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Sally Otto: genius

drupaladmin
22 September 2011
Evolutionary geneticist Sally Otto of the University of British Columbia has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (colloquially known as a 'genius grant'). She does important and wonderfully incisive work on the evolution of sexual reproduction, and also...

Ecologist interview: Alan Hastings and Carl Boettiger

drupaladmin
22 September 2011
A local radio station in Davis, CA recently interviewed mathematical ecologist Alan Hastings and his graduate student Carl Boettiger (who just won the award for best student talk in theoretical ecology at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting). You can hear...

Ecologist jokes

drupaladmin
22 September 2011
Anyone know any good ecologist jokes? Theoretical ecologist and demographer Joel Cohen once published a book of science jokes, Absolute Zero Gravity . He tells a couple of jokes from the book, including one involving an ecologist, in this video (warning: a little NSFW...

A new way to fundraise for research. Join the #SciFund Challenge!

drupaladmin
21 September 2011
Where does the money come from for doing science? If you are a scientist, you know the fundraising landscape is getting worse and worse. All of the traditional sources of cash for science – government agencies and private foundations - are getting harder and harder to...

Zombie ideas: the motivational poster

drupaladmin
19 September 2011
Why yes, I am procrastinating this morning--why do you ask? Created with this free online tool . Procrastinating readers are encouraged to create and send in their own ecology- or evolution-related mock motivational posters (not necessarily involving zombies). If you...

Questions about "Big Data" in ecology

drupaladmin
17 September 2011
Thanks to the influence of NCEAS, the internet, advances in computer hardware and software, advances in gene sequencing, the advent of NEON , and probably other factors I'm forgetting, ecology is entering the era of "Big Data". But we're far from the only field that's...

Advice: weak studies of short-term dynamics

drupaladmin
16 September 2011
In the comments on a previous post, I got into a discussion about the reasons why one might study short-term (i.e. transient) dynamics as opposed to long-term (i.e. asymptotic) dynamics. For instance, one might study a system's short-term response to a single...

Why trust physical scientists? Social scientists? Ecologists?

drupaladmin
14 September 2011
Physicist Sean Carroll has a terrific post up on why we do--and should--trust the opinions of expert physicists rather than our own opinions, but not the opinions of expert social scientists. Economics blog Noahpinion offers some smart follow-up remarks. Go read them,...

Oikos blog highlights

drupaladmin
14 September 2011
This blog's been going for a while now and has built up a lot of content. I've heard from a few folks who've found the blog fairly recently and like it a lot, but who don't have time to dig through all the old content. If that describes you, here are a few of my...

Bandwagons in ecology

drupaladmin
14 September 2011
The bandwagon effect is when people believe or do something just because lots of other people believe or do it, independent of other reasons for believing or doing it (such as empirical evidence or logical argument). Like every science (e.g., astronomy , information...

Yes, the IDH is a zombie: response to Karl Cottenie

drupaladmin
12 September 2011
Karl Cottenie has a thoughtful post up responding to my post on the zombie idea of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis . That's what I was hoping to do: get people to stop and think, so I'm really glad Karl did so. I thought I respond here, both because my response...

Interview: ecologist Jean Burns

drupaladmin
12 September 2011
Now up at Sarcozona .

Another legacy of NCEAS: overly-nice ecologists?

drupaladmin
7 September 2011
Thanks in large part to the influence of NCEAS , more and more ecologists are involved in collaborative research networks these days. Via email, Jason Fridley asks: are these networks making us too nice to each other? You'll naturally be reluctant to tell your...

Carnival of Evolution

drupaladmin
3 September 2011
The Carnival of Evolution is a monthly compilation of blog posts about all things evolutionary, hosted by a different volunteer each month. The September Carnival is now up, with an overview post written by the host, Henry Gee, a science writer for Nature . A whole...

Oikos article blogged

drupaladmin
3 September 2011
Over at Distributed Ecology , Ted Hart has a nice discussion of Lima & Berryman's recent Oikos article on positive and negative feedbacks in human population dynamics. The authors argue that the complexities of human behavior and societies create novel sources of...

Inductive vs. deductive research

drupaladmin
2 September 2011
Students especially should read this post over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative on inductive vs. deductive approaches to research. It touches on a range of issues, like whether we should seek simplicity or embrace complexity in our models, whether simple models are...

How hard do you work?

drupaladmin
1 September 2011
This week's issue of Nature has contrasting stories from two successful biomedical researchers, one of whom works well over 100 hours/week and expects his students and postdocs to do the same, and the other of whom advocates a much more balanced approach based on...

A picture (and caption) is worth a thousand words

drupaladmin
1 September 2011
If you like my posts for the Oikos blog, you'll like these posters . Especially this one , which is like a highly-distilled version of half my posts.

The University of Calgary: now with fewer zombies!

drupaladmin
1 September 2011
A colleague of mine here at Calgary read my post on how the intermediate disturbance hypothesis is a zombie idea , and decided to stop teaching the IDH to undergraduate ecology students. Hooray! Now that we're no longer turning our students into zombies, the next step...

Interview with Steve Ellner

drupaladmin
31 August 2011
Sarcozona has just posted her latest ESA interview , with Steve Ellner. Great stuff. Steve's thoughts on why microcosms are useful very much mirror my own . And he has a very trenchant question at the end about whether much of the putatively "policy-relevant" research...

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