publisher tips

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers features a fantastic battle scene: the battle for Helm’s Deep. There’s a lot of reasons why it works. The scale and physicality of it is awesome. But there is one factor that is underrated. In the DVD commentary, director Peter Jackson talked about watching famous sieges and battles of film, like Zulu . He said that what he learned from those was that the secret was all in the build-up . The movie spends a lot of time making sure that the audience understands the situation. The fortress is literally set against a mountain, creating the impression of “backs against the wall.” The city is outnumbered, with hundreds of defenders against thousands of attackers.  And you see that army of thousands marching in. Not doing anything at first. Just standing there. Then thumping their spears and yelling. More waiting. And then the army charges and all hell breaks loose and it is on . And when those orc charge and start throwing ladders up against the for...

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...