flynn0013

Today in, “Things I should not have to say.” A poster session is a place for exchange of scientific and technical information between professional adults. It is not a place for you to hit on people for a hook up or booty call. Beth Ann McLaughlin asked : Women of STEM, Quick question At any given science poster presentation, what percent of the time do you have a man at your poster who just won't go away and makes you uncomfortable? Results? 16% of women said every conference, 14% said 50-99% of them, 19% said 25-49% of them, and 51% of respondents said less than 25% of them. Now, sure I could niggle about the poll is structured might inflate perceptions of how common this is (there’s an option for 100%, but not 0%, so the most common situation could be women not getting bothered), but even if every one of that 51% was really never, that still means that half of women poster presenters had a bad experience. And that’s unacceptable. And reading the replies to that poll is not fun. ...

One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols. Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious. I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed. Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before. The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package wi...

This Twitter thread by Laura Williams about poster presentations began: 83% expect 10 or fewer poster visitors at large meeting. This reminded me of an unfinished project: a formula to estimate how many people you could expect at your poster. This is how far I got: My efforts were inspired by the Drake equation . The attendance at the meeting ( N r for number ) is the maximum possible number of people who can see your poster ( V for viewers). Most of the rest of the terms in the equation are fractions that reduce attendance at your poster. Looking back on this was, my favourite factor in this equation (mid right) was, “ f c = fraction (of attendees) more interested in coffee (than your poster).” And the postscript to that still makes me smile: “GEOLOGY f b = beer.” Geologists do love their beer, I’ve heard.

Most of the readers of this blog are lurkers. They read, but they don’t feel obliged to make a comment, or send me a tweet, or email, or anything else. And that’s fine. I’m a lurker in many online spaces. Some poster viewers are lurkers, too. They will see your poster during the poster session, and they are interested, but they will not approach you. Instead, they will often wait until you are giving a tour of your poster to someone else. Then, and only then, will they walk up and casually listen over the shoulder of the person you are mostly talking to. I only learned about this during the last #SciFund Challenge poster class. Several of the class participants admitted that this was their poster viewing strategy. It’s understandable. Not everyone is comfortable walking up cold to someone they’ve never met before, and saying, “What’s to learn here?” (This is usually one of the first things I say to a poster presenter.) What can you, as a poster presenter, do to reach out to the lurker...

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...

“I don’t have a question so much as a comment...” Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions .  “My question is the following statement” is the bane of any sane conference-goer’s existence. Any conference, panel, lecture, seminar, symposium, and so on, in any possible field you can imagine, can be the setting for this crime against humanity. The tendency of audience members to stand up and speechify rather than simply  ask  is remarkably widespread — anecdotally, everyone I know says they see it all the time, and everyone says they hate it. There’s no single, simple answer why people do this, but it got me wondering: is there an equivalent behaviour in a poster session? Oral presentations are designed to be a one time spiel by one speaker to many audience members, but a poster is designed to be shown many times to a small audience that comes and goes. An oral talk rarely offers the ...