A photograph I took of Eastern skunk cabbage appears on the cover of the Winter 2014 edition of The Conservationist.
Skunk cabbages are hot
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Category Archives: Graphic design
Antibiotic Awareness Week poster
Ten interesting facts about antibiotics, for Antibiotic Awareness Week (Nov 18 -24, 2013). Below is an image that can be used for presentations. PDF version for printing: facts-about-antibiotics.pdf.
I’ve tried to craft the above poster with information that is mildly interesting, with the hope that people (people like you?) might pass the link along. There are 100s of posters on the internet … but they seem to be completely ineffective at educating the public (according to an experiment). In my view, the problem is that all of these posters use “antibiotics” instead of the correct term, “antibacterial.” Please see my page, “Curbing the misuse of antibiotics” for details on why antibiotic/antibacterial choice matters for the public, even if it doesn’t matter to you (who probably have a higher degree).
Below are some links that explore some of statements in the PDF above. I’m putting them below the fold because they are probably TMI for 99% of the people who might be interested in the above PDF. If you are that 1%, go crazy.
- To reduce the number of patients demanding antibacterials for viral infections (often for their kids), doctors are urged to think carefully how they speak to patients. See this paper (from The Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics) for insightful suggestions on linguistic “levers” that physicians can use toward this goal. My suggestion: say, “An antibacterial will not treat your viral infection,” rather than “An antibiotic will not treat your viral infection.”
- Antibiotics are generally assumed to be primarily defensive compounds, but that assumption is under review: see excellent articles by Raaijmakers and Mazzola, Alicia Fajardo and José L Martínez, and Aminov.
10% of Americans believe antibiotics are addictive. Source: Pew Research Center (pdf). Also discussed here.- Percentage believing viruses can be killed by antibiotics. Also, see this pdf. In my opinion, the bulk of this misconception is actually due to people’s belief that viruses are bacteria. See haiku at right. I was forced to make this because I didn’t have “% believing viruses are bacteria” poll data. Why do those doing STEM surveys not ask this? If you are a teacher and use “clickers” in class, can you please assess this at the start of class some year? Ideally in a huge class with freshman. Ideally not a science course. And then tell me??
- Effect of antibacterials on mitochondria.
- Etymology of antibiotic.
- Modern definitions of “antibiotic” from multiple dictionaries. Many still define the word as applying to compounds that are active against microorganisms (i.e., not just bacteria).
- How Selman Waksman stole the discovery of antibacterials from his own graduate student. And, in doing so, likely stole the Nobel Prize that Waksman eventually was awarded.
- Antibiotics can be produced by bacteria, too. Waxman’s earlier papers (e.g.), in fact, say that antibiotics can be derived from any microorganism. And his claim to fame was streptomycin, which comes from a bacteria, though the organism was originally classified as a fungus (oopsies!). Microbiologists today like to define antibiotics as “just from fungi”, but that seems to be a recent fad.
The fine print on poster sessions
For giggles, I contacted approximately 100 societies with annual meetings coming up, and asked them whether they offered word count suggestions for attendees presenting posters. The majority didn’t write back (no real surprise), but of those that did the most common response was, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Some went on to provide me with the word count limit for the abstracts submitted (to get your poster accepted). Only one response had the information I was looking for: “5 pages of 16pt text” as maximum. If you fill up 5 pages with the phrase “average word”, that gives you 1750 words. Personally, I think 500 – 1000 is a good range. If you’re curious what a wordy poster looks like, I’ve attached to this post an image of text-only version of one of my templates.
In hindsight, though, it was probably a silly question. What is more important and understandable to attendees preparing their posters is the minimum acceptable font size, because even in posters with low word count, readability can be awful if all the figure text (for example) is set in 12pt instead of the size of the rest of the body text. If only the poster prize committee would police these limits, though. Whenever I stumble onto a site showing prize-winning posters, committees often seem to be awarding people who have made their font smaller than everyone else, invariably the size is smaller than meeting guidelines. It’s really puzzling. It could be that people with high-quality content have a lot to say, and so they have to shrink font size to get it all in. However, I just think people are somehow wired or trained to attribute small print to “authoritative, creative” and large print to “amateurish, insecure.” Or do judges take longer to read the small text, and thus demonstrate the “disfluency” advantage that gives strange fonts an advantage in memory retention? If there is a typographer/psychologist out there with insight into this phenomenon, please fill me in.
I know it’s never going to happen, but in an ideal world judges would carry one of those fun little plastic shape templates while they review posters. Then they could position the 3/8″ circle (or whatever) over a standard letter (“s” perhaps) to evaluate the size. If the “s” fits without touching the edges, it’s too small and the poster cannot be entered into the prize pool. Something like this would be really useful, because kids these days have no idea what font size means, especially when the final output is large.