flynn0013

Your blogger is extra busy this week, and only has time to steal this cartoon from Red Pen / Black Pen on Twitter . Click to enlarge!

Neil Cohn wins the “ Best poster reuse " award for this month: Neil writes: Given my last poster, I can't help but design my poster for #CogSci2017 thinking how I'm just going to turn it into pillows afterwards This short (30 second) video shows the same data, plotted different ways: D3 Show Reel from Mike Bostock on Vimeo . Think about what your intuitive reaction is to these different plots. As I have said before, design is all about choices, and sometimes we underestimate how many choices we have in showing our data. You can find more about the data here . I’m not sure what the difference between a fact box and an infographic is, but I’m intrigued by this article about the effectiveness of fact boxes. Hat tip to Hilda Bastien . Speaking of infographics, there’s a whole gallery of them here . Hat tip to Brett Favaro . I have become obsessed with titles. This slide about headlines makes the point: On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body...

I have to lead with Jeremy Fox on the Dynamic Ecology blog, which tells you a big mistake almost every poster makes : The post actually said too much text , but you get the point. (And thanks for the plug for the blog, Jeremy! Hat tip to Meghan Duffy and Pat Schloss .) Steven Heard delves into a topic we’ve discussed on the blog before: should you give a poster or a talk ? I think the poster option is underappreciated . Because talks are seen as the default, and because they’re easier to prepare, it’s easy to slip into preferring talks without thinking carefully about the advantages and disadvantages of each format. There are major advantages to posters – especially the very high quality of one-on-one interactions they can bring – and casually defaulting to “talk” blocks off opportunities. Steven has conferences on the brain this month, as he also wrote about how he tackles conferences as a introvert : I like all kinds of people – one or two at a time. No matter how much I enjoy seein...