Month: March 2023

Recommended reads #207

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Higher education’s other diversity crisis (the article is about Oxford, but really, it’s about everywhere)

Insect decline gets the Elizabeth Kolbert treatment in the New Yorker.

American teens are unwell because society is unwell.

Confidence. highlighted read

Women have been misled about menopause

The intersections of identity and persistence for retention in ecology and environmental biology with personal narratives from Black women – yes, this is an article that you can cite when you’re putting in your grant why you need to provide more support for Black women in field sciences. But more importantly, it’s a paper to read and digest!

Available evidence still points to covid originating from spillover. What up with certain US government agencies saying that covid was a lab leak, but without providing any evidence for this? So weird. Anyhow, here’s the take from a couple virologists that explains what we know and what we don’t know.

Did you know how extraordinarily out of date California water laws are? Maybe you can imagine, but if you want to know the details, here you go.

I think it was well established that Pablo Neruda was probably killed by poisoning, but now there’s more data for this.

Undergraduate research: course credit vs. getting paid

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Undergraduate labor powers many university laboratories. Many of us faculty in primarily undergraduate institutions simply would not be shipping much product without this source of labor. And even in PhD-granting institutions, undergrads are often the labor that makes dissertations possible.

Oftentimes, this is unpaid labor. But in the eyes of many, this form of unpaid labor is not uncompensated. You see, the students doing this work are getting “paid” with course credit.

The financial magic of this arrangement, in which faculty wave a curricular wand want to convert graduation requirements into research effort, is deeply embedded among our accepted traditions. It’s the way the world works. Students and faculty just acknowledge that this is the way things have been, and the way they are.

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