Next week is the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. If you’ve ever been to ESA, then you know it’s….big, often between 3000-5000 ecologists (which I thought was big until I heard about some of the biomedical conferences which have the attendance of a small city). It seems like most of those people are giving talks or posters.
I’ve been waiting for a while now for Ted Hart’s blog to get up enough steam to send folks over there, and since in the last two weeks he’s had three posts, revamped the mission of the blog, and engaged in the ongoing conversation about Lindenmayer & Likens, it seems like that time has arrived.
https://twitter.com/#!/ethanwhite/status/94412695587143680 The last week has been an interesting one for academic publishing. First a 24 year old programmer name Aaron Swartz was arrested for allegedly breaking into MIT’s network and downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR. Given his background it has been surmised that he planned on making the documents publicly available. He faces up to 35 years in federal prison.
As you may have seen earlier either on Jabberwocky, EEB and Flow, or over at Oikos’ new blog, the most recent piece about how some branch of ecology is ruining ecology has caused some discussion in the blogosphere.
There is an excellent post over at EEB & Flow on the empirical divide,inspired by an editorial by David Lindenmayer and Gene Likens in the most recent ESA Bulletin, titled “Losing the Culture of Ecology”. It was great to see some thoughtful and data driven consideration of the idea that we should choose to emphasize one broad area of ecology over another.
Here at Weecology we’re really into open science and that’s why we’re excited to announce our first serious attempt to facilitate open science beyond the confines of our own research – The Ecological Data Wiki. The idea behind this project is simple.
We are pretty excited about what modern technology can do for science and in particular the potential for increasingly rapid sharing of, and collaboration on, data and ideas. It’s the big picture that explains why we like to blog, tweet, publish data and code, and we’ve benefited greatly from others who do the same. So, when we saw this great talk by Michael Nielsen about Open Science, we just had to share.
Some time ago in academia we realized that it didn’t make sense for individual scientists or even entire departments to maintain their own high performance computing resources.
There is a new postdoctoral research position available in Jim Brown’s lab at the University of New Mexico to study some of the major patterns of biodiversity. We know a bit about the research and it’s going to be an awesome project with a bunch of incredibly bright people involved.
When I started graduate school (a little over a decade ago): Online literature searching was just becoming common You had to mail your manuscripts to the journals in triplicate Responses to published articles (when they happened) took a year or more. Mostly people just talked about problems they saw (or thought they saw) with people in neighboring offices.
xkcd does it again. Just plain awesome.
