⁴ Here are two true stories; you can’t make this stuff up. I was on the agenda of a conference where a professor was given a 25-minute segment, showed up with 180 slides, and droned on for 90 minutes, and no one from the organizing team stopped him. And the New England Journal of Medicine reported years ago that the speaker at its conference who received the highest participant ratings on the evaluation sheets—perfect 10s without an exception—had canceled prior to the conference and never showed up.