Symposia Summer: Are posters for kids? I daresay yes.

My former room mate (a post-doc and Humboldt scholar) once said that poster presentations rapidly lose their appeal once you have reached the age of speaking. And perhaps he was right after all.

Inlcuding this year's SVP meeting contributions I made 10 posters and was co-painterauthor of further 6 during the last three years (about two thirds about paleontology and one third on structural geology). That's enough to paper the walls of my of and my neighbour's lab room, but what did I get apart from that?

Flooding of the publication list? - Yes, but 20 abstracts = 1 peer-reviewed paper. To get something published cheeply should surely not be the point of postermaking - also considering the overall time you are investing for a mere halfpage of printed text.

Becoming a whiz in vector graphics? - Perhaps, but this is also part of normal publishing, lecture-preparation and thesis-writing, so you would have learned that anyway...

Feedback from experts? Negligible. Sometimes you are lucky and the right people are present and really interested in what you have done - but if they are not and yours is one of 50 posters displayed don't be too optimistic. Some people are so frustrated about the (probable) lack of response that they have their posters pinned up by an oral presenter from their own faculty and save the travel costs.

Dialogue with my former supervisor about a poster of mine:
- "Luckily I can give this to Maria. Symposia are such a waste of time!"
- "Obviously, you don't have yet understood what this part of science is about..."
- "Of course, I know about the importance of communicating your science and stuff... I was only teasing." (Afterwards pretending it was only irony, but meaning every word I said at first.)

I forgot something important: the winning of the poster prize! You can try. You need high-resolution colour fotos, high quality drawings, mirror finish paper, a sense for symmetry and for the golden section, and a vanilla ice topic (like dinosaurs, trilobites, Cambrian explosion, human origins).

And afterwards you can fancy yourself as the king of the symposium junior scientists layouters. Three cheers for the PP winner!

Why an oral presentation is better

Preparing an oral presentation is more time-consuming than making a poster: you have not only to put figures on a (rather patient) sheet of paper and do some write-around. Giving a talk you are really forced to make sense of your premisses, methods, data, results, conclusions and arrange everything in a sequence (only one dimension - time; a poster has two dimensions so you can illustrate complex interrelationships more easily and thus be more confuse without notice).

All these aspects help you directly with your scientific work: A well-structured presentation can easily make a well-structured publication and vice versa. And if there is a catch or lapse in reasoning you may become aware of it in the course of trying to explain your model to others.

With an oral presentation you get a real audience: Even if no one is interested in your topic common politeness makes them stay still and gives you the power to waste 15 minutes of the life time of 50 or 100 or 200 listeners. What a feeling of might!

If you are provocative you can even stir up a reaction. Compare posters and talks to potted plants and dogs. A dog/presenter is barking at you if he wants attention and thus you feel pushed to show him his place, the poster/ potted plant is simply hanging/ standing around and withers...

So give a talk if you have the guts!

Ballad

In memory of Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882)

My fish is sad and lonely
Striving for arms to embrace only
O Lamarck, the flesh is weak!
The fins just stay-
Despair 'n' dismay.

See generations later
Arms had but the best wade-through raider.
Fish feelings selection not passed.
They ebbed away-
Despair 'n' dismay.

Nothing but comprehension
Lies in Darwin's more stately mansion
World tells no moral'ty tale.
No more to say-
Despair 'n' dismay.

Constructivist geoscience and what we can learn from the financial crisis

The analyses are done. Because you are supposed to do an 'integrated approach' you are working on 'integrating' your data and doing an interpretation that fits in with everything.

After a short or long search for patterns (as a geologist you are at least talented in pattern-spotting), you will find that no easy existing model fits with all data (or worse: every existing model fits with all data) which gives you the chance to chose the model you like best and alter it a bit. You are using an auxilliary hypothesis which explaines why this model, which is adequate in general, is not working properly for the data you are involving.

The best ist to raise a whole set of model assumptions which are not easy to be proven or disproven. Imagine it as a daughter company, to which you can export your credit risks in order to keep the bilance of your adapted existing model clean.

If there are some new data that appear to falsify your model you are employing your daughter company of auxilliary theses to explain why they are not at all problematic.

Given your business concept is good you even manage to invert contradicting data - under the light of your additional theses they actually support your model.

As you can handle it flexibly, you can of course add to or remove from the stock of your daughter company at free will. A good idea is to pay attention to fashions (if 'Milankovich cycles' or 'metamorphic core complexes' or 'climate change' are en vogue you may think about including them).

Successful model constructors manage to give their constructs the appearance of inner coherence (e.g. by means of categories, definitions and a quantitative bluff package) and sell them to others who 'succesfully' convert them to new areas and problems.

And then everything collapses - some new conflicting data pushes your model to the point of absurdity. Usually the new data fit in with a much more parsimonious alternative model. And no one will understand how you could have been so stupid to overlook that possibility in the first place...