Maybe you’ve always know you’ve wanted to be a research professor in wildlife ecology. Perhaps you’ve just taken a course on fungi and stumbled into a whole new world of career possibilities. Either way, getting past the first step– your undergraduate degree– and onto the academic path isn’t easy. Academic culture isn’t […]
There are a lot of great posts on why Twitter and blogging are two excellent forms of social media, and why academics— including scientists– should do outreach (I like this series of posts by Christie Wilcox). While outreach is great, there are some very selfish reasons to use social media tools for collaboration and productivity. I’ve recently […]
I love Twitter for a lot of reasons (community building, outreach, networking, finding great content), but one of best quick-and-dirty ways to show an academic the power of Twitter is to crowd-source advice on an important topic. A couple of weeks, ago, Sandra Chung at NEON and I were invited […]
It’s been a whirlwind of a week: I deposited my dissertation last Wednesday and left for Providence, RI to start my postdoc at Brown, and then promptly boarded a plane for Portland, OR for the ESA meeting. This is my first time as a SEEDS (ESA’s group to promote diversity […]
I’ve been following a number of scientist-journalist discussions in the last year in various places, including ScienceOnline2012, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter. Increasingly, I’ve come to suspect that there is often a profound lack of understanding of the respective professional cultures of scientists and journalists, which has important relevance to the […]
I notice it all the time– on Facebook, in the comments of a science blog, over family gatherings, or listening to a radio talk show. Someone, maybe you, is patiently trying to explain how vaccines cause autism, perhaps, or why so-called “anthropogenic” global warming is really just due to sunspots […]
I’m in Bern, Switzerland, attending the International Quaternary Association’s 18th Congress. INQUA convenes every four years, and this will be my first time attending. It’s the largest meeting for those of us who study the Quaternary Period, and includes paleoecologists, archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, geologists, and geomorphologists– I believe there are about […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 