Counting plants and rats in the desert is fun to collect but also hard won data. Another Portal Project blog post is up!

Molecular Biology of The Cell , the official journal of the American Society for Cell Biology, recently joined a number of other periodicals in issuing guidelines for manuscripts, concerning statistics and reproducibility.

Ten years ago today I became a PI. Well, that’s not quite true. On that day, I took up my appointment as a Lecturer at University of Liverpool, but technically I was not a PI. I had no lab space (it was under construction), I had no people, and I also had no money for research. I arrived for work.

PH.D STUDENT OPENING IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY IN THE ERNEST LAB {.wp-image-1708 .alignleft loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“1708” permalink=“https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2016/09/19/phd-student-opening-community-ecology-ernest-lab/20916401782_019d3c14eb_z/” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/jabberwocky.weecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/20916401782_019d3c14eb_z.jpg?fit=640%2C480&ssl=1” orig-size=“640,480”

I’m currently writing two manuscripts that each have a substantial data modelling component. Some of our previous papers have included computer code, but it was straightforward enough to have the code as a supplementary file or in a GitHub repo and leave it at that. Now with more substantial computation in the manuscript, I was wondering how best to describe it. How much detail is required?

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

The next installment from the Portal Blog by my student Joan Meiners (@beecycles) on how we shook things up at the Portal Project so we could study regime shifts.

Statistical hypothesis testing , commonly referred to as “statistics”, is a topic of consternation among cell biologists. This is a short practical guide I put together for my lab. Hopefully it will be useful to others. Note that statistical hypothesis testing is a huge topic and one post cannot hope to cover everything that you need to know.

From how we do science to publishing practices to the sociology of science, there isn’t an aspect of the scientific endeavor that isn’t in flux right now.

The first, throat clearing post to kick off what (we hope) will be a revitalization of the Portal Project Blog