Hoisted from the comments: Gregor Kalinkat points us to this blog post asking why doesn’t Hollywood make more mass extinction films? As opposed to more numerous climate change films like Don’t Look Up and The Day After Tomorrow. My first reaction to the linked piece is that I’m not quite sure what the author means by “mass extinction film,” given that the chosen examples include movies as different as Waterworld, Threads, and Avatar. I guess “mass extinction film” here means “movie in which humans almost wipe themselves out, by first wiping out most other life on earth?” If that’s right, then ..read more

In the fall, I will be teaching my department’s graduate ecology course – a shift from my normal Intro Bio routine! I taught a section of the grad ecology course this past fall, but this coming fall will be my first time doing the whole thing.  One thing I’ve been wondering about is whether to have a debate in the course, where students are divided into groups and asked to argue in favor of a particular position. I have very little experience with this type of assignment (as either a student or instructor), and, sadly, have never seen one of the ASN meeting debates. I’d love to get feedba ..read more

Note from Jeremy: This is a guest post from my friend, UBC prof and food lover Rachel Germain. I asked her to suggest some of her favorite places for CSEE meeting attendees to eat and drink, and she came through in spades. Thanks Rachel! I added some hyperlinks and did some light editing. Beer nerd that I am, I threw in a few brewery recommendations at the end. They’re from a friend of mine who is a professional brewer here in Calgary, and who knows the Canadian brewing industry inside-out. Obviously, this post is just based on one person’s preferences and experiences. Commenters are welcome a ..read more

Earlier this week, I procrastinated by compiling a bit of data that I hope will be useful to Canadian graduate students and postdocs in ecology. As an ecologist, how many publications do you typically need to have to receive a major federal graduate scholarship (NSERC CGS or PGS), or an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship (PDF)? To answer that question, I downloaded the list of 2023 CGS, PGS, and PDF awardees. I identified the awardees who are ecologists.* (read the footnote if you care exactly how I defined “ecologist”) Then I searched for the awardees on Google Scholar. I counted up how many publ ..read more

Eleven years ago I shared a fairly heavily researched summary of the state of academic publishing. I mostly argued that OA (aka author pays) was a red herring and that we should really pay attention to the profit motives (or not) of the publisher. I would argue that analysis mostly still holds, but a lot has changed. Here are three new data graphs, five major trends I see since then, followed by some of my reflections on what this all means and briefly, what we should do. Figure 1 – the growth of # of papers published in total and broken out by publisher 2011-2021. Green are for-profit publis ..read more

Also this week: reviving cybernetics, Spinoza vs. Meghan, no one buys books (because they don’t want to), no one buys future onions (because they’re not allowed to), McSweeney’s makes fun of Jeremy, and much, much more. Oh, and 1957 called, it wants its panic about public trust in science back. From Jeremy: Public trust in science is alarmingly low today. We can and should fix this with more rigor in study design and statistical analysis, open data, de-emphasizing statistical significance, being honest about sources of uncertainty, valuing replications and incremental advances over purportedly ..read more

Chris Mantegna has a nice piece in Nature on the joys of field work, and the importance giving students from historically underrepresented groups opportunities to experience field work themselves. The piece resonates with the growing literature on positive field experiences as key to attracting and retaining students from historically underrepresented groups into ecology (e.g., Race et al. 2021, Armstrong et al. 2007, Bingham & Torres 2008; note that “positive” is a key word there, because without that it’s possible for field experiences to function as a barrier rather than a gateway, see ..read more

Last week, I had a post about the nuts and bolts (and emotions!) of responding to reviewers. In it, I talk about how my initial reaction to constructive criticism of my manuscripts is for my brain to fall out, leaving me unable to process anything for a while. I still think of myself as someone who is not very resistant to criticism, but who is resilient – I often feel pretty flattened by negative feedback, but bounce back fairly quickly. My approach is to give myself some time, then use a variety of strategies (post it notes, responding to X number of comments before taking a break, lots of c ..read more

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a post about writing a response to reviewer comments. It focused on the overall structure of a response to reviewers, with suggestions on what to include and how to address things like if reviewers disagree. That post – which I think is still relevant – focused on the response itself. In this post, I want to focus more on my process for actually writing the response to reviewers and making the revisions. As I said in the earlier post, I’ve generally had the good fortune of responding to reviews that are thoughtful and constructive. Even with that, it can be…. an em ..read more

Also this week: Leibniz vs. public health, fake superconductivity, Jeremy’s favorite eclipse image, and more. From Jeremy: Primatologist Frans de Waal, who emphasized continuities in intelligence and behavior between human and non-human primates, has passed away. Link goes to an obituary in Nature. Here’s Nature’s news article, summarizing the confidential University of Rochester report on how Ranga Dias faked a blockbuster result on room-temperature superconductivity. The report came out in the course of Dias’ lawsuit against the university in an attempt to get his job back. Getting to the bo ..read more