Blog

Turn your study system into a funny meme! (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
11 May 2012
In a previous post I expressed a bit of wariness that crowdfunded science, by requiring new forms of salesmanship on the part of scientists, might tend to favor style over substance. But if the style is going to be this funny, I'm all for it! Zen Faulkes' SciFund...

On the use and care of mathematical models

drupaladmin
10 May 2012
A wonderful passage from Simon Levin (1975) : Most models which find their way into the pages of journals such as this one are not meant as literal descriptions of particular situations, and thus generate predictions which are not to be tested against precise...

Wikipedia on ecological microcosms

drupaladmin
10 May 2012
I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry on " microcosm (experimental ecosystem) ". It's, um, sketchy. But it does cite Rees Kassen and my former labmate Lin Jiang , so it's got that going for it.

"I want to be the [famous non-scientist] of science"

drupaladmin
10 May 2012
A little while back, neuroethologist Zen Faulkes said in a post on crowdfunding that he " want[s] to be the Amanda Palmer of science crowdfunding ", Amanda Palmer being a musician who just had massive success crowdfunding her new album. And he's also on record as...

Three postdocs in quantitative plankton community ecology

drupaladmin
8 May 2012
Friends Of Oikos Blog ('FOOBs') Chris Klausmeier and Elena Litchman are looking for three postdocs; advert below. They are two of the best people in the world working at the interface of theory and experiment in community ecology, specifically plankton communities. So...

Canada vs the USA: is there an 'optimal' funding level for ecologists?

drupaladmin
8 May 2012
Context My colleagues and I worked on the top 1% of ecologists project for a long time. There was significant discussion of both the interpretation itself and the implications. We also discussed conducting a social survey of the NSERC Discovery Grant holders similar to...

Provocative new Oikos paper: should we reallocate funding away from the ecological 1%? (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
7 May 2012
My fellow Oikos editor and blogger Chris Lortie has a strong interest in scientific publication practices (see, e.g., here ). His latest effort, now in press at Oikos, examines patterns of funding and impact among the ecological 1%: the most-cited 1% of ecologists over...

Favorite popular science books about ecology?

drupaladmin
6 May 2012
What are your favorite popular science books about ecology? I'm actually struggling to think of favorites. I tend not to read popular science related to ecology. I tend to read popular science books on topics I know less about because I like learning new things; I...

Cool new Oikos papers

drupaladmin
4 May 2012
Some forthcoming Oikos papers that caught my eye: Tuomisto (in press) is a "consumer's guide" to evenness indices, showing how they are mathematically related to one another, and to partitionings of diversity into alpha and beta components. The take home message is the...

Robert Sokal, 1926-2012

drupaladmin
4 May 2012
Biostatistician Robert Sokal died on April 9. Like most ecologists, I knew Sokal primarily through his canonical statistical textbook with Jim Rohlf, Biometry . But he was of course much more than the author of a classic textbook. In his research, he was a pioneer of...

Advice: on choosing among different indices of the "same" thing

drupaladmin
2 May 2012
Lots of terms in ecology are only loosely defined, or can have somewhat different meanings depending on the context. Which can make it difficult to measure those things, because different measures often will behave at least slightly differently. "Diversity" is a good...

Video: a snarky take on the kin selection debate

drupaladmin
2 May 2012
I'm very late on this, but it might be new to some readers, so here goes. Back in 2010 prominent evolutionary theorist Martin Nowak and two of his Harvard colleagues (one of whom is the even more prominent E. O. Wilson) published a lengthy and quite strident Nature...

Crowdfunding science: the future?

drupaladmin
2 May 2012
Round 2 of the SciFund Challenge is now live. This is a crowdfunding initiative in which dozens of scientists get money to support their research by appealing for small donations directly from the public. Here's an old Oikos blog guest post from one of the SciFund...

Oikos blog used as course material

drupaladmin
1 May 2012
In the past few weeks the Oikos blog has been getting visits from a Moodle site associated with the undergraduate Plant Ecology course offered by Berea College . I assume this means that one or more posts are being used as course material. I tried to contact the...

Carnival of Evolution #47

drupaladmin
1 May 2012
This month's compilation of the best in evolutionary blogging is now up at Evolving Thoughts . Lots of good stuff as usual. One post that caught my eye talks about how Steven J. Gould was wrong to claim that Cope's Rule applies only to living organisms, not inanimate...

Advice for grad students: overcoming the feeling that you're an imposter (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
30 April 2012
Grad school can be daunting, especially for new grad students. It's a totally different experience than undergrad, and it's easy to feel like you don't belong, like you have no idea what you're doing, that you somehow fooled everyone to even get this far. In short, it'...

Is ecology becoming too collaborative?

drupaladmin
27 April 2012
Is it just me, or is everyone overcommitting to too many collaborative projects lately? Everybody likes to collaborate these days. It's easier to do these days, and the culture of ecology values it highly. And frankly, everyone sees it as a way to get their names on a...

Human instructors > computers

drupaladmin
23 April 2012
Like me, many of you are probably grading final exams right now. For a very funny illustration of why, for better or worse, computers will not be able to do this task for you any time soon, see here (see also here for an example of the sort of essay that computer...

Favorite ecology and evolution quotes? (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
22 April 2012
What are your favorite quotes about ecology and evolution? There's the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin , of course--the "tangled bank" image, "There is grandeur in this view of life", and all that. As good as anything I've ever read, but perhaps a bit too lengthy to...

Is 'synthesis ecology' a distinct scientific discipline?

drupaladmin
20 April 2012
Over at I'm a Chordata! Urochordata!, Jarrett Byrnes asks whether 'synthesis ecology' is a distinct scientific discipline . Interesting question, on which even current and former NCEAS postdocs can't agree on an answer (not surprisingly, since if it is a discipline it'...

Pages

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Comments & Hot Topics