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.)

Allen Orr wrote a masterful review of DS Wilson’s latest book on the evolution of altruism.

Jeremiah Ory has some spectacular advice non-advice for managing dual careers.

Quiz: Did a computer or a human write this?

from The Hawkeye Initiative.

How Eric Grollman came out of the liberal arts closet.

My 11-year old son Bruce just told me about the Hawkeye Initiative, in which the absurd sexualization of women in comics is highlighted by substituting particularly egregious images of women with sarcastic dude Hawkeye. (Who is Bruce’s favorite comic character, by the way.) Here is a two-year old article about the Hawkeye Initiative. (If you’re like, “which one is Hawkeye?” then he’s the one who was played by Jeremy Renner.)

According to a recent study, African Americans see little advantage from graduating from elite universities.

“I think we instead start to see in ecology what have already seen in other disciplines – rather than leave science, people will just leave. The US. I fear an ecological brain drain may be around the corner for the USA.” This is a really informative, link-filled, and important post by Emilio Bruna.

The chilling effect of mandatory reporting of sexual assault. An important read, especially if you are in a position to influence policy on your campus. (Actually, everybody is in a position to influence policy, but some have more individual power than others.)

Fundamental ecology is fundamental.

Why do we send so many of our best stories to journals whose editors are not accomplished, experienced, practicing scientists? Why do we give professional editors of journals that are not directly responsible to our community the authority to set the standards of our fields by deciding what gets published in top-tier journals? Most importantly, why do so many people serving on faculty hiring-and-promotion committees and grant review panels give these editors so much influence over who gets hired, promoted, and funded? Wouldn’t we, and science, be better served if we entrusted our best stories to journals with peer-editors whose authority is well founded, who have earned the respect of their peers, who are qualified to set the standards of the field? [and then this editorial goes off the rails and argues that journals should then be ranked based on the h-scores of the editorial board.]

5 Lessons Education Research Taught Us In 2014.

How misguided science fandom hurts actual scientists. This is pretty awesome.

Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.

For more and different weekend reads, Jeff Ollerton has started posting, “Something for the weekend”!

Here’s a nice piece with “career advice to young scientists” who are not planning to stay in academia. I’m not big on advice which is overtly labeled and construed as such, but this is a good list.

You might have heard that Sweet Briar College is closing up shop. This is a long-established, not-badly endowed institution that just couldn’t make ends meet. This does seem to be a cautionary tale, especially for small, private, rural institutions.

Did you hear the one about how humans have evolved tolerance to arsenic-rich water?

At every university, to the best of my limited knowledge, academic misconduct sanctions are handled on a case-by-case basis, and often subject to the preferences (or even whims) of faculty and administrators involved in the process. But not so at the University of Arkansas. They have a very detailed point system that standardizes how academic misconduct is handled throughout the university, ranking some kinds of misconduct as worse than others. I have no idea how often faculty go rogue and don’t use this system, but the fact of its existence is pretty striking, and maybe a broader model. Do other places have a system like this, or is Arkansas unique?

I picked up some of these links from the social media of Arvid Ågren,Meg Duffy, Auriel Fournier, Neil Losin, and Marianne Peso. Anything else of interest, please add to the comments! (People do follow links in the comments quite a bit.)

Gain a rare look into the brain trust at Nature to understand how they pick manuscripts for review.

Quiz: North Korean Slogan or TED Talk Sound Bite?

One journal bans null hypothesis significance testing. That’s right, they’ve banned the P value.

A look back on the time when a columnist for Parade magazine (the celebrity rag that comes with the Sunday paper) understood and explained math and probability better than university professors, who were proud to trumpet their own ignorance: “Maybe women look at math problems differently than men.”

We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.

There are probably a number of reasons that have contributed to the decline in field biology. These include the rise of molecular biology, the loss of staff competent and comfortable in the field, and the general decline in children getting outdoor experience. However, a key factor has to be that the skills involved have been distinctly unappreciated. In fact, we would argue that, in educational circles, this lack of appreciation goes much deeper. Educationalists have been guilty of formalising a gross undervaluing of the complexities involved in field biology. This has occurred through a naive adherence to an incredibly damaging dogma that has influenced so much of modern educational practice. Ironically, the dogma that has been so detrimental to field taxonomy is known as Bloom’s taxonomy.

This piece of writing has really made the rounds, but for good reason, so if you haven’t read this, now is the time to click through. Oliver Sacks discovered that he has terminal cancer, and this is his reflection on this discovery.

Shut Up & Write Tuesdays, a virtual writing workshop for academic folk.

Who is to blame for poor science communication?

How do you recruit new students into your lab?

Yet another gorgeous animation from the folks who brought you the stunning one about Alfred Russell Wallace. This is one is about Alfred Wegener.

Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline.

In praise of slow science.

The evolution catechism.

“The first rule for teaching ecology: “Get them outside; early and often”.

Current university courses on ecology often fail to persuade students that ecological science provides important tools for environmental problem solving. We propose problem-based learning to improve the understanding of ecological science and its usefulness for real-world environmental issues that professionals in careers as diverse as engineering, public health, architecture, social sciences, or management will address.

A Century After Being Cast into the River Thames, a Celebrated Typeface Reemerges.

For links, thanks to Allison Chapman, Lee Dyer, Karen Kapheim, and Steven Whitfield.

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.

There’s a site named Shit My Reviewers Say. Which has a bunch of heartless and unsubstantiated zingers that folks discover in their reviews. There are a several gems.

Wayne Maddison wrote a wonderful, brief obituary for Herbert Walter Levi, “one of the grand arachnologists of the 20^th century.”

There was an absurdly absurd op-ed in the New York Times that explained to us that all of the sexism problems in science are fixed. This was based on data from an not-yet-in-print paper in a social science journal. I’ll spare you reading it, but I do think the response from Emily Willingham is worth your time. Continue reading →

• “If you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t say it in an anonymous review.”

• Boat parts or names of unvaccinated children? A quiz.

• I’m not a big fan of crowdfunding, because of the asymmetries in who gets money. And I’ve seen firsthand that expressed need sometimes doesn’t match reality. Caveats aside, I really like this one: Planting Science, which is about bringing working scientists into classrooms to mentor students and support science teachers. And because it’s about plants.

• Michael Balter writes, “Why I have taken a leave of absence from Science: to protest the abrupt firing of 4 colleagues.

• Melissa Wilson-Sayres is doing a huge service by writing up summaries of the information sessions that her university is running for new faculty. The latest is about how to deal with teaching. The part about Creating and Authentic Model of Authority is so spot on, especially if your appearance might suggest that you’re not much older than your students.

Continue reading →

• Papers that triumphed over their rejections. How world-changing papers by Fermi, Krebs, Higgs, Margulis, Brockman, Mullis and more were rejected by Science or Nature. It’s fascinating to see the rationales for rejecting these manuscripts that, in hindsight, are so huge and important. By Nikolai Slavov.

• The new “What if?” book by Randall Munroe of xkcd is spectacular. I think it’s the best science education book of the decade, because it’s so fun and so chock full of applied science. This would be an amazing book for a physics class. Or for yourself. Or your kid, tween and up. Continue reading →

image by Tom Murphy VII

• Here is an especially gorgeous and fascination-inducing natural history site called Corner of the Cabinet.
• This essay called Change the Tenure System came out at the start of the year but was just brought to my attention. I think it’s the most concise and spot-on definition of the problems and false assumptions built into how universities grant, and don’t grant, tenure. One part includes the prescription: “Let’s NOT pretend that bias does not exist.” More recently in the news, a study came out showing that – after controlling for research productivity, women in sociology and computer science are half as likely to get tenure. Yes, this is a big problem.

• A well-produced 2-minute video by L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science about why science needs women.

• On avoiding overwork: “I’ve pretended I have a baby at home — even though I don’t — in order to compartmentalize my teaching”. Continue reading →

• Editorial boards of ecological journals are far less likely to have people who principally work with insects, compared to other taxa. Simon Leather runs down the numbers for us.

• Here is a great site for students about the Anatomy of a Scientific Article. Looks like great reading for students in lower-division and starting upper-division coursework. Continue reading →

• When editors reject manuscripts without review, does this decision indicate manuscript quality? This study says “no.” 

• “The best option of all may be the second-tier colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke.” Umm….

• The National Academy of Sciences just came out with a report on the status and future of field stations. If you’re a field scientist, this is an important read.

Continue reading →

• Setting boundaries for summers when faculty are not paid.

• Whoa. A “peer review ring” was caught and sixty papers were retracted. I’ve joked about such a thing before, but never truly thought that something like that would actually exist, especially on such a large scale. Considering the difficulty in detecting such a thing, it really makes you wonder how common this actually might be. This clearly can’t be the only one.

• “Randomized data showed similar patterns.”  You know those rhythmic courtship songs of Drosophila? Don’t bother, they don’t exist. They were merely an artifact of a sound analysis methods.

Continue reading →

• The EEB & Flow has provided a spot-on flowchart to help you produce the ultimate introduction to your next ecological manuscript.

• How exactly did you prepare for a conference presentation before the powerpoint era? What the heck do you put into a slide carousel? Check out the comments on the post about conferences from last week.

Continue reading →

• “The problem isn’t the technology–it’s the way we elicit students’ attention.” –Ban Disconnection, Not Laptops

• “How to search your hotel room for bed bugs,” written by an entomologist who knows how to break it down for non-entomologists. For starters, put your luggage in the bathtub at the outset. Continue reading →

• The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation is advocating for the reproduction of classic experiments. Right out of the gate, the Executive Director of ATBC (Robin Chazdon) and the Editor-in-Chief of Biotropica (Emilio Bruna) are cooking up a plan. I think this rocks.

• Scientific B-Sides brings to you the Four Stages of a Project infographic. With pithy observations and useful advice. Continue reading →

• A worthwhile manifesto: “Why I teach Plato to plumbers.”

• An exceptionally well-told story, of a too-uncommon interaction, by Valéria M. Souza, “Can you get me into college?” You really will have appreciated having read this story. Seriously.

• If you liked stories as good as the one in the link above, try picking up a copy of one of the back issues of The Best Nonrequired Reading series. For several years, it was edited by Dave Eggers with a bunch of high school students in San Francisco who found amazing pieces of writing and compiled a volume. (The most recent, and final, volume apparently had Michael Chabon’s kid in the group.) But I don’t think all of the participants came from such a background, given the mission of the 826 Valencia writing center where the work was done.

• Have you wondered exactly how corrupt football coaches always get away with funneling money under the table to their players without getting caught by the NCAA? This long-form article explains the intricate scheme in great detail, and is fascinating.

• Students totally love it when we distribute lecture powerpoint files to help them study. Here is a particularly cogent argument by Chris Buddle about why this is inadvisable.

• Measured thoughts on how we share links. David Perry suggests if you choose to share links with others via social media (facebook, twitter, pinterest, and all the others), it is more thoughtful to share original content from the little guys, instead of that one link that everybody sees over and over again. For example, in the last two days, I would wager that you’ve probably already seen at least one link to that cat who saved the toddler who was being attacked by the dog. Which is why I’m not linking to it here. Even though it was interesting. I’d rather do everything I can to get you to read that story by Dr. Souza that I linked to up above.

• There was what I thought was a great post in Dynamic Ecology this week by Angela Moles and Jeff Ollerton, about the oft-assumed but unsupported notion that the tropics have stronger and more specialized interactions than in the temperate zone. The discussion in the comments is worthwhile, too. One of the commenters who works on this topic, Carina Baskett, took exception to not just calling this topic a Zombie Idea, but also to any claims that there are Zombie Ideas. She wrote a rebuttal on another site. Baskett presents a very different vision about what scientific debate should look like on the internet. She wrote that Moles and Ollerton were “irresponsible and polarizing” and used “inflammatory language.”  Whereas, I just didn’t see that in a case of Rashomon. Baskett saw that Moles and Ollerton were trying to quash debate and suppress ideas from people such as herself, whereas I saw the whole point of their post was to generate ongoing discussion in the scientific community. Of course if authors are taking a stand on one side of a scientific issue, they argue for that point with the best arguments they can muster. Baskett doesn’t think she was outargued on the science, but rather that the authority of the blog has the ability to unfairly prejudice the scientific populace against her work. Without using the phrase, she essentially argued that academic blogs are bully pulpits, and implied that the authors held a claim to “the final authority on how to define, test, and interpret an area of science.” In other words, science bloggers should refrain from certain forms of argumentation because they are unproductive. I never would have anticipated that Moles and Ollerton post would drive a researcher on the topic to “cry foul,” as Baskett wrote. So, it seems I have a blind spot about certain ways in which people can get touchy about academic discussions in blogs, even when written in a collegial and professional manner. Which makes me wonder how often others think I’m being adversarial — or even working to squash discussion — on the occasions when I’m actually trying to engender discussion and be inclusive. I’ve written a lot of opinions about how I think science should be done, how I teach,  what approaches to teaching are more efficient or more effective, and on scads of other things. I clearly come from a certain point of view, but on any academic or pedagogical topic, I mean to convince others with argument rather than shut down the arguments of others. And I readily see that what works for me can’t work for everybody. Looking at Baskett’s response to Moles and Ollerton, which I never would have anticipated, makes me wonder if there is anybody out there who thinks that I use this site as a bully pulpit, when it is intended as a town square. If I need to shape up and be more aggressive in inclusive language, I’d appreciate the input. Also, please share any other interesting links you wish, just in case you feel compelled to share that cat-saving-the-toddler-from-the-dog video.

For links, thanks to HK Choi and Cedar Reiner.

• Here is a summary of a study that tracked time budgets of faculty members. I find it to be shockingly spot on, though I have made an effort to not work for more than a couple hours on weekends.

• On NPR, Frank Deford had an insightful, if crotchety,  three-minute piece on changes in the perception of sports and its reporting. You can read or listen to it here.

• The urban legend was true, about Atari throwing unpurchased copies of their famously horrible E.T. game cartridges into the landfill.

• Last week, nearly a score of Sherpa mountaineers died in a single event, while establishing a climbing route for their clients paying for a route up to the top of Mt. Everest. This tragedy has fueled the long overdue conversation about the ethics of paying people to put their lives on the line for the glory of reaching the top of the world. The climbing season has ended as the Sherpas have taken time to reflect and mourn their losses. Of course, you can always climb if you’re willing to risk your own life while carrying your own gear up the mountain. The Sherpas now have published a rather moderate list of demands to make the situation a little less exploitative.

• Dynamic Ecology ran four posts this week, all by Meg Duffy, about stereotype threat and what we can do to promote the development of all scientists. She provided many simple, concrete, useful and easy recommendations about what we can do about the problem. The first post is an introduction to the stereotype threat. The second one says what we can do to counter stereotype thread. The third explains how some people avoid engaging in these issues for fear of being criticized, and the fourth is a transcript of a Neil deGrasse Tyson remark about the path of greatest resistance as black science student, from a panel discussion that went viral last week. Every post is not only interesting, but also important. The talk:action ratio on this topic by individual PIs is outrageously low, and by reading these posts, we can learn how to do better, regardless of where we work.

• You presumably heard last week that the US Supreme Court decided that affirmative action is, or at least can be, illegal, in a 6-2 decision. The dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor is, in the literal sense of the word, epic. It’s definitely worth your while to read the original document. The bunk by Scalia, Roberts and Breyer precede her statement, which starts about halfway through the document.

• In case you’ve somehow missed it, you might want to ask: Has The Whale Exploded Yet?. But it looks like it’s deflating non-explosively. I’m sorry to disappoint you.

• Tomorrow (the first Saturday in May) is Free Comic Book Day! Head to your local comic store! The more people you bring, the more free comics you get. There will be a line, and it probably will be worthwhile, if only to savor the company of the characters in line.

• Along the same line, I just read the 14-year old book Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud. (This a followup to the classic required-reading book, Understanding Comics). It’s ostensibly about the business of publishing comics, the conflicting interests in comic publishing, the emergence of online comics, and is full of ideas about the causes and consequences of an oligarchy of for-profit publishers. While this might not be fully relevant to the comics industry anymore, oh my GOSH the parallels with current state of affairs scientific publishing are remarkable. I think anybody wishing to get a fresh outside perspective on the relationships among authors, funding agencies, publishers, open access journals and the executives running for-profit publishers really would benefit from reading this. I might write a post about it in the future, but that shouldn’t stop you from buying this book. (I got mine used at Goodwill for two bucks, but you can get a copy for 6 bucks online.)

• Are you Just starting out on your dissertation? Why not write it up in comic book form, like Nick Sousanis?

• I added The Wall of The Dead, hosted by Richard Conniff, to the blogroll. It is a memorial listing naturalists who have fallen in the line of work. I regrettably report the addition of Subramanian Bupathy to the list, as Madhu Katti reported this week on twitter. Dr. Bupathy was the Head of Conservation Biology at the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History. 

• Google tries to have it both ways when it comes to geopolitical boundaries. Where does Russia start and where does Ukraine end? That depends on your IP address. They want to tell the truth, but not if it involves pissing off Putin, I guess. If Google is so craven in a situation like this, then we sure are in trouble.

• Holy hell. As oversight fades, schools in southeastern USA are resegregating. This is a jawdroppingly factual article in The Atlantic. Here is a short interpretation with a key excerpt from the article. The bottom line is that if you care about the advances tied to the Civil Rights movement, I recommend knowing what is in this article.

• Simon Leather wrote about what it’s like to be the editor of a journal, as he’s done this quite a bit..

• This is an important post by ZL “Kai” Burington about being trans in science. “The personal stuff is none of your business. But I feel this is important, so I’m breaking the rules… By being visible I am showing other students that they don’t have to feel anxious about their identities. I can be that role model. I can relay my positive experiences. In the words of the Trevor Project, ‘It gets better.’ It is getting better.”

• Meg Duffy has a really important point about a completely outrageous situation with the NSF Waterman award, and big fancy awards in general.

• Here is a nice column in Salon with a title that speaks for itself: “David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture”. The notion that culture can be ruined is short-sighted, but otherwise I thought this was thoughtful. If you’re not yet familiar with David Foster Wallace, please check out this year-old post of mine about him. It has an embedded 23-minute audio which is nothing short of incredible. (By the way, he started out as faculty at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale before going to Pomona College. Two student-oriented teaching campuses.)

• This is a informative interview with the author of Bowling Alone, entitled, “America is moving toward a caste society.” If you’re a scientist prone to amateur sociological interpretations of what’s happening in the US and beyond, you’d love Putnam’s work because it’s so rich with data. (As a non-sociologist, I have found his arguments convincing.)

• When I was in college, the term “divestment” referred to shifting university investments away from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa. Recently my alma mater misspent its political capital “divesting” from assault weapons. Meanwhile, facing the most critical issue facing humankind at the moment, Pitzer College just divested from fossil fuels. Let’s all be like Pitzer.

• Honor codes aren’t what they used to be, or at least what others imagine they used to be like.

• Once again, BuzzHootRoar rocks it with Animals In Spaaaaaaace! (Lordy I sure hope everybody gets that Muppet reference.)

Note: this weekly feature is transitioning to a biweekly feature (meaning in this case: every two weeks). This is a great crop over the last week, but I think I can have a better list by doing it less frequently.

For a link, thanks to Mark Martin.

• “Should I be a bio major?” “What do I get out of a biology degree?” I just printed out this response to hand out when I get asked this question.

• Heads up: Do not trust Microsoft Excel, whatsoever, with dates. It doesn’t know how to handle them.

• EO Wilson writes a blog post, about spiders.

• Simon Goring tells us what it’s like to interview for a permanent research position with CNRS. This job is like a tenure-track position but with more latitude. It turns out the whole interview is just a very brief conversation. Here is a post before the interview and here is one after the interview.

• This column by Meghan Daum about David Letterman’s legacy was incisive and and explains how his flavor of wit and irony foreshadowed (if not modeled) our contemporary media environment. If you remember watching Late Night in his early days, you might find her column enlightening. (And pretty much everything that Meghan Daum writes is designed to view culture by piercing through superficiality. You’re lucky if your local paper carries her columns.)

• This weekend my family installed a Little Free Library — the picture of it is below. It’s accessible from the sidewalk, and people can come by and grab a book for free, and drop books off if they wish. It’s only been up for a few days now, but a few books have appeared and one’s disappeared. There is a low-to-moderate about of foot traffic by our place. As word gets out, we’re hoping it thrives. Do you have one in your neighborhood? Check out this map to find out. And look at the Little Free Library site to look into hosting one yourself.

Little Free Library Charter #12221, photo by T. McGlynn

For a link, thanks to Bug Gwen.

• Pseudoscorpions are awesome. I mean, literally, they inspire awe. Here are ten facts about pseudoscorpions including some great photos of these tiny creatures, too.

• How are highly ranked liberal arts schools different from the rest of them? This post on Memoirs of a SLACer nails it.

• You may have heard about some furor about a joke by Stephen Colbert and the Washington Redskins that infuriated some members of the Asian-American community. I thought most responses were two-dimensional, but this bit by Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker had useful surface texture and an interesting take-home message. For the basic summary of what happened NPR did a great job.

• There’s a great new article in BioScience about the importance of Natural History, with Terry Wheeler as senior final author. It got written up in Nature, too. [update: it turns out W is just near the end of the alphabet.]

• Robert Reich has an excellent short article explaining how, globally and locally, the emergency of tribalism is declining the ability of nation-states to govern.

• Thanks to a survey at the Molecular Ecologist by Jeremy Yoder, we now know who signs reviews and who doesn’t. It turns out that tenure-track faculty are more apt to sign. Less senior academics and tenured faculty? Not so much.

• Richard Sherman comes from Compton, right next to my campus, and he graduated from Dominguez High School with a GPA greater than 4.0. He was the first person from Dominguez High to go to Stanford on a scholarship in twenty years. He graduated from Stanford in 2010, and then got a job with the Seattle Seahawks, playing football. He grew up with another football player, DeSean Jackson, who was just fired from his football team (in Philadephia) because of alleged “gang ties.” This situation is pretty much full of crap. Sherman’s explanation and response to this situation is golden. I don’t even watch or care about American football, and I think this is an important read.. (Especially for me, because this is is exactly the kind of crap that is targeted at my students as well.)

• In which Michael L. Smith uses the peer-reviewed scientific literature as a form of performance art. Otherwise, I don’t know why one would intentionally kill a honey bee by having it sting one’s own scrotum, among other body parts.

• If you are a fan of biodiversity, natural history and wrestle with the balance of experimental and observational approaches to understanding nature, I bet you’ll be infatuated with this essay called A New Age of Naturalists, by Rachel Whitaker in the November 2011 issue of Microbe Magazine. Yes, there is a publication called Microbe Magazine.

Thanks to James Waters, and Jen Biddle for links. Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

• Southern California is the land of palm trees. But also the land of one sad and miserably lonely coconut palm.

• The Annual Review of Public Health just published an article with a detailed comparison of many kinds of popular diets and dietary choices. Here’s a writeup of this article from the pages of The Atlantic. The upshot is that Michael Pollan turned out to be right, if only by accident: eat unprocessed foods, mostly plants, and not too much.

• Need some science jokes?

• You know those stupid quizzes, like “which character are you?” Here are two non-stupid quizzes about biodiversity featured in a post by Holly Menninger.

• Did you know that the football huddle was invented by deaf football players so that the other team wouldn’t steal their signals?

• Charley Krebs and Judy Myers have a provocative blog called Ecological Rants. A post by Krebs that caught my eye was about how we might reconcile classic methods in community ecology with the radically different approaches that microbial ecologists must use to ask the same questions. A conversation on twitter was interesting and well as the comments on the post itself.

• In a literature class, there are times that you or the students might be reading text out loud. So, how do you handle it when the text you are reading is written in dialect?

• It’s wonderful to have quality administrators running things. But, the traits that would make a person a good administrators are also the traits that would inhibit a move into administration. I really liked this list of five reasons that helped Chris Buddle choose to move into admin.

• It’s reassuring that the former Secretary of Homeland Security, now running the University of California system, is sour on online education.

• I thought this site featuring horrible old books found on the shelves of libraries was hilarious.

• A paper just came out in PLOS Biology showing exactly how flies fly. It comes with some spectacular animations of fly thoraxes and the musculature associated with wingbeats. I’ll be psyched to share this the next time I get to teach insect biology.

• Forget doodle polls. When trying to schedule a meeting, When Is Good is way easier and better. This sounds like an ad, but it’s not. I just find doodle to be only slightly more convenient than a thousand emails, and this site is way easier.

• I’d like to bring to your attention the site Memoirs of a SLACer, by a sociologist in a small liberal arts college. That is, if you aren’t already familiar with it, as it’s been around for more than five years!

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For links, thanks to Rebecca Weinberg and Trevor Branch, and also thanks to my departmentmate HK Choi, who got me to start using Markdown. Next, I’m going to get all github and figshare on you, shave down to a handlebar mustache, and pop open a can of PBR.

The Guardian has written an article lauding the unheralded contributions of taxonomists and why their work is so essential. And it’s timed for the arrival of Taxonomist Appreciation Day on Wednesday, March 19th!

The gorgeous work of BuzzHootRoar!

Be sure to check out the illustrated taxonomy puns that have been coming out all week at BuzzHootRoar! All in preparation for Taxonomist Appreciation Day! Buzz, Hoot and Roar have topped themselves, and I am humbly appreciative that they’ve picked up the mantle of evangelizing the celebration of TAD (that’s Taxonomist Appreciation Day). They made their five illustrated puns into postcards, too! If you want to buy them, drop them a line by direct message on twitter or email. I’ve got one on my office door, and others in the mail to my favorite taxonomists!

College is expensive, but the non-wealthy rarely pay list price. How much does college really cost for you? Here’s an interactive featuring showing what people actually pay at every college, broken down by family income levels. This is fascinating stuff.

Powerpoint is a bane of education. This point was illustrated in a slide show by Rebecca Schuman so well, I bow to her achievement.  Here’s one line: “Powerpoint and its imitators have become the Comic Sans of instructional tools.”

Michael Hunsacker does biomedical research on autism and other neurodevelopment disorders, to make a difference in the people’s lives and the quality of their care. He just jumped from that track to take a job as a para-eduactor to work with children at a local elementary school. His piece explaining his motivation for this change is affirming and moving.

With the new Cosmos show, I got to thinking about the records that we stashed on Voyager 1, still flying away from us, beyond the solar system. We (as a species) put a golden record on the machine, to communicate what our planet and its people are like. Here’s an article about how the contents of the record were selected. And here is an over designed site that features the contents of the record itself.

We should be teaching calculus in Kindergarten.

Why we need to be conscious of white male classroom privilege.

In the United States, Major League Soccer is going through the second week of a referee lockout. Not all of the scabs replacement refs haven’t quite been up to snuff. The referee union distributed a big fat booklet with a one-page profile of every replacement ref, with a big photo and a list detailing their (lack of) MLS experience. 

How do people become less racist? Breadth of experiences, travel, and lots of other things, including reading literary fiction.

On a related topic, how can we parse out political opposition to President Obama and strategic racism targeted at the President? I found this piece of writing to be very insightful and carefully constructed.

Do you want your papers cited more? Should you phrase the title in the form of a question?

Behavioral biologist extraordinaire Bernd Heinrich is a world class runner. Here’s a profile of his running career.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology just launched a comprehensive and attractive outreach site about the biology of birds. It’s cool for everybody, and particularly for families and teachers of all ages, as well as non-majors and majors courses.

There is a great video series called The Brain Scoop, by Emily Graslie, which you might be familiar with. Just as interesting, I believe, is this article in the Chicago Reader about how her path from majoring in studio art towards museum education. (I liked this story, myself, in part, because my spouse also was a studio art major who also became a kickass museum educator.)

Be careful which classes you take at Harvard. You might not be allowed to say even a single word in class, when a MOOC is being recorded.

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For links, thanks to Bashir, Rob Dunn, and Kate Bowles. Have a great weekend, and feel free to add new links in the comments.

• There’s a paradox or a conundrum or dilemma in reckoning with rapid climate change that we are causing by dumping so much CO₂ back into the atmosphere. How do we personally approach the magnitude of the crisis, and what do we say to others about it? Hope Jahren nails it. Bravo.

• Jeremia Ory wrote a couple posts with some really interesting stats about the NIH R15 grants, traditionally the mechanism by which faculty at small teaching institutions have been funded. This is the first one and this is the second one. I thought both were really interesting and I’m not even in an NIH field.

• I just learned about this pretty cool blog with very specific and workable ideas for teaching non-majors biology.

• Here’s a provocative interview with Philip Roth, the great American novelist, in the New York Times. He decided to stop writing novels last year, and since that time, has re-read all of his 31 novels. He has some really good insights into his own life, our country, and what it means to be a member of our species.

•  When your course deals with sensitive topics, do you put a trigger warning in your syllabus to prepare students? This week, there were two insightful pieces on this topic, first by Tressie Cottom and the other was by Good Enough Professor. They might not say what you expect them to.

• This essay about why faculty members work more than they need to made the rounds this week. It doesn’t have any new brilliant insights, but it puts the ideas all together in a way that makes a lot of sense.

• There is an informative and depressing interactive feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education that demonstrates exactly how much our nation has pulled its investments into higher education over the past 25 years.

• Here’s a nice short article, accompanied with great images, about When trilobites ruled the world, also from the New York Times.

• There has been continued discussion this week about the asymmetries in credit for the use of previously published data. The comments on Monday’s post were interesting. To date, the best thing I’ve read was this post on Simply Statistics, including the following paragraph:

I’m completely sympathetic to data generators who spend a huge amount of time creating a data set and are worried they may be scooped on later papers. This is a place where the culture of credit hasn’t caught up with the culture of science. If you write a grant and generate an amazing data set that 50 different people use – you should absolutely get major credit for that in your next grant. However, you probably shouldn’t get authorship unless you intellectually contributed to the next phase of the analysis.

For links, thanks to Stelio Chatzimanolis, Dorit Eliyahu, and Barrett Klein.