also found at slideshare.net

Four questions to help you prepare your presentation

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When preparing your scientific talk, your mindset should on the audience and how it resonates with the message you are presenting. When preparing your talk you should consider yourself, the message and the audience. In many ways a talk is like a very short relation/friendship between you and the audience. This is no different in scientific presentations.  However, this relation is bizarre love triangle. It is a triangle because of made of you, the message/topic and audience, and bizarre because the only star in it is the audience. Presentations are like a bizarre love triangle between you, the message and the audience. It is the audience who  gets to call the shots in this relation, not you. The figure above shows this triangle along with 4 verbs that are essential when preparing: love and know, understand, and resonate. Let analyze them. 1. Do you love/care about the message/topic? If you don't, don't present. Or choose another topic. If you don't love/care the

Presenting Quantitative Data Part 2

Last night sorting some pdf files I came across an article from A. Globus and E. Raible call 14 Ways to Say Nothing with Scientific Visualization . How appropriate! Although not all the 14 ways directly apply to presenting quantitative data, some of them do. Here is a quick summary: 1. Never include a color legend. Or for that matter no legend at all. Forgot the labels on the x, y and z axes? Does your data have units? Which ones are they?  Is your title clear and accurate?  2.  Avoid annotation. Draw line and arrow to point at important features you data shows. This will help the audience understand your data better. But don't over do! Here is an example of a good annotation. During his 2011 State of Union Address Barack Obama used an enhanced presentation on the White House webcast. After 10 minutes and 30 seconds the first graph containing data appears. It is about the recovery of the Dow Jones after he took office. Now, I can say there has been a recovery because of th

Presenting Quantitative Data Part 1

Science is based on experiments and experiments give us data. The correct visualization and presentation of that  data is key in scientific presentations.  To get started in the topic I present some references on the visualization of data. Visualizing data looks easy, but it isn't. There are different kind of techniques and tools to produce data visualization, not to mention the different type of data. Even creating a clear and accurate time series requires knowing what we are doing.  We need guidance. So, where to start? Two great books are The Visual Display of Quantitative Information from Edward Tufte and Show Me the Numbers from Stephen Few . I encourage you to look at their homepages. Another two interesting blogs are David McCandless' Information is beautiful and Andrew Vande Moere's Information Aesthetics . Now, charts, graphs and tables don't say much by themselves. Data needs context, and that's why you there for.  Don't let people alone get

The Scientist's Talk

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Getting inspiration outside the office is an essential element to improve public speaking skills. The new film The King's Speech is a great inspiring history on the struggle with this skill.  Inspiration is not a word you hear often coming out from a scientist.  The word evokes the mental picture of artists, not scientists. But if you really want to improve your presentation skills you will need it. Back in high school I had really lousy history and geography teachers. But when the school finally found an exceptional one, it was already too late for me. Sitting on those classes was a drag. However, watching the History Channel was another thing.  Could history teachers get some inspiration from it? Curiously, the only fun activity I remember from my history class was a half-day trip around my town visiting churches. See? Inspiration . One way to get inspiration for scientific talks in to watch science documentaries and cool movies. One of these movies is  The King's Sp

Presentation Gurus: TED Conference

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Watching outstanding scientific presentations is a good way to improve our own. In this first installment of the Presentation Gurus series I introduce a source of such talks, the TED conference.  Described as "As they say in Boston it's like the Discovery Channel with beer", last night I went to Nerd Nite in Leipzig, Germany hoping to have a good laugh at science and some good German beer, but sadly I  only got good beer.   I came late to a talk on proteins and bacteria, which was good and I thought the night was just getting started. But I wasn't ready for what was about to come. A woman taking about mythology in Peru  started reading behind the lectern. Reading! But it wasn't even poetry or prose.  It was more like a term-paper. Do some people still read their presentations speech-like? I'm told this no that uncommon in humanities and that the word Vorlesung (lecture) literary means reading-aloud. Clearly, the speaker had learned to present by looking

3 things to check before your presentation

Getting familiar with the venue, looking at your slides on the "big screen" and paying a quick visit to the mirror before your talk help reduce anxiety and stress among other things.  Check the room. One good to reduce the anxiety before given a presentation is to visit the room or lecture hall where your talk takes places before it takes place. This has several advantages. First, visiting the room prior to your talk will show you the way to get there. Doing this you will have answered the question "How do I get to that room?" reducing uncertainty and stress. Second, getting familiar with the unknown room will also reduce anxiety. So take some minutes, walk the stage, look at the empty sits, and make yourself familiar with the place. Third, deciding where is  the best place to stand and how loud or soft you should talk will make you look more in control (because now you are more in control) giving you confidence. Bring someone along and ask him/her to stand o

Feedback after practice

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Practice by itself is not enough. Getting feedback from your peers, advisers and professors on your talk is a great way to improve your it. However getting the right feedback is not as easy as one might think. Before giving a talk at a conference, some of us at my research group rehearse in front of our peers and sometimes in front of our advisers. After the rehearsal we spend some time giving feedback and discussing it .  The idea behind this feedback session is that the audience and our peers have a similar foundation knowledge and thus you are able to anticipate many of the audience's concerns and questions. Rehearsing in front of your peers and adviser also helps you to spot content errors on your  presentation's visuals.  However, before you rehearse in front of other people, you should have already practiced on your own, otherwise the feedback is not as useful as it can be. The problem of asking for feedback is to get people to tell you what they really think. So b

Presentation sin: Overtime

Going overtime in a presentation is a common failure in scientific presentations. However practicing your talk should prevent this from happening. The scene is unfortunately quite familiar. A professor or student has 90/60/25 minutes for his or her presentation and it goes overtime. While the speaker keeps talking, the students need to run to another lecture, the next speaker is annoyed, or the audience wants to go to the break. Although we know this shouldn't happen, we see it often at conferences and lecture halls. I thought it happened because people  did not practice enough. But a friend of mine, who also happens to be involved in academia, told me two weeks ago that is not always the case. She said professors and students go overtime to show that they have more say, that it shows their passion for the topic.  At first I was skeptical, but I started thinking about some  of the talks I have heard/ and delivered in the past, and realized it is also true. People overtime to sh