Your own laptop

When you give a presentation with slides you will either use your own notebook or some computer supplied by the organizers of the meeting. In the latter case there are several drawbacks: (i) the organization will have your presentation as a file and they can do with that file whatever they like, and (ii) the computer of the organization might not have all the necessary software installed or they might not have updated the presentation software to the latest version. Especially video material might be problematic: your video runs on your notebook and not on the computer of the organization (happened to me a month ago). So I always prefer to use my own laptop. Nowadays video projectors are so smart that they can handle both Windows and Apple laptops or notebooks.

Read more... (496 words, 1 image, estimated 1:59 minutes reading time)

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.

Read more... (970 words, 7 images, estimated 3:53 minutes reading time)

Last May I visited the first large scale international conference (CLEO) during my PhD. I was shocked about the enormous contrast with smaller scale (more specialized) conferences. In this post, I will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages that struck me during this conference.

Read more... (385 words, 1 image, estimated 1:32 minutes reading time)