It’s my birthday but you get the gift

Yes, I have successfully completed another trip around the sun. Rather than a birthday present, you can do me a favour: pre-order my book!

The Better Posters book is currently scheduled for release in mid-April, 2021. The exact date is hard to say, because the COVID-19 pandemic is still creating delays and uncertainty in the production and shipping process. It’s been a long journey, to say the least. 

Pre-orders help books tremendously, and I would like to sell enough copies to have to write a second edition. You can pre-order from the publisher here and get a big 30% discount by using the code “POSTERS30” at check-out.

You could also recommend your university librarian purchase this!

Thank you for your support!

External links

Pelagic Publishing site for Better Posters

Update on the Better Posters book

The Better Posters book is inching closer to reality!

The book now has a:

• Cover (right).
• Release date (25 January 2021).
• ISBN number (9781784272357, accept no substitutes).
• A publisher’s webpage! I created an easy-to-remember URL for it: https://bit.ly/BetterPostersBook.

Most of the discussion about the content book will be over at the Better Posters blog, although I will occasionally talk about about the creation and backstory of the book here.

My only disappointment is that the ISBN is not a prime number. Divisible by 379. Damnit.

The @IAmSciComm threads

This post is a collection of threads I wrote during my week curating the IAmSciComm Twitter account.

Monday, 16 March 2020

• Introducing your host
• Taking over in a crisis
• Show me a poster
• Better posters means better academia
• The future is visual
• Posters in a time of crisis

Tuesday, 17 March 2020

• RTFM
• Getting to the point
• Online poster sessions
• Writing a title
• Lessons from Shaun the Sheep

Wednesday, 18 March 2020

• Decisions plus empathy
• Buy new fonts, cheapskate
• Reading gravity
• Type size

Thursday, 19 March 2020

• White space
• Type choices
• Academic camping and clothing choices
• Setting up an online poster session
• How to present a poster

Friday, 20 March 2020

• Public intellectuals
• Lessons from crayfish headlines
• The “kiloauthors” story
• How doing SciComm affected my scientific career
• How to build a science career while doing SciComm

Saturday, 21 March 2020

• Mission Mangal review
• Poster critique: Employee placement
• Poster critique: Fur seal populations
• Poster critique: Penguin metabolism
• Poster critique: Glucose toxicity
• Poster critique: Children's confidence
• Poster critique: Visual storytelling
• Poster critique: Asteroid impact
• Writing Better Posters: the book
• Peace out

External links

I am SciComm home page

Into the vault: oxidative stress and ascidian embryogenesis

I’ve talked before about the long waits in getting projects published. But sometimes, despite waiting, projects never make it past the conference poster stage. I’ve also talked about developing a gut instinct for whether something is publishable.

It’s nice that now, there are ways to turn ephemera into an archival, potentially usable and citable, document. For a while, I’ve been meaning to start putting up some of my posters into FigShare, which I’ve been of fan of from early on. I first used it when I published a paper here on my blog. Since then, I’ve used it to archive the raw data for several of my papers as unofficial supplemental information.

The first one to go up is a poster I presented at the third International Tunicate Conference in 2005 at the University of California Santa Barbara.

This one is one of the relatively few projects that we were never able to push out into a paper. I still think it makes for a pretty good poster, though.

Archiving this poster got me thinking. I see clear value in archiving old posters that can document projects that never made it into the scientific literature. But is there value in archiving posters that were the early versions of projects that did make it into the regular scientific literature? I can see old posters have some interest as examples of design (see the Better Posters blog). They might eventually have some historical interest.

But is there any scientific interest in archiving old posters? Posters are generally works in progress, so tend to be incomplete and preliminary. Might they actually confuse matters by including dead end ideas that were abandoned by the authors?

Reference

Stwora A, Scofield VL, Faulkes Z. 2015. Effects of oxidative stress on Ascidia interrupta embryogenesis. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1499282

Breaking Bio design chat

Earlier this year, I chatted with Morgan from Breaking Bio during Science Online 2013. That interview never made it to air, because it was a little too short.

I contacted Morgan and pleaded with them to let me have another shot at it. They were good enough to indulge me, so I sat down with the Breaking Bio boys again to do a little chitting and chatting (plus a substantial rant in the middle) about poster design.


I need to work on avoiding that slow blink.

The Captain Canuck post I mention in the beginning will be up this week!

External links


Episode 48: Let anarchy reign with Zen Faulkes!

Breaking Bio YouTube channel
Captain Canuck
Captain Canuck YouTube channel

The Zen of Presentations, Part 24: Slidesters

Many people have discussed the deficiencies of "sliduments": PowerPoint printouts that are given instead of actual, detailed prose documents. See also here.

Another misuse of PowerPoint is to use it to create large posters. My experience has been that PowerPoint is abysmally suited for this task. That said, I have not used the 2007 version of PowerPoint that was released along with Windows Vista, but I have suspicions that at least some of the problems I had are still true. The main reason I suspect this is that I deal with posters for HESTEC from our department every year for the last four. And every year I am horrified by the PowerPoint posters. People only do this because they know PowerPoint and think it’s “Good enough” for the task. My reaction is much like that of William T. Riker: “‘Good enough’ never is.”

In the last version, PowerPoint was limited in how big a poster it can make. Some conferences give several feet of space, and PowerPoint couldn't reach the large sizes.

PowerPoint is also wretched at typesetting and handling complex layouts. It’s harder to change even basic paragraph settings like line spacing in PowerPoint than Word. Perhaps the fatal flaw is that the heart of any poster layout should be a consistent grid, and setting up a grid in PowerPoint is very difficult. Consequently, I see many posters where I’m willing to bet no two items on them are actually aligned. They’ve been roughly kinda sorta eyeballed.

Strangely, many who use PowerPoint have an much superior tool at their disposal: Publisher. It’s part of the standard Microsoft Office package, but not many people are aware of it. It uses many of the same commands and logic as the other Office software that people know, so its lack of popularity is all the more surprising. Publisher has its limitations, but the improvement over what one can do in PowerPoint is huge.

There are many, many websites now that are devoted to improving the design of slides. I’m a big fan of many of them; they perform a very useful service. But maybe it’s time for a few dedicated individuals to take up the cause for poster design.

Revision of a figure

Yesterday, I did a quick revamp on our Neuroethology poster for HESTEC. Previously, I wrote about the design of one of the data figures for that poster. Interestingly, I found out at the meeting that I was too clever for my own good in designing the Neuroethology poster. The problem was that I used the bars coming from the boxes to represent the minimum and maximum. Several people interpreted these as error bars (standard deviation or standard error). Because overlapping error bars usually indicate that groups are not significantly different, and error bars are smaller than minimums and maximums, this led some viewers to momentarily question the results.

Consequently, I went back to a more standard bar graph in the revised HESTEC poster. It's similar to this one, except it shows transformed data rather than the raw data, and the colour is not bright red.

The size of the HESTEC poster was also smaller, so a lot of cutting text and general simplification occurred. It's probably a better poster as a result.

I also started work on my annual compilation of everything I've done in the last year. It's a dreary process, although sometimes it can be nice to see how much you've done.

Poster done

I just finished printing off my poster on the printer so big, they call it "Tank." Fortunately, as it was printing, I only saw about 3 things that I would change. One was a colour issue: some data I had printed in blue came out a bit darker on print than it does on screen, so the data points were not as distinct as I would have liked. A second was that I probably could have used some colour in the graph I described in my last post to make the mean diamond stand out a bit more. Third, some of the spacing between text and heading could be improved.

But if those are all I'd tweak at this point, I'm doing better than average, I reckon.

Making of a figure

It's late. Stupid late. But I just finished up a poster for a meeting. The last thing I was doing were some statistics. I had to do them by hand, because they're specialized enough that most computer stats programs don't calculate automatically.

But I thought I would share the evolution of one of the figures that went into the poster.

First thing I do is just plot the raw data, shown below. This is just for myself, not for presentation (besides this "behind the scenes" post in my blog, naturally), which is why it looks pretty poor. I don't like the bars in red stripes.

This is a useful step just to get a sense of what you've got, and sometimes helps detect errors. I found one of my students misplaced a decimal this way, so one of his data points was out by a factor of ten, which wasn't good. But we caught it.



That's the data from one experimental treatment. Now I want to see all the experimental treatments side by side. This one I was thinking I might end up using in a presentation at some point, so I cleaned it up a little more.



The good news is that it looks like there might be an effect. The bad news is, that from looking at the plot above, the data are not normally distributed -- most are piled up over on the left hand side -- and they differ in how much they vary. Both of these things are bad statistically.

The plot below shows how I transformed the data to try to fix those issues.



Not perfect, but certainly not as skewed toward the right as before. Again, this is just for my own exploration, so it's just the default red stripes. I could change the default, but I've been too lazy.

The next step is to run some stats. Here, I have to switch to a real stats program, which does all the test right -- but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of graphs.



The above was the default plot of averages I got when I ran the statistical test -- which confirmed that there was a significant effect! Still, the plot leaves much to be desired. I want the data points in different order, and I don't want them joined by lines, and I want to show some measure of the variation.

The stats program gave me this when I asked it to show mean and standard error.



Still not great. And the above two pictures are both screen grabs. I want an image in a form that will scale up and not get all jaggy when I put in on a big poster. The WMF format scales up, but when I try to export the graph in WMF, I get this:



Proof that the stats software is about the numbers, not the pictures.

So now I go back to my graphing program. I try using it to plot averages and error bars, and get a a basic bar graph.



Not bad, but because one of the issues with this was initially the skew and variation, I want something that might show a little more detail than that. I try a box plot of the raw (i.e., non-transformed) data.



Getting closer now, but the fiddling over details gets more intense. The lines are too thin for a poster, so I thicken them. The little square in the middle, which shows the average, tends to get lost when I thicken the lines; I turn that into a diamond to make it more distinct. The top and bottom whiskers are supposed to represent the 95% confidence intervals, but the sample size is small enough that it ends up being in the same position as the minimum and maximum, which are shown as the top and bottom Xs. So I get rid of the Xs while I'm at it.



Now I also want to show the transformed data, so I make a similar plot and change it much like I changed the graph of the raw data.



I add the letters above each box to show which condition is statistically different from the others. (Boxes that have the same letter above them do not differ.) But the plotting program doesn't allow me to line up the letters as precisely to the boxes as I want, so I import that into a real graphics program for final tweaking.



And that's the end result on the poster!

To make this one figure, I used four different software packages. Microsoft Excel 2003 for data manipulation, Origin 7 for graphing, SPSS 12 for statistics, and CorelDRAW 12 for final touch-up. I'm showing almost a dozen graphs, although there are a few more steps in the process that I didn't show here.

And this is the easy figure on the poster.

Posters and symposium

Despite that my student won the poster competition for the HESTEC Science Symposium, the symposium this Monday was very disappointing. The big problem was a huge disconnect between the speakers and the audience.

The organizers and speakers had the idea that this was an research symposium geared to fellow academics.

The organizers had masses of high school students carted in to the symposium.

Those poor high school students. They were basically prisoners a our symposium, being forced to listen to talks on the spinach principle: "It's good for you!" The speakers did not speak to things that interested the students, so the students were bored and noisy and constantly getting shushed. It was like being back in a high school auditorium.

The speakers were average at best, and they projected their slides in such a way that they got distorted (too wide).

Then, after the morning talks, it was time for poster viewing. After being advertised there would be free lunch during the poster viewing sessions, organizers decided to tell student poster presenters and faculty that the food wasn't for them. Apparently, it was only for the high school students.

One student got told she had to provide her own mounting board for her poster because the organizers had run out.

The afternoon roundtable was not bad, although the speakers admitted that they were expecting to be talking to university students rather than high school students. And when the moderator said a couple of times they wanted to give students the chance to ask questions, Congressman Hinojosa decided to get up and talk for several minutes instead, cutting into the actual discussion that should characterize roundtables.

Finally, it was time for the students who had won the poster competition to give their talks. And shortly after that started... most of the audience left. The imported high school students had to get back on their buses and leave. So these poor students were giving these talks (the sort you'd hear at national academic conferences) to mostly empty rooms with a few stragglers who probably didn't have the background to understand a lot of what was being said. Heck, I'm an academic, and I didn't understand large chunks of most of the student talks.

The day left me very sad to have seen such a missed opportunity.

But at least my student won a laptop for her poster.

In honour of Labour Day...

I laboured. At least part of the day, anyway. I started and more or less finished a poster for the HESTEC science symposium. Then I went out and saw a movie.

Big as a really big thing

Things are looking up, for the most part. After several weeks of clouds -- to the point where I only has vague sort of memories about some blazing ball of fire that used to inhabit the sky -- the sky has cleared up and we have some lovely sunshine.

Yesterday was also good for work related reasons. My student Sandra and I were preparing to print our poster for the upcoming Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting. This is actually part of a student presentation competition for The Crustacean Society, so the urge to have a good poster has a slightly greater importance than normal. We also have the luxury of lots of poster board space, if the SICB website is to believed -- so we took full advantage of that. In other words, we have a big poster. I mean, really big. Longer than I'm tall. By many inches. And I'm sort of pointlessly tall.

I was convinced that we were going to spend all day trying to print this poster. After all, it is coming up to Christmas, almost nobody's around. Even though Sandra did check that George, the computer lab manager, would be around to help us, you always sort of worry that you'll find a problem that could be fixed if only person X was in their office and not off in another state visiting family for Christmas.

Plus, there was the possible complicating factor of this poster being so big. We decided that it was, in all likelihood, the single biggest poster ever printed in the lab. The file was many megabytes -- 13.6, to be precise. And being an old school computer user, there was a time when working with a file that big was just asking for trouble. And while it's less of a problem now, it's always a concern in the back of your mind.

But we almost got it printed in one shot. We had to abort the first attempt after a couple of inches, because there was still some tape at the end of the paper roll. But the second attempt came off without a hitch.

Now all we have to do is to hope that the poster boards are actually as big as advertised. Because if not, we could kind of be screwed. And I have to put a few finishing touches on my own talk. This is pretty exciting -- two presentations at one meeting. It's been a while since I've been able to boast of that!

Post(er) it notes

Yesterday was sort of another day that got away from me in terms of research. The morning was spent getting my annual eye check-up, then back to work in time to celebrate a colleague's birthday (fellow chocoholic Anita received a big, deadly triple choccy cake), then I spent most of the afternoon chatting with our new faculty hire, cell biologist "Crazy" Jon Lieman, about teaching technology. (I didn't dub him Crazy Jon, by the way; his buddy Mike did.) About the only thing I managed to do, research-wise, was to straighten out my travel arrangements for the upcoming Tunicate Meeting, which is just a little over a week away. Eep!

That put me in sufficient panic that today was spent preparing the poster that I'm supposed to present at said meeting. And I pretty much finished it! Ha! Luckily, I've been writing all this stuff up for not one, but two grant proposals, so it's all very fresh in my mind, and all the information was pretty much all at my fingertips. Plus, I had the power of the newest version (12) of CorelDRAW!, one of my favourite pieces of software, working for me. I made up a small version of the poster (i.e., not the two meter long version I'm going to print next week) and sent it off to my colleagues and students to review in case I did anything stupid with it.

I'm getting closer to actually being able to spend time in the lab generating data. Soon. But not yet.