Another crack at 'zen' science

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Graphics supporting a February 20 lecture at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Scott Elias' "Taking Your Slide Deck to the Next Level"

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Scott Elias is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, and he's put together a wonderful set of slides describing his ideas on presentation design and effective communication. To make it even better, he's provided a voiceover track so that you can listen to his presentation and watch his slides at the same time.

This presentation combines a clear purpose with great graphics and engaging content. It's extremely effective. It runs 20 minutes. Go watch it.

Don't let bad visuals sink your talk

The United States Navy is, in anyone's estimation, a serious operation. The US Navy is by far the largest in the world, with nearly 300 ships in service and more tonnage than the next 17 largest navies combined. Even outside of combat operations, the men and women of the Navy deal with challenging and dangerous situations as part of their day-to-day routine.

The US Navy also employs a lot of scientists. Its Office of Naval Research (ONR) sponsors research over a broad range of scientific disciplines, and has funded the work of more than 50 winners of the Nobel Prize.

In the mid-1990s, the ONR released "Tips for Preparing Scientific Presentations', an online guide to preparing and presenting a scientific talk. Although the guide has started to show its age a bit (mainly through references to 35-mm slides), most of its advice is just as relevant to presentations using slideware.

The guide provides a wealth of constructive advice, ranging from how to prepare your talk to advice for dealing with the question-and-answer session. One of my favorite sections is the guide's 'Ten Commandments to Visual Aids'. To summarize briefly, the 'Commandments' include:

1. Each visual aide should support the material covered in your talk.
2. Information presented visually should be brief and concise.
3. Visual aids must be legible and visible to the audience.
4. Two or three facts per image are best (and in my opinion, the fewer, the better).
5. Don't cram too many visuals into your talk.
6. Use color for emphasis and clarity.
7. Don't read your slides.
8. Be aware of the 'life span' of each visual.
9. Rehearse your talk with your visual aides.
10. Tailor your visuals to suit your speaking environment.

As the guide says, "visual aids ruin more speeches than they improve". Keeping these rules in mind should help make your talk clearer, shorter and more informative.

Going 'Zen' for the first time

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I've been asked to give a presentation at a workshop to be held in Alberta in March. The workshop will revolve mainly around the use of tree rings and other natural 'proxy' records to water issues in the Canadian Prairie provinces.

I'll be presenting material drawn from the last chapter of my doctoral dissertation, and will talk about the strengths and limitations of tree-ring records as indicators of past drought. The audience will include between 50 and 100 water managers from the region, and for many of them, the workshop will be their first exposure to tree rings and other forms of paleoclimatology. I think it will be in their best interest (and mine) that the scientific presentations focus more on big-picture ideas and less on technical details and methodology.

With an eye towards getting my point across more effectively, I've worked up a set of slides in the 'Presentation Zen' style. I've included more photos than I have in previous presentations, and have also tried to swap out complex journal-style diagrams and replace them with simpler graphics.

I'm excited (and a little nervous) to see how the presentation is received - I imagine its style will be quite different from the other talks in the workshop. I've posted the slides at Slideshare.net, and would appreciate any comments or suggestions - the workshop is not for another six weeks, so I have plenty of time left to tweak or change my plans.

Building a better slide

I thought it might be interesting to work through the evolution of one of the slides that I'll use in next month's presentation. I started off faced with a common problem - determining the best way to describe a key part of my technical approach to an audience of non-specialists. The work I'll be describing next month falls under the general field of paleoclimatology. Paleoclimatology (literally 'old climate science') uses information stored in natural archives (things like tree rings, lake sediments and many, many others) to describe how the Earth's climate behaved in the past, before people began making measurements with thermometers, rain gauges and satellites.

I needed a graphic to help me describe how paleoclimatologists:

1. relate their natural record to a climate variable like growing-season temperature or winter snow depth;
2. develop a mathematical model that mimics that relationship, and;
3. use the model to estimate climate conditions during the past several hundred or thousand years.

Cramming all those ideas into a single graphic could easily lead to a dense, complex slide – exactly what I didn’t want to show this audience. Spending a lot of time describing my methods would also take time away from more important points. I needed something simple.

My first idea was to borrow an image from William Ruddiman’s excellent book, Earth's Climate: Past and Future. This is really a great textbook for undergraduate and graduate-level courses on the Climate System, but it also stands out because of its visual design. In collaboration with a professional illustrator, Dr. Ruddiman produced a set of graphics that are technical accurate and aesthetically pleasing. One of the figures in the book outlines how tree rings are used to develop estimates of past temperatures. It wasn’t exactly what I needed – I’ll be talking about river flow, not temperature – but it was pretty darn close. And because Dr. Ruddiman has made all of the books graphics available free online, I wouldn’t have needed to do any work other than downloading the file.

Close, but not quite right (Ruddiman, 2000).

Using someone else’s graphic probably would have worked OK, but as I thought about it, I saw a few problems for using this particular diagram for my talk. Ruddiman’s diagram represents tree-ring records and temperature data as two time series – a pair of coloured, squiggly lines. Squiggly lines are basically the hard currency of most climate science. I worried that the audience would be sick and tired of them by the time I spoke. The diagram also has a fair amount of embedded text describing the steps in the methods. It also has five arrows that go off in four different directions. I realized that the diagram was just too complex – great for a printed figure, not so great in a presentation.

I decided to make my own graphic. I wanted something that would highlight my basic point – how information from trees is converted into a quantitative estimate of river discharge. Trees and numbers and water. Trees and numbers that describe water.

My inspiration.

I had just watched Scott Elias’ excellent ‘Taking Your Slide Deck to the Next Level’, and liked the way he used a simple black-and-white scheme in some of his slides. I adapted his design to include an image of a tree on one side, and a stand-in for water and numbers on the other. I briefly considered using a picture of a real tree but decided a vector graphic of a tree silhouette would be more effective in representing trees in general.

Figuring out how to describe numbers and water was harder. I went through a few ideas – wavy lines representing the river, a line plot showing changes in river flow over time – but most of them were too complicated or just confusing and weird. Finally, I decided to strip the idea down as far as I could, and use a set of numbers paired with hydrological units. I added a fade-effect to the numbers, which I thought gave the impression of a continuous series of estimates stretching far back in time.

My last change added a bit of color. I liked the starkness created by the black and white color scheme, but it was maybe a little too harsh. I placed an arrow to connect the tree to the set of numbers, and coloured it to match the other slides in my presentation.

Trees become numbers that describe rivers in the past

I’m very happy with the final slide. It illustrates the main components of my idea, and doesn’t have any extraneous details that could distract me or my audience. It also fits exactly with my point of discussion, which means that I won’t waste time by explaining the differences between my ideas and my illustrations.

Philip Bourne's "Ten Simple Rules"

Philip Bourne is a Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. He's written a brief (zen?) article in which he outlines his "Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations". My favorite is his second rule ('Less is More'), where he says:

Your knowledge of the subject is best expressed through a clear and concise presentation that is provocative and leads to a dialog during the question-and-answer session when the audience becomes active participants.

The article also promotes the use of 'storytelling', simple visuals and repetition. Even better, SciVee.tv has a companion video that features Dr. Bourne explaining his rules with a friendly, easy-to-follow manner.










http://www.scivee.tv/pubcast/17500596

"Life After Death By PowerPoint"

Comedy by Don McMillan:

Alexei Kapterev's 'Death by PowerPoint'

Alexei Kapterev's 'Death by PowerPoint' is one of my favorite presentations on presentation design (and also, one of the best set of slides I've ever seen). Alexei describes an elegantly simple approach to improve your presentations, and illustrates his message with humour and engaging images.

These slides are, in my opinion, the best available on Slideshare.net (in itself a great source of ideas, good and bad), and are an absolute must-view.

http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint

PowerPoint should be ditched?

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Nothing sucks the life out of a presentation like a slide packed full of text. Except maybe three or four of them in a row. Even if, to that point, the talk has been going well, text-heavy slides can be a killer. You can often feel the audience sink in their chairs, knowing that the presenter will feel obligated to slog through the entire set of points. More than that, these slides are a burden on the presenter - getting through all those words is a lot of work!

This story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that people learn more poorly if they receive information in both the written and spoken form at the same time.

John Sweller of the University of South Wales went so far as to declare that "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched." Sweller also suggests that it's more effective to present the same information in very different format, such as a graph or picture.