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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...

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...

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