The Poster Competition

This year I have been allowed to judge a bit of the poster competition. Judging is fun. Specially when you are allowed to do it with a glass of wine in your hand.

I and the proper judges wandered round the posters on Tuesday evening, chatting as we went to the posters’ creators. My colleagues judged no doubt according to quality of statistics, innovative thought, relevance of methodology and analysis and suchlike. I had a much easier brief. It was: Could I understand it?

This year, the poster competition has an additional prize: The Significance prize for the poster which best communicates its message. That’s the bit that I was judging. Judges in past years have complained that some entries contained excellent and advanced statistics that were completely incomprehensible. I was looking for the reverse: I was looking for a poster which might translate into the sort of article that could go into Significance – in other words, a poster that even a non-statistician would find interesting.

Going round, you notice some points straight away. Print size is one. Does it contain acres of small print that you have to read with your nose up against the poster, blocking everyone else’s view for the 20 minutes it takes to slog through it? Or is there nice big print, not too many words, easily readable by the middle-aged like me from a reasonable distance? Layout helps. I was slightly baffled by one otherwise excellent poster, laid out in three columns, til I realised that I was supposed to start reading at the top of the middle column; I’d started, as with a newspaper, on the left.

Say ‘Poster’ to most people and what they think of is pictures not words. A picture is worth a thousand words; and a thousand words is far too many to fit on a poster. But you can fit three or four pictures on, – so, presumably, three or four times the amount of information.

So I was tempted by posters like P31, Andrea Roalfe’s ‘Working as an Applied Statistician in Primary Care and General Practice’; each type of illness she worked on had a picture to illustrate it. Much better than a dry list. Even more than pictures, people like pretty pictures. P9, ‘Supporting statistics in schools,’ scored highly there with its fluffy koala – but came from Australia, where they are entitled to use fluffy koalas as relevant to almost everything. How do you get an attractive picture into, for example, P14, ‘Assessing the Effect of Informative Censoring in Piecewise Parametric Survival Models?’ I don’t know. Probably you cannot. Still, those ones can still be in contention for the proper prize. P6, Tom Gerlach’s ‘Census rehearsal 2009’, with its image of a red-curtained theatre stage, looked marvellous – though it did perhaps lack content. Still, if statistics ever fails him, he should have a great future in design or advertising.

The real key, though, is clarity. Call it the quality of explaining things. Can you understand it at a glance? At first reading? It obviously helps if the message itself is fairly simple. As I have said, I was not looking for cutting-edge statistics. A useful application of standard statistical techniques is just as good for telling the great public why we all need statistics and statisticians.

The winner I chose uses simple statistics and clear graphs and explains its purpose clearly. I could understand what it was saying almost at first glance; three minutes reading it enhanced that understanding. It has a clear conclusion as well, and that conclusion is an important and an interesting and a useful one, and one which should influence real-life decisions and what people actually do. All of which makes it ideal for the basis of an article in Significance magazine – and, I suppose, a near-ideal poster as well. It will be announced at the conference dinner on Thursday. Before then, see if you can guess which one I have chosen.

Julian Champkin,Editor, Significance