Here’s another piece of information that might help conference organizers plan their poster sessions: How many pins do you need? Here’s how they do it at one of the biggest scientific conferences in the world: I received an email from the Society for Neuroscience this week describing the wrap up of the last conference. It included this tidbit:
- 110,000 push pins ordered to hold 15,116 poster presentations
This works out to 7.277 tacks per poster. An extravagance! You just need one tack for each corner, people!
But wait! There were eight poster sessions (two each, Sunday through Wednesday). Morning presenters could leave tacks for the afternoon presenters, who could leave tacks for the next day.
This means you effectively had 58.2 pins for each poster space.
That’s enough pins not just to attach your poster to the board, but to ensure it would not be cast adrift from its moorings should a small squall suddenly whip up in the middle of the convention center.
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Photo by Nrbelex on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I find that some posters require a pin in each corner and in the middle of each of the four sides dependent upon the paper printed upon and the material of poster board.
ReplyDeleteWhich means SfN is only overdoing it by a factor of 6 rather than 12. ;)
ReplyDeleteTotally agree, and a fair number of folks will actually bring their own either out of responsibility or professional paranoia.
ReplyDeleteI am in the 6 to 8 pins camp, to keep the edges from curling. Last time I had a poster, the person before me had printed their poster on 25 sheets of letter paper, tacked each sheet up individually with 4 tacks, and took off with the whole arrangement left in place. The box of free pushpins was not a good payment for taking 5 minutes of my poster time to take down their frankenposter.
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