Better Scientific Presentations

Last week I showed you an example of using photographs as visuals. Actually the last couple of posts have been heavy on my own examples. Let's change that by introducing a real guru on scientific presentations. Meet physicists Richard Feynman. Feynman was a great presenter who didn't live to meet the PowerPoint generation. I was able to find this on YouTube.  Enjoy!

In this post I give an example of how photos can be used in a presentation's visuals. I show one more example of image manipulation and how to use the power of analogy to produce beautiful visuals.  I'm helping a friend creating a presentation stack for a talk about an exchange program between a university here in Germany and the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Strictly speaking this is not a scientific presentation, but it will take place in a university context. The audience is made of potential students that would take part on the program exchange. After gathering the important facts, I went to Wikipedia and Fickr to pull some images. All the images have a creative commons license.  Here are some examples: To start, Sao Paulo. I pulled this panorama of old downtown Sao Paulo from Wikipedia. The original is larger than the size of canvas. Instead of trying to scale it or crop it to make it fill in one slide, I animated it in Keynote by moving from right to left. ...

Scientific presentations can profit  from cinematographic storytelling, specially from those effects that direct the eye gaze. In this post I present the vignetting and background blur effects. They are quick to prepare and yield great results.      If you are including photographs in your presentation there are two classic tricks to help to direct the attention of the view to exactly what you what. The tricks are called vignetting and background blur. You might already know what I'm talking about. The tricks are used in movies like The Graduate (1967) and Citizen Kane .  To show the first effect I created an artificial image using Inkscape. Original   Vignette . According to Wikipedia vignetting is a reduction of an image's brightness or saturation at the periphery compared to the image center . Vignetting helps directing the viewer into your slide. You can create this effect using the GIMP of Photoshop. Basically you just make an oval selection ar...

Designing math visuals is tough because of the level of abstraction. In this visual example I remix 5 slides of a math presentation.  I illustrate a way around the level of abstraction and show how to reduce to information per slide. In the past couple of days I have been working on remixing some slides of a math presentation. It is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time, and I'm happy I finally did it! The original presentation is called A short course on: Preconditioned Krylov subspace methods by Yousef Saad. You can download the presentation here .  Don't let the title scare you! Understanding the content is not important in this case.  I encourage you to download the original slides and compare them with the remix below. I've chosen this presentation for three reasons. First, it is a classic example of average visuals in scientific talks. Second, I know the topic, so I could be sure I knew how to remix it without making (hopefully) content mistakes. ...

Slideware doesn't always offer the right features to visualize presentations. In this post I present  Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, 3 free multi-platform applications to take your visuals to the next level.   Slideware offers limited features to create that diagram that you want, or to manipulate that image in the way you want.  But you don't have to settle for that ugly looking diagram or unwanted photo effect, let the multi-platform Open Source Software help you. Maybe you have heard about The GIMP, which is a similar application to Adobe Photoshop. If you haven't, take a look here .  Gimp is free and runs in Windows, Linux, and Mac ... and it is powerful. It is so powerful that it can be intimidating. From all of the free resource to learn how to use it, or to bring it to the next level I recommend these two sites: Grokking the GIMP is a book available online and can be downloaded. Meet the GIMP is an excellent blog on GIMP with tutorials and articles. ...

It is is been a while since I last wrote here. If you are a regular reader, you might have ask "Hey, what happened?" The silence has caught your attention. Pauses in a presentation work in  the same way. Making a pause forces the audience to focus on you. Think about it, even if the person on the back reading email will look at you asking himself if the talk is over. There is your chance to relaunch and engage him or her in your presentation. A pause is a powerful attention-grabbing tool, so use it, pause.

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...