In my post last week I talked about the importance of representative samples for making universal statements, including averages and percentages. But how big should your sample be? You don’t need to look at everything, but you probably need to look at more than one thing. How big a sample do you need in order to be reasonably sure of your estimates? One of the pioneers in this area was a mysterious scholar known only to the public as Student.

In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don’t have the time to examine everything, and we don’t have to be absolutely sure?

Open access and gated publishing have been discussed at length by researchers, publishers, and the media. Still, the debate got more intense when Elsevier sent takedown notices to Academia.edu. Yesterday, it got even more intense when it became public that the University of Calgary is also confronted with takedown notices from Elsevier. Elsevier responded to the critiques, but it is unlikely that this will take the heat out of the debate.

There’s a famous story about swans that Nasim Taleb used for the title of his recent book. European zoologists had seen swans, and all the swans they had seen had white feathers, so they said that all the swans in the world were in fact white. Then a European went to Australia and saw swans with black feathers.

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales ADDED BELOW: Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it) Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes […]

*This is a guest post by Dan McGlinn, a weecology postdoc (@DanMcGlinn on Twitter). It is a Research Summary of: McGlinn, D.J., X. Xiao, and E.P. White. 2013. An empirical evaluation of four variants of a universal species–area relationship. PeerJ 1:e212 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.212.

Over the past few years I’ve realized that there are a lot of scientists who have a different view of science than I do, and most of them don’t even know about my way of thinking. But my way of thinking about science Instrumentalism – is cool! I’m writing this post to explain what Instrumentalism is, and why I prefer it to other ways of thinking about science.

Sam Scheiner published a piece recently on ecology’s lack of engagement with theory. Frankly, the title pretty much tells you his conclusion “The ecological literature: an idea free distribution”, but if you want to know more, either read the original piece (it’s short) or EEB & Flow’s nice write up on it.  The empirical-theoretical divide is a topic I’ve been pondering for a while.

I have to admit I’m a superhero movie junkie. In particular, we watch the Avengers movie a lot in our household. I mean… a lot. Sometimes I really wish I was Natasha Romanoff (aka the Black Widow) from the Avengers. That would be rad. I could use my tricky spy interrogation skills to get program officers to tell me how to alter my proposal to get funded.

Academic publishing is in a dynamic state these days with large numbers of new journals popping up on a regular basis. Some of these new journals are actively experimenting with changing traditional approaches to publication and peer review in potentially important ways. So, I thought I’d provide a quick introduction to some of the new kids on the block that I think have the potential to change our approach to academic publishing.