Why I don't like to pre-submit slides for talks - lessons from #AAASMoBE meeting

So - I gave a talk at a meeting on Thursday.  The meeting was called "Microbiomes of the Built Environment" and it was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and run by AAAS.

The meeting organizers, as is often the case, wanted me to submit my slides a few days in advance, in theory to make sure they were loaded into their system and that all worked OK.  Well, as usual, I did not do this.  I like to make my talks fresh - just before the meeting so that I can incorporate new ideas into them and so that they do not have that canned feeling that a lot of talks do.

My talk was to be 15 minutes long and was to focus on my Sloan Foundation funded project "microBEnet: the microbiology of the built environment network" (see http://microbe.net for information about the project). I figured, I would work on the talk on the plane - five plus hours to edit a talk I had given relatively recently on the topic of this project.  And all would be good.  Plus, United had told me there would be WiFi on the plane so if I needed any new material I should be able to get it from the web right?  Well, the flight took off on time - 8 AM on Wednesday morning.  And I opened my laptop once allowed and paid the $15+ dollars for the WiFi and got to work.  Then, about 10 minutes later, the WiFi died and despite heroic efforts by the flight attendants, it never came back. And I plugged away at my slides doing some edits of the following presentation.

Talk about microBEnet (http://microbe.net) from Jonathan Eisen

Some quick notes on mini trip to DOE-JGI & UCSF

Well, just got back from a very brief trip to give a talk at UCSF.  I was invited by graduate students via the following email message

The students in the DeRisi Lab at UCSF are thrilled to invite you as our selection for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology (iPQB) Invitational Speaker Series!  This is a new type of speaker series at UCSF where students from a laboratory directly nominate and invite speakers from outside UCSF to deliver lectures about cutting-edge topics in quantitative biology.  All nominations are discussed by a QB3/iPQB student committee, and a speaker list is compiled from many outstanding nominations.  The invited speakers are scientists who gathered especially strong support from their nominating lab and the QB3/iPQB student committee, and who have an outstanding record in delivering exciting research talks grounded in quantitative methods. As our selected nominee, your travel, lodging and food expenses will be covered by funds from QB3/iPQB.

It was impossible to say no - I am always thrilled to be invited by student groups.  It took a bit to coordinate when I would come (I am notoriously bad at planning and answering such invitations).  But eventually, with a little prodding, I answered and we picked a date. I of course then asked to change the date and we settled on February 17.