Tweeting the ESA meeting

drupaladmin

28 July 2011

I won't be (I'll probably blog it). But if you will be, I just got an email indicating that the hashtag for the meeting is #ESA11. And because the meeting theme is "Earth stewardship", the ESA is bribing people to tweet about that topic using the hashtag #earthsteward...

Advice: coming up with an original research topic

drupaladmin

26 July 2011

Coming up with an original research topic isn't easy, especially the first time (say, for your undergraduate honors thesis). Here's some excellent advice to help you get started. It's aimed at economics students, but it's mostly applicable to ecology students as well.

An empirical divide in ecology?

drupaladmin

26 July 2011

Great post over at The EEB and Flow , responding to Lindenmayer and Likens' recent piece claiming that ecology is losing its empirical, place-based "culture" in favor of modeling, meta-analysis, and data mining. A quick glance at recent issues of our leading journals...

Free idea for an Oikos Forum paper: untapped potential in biological market models

drupaladmin

25 July 2011

Biological market models are a way to think about the evolution of behaviors in which organisms exchange goods. Examples of such behaviors include the exchange of "nuptial gifts" for mating opportunities in some insects, and the exchange of photosynthetically-fixed...

Bridging ideological divides in ecology - why can’t we be friends?

drupaladmin

20 July 2011

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland and a deputy Editor-in-Chief at Oikos. I’m interested in the evolutionary ecology of marine invertebrates, with a bunch of different themes within that field. One of my main jobs in the Oikos team is to be the...

Advice: how I almost quit science

drupaladmin

19 July 2011

This is a true story. It is meant primarily for students, but I don't know if it's uplifting, depressing, both, or neither. So I'm just going to tell it, and you can make of it what you will. In the late winter of 2004, I almost quit science. Indeed, I effectively had...

How to win the Braun Award for best student poster at the ESA Annual Meeting

drupaladmin

11 July 2011

Register to be considered! This of course won't guarantee that you win--but you can't win if you don't register. I help judge the Braun Award every year, and I'm always struck by how few students register to be considered--typically 20 or fewer. That's surely a small...

What's your best paper?

drupaladmin

9 July 2011

This is a common job interview question in academia, but it's also fun just to think about, at least once you've published more than a couple of papers. Often, the papers of which we're proudest aren't the ones that are most cited, because our pride reflects features...

37 ways choice of words can mislead scientists

drupaladmin

28 June 2011

In a previous post , I said that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is one of the works that most influenced me, because of the attention Wittgenstein pays to the ways in which the very words we use can mislead us. I think this is a particularly important...