Better Posters: A design brief for conference posters →

Zen Faulkes has a great post on the Better Posters blog, it's well worth a read if you think you will ever need to make an academic poster. This section nails it for me (emphasis mine):

Goals of a poster

Posters should get conference attendees talk to the presenter. Because attendees are busy, posters must grab attention, even if a potential reader is quite a long way from the poster. Similarly, posters should make an implicit promise to the reader that the gist of the poster can be grasped quickly.

Posters should also contain enough information that a person is able to read it and understand the main message.

Sprai: a bioinformatics software acronym that I actually like

I heard somebody mention the following tool today:

As someone who frequently heaps scorn on many bogus acronyms used for bioinformatics tools, I thought that maybe I should point out some good ones when I come across them. I like 'sprai' as a name for the following reasons:

  1. It is a genuine acronym (initial letters of all words are used)
  2. The name is short
  3. The name is pronounceable (though I'm making an assumption that it is pronounced 'spry')
  4. As a non-English word, it's pretty unique (especially in the field of bioinformatics)
  5. When I search for it on Google, it shows up on the first page of results (though it has some competition from this place)

The only negative might be that it is subject to being misspelt (especially if you only hear the name verbally and don't see it written down), but otherwise it's a good name.