I just returned from the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) 2016 Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. It was a great meeting overall, and allowed me to get better acquainted with the Pacific research community that I’ve recently joined. While there, I presented some preliminary work looking at planktonic food web pathways in the Northern Bering Sea between warm (early ice melt) and cold (late ice melt) years. The presentation was well-received, and earned a Best Oral Presentation award from the TCODE committee. See the presentation here:

A comparison of Bering Sea ecosystem energy pathways in warm versus cold years

On the technical side, I tried something new for my slides this time: reveal.js, a javascript library that allows you to create slides using html. I walked away from Powerpoint many years ago, after struggling futilely against its poor Mac interface and terrible support for vector graphics. Since then I’ve used Keynote, which is great if I’m presenting on my own computer but risky otherwise. I usually export to pdf for conference presentations to avoid Mac-to-Windows formatting issues, but this limits me to static graphics. The reveal.js option is platform-independent, since it runs in any browser, and I was impressed with how quickly I was able to be up and running with it; I threw in lots of graphics, animations, and even an interactive food web slide using D3, and all worked flawlessly! Overall, I consider this experiment a success.

As a bonus, I can now share the presentation directly from this website (see link above), and include my speaker notes, which I feel are a critical part of any talk.