Transient Theorist is planning on doing something with his Spring Break that most of us don’t do often enough – take a week to think. In the rush to do all of the things that have to be done, we often lose track of doing the things that are really important to our core mission – advancing scientific knowledge as quickly as possible.

I’m happy to announce that we’ll be hiring a postdoc starting this summer to work on research in the areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics. The complete description follows below. Please forward a link to this post to anyone you know who might be interested or post a link to it on your blogs. Thanks!

Cell Press has recently announced what I considered to be the most interesting advance in journal publishing since articles started being posted online. Basically they have started to harness the power of the web to aggregate the information present in in articles in more useful and efficient ways.

I have never been a big fan of comprehensive exams. In my opinion being able to perform on a test (of whatever form) has very little to do with what it takes to be successful as a scientist and most of the exam systems that I am familiar with have serious structural problems above and beyond this basic objection.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. —Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860) Via Signal vs. Noise.

I’ve been meaning to get around to posting about Stuart Hurlbert and Cecilia Lombardi’s recent paper (2009; Ann. Zool. Fennici 46: 311–349) on the use of p-values in drawing scientific conclusions… but thankfully Jarrett Byrnes over at i’m a chordata! urochordata! wrote such a great post about it that all I need to do is point you over to his place. Just so you know what you’re getting into, Hurlbert &

American Naturalist (one of the top journals in ecology and evolution) has just announced that they are rolling out a forum system to allow for online discussions about their published papers.

Imperial College London is offering a new masters degree program in quantitative biology. It sounds like a great opportunity to get some good quantitative training via an intensive 1 year MS program. The best part of their pitch follows below. If you’d like to see the whole ad check out the flier that Dan Reuman sent me.

We’ve recently been following a couple of blogs by graduate students studying ecology and have been enjoying them enough that we thought we’d point folks in their direction. Transient Theorist is a first year PhD student interested in quantitative and interdisciplinary approaches to ecology. How could we not love his blog. Particularly good recent posts include Ups and Downs and Intimidating questions.

In a couple of days I’m participating in a panel to help young faculty be ready for their 3rd year review (the halfway step to tenure, which is kind of a big deal at my institution). This is the sort of thing that I normally say no to, but I’ve been to a couple of these things and I just couldn’t bear the thought of another group of young faculty being told that what they really needed to do to get tenure is to have a really spiffy tenure