HR: 0800h
AN: ED51A-0006    [Abstracts]
TI: The Inflatable Poster
AU: * Tackley, P J
EM: ptackley@ucla.edu
AF: ESS and IGPP, UCLA, 595 Charles Young Drive East, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567 United States
AB: Inflatable devices are frequently used in advertising in order to grab the attention of consumers: one sees, for example, 20 foot tall inflatable drink containers, inflatable cell phones, inflatable bubble gum packets, as well as blimps wafting majestically over major sports events. More usefully, inflatable representations of scientifically-interesting items are widely available, including astronauts, space shuttles, dinosaurs and globes and can help to build and inspire the interest of the general public, and in particular children, in such ideas. How can such concepts be adapted to improve poster presentations? Possibility one is to use relevant existing commercially-available inflatables to dress the poster: skeletons, astronauts, globes and so forth. More exciting is to develop custom inflatables that represent three-dimensional renderings of objects that the poster is describing. Examples of individual objects might be an inflatable slab, inflatable avalanche, inflatable plume, or it's larger cousin, the 10 foot high inflatable superplume or 20 foot high inflatable megaplume. More elaborately, inflatables might represent isosurfaces in three-dimensional spherical convection, although other fabrication methods may be more suitable. More simply, inflatable spheres could be imprinted with the planform of convection, geoid, or other spherical fields of geophysical interest. Finally, it should be possible to put an entire poster on an inflatable object, possibly small ones (balloons) to hand out. A major concern, however, is that the presenter may use such techniques to inflate their scientific findings, or to present overblown ideas.
DE: 8120 Dynamics of lithosphere and mantle--general
DE: 0825 Teaching methods
DE: 0845 Instructional tools
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting