Abstract: Three papers that influenced my development as a scientist will be mentioned. The first deals with preparation of visual aids for and delivery of an oral presentation at professional meetings. The second and third concern techniques for data analysis; statistics that might help people get more out of their data. "Guidelines For Giving A Truly Terrible Talk" is dated (much of it appropriate for the old 35mm slides) but some if it is still useful. This is more of a "use it as a bad example" article. "Kendall's “Tau” coefficient as an index of similarity in comparisons of plant or animal communities" presents a useful rank-order correlation that can be used to compare two or more biological communities. An online calculator is available and it will give a P value (good for publications). "The investigation of samples containing many species: II. Sample comparison" explains how to analyze data from samples that contain a lot of species but where some species greatly outnumber others.
.jpg "Lawrence J. Hribar, BS, MS, PhD, PHE photo")