Better Scientific Presentations

 It is paradoxical that some scientists approach teaching in a anecdotal way, rather than in a scientific way. I'm paraphrasing Harvard Physics professor Eric Mazur. Garr Reynolds has written a couple of very interesting post about presentation and education in the 21st century , that include a talk from Mr. Mazur. By a scientific approach to presentation I mean two things. First, the use and application of the theory of the psychology of a presentation: How people think and learn, how to grab and hold people's attention, ans how people listen and see. 5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People from Weinschenk on Vimeo . The second thing is to measure how efficient a presentation is. It seems natural that if the scientific method is based on measurements, the outcome of a scientific presentation would also be measured. I have never heard or attend a scientific conference where the audience evaluates talks, or give feedback. That was exactly this measurement t...

It feels odd to write this post. In fact it feels odd to write about pretty slides, when the power of a talk doesn't come from them. However, memorable visuals help the audience understand better and remember longer. That's why visual storytelling matters so much in presentations. Science tells us that stories is a great way to learn, then makes perfect sense that scientists use stories in their scientific presentations. In fact, as most people are visual learners it makes sense to know and apply visual storytelling to presentations. So here is the story of today's post. Some months ago I worked on a stack of visuals, which involved representing that a certain oral test is a bridge between education and professional life . After having found an appropriate image (Puente de Alcántara, Toledo Spain) and the talk's rehearsal. I came with a decent slide, that got noticed by the audience. If some more time in my hands, I tinkered a bit more and came up with this: Thi...

Nicholas H. Morgan, Ph.D. No, in fact Dr. Nicholas Morgan is not a presentation guru, he's a presentation Jedi Master. His book Give your speech, change the word is considered —among experts in public speaking— one of the best.  What I mostly treasure about his book is PART III. Rehearsing the presentation . Most presentations suck because of their lack of preparation and feedback. Not only his book, but also his blog is amazing. Dr. Morgan's stand in Slideware is that the best slideware, is not slideware at all. He views communication as leadership, which to I completely relate to, because I believe that scientists ought to be leaders. By the way, wanna know what other books experts consider worth the time? The Top 35 Books on Presentations from Gonzalo Alvarez Image credits: Nicholas Morgan by nfrodom1 under CC BY 2.0 license.

It is February, time for the SOTU( State Of The Union) address and like in past years I have looked at the slides of the enhanced speech. The major why this matters to scientific presentations is because of the data visualization they provide to the public.  The National Public Radio did a piece on this and ask Steve Few author of Show me the numbers, and Nathan Yau of flowing data about the quality of charts. According to Mr. Few and Mr. Yau for the most part Obama's team did a good job. There were however some cases the criticized.  Here are 4 of them. Call it The Bad . You can click on them to see a larger version. whitehouse.gov 12 Of The Hottest Years On Record  misplaces the x-axis by not setting it at 0. This creates an unnecessary dramatic effect. The y-axis has no units and the labels on the same axis should be "-0.4", "-0.2", … to emphasize these are rational and not integers numbers.   Natural Gas Wells doesn't tell the whole story with t...

No big news, no breaking news. This is a classic: Edit your presentation. When I see people preparing their talks for the next day, I wonder how do they edit? How do they get feedback? A presentation should be written down. No to be read aloud, or to make a Powerpoint transcript of it, but to be used as a script. I mean, after all comedians also write their stuff . It doesn't have to be a book or prose. It can be a list of bullet points following a logical sequence. Still, edit that script. Get rid of everything that the audience doesn't care about.  Don't open your favorite slideware before you have written and edited your script. There. Now you have a better presentation. Image credit : Inauguration designed by Filippo Camedda from The Noun Project.

I know I blogged yesterday, but this is way too important, at least to me. Yesterday evening I found an awesome educational resource on typography: FontShop Education . The content is excellent. It includes a glossary on typography, how to choose a type, "typo tips" from the renown german typographer Erik Spiekermann, and Meet your type. A field guide to typography.

Last week I bought Numbers in Graphic Design by Roger Fawcett-Tang and it inspired this post.  In my experience the easiest way to start using pictures in slides is by using them to signalize the beginning of a new section. If the right name is chosen, the right picture might follow easy.  This is a creative task, and it needs time, specially if it is the first time it is done.  So let's say you have the names and the images. Now to the outline slide. First things first, do not put "Introduction" or "Motivation" on that outline, it conveys 0 (zero, null, cero) information. The same thing goes for "Conclusions".  Another thing specially for those LaTeX/Beamer users, subsubsection (aka nested bullet  points) in the outline, are you kidding me? You are killing your audience right at the start of your presentation. Who's going to remember that? The first example is a straight enumeration, to give a clue of the images I masks the section images wit...