What happens when you get paid 18 grand from NASA to stay in bed for two and a half months?

Ever wonder what it’s like to remove your own appendix?

How should we be selecting our grad students? This study indicates that we shouldn’t be looking at stuff like general GRE scores, GPA, and the fanciness of the undergraduate institution. Well, duh. But it’s nice to have numbers to point to your graduate committee when you go to bat for a great student that they don’t want to pick.

Undergraduate tokenism at its finest, from the good people of Nature.

From Black Geoscientists (tagline: Geology isn’t just for crazy white people!), “What’s with all the blackity-black blackness all the time?!”

Building insect manipulators for working with museum collections, made of LEGOs.

A guide to Bayesian model selection for ecologists. “Our aim with this guide is to condense the large body of literature on Bayesian approaches to model selection and multimodel inference and present it specifically for quantitative ecologists as neutrally as possible.” Another interesting this about this paper is that it has just two authors, but six institutional affiliations. Huh?

The story of the non-tenure-track faculty member did some great research, and leaves people stunned because adjuncts aren’t supposed to do stuff like that.

Here is a very short and very forcefully on-point argument about why academics need to spend time engaging the public to shape policy.

This obituary for Colleen McCullough, neurophysiologist and author, tells a fascinating life story.

Here is a blog about people in R1 universities who are teaching at teaching-centered institutions to learn how to teach better.  It’s been around for six months, but I just caught wind of it. It’s really mighty awesome stuff. Here’s hoping for more of the same for good long while, and lots of great work coming from that end.

Here is a short article in Scientific American that explains the details of the absolutely horrific, and totally avoidable, disaster of the Nicaraguan Canal that is in progress. The article doesn’t mention how this is a Chinese canal, and how this is one piece of a big overall strategy of the Chinese government to become the primary economic force in Central America. I’m not saying the Monroe Doctrine is a good thing, but it’s interesting that people don’t seem to be noticing that it’s no longer in operation.

Can a tenured professor lose his job because of what he says on his blog? Apparently, yes. I’m not shedding any tears for him, though I am concerned about the effects of his actions on others. Something that hasn’t cropped up in this conversation, as far as I am aware, is the fact that he was tenured at a private religious institution, in which there is little to no transparency about retention and tenure policies. If he was unionized, I wonder if he’d be able to keep his job despite his horrible behavior. The mechanism that allowed the university to strip his tenure could also allow the university to do the same thing to a professor who did precisely the right thing but pissed off the wrong person. That he lost his job? Not a bad thing. The specific policy that allowed it? Hmmm.

this is what p-hacking looks like. (Beware: Don’t click through unless you are equipped to travel paragraph after paragraph through a desert bereft of capitalization.)

In defense of the p-value. This comes to you from Scientist Sees Squirrel, Stephen Heard’s new blog which has lots of good insights on perennial topics, brings up new important ones, and is really interesting and entertaining and deserves a big start.

In the last 15 years, ecologists have shifted from simple ANOVA models with a couple independent variables to models with 5-8 terms. Is this messed up, is it helping us discover new things? What should you be doing? A very interesting read, and, as always at Dynamic Ecology, don’t forget overlook the comments.

Swirl. “swirl teaches you R programming and data science interactively, at your own pace, and right in the R console!” I haven’t used it, it just looks interesting and user-friendly. Just passing word along. And like everything related to R, it’s free and open, of course.

If you’re interviewing for jobs, have you ever wondered or worried whether the order of interviews reflects initial rankings or final outcomes? Well, it probably doesn’t.

Last month, the groundbreaking Leopold Leadership Foundation picked 20 researchers as 2015 Leopold Leadership Fellows. Congratulations to them! I have no doubt that all of the Fellows are deserving of the honor and opportunity. I mentioned in November that they had a history of failing to include scientists from teaching-centered institutions. This year, the pattern remains, as just one new Fellow comes from a teaching-centered institution. (I didn’t apply, so I don’t have sour grapes about this.) I don’t know if they are failing to recruit applications from excellent environmental researchers at teaching-centered institutions, or if they are actively choosing against them. I do hope they make an effort next time around. It’s hard to lead from a position of exclusivity.

Important and Valid Point: Vilifying Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Kids Is Counterproductive

Counterpoint: The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works, with a dissection of the difference between guilt and shame.

A grimly hilarious illustration: I’m an Anti-Braker

A study in Harvard used GoPros to track actual lecture attendance in nine different courses, and finds that students skip class a lot. Here’s a presentation with the data.

Scientists need more non-scientist friends. This, so much.

Claussen pickles are crazy good. I attempted this facsimile, which comes close enough for me. Who would have thought they have fennel, cinnamon and allspice among everything else in there?

for links, thanks to Darren Boehning, Amelia Chapman, David Clark, Meg Duffy, Tugrul Giray, Karen Lips, Loreall Pooler, Neil Tsutsui.

This video clip showing aggressive mimicry by the Persian Horned Viper is amazing.

University Signs Slavic Languages Professor to Five Year, $52 Million Contract

Here’s a tremendously useful Guide for Scientists on Giving Comments to Journalists.

The Emu War:

It’s a problem when people don’t understand (or choose to not bother to understand) mathematical models of evolution.

“A perverse focus on research cash and high-impact publications threatens academics’ careers and the aims of science itself.” Well, duh. But it’s nice to see this in Times Higher Education, regardless of its obviousness to those who are scienceing.

Do brilliant things occur to you while you’re washing the dishes? If so, here’s the job for you: Associate Dean of Eureka Moments.

Three kinda famous-ish people (who I’ve barely heard of, who are known from making youtube videos), interviewed the President of the United States. One of them wrote about the experience, and it puts “legacy media” vs. emerging media in perspective.

Following that thread, Adrian Smith just had a paper come out about fertility signaling in ants. When the paper came out, he released a 4-minute youtube video that explains the paper for a broader audience. It’s quite good. You might know Adrian from such podcasts as The Age of Discovery, previously mentioned in these pages.

Also on the same theme: A science communication course. In the rainforest. I have worked with the people doing this course from various encounters over the years, and I can only imagine this will be a great learning experience. This is no surprise as OTS courses have a reputation for excellence. If you have the time this upcoming summer and you’re interested in “science communication,” check it out.

“I owe it all to Chabot College,” says Tom Hanks. (He’s a well-known movie actor, if you’re more of a Hank Green kind of person.) If you ever look down your nose at the community college in your neighborhood, please read this piece and then, please reconsider. By the way, the movie inspired by his time at Chabot College (Larry Crowne) was filmed on my campus. Yes, people were very excited that Tom Hanks was on campus at the time. Even if he does live just 30 minutes up the road. LA is weird that way.

The citation revolution will not be televised: the end of papers and the rise of data. This is more of a wish than a description of the future. But it does show a model of how, if people make it happen, that people can get credit for data. The end of papers? Umm.

A reading seminar where every student reads, writes and contributes to the discussion in class. Unlike the preceding link, this isn’t about a utopia, and is a lot more pragmatic.

Does the myth of the solo genius scientist contribute to imposter syndrome?

Holy moly, rice has a lot of arsenic in it. As people eating predatory marine fish should be worrying about Hg, it looks like maybe those of us eating rice might want to think about As. Brown rice has more dietary fiber, yes, but also a lot more As. Tradeoffs are everywhere, aren’t they?

What’s a “publication power-of-attorney,” and why should you have one?

A bunch of Australian journal editors got together and wrote a document explaining how there needs to be some kind of credit, someway somehow, for doing peer review.

Did you know that when Behavioral Ecology switched to double-blind review, it increased the proportion of female first authors? This makes me want to think more consciously every time I write a review, and every time I consider reviews as an editor. What are the specific forms of the anti-female bias in the reviewing process? Is this because the reviews are targeting the credentials of the author rather than the quality of the work, or because the perceived quality of the work is lower because of the gender of the first author? I am also curious if American Naturalist will have the same results years from now.

Why journals sometimes are slow processing papers: look in the mirror.

Do you know about Software Carpentry bootcamps? Here’s a reflection from an instructor. I don’t really know the people who do this personally, but they look like they’re doing amazing and effective work with the pure intention of empowering people with useful tools. If I had a critical mass of participants, I’d be all over this.

Darwin’s hypothesis about inbreeding depression is tested within Darwin’s own pedigree.

For links, thanks to Lee Dugatkin, Russell Graham, Nate Sanders, and a comment from the previous recreads post.

If you haven’t read it yet, Terry Wheeler’s post, “20 Years in the Professor Game: things I did right and things I did wrong.” is just so great. (I’ve been playing the game for just fifteen, but found that this really spoke to me and reflected the same things I’ve screwed up and the same things I’ve done right.) This post got a lot of attention after it came out, and rightfully so.

Piotr Naskrecki made a top-notch super-duper high quality video about the biology of human bot flies, filming the critters that he was reared out. This is the link to share with someone when you need to explain bot flies. (Of course, just because you tell students what to do with a bot fly when they get one, doesn’t mean that the’ll follow your advice.)

In public colleges, student tuition now contributes more than state funding.

Who are scientists? When we try to differentiate ourselves from those who aren’t scientists, we need to be honest and inclusive about all the different places, organizations and people that are doing good science. This is a great piece by Alex Bond.

The Royal Society drafted up a document to tell universities and PIs about how PhD students need to hear about career options while they are in grad school.

Here is a delicious and spot-on rant by Auriel Fournier: “‘At least they don’t seal the fire exits,’ Or why unpaid internships are BS.”

There was a nice article in Nature about the history of how R has evolved to become a standard statistical platform in some fields. It’s really an interesting story.

First day of class activities that promote a climate of learning.

American Naturalist has just gone double-blind! Now reviewers have to pretend that they don’t know which lab group produced the article that they’re reviewing.

Speaking while female. It’s important that men read this piece. Especially those who don’t typically care about these issues. If it helps, one of the two authors is named Adam.

California condors that have been introduced into the wild don’t get much privacy from the researchers constantly keeping tabs on them. Except, apparently, for this pair of birds that had a baby and raised it for nine months without any notice.

The Royal British Columbia Museum might not be hiring a new curator for their mighty nice and important entomology collection. Let’s hope they maintain this position, and give them some encouragement.

Buy some nice, and quite reasonably priced, paintings that were made by ants. And this is how they were made.

Are Black Colleges Boosting Minority Representation in the Sciences? This article in The Atlantic explains how under-resourced and under appreciated campuses are pulling the heavy weight in training the next generation of scientists. And they’re doing it by being collaborative.

This article in The Economist explains how World War II changed the field of statistics, and how statistics changed the war. Fascinating.

Here is a blog post that claims to have a list of the best research articles about the science of teaching and learning. I’m not in a position to decide whether that’s true.

A fun post by Meg Duffy about teaching ecology with Pablo Escobar’s hippos. And a nice illustration about how our lessons are taste the best when seasoned with current events.

Andrew Hendry wrote a great How To Do Statistics post. It’s full of all of the good opinions, at least in my book.

Maya Lin — who is famous for designing the breathstopping memorial to the Vietnam War in Washington, DC — has designed a memorial for all of the organisms that we have lost. What is missing.

Here’s an informative and example-laden post about how Undergraduate Journals Are a Good Thing. I’m not sure I agree, but this is still interesting reading. (I have a long list of posts that I haven’t yet written, and one of those is about how I think undergraduate journals might not be doing much good at all, or that the not-good outweighs the good.)

You know bar charts. You know box plots. Do you know violin plots?

What are the new frontiers in Animal Behavior? Here’s what an NSF-supported workshop thinks.

What it’s like to be an adult college student with ADHD.

Buzzfeed Science goes entomophobic. Having serious journalists at the masthead clearly doesn’t keep them from publishing muck.

Take a stand against abusive advising.

Academia has too many frickin’ mixers.

What’s the new low price of gasoline in the US? About 25 fatalities per day.

Posting a preprint before a paper is in press puts you at risk for being scooped.

The Myth of Learning Styles.

PLOS apparently is asking authors to provide personal bank statements in order to get consideration for a fee waiver. Since this blog post came out, PLOS said on twitter that they don’t ask for personal bank statements. But here’s the thing: they did. So who are we to believe, PLOS’s twitter account or the quotes in the blog post? I’ll take the latter. They didn’t seem to offer any subsequent explanation or apology. The lesson is: don’t submit to PLOS if you can’t afford the pricey page charges, unless you don’t mind sharing your bank statements with them.

Siobhan O’Dwyer explains how our academic work is treated like a mass-produced trinket, but it’s really a hand-crafted artisanal product.

Academic assholes and the circle of niceness.

Jeff Ollerton asks and answers, “What do academics do once the research is published?” He points out that a third of all biology papers are never cited, and explains what we should be doing to fix that.

The American Museum of Natural History has started a video series called Shelf Life that takes us into their collections. It looks promising.

“Although scientists of all ethnicities reported losing interest in faculty careers as their doctoral studies continued, women’s loss of interest was more pronounced, particularly for underrepresented minorities.”

For some links, thanks to Marielle Anzelone, Kate Clancy, and Matt MacManes.

In an intentional experiment in peer review, the organizers in a computer science conference discover that half of the papers accepted to the conference would have been rejected if the review process were rerun. (Note: in computer science, conference presentations are the meaningful currency of academic productivity, not journal pubs.)

The University of Alaska is suspending its chemistry degree, because it can’t find faculty to work there.

Two weeks ago, very few people clicked through on the really good Veritasium link to a short video about effective teaching. Maybe if I explain how great it is, more people will click through?

The two cultures of mathematics and biology. If you read this piece all the way through, then you’ll learn a lot about the deep and unfortunate division between biology and math as academic fields, and how much we are missing out on as a result of this divide.

Are black colleges boosting minority representation in the sciences?

9 major takeaways from a MOOC called “An introduction to evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching.”

How does segregation happen and what are two possible routes to promoting integration? The Parable of the Polygons is an interactive simulation that answers this question, which I wager will be interesting informative, even for those who feel like they have a conceptual handle on these issues.

Here’s a strong-emotioned take on the pitfalls and inequity in the pass/fail system. It raises some important points about how pass/fail courses give an additional disadvantage to students who are already disadvantaged.

“Because you will always have low observed power when you report non-significant effects, you should never perform an observed or post-hoc power analysis, even if an editor requests it. Instead, you should explain how likely it was to observe a significant effect, given your sample, and given an expected or small effect size.”

This study of hype in press releases will change journalism.

In the New York Times, a story about how “colleges reinvent classes to keep more students in science.” It’s nice that news about not lecturing during lesson time in class is getting more press. (By the way, if you’ve exceeded your free reads in the NYT, you can just circumvent that by going into your browser’s private mode.)

Just as a reminder for prepping your syllabus and lessons for the upcoming semester, Meg Duffy maintains an annotated list of videos that are great for teaching, which just got a number of new additions. (And no, this is not a “curated” list, not that she called it one.)

Best wishes for a wonderful 2015. For links, thanks to Chemjobber, Richard Lenski, and Corrie Moreau.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears re-mentioning. NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology has a superb and informative blog, DEBrief. The latest post is called: How to win over panels and influence program officers: advice for effective written reviews. If you’ve ever wondered what NSF wants to know when you’re writing a review and the best way to write one, this is what to read.

There is a useful and detailed “mentoring” section on the lab page of Anna Dornhaus, of the University of Arizona. These pages include a lot of links to other resources, separated for undergrads, grad students, and postdocs.

An open letter to parents of college students, from Hope Jahren.

Preparing students for class: How to get 80% of students reading the textbook before class. This is a peer-reviewed paper in a physics journal. But the abstract says it works just as well for biology courses. So there.

From Veritasium, so frickin’ good, a 7-minute video: This Will Revolutionize Education. It explains the history of dumb technological fads in education. The best line, of many, in this video: “The fundamental role of a teachers is to guide the social process of learning.” Totally worth your while, and worth even more the time of your administrators. If you can dupe your adminfolk to watch this, even better.

The invasive hippos of Colombia are getting fixed. Fixed, as in, “take Rover to the vet to get fixed.” This is not a small task. You knew about the invasive hippos, right? It turns out that druglord Pablo Escobar had two hippos in his private zoo. A boy and a girl. And then in the aftermath of the Escobar empire, they just sort of made their way beyond the Escobar estate. So far, these hippos have only suffocated one cow, to our knowledge.

Jeremy Fox had a post at Dynamic Ecology reviewing the various tools that we can use to detect plagiarism, in addition to the widely used Turnitin service. The comments on the post are also useful. (On my campus we use Turnitin, which is integrated with our online course management system. And it gets lots of exercise in our department.)

Scientists are not that smart. Science is about effort and creativity.

This is hilarious. A pair of annoying pundits were doing their annoying punditry on C-SPAN, and their mom called into the show. To scold them for being so annoying. The first thirty seconds are hilarious, just to see the looks on their faces.

How far do you go with collaborative coding? Simon Goring makes the point that when you’re the collaborator dude on a project, it matters that other people in the project can understand what you’re doing. On the other hand, the reason people collaborate with coders is because they provide specialized skills, but working to avoid being needlessly inaccessible is still important.

I apparently missed this great piece in TREE two years ago by Fischer, Ritchie & Hanspach: about the important of Quality of science over Quantity of science in publishing. Box 1 in the paper has a very specific “roadmap” to get academia beyond quantity. The road looks as navigable as the road to Mordor or the route in the Phantom Tollbooth, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the trip. Euan Ritchie puts this paper in perspective on his site.

What do obscenely inexpensive oil prices mean for the future of oil exploitation? To keep this place from becoming a furnace, massive amounts of oil reserves must stay in the ground, resulting in lost profit for people making money off of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a dilemma that as we become more fuel efficient and ramp up use of alternative energy sources, the demand for oil will drop relative to supply, resulting in cheap oil prices. Which’ll in turn make people want to use oil. Here’s a piece where we hear what Al Gore has to say about it.

There’s a new tree for birds, with a lot of interesting finds.The Avian Phylogenomics Project site, which manages to be both slick and useful. Among the key results are that what we’ve called raptors are, for sure, not a monophyletic group. And a lot, lot more.

This new field station built by the University of Chicago is a gorgeous structure. So purty that it was written up with a bunch of photos in the New York Times Home and Garden section.

One year ago (back when people would leave comments with additional recommended reads, boy that was great, hint hint), Wendy recommended the book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Well, I finally read it. It was really good. If there’s an aspiring naturalist in your life, especially though not necessarily a tweenish girl, this could be a nice present. And I just saw while preparing this link that next year a followup is due! That will be a nice read, I bet.

I recently put in my preorder for Rob Dunn’s next book, The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. I imagine it’ll be at least as half good as his last two, which makes it a must-read.

Please list comments with other great reads over the last couple weeks! For links, thanks to Kelle Cruz and Emilio Bruna. Note that posts will more sporadic over the holidays and beyond, in part because I’m away on fieldwork for half of January.

45 things I’ve learned about science since I was a student, by Rob Dunn. Knowing these things matters. Staying conscious of these things when it matters is even more important. Pretty much the best set of advice for science and life as a scientist I can recall ever reading.

American universities are experiencing a brain drain, especially the University of Texas.

Next year I’ll be able to wear this awesome women-in-STEM shirt designed by Elly Zupko. You can still order your own! The kickstarter was fully funded within a day, and there’s still almost a month left. Get in on it, and share this widely! I’m loving this constructive response to the sexist incident that interfered with the successes of the comet robot mission. It’s lot better than dudes using shrill insults.

Here is a particularly cogent argument against traditional grading systems. It’s in Robert Talbert’s blog on the Chronicle of Higher Ed site. The whole blog itself looks pretty good, actually.

A paper just came out in PNAS explaining that triclosan, the widespread antimicrobial compound that people like to put in soap and a whole other bunch of stuff, promotes liver tumors.

So, the story about how the Secretary Bird got its name might be apocryphal? The latest from Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

“It’s quite striking how a small number of “elite” labs function as gateways to the professoriate. We found that about 10% of all faculty members are members of the National Academy of Sciences, but about 60% of new faculty members did a postdoc with a member of the National Academy.”

The British Ecological Society just published the handiest, informative, and most useful Guide to Data Management in Ecology and Evolution. This goes looks like to be a good partner to another BES document, a so-excellent-it-might-be-perfect guide to peer review. Kudos and thanks to the good folks of the BES.

One down, hundreds to go. The University of Alabama at Birmingham is shutting down its football program. But it’s not a principled stand about the exploitation of student labor, the corruption in the NCAA or the fact that American Football directly causes severe brain injury and dementia. It’s just about saving money.

You might be wondering how a 25 g mouse can take down a 9 kg albatross chick, but I can assure you that a) it does happen, and b) it’s a big problem.

That and a lot more from bird guy Alex Bond, who has been chronicling extended fieldwork in Tristan de Cunha, the most remote group of islands inhabited by humans anywhere in the universe. This is a seriously underbiologized location. He’s been writing about his work there on his site, The Lab and Field, with a series of posts. Prologue; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5. The only reason to not read this is that you’ll get jealous at the adventure cool natural history.

Do you want the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands to shut down? Me neither! You can help prevent this from happening – which might be imminent – by contributing. And if you click through there’s a great image of Darwin-as-Santa. Is individual philanthropy of non-wealthy academics a reliable funding model for an important research station? Of course not. But as a stopgap measure to allow them to find their feet, it’s not a reasonable thing to request at the moment.

My great-great-aunt discovered Francium. And it killed her.

A nice obituary for Chespirito, the comic genius.

BioMed Central discovered at least 50 papers with fake peer review in several of their journals, in which authors recommended reviewers with email addresses that point back at themselves.

Bring back the dead with old ecology photos. While long-term ecological data are valuable, old photos can often provide things that you won’t get in a spreadsheet.

An organization that advocates vegetarianism did a big survey about who, how and why some Americans are vegetarian. The results are really interesting. As one of the 2% of veg people in this country, I’ve always been curious about the numbers of people who adopt – and typically drop – the veg habit, and their motivations and challenges.

Meg Duffy flipped her intro Bio classroom. And it worked out well. Find out why she’s reluctant to recommend it to others. (How’s that for clickbait?)

NSF has a three-month pilot forum to discuss graduate education. Want NSF to know about priorities and challenges that might shape future funding guidelines? It would be a good idea to participate!

My Vassar College faculty ID makes everything ok.

The Chronicle of Higher Edcuation has “created a booklet full of tips, trends, and ideas collected from news articles and first-person accounts” about How to Be a Dean.

The community of Imperial College London suffered a tragic loss with the death of Stefan Grimm. Why would an academic kill himself over the prospect of a looming performance review? I recommend we listen, very carefully, to Kate Bowles.

This is what happens if you buy a scam dissertation. It’s a long read that I heard was funny.

Conferencing with a kid, on Tenure, She Wrote. A great prescription in this post: “Treat graduate students like the adults they are.”

The campus alcohol problem that nobody (except Rebecca Schuman) talks about.

The site Biodiverse Perspectives publishes Flump every Friday. That’s not so much an insult, but just a fact. If you’re looking for even more links on Friday, try Flump. And, of course, Dynamic Ecology’s friday links.