Better Scientific Presentations

Keeping the promise of elaborating on delivery I give two examples  of scientific talks. If speaker have awareness on their vocal delivery, their talks would immediately improve.  Continuing the theme  better shown than tell , I look at Columbia University  physicists Janna Levin's 2011 TED Talk The sound of the universe makes (click here to go there). In particular, I look at her introduction  which takes roughly one minute.  In these  74 seconds there are 188 words, here is the transcript (I added the times with an offset of -15 s): I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. The Sun burns our peripheral vision, we see light reflected off the Moon, and in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe (0:30) has come to us through l

I'm helping a friend with the visuals of a lecture on Multimedia learning based on the book of Richard Mayer of the same name. I asked if I could use some of the material to post here, so here we go: 2 traditional views of the learning process. Information aquisition (IA) + knowledge construction (KC). IA is better explained by the empty vessel analogy: The brain is an empty vessel and information is poured into it. KC refers to the sense-making process of the information that is presented. Ideally, good multimedia leads to KC allowing the learner to remember and apply the learned material. Traditionally, in the design of multimedia, this 2 concepts clash. An example is extraneous processing overload. Extraneous process overload is likely to occur when the lesson contains attention-grabbing irrelevant material and/or when the lesson is designed in a confusing way.  Avoid redundancy, i.e., presenting multimedia material in spoken text, printed text and pictures is likely

Inspired by a good book on public speaker, in this post I offer some advice on how to give a persuasive scientific talk. It turns out the ideal way of organizing a talk has been laid out by the Greeks. I used the updated version from Jay Heinrichs.  I recently read that the format of a modern talk came be traced all the way back to the Greeks, in particular to Cicero. According to him, a persuasive talk follows the sequential set of steps:  Invention  Arrangement Style Memory Delivery Memory seems to be odd nowadays, so I would update it to Rehearsal.  Let's start with Invention. Invention. An empty canvas or  page can be scary for fine art painters or writers, but what is worse is after the first stroke lands on the canvas or the first word on the page, a world of possibilities shrinks dramatically. After the second stoke or word there are no more possibilities, the path has been laid out.  This is no different in scientific talks, though here there is no canvas or pag

Commonsense doesn't always make sense. Sadly, in scientific presentations bad commonsense is too often. In this post I talk about some counter-commonsense practices and how to improve them.  Let's get honest, most scientific presentations suck mostly because people don't have the time to design them. Some do know that knowing their material is just not enough. In fact, some professors tend to expend a considerable amount of time preparing a course's material the first time. If time is the issue, the best way to solve that problem, is to present less times. It is also true that for giving a lecture a stack of visuals is not always necessary. In fact I wonder, how were the lectures our professors listened to? The abuse of PowerPoint led to the idea that preparing a presentation was almost the same as to create the visuals stack. That's when the commonsense disaster was released. In a broad sense, a presentation that incorporates a PowerPoint/Keynote/OpenOffice/Bea