As a GENERAL rule, academics are the worst,

oh really ? this could provoke me; I'll read on.....

and the more learned the
professor the more dire it gets.

Now there I agree with you! And the more prestigous the institution, the worse
it often becomes because of the emphasis on research rather than communication.


Classroom lecture techniques of scrawling on a whiteboard or on an OHP
transparency almost always lead to illegible and unintelligible results.

that's why that sort of thing went out - in most/many places - decades ago. I
have to admit that presentations at RMS meetings have improved vastly in recent
years, largely due to Powerpoint - though poor Powerpoint presentations can be
incredibly uninformative.

Julian Mayes, West Molesey, Surrey (and Univ of Surrey Roehampton).

Rodney Blackall wrote:

It is amazing how many Powerpoint users don't appreciate that there may be
a difference between their perfect colour vision view of a high
resolution monitor, and average eyes on a projected image. Silly
phantasies like yellow text on a cyan background, or bright red on bright
blue ought to bring punishments that only The Mikado could devise in his
object to make the punishment fit the crime.

Best colours are probably yellow on a dark blue background. Black on
white is good (excellent contrast) but the contrast is perhaps a little
bit too high for some people. Yellow-blue is slightly less contrasting.

Red-blue is bad because the eye needs to focus red and blue light
slightly differently. Hence the reason why the text seems to hover over
the background.

It's amazing how many people make these mistakes - I'm a member of a
'visualisation' (drawing stuff with computers) research group and even
the members of the group make these mistakes sometimes!

Jonathan
Canterbury