Liberal arts college, or celebrity baby name?

The New Yorker has a great piece about the backyard biodiversity work being done by the entomologists of the Natural History Museum of LA County.

Carl Zimmer on writing about science: “Imagine you’re a crime reporter writing a story about a shooting at a nightclub. Now imagine that none of your readers know what a gun is.”

Speaking of which, Ed Yong does a masterful writeup about a remarkable new discovery involving endosymbiosis.

Science is an art. You’re damn right it is!

Science students need the liberal arts.

“…A post about structural biases I’ve perceived within the NSF Biology system…They also aren’t inherently bad or need to be fixed, they just exist based on the pool of reviewers/panelists and timing of the grant cycles.”

Caroline Tucker has a nice review of a recent paper about a Periodic Table of Niches. If you think about convergent evolution – and how can you be an ecologist who sees the world and not be obsessed? – this post and the associated paper (Winemiller et al.) are good brain food.

Public higher education in the US used to be free or really cheap. Oregon is helping take a step back to where we used to be.

What overparenting looks like, from a Dean’s perspective.

A cool spatial data visualization (aka, a map) of logbook entries from ships of the 1700s and 1800s.

I’m behind the times, but I just heard about DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. In short, it’s a concrete declaration to evaluate research based on its content and merit, not where it was published. Worth learning about.

And, PNAS says some convincing words about how they’re more interested in impact, not impact factor.

How to apply for a field job.

Meat is a complex health issue but a simple climate one.

There is a humorous and fascinating “Shit Academics Say” twitter account. This is the backstory in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The job market is not a lottery. Saying you got ‘lucky’ allegedly perpetuates a pervasive and damaging myth.

Dynamic Ecology has just passed the three year mark. Brian, Jeremy and Meg wrote a post reflecting on what they’ve learned from writing for the site, and what surprised them. It’s a really interesting read, at least it was for me, as I’ve had a highly convergent set of thoughts and experiences. Seriously, if you want to know what I think about my experience blogging, then just go ahead and read what all three of them wrote. If you’re thinking about investing a nontrivial amount of time into blogging, then I imagine you’d have the same feelings as well.

Sports and politics-of-sports writer Dave Zirin explains why he’s done defending women’s sports.

Profiling Alex Morgan: routine sexism and a little plagiarism from FIFA.com

Nature covers the crisis facing North American herbaria.

How things are not necessarily 100% peachy right after tenure.

How can you be colorblind and racist? This is how.

A paean to the arctic and its insects.

Why we still collect butterflies.

Colleges and universities can’t have it both ways: “the institutions that are going to successfully navigate the transition that higher education is undergoing will be those that can most quickly figure out who they are and how they can best fulfill their niches. Those who try to continually operate under the rules of the old system likely have bleak futures.”

“You Draw It: how family income predicts college experience.” Both the tool, and the associated fact, is fascinating. And of course a source of worry.

“Science is about the future.” A worthwhile short comic about the measurement of scientific worth.

On a related note, “The Nobel Prize is bad.”

What it’s like as a “girl” in the lab.

This story is precisely why the public needs to understand natural history. Or at the very least, to be able to differentiate bear from non-bear.

A post about increasing your chances of getting funded by NSF. The short version is: work your ass off. But this post tells you specific ways to work your ass off in a way that increases your odds.

Here is a problem-solving puzzle that is interesting. I saw this in the context of a few facebook conversations, and the selection of people correctly ‘solved’ the puzzle and those who didn’t correctly ‘solve’ it was fascinating to me.

Data Scientist Jessica Kirkpatrick writes about confronting her own racism.

Contingency is now the exploitative norm in higher education rather than the exception.

Another piece that explains why using slide shows for teaching is horrible and why people still keep using it.

Take a video tour of E.O. Wilson’s office.

College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one.

That’s all, folks. You might have noticed that it’s been a while since a recommended reads post, which normally comes out on alternating Fridays. Well, I took a vacation. A real vacation. For two whole frickin’ weeks which I didn’t work at all, except for remote advising of students conducting fieldwork. It was glorious. (If you want see some of the cool stuff I saw, natural beauty and kitsch, from northern California and Oregon, you can find them on Facebook or Instagram.)

Here’s a post from Methods in Ecology and Evolution with the Top Ten Tips for Reviewing Statistics. I do wish people who review my stuff consistently followed these guidelines.

One of the most special things I’ve read in a while. About teaching, love, parenting, grief, and Pixar.

Crap Wildlife Jobs got featured in Nature.

Chris Buddle shares his reflections one year into his service as a “Deanlet,” a term he says he picked up from me. (I picked it up from Mo Donnelly, tropical herpetologist extraordinaire at FIU.)

This interview in Science with a dual-career couple about their job story is fascinating. And the part about their salaries is a doozy.

More evidence that active learning trumps lecturing.

It is very sad news to report that Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist, died in an accident this last week. Jarrett Byrnes, in his blog, wrote a passionate memorial for Dr. Sagarin.

I’m betting that you’ve heard about the messed-up “advice” from former AAAS president Alice Huang to a postdoc who is getting regularly ogled by her advisor: “I suggest you put up with it, with good humor if you can.” A lot has been written about this. All I have to say is that pretty much all advice says more about the person offering it than the recipient of the advice. (Which is why I do my best to avoid offering advice in these pages.) If you are interested in how the scientific community responded to Alice, Central Command for the “Don’t Ask Alice” responses is at Tenure, She Wrote.

I don’t give advice, but I sometimes link to self-avowed advice. Such as this excellent piece:  Career Advice From an Oldish Not-Quite Geezer. It’s about making sure that you don’t hit the tail end of your career and realizing you had the wrong priorities.

“Why blogging is key to the future of higher ed.” Okay, the title for is dumb. But forgive the author, who probably didn’t write the title. The article itself is interesting if you’re interested in student writing.

As the token female member of this action-adventure team, my job is to kick.

CalArts — a relatively highfalutin’ arts school in the LA area — switched to a gender-blind admissions process for its animation program. And they were surprised to find they mostly accepted women!

Gender equality at work depends on gender equality at home:

The impact of the top leadership is profound; changing your workplace culture is going to be an uphill battle unless your management is committed to the idea that it’s a mistake to sacrifice part of the talent pool for reasons completely unrelated to the jobs being performed.

A paper in Biological Conservation claims that peer review is not a crapshoot. Or that’s what they say they can test with their data and that’s their conclusion.

Tenure, She Wrote wrote about supporting other people’s students.

Quality doesn’t have to come from exclusivity: what happened when a highly selective school in stopped being highly selective but still focused on educational quality.

The Good Enough Professor points out how the higher education funding situation is bad for both STEM and humanities faculty. But the way we are prepared to respond to the crisis differs. Below is a snippet, but go on and read the whole thing.

Everyone is feeling the constriction of publicly funded higher education.  As grant money dries up alongside state budgets, STEM faculty and liberal arts faculty alike are coping with dwindling resources. The difference is, non-liberal-arts faculty confront this reality with the tools they already have ready to hand: the capacity to explain why people should pay for what they have to offer.

Jeff Ollerton looks critically at a disagreement in the pages of Science about pollinator declines. He also wonders about the role of conservation biologists as political activists.

While we’re at it, Charley Krebs is asking if Conservation Biology is a science. He’s got a better case than you might initially imagine:

Now this is certainly a silly question. To be sure conservation ecologists collect much data, use rigorous statistical models, and do their best to achieve the general goal of protecting the Earth’s biodiversity, so clearly what they do must be the foundations of a science. But a look through some of the recent literature could give you second thoughts.

This is a fascinating study that quantified the amount of effort that it takes to write grants, and what actions that grant-seekers should take based on the probability of getting money. The take-home message is that with funding rates below 20%, you pretty much have to spend all of your time looking for money. That’s true, but the math behind it is instructive.

Along the same lines, this article in the LA Times lays out a crystal clear case for how funding for basic science in the US is really really horrible. Man, this is grim when you look at the long term trends. If you choose to read very few things about the science funding crisis, I recommend this one.

If you want something done, give it to a busy person. Then, the busy person becomes becomes miserable:

A new paper by a team of researchers from Duke University, University of Georgia, and University of Colorado looks at not only how extremely competent people are treated by their co-workers and peers, but how those people feel when, at crucial moments, everyone turns to them. They find that responsible employees are not terribly pleased about this dynamic either.

What is model organism Arabidopsis thaliana actually like outdoors?

How temporary economic downturns result in permanent career setbacks for college graduates.

Every little thing about this piece of writing: College students are not customers, is great. As is pretty much everything that Schuman writes. Even on the rare occasion when I disagree with her.

Hippos as meat for the USA:

In 1910, the United States—its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted—was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

This New York Times piece on the absurdity and danger of extraordinarily high salaries for university administrators is on the mark. Yeah, this isn’t new news. But it’s important to keep focusing on it.

You know the spam from fake conferences and predatory journals? Wouldn’t it be interesting if someone collected those emails for a whole year and studied them?

“If you’ve ever assessed whether ΔAIC>2 you have done something that is mathematically close to p>0.05.” Brian McGill has a spot-on lament about how AIC isn’t being used as it was originally intended, and how it hasn’t really improved the ability to infer things in ecology.

An argument for more blinded and impartial experiments in Ecology, from a paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. But really, we can’t look at the Frontiers journal series to learn about impartiality and unbiased science. (Keep in mind this story, though, is brought to you from Science about a journal affiliated with Nature. But it appears the facts are facts and this wasn’t originally broken by Science.)

Congrats! You have an all male panel! The ‘road to tenure’ one is particularly rich.

Life is truly amazing and its capacity to surprise us seems to be limitless. A tremendous story about wharf borers. If you like natural history, you’ll love this.

On a related note, the opah is warm-blooded.

Harry Greene shared his three tips about how to become a naturalist.

Meg Duffy explains why she’s “out” as a mom in science.

What ecology labs do you remember from when you were a student?

What, specifically, can institutions and people actually do to foster equity for women in science? This is a great list.

Girls With Toys. Kudos to Kate Clancy.

Telling men with a gender bias to grow a pair.

What’s up the women-in-science all the time in these links? This is why.  This is a powerful read.

UC Santa Cruz doesn’t support student activism like they used to.

On the origin of Moore’s Law.

Theory in population biology, or biologically inspired mathematics?

Why grant funding should be spread thinly.

“Kid who got in to every Ivy League school is going to the University of Alabama — and it’s a brilliant decision” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, that’s a lot of applications to fill out. Looks like he’s ready for the academic job market!

“Research and practical experience suggest that focusing on continual improvement of teaching is more effective than imitating best practices.”

Saving paper by spending time — a switch to electronic grading.

A paper in PNAS from several months ago had some fundamental errors in how the data were handled, leading to an unsupported conclusion. And the person who detected this error shared it on twitter, with a detailed figure showing the error. And the authors who got called out on twitter are upset. It violates “social norms” they say. Huh? I suppose they could have written a letter to the editor, waited to go back and forth and all that. Or they could just be more open with their findings and share it immediately.

There was an frustratingly myopic thinkpiece in the New York Times discussing what it means to be a professor. It yearned for the good ol’ days when students were better students and professors were inspirational and weren’t focused on customer service. And lots more bullshit like that. There have been a lot of responses, and the ones that I read and liked were from Kevin Gannon and Melonie Fullick. The one from Daniel Drezner is okay, too.

Has a rich donor asked your Dean to fire you? If you work at the University of Oklahoma, that might be the case.

About procrastination.

A scientific paper studying the travel traumas of Tintin.

I mentioned in the last rec reads that the University of Western Australia gave a fancy position and lots of money to anti-environmental wackadoodle Bjorn Lomborg. It turns out they changed their mind. Protest sometimes works.

I’ve talked with other writers who’ve had experiences with Wired. My experience is not unique. So as far as I can tell, they don’t cover the future. They produce a white male fantasy of the future. Which isn’t surprising. But I’m still allowed to be disappointed. Because for awhile there, I thought someone was telling me, “If you have something to say, you have the platform.” And I was going to take it.

Stuffheads like this make professors look bad. But there are people out there to redeem us, like this.

If you’re a bloggery person, then this from Claire Potter about her ten years of blogging might interesting.

“5 things every data scientist should know about Excel.” Those aren’t my own words, for what it’s worth.

Stacey Patton, who always writes great things, discusses teaching evaluations.

How to convince a libertarian to support aggressive action to limit carbon pollution.

A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system. A lesson in scale, and visualizing data, and beauty.

Do university really want their professors to be public scholars? Really?

The messy business of deciding what math biologists take in college. There are a lot of biology professors who think that statistical literacy is secondary. This drives me nuts.

“For the love of God, rich people, stop giving Ivy League colleges money.” A thing that I wrote related to this is here.

An introduction to behavioral economics, or why people don’t make rational sense.

As summer rolls around, this story about vacation, kids, work, and parenting might sound familiar. In some communities, when kids get out of school, it’s really hard on the parents.

What the heck do they put in denatured ethanol, and how and why did they start doing this? “The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”

Here’s a really worthwhile new paper from The Journal Formerly Known as Conservation Ecology: “Unstructured socializing time, education for daring exploration, and cooperation with the arts are among the potential elements. Because such activities may be looked upon as procrastination rather than work, deliberate effort is needed to counteract our systematic bias.”

When I first went to Costa Rica as a graduate student in 1995, The National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) was full of gleaming promise as a privately-supported venture to catalog, explore, share and profit from the country’s biodiversity. In recent years, it’s been slowly shutting down, and now it’s kaput. Here’s a good story of the ascent and atrophy of INBio from, Scientific American. [update: I’ve been informed that there are a number of factual errors and bias issues in this article, that frankly hadn’t occurred to me when I linked to it. Now that they were pointed out, I definitely see them. Caveat emptor.]

Here is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in a long time: “Cambridge, we have a problem.” It’s a news story in Boston when Harvard and MIT don’t get a prestigious NASA grant. Even though, as the article points out, that it doesn’t even seem that the institutions even applied for the grant! Yes, that’s right. there’s a whole article in the Boston Herald about how it’s an outrage that MIT didn’t get a grant that it didn’t apply for. 

The NSF Division of Environmental Biology outdoes itself again with a big summary of numbers about per-person success rates. Because some PIs get multiple awards, the awards statistics can be confusing. These data fix that problem. One thing that caught my eye: men are more than 70% of the participants of DEB grants.

Community colleges are great for people who are clearly on a well-paved trajectory for a four-year university. For those who aren’t, though, not so much. “Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.”

What is the relationship between student performance and their evaluations of the professors who taught their prerequisite courses? The more students dislike your course, the better they do in future semester. At least according to this paper (actually I didn’t read it, but according to the blog post that cites the NPR report of this paper, that’s the take-home.)

Student effort declines as the average grade increases.

Open peer review: a randomised controlled trial. Signed reviews are, very very slightly, better in quality.

Ecologists far too often use causal language for relationships that clearly are not known to be causal.

Two scientists die while conducting Arctic fieldwork, because of the thin ice that they were out there to document.

Here’s an interesting conversation between developmental biologist Sean B Carroll and EO Wilson.

How to become a(n) ________ologist. The post says “arachnologist,” but it just as easily be any any other organism. Next time a parent asks you, “my kid wants to study X, and what should I do?” – this link can help that conversation.

Even more from Arthropod Ecology: Do students who complete an exam more quickly (or more slowly) do better on the exam? Chris Buddle’s answer is “no.” (I actually did the the same thing several years ago for a few exams, and in contrast, I consistently found an overt negative relationship between the completion sequence and exam score. In that course, the time allotted for the final exam was rather long, and I found that students who were unprepared would just spend a lot of quality time with the exam with the hope that enlightening might strike before they handed it in. Those who prepared were just, “bam – bam – bam – I’m done.” If you’re curious, my exams were about 4-5 pages of short-answer responses, and some problem-solving sections. Unlike Chris, I don’t have the data to share with you.)

Mythbuster Adam Savage has a great prescription of for STEM education: Bring back shop.

Planning your field work? Have you thought about safety?

The New York Times is still pretty good. But man, they don’t just understand California. Exhibit A and Exhibit B. Does LA suck or does it rock? Make up your mind, folks. (Anyhoo, the NY Times still does a good job with other stuff. Like this gorgeously illustrated piece about Messenger’s mission to, and collision with, Mercury.)

Instead of the NY Times, learn more about Los Angeles from filmmaker Werner Herzog and why he chose LA as his home. And also about how and why he chose to end Grizzly Man as he did. And about how nonchalantly he took getting shot while getting filmed for an interview with the BBC.

While we’re talking about LA — it turns out that >80% of nail technicians here are Vietnamese. That’s not a surprise, but is it really true that this is the case because of Tippi Hedren? And just for current context, there are ethical misgivings about nail salons.

Here’s a nice story from BBC about how one species of ant excavates really well, with some good video. (But you can ignore the pitch about how successful digging is part of the success of an invasive species. That’s just a dumb part of the sales pitch. For all we know, non-invaders dig just as well.)

From last year, here’s a great backstory about Maryam Mirzakhani, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014. If you know a girl who loves math but doesn’t feel good at it (does anybody feel they know enough math?), this could serve as some inspiration.

Here’s an important post about Gender Issues in Taxonomy – more than just Latin. If science has a gender problem, then systematics has a big big gender problem.

If you’re reading this site, then you also probably have heard elsewhere about the outrageously sexist review that one scientist got from the editors of PLOS ONE. It’s summarized here in a story from Science. Considering how bias in reviews like this isn’t an extreme rarity, it’s interesting how this one picked up so much steam. I’m guessing it’s because one specific argument of the reviewer (about how women are less vigorous than men) are so absurd and offensive and bizarre. An additional negative consequence of this affair is that PLOS ONE might be requiring reviewers to be non-anonymous. That would just require the sexist reviewers to hide their bias more effectively, meanwhile making the environment more difficult for junior scientists. Ugh. But as people point out, if you’re asked to do a review non-anonymously, then you don’t have to say yes. Then again, that’s not a good way to win the favor of influential editors, either :(

As for the outrageous PNAS paper that erroneously declared a bias in favor of women in STEM hiring decisions, this is the wittiest and most-spot on response. Meanwhile the authors of the original piece have chosen to respond to the great number of critical replies, the majority of whom are women. However, the authors somehow only chose to respond to the male critics. Huh? That irony itself speaks volumes.

Here is a summary of a good conversation about informal science education.

The anticlimax of finishing your dissertation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Baltimore uprising. (This event resonates on my campus. We were essentially created as a university fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion. The campus was put in a huge patch of undeveloped land, just two blocks from Compton, to provide higher education for a community that has historically been denied access. We — as an institution — are a tangible example of a positive community response to uprisings that manifest from systemic violence and murder by police. Creating our university obviously didn’t fix the problem of police violence against black men — the LA uprising in 1992 was a response to the acquittal of the police who assaulted Rodney King. By remembering that we were united with the charge of rectifying a diffuse systemic illness, we are able to have higher expectations of ourselves and our broader community.)

Faculty mentoring faculty: Relationships that work (and those that don’t.): “If mentoring between colleagues happens in the context of relationships, then that explains why structured mentoring programs are only intermittently successful.”

Apparently, your paper will get more attention if it is published on hump day.

This story from last year explains how the Mathematics program at King Abdulaziz University shot from unranked to #7 in the US News global rankings. What they did is pay a full salary to some of the most heavily published professors in the world to get their permission to list them as adjunct faculty.

A detailed and cogent argument for the abandonment of bar graphs.

I find reddit is generally best avoided, but you might have trouble keeping away from this huge thread of lab safety horror stories. Don’t read right before bedtime, or right before leaving junior trainees unsupervised in the lab.

In a related theme, what do to When Trainees Go Bad.

“How to make a killer map using Excel in under five minutes” Really? Okay, I’m not credulous but this looks credible.

Advice for students so that they don’t sound silly when emailing their professors. The preceding link is more respectful of students than this PhD comic on the same topic that came out the following week. The more we publicly vent about how our students are annoying, the less likely they will respect us and wish to learn from us.

Meg Duffy posted her “Important Lab Information for Duffy Lab Undergraduates,” which is very useful. Some of this is clearly targeted for undergrads inhabiting a lab at a research university, keep in mind. She’s totally cool with anybody taking this and using it.

If you find a mountain lion under your house, it’s probably a good idea to keep it a secret. No worries, P-22 got out okay. But I can see how he got lucky.

In case you missed this story, you should be aware that humankind is now using genetic engineering for eugenics. (And, no, I don’t mean ‘genetic engineering’ like the anti-anti-GMO strawman argument that traditional crop breeding is a form of genetic engineering.)

“So what, as a member of the academic alpha male club, can my fellow members and I do?”

There was a disastrous mistake of a paper in PNAS that used a miserably designed experiment to claim that the gender problem in STEM hiring is fixed. The best detailed debunking of this story comes from sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos. A field guide to the other debunking responses is here.

Some members of the Iowa Legislature want to bring the Hunger Games to the state’s public universities. If not hunger games, then Survivor or American Idol or something. Seriously, they want to mandate that students must vote professors off the island. I wish this were a joke. The good news is that this didn’t get out of committee. But, crikey, man. Just speechless.

Are ecological conferences safe? Not as much as they should be.

Oh, this is cool: “Sporadic, opportunistic pollen consumption by ants is common, but not ubiquitous, in tropical forests.”

Which is a higher priority: Robotic Lawnmowers, or Astrophysics? The makers of the Roomba want to use a new portion of the radio spectrum to run robotic lawnmowers. The same part of the spectrum that is really important for astronomers to observe and measure methanol, critical to study the formation of celestial bodies. Something tells me the lawnmowing robots can find a new frequency. Yes, this article has the phrase, “Stay off our lawn.”

In higher-ed parlance the herculean act of teaching eight courses per year is what’s known as “a 4-4 load” or, alternatively, a “metric ass-ton” of classroom time. And yet a new bill currently under consideration in the North Carolina General Assembly would require every professor in the state’s public university system to do just that.

Water is wet, diamonds are hard, and universities respond to racist incidents as if the chief worry is bad PR, not the underlying racism.

How the funding of science suppresses diversity:

This isn’t a male / female issue. The funding climate is selecting for people who can work 24/7. The ones with a partner at home (usually female) or without a partner or family obligations. I am not a good choice for a postdoc, not because I am not capable, not intelligent but because I can not make your lab 110% my priority. When “the small grocers” can no longer survive because you’ve starved them out you get WALMART science.

Environmental charlatan Bjorn Lomborg just got appointed to a $4 million position with the University of Western Australia. Really?

Ecologist? Consider throwing your hat in the ring for the E4 award from Ecography. It takes just a 300 word proposal. And a letter of support, and of course I imagine if it comes from someone prestigious that will count for a lot. The award is 500 euros and a free review article in the journal. It’s for early career scientists, meaning that you are less than 13 years post-PhD. Wait, that’s early career nowadays??? Not too long ago, it’d take 12 years post-PhD to get in the neighborhood of full professor in the United States.

Keeping sane in the midst of writing proposals.

An oldie but goodie from Sean Carroll: The purpose of Harvard is not to educate people.

More adventures in obviousness: A college’s high ranking often means less time with professors.

On another related note, what is it like to be poor at any Ivy League school? Yeah, some of these places give full tuition to the small fraction of students whose parents are below upper-middle class. But it is an acceptable educational environment non-wealthy students?

On yet another related note, Bryan Alexander points to a plan: Let’s tax the wealthiest universities and use that money to fund support services at community colleges.

Does your department have a toxic culture of discrimination? Check out this post and the comments at Tenure, She Wrote.

Last year, a study came out to show that professors —  at a small number of prestigious universities, in certain fields — were less likely to respond to potential graduate students if the names of the students were associated with ethnic minorities. That study just got replicated very broadly, and the result stayed pretty much the same. If your name sounds like you’re not white, prospective PhD advisors are more likely to blow you off. That’s a fact.

Read about how Buzzfeed is the future of journalism.

The academic senate of the University of Maryland is toying with the idea of changing the employment classification of postdoc, which would cut back on basic employment benefits and retirement. Because, they, um, need to save money. On the backs of postdocs. I mean, “postdoctoral students” as they are called.

A Scientist’s Guide to Achieving Broader Impacts through K–12 STEM Collaboration

Have a nice weekend.

If the names Gould, Lewontin, EO Wilson, DS Wilson, Dobzhansky, or Tinbergen mean something to you, then oh my gosh you’ll find this interview very illuminating. It’s amazing, with a few decades of perspective, how frank people will be about their own experiences. Seriously, if you haven’t read this, I really really recommend you read it. Yeah, this whole list is recommended reads. So I guess this is a highly recommended one.

A nice blog post journal article with some thoughts on keeping field stations and marine labs afloat in turbulent times.

How one editor at PNAS makes the decision to do a desk reject.

Claire Potter contrasts “liberal arts colleges” and “sprawling, urban universities.” The number of overgeneralizations is a bit high, but nonetheless I find myself nodding at some things.

27 editors at Nature are planning to resign unless they stop the corrupt practice of payola reviews. Nice to see some ethical behavior over there.

The academic senate of the University of Maryland is toying with the idea of changing the employment classification of postdocs, which would cut back on basic employment benefits and retirement. Because, they, um, need to save money. On the backs of postdocs. I mean, “postdoctoral students” as they are called.

The conservation biology community, or at least some fraction of it, has gotten into an argument over this well-written and kinda persuasive piece by Jonathan Franzen about climate change and biodiversity protection. The last act of the piece, featuring the work of Janzen and Hallwachs in northwestern Costa Rica, is compelling. The Audubon society got really pissed and accused Franzen of intellectual dishonesty. Some other people said, “meh.” It didn’t take long for people to ask, are we still arguing about the competing priorities of climate change and species loss?

Let’s say you worked at a university with alumni that were Nobel Laureates, and also had Heisman Trophy Winners? (The latter is the an award that a private trust gives to an athlete who plays collegiate American Football). Would you be cheesed off if there were statues of the athletes and not of the laureates? Here’s a petition you can sign to request statues honoring the Nobel Laureates who graduated from the University of Florida. “It’s about getting the word to the UF community that we value our academic heroes as much as our sports heroes.”

On a related note: 10 simple rules [to maximize your chances] to win a Nobel Prize.

An informative episode in the attribution challenges within the internet of today: An apology.

Here is an effective rhetorical takedown of the fear mongering “Food Babe“:

Hari’s rule? “If a third grader can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.”
My rule? Don’t base your diet on the pronunciation skills of an eight-year-old.

You can’t make this stuff up: Plagiarism guideline paper retracted for…plagiarism.

Ecologist Casey terHorst uses science to make the case for going veg. Or at least, less meaty.

The numbers in this report on non-tenure-track instructors are mouthdropping. In 2014, out of MUN’s 2,139 faculty staff, 997 were contractual, according to the latest auditor general report. Meanwhile, full professors at MUN are only required to teach two courses per term, and earn an average of $135,141, according to a 2010 Statistics Canada report. Associate professors come in well over the $100,000 mark, with assistant professors averaging $86,654. They also receive health and dental benefits, paid vacation and sick leave, and a pension plan.

Here’s what you “should” read.

I realized early on that many instructors teach introductory biology classes incorrectly. Too often evolution is the last section to be taught, an autonomous unit at the end of the semester. I quickly came to the conclusion that, since evolution is the foundation upon which all biology rests, it should be taught at the beginning of a course, and as a recurring theme throughout the semester.

“The scientific world is stunned by research which backs an Aboriginal legend about how palm trees got to Central Australia.” (I don’t know if “stunned” is the right word. But it’s interesting.)

The tiny island nation of Nauru, an eight-square-mile speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, was once one of the richest countries in the world, with a phosphate industry accounting for 80% of its economy. But around the year 2000, everything changed. The phosphate that had enabled many to live in affluence at home, buy houses abroad and send their children to expensive boarding schools was running out.

There is crying in science, and that is okay.

Just when you thought it was safe to run Generalized Linear Mixed Models. It is, but tune in for good caveats and approaches: For testing the significance of regression coefficients, go ahead and log-transform count data.

Small museums matter.

Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem? Man, everybody wants to pass the buck to the people who generate the applicant base. Nobody wants to work to build their applicant base or reconsider their evaluation criteria or process in a way that promotes equity. Sigh.

Chris Buddle, entomologist and Deanlet at McGill, is doing it right. He’s shadowing students to learn about their experiences and learn more about how to do his job well. I’m so bored of hearing whines about administrators who aren’t student centered, when I’d bet on average they’re about as focused on students as faculty, if not more so. (And no, I’m not going into admin for this reason.)

Speaking of which, the real reason college costs so much.

“Why would anybody would tally impact factors in the first place? Who has what to gain?”

Feeling unappreciated? Give yourself a boost and read what the critics wrote about The Beatles when they first came to the US in 1964.

A very useful list: Resources and Strategies for Recruiting a Diverse Faculty. If you’re about to run a search, please read this before you start the search.

FAQ: So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex [Wild]’s Photographs Without Permission. What Next?

One of those twitter hashtaggy things happened this week, in which a phrase was “trending” on twitter, when scientists shared “IAmAScientistBecause.” Some focused on the expressions of joy, but there were also some smug expressions of superiority.

When someone gets denied tenure for getting involved in political advocacy to protect the safety of women, they can wage a credible lawsuit against the university if someone in power actually suggests that pre-tenure advocacy is a bad idea. Like this situation at Harvard.

Our literature isn’t a big pile of facts. This is yet another really good thing from Scientist Sees Squirrel.

Have a nice weekend.

Why is so much of our discussion of higher ed driven by elite institutions?

Why has bioinformatics education failed?

The five biases pushing women out of STEM. One item that seems to be missing from the list is, “partners that don’t do an equivalent share of parenting.”

About a week ago, I came across a posting for a job that would be possibly the best fit ever for my skill set and interests with their needs. Huge genomic data acquisition efforts, with plenty of technological support, room for growth in a variety of new instrumentation and experimental directions – these are things that make me happy. You really couldn’t construct a more perfect “dream job”, and I’m one of a pretty small number of people that could even do it.

The catch – it’s in a state that is currently considering a “religious freedom” bill, and forecasts suggest that it will be one of the last 15 or so states to pass marriage equality. A year or two ago, it would have been really hard to pass up jobs in marriage inequality states. Today, I have options… I can choose dignity now.

“How I discovered 30 new species of flies in Los Angeles“. (And this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.)

To explore potential drivers of underrepresentation [in natural resource careers], we used a life-cycle analysis to review 55 scholarly articles to identify barriers and supports influencing career choices (i.e., personal, contextual, self-efficacy, outcome expectations) across 4 age groups…Exposure to nature was the most cited contextual barrier for all groups.

Here is a hell of a piece of writing in The New Yorker about what it’s like to be an adjunct and the effects of adjunct instructors on the lives of our students.

An open source, citizen-sciency library-centered project to figure out the relationship between heart rate and longevity. We know the story for mammals, but what about other vertebrates? This project needs data sleuths! This looks like it’d be good for a project for intro and non-majors bio courses.

A brief and brave piece about tenure denial, by Rev. Dr. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder with tips about what to do if you find yourself in this kind of situation. (Also, here’s an earlier thing of mine with more specific recommendations.)

“I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s in mathematics, all with a 4.0, and numerous published papers in major mathematical journals. I am a mathematical researcher in my spare time, continuing to do research in the areas of numerical linear algebra, multigrid methods, spectral graph theory and machine learning.” [And he plays for the NFL.]

For those keeping score in the battle over the role of inclusive fitness in the evolution of eusociality, here’s the latest round published a few days ago, in which the authors use the math of Nowak et al to rebut Nowak et al. I haven’t invested the time to give it a direct evaluation.

How awesome is it that there in an annual award of the American Library Association called the “Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity.”?!

…These are real requirements for a real job, not something made up by The Onion. I think that my favorite is the last one. [Leads and/or follows as circumstances require.] Combined with the other requirements, they are essentially saying, “we want the perfect faculty member, who knows what to do in all situations and, in the event that we decide that they are not doing the right things, knows that they were wrong and quickly starts doing what we say to do instead.”

If you work for your US university’s branch campus in Abu Dhabi, don’t say anything the UAE government doesn’t like, because they might not let you go back to work once you leave.

NSF is finally implementing publication access policies like the NIH has had for quite a while. Papers resulting from NSF support will have to be publicly available (without a paywall) one year after initial publication. That’s a good start.

Here is a sublime story about how entomologists tracked down a woman who published a single, wonderful, paper in 1968 on the biology of a group of beetles in their expertise.

Well, isn’t this an intriguing tweet?

You’d think UC President Janet Napolitano would have learned to be less coarse and more politic while dismissing student demonstrators.

It looks like pretty much every Irish scientist out there has signed a public letter to their government, published in The Irish Times, about the need for funding basic research in the sciences.

Test scores in my visual-communication course have gone up since I gave laptops the boot a year ago. Now I coach students on how to take notes longhand to help those who have not used that muscle much, because I am convinced that while laptops have a lot of good uses in the classroom, note taking is not one of them.

Here are some data showing how “speaking a second may change how you see the world.”

Here’s a cool shop when you’re buying a present for a girl: A mighty girl. (I have nothing to do with these folks, they didn’t pay me or anything, it just looks like a cool shop.)