Better Scientific Presentations

You might remember professor's Jay Lehr 1985 article "Let there be stoning!" about the state of scientific talks. Inspired by it, I have been working on a slide stack about presentations . It is still work in-progress, but it has been a while since I posted some visuals, so here a sneak peek of it. Just a legal matter, all of the images under CC licenses and were taken either from Wikipedia or Flickr. The point of this example is to seek unity, a concept, among the slides. Keynote or PowerPoint templates provide a unity concept, at the expense of death by Powerpoint.  Getting to that unity has proved, at least for me, extremely difficult. Going through this stack makes me uncomfortable knowing that although there is similarity there is no unity. 

In some presentations the use of mathematical formulas helps to amplify and clarify the message. In mathematics the use of the TeX's package Beamer is unfortunately widely spread. In this post I make a case to avoid using Beamer and instead use TeX to only produce snapshots of these formulas.   Seth Godin is an American entrepreneur and blogger on marketing of ideas in the digital age . Seth knows one of two things about presentations. He is an all-time TED favorite. He also wrote a booklet call Really Bad PowerPoint (click here to get it!) where he briefly talks about the birth, problematic, and possible solutions of the Death by PowerPoint. I strongly encourage you to read it. Bad presentations (aka bad PowerPoint) are all around, not only in sales, but also in education, science, and even in the military! Check out this article from the New York Times about use of PowerPoint in the US military. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse you meet Beamer. If you...