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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...

Postdoc in theoretical/experimental community dynamics

drupaladmin
16 May 2012
My collaborator Dave Vasseur is seeking a postdoc for an NSF-funded project combining theoretical and experimental work on environmental variability and community dynamics. Details here . Dave is a super-smart and super-nice (and super-tall) guy, so this is a super-...

Maybe we need even more stability concepts!

drupaladmin
16 May 2012
p.s. to the previous post : Commenter Christopher Eliot (indirectly) makes the important point that all those stability concepts related to equilibria and other attractors assume that whatever system you're studying can be described by a model with unchanging structure...

Advice: 20 different stability concepts

drupaladmin
16 May 2012
The comments on a previous post indicated some understandable confusion on the part of some commenters as to the relationship (or lack thereof!) between various measures of "stability" in ecology. The term "stability" is infamous for meaning different things to...

From the archives: bandwagons in ecology

drupaladmin
15 May 2012
What are some of the biggest bandwagons in ecology right now? Why do some research topics turn into bandwagons, while others don't? How do you tell a bandwagon from a non-bandwagon? Can a bandwagon be stopped? For the answers, check out this old post .

Crowdfunding crowdfunding

drupaladmin
14 May 2012
What if you want to crowdfund your science but are having trouble developing a professional-looking and compelling pitch? xkcd has the answer!

An important but little known fact about compensatory dynamics

drupaladmin
13 May 2012
Many ecologists expect competing species to exhibit compensatory dynamics, meaning that the densities of any two competing species should be negatively correlated over time or across space. If your competitor increases in abundance, you ought to decline, right? After...

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