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Take-home messages vs. the devil in the details

drupaladmin
15 June 2012
As scientists, whether we're reading a paper or listening to a talk, we often focus on the take-home message. The main conclusion. The key point. The bottom line. The gist. The summary. But should we do that? Always? Because the devil is in the details. And not just...

Great minds think alike (when they're trying to fix peer review)

drupaladmin
14 June 2012
PeerJ is a new open access publishing initiative which you join by paying a flat one-time fee, entitling you to publish as many open-access articles as you want for the rest of your life. Articles are peer reviewed for technical soundness. The initiative was founded by...

Intuition, education, and zombie ideas (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
13 June 2012
Here's an intriguing little cognitive psychology experiment, which shows that highly educated people evaluate the truth or falsehood of statements less quickly and less accurately if those statements are ones that appear true under a "naive" theory, but which education...

Blogging and tweeting the ESA meeting

drupaladmin
13 June 2012
The Ecological Society of America is encouraging bloggers to blog the ESA meeting. If you do a post on any aspect of the meeting, they'll create a post on their EcoTone blog with your post title, an excerpt, and a link back to the full post on your blog. Details here...

Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012

drupaladmin
13 June 2012
Elinor Ostrom , the first woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, has died. Ecologists, including me, mostly don't know her work (I only know of it). But we should. She did hugely important work on the management of common pool resources, and argued that...

Advice: where to eat and drink at Evolution 2012

drupaladmin
12 June 2012
I lived in Ottawa for four months a couple of years ago while on sabbatical. I've drawn on that experience to create an annotated map of suggested places to eat and drink for Evolution 2012 . Basically, everyone is going to be eating and drinking in the Byward Market...

How to attend big conferences: have a focus

drupaladmin
12 June 2012
Over at Sociobiology Joan Strassman has a great post on how to choose talks at big conferences like the ESA Annual Meeting. This is something we've talked about on this blog before , but no one ever brought up Joan's excellent suggestion: have a focus. That is, try to...

Accepted Today

drupaladmin
12 June 2012
Patterns and processes of population dynamics with fluctuating habitat size by Fukaya K (Hokaido University, Japan), Shirotori W and Kawai M. Competitive outcomes between two exotic invaders are modified by direct and indirect effects of a native conifer by Metlen KL (...

New Managing Editor

drupaladmin
12 June 2012
Hi everybody My name is Åsa Langefors, I’m the new Managing Editor at Oikos. After the two initial months at the office, I have now started to learn the routines and to get aquainted with editors, authors and reviewers. i.e. with Oikos. And just as things started to...

Against live-tweeting talks (UPDATEDx2)

drupaladmin
11 June 2012
A rant against live-tweeting talks, here . I don't tweet at all, so I don't live-tweet. In particular, I don't feel like I'd provide much of value to anyone by live-tweeting talks, or that I'd get a lot of value out of following others' live tweets.* And while it doesn...

Fighty crab: the meme that keeps on giving

drupaladmin
10 June 2012
I continue to find Zen Faulke's "fighty crab" meme hilarious. I'm still realizing how versatile it is. Written a confusing blog post ? Fighty crab tells you: Want to celebrate World Oceans Day? Fighty crab tells you how: Want to win your One True Love back (assuming...

Fighty crab vs. zombies

drupaladmin
10 June 2012

Advice: free e-book of presentation tips from Zen Faulkes

drupaladmin
9 June 2012
Zen Faulkes (' Neurodojo ') has compiled his many excellent blog posts on scientific presentation tips into a short e-book (i.e. a pdf file). Recommended.

Ecology is mostly not like billiards (but lots of people think it is) (UPDATEDx3)

drupaladmin
8 June 2012
Billiards is all about sequences of causal events. Your cue strikes the cue ball, causing it to roll into another ball, causing that ball to roll into the corner pocket. Falling dominoes are sequences of causal events. You knock over the first domino, which knocks over...

From the archives: why 'small, fast' community ecology matters even on 'big, slow' spatial and temporal scales

drupaladmin
8 June 2012
The current distribution of species bears the strong stamp of "big, slow" historical events and processes--speciation events, continental drift, meteor strikes, ice ages, the rises and falls of mountain ranges and land bridges, etc. Which has often been taken to imply...

Pollination ecology humor

drupaladmin
7 June 2012
Here's what it probably feels like for a strawberry flower to be pollinated and develop into a strawberry. With cartoons. "The changes can be unsettling." LOL! HT Jeremy Yoder

Is macroecology like astronomy?

drupaladmin
7 June 2012
Note: This post is old wine in a new bottle. It basically repeats some old posts, just in a slightly different way. I'm only doing it because the comment threads on those old posts are really good, but I felt like they petered out a bit too soon.* This is my attempt to...

Carnival of Evolution #48

drupaladmin
7 June 2012
Now up at the world's most popular evolutionary blog, Pharyngula . Check it out.

Advice: on the perils of "established" methods

drupaladmin
6 June 2012
Commenting on the previous post, Jim Bouldin notes that people often choose, or justify, their methods on the basis that those methods have been used by many others in the past. As Jim points out, there is a problem with this: You should choose well-justified methods,...

Garbage in, garbage out: what if your Big Dataset is lousy data? (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
6 June 2012
I'm all for making the most of the data we already have--but no more than that. An hazard of trying to wring as much as possible from any dataset is that you'll overstep and try to use the data to address questions or draw conclusions that can't be addressed or drawn...

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