Hotelling Society - Invited Symposium
Psychology 6140

Hotelling Society Symposium

Tips for paper presentation

PowerPoint

Here is one set of Tips for effective PowerPoint presentations (I'm not sure I agree with all of these and often violate many of them.)
Here is another set of recommendations

R Studio / knitr: beamer and ioslides

In R Studio, it is very easy to create nice slide presentations including R graphics, R code and output from a single (reproducible) document. You can do your analysis and write your presentation concurrently, and knitr tools and menu items make it easy to view the working version as you write it.

There are two basic formats:

Rnw (for processing with LaTeX beamer), producing PDF output: Write like LaTeX, R code in "Sweave-style" chunks
```
<<plot1, height=6, width=10, ...>>=
plot(1:10, 10:1, pch=16)
@
```
Rmd (for processing with pandoc), producing HTML output: Write like markdown, R code in "markdown-style" chunks
```
```{r plot1, height=6, width=10, ...}
plot(1:10, 10:1, pch=16)
```
```

Some links to get started:

R markdown: Dynamic documents for R gives an overview, a handy cheat sheet and reference guides.

Using knitr in beamer slides Contains some minimal examples to get started.

Phil Chalmers used this in a 2013 QM Forum talk, and provided his Rmd presentation file, and the associated R graphics file that generated his graphs.
A more recent QM Forum talk by Phil, Introduction to Monte Carlo Simulations with Applications in R Using the SimDesign Package has an even simpler format, incorporating all the R and text in a single Rmd file.

Writing beautiful and reproducible slides quickly
Create a Slideshow (PowerPoint) with R, Knitr, Pandoc, and Slidy

R graphics tips for presentations

One good guideline is to print a copy of your graph, put it on the floor and stand over it. If you can't read it, or see the details, revise it.

The tips below relate to graphs produced using R base graphics:

Pay attention to font sizes in graphs so that they are readable on the screen. Often this can be controlled using par() settings, such as cex=, cex.lab=, cex.main=, ...
cex= also controls the size of plotted characters in base graphics.
I also often use pch=16 to get filled circles as plotting symbols rather than the default pch=1 empty circles in scatterplots. These usually show up better in slides and other graphs.
Pay attention to plot margins, that can often introduce a large amount of whte space around a graph, making it less legible than it could be. par(mar=c(bot,left,top,right)) controls this.
Line widths are often too thin using the default lwd=1 setting.
Adjust the aspect ratio of your slides on screen maually until it "looks about right". Then, use dev.copy2pdf(file=, h=, w=, ...) to save a copy of the screen image to a PDF file, or wrap your graphics code in a device-driver call:
```
png(file=, h=, w=, ...)
#  graphics code here
dev.off()
```

If you use lattice-based graphics, there are often different parameters controling these things.

If you use ggplot2-based graphics, there are equivalent ways to do all these things, but all are different. I generally use the ggplot2 Cheatsheet, or ggplot2 Quick Reference, and the ggplot2 documentation to find what I'm looking for. ggsave() is the general way to save a ggplot2 graphic to a file.

Tips for poster presentations

The best collection of advice and examples I've seen for designing a poster for a scientific conference is the web page http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm. This is probably outdated, and maybe there is something better now.

Posters can be done relatively easily in both PowerPoint and LaTeX. The key thing is both is to set your "paper size" to the size of your poster. I don't have any templates or specific examples at hand.

Specifications for Proceedings Papers

Papers to be published in the Proccedings should be prepared are follows:

Please submit camera-ready copy, with all tables and graphs included in-line (whereever possible). Use no cover page; rather, include title, author and affilliation information at the top of the first page.
The Proceedings will accept the judicious use of colour in tables and graphs, although it will be printed in black and white, so design with this in mind.
Papers should be single spaced, no more than 6 pages in length (unless agreed in advance by the editor). You may use two-column format if you wish.
Page margins should be set to at least 3/4" left and right.
Here is a Micro$oft Word template for a two-column format (with a sample document) you can use and/or modify if you like.
If you use LaTeX, you may find one of these templates useful. There is another collection on ShareLaTex, and yet more at Overleaf.