Brilliant. This should be a poster at a design conference. So much to learn, presented in such a real and interesting manner. Love your use os humour and language too.
My question is, as teacher in my country we were 'encouraged' to make interesting task for children yet what i see is yhe majority of teacher don't understand this theory. The more the merrier, more colorful is better etc to the level that i even can grab what the teacher want to do. So how we, as a teacher set borders to avoid cognition overload? Thx
I struggle with the same thing in science. The overloading design that's useless in practice often FEELS the best in the first 2 second impression. Once people try to actually use it, it falls apart. Minimalist instructional design feels incomplete, empty, lazy, unbusy, uninteresting. But works. Research-wise, complexity & liking is curvilinear. So, people don't like things that feel too easy, even if they work best. I've tried to address this problem in posters by adding a little bit more complexity than I think people can actually process, but still much less than the former approach. Seems to get way more approval. Aiming for that midpoint of complexity. How about you? Any tips for me you've had succes swith?
Haha I suspect that's the reason most early students do the wall of text --- it really is perfect for hiding research. And make sure your title is vague!
@@MikeMorrisonPhD I mean, in real life, people may pause when they want to read. Anyways, I am preparing my first poster heavily inspired by your philosophy, so thanks!
I'm glad to have found this channel. I was looking for information on how to improve my university classes and material with better design. I was not expecting to find a research field of scientific communication design. I truly believe that we can not only be better at transmitting information to the scientific community, but also bring a wide range of people to science. And I will use all this information you are giving us to enhance the teaching activity, to generate a better educational experience. Thanks.
Same. FWIW I’ve seen one professor create ONE computational article and it became like a learning tool used across classrooms in his field. They’re that much more useful, and you can get that much more reputation points for making them. But, journals are still working to catch up on supporting them.
I had this argument with a previous boss. He would come at me like, "it is broke." I would ask, what is broke? Eventually, he broke me down enough and i told him, "you only have bugs when you have a spec." He didn't buy it. Guy had 20+ years of experience programming and i was confused how he didn't know how to communicate how something should work. What you mentioned resonated with me because without a spec, there isn't an alignment of what done means, what it is working or broken means, how long some thing should take, etc. I thought it was impressive that i was able to get it 80% how they wanted with just a sentence. However, when the expectation is that you read their minds, everyone is going to fall short.
"You only have bugs when you have a spec" is a great way to put it! I am also impressed you could get 80% there with one sentence haha. And "it's not working" was definitely my favorite pet peeve when I was a software dev.
Yeah there was a quote from Elsevier's CEO after that PR scandal a few years back about them trying to suppress open access (or control messaging around it...I forget). Anyway the part that hit me was a quote where the CEO was just like "Hey look, we're just trying to survive." Kind of hit home for me. As a psychologist I know how differently (and short-sighted) people act in survival mode. But after working with several publishers now, I'm can report that there are a few happy exceptions to this. American Geophysical Union is huge and they've been an absolute champion of moving to computational articles and stuff.
@@MikeMorrisonPhD worse, because [no picture] wouldn’t mislead users at all. It’s a matter of principle: we are starting an era of online existence where we need to presume that content is false (even if unintentionally) and actively engage to assess if more-than-zero-trust is a safe bet. We already shouldn’t take anything at face value, but it’s become exponentially easier to produce something either intentionally misleading or haphazardly corrupting the truth for entertainment. And it’s especially ironic that this is observed within the context of a video called “Future of scientific articles”.
Just like the rest of scientific publishing probably. And don't know about you but I'm not super optimistic for regulations working. Any ideas for ensuring validity? Maybe better human author identification protocols? Plus the arms race of AI vs. AI detectors?
I didn't mean it to be! Just love this idea from Kevin Kelly's book and found it helpful in my own thinking. But now I can see why it'd come off as an ad. FWIW, Myst Markdown is fully open source. And I genuinely think it's the best chance we have of improving scientific articles right now. So, I shill for it unabashedly sometimes I guess.
lol didn't mean for it to be. But, most of my videos on scientific articles do shill for Myst pretty hard. It's a free open source framework, and I contribute a little to it (so can you! come volunteer!), but it's also the best tech I've seen hit scientific articles in the 4 years I've been trying to improve them. For exactly the reason that it makes a perfect example for Kevin Kelly's theory.
Good question, and the fact that I'm uncertain of the answer probably suggests "not very established." I think there are a lot of people who do UX roles in scientific companies, but I haven't seen much in the way of formalizing and consolidating the field. That's what I'm trying to help with! Will be launching scienceux.org soon, and have created the r/scienceUX reddit as a start!
Right? I stole them from Kevin Kelly's book (The Inevitable). Maybe it's confirmation bias, but years later I still see these stages play out in different areas of tech.
Great idea. I really want to figure out how to have a middle ground between "ignore the presenter" and "talk for longer than you want". I've had some great conversations at posters, but my favorite was when a guy just walked by, read my betterposter-takeaway, asked me one drive-by question about something I hadn't considered to include in the study, and then walked away. Like a 1 minute interaction and it improved my research.
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Those are the greatest kinds of interactions!! Only if I could do that with most posters instead of accidentally being stuck in the first two...
@@juliexue3792 - Any ideas for encouraging it? It's probably a combination of creating new social norm, but also the design of the poster could facilitate that (by giving people walking by more to respond to without having to stop)?
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Ooh, it really feels like the encouraging need to come from conference organizers (maybe another way in organizing posters/presentations).
@@juliexue3792 - Working on it! Many conferences are open to this and want to help (and many encourage #betterposter already). What do you want to see them do as a presenter? Just push it from the poster guidelines page, or would you like to see something more?
Good stuff, Mike. I'll even use the word brilliant. As I am preparing for my first poster presentation in quite some time, for APA convention, so I thank you for this.
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Will do. And I have recently learned about end screens, which you can easily add to your video and gives viewers a clickable link to go to the next video you recommend. Easy peasy and is definitely helping me expand my RU-vid channel.
Great stuff @MikeMorrisonPhD. At least once a week I hear the call, "But that's how we've always done it", I appreciate your battle against this thinking.
Thanks Iain. At least once a day I think about the concept of informational conformity from my undergrad psych: "Everyone else is doing X, we've always done X, so X must be the best thing to do." While I'm sitting here looking at eye tracking data showing traditional poster content completely ignored. Creating improved designs has been by far the easiest part compared to adoption. But, having time and knowing people like you are in the fight too keeps me hopeful for the future!
Another point to consider is that writing a wall of text as the review encourages reflection and reconsideration whereas the system you propose encourages impulsive comments and nitpicking. Given that reviewers donate their time, this increases the risk that reviewers just add 4-5 superficial comments here and there and call it a day rather than reflecting on the paper as a whole. So I see the danger that review quality would actually go down with this new system and it would be important to study if that’s the case or not.
That's a great point on the nitpicking. I had actually figured on that effect happening for good: People will conform to the feedback that the tool encourages, so if the tools focus on concrete suggestions that could be good, but hadn't thought of the narrowing effect that could create.
Hm, I think you have exaggerated the time it takes to process a review a lot in favor of your point to redesign the process. Never haver I seen me or my colleagues taking two month to organize their thoughts on the reviews. Typically we have a fair idea after the first read and a detailed understanding once we prepared the draft of the response letter the next day with the review broken up into pieces followed by answers. Also, in many important fields, peer review does not take 2 years. More like 2 months (+ whatever time you need for changes). Another point you have exaggerated is pointing to locations in papers. Line numbers that are automatically added to the PDF and page numbers work just fine. Many journals have already started using a system similar to what you suggested for the final proofreading. It’s nice to have but the time it saves is marginal compared to the time spend on reading. Similar arguments apply to the reviews: The majority of the time is spend on reading and understanding the paper and thinking about the science or the thoughts of the reviewers. While I am a big fan of your thoughts on posters, this one felt overblown.
First, thanks for all this feedback. Building better peer review tools is a considerably more complex challenge than posters, and part of that is needing to hear from a LOT of reviewers, so your comments here will really help me develop version 2 of these concepts. In this case I based those delay times on an actual public peer review. But, only one. I've also waited months or even a year on paper feedback before. But to your point, that was the intake phase not actually once reviewers were assigned. With journal shopping and rejections, papers in my field at least can easily take 2 years to get published. Did you mean that papers in your field typically go from submission-to-publication in a few months?! If so that's great! Also, even though I didn't exaggerate in this case, I'm totally not above exaggeration so it was also a fair criticism haha. Also, what's your thoughts on receiving a todo-formatted review as an author, versus thinking as a reviewer?
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Thanks for considering my comment and for your feedback: Yeah, in my field, chemistry, 2 months (+whatever time you need to fix things) from submission to publication is on the faster end but quite common. I am just working on the minor revisions for one of these papers that we submitted May first and it will probably be published in late June. For another work, even after initial rejection in a high impact Journal, another rejection after peer review in another Journal, substantial additions and an appeal against this decision, the paper was out about 6-7 months after the first submission. Both your and my experience are anecdotal, but I am sure somebody has looked at this more rigorously. While it initially seems like a wall of text, most paragraphs can be easily broken down into simple todos. So this feature would be a nice-to-have convenience feature that would save me maybe 5 minutes per paper.
@@R-ok3cl Yeah maybe a sensible next step for me is to go through one of those big datasets of peer reviews so I can rely less on anecdotal experience. And also, the PR system I’m working on is for computational articles written in Myst Markdown or Quarto, which are way easier to build reviewer tools for than word files, so it allows for improvements that couldn’t be made before. And for me, even saving 5 minutes per paper is a win. If I can save you a single click I’ll put weeks of effort into it. One last question: where do you think the biggest waste is in the peer review process, if you had to choose and even if it’s small?
I know that algorithms can detect themes in the text surrounding a citation. But often, ambiguous writing/citation placement can inhibit both robots' and readers' ability to understand what a particular citation is supposed to show. Better human linking should improve AI-readability AND human UX. I think. But, CS people please tell me what I'm missing.
Yeah the goal is to help AI do its job better. And we eventually want to go far beyond the overall subject. We need really really precise metadata about causal relationships, because every percentage in extra accuracy makes it more viable and worthwhile to invest the $ in testing potential new treatments that pop out. Any inaccuracy in the data does the opposite: It makes testing new treatments more risk and costly.
@@theonlyjoe_ Exactly. The human author linking the meaningful text creates an optimization parameter that AI can both use and train on. Papers that have human-linked text help the AI understand papers that don’t.
@@MikeMorrisonPhD This proposal will never work, and is unnecessary. You're discussing a computation problem, not a categorization problem*. The surrounding text before the citation will already give the context you're looking for. I personally feel, and this is a stretch, that this proposal is similar to a major problem of Object Oriented Programming and why people have moved away from it. People have discovered that it's better to just let "data be data" (let citations be citations), and to not overthink how you group related functions and how they relate to one another (which part of the sentence best describes the work in the citation so I may link it?). *Your solution is categorizing citations with presumably a snippet of text in the sentence/paragraph that best summarizes the reference material. There is no reason to suggest this will save money. That is wishful thinking.
references always mentioned somewhere in the study itself, so you can find keywords and deduce which context it's referenced. there are bunch of algos who can measure relevance of the articles to some categories , so you manually work couple thousands and the rest will be referenced by the algorithm
Yeah the goal here is to meet the algorithms half way to increase their accuracy, and account for lots of sentences where often its not clear why an author meant to include each reference at the end of a sentence. And the reverse of this is also true, right? If we link authors, we need complex NLP to find meaning. If we link semantically, we need only simple NLP to find authors (which are always consistently formatted).
@@MikeMorrisonPhD has a dude who implemented some of it from bare bones. Some related videos. Stemming in Rust: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zRZZ8i8YhGU.html Classificator for text in C: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yef1_cMFknM.html Both has timecodes and some references, so you might find some of it useful . Both from their own series, so you might find previous videos useful as well to build your own classification for studies.
The names (or the numeric reference, as is more typical in the physical sciences) are what the reference is *hyper*linked to. But the sentence is what the reference is *semantically* linked to. Understanding that is a standard part of learning to read scientific papers. Furthermore, the way you link one concept to many papers is by... wait for it... listing all the references at the end of the concept. Just like the paper in this short already does. And while the extra click (references list --> other paper) slows down checking the citation a little, it also provides crucial context (when was this published? in what journal?) as part of the process of finding it. The bit about AI is, or should be, irrelevant.
Before we get into more back-and-forth: Is your background mainly scientific, or do you have some tech/web development background? If no to the latter, this article expands on the issue more than I could do in a minute. Let me know if this doesn't help and we can keep arguing? www.linkedin.com/pulse/traditional-academic-citation-links-bad-science-barry-prendergast-ls4ef/?trackingId=1vkomCnGTOKU3fVvRtuUPA%3D%3D
@@MikeMorrisonPhD You got me-my training is in chemistry, although my work touches on research software engineering as well. My apologies, I came off too aggressive in my previous comment. The article is indeed helpful, although I don't know that its sources support the strength of its rhetoric. I'm still not entirely convinced that machine-readability should be at the top of academic writing's priority list, especially since papers are still printed on paper sometimes. (I should also mention here that I'm a fan of your work; I'm looking forward to presenting a #betterposter at a conference in a couple of weeks.)
lol no problem. Thanks for explaining! And I agree! It's a good point: Scientists shouldn't have to think about machine-readability at all while writing. That should be optimized for you in the background by the writing and publishing systems. I've struggled to make the case for more machine-readability of papers, because I can only think of indirect, distal benefits to authors, despite it being so obviously crucial to developers. I'll keep trying and your comments will help me dig deeper and improve my understanding, I hope! Real quick on the print question: FWIW: Papers designed for machines first can be printed in any beautiful format you'd like instantly. But, the reverse isn't true: papers designed for printers are typically very opaque to machines. But, that's just abstract right now until we have better tools. Anyway, thanks for the discussion and have fun with your #betterposter! Remember that attention follows contrast. So the easiest way to get your poster noticed is to make it look very different from its neighbors. Get out your scissors! 😆
If you're serious, I will help you mock it up and publish it under public domain so science can use it freely and nobody can steal it. DM me on Twitter (mikemorrison) or HMU on reddit (mikimus2), or since those are both big tech, tell me how to talk to you and I'll figure it out!
@@awakenthechosen you don’t patent stuff like that lol, ai is all about open source everything, and no one cares who comes up with anything, it’s about the information itself and what it actually does, please take your L take somewhere else
Haha like because it's an annoying buzzword, or a different reason? For clarity, I don't mean AI like chatGPT. If you imagine a huge network of all these links...ML/"AI" can predict missing links, and discover new treatments. But you need a link structure like this to make that work.
... scientists not thinking about the posters and takking into account new findings about attention and learning is an equivalent of ignoring some key findings in chemistry/physics/math. What I wanted to say, is thanks for a wonderful video.
💯I've tried to make that point for years and never said it as clearly as you just did. EXACTLY. Especially, some people have been like "we can't exploit emotion in design we're scientists. Science is serious!" and I'm like "Um. Emotion is how you get people to actually remember things, according to science. So you're crippling the knowledge transfer of your presentation by ignoring half your audiences' brain just based your feeling of disgust. Sounds kind of unscientific to me?" And don't get me started on professors not allowing their students to experiment with their posters. Isn't experimenting and learning their whole job? Anyway sorry for rant but you made a very good point I've never gotten to talk about!
