This month’s contender for “Best conference poster” was spotted by Greg Fell:


Clever!

• • • • • 

If you have a fabric poster, Crystal Lantz can show you how to turn that ol’ science communication into a lovely tote bag!


She’s got detailed instructions, but you’re on your own for the sewing machine. Hat tip to Crystal Lantz and Caitlin verder Weele.

• • • • • 

I missed these tweets from Suzy Styles about poster club back in August, when there was discussion about harassment in poster sessions:

The First Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do 🤛🏻not 🤛🏻 talk🤛🏻about...
🤛🏻the presenter’s appearance
🤛🏻the presenter’s phone number
🤛🏻who you think ‘actually’ wrote the code
🤛🏻basically anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context 🤷🏻‍♀️

The Second Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻you 🤛🏻do🤛🏻not
🤛🏻try to look down the presenter’s top
🤛🏻stand unnecessarily close
🤛🏻touch the presenter 🙅🏻
🤛🏻block the presenter with your body
🤛🏻talk about anything other than the poster and relevant scientific context

The Third Rule of Poster Club is...
🤛🏻be aware that if you are much taller, standing close can be intimidating
🤛🏻be aware that if you are more senior, standing close can be intimidating
🤛🏻check - am I being a jerk atm?
🤛🏻do not talk about anything other than the poster++

• • • • • 

Phylopic is a great resource for biology presenters. It provides silhouettes of different animals. I tried, “Crab.”


Weirdly, I tried clicking Callinectes sapidus, which has an icon next to its name, and found there was no image of that species! But with a little more clicking, it provided this outline of Liocarcinus vernalis.


The “illustrated lineage” feature is also pretty nice. Hat tip to John Vanek.

• • • • • 

More conferences should use magnetic name badges, says Jennifer Rohn.

OMG - a magnetic name badge so you don’t have to pierce your expensive clothes! Where have you been all my life?

• • • • • 

This blog post mainly about bootstraps (in the mathematical sense) but also contains warnings against the problems of bar graphs and error bars.

(T)here is no substitute for a scatterplot, at least for relatively small sample sizes. Also, using the mean +/- SD, +/- SEM, with a classic confidence interval (using t formula) or with a percentile bootstrap confidence interval can provide very different impressions about the spread in the data (although it is not their primary objective).

• • • • • 

John Burn-Murdoch has a nice analysis of this wide-distributed graphic of US election results.


With that constraint gone, you can label them all directly! Immediately more readable.

• • • • • 

Kathleen Morris gives us a list of free graphics resources.



Hat tip to Lisa Lundgren and Emily Rollinson