Presentations (was: First impressions)

[Daniel Klein]

In article <15901 at vail.ICO.ISC.COM> rcd at ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>	- It takes skilled people and special equipment to produce good
>	  slides.  Many smaller organizations don't have it.  Good overhead
>	  transparencies can be produced on a < $4k laser printer on a PC.
>	  Smaller organizations DO have this sort of equipment because the
>	  dog-and-pony shows they're doing all the time need overheads.

Good slides can be made just as easily as good transparencies.  If you don't
want to go into all the glitz of color, you can go to your local photo shop
and have them create slides from paper copy for around $10 for a 24 slides.
Since 24 is too many for a 20 minute talk - you win.  Slides are cheap,
especially when you figure that overheads typically cost $0.50 each anyway.

>	- The overhead format is more convenient and familiar to many
>	  folk.

Yeah, we've always done it that way, and we don't want to change, even if
it's better another way.

>	- When you're doing that one last proofreading on Friday afternoon
>	  before you go to the conference, and you find that you wrote
>	  "Denise Ritchie", you can run off a new overhead yourself in a
>	  couple of minutes with nobody else's help.
>	- When you're sitting in the hotel room going over the talk the night
>	  before, and you discover that LR(k) somehow became LURK, you can
>	  patch over it with a marker.

This is one of the biggest problems at USENIX conferences - the last-minute
mentality.  If you are going to be making a presentation to over a thousand
people, you simply cannot make your slides at the last minute.  You cannot
prepare your talk on the Friday before.  It is absolutely unconscionable to
waste that many people's time by having an ill prepared talk.  Quite simply,
PLAN AHEAD.  Have your talk ready a month in advance.  Have your slides ready
a month in advance.  Don't complain about it - just do it!  For the D.C.
conference (coming up), all authors will have 2 months from notification of
acceptance until final paper deadline, and then another two months to get
their talk together and prepare slides.  It is unthinkable that anyone should
wait until the last minute to get their shit together, just so that they can
bore a huge number of people with bad slides and a choppy talk.

>	- When you're answering a question about "that slide about work-
>	  stations promoting Ferrari ownership" you can go back to it
>	  directly (by calling for the overhead) instead of subjecting a
>	  thousand people to the dizzying process of cycling backward
>	  through two dozen slides in an automatic changer.  (In Baltimore,
>	  the people who used slides generally had trouble backing up at
>	  all.  This is a common phenomenon.)

A 20 minute talk should have between 10 and 15 slides, maximum.  Flipping
back through 15 slides won't hurt anyone, and a well prepared speaker will
know the order of their slides ahead of time, so there should be no "hunting"
for that correct slide.  Calling for the overhead is just as time consuming,
because more often than not, the overhead turner does not know the talk, and
is only there to flip pages.  Use slides!  They are better, and as cheap.

>I'm curious about just how many speakers or potential speakers really have
>access to such facilities.  It must be very convenient for it to be useful,
>for the reasons I mentioned above.  Obviously the AT&T or DEC sized places
>can do it.  At the size of a company like Interactive (a few hundred
>people) the art dept exists but may not be geared to producing material for
>technical presentations.  Where's the breakpoint in the commercial world--
>perhaps a Kperson?  How are universities set for this?  Note that it's more
>than just having an art dept; they have to be able to deal with your
>material, which may contain tricky technical stuff (and they must be
>trained *not* to fix things which look obviously wrong or silly!:-), and
>they have to be able to turn it around pretty fast.

The SEI has 150 employees.  We have an art department.  Smaller organizations
also have them - the key is to PLAN AHEAD.  If you get in on the art department
queue EARLY, you can get your artwork out in time.  Typically, our art
department has a 2-3 week waiting list.  All I have to do is not wait until
the last minute, and all is fine.
-- 
-- =============--=============--=============--=============--=============--
"The only thing that separates us from the animals is superstition
and mindless rituals".          Daniel Klein   CMU-SEI   +1 412/268-7791
				dvk at sei.cmu.edu    uunet!sei.cmu.edu!dvk