Our inaugural Things you should read post is about Brian McGill’s new paper on unifying unified theories of macroecological patterns. One of the major challenges to understanding ecology is that there are so many different ways to characterize the structure of ecological systems. This means that we spread our intellectual efforts across a large number of different questions making progress in any given area relatively slow.

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the social web can/should play an increasing role in filtering the large quantity of published information to allow the best and most important work to float to the top (see e.g., posts by The Scholarly Kitchen and Academhack). In its simplest form the idea is that folks like us will mention publications that we think are good/important and then people who think we’re worth listening to

Dave Parry over at academHacK (and more frequently at @academicdave) is generally pretty far out on the intellectual edge, but that means he often has some pretty interesting things to say. His most recent installment, Burn the Boats/Books, includes a bunch of interesting ideas about moving beyond the traditional limits of book and journal publishing in order to embrace the benefits (and realities) of the modern web.

I think we make things that we like and that we think our friends would like, and we cross our fingers and hope that enough other people like it that we can earn a living.

As a graduate student, explaining what your day to day life is like to your non-academic friends can sometimes be a little difficult. In this enjoyable piece from The Science Creative Quarterly Daven Tai takes a unique approach to this challenge: If you’re looking for five minutes of academically oriented fun go check out the whole article.

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as “simple” as a handful of proven patterns—work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed […]

Steve Easterbrook over at Serendipity has three recent posts that do a pretty solid job of capturing what I think when I see the ongoing coverage of the fallout from the CRU email hack (if you’ve been living under the proverbial rock for the last 6 months you can start here). Here’s one quick highlight from the most recent post but you really should head over to Serendipity and check out the following three posts: Academics always fight over

A group of 5th and 6th graders where asked to define either “science” or “writing” and when the answers were combined this definition of creativity was the result. In scientific education, and as we conduct scientific research, we often lose track of the fact that creativity is critical to the scientific process. This is a great reminder of its importance.

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.

It’s probably not really to our benefit to be advertising competing positions when we’re currently looking for a post-doc ourselves, but this is a great opportunity so I thought I’d pass it along. The Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State has a post-doctoral fellowship available to work with one (or more) of it’s faculty.