xkcd does it again. Just plain awesome.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned something about being half of Jabberwocky to Ethan and, after a sardonic snort, he replied: You’re only loosely affiliated with Jabberwocky Ecology, right now. Ouch. But not untrue, sadly. While I have had some grandiose plans for things to post on, I have been sadly remiss in my duties here.

Thanks to an email from Jeremy Fox I just found out that Oikos has started a blog. It clearly isn’t on most folks radars (I represent 50% of its Google Reader subscribers), and Jeremy has been putting up some really interesting posts over there so I thought it was worth a mention.

There is an excellent post on open science, prestige economies, and the social web over at Marciovm’s posterous*. For those of you who aren’t insanely nerdy** GitHub is… well… let’s just call it a very impressive collaborative tool for developing and sharing software***. But don’t worry, you don’t need to spend your days tied to a computer or have any interest in writing your own software to enjoy gems like: Thanks to Carl Boettiger

Advertisements for three exciting postdoctoral positions came out in the last week. Interface between ecology, evolution and mathematics The first is with Hélène Morlon’s group in Paris. Hélène and I were postdocs in Jessica Green’s lab at the same time. She is both very smart and extremely nice, oh, and did I mention, her lab is in PARIS. Here’s the ad. If it’s a good fit then you couldn’t go wrong with this postdoc.

An increasingly large number of folks doing research in ecology and other biological disciplines spend a substantial portion of their time writing computer programs to analyze data and simulate the outcomes of biological models. However, most ecologists have little formal training in software development¹. A recent survey suggests that we are not only;

Jarrett Byrnes’ first turn at the helm of the ESA Bulletin’s Ecology on the Web feature is now up. It’s definitely worth a look.

UPDATE: As of April 2012 Wiley has now changed their feeds to include the full list of authors. Thanks to Brady Allred for letting us know. An open letter to John Wiley & Sons Inc. Dear Wiley, I like a lot of things that you do, but a few months ago you quietly changed your RSS feeds in a way that is both disrespectful and frankly not good for your business.

If you use R (and it seems like everybody does these days) then you should check out RStudio – an easy to install, cross-platform IDE for R. Basically it’s a seamless integration of all of the aspects of R (including scripts, the console, figures, help, etc.) into a single easy to use package. For those of you are familiar with Matlab, it’s a very similar interface. It’s not a full blown IDE yet (no debugger;

Our truly excellent postdoc, Kate Thibault, is moving on to bigger and better things heading up the mammal work at NEON. So, we’re looking for someone to join our group to do research in the areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics.