My next chair
I love to build things. That probably comes with being a scientist: the challenge of making a bunch of things fit together. I’ve built much of the furniture we have in the house, plus a couple of canoes, clocks, and the like.
Because of my bad knees, a couple of years ago I built myself a Morris chair for my office.
Read the rest of this entry »
So you want to be a great reviewer
In my current position as Editor-in-Chief of the American Naturalist, I read all kinds of reviews of scientific papers from all kinds of people. I routinely get asked, particularly by graduate students, what makes a good review. Here are a few thoughts on the subject.
Read the rest of this entry »
Unifying the unified theories of biodiversity?
A paper in Ecology Letters describes a “unification” of the six unified theories of ecology (doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01449.x). I didn’t know we had six “unified” theories to start with. (How can there be more than one “unified” theory? But that’s beside the point.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Nobody can give you an education
Nobody can give you an education; you have to take it.
Read the rest of this entry »
What are exams for?
If you teach long enough, you start to think that students are only after an extra point on an exam, and not trying to learn from what you are trying to teach them – particularly the broader learning experiences that students should be having in genuinely evaluating their own performance, and engaging in self-critical evaluations that will make themselves better.
Read the rest of this entry »
What one Republican wants to know about Health Care reform
What I want to know:
I want to know why begging an insurance company bureaucrat to cover some medical treatment is better than petitioning the government for a similar service. Read the rest of this entry »
New Authors and Rejection
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel of Editors that was answering questions from scientists about how scientific papers are published, and giving advice to help authors. This happened at the joint, American Society of Naturalist/Society for the Study of Evolution/Society of Systematic Biologists meeting in Moscow, Idaho. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the degree to which new authors think that the system is stacked against them or that their “enemies” are all reviewing their papers and having them rejected.
Read the rest of this entry »
Why don’t we do experiments anymore?
I came into the science of ecology during the mid-1980′s. This was a time when ecologists were learning the lesson that one cannot simply go out and collect observational data to test hypotheses. Proving that species compete by demonstrating Hutchinsonian ratios proved to be a rather futile endeavor, to say the least. The problem is that many different causal mechanisms can create the same general pattern in the data that one collects.
Read the rest of this entry »
The hardest transition
One of the hardest transitions that students have to make on the way to becoming a scientist is embracing the uncertainty of what you have to do. Science is a very weird endeavor. The philosophy of science explains why a scientist can never know whether they have the correct answer to a question; one can only know if they are wrong. Moreover, science is much more about defining a question, which means that we don’t even know what the right questions to ask are. Thus, being a scientist means that not only will you not know if you have the right answer, you won’t even know if you’re asking the right question.
Read the rest of this entry »
Returning to the Small Teaching College?
Many of Dartmouth’s disgruntled alumni feel that President Wright’s emphasis on increasing the research and scholarly profile of the faculty to be antithetical to Dartmouth’s mission. That mission in their minds seems to be defined as undergraduate teaching to the exclusion of all other activities.
Read the rest of this entry »