I got these jobs mailed to me in an envelope. On paper! And they might be the sort of job that a reader of this blog might want. Should said reader be, you know, an unemployed bum. Or a post-doc.
These are for the Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Animal Behavior (Assistant professor) - Research focus is open, but could include observational and experimental approaches that clarify the molecular and physiological bases of behavioural traits, their functional ecology and evolution, their consequences for multispecies interactions and social integration, and related areas. Teaching requirements will include an undergrad course in animal behavior. For more info, contact Robert Marquis, chair of search committee: robert_marquis@umsl.edu.
Animal Physiology (Assistant or associate professor) - Research focus is open, but could include comparative physiology, immunology, endocrinology, metabolism, functional ecology, host-pathogen interactions, adaptation to extreme environments, and related areas. Teaching requirements will include an undergrad course in vertebrate physiology. For more info, contact Robert E Ricklefs, chair of search committee: ricklefs@umsl.edu.
Evolution and ecology (Assistant or associate professor) - Research focus is open, but could include genetics of adaptation, phylogenetic aspects of diversification, population abundance and distribution, or community interactions and co-evolution. We are particularly seeking applicants with strong analytical, computational, phylogenetic, and/or statistical skills. Teaching requirements may include undergrad courses evolution, biometry, or GIS. For more info, contact Elizabeth Kellogg, chair of search committee: tkellogg@umsl.edu.
Send cover letter, CV, concise outline of research plans, statement of teaching interest and philosophy, in a single PDF. Provide PDF or up to 5 publicayions and request letters from 3 references. Send all application documents to Maryann Hempen (hempen@umsl.edu).
Review begins 1 October.
17 September 2011
16 September 2011
Being a fish out of water changes you
It might be tricky to keep mangrove rivulus in your typical aquarium. Mangrove rivulus are rather found of jumping out of water – and staying there. Being out of water is a rather different place from being in the water, and so this fish obviously have some evolutionary adaptations that allow it to pull off this stunt. But a new paper asks a different, possibly more subtle: do mangrove rivulus adapt to being in or out of water in the short term?
Mangrove rivulus have an advantage for studying these sorts of short-term physiological changes, as many of them are genetically identical, because they are hermaphrodites - not all that unusual among animals, but that they are self-fertilizing hermaphrodites is a rare and exceptional feature among vertebrates.Turko and colleagues first did a simple correlative study, allowing the fish to jump out of their tanks as often as they want. Most stayed in the water most of the time, but a few appeared to have what would have been a death wish in most other fish: they were out of the water almost two thirds of the time (64%). The authors saw differences in the gill shape that were correlated with the amount of time fish spent in or out of water.
But because correlation does not mean causation, the authors sensibly went back and did an experiment. They monitored animals for a week, then prevented them all from leaving the water, sacrificed half to check on their gills, and then left the remaining half go back to being free to leave the water if they chose.
The first that were prevented from leaving the water had different gill shapes than those that were allowed to return to the air. This strong suggests that the fishes’ behaviour drove the changes in the gill morphology.
But there is a problem in interpretation here. At the start of the second experiment, the fish were leaving water rather less than in the first correlation study. And there were no correlations between gill shape and the fish’s behaviour after the first week, as there was in the first study. The differences in gill shape emerged only after the week were the fish were forced to stay within water. The researchers suggest that there may be a minimum time the fish have to spend out of water for the gill remodeling effect to occur.
This makes me wonder if there were be a way to do the experiment were fish were forced to stay out of water for set periods of time. Here, the experimenters were at the mercy of the fish voluntarily leaving the water. It may be a little bit trickier, but the results would be much easier to interpret.
Related posts
Conquest of the land, a la Chubby Checker
Celebrate diversity: The fish that fertilizes itself (on Marmorkrebs)
Reference
Turko A, Earley R, Wright P. 2011. Behaviour drives morphology: voluntary emersion patterns shape gill structure in genetically identical mangrove rivulus. Animal Behaviour 82(1): 39-47. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.03.001
15 September 2011
Comments for first half of September 2011
Dr. Becca shares the tips she got for how to get tenure in 90 minutes. (I think that was the length of the session, not the length of her probation.)
Professor in Training notes that one funding agency now has a fee to submit grant applications to it.
Prof Like Substance collects advice for new grad students.
Professor in Training notes that one funding agency now has a fee to submit grant applications to it.
Prof Like Substance collects advice for new grad students.
14 September 2011
Subtropical Biology 2012
Please spread the news and help make this first conference a success!
ESA 2011, postscript
At the Ecology Society of America meeting in Austin last month, I mentioned that I had lunch with the most fab Sarcozona. She has notes from our chittin’ and chattin’ at Gravity’s Rainbow!
The two words that can sabotage your tenure
There are two words that have probably sabotaged many a promising academic on tenure-track.“Still time.”
Dr. Becca described “third year syndrome” in a tenure-track orientation session. One of the more cryptic pieces of advice was to beware of I had not heard of this, although the importance of the third year is that it’s normally the halfway point in the probationary period.
The problem with the halfway point is that it’s easy to get there without doing the research that is going to get you tenure. You think, “First couple of years, I'll be preparing courses for teaching and establishing my lab. Second year, I'll probably be recruiting students and technicians, and these experiments that I need to do to get me grant money are long and sophisticated, and they'll take another year...”
Before you know it, you’ve reached the halfway point and produced no original scholarship from your new university.
You might think, “That’s okay, they only evaluate the total publications at the end, so I can have a lot the last couple of years of probation.”
The problem with that way of thinking is that your probationary period starts to look like one Zeno’s paradoxes: you get to the halfway point with no publications, but there’s still time in the second half of probation. You get halfway through the second half with no publications, but there’s still time in the last year. You get to the last year and have submit manuscripts to journals... but the review process drags out. The reviewers demand more experiments before accepting the paper.
And then you’re at the end without the publications you need to get tenured.
Make it a goal: get something out by the halfway mark.
Photo by Graham Binns on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
13 September 2011
Tuesday Crustie: The crab that went into the cold
This large crab species (Neolithodes yaldwyni) has been making the news recently as they make their way into the waters of Antarctica.
Photo from here.
12 September 2011
The Zen of Presentations, Part 46: If you say this, you know your talk sucks
There are certain phrases that you never plan to say during a presentation. When talking out loud, though, they can sneak out in a moment of uncontrolled honesty.
Kate Wing nails it:
I have often heard some variation of, “This slide isn’t very clear, but...”. If you know that, then why are you forcing me to look at it? Apologizing for a slide might have been acceptable in the days of 35 mm film, where you couldn’t see the results until the film was actually developed. But we are living in the digital age, where high quality previews are immediate and photo editing software is everywhere.
You should always show the best image possible. Sometimes, that best image might not be so hot, but you should say, “This is the best available image.” Because that tells the audience that you respect their attention, and you put in your best effort to track down or make the clearest graphic you could.
Another phrase to listen for is, “This slide is to remind me to tell you...”
No! Slides are not for reminding yourself of what you want to say. Notes are to remind you what you want to say. Teleprompters are to remind you what you want to say. Rehearsal is to make it so you don’t need reminders at all.
If you hear phrases like these coming out of your mouth, you know it’s time to change your talk.
Never apologize, never explain.
Picture by Andrew Coulter Enright on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Kate Wing nails it:
Scientists - If you have to preface your slide with “you won’t be able to see this” it shouldn't be a slide.
I have often heard some variation of, “This slide isn’t very clear, but...”. If you know that, then why are you forcing me to look at it? Apologizing for a slide might have been acceptable in the days of 35 mm film, where you couldn’t see the results until the film was actually developed. But we are living in the digital age, where high quality previews are immediate and photo editing software is everywhere.
You should always show the best image possible. Sometimes, that best image might not be so hot, but you should say, “This is the best available image.” Because that tells the audience that you respect their attention, and you put in your best effort to track down or make the clearest graphic you could.
Another phrase to listen for is, “This slide is to remind me to tell you...”No! Slides are not for reminding yourself of what you want to say. Notes are to remind you what you want to say. Teleprompters are to remind you what you want to say. Rehearsal is to make it so you don’t need reminders at all.
If you hear phrases like these coming out of your mouth, you know it’s time to change your talk.
Never apologize, never explain.
Picture by Andrew Coulter Enright on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
10 September 2011
Things that happen to other people
Random emails asking to work with me as a grad student or post-doc.
People finding my blog through funny or strange search queries.
People emailing me career-related questions.
People finding my blog through funny or strange search queries.
People emailing me career-related questions.
09 September 2011
How students see scientific publishing
As I mentioned yesterday, I have been asking students to sketch things this semester. (This is inspired by a recent paper in Science about the effectiveness of drawing for teaching.)
In my biological writing class, I asked students to draw a little flowchart to show what happens between when a scientist writes a paper and someone else can read it.
About half the students mentioned “review” in some form, but only 17% used the phrase that distinguishes academic and scholarly writing: peer review.
There seemed to be great confusion about the difference between a publisher, an editor, and a reviewer. The terms were sort of used interchangeably to mean “people who handle stuff to get the paper out.”
Some students, perhaps not being aware of publishing jargon, used descriptive phrases like, “superiors” and the perhaps too honest, “someone of power.”
One person wrote about the part of the “publicist.” I liked the sound of that. Maybe more scientists should have publicists instead of publishers.
“Zen, baby! I’ve got you booked on Craig Ferguson next Tuesday! I’m still working on that Daily Show gig, but Stewart’s people won’t return my calls, the bastards...”
In my biological writing class, I asked students to draw a little flowchart to show what happens between when a scientist writes a paper and someone else can read it.
About half the students mentioned “review” in some form, but only 17% used the phrase that distinguishes academic and scholarly writing: peer review.
There seemed to be great confusion about the difference between a publisher, an editor, and a reviewer. The terms were sort of used interchangeably to mean “people who handle stuff to get the paper out.”
Some students, perhaps not being aware of publishing jargon, used descriptive phrases like, “superiors” and the perhaps too honest, “someone of power.”
“Zen, baby! I’ve got you booked on Craig Ferguson next Tuesday! I’m still working on that Daily Show gig, but Stewart’s people won’t return my calls, the bastards...”
08 September 2011
The white dude of neuroscience
It’s a faux pas for any large organization to show pictures of its people and show only white men. And rightly so, since any middling sized organization is going to have women and all sorts of wonderful human diversity contained within it, and that should be represented. (Though diversity in some places is not as great as we would like it to be...)
We often make that mistake in teaching.
In my neurobiology class this semester, I asked my students on Day One to draw and label a picture of a neuron.
The pictures fell into two broad categories. About a third were unlabelled (some of them may not have heard me ask for the labels). Of the two thirds that were labelled, essentially all of them were vertebrate spinal cord motor neurons: a multipolar cell body and one long myelinated axon.
I’m puzzled as to why, of all the many types of neurons, these one have become viewed as “typical.” I know the trivial answer: they’re the ones shown in all the introductory general biology textbooks. And I understand why invertebrate neurons are not shown as examples, because neuroscience is mostly concerned with human brains.
Even within humans, spinal cord motor neurons are not typical. Many of the neurons in the brain are not myelinated (the “grey matter,” as it’s sometimes called). And neurons come in many shapes, and the axon is often not easily distinguished from all the other branches coming from the cell.
In teaching, we often make the same mistake of showing one example as representative, when it’s about as representative as the middle-aged white guy in a business photo.Which is to say, not at all.
Collage of neurons from here.
We often make that mistake in teaching.
In my neurobiology class this semester, I asked my students on Day One to draw and label a picture of a neuron.
The pictures fell into two broad categories. About a third were unlabelled (some of them may not have heard me ask for the labels). Of the two thirds that were labelled, essentially all of them were vertebrate spinal cord motor neurons: a multipolar cell body and one long myelinated axon.
I’m puzzled as to why, of all the many types of neurons, these one have become viewed as “typical.” I know the trivial answer: they’re the ones shown in all the introductory general biology textbooks. And I understand why invertebrate neurons are not shown as examples, because neuroscience is mostly concerned with human brains.
Even within humans, spinal cord motor neurons are not typical. Many of the neurons in the brain are not myelinated (the “grey matter,” as it’s sometimes called). And neurons come in many shapes, and the axon is often not easily distinguished from all the other branches coming from the cell.
In teaching, we often make the same mistake of showing one example as representative, when it’s about as representative as the middle-aged white guy in a business photo.Which is to say, not at all.
Collage of neurons from here.
07 September 2011
Owls hunt at night when the moon is full and bright
The moon makes a difference for predators and prey. It’s easier to see during the full moon, which might mean greater opportunities for nocturnal predators, except that nocturnal prey might adjust their behaviour accordingly. It’s a delicate balancing act.This paper looked at the changes in behaviour of eagle owls (Bubo bubo) over the lunar cycle. Not this Bubo:
This Bubo:
The team categorized their owls into “breeders” and “dispersers.” Over 459 nights (whew!), the team tracked the movements, predation, and calling of their radiotagged owls.
The breeders paid attention to the moon. The breeders were moving more, and calling more, on the nights of the full moon. The authors think that this is because hunting is less efficient on the darker nights of the full moon. Reasonable idea, but the discussion section describing how the reproductive status of the owls is affecting their behaviour is loaded with qualifiers like “could,” “might,” “could be interpreted,” “may be,” and “probably.” There’s more work to be done to clarify.
The dispersers, however, paid no attention to the moon. The authors argue that disperser might have the luxury of reducing their effort when there is less food to be had, which the breeding owls can’t do.
This is a slightly frustrating paper, because it is one small chunk of a long-term study. It seems like there are certain details that make lots of sense if you have read all the papers arising from this project, but that are hard to glean here. For instance, I can’t quite figure out how the team categorized breeders and dispersers. the distinction is probably spelled out in another paper in the series
Reference
Penteriani V, Kuparinen A, Delgado M, Lourenço R, Campioni L. 2011. Individual status, foraging effort and need for conspicuousness shape behavioural responses of a predator to moon phases. Animal Behaviour 82(2): 413-420. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.027
Photo by FurLined on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
06 September 2011
Tuesday Crustie: Zanni
A harlequin crab, Lissocarcinus orbicularis, photographed off Maratua.
Photo by danielguip on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
05 September 2011
Anything is possible?
Back in April, Nature had an extended podcast with David Eagleman. Eagleman has also been profiled here.
Eagleman described some of his ideas as “possibilianism,” which might be summarized as “Anything’s possible.” He said:
It’s not committing to either of these two sides (Theistic or atheism, apparently - ZF), which I think are way too limited for modern discussion.
It bugged me, and I had been meaning to write a critique of the idea since April. I blogged about other things instead, and Jerry Coyne beat me to it.
As a lover of science fiction, I love exploring possibilities. It’s a great form of intellectual play, and play can lead to serious work. But Eagleman seems think that generating possibilities is enough, and is unwilling to sort through them to determine which is the best that reflects reality. This struck me as throwing your hands in the air and refusing to make a decision. As scientists, the point of generating possibilities is to arrive at a conclusion, not just sit and ooh and aah at all the things that could be in the mind.
Money for South Texas universities
Particularly interesting are the reports of $9.5 million to recruit new faculty in science and technology. The campus paper quotes my institution’s President, Robert Nelsen:
“We’re looking for starters,” he said. “These will be people with national reputations. We need new faculty and to have the quality of high-caliber faculty such as these is really going to be marvelous.”
Details on exactly how the money will be managed have not surfaced anywhere, as far as I can see. I wonder who will be making decisions about recruiting, and what that money will be used to do (i.e., salary, start-up, something else?).
In an effort like this, the devil is surely in the details. Recruiting new faculty (particularly people with “national reputations”) is a tricky business at the best of times.
Texas does not enjoy a great reputation for science. The last few weeks have seen a lot of discussion about Governor Rick Perry’s mistaken belief that we teach creationism here, and his comments about how climate scientists are lying about global warming to make money. Sprinkle with a couple of years of the Texas State Board of Education weakening the K-12 science standards, and is it any surprise you hear these sorts of dialogues among academics?
Way back when I was but a naive TT hopeful (ahh...2009), J and I had a not-that-serious conversation about which cities we'd be willing to grace with the privilege of our permanent/semi-permanent residence. In truth, it was not so much a conversation as it was me naming places, and J either accepting or vetoing, comme ça:
Me: San Francisco?
J: Probably.
Me: Chicago?
J: I could do Chicago.
Me: Houston?
J: No-HO! No Texas.
Then there is physical space. Our university has been talking about a new wing on our science building for some time. The most recent capital improvement has been for a new Fine Arts center - which they got, and good for them! But it’s not clear when we’re going to see new space on a science building.
Finally, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board announced new rules for doctoral programs that take effect in October. The new rules tie requests to new doctoral programs to the undergraduate completion rate: you have to be at or above the state average (excluding the flagship universities, the University of Texas in Austin and Texas A&M University). This means that half the universities in Texas are cut out, including ours.
To sum up: we have millions of dollars to recruit new faculty with “national reputations” to come to a somewhat rural locale in a state with an anti-intellectual reputation, who will then be expected to perform their wonders with no doctoral students and no new space.
Sometimes, you have to wonder if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.
In related news, the University of Texas system was widely praised for new plans to promote university accountability.
How to make the future
In the 19th century, the future was manufactured.
In the 20th century, the future was programmed.
In the 21st century, the future will be grown.
In the 20th century, the future was programmed.
In the 21st century, the future will be grown.
04 September 2011
Carnivals for September 2011
Carnival of Evolution #39 is being hosted at The End of the Pier Show.
Encephalon #90 is up at Labcoat Life.
Circus of the Spineless #65 is hosted at The Cephalopodiatrist.
Encephalon #90 is up at Labcoat Life.
Circus of the Spineless #65 is hosted at The Cephalopodiatrist.
02 September 2011
Microsoft Academic Research: First impressions
The search allows you to select certain domains. A lot of my research is spread over a wide field, so I checked as many boxes as I thought might be even tangentially relevant.
Oh dear.
I got five hits: Three in neuroscience and behaviour, one in biology and biochemistry, and one in clinical medicine. (Wha...?) Even for a beta version of the service, I was expecting double digits at least. Maybe I should have checked more boxes.
And... what a second... who’s that guy?
I have never met Michael N. Nitabach. He wasn’t an author on the paper. A little clicking reveals that there’s an “Edit” button, and that I can remove him as an author:
What?
Why is the DOI taking me to Figure 7 instead of the main page?
Okay, let's fix the DOI for the article. And add the link to the PDF. Might as well copy and paste the abstract too while I'm here. Why am I doing this work again? Isn’t the point of the database to have this stuff for you?
Sigh.
Also noticed that the “type” of article includes “poster”.
While I am a big poster booster, I don’t know that I want posters, which are typically very gray literature, in an academic research database. But Google Scholar catches blog posts sometimes.
Back to the main page. Hm. What are these “Were you looking for these authors” bar along the top? Yup, that’s what I was afraid of. Each one has pulled a different set of papers, even though all three of the alternates specify the same name. Why is the search for my name returning four hits instead of one? It’s not as though one was “Z Faulkes” - they all have the same name spelled out, although one includes my institution’s address below it.
The third “were you looking for...” – the one with my address underneath – is interesting, though.
This profile has a nice little dashboard, an RSS feed for updates... still missing a buttload of information, though. Let’s try editing author information. Ah, here is where add pictures, my home page, and - aha! - I can merge the three different profile!
But it’s going to take a week to verify the merger. While I appreciate that I can submit corrections, there is going to be too much literature to crowdsource corrections.
My first impression of this service is to ignore it for about a year, or until I hear about a major update. There’s just too many odd and unpredictable things going on here. It’s not trustworthy yet.
Hat tip to Bjorn Brembs on Twitter.
Additional: Bjorn Brembs followed up, saying:
It's less than beta and some/much of what you mentioned they are aware of.
The Zen of Presentations, Part 45: Down in front
You often have to give presentations in rooms where the floors are flat, the room is full, and the projection screens are always too low.
This was a curse at the recent Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting. The screens were too low in many of the rooms, and people noticed and remarked upon it.
I knew this... and I blew it.
Because the organizers of the conference were adamant that presentations needed to be able to run in PowerPoint 1997 format, I actually ended up with multiple versions of my slides. I had one done in PowerPoint 2010 with some of the graphic effects and typefaces I wanted.
In retrospect, I was stupid to show this slide. About 20 percent of the slide is taken up with the title, pushing the image, which is what I want people to see, further down so it’s more likely to be blocked by someone’s head.
I had another that was PowerPoint 1997 compatible, with almost no text, because I was not sure if the fonts would show correctly, as not every computer has the same fonts installed. I should have used that one, because the slide would have looked more like this:
The image is bigger, and shows more of what I wanted people to see. I’d okay with the first one if I knew I was in a room with stadium seating and everyone having clear eye-lines. But I wasn’t.
Sadly, you can probably only count on the top half, or maybe two thirds, of your slides being consistently and clearly visible to all. Don’t put anything important in that bottom half or third; someone might not be able to see it. Better to start a new slide and put it at the top.
Screen photo by ChrisM70 on Flickr; crayfish photo in slides by Mike Bok on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.
This was a curse at the recent Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting. The screens were too low in many of the rooms, and people noticed and remarked upon it.
I knew this... and I blew it.
Because the organizers of the conference were adamant that presentations needed to be able to run in PowerPoint 1997 format, I actually ended up with multiple versions of my slides. I had one done in PowerPoint 2010 with some of the graphic effects and typefaces I wanted.
In retrospect, I was stupid to show this slide. About 20 percent of the slide is taken up with the title, pushing the image, which is what I want people to see, further down so it’s more likely to be blocked by someone’s head.
I had another that was PowerPoint 1997 compatible, with almost no text, because I was not sure if the fonts would show correctly, as not every computer has the same fonts installed. I should have used that one, because the slide would have looked more like this:
The image is bigger, and shows more of what I wanted people to see. I’d okay with the first one if I knew I was in a room with stadium seating and everyone having clear eye-lines. But I wasn’t.
Sadly, you can probably only count on the top half, or maybe two thirds, of your slides being consistently and clearly visible to all. Don’t put anything important in that bottom half or third; someone might not be able to see it. Better to start a new slide and put it at the top.
Screen photo by ChrisM70 on Flickr; crayfish photo in slides by Mike Bok on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.
01 September 2011
Comments for second half of August 2011
Dr. Micro O is checking on the hiring practices out there. She follows it up with some thoughts on academic competition, with which Gerty Z further runs even further.
Kate Clancy seeks advice on teaching science to undergraduates who are not science majors.
Prof-Like Substance reviews the new grant submission policies for a couple of divisions in the National Science Foundation.
Jamie Vernon takes Governor Rick Perry at his word.
BenchFly Blog fields a question from a prospective grad student who doesn’t want to write the GRE.
Sheril Kirschembaum asks if doctoral programs are pyramid schemes, followed by whether we still need tenure.
Dr. Isis likes getting money. I did, too, once. And, she wonders, “A signed review?! What does that mean?!”
Dr. Becca tries to figure out if she should use the university gym.
Kate Clancy seeks advice on teaching science to undergraduates who are not science majors.
Prof-Like Substance reviews the new grant submission policies for a couple of divisions in the National Science Foundation.
Jamie Vernon takes Governor Rick Perry at his word.
BenchFly Blog fields a question from a prospective grad student who doesn’t want to write the GRE.
Sheril Kirschembaum asks if doctoral programs are pyramid schemes, followed by whether we still need tenure.
Dr. Isis likes getting money. I did, too, once. And, she wonders, “A signed review?! What does that mean?!”
Dr. Becca tries to figure out if she should use the university gym.
31 August 2011
The Zen of Presentations, Part 44: The language barrier
One of the most common pieces of advice for people giving a presentation is to get rid of almost all the text on the slides. There is quite a bit of research backing up this up.
There is one case where I would make an exception.
If you are speaking in your second language, have an accent, or some problem with your speech where people might misunderstand you, you might want to keep some of the text. More than if you and the audience are both fluent native speakers of the language, at any rate.
You don’t need to write out every line as a bullet point and read it, like so many people fall back on. But you probably want to have a few key phrases spelled out in text. In particular, it can be helpful to spell out somewhere on a slide any technical words or phrases that people might not be used to hearing.
For example, I spent much of a semester in an undergraduate genetics class trying to figure out what a doughnut trait was. I finally realized that the instructor was talking about a dominant trait.
While people might be slightly annoyed by the amount of text, annoyance or boredom is always better than confusion.
Just to round this out...
External links
American translation: Dr. Doyenne describes how she prepared a presentation when her audience was not fluent with the language she was speaking. Excellent post, and the inspiration for this one.
There is one case where I would make an exception.
If you are speaking in your second language, have an accent, or some problem with your speech where people might misunderstand you, you might want to keep some of the text. More than if you and the audience are both fluent native speakers of the language, at any rate.
You don’t need to write out every line as a bullet point and read it, like so many people fall back on. But you probably want to have a few key phrases spelled out in text. In particular, it can be helpful to spell out somewhere on a slide any technical words or phrases that people might not be used to hearing.
For example, I spent much of a semester in an undergraduate genetics class trying to figure out what a doughnut trait was. I finally realized that the instructor was talking about a dominant trait.
While people might be slightly annoyed by the amount of text, annoyance or boredom is always better than confusion.
Just to round this out...
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot. | |
| The West | |
| The Midland | |
| Boston | |
| The Inland North | |
| The South | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The Northeast | |
| What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz | |
External links
American translation: Dr. Doyenne describes how she prepared a presentation when her audience was not fluent with the language she was speaking. Excellent post, and the inspiration for this one.
30 August 2011
Tuesday Crustie: O hai
29 August 2011
The Zen of Presentations, Part 43: Not our best work
Today’s post is for students heading to their fall classes, whether for the first time or not.
Over the course of your career as a student, you are going to listen to a lot of lectures. You’ll definitely see that some lecturers are better than others.
In universities,
you may be lucky enough to have some professors who are world famous for their scholarship; people at the absolute top of their professional game.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, you may well be influenced by the style of lecturers. That might affect how you give presentations, either in class or elsewhere.
Don’t make that mistake.
A university instructor has two or three different classes a semester. For each class, that instructor has three hours of class time per week, for a total of six to nine hours of stuff every week. Let’s say eight hours, for the sake of argument.
The key to great presentations is practice. I consider at least two “out loud” run throughs before the actual presentation to be my bare, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for conference presentations. Hundreds of hours of work go into every Apple keynote, for which they are rightly praised.
Rehearsing each lecture twice would require 24 hours of rehearsal and lecture time a week. And remember, we still haven’t added in time needed research what the information to put on those slides, or the time spent organizing the information in a coherent way for students, never mind everything besides lectures that instructors have to do.
Because of the lack of rehearsal, it’s almost necessary to use your slides as notes. Lecturers are routinely guilty of “reading each bullet point aloud as it come up” style of presenting because of this.
When I’m lecturing, it’s not my best work as a presenter. It can’t be. There’s too much stuff and not enough time.
Students, don’t think that lectures are good examples of what to do presentations. Even the best instructors compromise on presentation practices to get the lectures done.
Picture by thekennelclub on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Over the course of your career as a student, you are going to listen to a lot of lectures. You’ll definitely see that some lecturers are better than others.
In universities,
you may be lucky enough to have some professors who are world famous for their scholarship; people at the absolute top of their professional game.Whether you’re aware of it or not, you may well be influenced by the style of lecturers. That might affect how you give presentations, either in class or elsewhere.
Don’t make that mistake.
A university instructor has two or three different classes a semester. For each class, that instructor has three hours of class time per week, for a total of six to nine hours of stuff every week. Let’s say eight hours, for the sake of argument.
The key to great presentations is practice. I consider at least two “out loud” run throughs before the actual presentation to be my bare, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for conference presentations. Hundreds of hours of work go into every Apple keynote, for which they are rightly praised.
Rehearsing each lecture twice would require 24 hours of rehearsal and lecture time a week. And remember, we still haven’t added in time needed research what the information to put on those slides, or the time spent organizing the information in a coherent way for students, never mind everything besides lectures that instructors have to do.
Because of the lack of rehearsal, it’s almost necessary to use your slides as notes. Lecturers are routinely guilty of “reading each bullet point aloud as it come up” style of presenting because of this.
When I’m lecturing, it’s not my best work as a presenter. It can’t be. There’s too much stuff and not enough time.
Students, don’t think that lectures are good examples of what to do presentations. Even the best instructors compromise on presentation practices to get the lectures done.
Picture by thekennelclub on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
28 August 2011
Who do we work for? Not these guys
27 August 2011
Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour #110
This week, I had a lovely live chat with Dr. Kirsten Sanford, a.k.a. Dr. Kiki on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour! She titled Episode 110, “Invasion of the Marmorkrebs!”You can listen to the audio, as well as subscribe to the show’s audio and video feeds, here. The audio is available now, and the video should be up any second.
Additional: And the video is now up on iTunes, YouTube, and elsewhere!
26 August 2011
Overdoing it?
This morning, I got a workload report for our college.
Every department in the college exceed the required workload standards. Two departments (out of the four in the college) did twice the amount of work they were required to do.
Some people promote the view that professors work very little. I’m sure there are some professors who only do the bare minimum required of their job. But as I said before, my experience is rather different.
Additional: The University of Texas system has announced it will have a reporting system on professors and institutions up and running soon.
Every department in the college exceed the required workload standards. Two departments (out of the four in the college) did twice the amount of work they were required to do.
Some people promote the view that professors work very little. I’m sure there are some professors who only do the bare minimum required of their job. But as I said before, my experience is rather different.
Additional: The University of Texas system has announced it will have a reporting system on professors and institutions up and running soon.
Why grade inflation is good for the GRE
You need variation to make decisions. I talked about this yesterday when I was discussing faculty evaluations. Today, I want to examine the consequences of that principle in graduate school applications.
In our department, we require students take the general Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In many places, the GRE is apparently the most important factor in deciding whether an applicant is accepted.
Now, there are good and valid arguments against standardized tests in general and the GRE in particular.* One argument that people make against using the GRE is that undergraduate GPA should tell you everything you need to know about a prospective grad students academic chops.
The problem is that there is less and less variation in undergraduate grades.
I’m sure that most of academics in the United States have seen this chart, which shows that a few years ago, “A” become the most common grade at universities in the United States.
As grades vary less, they become less informative, and people will stop making decisions based on them. And this can only be good news for the standardized test business, like the GRE. As long as GRE scores vary a lot, people are more likely to use them to make decisions, as flawed and as imperfect as though those scores may be.
* In our department, GRE scores are just one of several pieces of information we look at, and they are not the most important. I might talk more about our reasons for requiring the GRE some other time.
In our department, we require students take the general Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In many places, the GRE is apparently the most important factor in deciding whether an applicant is accepted.
Now, there are good and valid arguments against standardized tests in general and the GRE in particular.* One argument that people make against using the GRE is that undergraduate GPA should tell you everything you need to know about a prospective grad students academic chops.
The problem is that there is less and less variation in undergraduate grades.
I’m sure that most of academics in the United States have seen this chart, which shows that a few years ago, “A” become the most common grade at universities in the United States.
As grades vary less, they become less informative, and people will stop making decisions based on them. And this can only be good news for the standardized test business, like the GRE. As long as GRE scores vary a lot, people are more likely to use them to make decisions, as flawed and as imperfect as though those scores may be.
* In our department, GRE scores are just one of several pieces of information we look at, and they are not the most important. I might talk more about our reasons for requiring the GRE some other time.
25 August 2011
From evaluating teaching to valuing teaching
Research counts for more than teaching at universities. This is widely known and widely discussed. Many people don’t like this fact, and blame the pursuit of research excellence on universities’ pursuit of money and prestige. These are true, but there may be another less obvious reason why universities pay so much attention to research in tenure and promotion decisions.
I’m getting ready to submit my annual merit folder, and just for this post and giggles, I compiled my merit scores for most of my career here.
Pay no attention to the means (the black dots) being different. Look at the amount of smear. My teaching scores are tightly clumped (wide boxes show where half of the scores lie). My research scores vary significantly. Some years (like this one), I published a lot of papers. Some years, I didn’t.
I didn’t include service in the graph, because few people think service should be the main way we evaluate professors. The variation for service is closer to that for teaching than it is for research, anyway.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume my personal record is not different from other faculty as a group.
You need variation to make decisions. If you want to buy a car, and every car you look at has air conditioning, you are not going to factor, “Does this car have air conditioning?” into your decision.
To me, this indicates that we need much more sophisticated measurements of teaching achievements. We can’t value teaching when we have so few ways of distinguishing between teachers.
I’m getting ready to submit my annual merit folder, and just for this post and giggles, I compiled my merit scores for most of my career here.
Pay no attention to the means (the black dots) being different. Look at the amount of smear. My teaching scores are tightly clumped (wide boxes show where half of the scores lie). My research scores vary significantly. Some years (like this one), I published a lot of papers. Some years, I didn’t.
I didn’t include service in the graph, because few people think service should be the main way we evaluate professors. The variation for service is closer to that for teaching than it is for research, anyway.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume my personal record is not different from other faculty as a group.
You need variation to make decisions. If you want to buy a car, and every car you look at has air conditioning, you are not going to factor, “Does this car have air conditioning?” into your decision.
To me, this indicates that we need much more sophisticated measurements of teaching achievements. We can’t value teaching when we have so few ways of distinguishing between teachers.
24 August 2011
Taxonomy in decline or growth?
Earlier this year, Craig McClain from Deep Sea News wrote an editorial at Wired arguing that taxonomy as a scientific discipline was “going extinct.”A short new paper challenges that view.
Joppa and colleagues looked at taxonomic research on cone snails (pictured), spiders, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and mammals. The number of taxonomists studying each group has gone up in every case, not down. The number of species being described is also going up, but it is actually not keeping up with the growth of taxnomists: the average number of new species described by each taxonomist is getting smaller. It’s also noteworthy that taxonomists are not working alone, contrary to popular conceptions of expertise for whole groups being locked in the head of single individuals.
Can the perception of taxonomy as a discipline in decline be reconciled with the data? First, the data only goes to 2000. A lot has changed in ten years, though I don’t know if it has changed that much. Second, the authors suggest that taxonomy in North America and Europe might be running counter to a global trend: declining here while growing in the rest of the world.
Another idea I have that might explain the discrepancy is that there is no control group. The number of taxonomists may be increasing, but how does it compare to other disciplines in biology? I suspect that there has been healthy growth of biological sciences as a whole, and that while the number of taxonomists may have increased “exponentially” (as described by Joppa and colleagues), other fields, like cell and molecular biology, have increased even more exponentially. (Mathematicians, don’t bug me if that is a meaningless phrase.)
Reference
Joppa L, Roberts D, & Pimm S (2011). The population ecology and social behaviour of taxonomists Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010
Photo by richard ling on Flickr; used under Creative Commons license.
23 August 2011
Tuesday Crustie: Don’t mess with the front or the back
Stomatopods, like this one, Chorisquilla hystrix, often feature in this recurring feature because their are pretty photogenic. As do the photographs of Arthropoda blogger Mike Bok, because he takes damn good photos. (Really, he should be doing a Tuesday Crustie series, not me.)
But what is most astonishing about this particular one is an extravagant back end (known in the crustacean biz as the telson):
An astonishing array of protuberances! What might they be for? In his Flickr photostream, Mike notes this is the first one he’s seen in three years, and a Google Scholar search for the species yields a paltry seven hits, almost all taxonomic surveys. None seem to be promising leads for hints on why the back end of this beast is so extravagant.
Photos by Michael Bok on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
22 August 2011
Decisions, decisions
In Moscow on the Hudson, there’s a scene where Vladimir Ivanoff (played by Robin Williams), a new Soviet* immigrant to the U.S., goes into a grocery store to buy coffee. Faced with more kinds of coffee than he has ever seen in Moscow, he struggles to make a decision. In the end, it’s all too much, and passes out on the store floor.
Option paralysis.
I’d heard that term before. I’d also heard some research that showed that willpower was a finite resource, but new to me was a concept that tied the two together: decision fatigue.
This article in The New York Times Magazine is a superb explanation and examination of research in psychology that shows every decision you make makes the next one harder. Decisions take effort, and at some point, we get sick of it, and just stop deciding. That’s the point the “Screw it” factor comes in that lies behind so many bad choices.
Since reading that article, I can’t stop thinking about what that means for teaching.Classes start up again in one week.
Over the last few years, I’ve been using clickers in class. I’ve done this in part because research shows that retrieving information enhances memory, and that many people claim that people can only pay attention for a few minutes (though I remain skeptical of this). I talk for a while, then ask a clicker question.
But how much I contributing to my students’ decision fatigue?
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if students are suffering from chronic decision fatigue. In particular, the current crop of American students have probably been tested and assessed so often that I’d wager that some of them are running decision deficits.
For instance, university students show survey fatigue. Even taking a survey requires making a bunch of decisions. Was I “extremely satisfied” with the service, or merely “satisfied”? Was the instructor “excellent” or simply “good”?
On the one hand, boredom. On the other hand, decision fatigue. Both are bad for learning. Which is least bad? Or is there some optimal balance? I can’t decide. Screw it. Time for a snack.
Additional: That willpower is limited does not mean that it cannot be strengthened, however. A blog post at Time examines research on this topic that suggests that while the effects of decision fatigue are real, how much people are affected by it varies tremendously.
Photo by mattwi1s0n on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.
* Yes, Soviet. It was the 1980s.
Option paralysis.
I’d heard that term before. I’d also heard some research that showed that willpower was a finite resource, but new to me was a concept that tied the two together: decision fatigue.This article in The New York Times Magazine is a superb explanation and examination of research in psychology that shows every decision you make makes the next one harder. Decisions take effort, and at some point, we get sick of it, and just stop deciding. That’s the point the “Screw it” factor comes in that lies behind so many bad choices.
Since reading that article, I can’t stop thinking about what that means for teaching.Classes start up again in one week.
Over the last few years, I’ve been using clickers in class. I’ve done this in part because research shows that retrieving information enhances memory, and that many people claim that people can only pay attention for a few minutes (though I remain skeptical of this). I talk for a while, then ask a clicker question.
But how much I contributing to my students’ decision fatigue?
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if students are suffering from chronic decision fatigue. In particular, the current crop of American students have probably been tested and assessed so often that I’d wager that some of them are running decision deficits.
For instance, university students show survey fatigue. Even taking a survey requires making a bunch of decisions. Was I “extremely satisfied” with the service, or merely “satisfied”? Was the instructor “excellent” or simply “good”?
On the one hand, boredom. On the other hand, decision fatigue. Both are bad for learning. Which is least bad? Or is there some optimal balance? I can’t decide. Screw it. Time for a snack.
Additional: That willpower is limited does not mean that it cannot be strengthened, however. A blog post at Time examines research on this topic that suggests that while the effects of decision fatigue are real, how much people are affected by it varies tremendously.
Photo by mattwi1s0n on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.
* Yes, Soviet. It was the 1980s.
18 August 2011
Texas governor does not know the law of his own state
This is weird. Texas governor and American presidential candidate is reported on NBC news as saying:
Not in the K-12 public schools, you don’t. I don’t doubt that it’s something Perry wants to be true about public schools, but it is not true.
Indeed, Ken Mercer of the Texas State Board of Education recently offered $500 to anyone who can show there is creationism in the Texas science standards.
I’ve looked at those standards, and Mercer is right. There is no creationism in the Texas science standards. It’s the law to teach evolution, and nothing else.
Maybe Perry is talking about home schooling or something else. But that’s me being charitable.
Additional: A reporter chases this down, and gets surprising replies:
More additional: Politifact backs me up.
(I)n Texas we teach both creationism and evolution.
Not in the K-12 public schools, you don’t. I don’t doubt that it’s something Perry wants to be true about public schools, but it is not true.
Indeed, Ken Mercer of the Texas State Board of Education recently offered $500 to anyone who can show there is creationism in the Texas science standards.
I’ve looked at those standards, and Mercer is right. There is no creationism in the Texas science standards. It’s the law to teach evolution, and nothing else.
Maybe Perry is talking about home schooling or something else. But that’s me being charitable.
Additional: A reporter chases this down, and gets surprising replies:
I called the Texas Education Agency for confirmation. And I got an even bigger surprise.
First, spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson sent me a wordy statement: “Our science standards require students to analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations, so it is likely that other theories, such as creationism, would be discussed in class. Our schools can also offer an elective course on Biblical history and it is likely that creationism is discussed as part of that class too.”
I called Culbertson to get a direct answer to my question: “Does the state of Texas teach creationism as scientific fact?”
Culbertson wouldn't say yes or no: “It could be part of the discussion,” she said. “If it comes up, then it's in the classroom.”
There you have it, science teachers of Texas. On the subject of teaching creationism in class, the education department won't say it's wrong, and the governor thinks you're already doing it.
There's nothing to stop you now but the law.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/article/Texas-teaching-of-scienceapparently-has-evolved-2122863.php#ixzz1VTepr6R8
More additional: Politifact backs me up.
As science funding dries up...
The funding of scientific research in the United States (and many other countries) is looking ever more like this:
With small ponds, a lot of people are determined to become the big fish.
So lots of researchers learn about “grantsmanship” and spend hours crafting the perfect proposal.
Some hope to find new funding sources in industry, private foundations and crowd funding.
But maybe there’s another strategy...
Rely on it a lot less than everyone else.
Adaptation or extinction. Those are always your choices in the face of extreme selection pressure.
Drying up photo by by Brian Auer on Flickr; big fish wall art by As_One on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.
With small ponds, a lot of people are determined to become the big fish.
So lots of researchers learn about “grantsmanship” and spend hours crafting the perfect proposal.
Some hope to find new funding sources in industry, private foundations and crowd funding.
But maybe there’s another strategy...
Rely on it a lot less than everyone else.
Adaptation or extinction. Those are always your choices in the face of extreme selection pressure.
Drying up photo by by Brian Auer on Flickr; big fish wall art by As_One on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.
17 August 2011
Fields of research
As a graduate program coordinator, I field questions from students. Sometimes they ask about marine biology. I’ve gotten shocked looks when I tell people that marine biology doesn’t exist.
Well, I never put it in quite so many words, but the gist of it is that marine biology is not currently a distinct research field in biology the way people think it is.
Biology used to divide itself by the type of organism you worked with. There were zoologists, botanists, entomologists, mycologists, microbiologists, and so on. But that’s not how biologists divide their fields now. Biology is divided up into physiology, ecology, developmental biology, cell biology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and so on.
One of the ways to recognize research fields is the societies that scientists form to promote their fields. I belong to a lot of them. The Society for Neuroscience, the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Neuroethology, the Ecological Society of America (from which I was just blogging last week), the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and a few others.
There’s no Marine Biology Society.
Marine biology may have once been more of a defined discipline. But there used to be departments of microscopy, too, and you don’t find those any more. Scientific fields come and go, and academics reorient themselves to new fields all the time.
I don’t quite know how marine biology has gotten fixed in the minds of students, and more widely, the general public, as something that exists as an active research discipline.
Are there other scientific fields that exist in the mind of non-scientists, but not in practice?
Well, I never put it in quite so many words, but the gist of it is that marine biology is not currently a distinct research field in biology the way people think it is.
Biology used to divide itself by the type of organism you worked with. There were zoologists, botanists, entomologists, mycologists, microbiologists, and so on. But that’s not how biologists divide their fields now. Biology is divided up into physiology, ecology, developmental biology, cell biology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and so on.
One of the ways to recognize research fields is the societies that scientists form to promote their fields. I belong to a lot of them. The Society for Neuroscience, the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Neuroethology, the Ecological Society of America (from which I was just blogging last week), the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and a few others.
There’s no Marine Biology Society.
Marine biology may have once been more of a defined discipline. But there used to be departments of microscopy, too, and you don’t find those any more. Scientific fields come and go, and academics reorient themselves to new fields all the time.
I don’t quite know how marine biology has gotten fixed in the minds of students, and more widely, the general public, as something that exists as an active research discipline.
Are there other scientific fields that exist in the mind of non-scientists, but not in practice?
16 August 2011
Tuesday Crustie: Cool
Uca panacea, a fiddler crab, whose specific name refers to a goddess of healing.
When I gave a public talk earlier this year about fiddler crabs, I talked at length about the role of the large claw in signalling. Signals from males to females, signals from males to other males, deceptive signals, and more.
A new paper suggests we might have been overlooking another use of this large claw: control its temperature.
Crabs are ectotherms: they rely on using the environment around them to change their body temperature. Fiddler crabs sometimes come up to the entrance of their burrow first thing in the morning, and hold up their big claw, which hints at the claw acting as a sun gatherer.
Darnell and Munguia tested whether the claw affects the crabs ability to thermoregulate by heating them up with incandescent light bulbs and measuring their body temperature. They had four groups:
- Intact males with one large claw and one small claw
- Males with the small claw removed, which controls for effects of claw removal
- Males with the large claw removed
- Females, which have two small claws
If the large claw is acting as an aid to controlling the crabs’ temperature, you’d expect to see groups 1 and 2 faring much better against the heat than 3 and 4.
And that’s what you find. Everyone heats up, but the males with their large claw are doing so more slowly.
You do have to dig for this finding, though. Considering that this is the main point of the paper, it’s a bit odd to find this key graph buried as Figure 5B.
Fiddler crabs can also change their colour to some degree. The crabs tended to get lighter on their backs when placed under the bulbs. This makes sense, as this would reflect more light. This was also affected by the treatment, with the males who had lost their claws becoming the lightest.
And that’s a problem. There’s no control here for carapace colour, which means that the claw removal and colour are intermingled. The authors say:
This difference in shade, however, does not explain the observed differences in heating rate, as males with the major claw removed had the greatest heating rate, and not a lower heating rate as predicted for a light-colored crab.
I would have suggested painting the carapaces to prevent colour changes from altering the crab’s reflectance. Then, there would be no doubt.
It may be that the claw is just a passive radiator, though with all that claw waving fiddlers normally do, you might expect behaviour to be involved. The authors note that the crabs didn’t wave in this experiment, possibly because they were in the room with the crabs. They think that if the crabs could wave, the effect would be even bigger than recorded here.
I also would have been interested to see if the behaviours changed when the crabs got cold. Thermoregulation cuts both ways, after all. But this paper is very much a starting point for new directions in research on crabs that have already taught us much.
Reference
Darnell MZ, Munguia P. 2011. Thermoregulation as an alternate function of the sexually dimorphic fiddler crab claw. The American Naturalist: in press. DOI: 10.1086/661239
Photo from here.
Comments for first half of August 2011
Joanne Manaster has a piece of the Scientific American Guest Blog about reforming science education, in which I make a brief cameo.
Kevin Zelnio asks if crayfish are lobsters. You know I got stuff to add there.
There’s a list of recommended scientists for Google Plus. Except that a good chunk of them aren’t scientists.
Kevin Zelnio asks if crayfish are lobsters. You know I got stuff to add there.
There’s a list of recommended scientists for Google Plus. Except that a good chunk of them aren’t scientists.
15 August 2011
ESA 2011, Day 5
I hate the last days of meetings.
They’re usually half days that feel half-hearted with half the people. Long meetings are even worse for this, and the ESA 2011 meeting seemed particularly bad in this regard.
There was a full slate of talks at the ESA meeting on Friday morning, and the late-breaking poster session. Contrary to what you might expect, the late-breaking poster session was one of the largest sessions of the week.
But unlike the rest of the week, the talks and the poster sessions conflicted. There was no time to see the posters when there were not a bunch of talks going on. Plus, all the vendor booths had been torn down on Thursday night, so the room was twice as empty. We could argue as to whether “dead zone” or “ghost town” would be a more apt metaphor, but it was a discouraging sight.
We had a lot of students from my university who made the trip for the day. Alas, nobody warned them how ecologists dress. As reporter Lindsay Patterson wrote:
Most common footwear @ #ESA11? Tevas, Birkenstocks, Chacos & hiking boots. Ah, ecologists.
Some of the female students from my department were not only in killer heels, but I smelled perfume, too. (This may have made Sarcozona happy, as she had put an #ecologyinheels tag on one of her tweets.)
There was some closing plenary talks, but I couldn’t attend it because my hotel wouldn’t give me a late check-out time. Was there anyone there who can tell me about it?
The morning was not a total waste. Far from it.
I had a beautiful breakfast at Le Cafe Crepe. I’ve complained to people about how hard it is to find a good croissant in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, but when I walked into this restaurant first thing, I could smell the fresh croissants. And I melted. I had a crepe and a croissant. They were the real deal, my friends.
While I was there enjoying my breakfast, I struck up a conversation with three other people attending the meeting. The conversation turned to a question that was a recurring theme throughout the week for me.
Whither professional ecology?
Ecology seems to be a field locked in heated argument about whether it is an academic research science, or a mix of science and political action group. The society, and its members, seem to be utterly conflicted, from the point of view of this onlooker.
For instance, the ESA had a whole session on interacting with religious communities. You don’t often see that at scientific conferences.
On the other hand, Sarcozona noted it would be great to see different kinds of talks at conferences, including more public talks. When I mentioned this on Twitter, several people thought it was a good idea.
Some people pointed out that there are academic conferences that give public talks. Some include Archeological Institute of America, the Canadian Society of Zoologists, Canadian Association of Physicists, the Ecological Society of Australia, and American Physicist Society do this, but in the last case, public attendance is poor.
The ESA responded that the opening plenary session was open to the public, and advertised through public service announcements. But if they meant Steve Pacala’s talk, I have to say that while it was excellent for a group of scientists, much of it would have been near impenetrable to someone outside of biology. And it’s not a good sign when the attendees themselves don’t know that talks are public, or recognize that there are members of the general public there.
For an organization that is talking so much about outreach, citizen science, and much more, the nature of the public talks at the ESA meeting seemed to be a missed opportunity.
But there was an even bigger question about how ecologists should be presenting themselves to the public.
As mentioned previously, the ESA conference got some coverage from local media on Thursday. This prompted Jacquelyn Gill to note:
KUT report on #ESA11 conflates ecology and environmentalism. Majority of talks aren’t on meeting's theme. Are there even talks on overpop(ulation)?
And:
I’m glad #ESA11 is getting press attention, and global change is important, but ecology is cool for its own sake.
Several people replied that all the ecologists were environmentalists, and implied that was the way it should be. Steve Pacala’s keynote implied this, too, when he said ecologists should reserve part of their career for dealing with environmental crises.
That same day, an article came out about Paul Ehrlich, who spoke on Thursday. (Very disappointed to have missed this; see here.) Ehrlich takes a hardcore position that ecologists must become political advocates. If not, we’re all gonna die. And I don’t mean ecologists, I mean humanity.
My own take is closer to the other end of the spectrum, which I previously detailed here. Scientists run risk losing credibility by jumping into the political system whole hog.
Ehrlich also characterizes ecologists as doing the most important science in the world. If so, the attendance at this meeting – about 3,500, from gossip I heard – should give one pause, when compared to the 30,000 who go to Neuroscience.
I had discussions about this with other attendees over multiple meals, including my Friday breakfast with three other ecologists. One, Susan, worked for the Environmental Protection Agency. She described a lot of the difficulties in getting things done, particularly when some of the parties involved will outright lie. That said, she did point out a middle ground for ecologists between detached academics and political advocates: the role of advisor, someone who informs policy but does not set it.
We never have these kinds of debates in neuroscience, or animal behaviour, or almost any of the other disciplines that I belong. The evolution field gets a bit in a twist about K-12 teaching, but that is a very small and very narrow piece of policy that is widely supported across the field. There is much more angst about the role of the professional ecologist in society than any other scientific organization I’ve seen so far.
Coverage on other blogs
Ecotone: Psychologist, green building manager, religious leader urge ecologists to move beyond their own scientific community; So What Do You Do? On answering the big conference question
Additional: Coverage at the NEON blog, on the meeting via Twitter, and DCXL blog on using Excel in science.
13 August 2011
ESA 2011, Day 4
“Give me ‘angry mob’!” I instructed.
Do these people look remotely angry? No!
This is a picture of the Ecological Society of America 2011 tweet-up, which I sort of instigated. Everyone was waiting for someone to do something. So I decided to be that someone! We were going to go back to Koriente, which I’d been to earlier in the week, but they had a line out the door. We went around the corner for barbecue at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. Barbecue in Austin is a very safe bet, and it was very good.
Contained within the picture are (in no particular order) @bgrassbluecrab, @JacquelynGill, @butterflydoc, @cboettig, @msanclem, a couple of freeloaders, and several fine people whose Twitter handles have escaped me this exact instant (sorry).
Great food, great company. Networking win!
I slid around from session to session today. One morning session, “Invasive species with cross border spread,” made me think, “My institution missed out. We should have had a lot more people at this meeting.” My university sits on the border and has several people concerned with invasions. There are almost certainly other universities in Texas, which also might study species crossing the border between Texas and Mexico. But almost all of the talks in this session were about the Canada-U.S. Border...
I also saw an interesting talk by Steve Ellner of Cornell University (Sarcozona’s star interviewee), who was looking at the effects of rapid evolution in an ecological context. Sometimes, evolution is working very, very hard, to counteract the effects of environmental change – but you wouldn’t necessarily know it, because the environmental change and the evolutionary changes are canceling each other out. In some cases, evolution is actually working in the opposite direction to the observed change, but it just can’t keep up.
Ellner was speaking as part of a symposium on variation within a species. After the last speaker, they had a roundtable with the speakers. I liked this, and wish there were more examples of breaking the standard string of talks.
After the lunch tweet-up, I again wandered from session to session, catching some by the tweet-up crowd. One of the more general ones concerned citizen science. It reviewed papers published to date on citizen science, and compiled some of the challenges and opportunities for citizen science projects.
The benefits of citizen science for scientists is to get more data. For the citizen participants, the main benefit is education. It’s a reciprocal rather than mutual relationship – as citizen science is currently practiced. But because citizen science is so new, it’s worth asking what citizen science could be. There’s a lot of innovative directions in tools for science, and it could create a lot of translational science that citizens can use.
After the poster session, I went back to the T.G.I.Friday’s “batio” to watch the bat emergence for the fourth time. Because watching the bats never gets old. I struck up a conversation with Alina, who I saw in the restaurant with an ESA tote bag. It’s true what they say: “You shall know them by their khaki tote bags...” And we were rewarded with probably the densest pulse of bats I’ve seen so far this week. And this was the night I thought, “Oh, I’ve got plenty of pictures, I won’t bring my camera.” Whoops.
I was also rewarded with T.G.I.Friday’s vanilla bean cheesecake. I think that made my top ten all time dessert list. And I love me some desert, so that’s pretty high praise.
I’m behind, but I still have one more report from ESA to come!
Local radio station KUT has some interviews from the conference floor, and reporter Lindsay Patterson writes about it on her blog. I like her comment that, “Basically, Austin is everything that’s wrong with the Earth.” (I don’t think she meant it like it sounds.)
The EEB and Flow: ESA Austin: Day 1, Day 2 in Austin, ESA Austin: Day 3, Day 4 (why do conference organizers insist on starting at 8:00 am? Discuss), Day 5 in Austin
Oikos: Sunday and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, The ESA meeting should have public lectures, Thursday, The ESA should have science cafes, Friday
R-ecology
blog (and Monday)
A leaf warbler’s gleanings: A few thousand ecologists meet in the city to discuss Earth stewardship... but does anybody know or care? As Ecosystems, Cities Yield Some Surprises - a report on the ULTRA-Ex symposia at ESA 2011; Austin's urban bats pour out into the warm summer night
Biocreativity: Biocreativity at ESA 2011; Ants in my pants; Natural history at ESA 2011; Images for outreach, research and conservation
Culturing Science: The new ecology
Do these people look remotely angry? No!
This is a picture of the Ecological Society of America 2011 tweet-up, which I sort of instigated. Everyone was waiting for someone to do something. So I decided to be that someone! We were going to go back to Koriente, which I’d been to earlier in the week, but they had a line out the door. We went around the corner for barbecue at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. Barbecue in Austin is a very safe bet, and it was very good.
Contained within the picture are (in no particular order) @bgrassbluecrab, @JacquelynGill, @butterflydoc, @cboettig, @msanclem, a couple of freeloaders, and several fine people whose Twitter handles have escaped me this exact instant (sorry).
Great food, great company. Networking win!
I slid around from session to session today. One morning session, “Invasive species with cross border spread,” made me think, “My institution missed out. We should have had a lot more people at this meeting.” My university sits on the border and has several people concerned with invasions. There are almost certainly other universities in Texas, which also might study species crossing the border between Texas and Mexico. But almost all of the talks in this session were about the Canada-U.S. Border...
I also saw an interesting talk by Steve Ellner of Cornell University (Sarcozona’s star interviewee), who was looking at the effects of rapid evolution in an ecological context. Sometimes, evolution is working very, very hard, to counteract the effects of environmental change – but you wouldn’t necessarily know it, because the environmental change and the evolutionary changes are canceling each other out. In some cases, evolution is actually working in the opposite direction to the observed change, but it just can’t keep up.
Ellner was speaking as part of a symposium on variation within a species. After the last speaker, they had a roundtable with the speakers. I liked this, and wish there were more examples of breaking the standard string of talks.
After the lunch tweet-up, I again wandered from session to session, catching some by the tweet-up crowd. One of the more general ones concerned citizen science. It reviewed papers published to date on citizen science, and compiled some of the challenges and opportunities for citizen science projects.
The benefits of citizen science for scientists is to get more data. For the citizen participants, the main benefit is education. It’s a reciprocal rather than mutual relationship – as citizen science is currently practiced. But because citizen science is so new, it’s worth asking what citizen science could be. There’s a lot of innovative directions in tools for science, and it could create a lot of translational science that citizens can use.
After the poster session, I went back to the T.G.I.Friday’s “batio” to watch the bat emergence for the fourth time. Because watching the bats never gets old. I struck up a conversation with Alina, who I saw in the restaurant with an ESA tote bag. It’s true what they say: “You shall know them by their khaki tote bags...” And we were rewarded with probably the densest pulse of bats I’ve seen so far this week. And this was the night I thought, “Oh, I’ve got plenty of pictures, I won’t bring my camera.” Whoops.
I was also rewarded with T.G.I.Friday’s vanilla bean cheesecake. I think that made my top ten all time dessert list. And I love me some desert, so that’s pretty high praise.
I’m behind, but I still have one more report from ESA to come!
Coverage on other blogs
Local radio station KUT has some interviews from the conference floor, and reporter Lindsay Patterson writes about it on her blog. I like her comment that, “Basically, Austin is everything that’s wrong with the Earth.” (I don’t think she meant it like it sounds.)
The EEB and Flow: ESA Austin: Day 1, Day 2 in Austin, ESA Austin: Day 3, Day 4 (why do conference organizers insist on starting at 8:00 am? Discuss), Day 5 in Austin
Oikos: Sunday and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, The ESA meeting should have public lectures, Thursday, The ESA should have science cafes, Friday
R-ecology
blog (and Monday)
A leaf warbler’s gleanings: A few thousand ecologists meet in the city to discuss Earth stewardship... but does anybody know or care? As Ecosystems, Cities Yield Some Surprises - a report on the ULTRA-Ex symposia at ESA 2011; Austin's urban bats pour out into the warm summer night
Biocreativity: Biocreativity at ESA 2011; Ants in my pants; Natural history at ESA 2011; Images for outreach, research and conservation
Culturing Science: The new ecology
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)