One of the disappointments at this EIA conference was the relative lack of slides. Many of the speakers did not use slides. What few slides were used are not yet up on the EIA website. I always prefer to have slides available to write about, because a "picture is worth a thousand words".

I believe the lack of slides was "feature" of the conference. Except in the plenary session, the typical arrangement of the panel of speakers was seated around a table. Most presenters had either no slides, or only a few slides. Quite often, their remarks were more or less to each other. In some cases this lead to kind of cryptic remarks, using the "lingo" of the speakers, and assuming a fairly high level of knowledge going into the talks. I know Dave Summers and I sat together at the "What's Ahead for Natural Gas?" talk on Tuesday, and remarked that we were barely able to figure out what the speakers were saying. It seemed like people without a good knowledge of the subject would miss quite a bit of what was being said.