Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights. Current applied research often relies on past fundamental research.

Joan Strassman has a very nice post about why it is sometimes useful to step back from the intricate details of biological systems in order to understand the general processes that are operating. Here’s a little taste of the general message The whole post is definitely worth a read.

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.

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.

I’ve read two great posts in the last couple of days that highlight what the recent debate over the the possibility of ‘arsenic based life’ has shown about how scientists are leveraging the modern web to quickly evaluate, discuss and improve science. Marc Cadotte, Nicholas Mirotchnick and Caroline Tucker have a great post over at EEB & flow that will fill in the background for you.

We’ve had a bit of discussion here at JE about potential solutions to the tragedy of the reviewer commons, so I found a recent letter in Nature (warning – it’s behind a pay wall) suggesting that there may not actually be a problem interesting.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not a big fan of the configuration of most comprehensive exams, but my post on the matter keeps languishing on my out of control To Do list.

Anyone who has been around the halls of academia for a while has heard some well meaning soul talk about how we produce too many PhD students for the number of faculty positions, that this is unfair, and that therefore we should take fewer students. The most recent version of this idea on the web goes so far as calling the academic enterprise a Ponzi scheme. I’ve never personally found this argument very convincing.

Successfully doing creative science is hard. The further along you get in a research career the more things are competing for your time and energy and the more distracted you are from your primary goals. This distraction becomes increasingly problematic when it distracts your subconscious as well as your conscious mind.