Science is about competition, about collaboration and about communication, to mention a few keywords dominating the life of a scientist. In this post I will discuss a matter relating to collaboration and communication: sharing of slides.

Active scientists spend a large fraction – if not a major – fraction of their time to either listening to a scientific presentation, or preparing and giving their own presentation. Successful scientists have a collection of hundreds of slides and pick out the relevant combination shortly before they give their talk.

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I haven’t written much for this blog for a while now. The reason is that I had some serious lecturing duties this semester, which runs for 12 weeks until next week. If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case you were considering an academic career yourself).

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In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In earlier days,  when a presentation was done with the help of overhead projectors, transparencies that were very clearly made while being in the air were referred to as “air-plane transparencies”. These slides showed all the signs of shaky fingers. In this post I will tell you something about my last-minute preparations for my latest presentation.

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