O’Bayes 19/3.5

 

Among the posters at the second poster session yesterday night, one by Judith ter Schure visually standing out by following the #betterposter design suggested by Mike Morrison a few months ago. Design on which I have ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, reducing the material on a poster is generally a good idea as they tend to be saturated and hard to read, especially in crowded conditions. Having the main idea or theorem immediately visible should indeed be a requirement, from immediately getting the point to starting from the result in explaining the advances in the corresponding work. But if this format becomes the standard, it will become harder to stand out! More fundamentally, this proposal may fall into the same abyss as powerpoint presentations, which is that insisting in making the contents simpler and sparser may reach the no-return point of no content [which was not the case of the above poster, let me hasten to state!]. Mathematical statistics poster may be automatically classified as too complicated for this #betterposter challenge as containing maths formulas! Or too many Greek letters as someone complained after one of my talks. And treating maths formulas as detail makes them even smaller than usual, which sounds like the opposite of the intended effect. (The issue is discussed on the betterposter blog, for a variety of opinions, mostly at odds with mine’s.)