Posts by Tom Beard
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
"Chief Feature Writer, @catholicherald ... I write about technology, culture and religion."
Not to be reductive about Catholicism, but ... actually, I can't be bothered avoiding stereotypes. Sex bloggers are bad because they encourage women to be something other than virgins before they get married and have babies.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes it is nice, but you want a scientist because they have knowledge and skills and yes intellect that can advance science.
Knowing when a graph is misleading, or how to design one so that the salient information isn't cluttered by extraneous elements to a point where it stops you seeing the underlying patterns, are pretty vital skills for the advancement of science. Presenting information with clarity and concision isn't as crucial, but still very useful for a publishing scientist.
Making type choices that don't seem amateurish at best and condescending at worst? Well, that's a nice-to-have, but you'd have thought that someone on a large, well-funded, high-profile team would be able to do it.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
To me it’s like criticizing an artist for bad grammar in the gallery programme.
Although the programme would presumably be written by a curator or critic, from whom one would reasonably expect good grammar.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Sacha,
I was thinking more of a minimally-design-competent team member or shared PA if such roles still exist in such orgs.
Given the importance of data visualisation in most science, and the role of graphs, charts and maps in not just presenting final results but intepreting data and prompting insights, I'd go so far as to say that a modicum of visual literacy should be a prerequisite for scientists.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But at tea break and in the weeks after a conference nobody talks about the gorgeous colour palette, or the great use of a theme on the poster and how they stayed under the ideal 200 word limit for text that the marketing dept recommends.
Exactly: this is one case where design should be invisible. It should be clear and legible and let the science come through. If this were a case of a scientist bashing something out on her computer without really thinking about it, then it wouldn't matter. But it seems that they made an active design decision to put in cheesy clip art and choose a font that is the typographic equivalent of baby talk. It's jarring, especially when combined with all the boxes and colours, and gets in the way of the message.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
here is also a study that recently showed that people asked to read a paragraph written in ALLCAPS were less likely to accept dogma or were more critical in their thinking than people who read the same paragraph in normal font.
Again the inference drawn was that the effort required to read the more difficult font stimulated their critical thinking.Either that, or they assumed that the author was an angry nutter.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Ross Mason,
I HATE to say it, but I hazard a guess that it is the BAs of this world, trying to understand science, who are the ones who got their knickers in a twist over the font.
Put me down as a BSc who thinks that good presentation is important. I have enough experience of both cultures to know that the medium can reinforce or undermine the message. In this case, the message is one of the most important announcements in the history of science, but the medium says "Duuuuh, science is boring, so I'm going to talk to you as if you were a two-year-old".
It reminds me of what Edward Tufte said about the urge to decorate charts to make them less boring: "If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers." There's no need to make the announcement "less austere", since the story itself, while technical, is inherently exciting.
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Sacha,
Exactly. It's true that they had more important things on their minds, but the announcement had a long buildup, and it looks like the presentation was based on a template. There should have been time to set up a clean, professional default font, and get someone to cast an eye over it to tidy up the heavy boxes and clashing colours.
-
I was annoyed by the Comic Sans hating at first, thinking it was churlish and trivial to criticise the presentation when such an important result was being announced. After all, we don't expect scientists to be graphic designers, and they probably just fired up PowerPoint and started typing in the default font.
But then I saw this, and the use of such grotesque clip art suggested that Comic Sans had been actively chosen as part of an effort to make difficult science seem friendlier. Unthinking use of Comic Sans would be the equivalent of an absent-minded professor wandering onto the stage in a rumpled sports coat and scuffed shoes, but this is more like someone putting on a Mickey Mouse tie and huffing helium before giving a speech.
If you look at the full presentation (warning: very large and very ugly) you'll see that they had to keep dropping into another font (probably Arial) for every psi, mu or sigma. Apart from being jarring, the fact that Comic Sans doesn't have Greek letters should have been a good hint that it's not suitable for scientific communication.
I don't buy The Guardian's argument that it helps make difficult research accessible:
We joke about how inscrutable the research at Cern is, so why make it seem even more austere? Yes, the Higgs boson is a serious business – but that's all the more reason to communicate it in as friendly and accessible a way as possible.
No matter how "friendly" a font might be (and Comic Sans' version of friendliness is as welcome as an incontinent puppy), there's no way that it will make a sentence such as "Photon isolation requirement: ET < 4 GeV inside cone ΔR < 0.4 around γ direction" any more accessible to non-specialists. The content makes it clear that this is no "Quantum Mechanics for Dummies" but a detailed technical presentation, and "accessibility" in that sense is not really an option. And talk of Comic Sans' accessibility to dyslexic people is a red herring, since there are plenty of other options that are at least as good.
This wouldn't be worth getting het up about if it were just an indication that physicists don't care or know about typography. I'm not going to join the calls of "Oh lol, the geeks used an uncool font". But if it was deliberately chosen in an attempt to make it "friendlier", then it's a misguided and ultimately patronising decision. Scientific communication needs clarity, precision, imagination and awe, not a fake grin.
-
OnPoint: Pants != Journalism, in reply to Scott Chris,
maybe it was a bit rich of Justice Simon France to object to the flamboyance of McQuillan’s pants considering the fact that he himself was wearing a moo moo.
I presume that the judge was both justified and ancient.