The Ecological Database Toolkit Large amounts of ecological and environmental data are becoming increasingly available due to initiatives sponsoring the collection of large-scale data and efforts to increase the publication of already collected datasets. As a result, ecology is entering an era where progress will be increasingly limited by the speed at which we can organize and analyze data.

We have a postdoc position available for someone interested in the general areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics. Here’s the short ad with links to the full job description: If you’re interested in the position and are planning to be at ESA please leave a comment or drop me an email (ethan.white@usu.edu) and we can try to set up a time to talk while we’re in Pittsburgh.

Introduction I have been very encouraged of late to see more and more ecologists embracing the potential of the web for communication and interaction. I’ve recently blogrolled some graduate student blogs and in the last few weeks I’ve come across American Naturalist’s trial run of a forum system, Ecological Monographs’ blog, and a blog soliciting feedback on a new initiative to digitize existing biological collections.

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’ve recently started reading two scientific programming blogs that I think are well worth paying attention to, so I’m blogrolling them and offering a brief introduction here. Serendipity is Steve Easterbrook’s blog about the interface between software engineering and climate science. Steve has a realistic and balanced viewpoint regarding the reality of programming in scientific disciplines.

A couple of weeks ago we made it possible for folks to subscribe to JE using email. We did this because we realized that many scientists, even those who are otherwise computationally savvy, really haven’t embraced feed readers as a method of tracking information.

Nathan over at Flowing Data just posted an interesting piece on the emergence of a new class of scientists whose work focuses on the manipulation, analysis and presentation of data.

This picture and caption of a young linux developer-in-training is hillarious. At least if you’re a bit of a computer nerd like me. Via Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks.

The PC hosting linnaeus.zoology.gla.ac.uk and darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk has died, and this spells the end of my interest in (a) using generic PC hardware and (b) running Linux. The former keeps breaking down, the later is just harder than it needs to be (much as I like the idea). From now on, it's Macs only. No more geeky knapsacks for me.Because of this crash a lot of my experimental web sites are offline.