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

The Community and Conservation Ecology group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has a job opening for a tenure track assistant professor in Experimental Conservation Ecology (details below). This is a very impressive group that is headed by Han Olff and includes Rampal Etienne and David Alonso.

I just came across this great Robert MacArthur quote on Allen Hurlbert’s website: It seems to me that one of the real challenges for us as scientists is to make sure that even if we don’t understand what others see when they look at the ecological world, we need to consider the possibility that they simply have an alternative, and equally valid, perspective.

I just read the excellently forward thinking year end editorial of the new journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution. The editorial was written by Lonnie Aarssen and Christopher Lortie and is filled with Aarssen’s trademark,creative, outside the proverbial box, thinking.

There are a couple of upcoming meetings (or sessions of meetings) related to metabolic scaling and it’s relationship with/to ecology that I thought might be of some interest. The first is  a symposium at the 2010 Society for Experimental Biology conference in Prague on the relationship between the scaling of metabolic rate with body size in organisms and the ecology of those organisms.

I have nothing against journals charging for content. While I like the open access model I think that there are upsides to both systems. But seriously, there really are some things that should not be hidden behind a pay wall. Corrections of any kind: Errata, Corrigenda, etc.

I’m going to be participating in a Royal Society Discussion Meeting and they’ve asked us to advertise this to interested parties so I figured I’d just post about it here. The meeting is on Biological Diversity in a Changing World and (other than your humble narrator) has a pretty impressive list of speakers. Here are the key bits of information (straight from the meeting’s web page).

How then is it possible to modify and improve upon an academic culture populated by smart, creative individuals who are motivated by ideals more than by money, who have deep, intense interests, value substance over form, have little patience for conformity, think for themselves, do not defer to authority, and see their work not as […]