• Have you always wanted to trash (or praise) a paper publicly? Check out PubPeer, “the online journal club.” All of the comments also show up in PubMed, too.
• Just like nearly every other fad in education, “flipping” a classroom is not really an innovation and not a big frickin’ deal. This is explained really well by Rebecca Schuman in her column in Slate. (Yes, Slate is click-baiting pablum, but everything Schuman has written there rocks. If you want a reality check on issues in higher education, and you are a twittery person, follow her at @pankisseskafka.)
• I learned a number of things in this essay by Tricia Matthew, about Teaching While Black.
• It’s conventional knowledge that the increasingly competitive job market has increased the time it takes for a postdoc to land a tenure-track position. Surprise: that’s flat-out wrong. At least in my field. For more than a couple decades, the mean PhD-to-tenure-track duration hasn’t changed at all, and is just under 4 years, among ecologists those who start tenure-track positions. Here are the data (it’s a paywalled pdf.)
  
• Don’t forget that Taxonomist Appreciation Day is coming in less than a month, on March 19th! To warm us up, here’s a heartwarming and science-laden post by David Maddison called The Legacy of a Taxonomist.
• If you’re thinking about taking someone else’s poop and shoving it up your butt, be careful, because there’s a growing call for government regulation.
• What does the largest bat in the Neotropics eat? Other bats! Here’s a video of this discovery, and be sure to turn the volume up for crunching sounds. [update: old fact, just a new video. thanks to Dan Janzen for setting this straight.]
• New York City has some great wildlife, especially ants. Now there’s a great new, and free, book about them written for the general public. Great for a variety of ages. Get it here. You can get a pdf or an interactive iBook.

Anything you want to share? Please add them in the comments.

For links, thanks to Morgan Jackson (via @BioInFocus) and Sharlene Santana (via TheBatcave_SS) and Meghan Duffy (via @duffy_ma).

What do journal impact factors really mean? For starters, impact factor predicts retraction rates better than long-term citation rates.

Who doesn’t love critters and maps? Here’s a brand-new site with high quality biodiversity maps, by Clinton Jenkins. On my first browse, I learned that the real salamander diversity in in the Smokies:

My family went to see the anti-consumerist Lego Movie and really liked it. Here’s an article in The New Republic, putting the competing views of the movie’s social commentary into context. (By the way, here’s the old post about female Lego field biologists.)

My favorite new academic blog is Good Enough Professor about teaching and scholarship in the humanities, with many lessons for scientists, and everybody else, too.

What should a manuscript review look like? The British Ecological Society put together a great pamphlet for novice reviewers (it’s a pdf.). It also would be great for giving to someone outside academia who wants to really understand what “peer-reviewed” means.

Here is a compelling news item from NPR, about a long-term demographic study, that was depressing, discouraging, and fascinating, about how “race is socially constructed,” and not in a good way. It’s definitely worth the five-minute listen.

We really do have to keep making the point to girls, again and again, that you really can do what you want to do. Here is a touching story about a girl discovering that she can grow up to have the career she wants.

The thylacine went extinct a good long while ago, so I was surprised to see there is video footage of the last one.

If you sample material from the last known individual of a tree species, and then it dies from an infection, well, that’s not a good thing.

How do you get the public to be aware of the importance of taxonomy? I guess you could name a beetle after David Sedaris. Is that pandering?

Some education reform knuckleheads want to impose a “college readiness exam” on students enrolled in college before they can receive a federal Pell grant. Tressie Cottom explains how this is as paternalistic and a back-door discriminatory filter like a poll tax: “If you know the kind of racialized, gendered and classist segregation that defines who is and who is not “college ready” AND you concede by ideological imperative that knowledge is a type of capital, then what is a readiness test, exactly?”

Please add additional links you’d like to suggest in the comments.

Thanks to @phdbee, @myrmecos, @leafwarbler, and @TrevorABranch for leads.

Wouldn’t you like to see the cutest darn photos of collembolans? I thought you might.

Students have abandoned professional correspondence when writing their professors. That is old news. The new news is that now you have a clear explanation to give your students to save yourself the trouble: Here are the reasons that students need to write professionally to their professors.

Two of the best programs on radio are This American Life and Radiolab. They have their distinct aesthetics, and the Radiolab guys came on the scene well after Ira Glass created This American Life and reinvigorated how we tell, and listen to, stories. I’ve wondered how they feel about one another: as colleagues, competitors or both? Here’s the answer: Ira Glass wrote a gorgeous paean to Radiolab, explaining in minute detail exactly how good these guys are and how their show works.

What are the characteristics and behaviors of someone who can be successful in the sciences? This post at Dynamic Ecology makes a really good case for the ability to get stuff done at every stage in the research & publication process.

When we talk about women leaving science because of gender inequity, we tend to focus on students and early-career scientists. But the unjust crap women have to deal with doesn’t stop as they advance in their careers. We can hear about it from this heartfelt and detailed story from a high-achieving senior scientist, Jenny Martin, who had slightly more senior idiots in her path. There are a few comments that are also well worth reading.

What it’s like to be the first person in your family to go to college. A good account in the pages of The Atlantic.

NIH has a well-documented problem with racial biases in funding rates. Here is an intriguing idea: maybe the lower level of diversity in those who are funded by NIH might reflect a lower diversity in the topics of proposals. Maybe scientists from the underfunded groups are interested in different stuff that the NIH panels don’t want to fund?

Weeks ago, there was a joint post organized by Hope Jahren from some of us who blog with our real-life identity. (To clarify, the names on our blogs are the same names that we use at work, on our CVs and papers, and with people in our lives. Call the name on my birth certificate a pseudonym if you wish.) I mentioned this in my own post about it, but I really want to point to it again because I really liked it: the post by tressiemc on using one’s own name in blogging. One memorable line: “The penalty for raising hell is not the same for everyone.”

Feel free to add more links in the comments.

For leads, thanks to Karen James and Jane Zelikova.

If you hear a song and want to know what it is, you can whip out your phone and an app called Shazam will identify it for you. It’s been around for years. Isn’t it about time that we should be able to do stuff like that with birds and trees? Natural history guides on phones are not taking advantage of the possibilities: “We stuck dumb apps on smart phones.”

Someone set up a site just to list kind things that academics have done for one another, typically with more senior people being unselfish with junior scientists. I find it discouraging that common human decency needs to be highlighted, as if it is an exception.

What might be the coolest subfamily of ants is no longer extant. The fossils of these creatures are stunningly weird. Maybe you could suggest how those crazy mandibles might be useful. It’s a puzzle to me.

You can visit behind the scenes of the Smithsonian Insect Collection. Virtually, that is. Here’s a great post about what entomology collections looks like and how they work, with great photos.

In a variety of groups of animals, there have been some clownish people publishing taxonomic revisions that range from absurd to nonsensical. According to current rules, the crazy stuff is supposed to be honored. Are you interested in contributing your point of view towards changing the rules of the ICZN?

This wasn’t a long list; after a couple weeks of vacation I didn’t read much online. But one of the books I read was an amazing non-fiction page-turner. I’m now helping out with the Organization for Tropical Studies field course in Costa Rica. The traveling course has a mighty substantial blog, and the very short daily podcasts provide a great taste of the course as it is experienced by the students.

Have a great weekend and please feel free to add any additional interesting reading in the comments.

Would you like to volunteer in a natural history museum collection but can’t find the time or opportunity? If you have a computer and 15 minutes, you have a chance to make a great contribution to the entomological collections of California. The web interface is really slick and you can make a real difference.

We have such a love/hate relationship with the freeway system in LA that we name our interchanges. I recently drove through the “Marilyn Jorgenson Reese Memorial Interchange” (It’s the 10-405 interchange for you Angelenos out there.) Who was she? Reese was the first female civil engineer in California, and she designed the interchange, which opened in 1964. While reading through her 2004 obituary in the LA Times, this snippet stood out:

In a 1963 story on “lady engineers” in a California Highways and Public Works publication, Reece said she felt that women had an advantage in the field of engineering and “if there’s any prejudice toward women, I’ve not encountered it. Men have always been very helpful; and being a woman has never hampered me in my career.”

This makes me wonder what has changed since 1963: working conditions for women, or the freedom to discuss working conditions?

It’s refreshing when rich and famous athletes give back to their communities by supporting the arts. Widely recognized as one of the three best football soccer players in the world*, Cristiano Ronaldo has fully funded a new museum…. about himself.

At this moment in the arc of the annual academic job search, those with two-body problems who are blessed with possibilities also are cursed with dilemmas. I enjoyed reading this bit of advice about handling this kind of situation.

I’ve never bought the notion that grades in the Ivy League are inflated because the students who are admitted are already so damn smart. But I haven’t taught in the Ivy League yet. Here’s a personal account of how grades get inflated in the Ivy League. Spoiler: it’s not because the students are smart.

Most weeks, I put together a list of links I like to share, like what you’re reading right now. Whenever I go through the wonder full reading items put forth by Dezene Huber, I realize I’m still something between a neophyte and an amateur. His latest set is here. It’s a collection of items that allow you to reflect, think, and appreciate.

Do you hate long-form journalism? I do — the label, that is.

Thought of the month on academic publishing, and how perverse incentives for academic publicity are akin to ratfarming, brought to you by Kate Bowles:

The idea of publication as a means of making funded research genuinely useful has been substituted by the work of counting and factoring up research outputs. The classic story told about perverse incentives is ratfarming under colonial rule in Hanoi: in an economy where peasants are paid per rat kill, the sensible response is to farm rats to kill and turn in for reward. In other words, the rational decision that the system triggers is the exact opposite of the system’s goal. The hyphenation of citation to rankings means that higher education is very close to perfecting in its workers its own ratfarming calculation, and we all know it.

Quality eggnog is about pH balance? Using science to perfect your ‘nog.

A little while ago I wrote a little introduction to Jeffrey Beall, the guy who runs the website keeping track of predatory publishers. Apparently, this anti-pseudojournal warrior doesn’t really have a beef with predatory publishing, but with the open access model in general. He just went full Repub (link is pdf).

If I were an agouti parent, I’d make sure that my kids keep to curfew.

Have a wonderful holiday, y’all.

–

*Number two would be Ibrahimović.

Thanks to Holly Dunsworth and John Coupland for links.

Through the holidays, things will be slowing down on the site. In early-mid January, things will be ramping up again.

How many scientific arguments are philosophical disagreements rather than disputes over scientific theory? Jeremy Fox makes a great, and detailed, case for why scientists also need to be philosophers, over at Dynamic Ecology. I’ve heard some folks wonder why there are not more, and more active, blogs among ecologists. Maybe it’s because Dynamic Ecology has set the bar so high for everyone else. The quality and utility of comments on the site are spectacular, too.

How is it that new religions emerge, especially those that are not derived from established faith traditions? Scientology sprung out of the head of L. Ron Hubbard, and much of what happens in the church is held under tight secrecy. Is it a weakness to be curious about the secrets of Scientology? If you’re as weak as me, here’s a site that tells you quite a bit.

Before Thomas the Tank Engine was teaching the proletariat their role in a capitalist society, there was Richard Scarry’s Busytown, a multiracial multispecies community of people animals doing all kinds of work together. It seems rather progressive and egalitarian, but different kinds of animals have different kinds of jobs. What is to be learned about culture from Richard Scarry?  Martin, J.L. 2000. What do animals do all day?: The division of labor, class bodies and totemic thinking in the popular imagination. Poetics 27: 195-231. (pdf)  Keywords: Animals; Totemism; Class body; Busytown; Symbolic domination; Division of labor.

Myrmecologist extraordinaire Adrian Smith recently started an engaging podcast series entitled The Age of Discovery, featuring “interviews with biologists about being a biologists.” I’ve heard a few of them so far, and Adrian is an engaging interlocutor who asks great questions and is an even better listener. The great news is his latest interview is with Bert Hölldobler, perhaps my greatest academic hero. Each episode is about an hour, good for a little spell of labwork.

White House official photographer Pete Souza is mighty spectacular. This set of his behind-the-scene photos from the trip to the memorial service for Nelson Mandela is pretty interesting.

Did the Lobotomy Committee of the US Veteran’s Administration decide that your family member needed a lobotomy to address postwar behavioral problems? If so, here’s the handy six-page guide provided by the VA, to help you take care of your loved one after the lobotomy.

This superhero movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. Antboy.

Thanks to John Chapman for a link.

Did you know that the funding rates of NSF Graduate Fellowships are about 50%!? That’s true as long as your letter-writers get all their letters in on time. For the 2/3 of all applicants who have a recommendation letter arrive late, the funding rate is 0%.

It’s not often that students from low-income backgrounds attend wealthy universities. But it happens sometimes. Here’s an interesting little article about what it’s like to be poor student surrounded by rich students.

I had to spend way too much time in a car this week, alone with NPR. And let me tell you, this gave me the chance to catch the Planet Money five-part series about the garment industry, which is spectacular journalism and storytelling. They tell this story by following the production of t-shirts they ordered, featuring this squirrel, a pun on a classic Keynes phrase about the forces governing the capitalist market economy.

The current pope of the Catholic church is sounding a lot more like Jesus of Nazareth than his predecessors. (Don’t get too thrilled: being gay is still a sin, and women are still second-class members our species.) Check out chapter two the latest document released by his administration. There some serious words in there:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

Did you ever wonder how long it took for faculty members to land their jobs, and how much time and effort they had to put into the job market? So did Alex Bond, so he set out to collect data, and he presented the results in this great post on his site, The Lab and Field.

Impact factors are dumb, but it doesn’t stop people from using them. There are many citation-based approaches to sizing up journals other than the classic “impact factor.” Daniel Hocking wrote a paper to compare these measures of journals in ecology and evolution. Here’s his blog post about the paper, with a link to his paper.

Below is a 1907 image of Churchill, up in Manitoba, Canada. This place is well known as a hangout for polar bears. (Image by Geraldine Moodie)

Can you believe that this place has 198 species of spiders? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m willing to bet that they’re boring spiders. And I don’t mean that they dig holes into wood.

On the death of Nelson Mandela: “Mandela lived a life without sanctimony. You try it; it’s not easy. His lack of piety helped him turn former foes into friends.” This and a little more from Bono.

If you accidentally steal a shipment of ⁶⁰Co, don’t open up the sealed container.

Here is a novel approach to cutting back on the rejection-review cycle in scientific publishing: pay a bit of cash to a group that will procure reviews and then attempt to get your paper into journals on your behalf. Or something like that. Ask Jeremy Fox, who is involved with the project.

For links, thanks to Cedar Reiner and Chris Buddle’s Expiscor.

Alfred Russel Wallace gets his first statue, unveiled by David Attenborough.

About ten years before AR Wallace got his due, Antarctic Explorer Mrs. Chippy was memorialized with a statue, in honor of Harry McNish, the carpenter who was instrumental in the survival of the the entire Shackleton expedition.

It’s very rewarding to work with first generation college students. This site is designed to help more students be able to say, “I’m first!” There are a huge number challenges connected with the leap of going to college, but life without having gone to college is a lot more difficult. That notion might be obvious to those with an academic background, but could be a rare and unsupported concept for students without family members who have graduated from college. This site can help make these concepts more tangible and looks like it has the potential to be a powerful outreach tool.

It is crazy how many museum administrators and board members have no grasp of basic museum ethical guidelines regarding curatorial practices. Here’s a story about how the San Diego Natural History Museum (which recently adopted the unfortunate moniker “The NAT”) narrowly stopped a sale of valuable fossils in their collection.

This one made big rounds in social media but I want to share it anyway: A collection of lists of things that people were surprised about when they came to the United States.

There was a great story on the BBC about an engineer who learned he had Marfan syndrome, a lack of elasticity in his aorta. So he invented a new fix for it and convinced his doctors to implement it.

Here is a non-link reading item: There is a growing trend for public shaming of tourists doing big-game “hunting” in Africa by broadly distributing the photos that the perpetrators share on social media. Anybody who is both willing to shoot a lion or elephant as a trophy and stupid enough to circulate a picture of themselves celebrating their actions really deserves these photos to be widely distributed.

If you’re looking for a longish vacation, in a home rather than a hotel or rental unit, then home exchanges are awesome. This article about a California family’s exchange with a Parisian family is so much like my own family’s experience it’s summer, it’s like we could have written it ourselves. Including the part about not easily figuring out how to find reverse on the gearshift of our host family’s car. (I’ve done two home exchanges so far, and I’ll probably doing it a bunch more.)

Have you noticed the deflating uniformity shared by rehabilitated and upper-class locations? Is it the case that true local character is destroyed by wealth? Here’s a thought-provoking article about that idea, which is also about Paris.

I’ve always been pleased to tout Chris Buddle’s great roundup of things in the world of science called Expiscor, with a tilt towards charismatic spiders. He’s sold out moved up to a new home hosted by SciLogs, tied to nature.com. (And hey, I’d link to Expiscor even if the First Segment didn’t feature my ant-y stuff.)

Thanks to Andrew Farke (@AndyFarke) for a link.

Oh, and this’ll be the last time I mention Jared Diamond, I promise: As recompense for the creatively titled monomaniacal review I linked to earlier, here’s a review in the pages of the London Review of Books that is far more measured, and as a result, is even more damning: The final sentence reads, “We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.”

Have a great weekend, and as always, feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.

This story was buried off the front page of my local paper, but did you hear about the discovery that when Yasser Arafat died in 2004 it was an assassination by Polonium radiation poisoning? The use of Polonium as a murder weapon wasn’t described publicly until a couple years later, when a KGB agent was killed this way in London.

Grandma got STEM. That’s what the site is called.

One hundred years ago this week, one of my heroes died: Alfred Russell Wallace. While science in the Victorian era was mostly the province of wealthy men, Wallace was a notable outlier. Whether you know the story of his remarkable life or not, I predict that any biologist will greatly enjoy this account told through superb paper puppetry. Nobody can go wrong picking up The Malay Archipelago and giving it thorough read.

Holy moly. The Australian government is seriously gutting its research labs.

You ever read a really cool science story in the news that sounds so awesome that it’s hard to believe? The latest one is about a fly with scary-looking critters patterned on its wings – believable but awesome. All kinds of people got duped but Morgan Jackson knows enough about flies that he looked at the same set of facts, got the story right, and then retold the story with high class.

Science never gets better than when you find out you’re wrong. Here’s a great story about that from Alan Townsend.

I’m loving this post by Chris Buddle about how he has his students do the teaching.

It’s wonderful to get to know undergraduates in my department. But boy howdy, it sure is crass when they try to buddy up with me with purpose of cultivating a letter of recommendation. Supporting students with letters is both my duty and my pleasure, but I want my relationships to be genuine. A recommendation letter should emerge as a natural by-product of a faculty-student relationship, rather than be the primary purpose of the relationship. Please do not regard your relations with people as mere tools for your own ends.

Do you know a young affluent person of privilege that is interested in using their position to facilitate positive social change? There are are a huge number of 1% kids that disdain the heritable inequity in their midst, but in their social realm might not feel empowered to realize all of the good things that they can do. In a comment on Wednesday’s post, Lirael shared a link to Resource Generation, which provides education and means for action. I spent some time on this site. it’s pretty cool.

By the way, if you’re looking for a fun read with or for your kid, check out the 2010 Newbery Winner When You Reach Me, which I read this summer. There are a number of elements of A Prayer for Owen Meany, if you’re a John Irving kind of person.

Have a great weekend – feel free to share more links in the comments.

There’s a long tradition of using anthropomorphic common names for animals that do things analogous to humans. Years ago, there was some disagreement about whether we should stop using the term “slave making ants.” Alex Wild recalls that episode and proposes a new common name for these creatures: “kidnapper ants.” In terms of sensitivity to victims of crimes, I’m not sure this is a big step up. I just call ’em Polyergus.

Mulling over job interviews and offers usually presents big-time dilemmas. Mizuki Takahashi discusses his own experience with frank detail. The seasonality and non-synchronicity of interviews leads to some interesting thoughts about bet-hedging and game theory, with really high stakes.

On Wednesday morning, I heard a heartbreaking story on NPR about a Pakistani family that traveled to Washington DC to testify in a hearing about drone strikes. They recounted the remote-controlled murder of their grandmother by the US Government. One thing that they didn’t mention on NPR, as much as I recall, is that only five members of Congress attended this hearing.

Sometimes blogs include posts about blogging. This post by Simon Goring is about the personal motives for blogging and how whether, or not, it matters how well read your blog is. This post ended up getting seen, and commented on, by a bunch of other bloggers and the comments are worthwhile if you’re interested in the topic. (Note: this link starts out saying really nice stuff about this site. That’s not why I linked to it, though I always appreciate nice words.)

You know when a Senior Editor of scholarly journal is really pissed when the editorial is simply entitled, “Fuck Jared Diamond.” That message was brought to you by David Correia.

The density of people on the planet is unevenly distributed, to put it mildly. This animation of birth and death events, simulated using real demographic data, is really cool.

What if Darwin died on The Beagle? Jeremy Fox reviews the book Darwin Deleted that delves into this thought experiment. It was an interesting review, so interesting that I think I might not have to read the book. I’m not big on the alternative history genre, but I did enjoy and learn a lot from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America when it came out.

Thanks to Boing Boing and Jane Zelikova for links.

You probably caught the news about the oarfish. Two washed up in Southern California. Why did these creatures make it up to the surface? One idea, that I haven’t heard or read anywhere else, is that it was probably the US Navy. They keep using massive sonar instruments that are deafening to whales, and it makes sense given the locations. It’s wholly credible. (This wasn’t my idea, but a student’s, though I wish it was mine.)

Darwin was a loving and doting father, if not up to current standards, then at least a far better one than his contemporaries. And when he was done writing drafts, his kids used his paper for their drawings.

Heard that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction? There’s no rule against it. So don’t sweat it if you do.

This newly-famous guy named Macklemore wrote on his website about the last year, about the process through which he became famous. It’s refreshingly reflective and honest about the interplay of the strategy, thrill and weirdness involved in going from a restricted distribution to cosmopolitan in a very short period of time.

When you’re in a teaching campus, how do you allocate your limited research time? Do you put all the eggs in one basket?

Is your department’s seminar series no good? Here’s how Alex Bond thinks they can be less sucky.

David Foster Wallace on doing science.  Okay, not really, he wrote about writing, but if you substitute “doing scientific research” for “writing,” this piece works just as well. Remember, we’re in this to discover stuff, and being high-profile should be a side benefit rather than the purpose.

If you’re wanting the authoritative recap on the sexual harassment saga in the Science Online community, it made it to the New Yorker. The ensuing discussions led me to think about how I structure discussions and work to be inclusive on this site. Some of the comments on that post earlier this week were curious and particularly revealing about the subculture of science blogging, and only reinforce my will to make sure that this site is a conversation designed for everybody.

Damn, Hope Jahren sure can write. A little flavor of VonnegutBorgesZadieSmithSedaris.

As always, share any other links you wish to share in the comments. People really do click on these things, you know!

Thanks to Arikia Millikan and Stacy Philpott for pointing to things via social media.

What are deans thinking when they’re evaluating tenure cases? Apparently, at least one of them is sizing professors up like used cars.

That’s not how you pipet.

I’ve always thought that the actual content of the bulk of TED talks are distilled bunk. I’ve discovered that someone wrote a critique of TED talks of which I am a little jealous because it’s so well done, but grateful because I was never going to write it.

Have you seen the fake TED talks from the Onion?  It’s the best illustration of how a typical TED talk convinces people that boring and well-established ideas are novel and interesting. Maybe people should, you know, read something with substance once in a while.

By the way, the biggest rock is Uluru. You can walk around it in less than a couple hours.

Getty Research Institute has an amazing collection of historic, compelling and often gorgeous artistic images. This week, they released a fraction of them for open content. It’s a good start, considering they’re still living off the legacy of an exploitative oil baron.

Here are a couple posts addressing core issues of small ponds:

• How do you set aside research time in the midst of your busy teaching schedule?
• How do deal with the fact that you just moved from an R1 university to a liberal arts college to solve a 2-body problem?

Don’t like the continued exploitation of contingent instructors in universities? It’s up to tenured faculty to fix the problem.

This has been a challenging week for people who blog about science. It started with the fallout of Scientific American censoring Dr. Danielle Lee, which I’ve already addressed. These events caused an unrelated set of incidents of sexual harassment to become known, with victims providing clear, nuanced and details accounts of their interactions with one central figure in the science blogging and science writing communities. It’s broken out into the mainstream media and a summary of it on one such site is here. What has happened is not a rarity but something that happens every day, everywhere. This moment is different is because a few people had the courage to share their story, and the unflinching support from all parts of the community is heartening.  Here are a few of the reflections on this week that I wanted to share with you:

• Hope Jahren’s The Worst part is not.
• Drugmonkey’s I miss my sisters.
• Mark CC’s It’s easy to not harass women.
• Chris Buddle’s A difficult week (and a way forward).

I haven’t written my own piece about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in science. I’m not going to, because I don’t think I could come close to matching the efforts above. I intentionally chose three guys’ thoughts, whose perspective on this matches my own, but whose ability to express these thoughts exceeds my own. I’m grateful that they took the time out to show how important this issue it is.

For a link, thanks to Paige Roberts.

As always, feel free to add your own recommended reads, or remarks on anything found in these links.

My favorite new comic is BuzzHootRoar. It’s brand new, with two new comics that have come out this week. It has science that is accurate and interesting, and the art is super cool. I’d compare it to other comics, but I don’t want to make other comics look so inferior.

There is a group of National Geographic Society member/agitators advocating for a shift in how the Society does its business. Their site is called Society Matters, and if you’ve ever been curious about what it looks like at National Geographic under the hood (and what it means to be an NGS dissident) this is the place to visit. For starters, National Geographic TV Channel is operated quite independently of the rest of the Society, and the controlling owner is Rupert Murdoch. Considering the crap on the channel, compared to what’s in the magazine, that makes a lot of sense. (disclaimer: my research been funded by Nat Geo.)

A dangerous list. Meg Duffy compiled a great list of videos for teaching ecology concepts, but even if you aren’t a biologist you’ll find this a spectacular time sink, I mean, spectacular entertainment. And you might learn something, too.

It”s now clear that anybody who was going to have an Antarctic field season during this Austral summer is not going to have one. Here is a story from one of the many scientists who is adversely affected. (warning: contains offensive language and Comic Sans.) If John Boehner was a patriot, he’d call a vote right now to fund the US government, but he refuses to do so.

On a related note, Andrea Maguire wrote some tips for those writing an NSF Graduate Fellowship application, which could be useful if you presume that NSF gets funded again.

While still on the topic of the atrophy of scientific infrastructure, let’s look into a more historic example of how anti-science obstructionism put the stop to a major research endeavor in the US. Have you heard of the Superconducting SuperCollider? It was a partially constructed accelerator that would have dwarfed CERN, that was in production in Texas, funded by the federal government. Until it wasn’t. Here’s a story from last year about how the SSC was defunded after half of it was already built. When I was in college, I wasn’t even that interested in subatomic physics but I was excited for the SSC as it was under construction. Oh well.

Being a professor is awesome, isn’t it? Why don’t people stop complaining about how hard the academic life is, when it ain’t?

Being Canadian just got a little better. I’m not talking about Alice Munro, their new Nobel Laureate. Citizens traveling abroad can get free beer.

Morgan Ernest brought to my attention (via twitter) a “head-exploding” disaster of a paper by three men (a philosopher, a political scientist and an ecologist) who attempt to study the sociology of ecologists. It might seem vaguely reasonable and only slightly sexist by the abstract, but when you look inside and see the inferences and conclusions that are not supported by their own data, you have to wonder why they would go to the trouble to write a paper that spews 100-year old rhetoric that, in my view, seems misogynist. But please, judge for yourself. Really, if three dudes are going to be making such broad generalizations about women, you’d think they at least would have enlisted a female co-author?

Do you know the spectacular story of the American who is coaching the Egyptian soccer football team which is on the verge of qualifying for the World Cup? Grant Wahl’s latest piece in Sports Illustrated tells how Bob Bradley, who was recently a coach for the US National Team, is a hero, in the classic meaning of this overused label. Even if you don’t care much for football, then this is still a great story.

Everything I’ve read by or about Malcolm Gladwell has led me to think that he’s a pseudoacademic hack who who is brilliant at marketing overly simplistic ideas, but not good for much else. Finally, someone has suffered enough through his books to build the the rhetorical takedown that is well deserved and overdue. If I ever meet Christopher Chabris, I’d love to buy the man a drink. What does Gladwell himself have to say in response to his many academic critics? Oh, on the radio he admits that he writes books by cherry-picking concepts out of context to tell a false narrative, because that’s what the public wants and can’t handle serious thought or critical thinking. (That’s a paraphrase, but a pretty good one).

By the way, the Chabris piece was picked up by Slate and reprinted there, but I’d rather not give Slate the clicks because they often publish overwrought junk that serves no purpose but to generate righteous indignation, and as a result, revenue-generating traffic. Gladwell’s oversmug response to Chabris is on Slate, too, and I link to it only because he’s entitled to an attempted comeback from such an epic takedown. I do have to admit it is masterful how he slides in just enough slightly-condescending digs against Chabris, just enough to paint Chabris as an overheated academic, but not enough to make show any of his own flopsweat as the person under attack. Of course, he hasn’t done anything to address the heart of Chabris’s arguments.

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Thanks to Dawn Sumner and Alex Wild who brought links to my attention.

Alan Townsend has a remarkably frank post about how departments and individuals handle tenure decisions, and how plenty of people are cowards. If you ever find yourself in a contentious tenure decision-making process, this post is important reading. Stay tuned for more strong experiences and opinions about retention and tenure decisions.

Lots of great things have yet to be digitized. We need to take great care to make sure that the efforts of those who occupied earlier times remain known. A truly wonderful story by Chris Buddle about his rediscovery of natural history information by some outstanding biologists that has been overlooked. It comes with beautiful images of ant-mimic salticid spiders.

It’s now official that NIH isn’t funding science education. Just forget about the anti-vaccine freaks and the public ambivalence towards the wanton use of antibiotics in factory farms that puts all of us at risk.

If the hopefully temporary shutdown of the US Government is boggling to you, here is the clearest, most straightforward explanation of how something this idiotic has come to pass: “America is being primaried.”  The consequences of this shutdown, and how it is handled by the current administration, transcend temporary politics and it is not hyperbole to claim that our democracy is at stake. Keep in mind that our constitution was a beta testing version for more contemporary parliamentary republics. It’s firmware so we can’t reinstall a new constitution.

Why do general education science textbooks suck? It would help if they weren’t designed for premeds who aren’t even taking GE science classes.

More plagiarism by a famous writer. This time it’s Dave Eggers. One of my favorite nonprofit organizations has to be 826 National, which has literacy and writing centers for kids in a variety of cities (Their time travel mart in LA is a great place for gift shopping, too.) It was founded in in part by Dave Eggers, author of the entertaining read Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and creative force behind McSweeney’s, for which I have respect on multiple axes. Kate Losse has made a forceful case that his latest book is heavily plagiarized from her own novel. (Some are viewing this as a gender issue, suggesting that he could get away with it more because he’s man coping from a woman. I just see it as a plagiarism issue, with a famous person copying a non-famous person.) These accusations of plagiarism aren’t new, though. A 2010 book of illustrations and quotes by Eggers is so highly derivative of work by Ketch Wehr, without appropriation or credit, and this is pretty much a textbook case of someone famous ripping off someone who isn’t famous and getting away with it. So, I don’t want Eggers to get away with it. But then again, if Doris Kearns Goodwin can get away with overt plagiarism, then I suppose Eggers will too.

Once a journal rejects you for some dumb reason, wouldn’t it be great to take those reviews, respond to them, and send them to a new journal to speed up the publication process? If you like that idea, submit to Biotropica. (As a disclaimer, I’m on the editorial board.)

Schadenfreudlicious. Finally one football coach whose sweetheart housing deal fell apart as quickly as his coaching ability. The loan for his fancy house was designed to be returned — with interest — if he left the job or got fired. He got the boot this week.

On TV as the new novel. I can only imagine there will be a lot of scholarship about Breaking Bad, as the show is a single 50-something-hour-long, beautifully created, Shakespearean tragedy. The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece about TV as the new novel last year, too. Let’s not forget, though, that the novel is still the novel.

On mentorship. We shouldn’t treat students as roles (like this). We should treat students as people. Advice ain’t mentorship.

What character in popular culture, in the depths of a cancer diagnosis, used extraordinary talents to become rich as a drug kingpin before an ignominious fall? Lance Armstrong, of course. That piece is by Dave Zirin, who writes about the politics of sports. Even if you’re not into sports or politics, he is routinely interesting and raises important issues that a lot of people would otherwise fail to consider.

Having a child? Even if you’re already vaccinated, go get your pertussis vaccine booster.

Nate Silver on how to become a statistician. He says that it’s more important to teach yourself by doing than going to school. That’s true, unless the faculty do it right, in which case the students are still teaching themselves by doing.

A well-researched piece of long form journalism about gender inequity in science came out in the New York Times. There is nothing new in it, but it is probably shocking to people who are unaware of how messed up things are, and that for all of the progress, much work remains. The problem about the inequity experienced by women in STEM isn’t the lack of awareness, but instead the lack of specific resources to fix the problem within a structured agenda. Systemic bias doesn’t get fixed by an awareness campaign.

Feel free to add additional recommended reads in the comments.

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Folks who brought these reads to my attention via social media, in no particular order, include @SciOfMotherhood, @pankisseskafka, Anna Dornhaus, @sarahkendzior, @leafwarbler, @KateMfD and @natesandersUTK. These are all interesting people to follow, by the way.

Predicting successful scientists early in their careers? There was a paper in Bioscience by Bill Laurance et al. with a somewhat obvious finding that students who publish a lot early will publish more and be more successful, in traditional measures. The final author of the paper, Corey Bradshaw, wrote about this paper in his blog, acknowledging that this kind of thing just feeds the frenzy for frequent publication over thoughtful and reflective publication. The argument for fewer and better papers is often made by Lee Dyer among others. (This is Dyer’s “Public and Perish” talk as a pdf). But before you get all excited about the Laurance et al. paper, you might just want to read Emilio Bruna’s high-quality assessment of this paper, which really makes you wonder how it got through the peer review process by the editors of Bioscience. Maybe we could convince the authors of the paper to respond to Bruna’s remarks in the comments on his site.

Don’t Be That Dude. Tenure, She Wrote does it again with a handy list of things that men should be sure to do, and not do, in the academic workplace to promote gender equity. Early indicators are that this post has given birth to yet another textspeak acronym, #DBTD.

Trouble delegating research tasks? Chris Buddle has your back. Keep yourself from burnout, get more done, and be a better mentor.

Just as troubling as the death of the Duquesne adjunct Mary Margaret Vojtko were her living conditions, as described the article to which I linked last week. The activism for a living wage for contingent faculty has grown in the past week, especially in the face of asshattery, excuse-making and rhetorically absurd justifications by the people in charge at Duquesne University. Lots of great things have been written about it, and by far my favorite has been this one by Rebecca Schuman. She explains why people at large aren’t up in arms about the tiny fraction of university budgets that go to pay for the efforts of the majority of instructors. I am remarkably surprised how mum tenure-track faculty are on the matter. I hope it’s not because we’re just a bunch of lazy selfish bastards, as was argued by one petulant commentator on my post on the topic earlier this week.

Staging the World Cup in Qatar is projected to cost the lives of thousands of migrant workers, caused by the lack of regulation and human rights abuses of the non-citizen underclass. What makes this more troubling is the abject lack of concern in the pro forma response by the people in power who are capable of preventing these labor-related deaths.

How about having journals put in offers to publish your paper? Here also is a curious newish phenomenon in scientific publishing. Some folks have set up a for-profit business that solicits peer reviews for you, and then journals can see the paper and reviews and put in an offer. They’re just doing ecology/evolution at the moment, and some mighty decent journals have signed on, and others will accept the reviews from this group. They’re called Peerage of Science. As for the for-profit thing, well, most scientific papers make it to press with for-profit publishers. Anyway, I’m tempted to try it out. If so, I’ll let you know how it goes. The notion that a set of reviews travels with a paper from journal to journal is a lot better than the idea of editors having to scrape the barrel again and again to get more and more reviews for the same manuscript. As for any scientists who don’t like the fact that this is a for profit company, I’m sure these objectors must charge for-profit publishers for reviews and editorial services, and wouldn’t ever let a for-profit journal publish their work without getting a cut from the publisher.

Jim Henson died early and suddenly, but he wrote goodbye letters well in advance. They are light-hearted and touching. That’s brought to you by Letters of Note, one of my favorite nodes on the internet.

You’ve seen those camera trap images of an eagle taking out a deer, right? Just in case you haven’t. You can go find that picture of a Rhinella marina toad that swallowed a bat on your own.

The New York Times published a feature on various leaders in government, science and education and their ideas for improving science education in the USA. When I read this, all I thought was BLAH BLAH BLAH. And then I got terrified because all of the important decision makers were clueless about what really is happening in public K-12 classrooms across the country. These folks aren’t wrong about good science education, but they’re fooling themselves that if they could implement their ideas, that this would result in change. They all made me sigh with disappointment because of the inability to see the forest. The only great and important ideas came from the kids. That was uplifting. But, they’re not the ones making the decisions. Yet.

A crowdsourced list of teaching faculty pet peeves. Mine was #2, but they’re all spot-on. (To strive for excellence as a teacher, please don’t get peevish about these peeves.)

A not-too-long article, The Death of an Adjunct, is important reading. The invention of the adjunct caste in higher education is unconscionable.

John Green made a video that explains how, and somewhat why, healthcare costs in the United States are so much higher than elsewhere. More importantly, he clearly demonstrated that any discussion about as issue as complex as this one requires reflection, knowledge, curiosity and an ability to see beyond overly simplistic concepts.

On a related note, Brian McGill wrote something this week that probably has changed some opinions about publishing ethics and open access. This detailed and carefully reasoned piece over in Dynamic Ecology is a breath of fresh air in its view from 30,000 feet. I wouldn’t want to argue about open access publishing at all with anybody, but if I had to, then I’d make sure that all participants in the argument were very familiar with this piece.

If you appreciate the history and geography of our species and the environments that we create, then I recommend checking out Atlas Obscura.

Here’s a quick piece of advice for humanities faculty, and I guess anybody whose discipline is focused on scholarship in books rather than journals. Write your second book fast. Just do it, or you might never. A parallel prescription for new science faculty is to be sure to start and publish on a new line of research after completing the dissertation. Don’t get stuck in a rut. Be sure to develop (and show) the ability to do and complete research on more than one thing, which will help serve you for a long time in your career.

Just in case you’re curious, the non-science I’m reading this week: Finished Ian McEwan’s latest, and deep into the collected Bone for the first time.

Feel free to add in the comments any other great reads you came upon this week that you’d like to share.

Some sites make a habit of using Friday to share links to good reads. I thought I’d try it out. In my typically verbose form, I’ll use plenty of words to put the links in context.

Feel free to use the comments to discuss any of these things, of course.

A newish site by a team of pseudonymous early-career scientists is Tenure, She Wrote. This is very good stuff. Learn what it’s like to launch your career in academia at various stages, including the outrageous crap you have to deal with if you’re a woman. This week was a two part series with infuriating story about an anonymous lecherous student and a sexually harassing dean. In an odd way, the story is a triumph, because the author is such a badass in handling a messed up situation the best possible way.

There was an argument on a variety of sites regarding fundamentalism regarding open access journals. You can find that if you want.

Meanwhile, I pronounce that the winner of the Onion or Not Onion? Award actually goes to the Onion for this editorial.

Earlier in the summer, social insect researcher Phil Starks was asked to write a review of his summer reading material for his university’s glossy alumni magazine. You won’t regret clicking through to read his review of Penguin on Vacation.

There were dueling posts among field ecologists this week: Meg Duffy argued that local field sites are a great way to go and Emilio Bruna wrote in defense of far-flung field sites. We all realize that whatever floats your boat is fine, but there are some good points on both sides, and the comments are interesting as well.

This November, in sunny San Diego, there is going to be a weekend institute designed to prepare people how to Begin a Research Program in the Natural Sciences at a Predominantly Undergraduate Institution. I don’t know what they’ll be doing, but it sounds really cool if you’re in that boat, and I bet the folks with CUR running it are both experienced and savvy.

Lots of academics feel strongly about supporting public education. If you happen to live in an under-supported public school district, then there are a set of challenges and tradeoffs in deciding where to send your kid to school. There was a barn-burning judgmental manifesto by Allison Benedikt about why she sends her kids to public school. Aside from her supposed non-humblebrags and proclivity to be nasty, this is an informative read if you’ve ever wondered why folks like me send their kids to our local public school even though some others in the same economic caste would be terrified at the concept. In a subsequent discussion emerged a great piece by Pat Cahalan that explains exactly what is happening in my own kid’s school, and the forces that shape what makes our school mighty great (one of which is the author himself). He explains what it is about having a certain percentage of middle-class families can matter, in the context of a useful and specific example. There’s so much dogmatic verbiage out there about the public education crisis, but Cahalan cuts straight to a central and under-addressed aspect, with nuance.

You might be an academic careerist if… (I ask you to forgive me for linking to a listicle).

Three science sites that have cool recommended reads on a weekly basis. In no particular order, first is Expicor by Chris Buddle, which comes out on Mondays on Arthropod Ecology. This is some general interest science and academia, with a good dose of spiders. Second is Malcolm Campbell’s Morsels for the Mind, which is surprisingly great considering how long it is every week, and has many broad categories . (Malcolm’s shtick on twitter is to link to lots of particularly cool science stories and he’s definitely worth a follow.) The crew at Dynamic Ecology has Friday Links on, um, Friday. This is mostly for ecologists, often with concepts pulled from other fields like economics, and it’s predictably interesting stuff regardless of your discipline.

Have a great weekend!