Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 July 2005 14:15:22
The concept of the "conference poster" is a strange one. It is designed so that conferences can have a lot more presentations than if they were all actual spoken presentations, in today's information-overload age, and so that nervous young scientists don't have to stand up and speak in front of the three men and a dog, er, eminent scientists that attend their presentation session in an odd room no-one can find at 8am, er, in a large conference hall at a peak time. If you do have a poster, you stand by it for a couple of hours with an increasingly fixed grin, and airplane stewardess hand gestures*, and people come up to you and say "Talk me through it", and you fight the urge to say "can you not read yet, or are you just lazy?". On the other hand, other people come up to you and say "ooh, that's fascinating, give me a handout, and your email address, I'll be in touch".
Anyway my assistant and I are going to Berlin to a conference next week and I have finally managed to get the poster she'll be in charge of printed out. I have a presentation slot which is astonishingly on the first day (people won't be fed up) and in a group with some actual similar papers (usually I'm in with everyone-they-can't-work-out-where-to-put). So it should have a few people there.
A colleague asked where we were off to, today, and on hearing it was Berlin, said he'd always wanted to go there. Well, was my witty reply, you should research what I research, shouldn't you?
*There are two emergency exits from my poster, and you will find the introduction located towards the front of the display, with the references towards the end. Please note the graph located at the bottom of the second panel, in which the most interesting results are displayed, and the statistically significant results which will light up should there be a loss of cabin power.