Better Scientific Presentations

Scientist and engineers need diagrams to express ideas, and so they make it into a presentation's visual stack. Some caution is necessary when inserting diagrams into a presentation's visual stack.  Some could come in the form of a scanned document, some could come from a cropped pdf, or a image file. Biology Professor Zen Faulkes  has also written about the topic of redrawing here . Here is an example of a diagram that needs to be redrawn: If I would have inserted this diagram as it is there would  have been several problems, including Not all text would have been legible.  The diagram would have included information the audience doesn't need. The diagram might have looked pixelated. In other words, I would have lost control over it. I can recover the control by redrawing the diagram. Nowadays it is fairly easy to do this. High quality SVG maps are released under public domain or Commons Creative licenses. Plus, open source for manipulating vector graphic...

Diagrams are an essential part presentations and Nancy Duarte knows it. In her book Slide-ology she gathered many type of diagrams and organize them in a taxonomy. Now, Duarte Design has come with a great idea, Diagrammer , a collection of diagrams in a simpler taxonomy that presenters can buy as PowerPoint slides. I recommend you check out them out. The basic taxonomy will just be enough to get you started using the right diagram for your task. I used the linear-flow diagram to represent a progress that otherwise would go in a list of bullet points:  In case you wonder TPWL is a numerical method to simulate very big dynamical system developed by Michal Rewienski at MIT.