Blog

Advice: how to win the Buell and Braun awards at the ESA Annual Meeting

drupaladmin
6 February 2012
The Buell and Braun awards respectively to the best student talk and poster at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. They're nice awards: besides the prestige, you get $500 plus travel reimbursement to the following year's meeting. To win the awards, the...

Postdoc in plant population ecology

drupaladmin
3 February 2012
Friend of Oikos Blog* Peter Adler and colleagues are seeking applicants for a postdoc in plant population ecology. The ad is below. Peter's a terrific plant population ecologist and this sounds like a neat project. In the past I've only posted job ads for myself and...

How international trade almost wiped out the North American bison

drupaladmin
3 February 2012
Economics, even ecological economics, isn't something I'd ordinarily write about on the Oikos Blog--it's not really the blog's purpose, and it's not something I'm really qualified to write about. But I'm making an exception to plug a very interesting exercise in...

Tenure-track position in theoretical/computational ecology

drupaladmin
3 February 2012
My fellow Oikos editor Andre de Roos passes on word that the University of Amsterdam is hiring a tenure-track theoretical/computational ecologist. Details here .

Ecologist interview: Juliana Mulroy

drupaladmin
2 February 2012
Sarcozona resumes her series of interviews from last year's ESA Meeting (better late than never!) with a chat with plant population ecologist Julian Mulroy from the ESA Historical Records Committee.

Carnival of Evolution #44

drupaladmin
2 February 2012
The best of last month's online evolutionary writings, here . Get 'em while they're hot!

Advice: how to give a good presentation

drupaladmin
2 February 2012
Over at NeuroDojo, Zen Faulkes has been doing a lengthy series of posts on how to give a good presentation. The latest one, on the need to avoid "shortcuts to credibility" (like trying to talk differently than you usually talk), is here . The whole series is...

Cool new Oikos papers (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
2 February 2012
Lots of interesting papers coming out in Oikos in the next little while. I wanted to highlight a few that particularly caught my eye. In the most recent (Feb. 2012) issue: Barto & Rillig on dissemination biases in ecology. This is a really important study. Barto...

Deborah Mayo's blog has moved

drupaladmin
1 February 2012
Ace philosopher of science and statistics Deborah Mayo has moved her blog. It's now here (and now looks much sharper).

Getting over Robert MacArthur (UPDATEDx3)

drupaladmin
31 January 2012
The previous post referred to a philosophy talk about Robert MacArthur, his observations of feeding warblers, and the competition models which his warbler work helped inspire.The speaker apparently drew some general lessons about the conduct of ecological science from...

On seeing the big picture

drupaladmin
31 January 2012
Nice post from Joan Strassman at Sociobiology on the art of seeing the big picture, the forest for the trees. The way to do that is to have "blurry vision", so that you can't see individual trees at all. Read the whole thing. Joan's thoughts were prompted by attending...

Statisticians, meet ecologists

drupaladmin
30 January 2012
Interesting discussion thread over at statistician Andrew Gelman's blog, about time series analysis of the lynx-hare cycle. Standard phenomenological statistical models (autoregressive moving average models) don't fit or predict these data all that well. Andrew links...

The last word on US vs. Canadian funding systems

drupaladmin
29 January 2012
This kind of sums up my experience of this debate: Well, either that, or this: UPDATE: I'm kidding, of course. ;-)

Crowdsourcing papers on species' traits as predictors of their abundances

drupaladmin
27 January 2012
Back in the blog's early days I did what I still think is a quite nice little post on whether we should expect species' phenotypic traits to predict or explain their abundances. I'm going to be fleshing that post out into a short perspectives-type review paper, mixing...

Another legacy of NCEAS: devalued introverts?

drupaladmin
26 January 2012
Modern science is increasingly a collaborative enterprise. In ecology, NCEAS was very influential in driving the shift towards collaboration. But The Curious Wavefunction asks a good question: what if one side effect of this shift is to devalue the scientific...

Zombie ideas in ecology: "neutral" = "dispersal limitation"

drupaladmin
24 January 2012
Following on from the previous post , another way in which community ecologists often misinterpret neutral models is by mixing up neutrality with dispersal limitation. This leads to mistakes like testing for neutrality by testing for a community ecology equivalent of "...

Zombie ideas in ecology: "neutral" = "stochastic"

drupaladmin
23 January 2012
Recent interest in neutral theory in community ecology has given rise to a zombie idea: that "neutral" and "stochastic" mean the same thing. They don't. It's easy to see where this zombie idea comes from: neutral drift in evolution is a stochastic process, while...

Another peer review reform: Peerage of Science (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
23 January 2012
Following on from previous posts on reforming peer review (see here , here , and here ), I wanted to note a new peer review service, Peerage of Science . PoS is a private company founded by a trio of Finnish scientists, which combines several proposed peer review...

What if science journals "bid" on manuscripts?

drupaladmin
22 January 2012
In science, we "match" manuscripts to journals by submitting to them one at a time. If the journal declines the ms, we resubmit elsewhere. This is arguably an inefficient system. Leading journals like Oikos decline the vast majority of mss they receive, and it is not...

Sh*t scientists say

drupaladmin
19 January 2012
Amusing video here . But it's mostly not sh*t ecologists or evolutionary biologists say (well, except "stochastic", "got any virgin flies?", and "more work is needed"). Feel free to suggest sh*t ecologists or evolutionary biologists say in the comments.

Pages

Subscribe to Blog