Presenting Research Results in .NET

Printer QR-Code in .NET Presenting Research Results

How you present research results depends upon many factors, including the circumstances of the research assignment and what the client has requested (and what you are being paid to do) Some possibilities are to personally present information, write up a paper, provide a PowerPoint presentation, use e-mail, present information on the Web, or create a Web-based application for presentation You may also want, need, or be required to combine these research delivery mechanisms In some cases, the format of research assignments may be determined by your client, depending on the industry the client is in For example, if your client is a business that does biomedical research and it wants you to research the effects of Prozac on teenagers, you may need to follow APA (American Psychological Association) style, with an abstract and appropriate citations Or, if you re doing research for an academic publisher, you may have to use MLA (Modern Language Association) style Here are some of the common formats for research question and answer deliverables (see 12 for more details), roughly ranging from least formal to most formal:

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Informal answer to an ad-hoc question, delivered in person, by phone, or via e-mail Compact verbal report, either on the phone or in person Summary e-mail Web delivery of initial results Executive summary PowerPoint presentation Extensive in-person presentation Formal written report or paper, with or without formal sourcing information Statistical information, such as quantitative information entered into a spreadsheet program using Excel A software program, with or without data, perhaps created using the Google APIs, as explained in Part IV For example, to answer a question about changing popularity of specific words and concepts on the Web over time, you might present to your client a modified version of the program I show you in 18 Making assumptions about the format for presentation delivery is unwise In fact, the results could be disastrous if you don t meet the client s expectations Always ask your client what his or her preference is For example, the client might require the information to be posted on a Web site with plenty of cross-referenced links; if you present the answer to the client as a PowerPoint presentation, your answer may be useless, even though it contains the correct information

Software makes life easier for everyone, and software for researchers is even better You can create custom software that helps you (and others) obtain research results You can also use software to analyze and present research results The following sections explain the basics of writing software that uses Google

When you enter search terms on the Google home page and click the Search Web button, Google uses the search terms you ve entered to create a URL

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(Uniform Resource Locator) Your search results are generated by opening this URL in a browser (which Google does automatically in a standard Google Web search) For example, if you want to search for the term harold davis, the following URL is used to open the first page of search results in your browser:

The URL for the results page is viewable in the Internet Explorer Address Bar (see Figure 3-1)

This URL tells Google that the search results are to be in English and that the search is for both terms (harold AND davis) (See 4 for more information about Google s default conjunction operator, represented in a search query by a space, +, or AND) All this stuff about URLs is interesting, but what s the point You can use the Google search results URL in the HTML of your own Web pages For example, you could create a hypertext link with the text Find Harold Davis, as shown in Figure 3-2 When the user clicks the link, the Google search results page opens in the user s browser

Figure 3-2: The hypertext link opens the Google search URL (shown here on the status bar)

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