No time for any substantive posts for a little while, as I'm swamped with grant writing and teaching. So here's one of my favorite posts from the archives. It's about all the reasons why coexisting species should be similar to one another rather than (or in addition to...
drupaladmin
26 February 2012
A while back I asked what was the biggest scientific claim that you had changed your mind about ? At the time, I wasn't aware that hundreds of very prominent scientists had already answered a slightly broader version of this question in 2008 for the Edge website . I...
drupaladmin
22 February 2012
Inferring causality is hard. Especially in a world where lots of factors, some of them unknown, causally affect the response variable of interest (and each other), and where there are causal feedbacks (mutual causation) between variables. It's even harder when, for...
drupaladmin
16 February 2012
Not "proportion of variance explained"! At least, that's not the most precise gloss. Nice discussion here . HT Jarrett Byrnes (via Twitter)
drupaladmin
16 February 2012
Just make all the usual judgment calls and conduct all the usual "exploratory" analyses that scientists conduct all the time! The linked paper is the best paper I've read in a long time. It's essential reading for everyone who does science, from undergraduates on up...
drupaladmin
16 February 2012
Here's an issue which I've encountered occasionally as a referee over the years (though not recently, and not as a handling editor as far as I can recall). It concerns manuscripts for which a student is the lead author, and their supervisor is a co-author. Once in a...
drupaladmin
7 February 2012
Biological Posteriors asks a good question: how far down the [mechanistic] rabbit hole should one go to get an answer to any question? For instance, if you want to understand plant distributions, do you need to study plant physiology? Or even plant biochemistry?...
drupaladmin
3 February 2012
Economics, even ecological economics, isn't something I'd ordinarily write about on the Oikos Blog--it's not really the blog's purpose, and it's not something I'm really qualified to write about. But I'm making an exception to plug a very interesting exercise in...
drupaladmin
31 January 2012
The previous post referred to a philosophy talk about Robert MacArthur, his observations of feeding warblers, and the competition models which his warbler work helped inspire.The speaker apparently drew some general lessons about the conduct of ecological science from...
drupaladmin
30 January 2012
Interesting discussion thread over at statistician Andrew Gelman's blog, about time series analysis of the lynx-hare cycle. Standard phenomenological statistical models (autoregressive moving average models) don't fit or predict these data all that well. Andrew links...
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