Hi everybody, I'm Jeremy my talk today is ruby techniques by example now I'm aiming for a slower pace than yesterday's lightning talk So if I am going too fast, please tell me to slow down Now this presentation will take you behind the scenes of production ruby code and show you techniques that you can use in your own code Now a great Ruby programmer told us last year that as we become better Ruby programmers We should read more code and for those of you who weren't with us last year. That's James Edward Gray Who ran the Ruby quiz for a long time? I don't know about you, but personally I find that reading code is often boring And I think the reason for that is that the signal-to-noise ratio of most code is quite low At least in terms of learning from the code Now I don't mean that most code has serves no purpose But I do think the majority of code that you read is not going to teach you new things I'm not suggesting reading code is a bad idea However, I do think that it may not be the best use of your time And that's where this presentation comes in I've read over 10,000 lines of code so that you don't have to and have chosen to highlight only those techniques that I think are interesting Now the first technique I'd like to discuss deals with creating more easily extensible classes And by extensible I mean classes that are easy for other users to extend in any way that they see fit Now I'd like to give a warning that the rest of the presentation is very code heavy And I'll try to give you enough time to read the code on the slides before I talk about it But if you want more time, please just speak up Now consider this quite common way of adding class and instance methods to a class For most classes, this is perfectly fine But it is not the most extensible way to add the methods to the class and the problem with this way is that it's Difficult for someone to override one of your class or instance methods that you have defined and call super to get the default behavior Now you who had touched on this near the end of his presentation yesterday, so I'll try to go into a little bit more detail All right, you can have users subclass your class in order to override your methods But that will not affect all instances of the class and the user may want to affect instances They are not themselves creating Now the goal here is to allow users to override the methods that you have defined But still call super to get the default behavior and have the overriding affect all instances of the class Now here's one solution that unfortunately does not work When you define methods in a class like this, you're defining them directly on the class or the class is a singleton class Class methods defined this way cannot be overridden by modules and Instance methods defined this way can only be overridden by modules on a per instance basis You cannot override the instance methods for all instances at once and this is due to how method lookup works in Ruby I'm going to attempt to explain Ruby's method lookup quickly with some simplification imprecision and inaccuracy Basically when a method is called on any Ruby object It's going to first look in its singleton class and then any modules included in that singleton class and reverse order of inclusion If the method hasn't been found or the found method called super It substitutes this singleton class with the singleton class is super class and then it restarts the lookup Now given that lookup process that I've described. There's three interesting cases for classes The super class of the singleton class is the singleton class of the classes of super class And unless the current class is subclassed directly from object in which case the super class of the singleton class is a class class Now for other objects the super class of the singleton class is just the objects class itself Now, here's an example of the method lookup process for a class method of big num. Let's extend the integer class with a new module, which includes the module and integer's singleton class. It tries the singleton classes of big num and integer, then the module that extends integer, and then the singleton class of numeric. Since numeric's superclass is object, the singleton class of numeric's superclass is class, so it tries that next, followed by module, object, and finally kernel, a module included in object. Now, here's the method lookup process for an instance of file extended with a module. Ruby will first look at the singleton class of that object, followed by the method, sorry, the module that you extended the class, the object with, followed by the file class, followed by the ancestors of file, which are class IO, module file constants, which is included in IO, module enumerable, which is included in IO, class object, and finally kernel. Now, now that we've finished the digression on Ruby's constant lookup, let's get back to extensible design. If your initial class definition defines all of your class and instance methods in modules, then future modules can extend or be included in the class, and they can call, super, to call the definition of the method in the most recently included or extended module. Now, this design approach works very well, but the simplistic approach shown here is a tad verbose. You can structure your extensions so that an outside module encloses both the class method and instance method modules. And then you can make extending your classes as easy as a simple method call inside the class. To implement this is actually fairly simple. Here's a simplified version of SQL model's plugin method. You just need to check if the submodules are present and extend them or include them in the class if so. Now, you could accomplish the same thing using the extended method of the class methods module or the included method of the instance methods module. But some plugins may have only class methods and some plugins may have only instance methods, which is why a separate method is a superior solution. With your plugin method set up like that, you can allow the user to extend the class with as many plugins as they want. If all three plugins define the all class method and have a call super, when the user calls person.all, it will call the version in plugin three, and then plugin two, and finally plugin one. Now, this design approach makes it possible for extensions to have complete control to override any part of the class's behavior while making it easy for the user to extend with any combination of extensions for their own use. The second technique I'd like to discuss deals with handling class level data in inheritance hierarchies. I'm going to go over three different approaches to this, which I'm going to refer to as the class variable approach, the delegating approach, and the copying approach. All right, this is the class variable approach, and you will rarely see it used as it's basically unworkable when changes in subclasses need to be independent. And with this code, setting the class variable inside customer affects person and employee as well, since class variables are shared throughout an inheritance hierarchy. Now, class variables should generally be avoided and are definitely not appropriate for situations where parts of the hierarchy are independent. All right, here's a simplified version of the delegating approach pulled from act of support. With the delegating approach, whenever they look up of a class instance variable as requested, it looks in its own class. And if it has not been defined there, it tries its superclass, continuing up the hierarchy until the class instance variable is defined or the top level class is reached. The possible advantage to this approach is that if you create a subclass and you later modify the value of the class instance variable in the superclass, the subclass will see the changed value unless it has been overwritten in the subclass itself. The disadvantage is speed, as lookups can be significantly slower, especially for deep hierarchies. Now, this example of the copying approach is pulled from SQL's force encoding plugin, which is similar to the approach of other SQL plugins. In Ruby, when subclasses are created, the superclass's inherited method is called with the subclass as an argument. So you can override the inherited method in your class, call super, and then set values in the subclass. In this case, the value of forced encoding is copied from the superclass to the subclass. And the advantage to this is that lookups in the subclass are just as fast as in the superclass. And the possible disadvantage is that modifications to the superclass after subclass creation are not copied to the subclass. Now, the next technique relates to safety. In particular, safely defining methods via metaprogramming. I'm gonna pick on the delegating example I showed earlier for an example of unsafe metaprogramming. And in general, anytime you use eval created with a string that's created with interpolating arguments, you need to be sure that the string created is valid Ruby code. And for most cases, this will work just fine. But take a few seconds to look at this method and see if you can spot some safety issues. All right, let's consider what happens if name contains a character valid in a method name, but not valid in a literal, such as a space.  But the Ruby code produced by superclass delegating a reader will not be valid. In this case, the string of value will raise an error. But if the code body did not raise an error, instead of defining a method named foobar that takes no arguments, it would define a method named foo that takes one argument. Now you can fix this by switching from a string eval to a block eval and referencing the objects directly. However, this has performance implications. Methods that are defined with a defined method are closures, and they do not perform as well as methods created with eval strings that are not closures. So in general, there's a performance versus safety tradeoff, with string evals being performance and block evals being safety. However, you don't have to sacrifice one or the other. You can write code that has maximum performance in the normal case using a string eval, while still handling the abnormal case with a block eval. Now this example is taken from SQL, which creates accessor methods for the columns it finds when introspecting the database, which may contain spaces or other characters not valid in Ruby literals. And basically, you just need to check your inputs and make sure that they would create valid Ruby code. If so, you can use this ring eval. If not, you have to use the block eval. Important to note here is the use of a separate method for the block evals, instead of including them in the main method. Because block evals create closures, objects created in the surrounding scope will not be garbage collected, even if they are never used in the block eval code. In a simplified example, it's not a major savings, but one application using SQL measured the savings of half a megabyte of memory per process by moving block evals to a separate method. Our next technique is a brief but complete description of a simple DSL, and some issues that you need to deal with so that your DSL works nicely. Now this example is taken from the validation helper's block plugin for SQL, which provides a simple DSL for SQL validations. And the DSL syntax should be fairly straightforward. Inside the validates block, methods indicated tributes, and inside those blocks, methods indicate the type of validation that you are doing. I'm going to go over how this DSL is implemented, which is actually fairly simple. The first step is the definition for validates, which just passes along the block it receives, along with reference to the current object to a new DSL class. And the DSL class is named a validation helper's attributes block to indicate that method names inside the block are used to specify attributes. And the implementation of this class is fairly simple, but the important thing to note is that it drives from SQL basic object. And with DSLs, it's usually important to derive from a basic object class so that the methods defined in object can still be used. Now there are a couple of issues with using basic object. For one, there is no basic object in Ruby 1.8. All right, here's SQL's basic object class. And note that it has separate versions for Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. On Ruby 1.8, the SQL basic object class is just a subclass of object, with most of the methods removed using undef method. And we'll get to the Ruby 1.9 implementation in just a bit, but first I wanna take two quick surveys. A quick show of hands, who knows what this code will do in Ruby 1.9. Does anyone use Ruby 1.9 here? All right, a few people. Now if you think output zero, you are correct. How about this code, let's get another show of hands. Who knows what this code will do in Ruby 1.9? Matt, what will it do, Matt? Yeah, so you get a name error, because inside the definition of basic object, you could not directly access constants to find an object, which is where all other classes are defined by default. Now you can work around this by adding a double cone in front of all constants inside of basic object. However, with DSL design, users are generally not going to know to do that, as they aren't gonna know that the blocks that they are gonna be using are gonna be evaluated inside the context of a basic object derived class. Now here's an example of a separate SQL DSL that allows easy filtering of data sets. Without changing the constant lookup inside basic object, this used to raise constant lookup errors on Ruby 1.9, because of the time constant did not exist inside of basic object. Now the previous workaround was just to add a double colon before time, but by changing the constant lookup, you can allow users to not worry about prefacing constants in DSLs with a double colon, which brings us to how to fix constant lookup in basic object. Thankfully, it's actually fairly easy. You just need to add a constant missing class method to the object or to the class that calls object.constget. You'll note that you do need to preface the reference to object with a double colon, otherwise you should get a system stack error. However, when I tried this without double colon, I got a sig ill and a core dump. Now that we've finished the digression on constant lookup, let's look back at the DSL implementation that we were talking about originally. And as you can see, this is fairly simple. In initialize, you're just keeping a reference to the outer self in an instance variable and an instance of valing the block. All method calls in the block are handled by method missing, which passes the outer self and the method name specifying an attribute along with the block to a new DSL class. Now method missing is used here because potentially any method name is valid. And in general, you should only use method missing if any possible method name is valid. Now here's the final DSL class that handles the actual validation. In initialize, again it's just keeping a reference to the outer self and a current attribute and an instance of valing the block. Note that method missing is not used here. Because we know in advance which validation methods exist, we only create methods for those validations. In this particular case, the methods also have different arity, so two separate class of values are used, one for methods that accept an additional argument and one for methods that do not. Now in both cases, the methods created via metaprogramming just call the appropriate validation method on the object for the given attribute. Now my next topic isn't really a technique, it's just a code example that shows off a little appreciated aspect of Ruby. One of the libraries I work on is scaffolding extensions, which is a very flexible admin front end for multiple wave frameworks and all three major ORMs. And one of the things that allows you to do is override pretty much all of the defaults. For example, you can set the default fields to be displayed on the pages for the person model to be name and age, but to also show the position on the browse page. Now I'm gonna go over two of the internal methods that implement this support. First, all methods have a default implementation that is defined by the library, but the user can override any of those methods for specific cases by defining methods or instance variables that handle that case. Now this method takes multiple method name symbols. For each method name symbol, it first aliases the default method to a private method and then it creates a public method that checks that the method has been overridden before the given argument. If the method has been overridden, it calls the overridden method, otherwise it falls back to using the default method. Now here's what I think is the more interesting part. In order to use this in classes, you just need to extend the class with the overriding module. Now the overriding module has an extended singleton method. And in order for it to work correctly, it exploits a little appreciated aspect of Ruby, which is that virtually all objects can have singleton classes, including all singleton classes themselves. So when a class is extended with overridable, it adds the necessary metaprogramming methods to the singleton class of the singleton class of that class. And inside the singleton class calls the metaprogramming methods, which in turn override the given singleton methods on the class itself. Now this is the only production code I've seen that modifies the singleton class of a singleton class. Anyone else used it? Okay, now our next topic is about presenting multiple backends using a unified interface. And the general strategy for doing this is using separate subclasses for each backend and having a method in the parent class return an instance of the appropriate subclass. Now distilled to its essence, that's what SQL's connect method does. SQL's connect method is supposed to return an appropriate SQL database instance for the database. In order to handle differences between databases, the connect method returns an instance of the database adapter specific subclass. It processes its input, and then it calls adapter class with the appropriate adapter. Now this is a simplified version of the adapter class method. It just takes the adapter scheme given and requires the appropriate adapter file. In each adapter file, the adapter registers the adapter's database subclass in the adapter map, and then the adapter class is just looked up in the adapter map and returned. Back to the connect method, it just takes the class return from the adapter class method and just instantiates a new instance of that class using the given options. Now that's basically all you need to do for the initial setup to work. As long as the subclasses implement the appropriate methods, the wrapping is fairly transparent. Transparent, that is, until you have to handle exceptions raised by the underlying backends. For example, let's say you try to insert into a non-existent table. In order to treat the multiple backends as one, you don't want a PGR to be raised using PostgreSQL or MySQL, or it would be raised when using MySQL.  Now in this case, no matter what backend you are using, if that backend raises an exception, SQL will raise a SQL database error. Doing this properly is actually a little bit more work than you might think. Here's a simplified version pull from SQL 2.0 as MySQL adapter. Now this is the simplest thing that works, but it has some unfortunate drawbacks. Now when the SQL error is raised, the exception message from the underlying exception is kept, but the backtrace is lost. And what's also lost is the ability to tell which backend raised the message, which can be helpful when debugging. Now this is a simplified version of SQL's current exception class conversion method. Note first that the exception class name is included in the exception message, which easily allows the user to tell what the underlying exception class was, while still only rescuing SQL's exception class. Also note that the wrapped exception is kept in its entirety, mainly to make it available for use in a case statement inside a rescue clause so that higher level application code can treat different backend errors differently if it wants to. And finally, the backtrace from the newly created exception is set to the backtrace of the underlying exception so the user can easily see which line actually raised the error. I'd like to close out the presentation with a few simple reminders to prevent some issues in Ruby code. The most experienced Ruby programmers probably know about all of these, but I still see these occasionally in production code. Now the first reminder relates to using strings with eval. Now see if you can identify a problem with this code. And the main problem is that the file and line arguments were not passed to instance eval. So if an error is raised, you aren't sure where it happens. And the solution is fairly simple, you just add the file and line arguments to all of your string evals. Now note that if you are using here document, you should add one to the line argument because the string starts on the line after the line that calls the eval method. Then, if the eval code raises an error, the user can see where the error actually occurs. Now the second reminder relates to the appropriate use of the logical OR operator in Ruby. Now think about problems with this code, which is supposed to set the single-threaded mode of given or fall back to whatever the class default is. Now the problem with this code is if the user sets the single-threaded option to false when instantiating the database, it will always use the class default. So if the class default is true, the database will be put in single-threaded mode even though that's not what the user requested. Now this is due to how the short-circuiting logical OR operator works. Now the solution to this is to not use a logical OR operator at all, but to switch to a conditional. And the basic principle is that anytime nil or false can be a valid value, you cannot use a logical OR operator. Now the final topic is a combination of a fairly simple technique involving creating re-entrant methods, along with a reminder about the proper use of insure. Now let's first discuss re-entrancy and why it is important, at least in this context. Consider this code. The insert method inserts a hash of values into one or two tables inside a transaction. However, the fact that insert uses a transaction is not obvious to the caller. If the caller calls insert inside their own transaction, you don't wanna open up a new database connection in transaction, you want to reuse the databases currently open transaction. Now this is the actual code used for an old version of SQL's transaction method. These are the parts that deal with re-entrancy. Basically, you need to store references to the threads that are currently inside the method. Then before they begin rescue insure block, you check that the current thread is already inside the method, and if so, you use return yield to immediately pass execution to the block and return. Now this return yield technique is used in multiple places inside of SQL. Now let's revisit the insert method we defined earlier and consider an issue with it. Think about the highlighted line and how it may not work correctly. Now the problem with returning inside the transaction block is that the lines of code between the yield call and the rescue block are not called. Now the solution to this is fairly simple. You just need to make sure that all code that must be executed is inside an insure block. I think the original author of this code did not want the commit query to be sent in case of an error, which is why it was not in the insure block to begin with. Now if you only want code to be executed if no exception was raised, you should have the rescue block assigned the exception to a local variable and then inside the insure block only execute the code if the value of that variable is no. And that concludes my presentation. I hope you found some of these techniques interesting. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present here at Mountain West Ruby Conference. Anybody have any questions? No questions? All right, if you don't have questions, I will attempt to show you something at least vaguely interesting to me. All right, who else uses Word in their presentation? All right, so what possible, where those question marks are, what's the only thing that can be there in order to get this code to work? So basically this is something where you call the class method and it'll call the class method first and then call the instance method on the same class. Anybody, Matt's? Matt's too busy reading his email. It's okay. Okay, Matt's. Where do you have those question marks? What's the only valid thing that can be there? What's the only thing where you can call the class method and calling super will then call the instance method? Anybody, anybody else? So if you call class, because of the way I describe Ruby's method lookup, classes are basically, it's super class of class is object. So when you call the singleton method of classes, that super class is class itself, which is when you go to the instance methods and that's how you end up with the same code. Thank you. Questions? You're talking about the method lookup slides? Or let's see, okay. So let's see. That or? Okay, I mean, basically the idea for doing that would be if you're defining a method in the class that's already there, you'd have to sort of create an anonymous module included in the class and then have the method call super to go to that. There was also talk, I think Yehuda brought it up, talking with Matt's about the ability to prepend modules to the ancestor chain so that they'd show up before the class module itself and I don't think as I got anywhere Matt's. Okay, we're still thinking about it. So, anyone else? Okay, thank you very much.


hosted by AIC's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network, better known as ECPN. My name is Fran Ritchie and I'm the Network's Professional Education and Training Co-Chair and the Webinar Coordinator. Today, we are very pleased to present ECPN's seventh webinar on Presenting Talks and Posters. ECPN is happy to have with us two conservators who are effective public speakers, Katie Sanderson and Ariel O'Connor. Katie is an Assistant Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ariel is an Objects Conservator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Both have given numerous professional presentations and posters. Before we continue, I would like to familiarize you with the GoToWebinar program that's the program that we're using today to facilitate this webinar. The view window where you see our title slide right now can be resized by clicking and dragging the lower right corner. The control panel is where you as an attendee can take some control on your own screen. You may find that with inactivity, the control panel automatically minimizes. If you'd like to keep it open the entire presentation, then go to View up at the top and there's an auto-hide control panel option that can be turned off by unselecting it. The audio section tells you if you are joined to the audio by phone or internet. All of you listening out there are muted so the way that you will be communicating is through the question or chat box. We have solicited questions for the Q&A today but if you have one, feel free to type it into the chat box. I'll keep an eye on this and we will hopefully answer your questions during the program but if there are questions that do not get answered, we may be able to address them in a post webinar blog post. We won't be using the raise hand option today. I'd also like to take a moment to share information about ECPN and our webinar series. For those who don't know, we are a network within AIC that is dedicated to supporting conservation professionals as they move through the first stages of their careers. We do this by organizing a variety of initiatives and programs. We are developing our own WICI page within the AIC WICI Education and Training section where you can find many of the resources we have been creating over the years. This is very much a work in progress that will continue to be updated but I wanted to go ahead and share this with you so you get used to going to this page. We also have a popular webinar series and provide programs at the AIC annual meetings. For this year's meeting in May, we have planned another lunchtime speed networking session based off of last year's successful event. You can advance, Katie. Join us on Saturday, May 16th from 12 to 2 to gain insight and advice from other conservators. We are also excited to be partnering with the Conservators in Private Practice Group or CIPP for a discussion panel and happy hour beginning at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 13th. The panel will include established private practice conservators as well as those who have just started their practice. Both groups will offer advice for beginning private work. The panel is from four to six and our traditional happy hour directly follows from six to eight. By having the happy hour directly after, this will give us the chance to continue the panel discussions but please do feel free to join in the happy hour even if you did not attend the panel. Register for the speed networking event and learn more about both of the programs on AIC's website under the annual meeting. Next slide. To learn more about ECPN, we encourage you to join us for our bi-monthly conference calls which are usually held on the second Tuesday of every other month at 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The number to join can be found under the information section of our Facebook page or you can email ECPN share Megan Salazar Walsh for more information. Please also consider subscribing to our periodic e-blast which you can do by logging on to the AIC website, clicking on manage your profile and selecting ECPN. You can also follow us on the AIC blog, Conservators Converse. Visit the link on your screen for more information about all of this. The Emerging Conservatives community is also very active on our ECPN Facebook page where people post questions and advice and they also offer support. We encourage conservators of all levels to join in this conversation. Next slide. Through our webinar series, ECPN strives to provide ongoing programming that responds to the needs of emerging professionals at different stages of their early careers although we believe that the webinar series can be beneficial to all conservators. Recordings of our webinars may be accessed on AIC's YouTube channel and a recording of today's program will also be posted on there soon. Turning then to today's program, the ability to communicate our work effectively is an essential part of being a conservator especially as we advocate for funding and educate non-conservators on the importance of preservation. Today we are focusing on presenting talks and posters or ways to utilize and polish these platforms so that your audience is focused on your work. We have all attended talks when the presenter seems unprepared or seen those posters with too much information and too small to font. Katie and Aria will help us prevent those blunders. As I mentioned, today's program will conclude with a Q&A session and these questions were selected from those submitted by the audience through the emails provided in the registration form. Although you can submit questions through the chat box on your screen. Even if we run out of time, our speakers may be able to address additional questions in the form of a blog post. So please do continue to submit. And now I will turn over the program to our first speaker, Katie Sanderson. Thanks, Fran. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be here. And I'm going to jump right in and I'm going to divide my comments this morning among four sections covering abstracts, posters, and then writing the actual talk and finally the act of presenting it. And then Ariel will address some of the practical aspects of creating and presenting PowerPoint presentations. So jumping right in with writing your abstract, I'm starting with this obviously because writing your abstract is the beginning of the process. And a well-written abstract can really act as a sort of mission statement you can refer back to as you're preparing for your presentation. So it can be a very useful tool as you're working through. The purpose of an abstract is to give a brief and clear idea of what you'll be talking about in your presentation. It should never be a summary of your entire talk. Abstracts can vary a lot and there's really no single way to write a good one. But generally they should include an introduction describing the question or problem you might be addressing, some background information related to your project, giving it some context, sometimes with the larger body of work in your chosen specialization. The objective of the project you're actually presenting. And then a description of the project and the results you plan to discuss. And if you're unsure of how to start writing an abstract, looking up examples is a really great way to get a sense of how you think it should come into shape. Abstracts are everywhere and the AIC conference abstract books are really the perfect place to look first I think. In many cases you may be writing your abstract before you actually know the outcome of your project you'll present. And I think this becomes more and more common the farther into your career you go. This is fine. Just remember that you'll usually be given an opportunity to edit your abstract before it's printed finally in the conference program, just in case you need to make any changes. Although that's something that's definitely worth double checking for whichever conference you might be presenting at. And I want to make a quick note about brevity here. I'm a firm believer that a good abstract is a short one. And of course not all short abstracts are good ones. But substance, because substance certainly matters as well as does structure. But as the co-chair of the AIC poster session for a couple of years now, I've read a lot of abstracts and I have to say I've come to value those that are well written, clear and concise. The example I showed you earlier was about 300 words and I think it's a common upper limit is about 500 words. And that's something I tend to strive for. I've certainly written longer abstracts than that, than 300, but I usually try to keep it under 500. And this way of thinking, this sort of attempt to write brief and concise prose should really be applied to anything you do, but especially for abstracts and also for posters. I'm going to talk briefly about designing a poster. With poster design, it's like abstracts. Less is really more. They should be visual with lots of pictures and only the most important information in the text. Like writing a good abstract, the most challenging part of course is editing it down to only the most essential information. And especially when you're writing it out in say a word document before you format it as a poster, it will look incredibly short and it will feel like you're including virtually no information. This poster by Emily Hamilton is nicely designed with really clear section headings, good images, and just the right amount of text, not too much. She's also included her contact information and a photo of herself, which I think both of these are a great idea, especially the contact information, which allows a nice easy way for people to follow up with questions later. And if you're putting together a great poster, people really will want to reach out to you. The best way to control the amount of text you add to your poster is by using images that illustrate your point instead. Sometimes this can actually be clearer than writing if you find the right images to do this. This is a poster I presented in 2007 about wheat starch paste, and which is a pretty dry topic. And it turned out to be much easier for me to discuss the stages of clicking paste with images and brief captions rather than writing it out. And I think far more interesting, although I was surprised even that I was able to get reasonably interesting pictures of paste. I've also, I always format posters right in PowerPoint. It's easy and it's familiar for me. You can, of course, use any design program you like, Photoshop or InDesign are popular ones with people that I know. Whatever works best for you. If you're using PowerPoint, I'll just give you a quick piece of advice to be sure that you change the size of your slide to reflect the actual dimensions of your poster. I think AIC's requirements are no bigger than 4 by 4 feet. So if it's a 3 by 4 foot poster like this one was, you just want to actually enter those dimensions in PowerPoint. And do pay attention to the formatting requirements for whatever conference you're attending. Some can be fairly strict and some can be a little bit more lenient. And consider making a handout of some sort, which includes your contact information and any details you think anyone might want to take notes on. It doesn't really need to be fancy. It can be a simple printout or it can be something a little bit more complex like a pamphlet or even a bookmark like this one. People who are interested in your poster will want to take one. Any takeaway, if it's an interesting and useful topic, will be taken. And actually, I have to say once in a while, I do still hear from people that they have this bookmark hanging in their lab next to their paste setup, which is great. In addition to your poster and your handouts, when you arrive at the conference, you always want to bring pins for hanging your poster in case there aren't any available on site. And bring a couple envelopes or transparent sleeves for your handouts in case there's no table. I think this is usually the case these days. I think it used to be more common that there might be a surface. But these days, having some sort of container for your handouts that you can actually pin to the board is a great idea. OK, so that's my brief description of poster design. And I'm happy to answer more questions about that at the end of Ariel's talk today. But writing a talk is really writing and presenting are really what I'm going to focus on the most today. And I'm going to run through some of the most important things to consider when you're pulling your talk together. First and foremost, get organized. And whether you tend to read your talk, use notes, or speak off the cuff, I think an outline is one of the best tools at your disposal to organize your thoughts and to work out the transitions between ideas that you'll be presenting. As you're fleshing out the outline, you may find that an actual script will emerge, which can be a really useful process. Of course, everyone works differently. So maybe you work better by weighing out your PowerPoint first. I know Ariel and I seem to have opposite preparation methods, which is always really interesting.  And of course, there are a number of other things to consider as your presentation starts to take shape. And number one should be how to engage your audience. This is really something you should be thinking about in the very early stages of writing your talk, because you first need to identify who your audience is. What you present should be shaped by who's listening to you. So for example, a talk to an audience of conservators within your chosen specialization will be very different from one for the general public, of course. It's important to understand what your audience is likely to know, what they may not know, and also what they may just need a reminder for. Some slightly more technical information, even if you're speaking to an all-conservator group, might just require a little bit of an introduction or a reminder. For any audience, if you have graphs or other technical slides, you'll need to explain them in order to orient the audience to the format that you've chosen. I think it's natural for us to sometimes assume that because we've worked with these formats for a long time, others will pick it up quickly. But it's rare that people can pick up the exact format of a slide in the amount of time that the slide is up. So do be sure that you orient people to the format that you've chosen. This slide shows color data for this photograph by Paul Strand. And the most important detail here is that the print is changing more rapidly on exhibition than while in storage. But with all of these numbers, it's nearly eligible and completely varies to point. So here's another way to look at the same exact data. This is a significant improvement, but it's still a lot of information for one slide. Just because you gathered the data really doesn't mean that it belongs in your talk. And it's important to only include information that's really relevant to your point. So pulled from all of that data, this slide, graphs change over time and a little bit more clearly conveys that the slope is steeper for two exhibition periods if you look at this. And the only method I've come up with for getting to this point of sort of honing in on the format of a graph or some other kind of technical slide is to just spend a ton of time trying out lots of different formats and versions. The good news is that if you're using graphs, you can copy and paste them straight from Excel into PowerPoint. So that part is actually pretty easy. And Ariel is going to talk a little bit more about PowerPoint and some of the practical aspects of building a PowerPoint presentation. But while I'm on the topic, I just wanted to share a few more quick thoughts about this, just especially because I have this slide up. Always be sure to label images of art objects. I've actually seen a lot of presentations where there'll be a beautiful image of a painting or a sculpture. And for some reason, there's no artist information or collection information. It's just nice to know, even if it's not entirely relevant to what you're saying. Always credit photographers other than yourself and if you know who they are. And just a personal pet peeve and I'm throwing this in here because I wasn't sure even where to put it in the rest of the talk. I've actually seen smiley faces next to good data on slides and I do not recommend doing that. OK, to read or not to read, I think, is one of the most common topics of discussion regarding public speaking, particularly among students who are taught differently depending on the graduate program they attend. And I think that most of us would agree that really the ideal talk is one where the speaker presents seamlessly without a script. This is a pretty tall order though, particularly if you're new to public speaking or if you're just very uncomfortable doing it. So I'll say this, comfort level is key. If you need to read, that's absolutely fine. But you should practice out loud so many times that it sounds like you're speaking off the cuff. At all costs, you really want to avoid sounding like you're reading. It detracts from your talk if people are focused on the sort of sing-songy cadence of a sort of story time that many of us take on when we're reading aloud. It's just not a natural speech pattern and it can be very distracting. Instead, think about your talk as a conversation. Write your script in the type of language that you use when you're speaking, not when you're writing. And read it aloud many, many times and change the language each time to most closely resemble how you would normally speak, not how you would write a paper. Because a presentation is decidedly different from a paper. Your writing skills might be great, but reading a well-written paper to your audience puts way too much distance between you and them. Your presentation is also not a treatment report. So use the active voice always. There should really never be the third person in an active presentation. So watch yourself on that one. I think it's a common tendency and I'm not sure everyone is aware that they're doing it. The structure of your talk is also key in keeping your audience engaged and to avoid overly repetitive structure is really what you need to hone in on. You want to avoid telling the audience what you're going to say, then saying it, and then telling them what you said. Which is, I think that's a format that's taught frequently and I think this is overly simplistic and a little bit literal and it can result in a boring talk. So instead design your talk so it evolves from the first slide to the last, avoiding too much repetition. And what you really need to do to accomplish this is to establish an actual narrative. You want to be telling a story rather than a strict chronology. Maybe your findings took you in a different direction or an initial treatment decision didn't go very well. This is the stuff that's interesting. People will not only want to know the information that you're presenting, they'll also want to find out what happens next and that's what keeps people engaged. You also want to make sure that you edit yourself. A 20 minute talk is incredibly short. It's inevitable that you won't be able to cover all the details you'd like to. So do avoid trying to cram it all in and that's really what your publication is for. And also be careful not to overload your slides with too much text. Keep it as minimal as possible and my general rule of thumb is to avoid complete sentences. Polluted lists is really as much text as you should probably have unless it's a very specific and important quote. And of course, make sure you know your topic inside and out. This is the best way to feel confident going into your talk. This means digging deeper than you need to as you're preparing and you really want people to ask questions after your talk as scary as that can sometimes be. And people will line up at the microphone if you've engaged your audience successfully. They'll want to ask you more questions. So I think of this as sort of an iceberg. You're only presenting the absolute tip and you've done all this other work and the audience doesn't know you've done that but you've got that preparation behind you and that should push you into this particular situation feeling confident that you're better prepared than certainly anyone else in the room. So you're gonna be prepared to answer these questions as long as you think about this. Think about possible questions that people might ask you and bounce these ideas off of colleagues and friends also and objective perspective can be very helpful for this. And also remember with questions that it's always okay to say I don't know and if you have a way to reference a possible source for that information, whether it's another person at the conference or an article you're aware of that's an even better way to say I don't know. And practice is really important. I mean I highly recommend practicing as much as possible. Talk to yourself as you're getting ready in the morning. Pretend you're explaining the nuances of a certain point to someone you know or actually do that if they'll let you. Do run-throughs with colleagues, classmates, friends, family, pets. I know that I've definitely become a better speaker over time because of the advice and support of my current and past colleagues. Also try recording yourself at some point. This isn't something I would recommend doing right before you give your talk but I definitely think that this is a very useful tool although honestly there's nothing more humbling than looking at that tape. It will help you improve though as long as you're careful to look at it being self-critical in a constructive way. And then so after all of this practicing the day before your talk, just stop practicing.  Athletes tend to taper before a big race and that's really what you should do before a presentation.  Although after all of this it's a sort of practice what you preach moment. In the spirit of full disclosure, these days I honestly tend to finish my presentations pretty close to the presentation time. I would never recommend waiting until the very last minute for anyone who's new to presenting but as you're getting some more talks under your belt you'll learn where your limits are and how you work best. Also I know it doesn't seem like this at the time but you'll really never have more prep time than you do when you're a student. So take advantage of that as well. Okay finally I'm just gonna talk about the actual act of presenting. The first instruction I ever received in public speaking was from a professional public speaking coach named Barbara Tenenbaum from Brown University. She had been hired by the museum where I worked at the time to provide training for employees and I was incredibly fortunate to participate especially because it was about a month before I interviewed for grad school which was also somewhat humbling when your flaws are sort of pointed out to you but of course it was a net gain and I learned a huge amount from Barbara and continue to draw on her advice every time I prepare a talk. But the most significant thing I think I learned from her was the importance of confidence when giving a presentation because a perceived lack of confidence will erode any authority you have. Even if you have confidence there are certain things that I think we all tend to do that can make it appear as if you don't have as much authority as you do. And so I'm gonna run through a few dos and don'ts for conveying confidence while presenting and I find that really most public speaking advice falls into this category. So rule number one, just speak up. A presentation is not the time to be quiet or meek and if this is outside your normal comfort zone you'll just need to practice a little bit more.  If you need to stop and take a sip of water, do that. Those moments can seem like an eternity when you're at the lectern but they really aren't that way when you're sitting in the audience. So just remember to relax a little bit. Physical appearance matters a lot.  You really don't want to sort of shrink into yourself like this poor selling bee participant is doing. You want to exude confidence in just in your physical stature. You also want to keep hair out of your face. Just make sure your hair is pulled back and you're not playing with that or trying to keep it out of your face while you're talking. You wanna wear clothes that don't really compete with what's going on on the screen or what you're saying. It's a simple monochromatic, just not too fussy. You also want to take off your name tag. This sort of goes along with keeping sort of a clean, uncluttered appearance. It can, your name tag can actually look a little bit messy but also if it's pinched to your lapel, it can even reflect out into the audience and cause glare. So just remember to take that off as sort of a last thing before you go up to the lectern. You also don't want to be fidgeting.  And you wanna be organized. If you're reading your talk, one tip that I like, if I have a full script and it's on paper, I prefer to slide my pages from one pile to another instead of flipping them and that way your papers aren't visible to the audience and actually for the last couple of years I've been using my iPad more for my notes and that works really well also. So if that's the way you go, just remember to turn off any auto lock or sleep functions. And then one last point in this section. Laser pointers are something that I just do not use and it's because even if I'm walking up to give a talk and I'm feeling confident and prepared, my heart rate will always be faster. There's always a little bit of nervousness and the laser pointer is the first way to betray that. Even if you've seen confident but you feel nervous, if you're holding a laser point, it's likely to shake. So if you can come up with other ways to build in highlighting features in your PowerPoint and Ariel will show you some tips for this, I highly recommend that instead of using a laser pointer. You also wanna speak clearly and avoid as much as possible using space filling words like um, you know, or like. It's really difficult to eradicate these from our speech altogether, but it's very possible to significantly reduce their use. If you use these less frequently in your everyday speech, you'll also rely on them less when you're presenting. And the best advice I ever received about this was to ask close friends or family members to just point out every time you use a space filling word. It takes time to change your habits, but this really works if you stick to it for a while. Also avoid beginning sentences with words like so or okay. They tend to have the same effect as space fillers, and all of these words will really just dilute your message and make you appear a little bit less confident. Rule number four is a big one. You wanna avoid what's called girl talk, and this is something that Barbara Tenenbaum calls it. Many people tend to do this, both men and women, but unfortunately it is more common with women. And this is the tendency to inflect upwards at the end of a sentence, making your statement sound more like a question. And this tends to erode any authority you might have by turning all of your statements into questions. And again, changing this kind of speech pattern is like space filling words. It's something that simply requires a lot of practice and change over time if it's something you tend to do. You also don't want to apologize. If something goes wrong with a slide, try to move on and explain what you can without your illustration. Sometimes this is a little bit unavoidable, but you wanna avoid apologizing at all costs if you possibly can, or come up with even a slightly different way of acknowledging that your very important graph didn't show up rather than actually apologizing. Of course, we all make mistakes sometimes, even seasoned public speakers, but the more mindful you are of how you present yourself, the more polished your presentations will be. Ultimately, how we present ourselves to the world is tremendously important, and speaking clearly and confidently is essential for any good presentation. And if this is done well, your content is what will be more memorable than your presentation style, and that's really the whole point of giving a talk. And this just feeds into a larger point I want to end with today about recognizing and valuing your contribution to the field by giving presentations. Whether you're pre-program, a current student, or a recent graduate, when you're speaking publicly, you're there by invitation, just like anyone else. People wanna hear what you have to say. So don't forget that, and don't ever diminish your presence at the conference by expressing surprise, for example, that the programming committee selected your paper. Of course, it's appropriate to express thanks to the organizing body. It's a pleasure to be here, et cetera, but do be confident in this act that you're there because you have something to say that's worth listening to. And along with thorough preparation, knowing that you belong at that lectern really is the best way to give a great talk. And that's it for me. So I'm going to hand this over to Ariel. Thank you, Katie. Hello, everyone. I'm switching just momentarily to my PowerPoint. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. And as strange as this might sound to some people, I actually really enjoy making PowerPoints. And I enjoy trying to figure out how to get this sometimes cumbersome piece of software to make things look elegant and interesting. And I know everyone listening in today is very tech savvy and could certainly teach this topic alongside both of us. And many of you have already created dozens of PowerPoints. So what I was hoping to do today was focus on a bit of a workflow and some tools that I personally use the most when I'm approaching making a PowerPoint. And I'll start with a few general tips. And then go through the PowerPoint menu tools and highlight the ones that I think are best suited for conservation presentations. Then I have just a few easy tricks to share that I think can make your PowerPoint stand out from some of the other ones. And finally, I'll go over what to bring with you to the venue when you're giving the talk. And hopefully there might be some new tips in here for the seasoned PowerPoint experts who are listening and hopefully some good basics for those of you who are pre-programmed or thinking about your first conservation PowerPoints or even preparing for grad school interviews. So the first general tip is really starting with a color or a theme combination. And I generally pick a few theme colors that match my object or a project. And it kind of allows your object to stand out. My go to sort of easy to see color combinations are often a black background with cream text if my objects are light colored, yellow or an orange on a gray for a darker object. For this talk, I just decided that orange seemed to complement the images on the title slide, but it easily could have been other colors too. But the main thing I think to keep in mind is the more care that you put into the overall aesthetics and the design of your slide, I do think people will pay more attention. And I've actually had a few arguments with some very brilliant conservation scientists about that because they argue that the content of the presentation is much more important. And I certainly don't disagree with that, but I think the visuals will really augment your content and shouldn't be disregarded. And when I sit down to a talk and I see a white background on a title slide, I instantly get worried about the next 20 minutes. I sort of call this the car wash maintenance theory because my mom will always wash her car before taking it to the mechanic. And she says that if people see that you take care of it, they'll pay more attention and they'll be more careful too. So the next tip that I wanted to mention is a fairly obvious one, but screenshots really form the foundation and are the most basic, but I find the most useful tool. And on a PC, I usually use this wonderfully named snipping tool. On a Mac, I use Grab. And both programs have good keyboard shortcuts. You can Google them if you're not sure what they are. They can do full screen. You can do window selection, a smaller selection. On the Mac version, I really like the timed screen, particularly if I need a few seconds to lower a dropdown menu, for example. On the PC version, I like using the freeform snip tool because you can draw a specific area. And I also have Dropbox set up to accept the screenshots, so I don't have to paste them into something each time if I don't want to. And this is an example slide from my third year internship presentation to Buffalo. And I'm showing it to you because it's actually a screenshot because I wanted to use a non-standard font. This one is Garamond, but I wasn't sure if the computer where I was showing the talk would have Garamond. So I simply made the slide and then took a screenshot and pasted that in as my first slide. So I didn't have to worry about it opening properly on the auditorium computer. I also use screenshots for slides like this one. This was from an ANACPIC talk at Delaware in 2011. The slides that have multiple images that perhaps I will animate or do something with the slide as a whole. And I don't want to accidentally move around one of the images on it. So if you're worried about that or perhaps you like drop shadows or something that you don't know if it will transfer between a PC and a Mac or different versions of PowerPoint, screenshot is a really good way to go. Video screenshots I also find really helpful and a great tool to show perhaps a piece of software or a procedure without having to do it live during the talk and risk internet connection not working or risk something not working the way that you want. For a PC, there are two programs that have been recommended to me as good free software, Cam Studio and Fraps. On a Mac, which I use at home, I have QuickTime. Both platforms, you can select an area or you can select the whole screen. And these are just a couple examples to get you started but there's certainly tons of programs out there for you to choose from. This is an example from the Princeton Art Museum website on the left and they have a wonderful interactive website on Chinese piece mold casting. So that short video clip on the right, I just use QuickTime to record a section of the website and record a video for each step so I could use to teach bronze casting without having to do still images. Now to align two things perfectly on different slides can be tricky sometimes. But the easy way to do it is if you make them the same size, you can then determine the position on the slide of one of them by right clicking on your image and checking the position with format picture. You can see under position on the right, there's a horizontal and vertical number from the top left corner. If you copy those numbers from one photo to the next, they'll be in exactly the same spot on both slides. And I use this all the time because I want images to be overlaid perfectly and sometimes you can't get it just right. And so this is a helpful tool for that. It also works well if you are trying to make very minute position changes to a shape such as maybe a rectangle that you've highlighted around something and it won't quite center because your arrow keys right and left move it too much and you can use this position to fix that. And the final general tip that I wanted to mention is something that I called the fake crop. I'm always looking for workarounds to make PowerPoints faster but look nicer. And if you have two images that you can't easily make the same size like I was just mentioning but you need them to overlap perfectly, I fake crop them by adding squares around the borders to match the background. So I'll show you. For example, if you have an important PowerPoint coming up and this image needs to be perfectly cropped and overlaid on this image. It would be difficult to crop them both to the exact same dimensions and size but instead what you can do is you can overlay both photos and add squares around the borders that match the background. Here I just made them tan so you could see where the squares are but if I switch them to black it looks like I've cropped both images. And then you can just overlay them and it's a quick workaround. So what I'm going to do now is I've taken some screenshots of the PowerPoint toolbar menus and I'm going to highlight across the top some of the tools that I use the most often when creating presentations and I'll just go tab by tab across the top. So if we start here on the home tab. The tool that I absolutely use the most is this free form drawing tool. It's great. You can draw any shape you need with transparent fills. I use it often to highlight or emphasize edges of an object such as drawing lines on the edges of this one. You can draw many different lines or shapes with it and then group them all together as one object. The arrange tool is useful if you're managing slides that have many images or text boxes on them. In the selection pane on the right-hand side we'll show you the layering structure and you can rearrange the order. This is how it looks on a PC. On a Mac it's different. It's called Reorder Objects. I actually find it to work a lot better on a Mac and what it looks like is it shows you each item almost in a plane and you can drag them forward and backwards to rearrange and I use this all the time. So those are the ones I use mostly on the home tab. On the insert tab, insert picture is fairly obvious though I'm sure most of us just drag and drop into the slide. But I want to mention a few things about image size while we're talking about photos.  When you've selected your important image, you can compress it directly in PowerPoint and you should select the best quality, the 220 PPI. If you want the cropped borders removed, say you've cropped it or edited it, you can check the box but you can't undo that action so it's important to make sure that you're confident and you don't want to change your mind about the size and it's also important to note that you should not compress your photos before they're the final size you want them on your screen because once you've compressed them, if you decided you want it bigger for example, you can't do that because it will be too pixelated. So I often don't do this until the very end of my presentation and then I will compress it for all of the pictures in the file. This feature under the Insert tab for Photo Album is one of my favorites in PowerPoint and I only discovered it fairly recently and you can use this to create a 15 second PowerPoint and I'm actually not kidding about this at all. So the way it works is you haven't used the Insert Photo Album. You can insert a picture from the file and disk. You can see that on the top left of the screen and it just opens in a browser window and you can select a group of images, which I've done here and then it populates these pictures into an album. You can see the file names and you have the ability to remove them, to reorder. You can change the brightness, the contrast. You can rotate them and you instantly, when you say okay, they populate into an album for you and here I've selected a fit to size so the longest side of the photo is automatically scaled to that slide.  Here under Album Layout, instead of Picture Layout, here I've selected four pictures with title and what that allows you to do is it will give you a title bar across the top and it shows you the image file name. So it's a really great tool if you don't have a lot of time and a curator comes up to you and says I need you to give a presentation to this group of donors and they're here in 10 minutes. If you have a folder of photos, it's not a problem, you can do it. So the last thing that I use most often on the Insert tab is Insert Video from File and you can link directly to a file you have on your computer like this one here. This is a treatment video of a Hexdill fill on a glass object from the Met inserting a small magnet and chasing bubbles out of the fill. And sometimes you really can't describe something in text or photos, you really need to have a video. So it's quite useful. If you don't have a video yourself and you want to link to something on YouTube, that's absolutely okay too. I seem to always have trouble embedding an embed code in so I often don't do that. What I prefer to do to get a video like this from YouTube is go to a file conversion website such as ZAMSAR or there are many others and you can paste in the URL address and it will send you a link to download the video and then you can link it to your PowerPoint. And I also just want to emphasize that when you are linking a video you have to transfer this video file with you. I'm sure this is obvious to most people but it's really worth repeating because I have seen presentations where the presenter puts the PowerPoint on there and they didn't transfer the video file and they thought it was embedded. It never actually gets embedded, it's just a link. So what I tend to do is make a folder like this example folder and I put my movie and my PowerPoint there together so when I transfer the folder over to the computer where I'll give the presentation the link doesn't break between the two of them. Under the design tab I often use this just to change the slide orientation or the page setup size and I often change it to 8.5 by 11 making diagrams for condition reports and I'm mentioning that here just because it's something I do a lot in PowerPoint for example I'll make it this 8.5 by 11 and paste a photo for an object that I'm doing a condition report on and then I will outline areas using the freeform tool and I can easily and fairly quickly make a diagram. This was an object where I was mapping areas of different bronze alloy using different colors but what is great about this method is it's a Microsoft program so I can copy this diagram and paste it into a Word document or I can paste it into my PowerPoint slide that's formatted for presentations and so if you put an adjacent photograph and text of your object you have a really useful presentation tool to emphasize something perhaps as I'm talking about the different parts of the alloy I have the different colors that are already to go and it looks fairly fancy but it was something I had already created for a condition report and I was able to repurpose it for my presentation. The transitions tab, I don't use this very much sometimes I'll use fade which is just a soft transition between slides sometimes I have none, it depends but what is nice to know is that over here on the right you can actually set the amount of time between slides and you can set automatic slide advancing and that's what I just used on that bronze diagram with the colors so you can minimize the amount of times you have to click the mouse to advance the slide in your PowerPoint by just having it advance automatically if you can make sure the timing works out in your script. None of the animation tabs I feel like I need to say something about animations because it has a bad connotation in PowerPoint you often think of business board rooms with blue stardust background spiraling in and out or people who use flashy movements on their PowerPoint to try and keep you awake instead of the content but I do use a few animations and I think the subtle use of animations can make a big difference and can make things seamless and for my animations I almost exclusively use these two just click to fade in, click to fade out soft quick transition and I think a good animation is one that you don't realize is animated and the fact that it's moving shouldn't take up more of your attention than the object that you're showing and usually when I animate and fade in and out things I choose the shortest possible option which is a half a second and you have tools also to animate something with the previous thing that you did or after the previous thing that you did so you can click fewer times if you set this up and that can be helpful and the last thing I want to note with animation says if you are grouping items if they already have an animation if you create a group that old animation will go away so you'll have to reanimate the whole group so just something to keep in mind that you should group it first before making your animation and under the picture tools the final thing I want to mention is removing a background on the left hand side you can see the removed background I used to do this manually by hand in Photoshop before the removed background tool came into PowerPoint so this is such a huge time saver and I find that about 90% of the time it actually works very well in PowerPoint if the object has a really irregular border or it's very close in color to the background you may have to go ahead and do it in Photoshop but it makes it quite easy it will highlight what it thinks is the background you can drag the border around to give it a better idea of the edges you can also add little areas here and there to add or subtract and then it will remove the background for you and I like this often because I put soft drop shadows under things and I feel like that emphasizes the object well and you can even change the background color and you don't have to worry about it so those were mostly the PowerPoint menu tools that I use when I'm making a PowerPoint now is the fun part now I want to show you a few tricks that I've developed both in PowerPoint and in Photoshop that I think are pretty easy and they can make your presentation unique and it can make and stand out from some of the others and the three that I'll tell you about are the ones that I use a lot and I've given them these impossibly complicated names but they'll make sense momentarily I promise the transparent highlight, the emphasis fade and the cutout fade and the last one does need to be done in Photoshop if you have access to that which many of us do and really the reason I use all of these is just to avoid using a laser pointer as Katie mentioned so the first one I'll show you is the transparent highlight and this is a slide from talk for OSG in Philadelphia in 2001 and it was a reassembly of a small glass inlay so I took a photograph of the working procedure on my bench and what I wanted to show in the slide was the printout, the photograph that's on the back of my bench and so to mention that rather than pointing it out I just highlighted around the outside using that freeform tool in a very transparent color and to mention the two brushes the brush on the right was a pointed wet brush that I used to pick up the flakes and the brush on the left was dry and I used to tamp it down and so I prefer actually showing people in that way what I want them to see rather than sort of pointing at it with a laser pointer or just using an arrow which may not be as clear and this is just to give you a sense of the number of shapes on the slide, that's not too many and I have one just animate in and then animate out automatically so I only have to click once per object and this is another way to use that method if you want to outline something so this is the inlay when it was reassembled and I would use the same tool just to show the number of pieces and then filled in some of the areas with a transparent fill to show the areas that were filled with Japanese tissue and that would be something that I don't think would be possible to show with a laser pointer or any other way other than to use that transparency and here's a breakdown of the layering on that slide and the last example is a slide from a Jade Toolmark project that I worked on at the Harvard Art Museums and this is a Chinese Jade disk that I wanted to show parallel toolmarks on and I just used that transparency just to briefly highlight the areas that I wanted people to see and had it automatically fade away afterwards so that your eye could return to the object as opposed to looking at the transparency and that's the example of that slide so the next trick is called emphasis fade and what I mean by that is if you have everything around what you want to show darken it will emphasize and sort of highlight a particular area that you want people to see and you can do a lot of that in PowerPoint directly and one example is for people that maybe have archival material and they want to show or read a short quote from it rather than typing the text you could do something like this where a portion of the text zooms up but the emphasis fade part is just darkening the space behind it and the way you do that is by simply putting a black square between the two areas of text and making it transparent and then when you animate up your small quote it animates at the same time as your transparent square and it's a simple easy thing you can do it in two seconds but it just darkens everything around and emphasizes what you want to show and this slide I'll show you has the last two techniques together and this is the slide that I used for a third year internship talk from the Met and I wanted to show a few objects that I'd worked on from the Greek and Roman department so the beginning of the slide used the freeform tool just to outline the area on a map from the curatorial department and then this was the fade so it was just a dark transparent black square that animated up with these objects that the backgrounds cut out on top of them and one of the things that you can do is reorder the dark square so if I wanted to just mention the marble statue on the left you can still see the other objects to the right but not very much they're not really distracting and then you can switch the order of the square so that you can highlight the objects to the right where you can highlight the ceramic in the center and when you look at the animation pane it's just objects layered on the background but that dark square shifts around and that's the only thing that changes to give you that effect and the final one is my favorite cut out fade but you have to have Photoshop for this one and this is an example of a slide that uses this this is from Anacpic from 2011 and these are objects from the Harvard Art Museum as part of a study looking at composite Chinese ceremonial weapons so these are made of different materials they have turquoise and bronze and jade and what I wanted to show was the parts that were made of a specific material so when you click it will darken the jade areas and I just emphasize the bronze half and then when I spoke about the jade blades it just emphasized the jade and then everything went back to normal so I'll show you how to do that and it's not really any different than the one from PowerPoint before but since it has to be a specific shape and it can't be a square that's the only reason you have to do it in Photoshop so it's pretty easy to do in Photoshop I started with a screenshot of those six objects and then if you look here in the layering section of Photoshop you create a new layer on top of your image and use the paint bucket tool to make it completely black just solid and then you can change the opacity of that layer and here I've changed the opacity down to 60% so I can still see the image behind and use the polygonal lasso to start selecting the area that I want to reveal and then I simply delete the part of that black square in the area and you can continue along and then you'll make a mask that shows what you want to see and you can save a JPEG and the number of slides that you have or the number of layers that you have visible will also be visible in your JPEG so you can keep working on the same Photoshop document and here I've created a second layer where I've started to delete the bronze half so in the end I'll have one Photoshop document that contains many different layers and then I only save JPEGs as the ones that are visible and that's what gets layered on the slide so the slide that we saw only had three images on it the top one shows all of the objects the bottom left reveals just the bronze half and the bottom right reveals the blade and when you layer them back to back it gives a pretty nice effect and it's a lot more efficient I think than trying to hold a laser pointer and here's one other example of doing that on a paper object for people who may be paper this is simply a PDF of an old article and I wanted to show a drawing of an object that I was treating and I wanted to show the line drawing in comparison to the object and so I used the same fading technique on the PDF just by simply deleting the area that I wanted to show on the object and leaving the space around it in this case I left it black and didn't make it transparent but you can use this technique and you can play around with it a lot and it's not very hard and it makes it look pretty fancy and I think it can be really useful and quite fun for the audience because it's not always expected so the final thing that I wanted to mention quickly is once you have your PowerPoint and you've prepared and you're ready to go what do you bring with you to the venue? Really the two most important things to bring with you a thumb drive that has your presentation on it and your presentation somewhere in cloud storage I use Dropbox but there are many other devices that you can use and one of the great things about Dropbox is that it's also on mobile devices and so I found this helpful when I was asked questions after a talk or maybe later at a conference dinner I could pull up my presentation because I have them all in a presentation folder in Dropbox and actually the talk we're looking at right now is brought to you by folder number 21 but it's just an easy place to group everything and have access in the event that my thumb drive failed or something didn't load properly and you'll probably be bringing a script this is an example of one of my scripts I do make them a little bit differently than Katie does because I want to try to stick to time but it's really whatever you're comfortable with but if you're bringing a text script you do want to make sure that the podium has a light that works or maybe has a backup headlamp or if you have a tablet or an iPad that's a great way to read a script because it's backlit just make sure you have your charger with you and this is just sort of my checklist that I think about the first three we mentioned they're most essential the thumb drive, a cloud based backup and your script either on the tablet or on paper but I do also like to bring my laptop with me definitely with the power cord and anything you might need to connect it to the projector because if something fails with opening your talk on the venue's computer you could probably always connect your laptop and it's a good third back I do also like to have a pen or a pencil with me because sometimes in the question and answer sessions people may ask me something that I want to follow up with later or perhaps they have a good suggestion and so I usually bring one up with me to take notes and you'll want to bring a water bottle and maybe some mints or something in case you have a dry throat and other than that once you get to the venue if you've loaded your PowerPoint onto the presentation two things to check just make sure any slides that have animations do work and make sure that any videos or media that you've inserted are functioning and if you have a moment to just quickly run through your slides I find that really helpful because if you see a font change or you see something that didn't work you can just change it right there on the copy that's on the desktop and you know it'll be okay so I finally just wanted to conclude by saying that really everything that I showed you about PowerPoint came from two places it came from Dan Cushel in his class at Buffalo and it just came from Googling things so I've never taken a class I just knew sort of what I wanted something to look like but I didn't know how to do it so I watched online tutorials and you can build up an arsenal of tools that way so don't be constrained when you sit down to PowerPoint by what you know how to do it doesn't really matter just approach your talk by saying what's the best way to show this to people what do I think would be an effective way to show this to people and then just Google it and you'll learn how to do it and I'm sure that someone somewhere out there will have an online video to teach you so thank you very much to everyone who contributed ideas and thoughts to the PowerPoint and Katie and I would love to hear from you if you want to get in touch with either of us in the future about any of these ideas thank you very much Excellent thank you so much Katie and Ariel you guys covered a lot of ground in this short amount of time since it is after one o'clock I'm going to go ahead and cut out the Q&A session but you did answer a lot of the questions in fact almost all of them so I'm just going to consult with you and see if we could maybe get a blog post up with some of the remaining ones and then of course everyone if you didn't get a chance to write down all those notes or you want to see some of this again we will let you know when the recording of the webinar is available on AISU's YouTube channel by creating a blog post and posting about it and then also announcing on Facebook so hopefully we'll get that out to you soon while you're working on your PowerPoints and your posters and also yeah, feel free to email Katie or Ariel or if you have some more questions email ECPN chair, Megan Salazar Walsh and email me Fran Richie our emails were included in the registration for this webinar so thank you both so much again and thank you to AIC for organizing this for us thank you to Ryan and Ruth any final things? Excellent, thank you


Patriotic music and colorful fireworks exploding Cal OES logo quick look OES news com I'm Brian May in the Cal OES newsroom we are coming up on the 4th of July it's time to bust out the hot dogs apple pie and fireworks and it's kind of hard to mess up on the hot dogs and apple pie part but fireworks as we all know can be incredibly dangerous if we don't take the proper steps or use them in the way they're intended so before we light up those Tasmanian cyclones or zombie apocalypse let's first check in with Jonathan Goodell for some safety reminders have you bought your piccolo Pete's what about your family packs remember before you do that nearly 70% of firework related injuries occur within a month of the 4th of July fireworks going off it's easy to get lost in the beauty and pageantry of fireworks but they can also be dangerous to your health and a potential fire hazard to your property all legal fireworks must have the state fire marshal seal on it if it goes up into the air or explodes it's clearly illegal nearly 700 people are injured by fireworks on the 4th of July alone dogs and kennels whining and don't forget about your pets they need special care as well the number one thing we encourage is make sure your pet is microchipped because if they do get out we can reunite you with them immediately one of the biggest mistakes is not disposing of fireworks correctly never put hot fireworks in the garbage from all of us here at Cal OES have a safe 4th of July all right john thank you and before we go I wanted to see how well you know your 4th of July history so I've got four true or false questions for you here we go true or false the original draft of the Declaration of Independence is currently displayed in the rotunda of the US Capitol well that's false you know the original draft was actually lost the one that was eventually signed is the engrossed document and it is displayed at the National Archives in Washington DC all right true or false only two people actually signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th that's true it was John Hancock and Charles Thompson who was the Secretary of Congress most of the other signed about a month later on August 2nd true or false the United States is the only country to celebrate the 4th of July believe it or not that's false Denmark England Norway Portugal and Sweden also celebrate the 4th of July as a way to bring in American tourists all right and finally true or false the 4th of July the biggest day of the year for consumption of hot dogs and that is definitely true on average we eat about 155 million hot dogs on July 4th to go with 700 million pounds of chicken 92 million dollars worth of chips and 168 million dollars worth of watermelon and that will do it for this edition of quick look as Jonathan Gadel said earlier on behalf of all of us at Cal OES we hope you have a safe and sane 4th of July visit our online newsroom at OES news dot com to learn more about this program and get the latest news and information from our team don't miss our next video on your Facebook timeline like our page and you'll get the latest posts as they happen if you're an Instagram user you can see the latest snapshots by following our Cal OES Instagram account and Twitter users can get instant access to our tweets from across the state by following Cal OES