Creating Effective Scientific Presentations

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• Creating Effective Scientific Presentations

Lance Cooperand Celia Elliott (with help from
our colleagues Dave Hertzog and Al Nathan)
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Heres what we will cover today

• Why give presentations?
• Important starting points
• Logical structure of a presentation
• Using figures, tables, and equations
• Powerpoint esthetics

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Why are presentations necessary?

• Publications lag months/years behind discovery
• Talks at scientific meetings are current!!
• Presentations can accentuate results/ideas
• Talks before your research group, collaboration
  meetings
• Your future job will require presentations
• You will give talks as a job candidate
• You will give presentations as an employee
• You will give presentations as an instructor

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Goals when giving a scientific talk

• Persuade collaborators your analysis is correct
• Disseminate your results
• Teach the audience something
• Learn something from the audience
• Gain the respect of the community
• Establish future collaborations
• Get a job or secure funding
• Learn something yourselfgain a new perspective
  on your work

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Key Goal Communicate your ideas!
This fundamental goal should govern every aspect
of the design and presentation of your talk!
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Remember your purpose in preparing and giving a
talk
Your purpose is to tell an interesting, memorable
story of your work

• Not to read a book
• Not to demonstrate how smart you are
• Not to attack others work
• Not to show how fast you can talk

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Essentials for preparing your talk

• Know your audience!
• Find out how much time you have to speak
• Determine the style of your talk decide on the
  structure that best fits your audience and your
  message
• Decide on the key points you want to communicate
• Determine how best to use graphs and figures to
  illustrate your key points
• Consider effective slide aesthetics

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Essential rules for preparing your talk
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You cannot give a successful talk unless you
tailor it to your audience
First commandment Know thy audience

• Who are your listeners?
• How large is the audience?
• What is their level of understanding?
• What two or three key points from your talk
  should they take home?
• What background information do they need so that
  they can understand these points?

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First commandment Know thy
audience!

• Experts (e.g., seminars, group meetings)
• Roughly 2030 introductory material
• Can be more focused on advanced topics
• Novices (e.g., public lecture)
• Assume your audience is intelligent but knows
  nothing about the material youre presenting
• 80 of material should be introductory
• Mixed (e.g., colloquia)
• Most difficult audience
• 60 of material should be introductory

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Decide how long your talk should be

• Contributed conference talks
• 1015 minutes
• Most difficult!!
• Limit talk to 810 minutes
• Only make 12 main points
• Invited conference talks and journal club talks
• 2030 minutes
• Limit talk to 1525 minutes
• Make 23 main points
• Invited seminars and colloquia
• 60 minutes
• Limit talk to 50 minutes
• Make 23 main points
• Timing rules of thumb
• Allow 1½2 minutes for each slide
• More time needed if slide has complicated
  figures or data

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Know the style of your talk

• Persuasive
• Instructional
• This talk!!
• Informative
• Norm for scientific meetings
• Formal or informal?
• Hard to time informal

The style of your talk will depend on your venue,
audience, and purpose
Informal seminar Scientific conference Colloquium
Collaboration meeting Report to funders Job
interview
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How do you start?

• Write down the 23 key ideas you wish to convey!
• The introductory material flows from these ideas
  (what background/motivation does the audience
  need?)
• The body of the presentation flows from these
  ideas (what supporting evidence, figures, and
  data do you need to present?)

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Setting the overall structure of the talk also
follows from the key points

• Motivate the key issues (Introduction)
• Preview your main messages
• tell them what youre going to tell them
• Provide support for your messages (Body)
• tell them
• Summarize your messages (Conclusion)
• tell them what you told them

In other words, dont let them leave without
knowing your main messages!
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The title slide and outline prepares the audience
to listen and tells them what to look for

• Title slide
• Your name and affiliation
• Venue and date
• Attention-getting graphic

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The Mighty MuonA dash of history and a pound of
precision
David Hertzog University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Muon g-2
Muon Capture
Muon Lifetime
Great title slide, especially for a colloquim
Colloquium University of South Carolina
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The title slide and outline prepares the audience
to listen and tells them what to look for

• Title slide
• Your name and affiliation
• Venue and date
• Attention-getting graphic
• Outline or overview of presentation
• Prepares the audience to listen
• Provides a logical structure for your talk
• Provides motivation and context
• Summarizes key points (limit to three or four for
  a 20-minute talk)

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Particle Physicists Ask

• Why matter?
• CP Violation
• Why mass?
• Higgs field
• Why this standard model?
• SUSY or other extensions

Great overview slide, especially for a colloquim
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Overview
Black holes and star clusters
The galactic center
Intermediate-mass black hole kinematics
Here, we have a VISUAL and WRITTEN outline and
its not too long !
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The body of your presentation is the
intellectual content of your talk

• Problem statement, motivation 12 slides
• Previous work
• 1 slide
• Method
• 12 slides
• Results
• 46 slides
• Future work
• 12 slides

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We measure
Superb slide! This explains in pictures and very
few words the essence of the experiment. Note
the schematic equation.

• (1) Precession frequency
• (2) Muon distribution
• (3) Magnetic field map

B
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Provide a summary slide

• Recap key results
• Reiterate principal conclusions
• Repeat your contact information

This slide will probably stay on the screen
during the question period and will thus get the
longest audience exposuremake it count!
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Summary Conclusions
Not exciting but it has the pieces

• All g-2 data published
• Systematics lowered again
• Consistent results, consistently above theory
• ee tau controversy sill quite active
• considerably more ee type data on the way
• The systematic limit is far away we should go
  there

What we did
Where we stand summarized nicely on the plot
What to do next
Note e-mail and web link.
hertzog_at_uiuc.edu
Copy of talk www.npl.uiuc.edu/hertzog/ASPENg2.pd
f
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Use figures to illustrate your key points
Figures are good! 1 Figure xxxx words
They enliven slides, promote audience interest,
provide supporting evidence for key points, and
help explain complex ideas and relationships
quickly, show how things work, etc.
Much more on figures next week!
Myosin walking on actin Courtesy of P. Selvin
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Label all elements in a figure

• Point out important features
• Label both axes of graphs and show units
• Provide a caption
• Give credit

The Nike laser system uses discharge
pre-amplifiers. (Courtesy US Navy)
Sample normalized signals from the two-beam
optical drive.(Courtesy C. Michael)
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Presenting data is your most important and
challenging task

• Avoid copying a graph for a formal article they
  have a different style
• Use color and make lines thick
• Label axes and annotate important points with
  arrows and add words
• Use tables sparingly if you do, highlight
  important parts

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Presenting data is your most important and
challenging task

• What you show depends strongly on the audience
• General audience perhaps only left plot
• Experts need to see the right plot too

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Fit to Simple 5-Par Function
Equation uses COLOR to highlight the terms
important to the talk
N(t) N0 e-t/t 1Acos(wat f)
Few billion events Getting a good c2 is a
challenge
For a talk meant for experts, additional slides
will follow
Blowups provide extra detail
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Show the equipment IF it helps as part of your
proof but sparingly, not just because you love
it

• Photographs give scale and reality but add
  labels
• Schematics provide concept
• Icons strip away unnecessary details
• ALL OF THESE can be useful in combination

Mass spectrometer
Why is this not such a useful picture?
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Experimental Apparatus
Polarizer
Diffraction Grating
PRQW
Polarizer
Beam Reducer
Chopper
Here we add detail to picture of the optical
benchmuch more useful
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The title is the conclusion of this slide
am is proportional to the difference between the
spin precession and the rotation rate
This figure relates the concept to the real object
This supports assertion in sentence headline
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BNL Storage Ring
Features Blue/Black circles are part of the
physics story Diagram allows description of
components that enter in the data analysis
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Basic setup
Schematic setup
Courtesy IAP/TU Wien
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First Atomic-Scale Imaging of a CuO2 Plane in a
Superconductor
STM Tip
the CuO2 plane
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Some more examples of data
A photograph, which reveals the detail
A photograph, which reveals the detail
10 nm wires AuPd on DNA
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Use graphs and tables to present numerical data

• Use to show trends or reveal relationships
• Keep graphs and tables simpleprovide complex
  data in handouts
• Specify units of measure (in SI units)
• Provide a title for each graph or table

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Keep Graphs and Tables SimpleConvey Ideas, Not
Data
Women in Top-Ranked Physics Ph.D. Programs (1998)
Regrettably, does represent actual data
Illustration only, does not represent actual data
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Use equations sparingly

• Use equations only if absolutely necessary
• If you use equations
• Slow down
• Talk through step by step
• Explain relevance
• Combine with a picture that illustrates the
  physical principle involved

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Keep equations selective and informative

• What can an audience grasp in real time?
• If they already know it, then they know it
• If they dont know it, they usually have to study
  it term by term
• Take a sparse approach
• Substitute proportionalities for equalities ?
• Can eliminates uninteresting constants
• Can emphasize relationship of variables
• Substitute words for blocks of standard terms?
• Use builds and arrows to walk audience thru (see
  example)

Set them off attractively
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The Radiative Transfer Equation
I think this is a great and effective example
from one of our students

• Requirements to solve analytically
• n is a constant
• qa 0 or qs 0

We want turbulent clouds. n is not a constant
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Equations
better still, provide a physical interpretation
in words next to equations
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PowerPoint Esthetics
Remember, your goal is to convey your ideas, so
avoid distracting text and effects!
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Remember, your goal is to convey your ideas, so
avoid distracting text and effects!

• Dont overuse PowerPoint animations and sounds!
• Use simple (or no) backgrounds on slides

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Eschew weird fonts
Dont use calligraphy or serif fonts

• Use the same font throughout the talk

Make all text at least 20 pt
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Use San Serif Fonts
Use San Aarif font (e.g., Ariel) O Not Sarif
font (e.g., Times New Roman) O
Skinny parts disappear when projected
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Slide Esthetics

• Remember, your goal is to convey your ideas,
  so avoid distracting text and effects!
• Text
• Use simple fonts

• Select a font

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Slide Esthetics

• Remember, your goal is to convey your ideas,
  so avoid distracting text and effects!
• Text
• Use simple fonts
• Use same font throughout presentation
• Dont use smaller than a 20 pt. font size

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Choose an easy-to-read font (36 pt)

• Make sure your audience (32 pt)
• Can easily read (28 pt)
• Every one of your slides (24 pt)
• From the back of the room (20 pt)
• See what I mean? (14 pt)

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Use normal colors

• DONT use red/green or red/blue as contrasting
  colors
• Dont use more than three or four different
  colors
• Make sure colors looks the way you expect using
  an LCD projector!
• Avoid neon colors and pastels
• Dont use random colors people expect color to
  mean something

Strive for easy reading
Strive for easy reading
Strive for easy reading
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Embed special fonts in PPT
(1). Open the document in PowerPoint (2). Click
on the "Tools" tab on the top menu (3). Click on
the "Options" link (4). Click on the "Save"
tab (5). Locate Font options for current
document only and Embed TrueType
fonts (6). Click in the check box to turn on the
option