Introduction
Authors are expected to maintain high professional standards, to take this event seriously, and produce a high quality product for display in this public event. The Art of Speaking Science has examples and discussion of good and bad posters. Apple has a very concise page with scientific poster tips and templates to give you a start. An excellent commentary with examples of graphs is The Craft of Scientific Illustration.

Posters to be printed by the Physics & Astronomy or Geology Department printers must be in the print queue no later than noon, Wednesday, 9 April. Authors submitting after this time will be referred to the Library or Kinko's and will have to pay for their own printing.

How To Enter
In a nutshell here is what an entry needs to contain: authors, department, title, abstract and contact info for at least one author. All of this must be in the body of a plain text email, NOT as an attachment. As a matter of professional courtesy, please make sure all authors approve the abstract before you submit it. It makes the editor really cranky when he gets three emails asking for changes after it has been posted. Entries must be received by Friday, 4 April. Late entries may be accepted at my whim.

Submit your entry in the body of a plain text email message, not as an attachment. The organizer is the judge of stylistic matters. There is a limit of 150 words for your abstract. Special text features, such as bold, italic, superscript², or subscript₂, will be added when I format it for the web. You can just make a note to me in your entry that you need some things treated specially and I can do it. Please include a brief descriptive note below your abstract.

Please include a telephone number and an email address with your submission, but not in the abstract proper, so I can contact you if necessary. Put it clearly separated from the abstract itself.

I expect to reply to your email submission within a very few days after receiving it. When I have posted them to the web site I will email you, indicating that I have posted your entry on the poster session web site.

Sample Entry - plain text email to Jeff Wragg

Dear Jeff, Below is our abstract for the poster session. Thanks, Ferd phone: 900-555-1212 *************** The Effect of Saturn's Position on Birth Weight (NOT all capital letters) Ferd Berwick and Leroy Brown Department of Metaphysics & Astrology The position of the planet Saturn was determined for 253 births recorded at St. Luigi's Hospital during the year 2007. The time of birth listed on the birth certificate was used in conjunction with the planetary motion program Where's My Planet to ascertain the relative positions of the infant and the planet Saturn. A correlation analysis of the birth weights and the position of Saturn was performed using the statistical program Stats R Us. The results of the analysis indicate that birth weight is unrelated to the position of Saturn. NOTE: please italicize "Where's My Planet" and "Stats R Us"

Event Day Details
The session runs from 11:30 pm to 1:30 pm on Friday, 11 April, on the first floor of the Rita Liddy Hollings Science Center. You need to have your poster ready before 11:30. You can place your poster any time that morning. You will also need to be present a significant portion of the time to answer questions.

Presenters at the Poster Session are allocated a space, usually either one side of a free-standing poster board, or wall space. Plan on having roughly a 3 foot tall by 5 foot wide space, but presenters will often not use that much space. Verify your actual space allotment by consulting the Poster Location Map and going to examine your space. Depending on your location, you may use staples, push-pins, or thumb tacks to secure your poster.

Winners
We anticipate presenting some posters an "Award of Merit" and displaying them at other venues.

Archive of Final Research Report
You may send me a .doc or .pdf file which gives a more complete and final report on your research than just the abstract. These files will be linked from the archives such that there is on-line access to your final, full report.

Poster Production Information
It is expected that posters will meet the highest professional standards. This is a public event, and you represent yourself, your department, the SSM, and the College. The Art of Speaking Science has examples and discussion of good and bad posters. Apple has a very concise page with scientific poster tips and templates to give you a start. An excellent commentary with examples of graphs is The Craft of Scientific Illustration.. (I know this was repeated, but it bears repeating)

There are some templates in Microsoft PowerPoint format along with some poster presentation tips for scientific posters available here. The essence is that you

In general you:

• Use very large type (make it easily readable from 6 feet away)
• Don't have a lot of dense text
• Do use pictures, graphs, and charts
• Clearly state your motivation and results
• Have it visually appealing, but not distractingly so

Remember your audience!

Requirements for printing

Posters to be printed by the Physics & Astronomy or Geology Department printers must be in the print queue no later than noon, Wednesday, 9 April. Authors submitting after this time will be referred to the Library or Kinko's and will have to pay for their own printing.

• A completed Poster Request Form. Download the poster printing request.
• Format: Powerpoint
• Geology printer: Max size 54" x 40" (Landscape) format works nicely.
• Physics printer: Max size 56" x 36" (Landscape) OR -- A0 (118.90 cm by 84.10 cm) format works nicely.
• PC compatible media. Bring poster data on a CD or usb flash drive to either
• Bob Nusbaum (Geology: SciC 340b),
or
• Chris True & Kat Low (Physics: SciC 105a)

Posters take about 20 minutes to print. The amount of time it takes for your poster to come out of the printer depends greatly on how many people are ahead of you!

To head off problems... We ask that supervising professors view the poster on a computer in PowerPoint (or other program as appropriate) and sign off on the Poster Request Form.

Things that lead to snafus:

• overlapping frames
• complicated backgrounds
• funky fonts, especially proprietary ones not found on all computers
• symbols: no symbol font sets are identical and there can be some weird substitutions made by the opening computer
• OLE objects; looks nice on the computer that has the source file, but sinks like a rock on other computers

Test "printing" to a pdf file (not to a hard copy from a printer) is a good way to see if your file will print properly. Very often we have seen this result in a four-page PDF file which otherwise would have been an expensive four-page (poster) printout on the poster printer. Three of the pages in those cases contain bits and pieces, probably resulting from overlapping frames or from the use of OLE objects in the poster document.

A Word of Warning
The organizer and the School of Sciences & Mathematics are not responsible for your poster. Please take steps to secure it promptly after the session is over. The Science Center must be returned to good order by the end of the day, so posters left up are subject to disposal or mysterious disappearance.

Send comments, suggestions, corrections, or additions to: Jeff Wragg

updated: 21 Feb 08 - jlw