Better Scientific Presentations

You probably know I hate presentation templates. However in last couple of months I have found myself not only using them, but creating them, I have been blown away with what  I have been able to achieve. There is a caveat, my own templates have only one master slide, and it is a blank one. That is all you actually need from a template: one single blank master slide. There are 3 things that blank slide has. A font family, like Roboto. A background color. A color palette. Here is an example: I like Roboto for 3 reasons: It is free, it is professional, and it has enough styles and glyphs. I have been starting to use Keynote's Color Palette just a few week and it has helped me speed out my work and keep my work consistent.  Mini-tutorial 1. Getting down to only 1 master Slide 1.  Let's start from with a default template, say "White".  2. Click on Show Master Slides. 3. I have added the Rule of Thirds to my white template for better placem...

The titles (if any) of your slides, are most likely to be dead. They don't communicate. They aren't memorable. They don't stick. But don't despair, there is a better, scientifically proven way: Assertation-Evidence driven slide title—a concise, complete sentence headline (no longer than 2 lines). The following video shows an  example of this type of slide design You can find more information of Assertation-Evidence slide design at PennState here . The key word is headline . Getting an appropriate, memorable, sticky, and concise headline is not easy. Fortunately there is enough inspiration coming from the news.  Here is an example. Granted, these are not scientific, but they do show their basic language structure . All in all, Assertation-Evidence slide design is thought to improve the quality of a presentation. Though is it hard work, the outcome is worth the effort and inspiration is also everywhere.

 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.