A week ago I went to an international conference where I had to give a presentation. I was confronted with an unpleasant surprise when I wanted to deliver my presentation.

Glass surface
The conference was held in an expensive hotel in Majorca (Spain). The rooms had a fast Internet connection. Only when I checked out I discovered I had to pay for the connection. There was a luxurious desk in the room, unfortunately covered by a nicely looking glass plate. As could be expected my optical mouse did not work on the glass plate. I always bring a cordless optical mouse for a number of reasons: I prefer a mouse over a touch pad and I use the mouse during my presentation. My improvised solution was a that I slid a sheet of paper under the glass plate.

Conference room
The presenters were supposed to put their laptop on a reading desk present in the conference room. Against my principle I did not check this out before my talk. When it was my turn I discovered that the nicely styled reading desk had two bad properties: (i) the laptop had to be put in there in an almost vertical position and (ii) it was fully made out of transparent perspex.

I discovered something a few days ago that made me ask the question: Am I mad, or are all web designers out of their minds? The sun was shining in my office and I just could not read the information on the web site of a major multinational company.

In my book I spent tens of pages on how to improve the slides of a presentation. I consider the most important guiding principle whether or not people in the audience can actually read the slides. For a number of reasons the legibility is poor in at least 25% of the scientific presentations I have been going to lately. The two most important causes are: (i) too small font sizes and (ii) bad contrast.

Abstract
In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior.

Introduction
Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form where the focus is on the presentation of slides. Old-fashioned people claim  - and complain - that a presentation with blackboard and chalk is a much better form of communication. This almost obsolete style is to be preferred in a limited number of cases only. For instance when you are lecturing to students and you really want to go slowly through a sequential line of arguments, like a full mathematical derivation. In all other cases the era of PowerPoint is a blessing. Both for presenters and for audiences.

The digital formats of a slide presentation allows for reuse by the presenter himself, and for reuse by others. Slide sharing is becoming fashionable. In this post I limit myself to the sharing of the presentation file. So I am not discussing full-blown video presentations.

In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In earlier days,  when a presentation was done with the help of overhead projectors, transparencies that were very clearly made while being in the air were referred to as “air-plane transparencies”. These slides showed all the signs of shaky fingers. In this post I will tell you something about my last-minute preparations for my latest presentation.

Laptop with a screen crash
I used to present my talks using a Dell laptop. Reliable, sturdy and so heavy that additional physical exercises were not necessary. About two  weeks before my conference in Crete would start the unexpected happened: my laptop had a crash, that is to say the screen stopped working and even hooking up an additional monitor did not save me. I only lost about a few hours of work. I always backup my data regularly so this little damage was a reward for my consistent backup procedure.

My example presentation
When discussing quality of presentations it helps a lot to discuss on the basis of example presentations. An example presentation is exactly what this post is about. Although I do not expect all the readers of this blog to be interested in the content of my talk, it would probably not harm to sketch the context of this speech. About a year ago I gave a 25minute presentation for an audience of about 75 physics PhD students. That day was organized by the Dutch science-supporting agency FOM especially for the students. The program included workshops on presentations, on writing papers and on career planning. I was the last, plenary,  speaker, just before the good-bye drink. My task was to give them a flavor, possibly with some humor, of what it means to pursue an academic career.

Technical aspects
The idea of posting this presentation is to show some technical details:

When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.

Writing grant proposals is a fact of live for every group leader. This writing can be quite time consuming. Your chance of success depends on a number of factors. The factor I want to discuss here is the originality and the detail of the proposal .

New idea
Pursuing a new idea is what makes the life of a scientist fascinating and challenging. But also demanding. Just continuing one’s research on old ideas is much easier. But a new idea is very difficult to come by.  Continuation of old stuff is much easier. Grant organizations want new ideas. Supporting continuation is in our society never appreciated. ( Unless it is Scottish whisky.)  So even when you are just going to do the same research you have to package it in the form of a new idea.

In my book Survival Guide for Scientists I give very precise advise on how, in my opinion, one can improve a scientific presentation. For educational purposes examples of really bad presentations and examples of really excellent presentations can be a very useful complimentary instruction material. When I asked some of my colleagues to allow me to criticize (positively or negatively) a recent presentation of them, they all ducked.

Some time ago I listened to a presentation in the USA by Femius Koenderink, a junior colleague group leader of our institute. I was impressed by his talk and his slides (and I am known to be critical). I asked Femius if I could use his presentation on our web site as an example of a good presentation. And under the condition that I could comment all slides one by one. Femius is a good sport, so he immediately agreed, which please me a lot. I will not supply the PowerPoint file, for a number of reasons, but I will supply a pdf version. The pdf version has the slides and the comments. Please download and enjoy. And criticize me (or Femius).

I read the Survival guide with great pleasure and find it very useful and many times very amusing. A few comments/recommendations.

1. A useful addition to Presentation Guide 5.B.4 Sound. Although a speaker should face the audience as much as possible, we all know that for the majority of presentations, people are facing the screen at least 25% of the time. Please place the wireless microphone on your jacket/sweather/shirt on the same side as the screen is. This will avoid a complete dimming of your voice when you punt something out on the screen.

2. The majority of the Email Guide has an even page header showing ‘Presentation Guide’ (this even continues at the index, not very appealing). This mistake is very inconvenient during browsing when the Guide is used as a reference book .

In my book I classify scientific presentations according to the following scheme:

a)  speaker has no goal apparently
b)  speaker wants to prove he is smarter
than anybody in the audience
c)  speaker wants to give listeners a flavor
of new developments in his field
d)  speaker wants to teach some new
science to the listeners.

In the book I discuss talks of type a), b) and d) to some length, but I say noting about talks of type c). The basic reason being that talks of this type are very difficult to deliver.

Flavor of new developments
If you do not talk to specialists and you do want to drown your audience you have a very difficult task. In the first place be honest to your audience how difficult the subject is. Feynman says in his set of lectures
QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter about calculating (Feynman) diagrams: “It takes seven years to train our physics students to be able to do that trick.”
So you must separate those concepts that your audience can understand and those they cannot understand. Make clear that it is not your intention to impress them and that they must accept the fact that a number of things you present they cannot understand (you can make them plausible, though). Furthermore be very modest. Do not overload them with too much new information.