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What am I doing here?
The
purpose of this course is to give you experience at delivering oral
presentations of scientific material and technical information. You will
be required to give four different presentations and to critique those
of your peers. At the end of this course, you should be more confident
when speaking in front of your peers, you should have developed
prioritization and time management skills for presentations (since
professional talks are frequently only 10 minutes long), you should be
more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of technological aids used in
presentations (PowerPoint, Zoom, etc.), and you should be more capable
of critiquing and assisting your peers with these same skills.
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There is no formal textbook for this class. However, you must read the
four very short articles on public speaking (pdfs linked above), taken
from various sources, before class on February 1, 2024. You have other
assignments also due on that day, as outlined
here.
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- How will I be graded? Your
grade will be determined by:
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Your
presentations will be graded on clarity and scientific content,
appropriateness of your visual aids, time management, ability to answer
questions, and poise. Design your presentation for an audience having
the same knowledge as competent junior physics majors. Your critiques of
others will be graded on helpfulness and integrity. Furthermore, the
questions you ask of other presenters will be included in your
“Critique” grade.
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- What are the presentations
about? Each presentation
will be different, and the standards will be higher for later talks.
You may not give a talk on the
same subject already given by you or another student this semester.
Each topic must be
individually approved. In all cases, you must create all
graphics from scratch yourself.
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Talk 1:
10 minutes long + 2 minutes for questions. Select a talk
from category 1.
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Talks 2:
12 minutes long + 3 minutes for questions. Select a talk
from category 1, 2, or 3.
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Talks 3:
15 minutes long + 3 minutes for questions. Select a talk
from category 1, 2, or 3.
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Talk 4:
17 minutes long + 4 minutes for questions. Select a talk
from category 1, 4 or 5.
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Category 1:
A simple experiment that you design and perform this semester.
At a minimum, you must create at least one relevant plot (e.g.,
y vs x) with at least 10 data points.
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Category 2:
A
repeated experiment from sophomore physics lab, performed
again this semester. You may not choose an experiment for
which you already gave an oral presentation in another course.
You may not choose from this category twice.
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Category 3:
An
article from Scientific American, Physics Today,
or similar journal. The talk must focus on the article
itself, so you may not incorporate information from other
sources about the same topic.
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Category 4:
An
experiment that you performed in Intermediate Lab experiment.
You do not need to repeat the experiment. You may not choose an
experiment for which you already gave a talk. You may not choose
from this category twice.
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Category 5:
A more complex experiment that you have never presented to a
class
before, such as a summer REU project or a PHYS 372
(Undergraduate research) project.
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- Can you make any suggestions
for me for category 1?
- I didn't think too hard about any of these; maybe they aren't
even good ideas.
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- Here are some more details about these: (pdf)
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- 1. Physical (not simple) pendulum: Q value
(probably too easy).
- 2. Fidget Spinner (or bicycle wheel, etc.) spin down decay rate(s).
- 3. Air resistance using
coffee filters.
- 4. Complex Index of Refraction using a
stack of microscope slides (or
transparencies).
- 5. Torsional elastic coefficient for a
string holding an object.
- 6. Precession Rate of the ISC Foucault
Pendulum
- 7. The neck size of a falling
liquid
dish soap (or
glycerin)
stream vs. height.
- 8. Cantilever bending of a plastic ruler.
- 9. Resonant frequency of cantilevered
plastic ruler.
- 10. Smartphone accelerometer riding on a swing.
- 11. Electro-Mechanical Properties of a
gear motor
- 12. Response and efficiency of a photodiode (possible circuit)
- 13. Amplification ratio of npn transistor
PN2222A (possible circuit)
- 14. Helmholtz resonance frequency of a 2 liter bottle as
water is added.
- 15. Newton’s cradle: coefficient of restitution
of each collision.
- 16. The pitch of a plucked string with an
attached weight (similar to a PHYS 126 Lab)
- 17. Coefficients of friction using inclined
planes of various angles (too easy).
- 18. Index of Refraction of corn oil using
Snell's Law and a laser pointer (too easy).
- 19. Trajectory motion with air resistance
(probably too easy).
- 20. Conductivity of
glycerin mixed with water by mixing fraction.
- 21. Rate of cooling of a heated metal block
(probably too hard).
- 22. Heat capacity of corn oil using resistive
heating. Requires some electronics (probably too hard).
- 23. The changing radius of an air bubble rising
in a tall tank of water (probably too hard).
- 24. Frequency response of RLC circuit (possibly
too easy)
- 25. Dependence of magnetic force with distance.
- 26. Radius of the earth using variation in
sunset times as a function of camera altitude
- 27. Orbital radius of a satellite based on
transit time in the sky.
- 28. Angular velocity of the sun using sunspots
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- Twenty
Tips for Oral Presentations
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- Know the
science of your talk inside and out.
- Be careful to
not assume that your audience knows more than they actually do.
- Stay on topic.
Although you may discover interesting biographical material about
the scientists who did the work, that is not the subject of your
talk.
- Don’t include
a lot of text in a slide. Visual aids should be visual, not textual.
Slides should be primarily for pictorial information and summary
points. Whenever you have a lot of text, say it aloud rather than
showing it.
- When you do
have text (such as titles or bullet points), don’t read it to your
audience. For the most part, the audio (spoken) and visual
components should complement rather than repeat each other.
- Memorize your
script.
- Practice and
time your talk aloud several times.
- You may bring
notes (i.e., 3
´
5 cards, or even 8½
´
11 paper), but they are for emergencies only, since you’ll
have your talk memorized. Well designed slides provide all the
prompting that any speaker needs.
- Make eye
contact with your audience.
- Avoid embedded
sound effects, and animations that are cute rather than insightful.
These suggest that you are filling up time because you have nothing
relevant to say.
- Make sure that
visual aids have excellent (not merely adequate) contrast. Nobody
can read a black font on a blue background. Projection images rarely
have the same contrast as a monitor seen up close.
- Artwork should
be clear and as simple as possible to communicate the concepts.
- Don’t
plagiarize! If you borrow artwork, you must cite the source. You may
never “borrow” text of any kind. This is supposed to be your
talk, not some web site’s.
- Begin on time.
You will be given a 59 second grace period to start your technology.
If you start late, it is your fault, not the speaker who went
before you.
- End on time. A
10:00 minute talk should last between 9:45 and 10:15 minutes.
- Avoid
inappropriate humor. This includes, but is not limited to, “inside
jokes”, comments about how the talk is going, and all slides having
no purpose other than humor. In a real presentation, your audience
will be comprised of 99% people you’ve never met.
- Spend
absolutely no more than 4% of your preparation time adjusting the
layout of slides (borders, backgrounds, etc.).
- Be prepared to
give your talk even when there is no network connection! This
probably means that you have a “physical” copy on a thumb drive when
you arrive to class. You will be permitted to reschedule only on
days when SUNY closes the campus.
- Practice with
the actual hardware. Software may be missing, different, or too
slow.
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Dress
appropriately for a formal presentation.
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