Overview

It was very long ago when Richard Feynman had felt nervous at having to give a seminar . Since then he had developed into an accomplished and inspiring teacher and lecturer, who gave virtuoso performances full of showmanship, humor, with his own inimitable brilliance, style, and manner. ^[1]

Jagdish Mehra

In terms of hours spent, scientific presentations are costly. Even for informal presentations given on site, the audience members have to devote valuable time to attend, and the speakers have to give up valuable time to prepare and deliver. For presentations that require travel, the costs rise dramatically. Each year, large institutions, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, spend millions of dollars in salary and travel expenses to have their scientists and engineers attend and make presentations.

Although expensive, scientific presentations are important. Consider that the information communicated in presentations is often only a few days old, sometimes only a few hours old. Conversely, the information in a professional journal at publication is typically a few months old, and the information in a scientific book is typically a year old at publication. For some areas of science and engineering, major advances occur so often that scientists and engineers cannot afford to wait for a publication cycle to learn the latest news. For instance, at Pratt & Whitney, the principal means of communicating new information about gas turbine engines is not documents, but presentations. ^[2] There, laboratory and computational results from presentations are sometimes directly incorporated into new...