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Showing posts from October, 2011

Presentation (anti)guru: Doug Zongker

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I found this video in a blog last week. If you have been into a scientific conference,  "you will not be able to resist the irony of this short video. " Have you experienced presentations like this?  Does your presentation look that this? Enjoy.   

Quick tutorial: Re-sizing an image (in a sort of right way) using gimp

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In this quick tutorial I show different ways to upscale an image an how to do it using gimp.  Last Wednesday I watched a presentation from Israeli presentation designer Jan Schultink where among other things, he talked about avoiding stretch images. You might know this case. You have a small image and want to make it bigger, so you pull the image handles but the image's proportions are not kept constant. To re-size an image keeping its proportions constant, press the Shift key and drag the handles. However you should not up-size an image. As a good practice, always use images that have at least the size height or width of your canvas (typically 1024×768). If you want to size the image in it full size and still it is some pixels short, you can use a black background to make it appear full size. Sometimes good practices are not real practices and you might yourself forced to use an up-sized image.  Something like this (click below to see in original size and see the resulting

Presentation Sin: Overboard detail

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The saying goes that the devil is in the detail, and in scientific presentations is this certainly the case. Sadly, all too often students, researchers and professors run over their audiences with too much detail. If everything is important, then nothing is important. If you provide too much detail, you will decrease the contrast of your talk, making it monotonous, losing your main point.  Short presentations, that is, 20 minute talks plus Q&A should be about --what I call-- vision: one solid point supported by two, maximum three arguments. Leave the detail for the report, article or even a book. Left: Clear contrast between your vision and the surroundings. Right: Tough to differentiate details from the surroundings Clarity, not detail should characterized short talks. If you suspect your are giving too much detail, chances are you have not defined your core message. In this case, you need to review who is your audience and why is it they are coming to see you. The fact that y