flynn0013

Lisa Rost has a nice overview of colour tools to help with data visualizations. Some have appeared on the blog before, but this is a great summary. MarkMaker bills itself as an automated logo designer (backstory here ). It’s fun to look at, but I was unimpressed with the first suggestions: I stayed with it, trying a few favourites and deleting ones I didn’t like. I was still baffled by this suggestion after a few rounds: I suppose it might have a certain utility in getting you out of ruts, but I’m not convinced it has much more utility than randomly picking fonts in your graphics editor. Hat tip to Doctor Becca . DrugMonkey reports from the floor of the joint American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Experimental Biology meeting: Saw a poster with Supplemental Materials today at #aspet #expbio #eb2016 – this is where we are people. I... wait... what? As Clay Clark asked : On back side of the poster? Let me make this clear: That’s dumb. Do not do that. We hear a

Cathy Newman pointed out that this year’s Evolution meeting in Austin has conference T-shirts... but none in women’s styles. Sigh. Weirdly, this is a choice you have a pre-registration, months out from the conference , so it’s not as though you would make unneeded T-shirts. In a little Twitter poll I ran, most people reported that if a conference had T-shirts, there usually weren’t women’s tees available. Double sigh. Come on, conference organizers. This sort of thing matters . I can’t do better than this post from Kathy Sierra: The point is showing us that you care about more than just saving a few bucks on a t-shirt print run. That you care about ALL your users, not just the Big Burly Men. This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but still... the t-shirts are a metaphor for – or at least a reflection of – the way the company feels about users as individual people. The shirts matter, and they speak volumes about your company. External links Tech t-shirts aren't sexy enough

This week’s contribution comes from Scott Van Keuren. This poster recently graced the halls of the Society for American Archaeology meeting .Click to enlarge! This a poster that has the right ideas, but doesn’t go far enough. The title is excellent. It’s big, clean, and clear. I appreciate that this carries through the author listings, which are simpler than many posters. The logos are sensibly placed, unobtrusively, in the fine print section of the poster. There are excellent photographs of physical objects, particularly in that critical left hand side. I would have like to have seen fewer, bigger pictures, even if that meant reducing the size of maps somewhat. The headings also show consideration for the reader. Instead of the standard “IMRAD” headings,we mostly get questions that make it extremely clear which section of the poster is. If anything, I would like to see them bigger and more prominent. And that’s particularly valuable, because the rest of the poster sometimes leads you

This week’s poster is from Kasey Pham, and is used with permission. Click to enlarge! Kasey writes: I’m a student having a little trouble with my first poster presentation. I’d like to cut down the text more so that there's more white space, but I'm already having trouble keeping the story coherent. It’s certainly nowhere near the worst I’ve seen in terms of amount of text. It seems that the main areas to edit are the introduction and the conclusion. My crack at condensing the intro was to use Randy Olson’s “And But Therefore” template: “Every individual of a species should share a common ancestor, and this can be tested using public data, but those data are sparse, therefore we created a tool.” I think I’m closing in on shrinking your four paragraphs down to once sentence. But I don’t know what “sparse” data means in this context, therefore I’m not sure what problem the toolkit solves. Cutting the conclusions are more important than the intro, because that could give space ar

How many conference posters turn into published papers? It’s not a trivial question. A huge amount of scientific information is presented at conferences. Scientific conferences should be the places to find the “coming thing.” But in most research fields, the importance of conference presentations pale in significance to final papers, published in peer-reviewed journals. (My understanding is that conference proceedings take on more weight engineering and computing.) How much material from conferences is lost is relevant to discussions about the speed and efficiency of scientific communication, replication crises, file drawer problems, p hacking, and the permanence of the scientific record. It raises issues of how much you can trust what you see at conferences, and how soon you might be able to cite work that you have seen at a conference. There is an emerging literature on this. There are nine journal articles on the topic in the last two years alone . Because this is the poster blog, I