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Haha thanks Joel! The foraging theory video talks about bushes if you want to test your limit!

Would LOVE to do it this way, but we'd probably have to limit ourselves to industry poster sessions (like with science-heavy companies who often have internal poster sessions). Companies and government agencies won't hesitate to video crowds for learning. But scientific conferences are squeamish AF about collecting identified data. Even still, I wonder if we could inspire them with a proof of concept? Probably way more software already built for video data, right?

@@MikeMorrisonPhD I resonate with the concerns over personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy. I can think about a number of ways to mitigate the privacy concerns, such as low quality video taken from the ceiling, rather than at eye level, so face recognition would be challenging at such angles. Alternatively, the software can pre-process the footage to blur each person before storing it, or simply storing the position of the "center of mass" of each person at a given time. If cameras are an absolute no-no, There are other types of sensors that cover large (10 by 10 meters or so) areas with enough accuracy for this application, and no possibility of PII, Kinect, or infrared beacons come to mind, and those can be controlled with arduinos!

Same principles of course, but layout-wise I'd try something like this: osf.io/g6xsm

Ideally, conference program would have takeaways (not titles) and authors! That way you can learn as you're skimming the program.

Well said, Erich! First, some updates to this design here: th-cam.com/video/SYk29tnxASs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=mhzCnBFTIreM65sk And more recent (2024), more nerdy updates on the broader challenge of changing posters here: th-cam.com/video/QU8HMU8A3ns/w-d-xo.htmlsi=W4EVbBUzHG3dhflC But I think you're right that researchers need a massive push towards rigorous communication design. I got a little lucky with this video helping to destabilize posters a little when it went viral, but the effect is waning. Any ideas for how we could create that massive push?

@@MikeMorrisonPhD Thanks for the update! I'm using the updated designs for a poster on some asteroid research I've been doing for the past year...can't wait to see how it turns out! For the massive push, I think you'd need to get this in front of as many undergrads and grad students as possible earlier in their careers. To help with that, I'm passing your most recent content along to a student volunteer network I help coordinate...hopefully they take it on and rock their next poster session! (Getting it into student-run, science clubs/networks is probably a lot easier/faster than encouraging a faculty to switch paradigms). A lot of grad students I know mimic their supervisors, which I think is part of what's keeping the wall-of-text design alive (which you actually mentioned in the video haha). To me, it seems easier to simply train the next generation to do better than to convince seasoned supervisors to switch things up. I know some faculty who would love this, but they're the ones already interested in science communication anyways haha I think we'll see rapid progress if today's undergrads/grads are shown more effective, evidence-based communication tactics and begin to model them to their students in the future! 🙂

Clearly you also understand the value of UX Design haha. Pinned and thank you!

Thank you! Be sure to check out the sequel here! th-cam.com/video/SYk29tnxASs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=-jhLuPb9ekSM5BM0

Thanks for watching! Have fun with your poster!

I struggle with the same thing in science. The overloading design that's useless in practice often FEELS the best in the first 2 second impression. Once people try to actually use it, it falls apart. Minimalist instructional design feels incomplete, empty, lazy, unbusy, uninteresting. But works. Research-wise, complexity & liking is curvilinear. So, people don't like things that feel too easy, even if they work best. I've tried to address this problem in posters by adding a little bit more complexity than I think people can actually process, but still much less than the former approach. Seems to get way more approval. Aiming for that midpoint of complexity. How about you? Any tips for me you've had succes swith?

Sure! The hidden twist is that the boring abstract I showed was my own publication haha. Wish my conference supported these!

Haha I suspect that's the reason most early students do the wall of text --- it really is perfect for hiding research. And make sure your title is vague!

You mean the scrolling posters? Yeah it's hard to read at all when walking by! That's in real life too.

@@MikeMorrisonPhD I mean, in real life, people may pause when they want to read. Anyways, I am preparing my first poster heavily inspired by your philosophy, so thanks!

Glad to meet you too, Rodrigo! Come hang out on the r/scienceUX reddit sometime and share what you're working on!

Awesome! Have fun! Be sure to check out the new designs too: th-cam.com/video/SYk29tnxASs/w-d-xo.html

by what measure?

Thanks for watching Jimmy!!

Same. FWIW I’ve seen one professor create ONE computational article and it became like a learning tool used across classrooms in his field. They’re that much more useful, and you can get that much more reputation points for making them. But, journals are still working to catch up on supporting them.

thanks!

Of course! Bad design at scale will do that to you haha. Glad you enjoyed it!

"You only have bugs when you have a spec" is a great way to put it! I am also impressed you could get 80% there with one sentence haha. And "it's not working" was definitely my favorite pet peeve when I was a software dev.

How would you measure alignment?

Yeah there was a quote from Elsevier's CEO after that PR scandal a few years back about them trying to suppress open access (or control messaging around it...I forget). Anyway the part that hit me was a quote where the CEO was just like "Hey look, we're just trying to survive." Kind of hit home for me. As a psychologist I know how differently (and short-sighted) people act in survival mode. But after working with several publishers now, I'm can report that there are a few happy exceptions to this. American Geophysical Union is huge and they've been an absolute champion of moving to computational articles and stuff.

Better or worse than no picture for that point?

@@MikeMorrisonPhD worse, because [no picture] wouldn’t mislead users at all. It’s a matter of principle: we are starting an era of online existence where we need to presume that content is false (even if unintentionally) and actively engage to assess if more-than-zero-trust is a safe bet. We already shouldn’t take anything at face value, but it’s become exponentially easier to produce something either intentionally misleading or haphazardly corrupting the truth for entertainment. And it’s especially ironic that this is observed within the context of a video called “Future of scientific articles”.

Which reason? Go on!

Just like the rest of scientific publishing probably. And don't know about you but I'm not super optimistic for regulations working. Any ideas for ensuring validity? Maybe better human author identification protocols? Plus the arms race of AI vs. AI detectors?

I didn't mean it to be! Just love this idea from Kevin Kelly's book and found it helpful in my own thinking. But now I can see why it'd come off as an ad. FWIW, Myst Markdown is fully open source. And I genuinely think it's the best chance we have of improving scientific articles right now. So, I shill for it unabashedly sometimes I guess.

@@MikeMorrisonPhD ok fair enough..

Yah

lol didn't mean for it to be. But, most of my videos on scientific articles do shill for Myst pretty hard. It's a free open source framework, and I contribute a little to it (so can you! come volunteer!), but it's also the best tech I've seen hit scientific articles in the 4 years I've been trying to improve them. For exactly the reason that it makes a perfect example for Kevin Kelly's theory.

Good question, and the fact that I'm uncertain of the answer probably suggests "not very established." I think there are a lot of people who do UX roles in scientific companies, but I haven't seen much in the way of formalizing and consolidating the field. That's what I'm trying to help with! Will be launching scienceux.org soon, and have created the r/scienceUX reddit as a start!

@@MikeMorrisonPhD sounds great, good luck with all these endeavors I'll gladly follow

What do you mean?

You may like the book I stole this from then! Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable

Right? I stole them from Kevin Kelly's book (The Inevitable). Maybe it's confirmation bias, but years later I still see these stages play out in different areas of tech.

Great idea. I really want to figure out how to have a middle ground between "ignore the presenter" and "talk for longer than you want". I've had some great conversations at posters, but my favorite was when a guy just walked by, read my betterposter-takeaway, asked me one drive-by question about something I hadn't considered to include in the study, and then walked away. Like a 1 minute interaction and it improved my research.

​@@MikeMorrisonPhD Those are the greatest kinds of interactions!! Only if I could do that with most posters instead of accidentally being stuck in the first two...

@@juliexue3792 - Any ideas for encouraging it? It's probably a combination of creating new social norm, but also the design of the poster could facilitate that (by giving people walking by more to respond to without having to stop)?

@@MikeMorrisonPhD Ooh, it really feels like the encouraging need to come from conference organizers (maybe another way in organizing posters/presentations).

@@juliexue3792 - Working on it! Many conferences are open to this and want to help (and many encourage #betterposter already). What do you want to see them do as a presenter? Just push it from the poster guidelines page, or would you like to see something more?

Sure thing!

Hey, Brittney! Thank you for being such a big part of developing all this stuff over the years!!

Haha thank you! You may like the sequel! th-cam.com/video/SYk29tnxASs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=pxOwQbpjmh_xchUr

Haha yes I am! Go white!

Thank you! Check out the generation 2 sequel cartoon too, and have fun at APA!

@@MikeMorrisonPhD Will do. And I have recently learned about end screens, which you can easily add to your video and gives viewers a clickable link to go to the next video you recommend. Easy peasy and is definitely helping me expand my TH-cam channel.

Thanks Iain. At least once a day I think about the concept of informational conformity from my undergrad psych: "Everyone else is doing X, we've always done X, so X must be the best thing to do." While I'm sitting here looking at eye tracking data showing traditional poster content completely ignored. Creating improved designs has been by far the easiest part compared to adoption. But, having time and knowing people like you are in the fight too keeps me hopeful for the future!

That's a great point on the nitpicking. I had actually figured on that effect happening for good: People will conform to the feedback that the tool encourages, so if the tools focus on concrete suggestions that could be good, but hadn't thought of the narrowing effect that could create.

First, thanks for all this feedback. Building better peer review tools is a considerably more complex challenge than posters, and part of that is needing to hear from a LOT of reviewers, so your comments here will really help me develop version 2 of these concepts. In this case I based those delay times on an actual public peer review. But, only one. I've also waited months or even a year on paper feedback before. But to your point, that was the intake phase not actually once reviewers were assigned. With journal shopping and rejections, papers in my field at least can easily take 2 years to get published. Did you mean that papers in your field typically go from submission-to-publication in a few months?! If so that's great! Also, even though I didn't exaggerate in this case, I'm totally not above exaggeration so it was also a fair criticism haha. Also, what's your thoughts on receiving a todo-formatted review as an author, versus thinking as a reviewer?

@@MikeMorrisonPhD Thanks for considering my comment and for your feedback: Yeah, in my field, chemistry, 2 months (+whatever time you need to fix things) from submission to publication is on the faster end but quite common. I am just working on the minor revisions for one of these papers that we submitted May first and it will probably be published in late June. For another work, even after initial rejection in a high impact Journal, another rejection after peer review in another Journal, substantial additions and an appeal against this decision, the paper was out about 6-7 months after the first submission. Both your and my experience are anecdotal, but I am sure somebody has looked at this more rigorously. While it initially seems like a wall of text, most paragraphs can be easily broken down into simple todos. So this feature would be a nice-to-have convenience feature that would save me maybe 5 minutes per paper.

@@R-ok3cl Yeah maybe a sensible next step for me is to go through one of those big datasets of peer reviews so I can rely less on anecdotal experience. And also, the PR system I’m working on is for computational articles written in Myst Markdown or Quarto, which are way easier to build reviewer tools for than word files, so it allows for improvements that couldn’t be made before. And for me, even saving 5 minutes per paper is a win. If I can save you a single click I’ll put weeks of effort into it. One last question: where do you think the biggest waste is in the peer review process, if you had to choose and even if it’s small?

Looks like connectedpapers, I don't what they use though

yep connectedpapers!

Yeah the goal is to help AI do its job better. And we eventually want to go far beyond the overall subject. We need really really precise metadata about causal relationships, because every percentage in extra accuracy makes it more viable and worthwhile to invest the $ in testing potential new treatments that pop out. Any inaccuracy in the data does the opposite: It makes testing new treatments more risk and costly.

Sure but if the ai has a bit of text beforehand, it can then filter the ones that aren’t relevant much quicker

@@theonlyjoe_ Exactly. The human author linking the meaningful text creates an optimization parameter that AI can both use and train on. Papers that have human-linked text help the AI understand papers that don’t.

⁠​⁠@@MikeMorrisonPhD This proposal will never work, and is unnecessary. You're discussing a computation problem, not a categorization problem*. The surrounding text before the citation will already give the context you're looking for. I personally feel, and this is a stretch, that this proposal is similar to a major problem of Object Oriented Programming and why people have moved away from it. People have discovered that it's better to just let "data be data" (let citations be citations), and to not overthink how you group related functions and how they relate to one another (which part of the sentence best describes the work in the citation so I may link it?). *Your solution is categorizing citations with presumably a snippet of text in the sentence/paragraph that best summarizes the reference material. There is no reason to suggest this will save money. That is wishful thinking.

@@theonlyjoe_ What about the paragraph the citation is attached to already?

Thanks, Josh! What's the most annoying part of citations to you?

Lol I was so afraid of making this exact mistake in my examples. I’m blaming it on having a newborn! Or maybe that paper invented time travel!

@@MikeMorrisonPhD The correct answer is: “This was a test to see if you were paying attention”. 😋

@@kabochaVA - Oh that's a way better answer. Yes, you win! Thanks for watching so closely!

Yeah the goal here is to meet the algorithms half way to increase their accuracy, and account for lots of sentences where often its not clear why an author meant to include each reference at the end of a sentence. And the reverse of this is also true, right? If we link authors, we need complex NLP to find meaning. If we link semantically, we need only simple NLP to find authors (which are always consistently formatted).

@@MikeMorrisonPhD tried any simple text categorizer?

@@DeathSugar - Yeah did a (very simple) NLP algorithm for my masters, but it's been a while. Got any current favorites you can link me to?

​@@MikeMorrisonPhD has a dude who implemented some of it from bare bones. Some related videos. Stemming in Rust: th-cam.com/video/zRZZ8i8YhGU/w-d-xo.html Classificator for text in C: th-cam.com/video/yef1_cMFknM/w-d-xo.html Both has timecodes and some references, so you might find some of it useful . Both from their own series, so you might find previous videos useful as well to build your own classification for studies.

Before we get into more back-and-forth: Is your background mainly scientific, or do you have some tech/web development background? If no to the latter, this article expands on the issue more than I could do in a minute. Let me know if this doesn't help and we can keep arguing? www.linkedin.com/pulse/traditional-academic-citation-links-bad-science-barry-prendergast-ls4ef/?trackingId=1vkomCnGTOKU3fVvRtuUPA%3D%3D

@@MikeMorrisonPhD You got me-my training is in chemistry, although my work touches on research software engineering as well. My apologies, I came off too aggressive in my previous comment. The article is indeed helpful, although I don't know that its sources support the strength of its rhetoric. I'm still not entirely convinced that machine-readability should be at the top of academic writing's priority list, especially since papers are still printed on paper sometimes. (I should also mention here that I'm a fan of your work; I'm looking forward to presenting a #betterposter at a conference in a couple of weeks.)

lol no problem. Thanks for explaining! And I agree! It's a good point: Scientists shouldn't have to think about machine-readability at all while writing. That should be optimized for you in the background by the writing and publishing systems. I've struggled to make the case for more machine-readability of papers, because I can only think of indirect, distal benefits to authors, despite it being so obviously crucial to developers. I'll keep trying and your comments will help me dig deeper and improve my understanding, I hope! Real quick on the print question: FWIW: Papers designed for machines first can be printed in any beautiful format you'd like instantly. But, the reverse isn't true: papers designed for printers are typically very opaque to machines. But, that's just abstract right now until we have better tools. Anyway, thanks for the discussion and have fun with your #betterposter! Remember that attention follows contrast. So the easiest way to get your poster noticed is to make it look very different from its neighbors. Get out your scissors! 😆

That would be a good feel! I'll try a prototype!