Why are Powerpoint slides so poor at scientific meetings again? Remember P.C. Williams!

Those of us of a certain age enjoy the wry amusement of seeing topics emerge time and time again as if nobody had considered the problem previously. Trying to stop methane production by farm animals is a prime example.

I was at a scientific meeting a few weeks ago. I was immediately struck by the very poor quality of the Powerpoint ‘slides’. Crammed with data of garish illegibility was the rule rather than the exception. The people in the audience popping up and down to take photographs of the slides with their phones must have had a hard time deciphering the resultant image. I groaned audibly as I realised that all the effort in improving standards of audio-visual presentation over the past fifty-odd years had been wasted. The organisers of the conference cannot be blamed. Speakers received instructions on best practice such as the maximum number of lines of type, font size and colour combinations. Nor can young scientists be blamed; the worst I saw were from the professoriate firmly, it seems, stuck with the notion that quantity of data is what is required to impress an audience.

Some people blame Microsoft’s ubiquitous Powerpoint software package, with its capacity to cram easily any amount of information onto a slide, but the problem is much older. When slides really were slides, with hand-drawn graphs and stencilled lettering, standards of presentation and legibility were so low that scientific societies in Britain decided to do something about it. The result was an article in 1965, later published as a pamphlet by the Biological Council (representing the various societies). The problem was regarded as so important that institutions bought copies by the hundred to distribute. I got my copy, along with everybody else, some time after a batch arrived at what is now the Babraham Institute.

The author of the article and pamphlet, Suggestions for Speakers and Standards for Slides, was Peter Claringbould Williams (1913-1991). I knew him as a regular attender of Zoological Club dinners in the 1970s. At that time he worked at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (later merged into Cancer U.K.). He was an endocrinologist working mainly on oestrogens but also had something to do with running the animal house. Earlier, I now find, he had worked at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry at the Middlesex Hospital. In the 1939 Register he is shown as a ‘research physiologist’. Like many British scientists of his day, he had no Ph.D. degree—the ‘German degree’ so often derided by many, including Williams.

His other publication for the Biological Council was a list of abbreviations of the titles of biological journals. However, he argued that such an approach should be abandoned (an enormous amount of time was wasted by authors and editors finding the correct abbreviations for their list of references at the end of a paper) with journals publishing the titles in full. That suggestion was taken up by some journals but seems to have been abandoned again for some reason that defies logic. The really lengthy journal titles which were abbreviated to reduce the cost of type-setting, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, for example, seem to have been abandoned anyway.

The pamphlet was extremely successful in raising standards. So successful I heard one young speaker (after describing at length the methods used to reach his conclusions) announce to the audience that he had prepared his slides, 'according to the method of P.C. Willams'.

Metal 'frog' clickers

I remember Peter Williams actually giving a paper. He, of course, followed his guidelines for slides. Before the days of remote control of the slide projector, speakers used a variety of methods to ask the projectionist for the next slide. Actually asking for the next slide was one method which sometimes had to be repeated if the projectionist’s mind had wandered. Some lecture theatres had buttons installed on the podium which when pressed lit a bulb in the projection box. But Peter Williams used a method he also recommended: a metal ‘frog’ clicker of the sort that used to appear in Christmas crackers and made famous by U.S. paratroops who used them to locate their fellows after landing in the dark. Peter Williams and his ‘frog’ certainly kept the projectionist—and his audience—awake.

Note the oval shape of Peter Williams's brand
of cigarette

The other abiding memory is his brand of cigarette. He always smoked the oval-shaped Passing Clouds. He did so, he argued, because they contained the most nicotine and nicotine acted to increase the rate of coronary blood flow. He had already suffered one heart attack and did not wish to have another. Contrary to all medical opinion (nicotine is a coronary vasoconstrictor but increases coronary blood flow by raising cardiac output), perhaps, but he did reach the age of 78.

Great efforts were made to adhere to Peter Williams’s standards for slides in the 1970s and 80s but we do seem to back to to the sort of things this reviewer of the pamphlet wrote about in 1974:

At some time or other, we probably all have been annoyed by a speaker showing slides which were unintelligible—perhaps a slide showing a full-page table taken from a recent paper in which the values of, say, fifteen parameters are compared for thirty organisms. Even if we had brought opera glasses and could read the micro-letterpress, who could hope to assess the significance of 450 facts in the few seconds the slide was projected? Equally useless may be a slide showing profiles of several hundred fractions eluted from a column, all superimposed on each other like criss crossing craggy mountain peaks and intended to represent concentrations, radioactivity, enzyme activity, pH changes and so on. 

 
One of the first lessons a lecturer should learn is not to insult his audience with low quality slides. If this is how he treats his colleagues, what hope for his students in a less public place? It seems worth while to draw attention to a useful article by Dr. P.C. Williams, although nine years old, since it contains some valuable and forthright advice. Never, he says, never take a slide from a printed paper—the print is too small and there will be too much unnecessary detail. Label lines on your graphs instead of using a symbol code. 

Perhaps scientific societies need to take draconian measures to ensure the legibility of slides because at the moment the overall standard is an insult to the audience. Either that or opera glasses for all.

Williams PC. 1965. Suggestions for speakers and standards for slides. Journal of the Institute of Biology 12, 65-70

Jim and Sylvia Tait, discoverers of aldosterone, on what's wrong with how science is funded

I have been reading the excellent recent biographical memoir of James Tait FRS (1925-2014) written by Gavin Vinson and the late John Coghlan (1934-2018) for the Royal Society. Jim Tait with his wife Sylvia (1917-2003) discovered the hormone aldosterone, secreted by the adrenal cortex. For this work, published in 1952, they were both elected to the Royal Society in 1959.

Until I read the obituary I had not realised the Taits had published an account of their life and work as well as a defence of those they thought should have been recognised for their part in key biological discoveries. A copy was soon in my hands. It was published shortly in 2004 after Sylvia died. Sadly, it appeared in need of hard editing while Jim Tait was ill. However, there are a number of cogent observations on how research is funded and organised in the 21st Century:

…in the opinion of the authors, the advantages of Institutional Grants in encouraging highly original research outweighs the disadvantages…
     The reader may have gathered by now that the authors favour the system of research funding, operating as in the 1960s in the UK and USA, with mainly Government funded support (both Project and Institutional). Unfortunately, there is a tendency in central administration of any activity, even including medical research, which even if a successful method is found then it must be changed to indicate progress.

Amen to that - but why is nobody listening above the clamour of vested interest?

Denton DA, MacIntyre I. 2006. Sylvia Agnes Sophia Tait. 8 January 1917-28 February 2003. 

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 52, 379-399.

Tait SAS, Tait JF. 2004. A Quartet of Unlikely Discoveries. Twickenham: Athena Press.

Vinson GP, Coghlan JP. 2018. James Francis Tait. 1 December 1925-2 February 2014. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 65, 381-404.

Human Organizational Behaviour Impeding Science: Annual Assessments, Scientists and Folly

The pendulum swings. I read with great amusement last week that some of the biggest employers in Britain are dropping annual assessments of employees. Somebody, somewhere, has actually had the guts to say that the king has no clothes and that much valuable time and effort has gone into something that anybody with even a couple of neurons firing would recognise as utterly futile.

The first stage of the adoption of annual assessments in the UK research councils came in the early 1970s with what were called Annual Confidential Reports. All working scientists knew that they were unnecessary, none more so than Richard Keynes FRS, then Director of Babraham. He told the old Agricultural Research Council so and asked what would happen if he refused to implement the directive. ‘You will be sacked’, came the reply from what was then the Personnel Department, then based in offices in Great Portland Street. His successor, Sir Barry Cross FRS got it right; to him it was always the Anti-Personnel Department because it actually damaged science and scientists by wasting time on pointless paper exercises and devising procedures that were actually damaging science. But these were the proximate villains; the ultimate villains were the civil servants and politicians who saw this sort of nonsense as behaving like successful big businesses. Nobody took any notice of Sir Edward Bullard’s published* statement:

A research establishment is not, however, just another large organization employing several thousand people; it is not like a factory or a railway or a regiment or a warship. Its purposes are less clearly defined and its effectiveness much harder to assess.

I  now though would add ‘financial institution’ to Bullard’s list since that is where everybody now seems to work.

Scientist working in small groups know on a day-to-day, and often an hour-to-hour, basis know how their staff are performing. Moreover, they can do something about any problems without having it all formalised in an annual process. The sad thing about the annual appraisal process was that it was sold to gullible junior staff as a magic bullet to redress any perceived grievance, or to seek promotion, by the parasitic public-sector trade union officials who claimed such measures as a ‘right’ they had fought government-funded employers to obtain.

The whole time-consuming process, as a number of us consistently argued over the years, decreased scientific productivity and had a deleterious effect on morale. Other than occupying time and effort, there was no effect in improving the quality of the science or in how people were treated; it did and does though decrease the output of science and therefore the bang for bucks. That major employers in other fields now see how useless it really is; can we afford to see it continue in science for any longer?

More widely, in all sorts of organisations, is this the first sign that the growth of the ‘human resources’ anti-personnel industry is eventually being checked? Perhaps one of my definitions of a good organisation—no human resources department—is not just a pipe dream. 

*In The Organization of Research Establishments, edited by Cockroft, J, Cambridge University Press. 1965