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Evolution 2012: Tuesday notes

drupaladmin
10 July 2012
Evolution 2012 is over for me, couldn't stay for the final afternoon. Highlight of the morning was watching my students talk, of course. They all did the Fox lab proud. I enjoyed the meeting, and got out of it what I wanted to get out of it. I wasn't blown away by the...

Evolution 2012: Monday highlights

drupaladmin
10 July 2012
Susan Bailey's discovery of synonymous beneficial mutations continues to be the talk of the meeting, or at least that portion of the meeting that I hear about. Another good day for conversations. Had a good chat with Carl Simpson, a paleontologist who's using Price...

Evolution 2012: Sunday notes

drupaladmin
9 July 2012
Fairly short tonight , I'm exhausted and I need to go to bed. Indeed, my exhaustion today caused me to embarrass myself when Elisabeth Pennisi, who writes for Science , asked me some questions about the meeting. I know who she is, I read her work every week, but I was...

Evolution 2012: Saturday notes (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
8 July 2012
Greetings from Evolution 2012 in delightfully summery Ottawa. My hometown of Calgary experienced an intense hailstorm centered on my house the day before I left for the meeting. I took this as an indication that it was a good time to get out of town for a few days. The...

Evolution 2012: Protest against Canadian government suppression of scientific evidence

drupaladmin
3 July 2012
A Canadian colleague has alerted me to a protest in Ottawa against the Canadian government's suppression of scientific evidence, planned to coincide with the final day of Evolution 2012. Previously I've noted with dismay the government's decision to cease funding the...

Evolution 2012: facilitated networking

drupaladmin
3 July 2012
I've talked in the past about how to network at scientific conferences --how to overcome any shyness you might have in order to talk to the people you'd like to talk to. The Evolution 2012 meeting is trying an interesting experiment on this. Poster presenters have been...

Carnival of Evolution #49

drupaladmin
2 July 2012
Now up at Mousetrap . Includes a contribution from yours truly. Now you know what to read on the plane to Ottawa.

How to become a leading ecology blogger

drupaladmin
2 July 2012
Here . I swear by the techniques in panels 1 and 2. The techniques in panels 3 and 4 are totally beyond me. ;-)

Evolution 2012: Meeting preview

drupaladmin
1 July 2012
It's almost here: the biggest (~2400 attendees) evolution conference ever! I'm excited. I've only ever attended the evolution meeting once before, in 2009 in Idaho when it was much smaller because there were fewer societies involved. Evolution 2009 was the best...

Evolution 2012: use the scheduling app

drupaladmin
1 July 2012
Presenters at Evolution 2012 know about this, but I'm not sure if all attendees do: there's a slick app for making your personal schedule. You can access if from any browser-equipped device. Its fully searchable as well as browsable, it auto-updates if there are...

The ecology of hipsters

drupaladmin
29 June 2012
The Dependent magazine wins the internet by estimating the population density of hipsters in Vancouver, using capture-recapture methods . If they continue sampling and build up a time series, Ted Hart at UBC can show them how to estimate past hipster abundances . HT...

Advice: how to prep for, and attend, a conference

drupaladmin
29 June 2012
A mix of serious and silly advice on conferences, here . HT American Naturalist, via Twitter .

Evolution 2012: presenters will literally be treated like children (UPDATEDx5 --no, they won't be))

drupaladmin
28 June 2012
FINAL UPDATE: The snark in this post is out of line, and for that I apologize to Howard Rundle and the other Evolution 2012 organizers. It was and remains true that I'm personally skeptical of the need for the chimes, based on my own experience over many years at an...

Why "Lonesome George" was lonesome

drupaladmin
28 June 2012
It's not why you think . ;-) (warning: text a little NSFW)

Research dynamics and part-time work: an ecological model for factors driving gender imbalance in science and engineering.

drupaladmin
27 June 2012
Press release: The academic jungle: ecosystem modelling reveals why women are driven out of research. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2012.20601.x A large proportion of women and a growing number of men wish to work part-time in order to balance the demands of family and work...

Upcoming group blog on Open Data

drupaladmin
25 June 2012
This is pretty tangential, even for me, but I thought it might be of interest to some readers. Ecology, like many fields (including social science as well as hard science), is seeing a push towards data sharing becoming the norm rather than the exception (e.g., many...

Yet more on the inclusive fitness - kin selection - group selection kerfuffle

drupaladmin
25 June 2012
If you can't get enough of heavyweight intellectuals arguing about how to think about group selection, Steven Pinker has a lengthy post at The Edge , which has drawn responses from Dan Dennett and David Queller, among others (Queller's response is particularly on point...

Darwin's Origin of Species: notes for your reading group (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
21 June 2012
I teach a graduate seminar on Darwin's On the Origin of Species . We read and discuss the Origin and some related readings. It's a lot of fun, for me and the students. If you haven't yet read the Origin , or read it when you were too young to fully appreciate it, or...

Rapid evolution of evolutionary biology (and ecology): what's changed since 2005

drupaladmin
20 June 2012
Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense , newly-minted PhD evolutionary biologist David Hembry reflects on the biggest changes in evolutionary biology and ecology since 2005. It's a thoughtful piece, reflecting on some less-noted aspects of widely-noted trends. For...

Has the ESA website been hijacked?! (no joke) (UPDATE: yes, but they've fixed it)

drupaladmin
16 June 2012
I just tried to visit the Ecological Society of America website, and Google gave me this: What the hell?! The diagnostic page says that over the past 90 days, a bunch of pages from esa.org resulted in malicious software being downloaded without user consent, including...

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