So many great things came my way this week, I’ve had to unload them a week early. Enjoy!

A survival handbook for teaching large classes. This is good stuff.

Mad Max: Field Assistant

As a professor, here are five really simple things you can to do help single parents in your classes. Keep in mind you might have a single parent among your students but not be aware of it!

Maybe there is no such thing as renaissance person. Maybe these people are merely expert in an unrecognized speciality.

Simon Garnier explains how the big four in football made sports predictable. (For Americans and Aussies, he’s talking about soccer.) If you watch the EPL on occasion and enjoy statistics, this is a wonderful read.

Some months ago, a video about predatory ants carrying millipedes with daisy chains went viral. This inspired an investigation that has now gone through peer review, and the natural history story itself is mighty cool, and well worth watching and reading.

Five big ideas that don’t work in education. This is not gobbeldygook.

Speaking of certain kinds of ideas in education, Joan Strassmann is teaching statistics differently. In her class, understanding probability, distributions, and statistical concepts is getting passed over, so that students can jump right into knowing how to do analyses.

Oliver Sacks writes about the Day of Rest, as he sees his life coming to its last chapter.

The general secretary of the international Astronomical Union, and amateur butthead, chose to praise women by explaining that they have a special gift in being more caring and more dedicated educators.

That Netflix parental leave policy just got even worse. Not all Netflix workers will get unlimited parental leave.

Here’s your feel-good light happy human-interest story if you need one. A barber that gives kids free haircuts if the kids read to him.

Matt Might — who has a penchant for writing the best explainers ever — just wrote an inspiring “How to get tenure” piece. It’s most definitely worth reading (as are all of his articles on his site). He explains how he handled some tremendous challenges and stresses, and emerged all the better by focusing not on tenure, but instead on the transcendent things that really matter. (In that message, it bears resemblance to the story from a Harvard professor about how she got tenure by not worrying about it.)  I am reluctant about recommending this as a piece of how-to-get-tenure advice because on that count, it’s an a posteriori explanation. If you’re trying to decide about what really matters in life, then in my opinion Dr. Might is spot on. If you’re trying to decide how to handle your life balance as a pre-tenure faculty member, then this could be good advice. But it wouldn’t be good advice about how to get tenure, per se. If you can’t be happy and well-adjusted in the six years before tenure, then you probably can’t do that afterwards either. Dr. Might didn’t get tenure because he didn’t worry about it, he got tenure because he performed exceptionally. That exceptional performance happened either because, or in spite of, his insistence on the right priorities. Choosing family as a top priority is necessary to be happy and healthy and well-adjusted, but it’s not a ‘how-to’ for tenure. I don’t think that Might is suggesting that his recipe for tenure is one for us to follow in order to get tenure. I think his message is that worrying about bad consequences can prevent us from focusing on doing what is most necessary and most constructive. He’s saying you can get tenure without driving yourself insane by following academic norms, and if you reject those norms you can still get tenure. On the other hand, rejecting those norms doesn’t necessarily get you tenure.

Since I mentioned that Harvard professor ‘treat your job like a postdoc’ advice piece from two years ago that everybody but me loved, I might as well re-share my misgivings that I wrote back when it came out.

It didn’t make the rounds as much, but just as enjoyable as Might’s “How I got tenure story” is this one from Holly Dunsworth, which might have more directly practical utility for those of you on the tenure track.

What’s in John’s Freezer? A visit to the bird collection in the LA Natural History Museum.

Since I know a variety of people at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I’ve been hearing about the continued horribleness of their now-former chancellor, Phyllis Wise, who just stepped down (or wasn’t allowed to so she could get fired) because of a scandal emerging from the Salaita affair. That’s was the newly-hired professor who was fired before getting to campus because he said things on twitter about Isreal and Palestine that the Chancellor didn’t like. Anyway, Wise made a point of deliberately conducting university business on her private email because she knew what she was doing was wrong. Here’s a recent take on it, if you want the salacious details.

Fivethirtyeight (that’s Nate Silver’s shop, better known as the presidential election stats dude) has an explainer about p-hacking. It shows how you can come to essentially opposite conclusions using the same dataset if you look hard enough, and explains how people often come to erroneous conclusions because of the way they handle data and they way they think about their experiments. I’m planning on including it in my biostats course this semester.

The AAAS Vision and Change report for undergraduate biology education is out from a conference they held last year. I haven’t read it, it looks like a tome with more self-congratulatory content than constructive examples, but that’s just what I saw from a quick browse, so go ahead and make up your own mind.

This year’s Burning Man has a huge number of bugs. (Mirids, I hear.) And people are freaking out, but really there’s no reason to freak out.

You probably heard how Ashley Madison got hacked. Ashley Madison is a site that married people pay a not-small amount of money to, to find other married people so they can have sex with one another. Now a lot of people have access to all of the email addresses (and more) on their website. This will result in some interesting consequences, with victims well beyond the people whose names appear in the database. Here’s a rundown on what the consequences of this data breach will mean.

Biodiversity conservation: the key is to not eat meat. Just putting it out there. It’s hard to argue with the numbers.

Mike the Mad Biologists dons a tinfoil hat but, well, data are data. It is hard to argue with the numbers, and I didn’t scrutinize it myself but I am never willing to underestimate the depth of nefariousness in electoral politics in the US.

Here is a love letter to PLOS One – an overly optimistic summary of the perverse incentives in the academic publishing environment in science.

While we’re on perverse incentives, this piece in PNAS hits home:

When universities publically brag that we are “Xth in federal research spending,” it is akin to an airline proclaiming, “we use more gasoline than any other airline!” or “we spend more per year transporting our passengers!” Consider the appearance and potential consequences if other segments of the national budget advertised in the same way: “The Army outspent the Navy and National Guard combined in 2015!” These proclamations offer nothing about what the public received for its money. Although winning grants is an exciting and necessary benchmark for researchers, the public’s interest is the degree to which we advance science with this massive investment.

Writing a doctoral dissertation improvement grant for NSF? Here are some very useful pieces of information and tips, including actual reviews of successful and unfunded proposals.

This essay about how British universities pick students is a great companion to the thing that I wrote earlier about NSF graduate fellowships being a part of the inequity problem in science.

Why botany matters in college. When I have taught an intro course on the ‘evolution and diversity of life,’ I spent more time on the evolution of plants than the evolution of animals, despite being an animal person (and also, an animal myself). So much of what happens in this world is tied to understanding precisely how plants reproduce, and how it came to be that they capture oxygen from the air and convert it into tissue, and how the changes in the environment have driven the changes in the biology of plants. So many biologists really don’t get how the alternation of generations in plants happens, and what the various parts of plants are. Understanding this isn’t just knowing stuff about organisms, it’s about understanding how our soil and air is the way it is. How this Earth breathes.

About writing clearly in academia: “I start the class with an exercise. I take a random page from a prestigious scholarly journal and make them compute the average number of words in each topic sentence. Then I take a page from whatever Jill Lepore New Yorker article happens to be my favorite and have them do the same. The last time I did this, the average for the “prestigious” journal was 46 words (versus 15 for The New Yorker), a number so outrageous that, whatever goals the author had in mind, communication wasn’t one of them.”

Last, I wanted to provide a very short report after finishing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. It was a short read, but I still learned a lot from it. (I wrote earlier that it was “revelatory.” Then I read the quote on the back from Toni Morrison and found that she convergently used the term “revelatory.” So I’m a little proud of myself that I have at least I have that much in common with her.) There are two specific thoughts I want to share about this book. First, if you’re trying to get your mind around what it is to be a black man in the United States — or what it is like to raise a black son in these United States — then this book communicates that experience. Second, one thing I didn’t expect to find in this book, but was a major piece, was the transformative power of higher education. Coates’s life, and his view on the world, was changed by college. He is very frank and transparent about his own evolution. It’s amazing to see how professors and fellow students can change one another’s lives because of what a university is designed to be. I don’t think that is the point of his book, but as a person who works with college students all the time, it’s great to reflect on his story from that angle.

Okay, I said that was the last thing but it wasn’t. More on Coates: Here’s a great interview between him and Roxane Gay. She asked him about what it means to be an ally (as the term itself and how it is used can be not so helpful, as Alex Bond explains), and he summed up clearly why he’s not so jazzed about the ‘ally’ thing in a way that really put logical clarity to vague notions that I’ve been feeling. By saying that you’re an ally, that’s tacitly saying that it’s not your problem:

RG: How can allies best serve as allies? What is an ally? Are they needed?

TC: I don’t know. I think it’s probably terribly important to listen. It’s terribly important to try to become more knowledgeable. It’s important to not expect that acquiring of that knowledge — in this case of the force of racism in American history — to be a pleasant experience or to proceed along just lines. They certainly don’t proceed that way for black people. It’s going to be painful. Finally I think one has to even abandon the phrase “ally” and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.

Have a great weekend.

If this piece of writing doesn’t move you, then you must be a very very heavy object: Oliver Sacks, the periodic table, and mortality.

Museum dioramas are inspirational, if not educational. And “endangered as the animals they contain.”

Beatrix Potter was a mycologist.

You really can be an academic parent and “have it all,” so long as that notion of all is realistic. This is a moving and inspirational post from Tenure, She Wrote.

And for men to have it all, let’s realize that all includes being a responsible parent? Dads need to bring more of home to work.

Isn’t it amazing that Netflix is giving its employees unlimited parental leave? Well, no. That “unlimited” leave reflects a unhealthy work-obsessed environment that is not good for families. It would be truly healthy if they actually gave employees a year or six months or some specific time, rather than “as much as you think you need” which is not so good. Here’s an insightful take from the inside.

And what’s the more hideous thing about the Netflix policy? Only their fancy-dandy white collar workers get parental leave. What about the regular working stiffs in the warehouses? Fuck them, said Netflix.

What really is a food web, anyway? You talk to different people and they have fundamentally different notions about what one is. (And you talk to K-12 teachers, who often have food webs featured heavily in the curriculum, you get something even different!) Here’s a review about the evolution of the idea of food web in ecology.

The Ecological Society of America announced that it is moving its publications over to the mega-publisher Wiley. This doesn’t seem to sit well with some advocates of “open science” – this post by Russ Mounce seems to provide a full summary of the misgivings.

I don’t have those misgivings. I think the shift to Wiley will strengthen society finances, and keep things sustainable as the publishing industry evolves. I agree that it would be a very good thing for all scientific papers to be instantly available to everybody as soon as they were published, and that it is a bad thing that anybody hits a paywall whenever they want to access a paper. Ecology and its sibling journals (aside from Ecosphere) have always had a paywall, of course, and this paywall has actually been growing in size as subscriptions to the journal have been sliding. [Correction – all ESA journals have been, and remain, “green open access,” meaning that you can’t get them for free from the journal but authors can self-archive them. Which means you can get them for free from the author or from a site like google scholar which will find self-archived articles. This is ESA’s current deal with Wiley. So really, nothing has changed.] This switch to Wiley isn’t removing that paywall, but will allow libraries that have agreed to the evil Wiley bundle to be able to include ESA journals. So it’s anticipated that more people will be able to get Ecology than if the switch did not happen.  So why didn’t ESA just go open access instead of shift over to Wiley? That’s a remarkably naive question that doesn’t take into account the financial aspects of publishing and marketing a journal, and the razor-thin financial margins on which academic societies usually operate. I don’t think anybody can predict what the publishing landscape will look like ten years from now, and thought the big publishers like Wiley, Springer and Elsevier are going through what the music industry went through ten years ago, where things will evolve is hard to see. But going open-access would greatly increase author costs, and considering how many students and postdocs publish in ESA journals, it’s not financially reasonable to ask them to assume those publication costs (which frankly are more than the price tag associated with PeerJ). As things sort themselves out, I think ESA is doing well and ride the financial wave of the big publishers for a while, who actually don’t make a profit off of society journals anyway. If there is any real crime here, it’s not failing to go open access, which currently is not financially viable. It’s using the name of ESA to sustain the legitimacy of an endangered corporate financial predator.

Yes! Putting the Ph back in PhD

Here is an interesting short explainer about how the contemporary way we eat meat was driven by the US military.

A recently-finished undergrad has tips for new ones.

I just finished Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. (It’s funny, I was just about to buy it at the Festival of Books, but on an uncommon whim I decided against it. Then after moving away from the booth, saw it was in the stack of books my spouse bought. So it was meant to be.) Martin wrote a memoir about how he became famous as a stand-up comic, in an era when comedy clubs didn’t really exist. His insights about how he built his career, and how he took more than a decade to hone his craft, can be really informative to scientists. The way that you become popular as a comic isn’t that different than how you become popular as a scientist. Seven years ago, Mike Kaspari read the book right after it came  out and wrote a post about it. It’s no coincidence that the quotes that he pulled out convergently tugged at me.

The liberal arts degree has become tech’s hottest ticket, allegedly.

Some points for students about technology in the classroom. Here are some non-tech-phobic thoughts about how students might consider how they use technology in the classroom to help themselves learn, or do do well in class (which is not the same thing of course).

“To the [UW] Eau Claires of the world, I say, keep fighting. No disrespect to Madison, or Boston, or New York City, but sometimes things look different from here. It would be nice to see that acknowledged before terrible decisions were made.”

White dreadlocks as cultural appropriation.

How do we build a diverse scientific community? Here’s a place to start:

Latino women and Black men had the highest levels of discouragement— half in the sample for both groups.

And who were the worst offenders?

Their college professors!  Almost half of those pointed to their college professors as the chief source their discouragement, and 60 percent reported they experienced dissuasion in college. African-American women were dissuaded the most by their professors — an alarming 65 percent.

Essay questions written by a first-year instructor who does not have the time or wherewithal to do the required reading.

George Washington University — (I’m sorry, it’s actually The George Washington University) — is no longer requiring standardized test scores for applicants. Before you think it’s about increasing diversity, evening the playing field, and just generalized sanity, keep in mind that the more parsimonious explanation is that they’re just gaming the university rankings, by attracting more applications and increasing their rejection rate.

A very high quality and easy-to-follow explainer about the fact of evolution from the BBC. Good for teaching non-majors, or alienating your creationist family members on Facebook.

The story about a renegade fishing vessel chased around the whole world by people committed to bringing them to justice, and to stop the illegal exploitation of the world’s fisheries. My gosh this was a good story and also a great lesson about the loosey goosey state of things once you leave the land.

Here is a great well-animated 4-minute explainer video about El Niño. Which actually is not as simple as people realize

There was yet another op-ed in the New York Times that sought to mock the idea of a university, or something like that I guess. Forget the original, but this response is worthwhile.

Reddit gonna reddit: “I fabricated some data for a term paper. My professor wants to publish it with me. What do I do?” Just in case that thread gets deleted or certain things get removed, here’s the web archive of as of Thursday morning.

On being the only one in the room.

This is the best thing I’ve ever read about the danger of DWB, by Tressie Cottom.

Why IFLScience is anti-science

In a public relations coup, the meth lab explosion at the NIST has actually not been in the news! This is the only update I could find, which is intriguing.

Why we work so much. Accompanied with interesting data.

Wait, so General Chemistry doesn’t help you do more advanced chemistry?

People who work with arthropods in biodiversity and community ecology projects often fail to store vouchers. The crustacean people are particularly bad about it. This is problematic. (And yeah, I think I’m part of this problem.)

No victor believes in chance.

Why being a straight A student isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Suicide on campus and the pressure of perfection.

Most climate models have most of southern Florida underwater in a hundred years. Yet the people in Miami are acting like this isn’t even happening. It’s totally bizarre. And it’s particularly problematic because the whole city is on porous limestone, so levies and similar machinations won’t do the trick. Here’s a story from The Guardian about the state of denial in Miami, which already is experiencing major problems from the tides.

Classroom observations are only really useful if the observers are capable and appropriate for evaluating. Considering that almost no college faculty are trained in pedagogy, who is qualified to evaluate teaching at the university level?

Just in case you somehow haven’t yet seen the Key & Peele Teaching Center video:

And not least by any means, is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me. I’m halfway through it now, and I’m finding it revelatory.

Have a great weekend.

Some fundamental lessons from ten years of sciencing.

You know you want to look at this church shaped like a chicken.

A meth lab at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology exploded. I imagine more news will be forthcoming. I don’t know what is driving NIST employees in exurban Maryland to operate a meth lab.

A librarian is caught after having stolen more than hundred masterworks of art from his institution, and replacing them with his forgeries. His defense? Everybody else is doing it.

Workaholism isn’t a valid requirement for advancing in science.

When the end of human civilization is your day job. This is a great piece that discusses how scientists handle, think, feel, and discuss climate change, in Esquire. (Better than the testosterone-laden books-for-dudes list that came out in Esquire.) But the best thing I’ve ever read about how to feel and talk about climate change came from Hope Jahren.

The myth that academic science isn’t biased against women. This is an information-laden explanation why that PNAS paper (which claimed that the bias problem in hiring is over!) is just really off target.

There’s been a long-growing academic issue here in southern California that’s now amounted to a pretty big stink-up. USC has always been known as a place that has good athletic programs, but not so much for academic excellence, notwithstanding the fact that wealthy people who graduate from the so-called “University of Spoiled Children” often end up in powerful positions, and then go on to hire their fellow Trojans. Despite the social capital of USC, it’s alway been considered as an academic minnow compared to UCLA and pretty much every other major research institution in the region. (Not that I feel good about slighting one kind of fish over another.) But in the past decade, things have changed for USC, they’ve really stepped up their game in attempting to fix what was their miserable academic reputation. Lately, people are actually speaking highly of their academic programs. They’ve done this on a short time scale, and a big part of this strategy has been to absorb pre-existing facilities and programs. The latest poach is a research group from UCSD, that runs a huge Alzheimer’s research program. UCSD isn’t just letting USC take the whole program that easily, though. Says the provost of USC, “I don’t want San Diego to feel like the University of Southern California is being some threat.” This comes one year after USC attempted to subsume the Scripps Research Institute, in a secret deal with Scripps administration. The plan only ended at the last minute because someone leaked the news out to faculty before the deal was finalized. So, USC is basically trying to cash in its huge endowment to buy an academic reputation over a very short period of time. Which for people who care about reputations, I guess that’s fine, but the problem about doing this too quickly is that you end up screwing over people who are currently in the system.

So the career/editorial section of Science is just totally f’ed up. But Nature is noticeably less horrible. Especially this piece about how science professors need leadership training. So, so much this.

Also, this comment in Nature about improving undergraduate science education is a really great blog post. I mean, um, peer-reviewed publication in Nature. Same difference, right?

A book review of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra. I don’t have plans to get up to the tundra anytime soon, but the review sure makes me want to pick up this book.

Why it’s not a good idea to kill venomous snakes in your yard. Just imagine the productive conversation this would lead to on Facebook.

A listicle of ten myths about teaching computer science.

This is a good post about the need to recalibrate the professional expectations of those into graduate school. Grad school is research training and a low-paid job, and also preparation for a great number of other things, if you go about it that way.

David Raup recently died at the age of 82. If you’re not familiar with his contributions to our understanding of the history of life, this obituary is a great explainer.

What do climate deniers talk about when they meet and talk about climate? It’s all pretty weird, apparently.

This transcript of the conversation that led to Sandra Bland’s arrest is infuriating and heartbreaking. This is the first chapter of an actual tragedy. But if you read it line by line as you would a screenplay, then you can feel the hate and racism oozing from the police officer. What makes this all the more horrible is that this happens every day in America. Let’s keep paying attention to this, to emphasize that black lives matter.

On a related note, renowned putz David Brooks penned a confoundingly ignorant review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book. Here’s a great piece making fun of Brooks’s review. Here’s another one that explains how, if not why, Brooks is such a dumb person. I haven’t read the book itself, I am looking forward to it.

Are you heading to China but don’t know if the government firewall will let you use a certain website? Here’s a site you can use to test things out ahead of time.

How do you measure a scientist?

What happens when you talk about salaries at Google.

Have a great weekend.

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.