slideshare m’a tuer…

This afternoon, I completely botched my talk at the workshop “Méthodes de Monte Carlo pour les problèmes inverses bayésiens en traitement des signaux et des images” thanks to a weird mishap on slideshare. As Og’s readers are aware,  I am a big fan of slideshare as a public depository for my slides. However, when I uploaded my talk this morning, “something” happens with the pdf file in that, while I was seeing a regular talk on my own computer (using acroread Paris.pdf), the output of the file on slideshare was missing integrals, sum and products! This was most embarrassing for me and most  inconvenient for the audience as I had to explain over and over the meaning of the missing symbols… I could have stopped the talk and gathered the pdf file from my laptop, of course, but this was the last session of a busy day, I was not sure the original was all-right ,and I had no USB key nor power plug with me… The audience was much sympathetic than I would have been myself. Apologies to all! The most bizarre thing is that I have been trying to reproduce the phenomenon since then, but to no avail. Every version I have downloaded from this afternoon onwards contains the right symbols (on my screen). Maybe it was due to the resolution of the local computer I was using for my presentation as it could not produce a full screen output… Anyway, an embarrassment I could have done without! (The title of this post is inspired from a famous crime story in southern France where the victim supposedly wrote “Omar m’a tuer” on a wall with her blood, committing a very unlikely grammatical mistake… This erroneous sentence became almost immediately part of the urban culture. I once got a “Robert m’a tuer…” as a course evaluation the only year I gave a course on classical testing!!! A movie on the crime came out recently.)