To SSA 2005 Presenters,
In two weeks we will all be converging at beautiful Lake Tahoe for one of the biggest SSA annual meetings ever. As presenters, each of you is a vital part of the success of SSA 2005. I would like to help everyone have a clear understanding of how you can help keep the meeting's focus on engineering and science, and avoid any logistical distractions.
I can't emphasize enough the importance of the poster sessions. As at AGU meetings, poster presentations are equally important to oral presentations. For SSA 2005 we have set aside many hours specifically for the poster sections of each session, with nothing else scheduled. I expect poster presenters to hang their posters in advance and not take them down before the end of their poster session. Wednesday posters should be hung Tuesday afternoon and taken down Wednesday night. Thursday/Friday posters should be hung late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning and taken down Friday at noon. Please designate on your poster two hours of the poster session when an author will be present.
Wireless internet access will be available in the poster area. Please contact vonseg@seismo.unr.edu if you need alterations to any additional equipment or connections you requested for your poster presentation.
SSA 2005 is fully using all of the space, time, and staff resources our hotel venue has available. There are oral sessions in the program for which, if they run even five minutes after their scheduled end, hotel staff will be forced to bring up the lights, unplug the projector, and begin stacking chairs. The rooms must be reconfigured in a short time for other uses, such as the SSA annual lunch.
To be fair to all presenters, all sessions must keep exactly to the presentation schedule. The organizing committee is looking to you, the presenters, to keep each and every presentation on its stated schedule. Even specially invited speakers have been given only 20 minutes total (including the transition to the next speaker) in the technical program. The standard 15-minute presentation slot is, as you know, an extremely short period of time. I like to think of an SSA talk as really being only 10 minutes long, to allow a few minutes for questions and two minutes to change speakers. For most of us, a 10-minute talk implies preparing only 10 PowerPoint slides.
Session chairs have no flexibility to allow extra time for speakers who are experiencing technical difficulties. It is my personal opinion that any research that cannot be explained in 10 minutes, with no visual aids, really belongs in the poster sessions anyway (that is where I will present a web demo, for example). Speakers unable to show their visual aids can often refer the audience to a companion poster, and there are many specific times set aside for poster presentations only. There will not be any type of internet connections available in the oral session rooms.
You can rest easy, though, because our AV contractor will have a technician on-site and on call during all oral sessions. So help will be just moments away, while your session chair directs you to to give an oral summary.
All speakers: Please bring your presentation on CD or USB flash disk to the session room before the session begins. Loading your file during the session will leave you with less time to present. The minute or so it might take to copy your PowerPoint file to the hard drive will have to be subtracted from your presentation time.
All of the projectors will be linked to a WindowsXP PC. Please configure your PowerPoint presentations for this environment. There will be a speakers' ready room, starting Tuesday night, with an identical computer for testing and repairing presentations before sessions start. You may be allowed by your session chair to plug your own laptop into the projector, but your presentation risks being cut short if there are any problems, or even because your laptop takes time to boot up. Please contact your session chair now if you intend to present from your own computer. The 15-minute interval between presentations leaves no room for error. Below are some tips for Mac users who are willing to show their PowerPoints on the Windows computers.
With your help, I am confident that we can have a brilliantly successful SSA 2005 in our scenic location.