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Advice from the archives: preparing to present at, and attend, the big summer conferences

drupaladmin
5 June 2012
The summer conference season is upon us. I'll be at Evolution 2012 in Ottawa and the ESA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon (where I'm talking on Thursday afternoon...sigh).* Closer to the meetings, I'll have meeting previews highlighting talks I'm especially looking...

Journal versus publisher webpages

drupaladmin
4 June 2012
I find it a little challenging and often distasteful that the top hits for some ecological journals, including Oikos, are the publisher's page of it. Often, I want to get right to the journal, imagine that, and it is tough to navigate through the publisher standard...

Cool forthcoming Oikos papers

drupaladmin
4 June 2012
Some forthcoming (in press) Oikos papers that caught my eye. Lots of good stuff in the pipeline!* Nadeem and Lele introduce a new maximum likelihood-based method of population viability analysis (PVA) and test it on song sparrow time series data. The new method, called...

Techniques aren't powerful; scientists are

drupaladmin
1 June 2012
During a long and interesting post on storytelling in science, Andrew Gelman makes the following remark about some famous statisticians and the techniques they've developed: The many useful contributions of a good statistical consultant, or collaborator, will often be...

Oikos editorial now open access

drupaladmin
1 June 2012
The editorial describing and announcing future endeavors is now open access. Whew. We intend to offer all future editorials similarly. Thanks for your patience.

Engaging with crackpots at scientific meetings

drupaladmin
1 June 2012
Here's a rare problem, but one that raises some interesting issues: What's the appropriate way to deal with a crackpot at a scientific meeting? Specifically, a crackpot presenter? Over at Doing Good Science , Janet Stemwedel raises this question in the context of a...

Robert McIntosh, long-ago zombie slayer

drupaladmin
1 June 2012
FOOB Chris Klausmeier recently sent me a 1962 Ecology paper by Robert McIntosh.* Here's the first paragraph: Thomas Henry Huxley once commented, "Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once" (Huxley 1901). Certain ideas seem to be...

Advice: how to collaborate

drupaladmin
1 June 2012
Don't tell me none of your collaborations are like this .

Simplifying a complex, overdetermined world

drupaladmin
31 May 2012
Ecology is complicated. Anything we might want to measure is affected by lots of different factors. As a researcher, how do you deal with that? One way to deal with it is to try to focus on the most important factors. Try to "capture the essence" of what's going on...

Here's what happens when you don't understand math

drupaladmin
29 May 2012
You end up making a terrible sandwich . (I know that's not really the take-home message of the linked post. But it was the best teaser line I could come up with to encourage you to click through and read the whole, hilarious thing).

Advice for thesis writers

drupaladmin
29 May 2012
Just discovered The Thesis Whisperer , a blog by Inger Mewburn, who studies research student experiences. It looks to be quite honest, thoughtful, and funny, and has quite the following (most posts get dozens of comments, which puts this blog in the shade). Worth...

I'm busy

drupaladmin
26 May 2012
Invited ms due in a few days, too busy to post, so here's a video of a cockatiel singing "Rock Lobster " by the B-52s :

Oikos now live on ScholarOne Manuscripts

drupaladmin
25 May 2012
We want to welcome authors, referees, and the board to the manuscript central platform used by many journals. It is our hope that this will increase speed, efficiency, and communication for the journal. I will miss the old system in some respects, but please do not...

Important developments at Oikos

drupaladmin
25 May 2012
Oikos has a new EiC, Dries Bonte. In an editorial , this and other major developments are described including some of the new philosophy and current goals for Oikos. Dries in action... likely calling authors to tell them the good news. Here is a brief summary of the...

What makes for productive scientific debates?

drupaladmin
23 May 2012
Science is full of debates. Some are productive, some aren't. What makes for a productive debate? First, a few remarks about what I mean by a "productive" debate. I don't mean a debate that leads to agreement on all or even any points, either among the main...

Effort underway to save the ELA

drupaladmin
23 May 2012
The Canadian federal government recently announced that it will no longer fund the renowned Experimental Lakes Area . There is now an effort underway to save ELA: go here for info.

On confusing specific examples and general principles

drupaladmin
22 May 2012
Here's something I struggle with in my teaching and writing (blogging as well as papers). How do you keep your audience from mistaking specific examples for general principles, and vice-versa? For instance (to pick a specific example!), "density dependence" is a...

My blogging is starting to have real-world impact

drupaladmin
22 May 2012
I've just been asked to review a paper by a leading journal, on a topic that I've never published on, but have blogged about. Who says blogging has no real-world impact? ;-)

Canadian Government axes funding for the Experimental Lakes Area (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
18 May 2012
The Canadian federal government is going to cease funding the Experimental Lakes Area . Since the late 1960s, the ELA and its 58 small lakes have been doing amazing long-term monitoring and experiments on whole lakes, including groundbreaking studies of eutrophication...

Must-read: on ordinary language vs. scientific understanding

drupaladmin
17 May 2012
One of my pet themes on the Oikos blog is how subtle scientific errors can arise from using ordinary words to describe technical concepts (e.g., see here , here [especially the comments], and the last item on this list ). Here's a lovely passage on this, from physicist...

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