It’s no secret that science funding rates are, in a word, abysmal*. As a pre-tenure faculty member, this has been weighing heavily on my mind, and I’ve devoted a substantial portion of my year to grant writing (fingers crossed!). There’s a running joke that you typically get funded to do […]
Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and […]
Last year, I crowd-funded my attendance to ScienceOnline2012, an un-conference for people communicating about– and doing– science on the internet. In exchange, I offered to interview one attendee for every $100 I raised. In the lead-up to ScienceOnline2013, I’ll be sharing those interviews. Based on feedback from Twitter, I decided […]
Last month, I spent a couple of days in Oxford with a group of paleoecologists of many nationalities, timescales, and taxonomic foci, as we frantically narrowed down a list of more than nine hundred crowd-sourced questions to fifty. Our mission: to determine the most pressing, five-year-horizon-scanning questions in the field of […]
The subject of retractions has been gaining a lot of steam in the media recently, with several recent studies (outlined nicely in this New York Times article) showing that retractions are on the rise, and misconduct and falsifying data are one of the most common reasons. Yesterday on Twitter, I […]
Paleoecology has really blossomed as a field in the last decades, due in large part to increasing concerns about climate and the environment. It’s always been a strong, dynamic field, going back almost a century ago if you start with the very first modern pollen analyst, von Post, but recently […]
Today’s post is by Dr. John W. (Jack) Williams, a paleoecologist and climate scientist in the Geography department at the University of Wisconsin. Jack is the Bryson Professor of Climate, People & Environment, and the Director of the Center for Climatic Research. You can follow him on Twitter as @IceAgeEcologist. Hi everyone. At […]
Paleoecological research involves equal parts detective work, mental time-travel, and story-telling. Clues from the past are collected and pieced together to map out what landscapes might have looked like, and how they may have changed through time. It’s not unlike walking through the set of a play after all the […]
“So, what’s next?” As I hurtle towards #phd2012, I’m getting that question a lot these days; from family members, casual acquaintances, cab drivers and dental hygienists. Those who know me really well– colleagues, close friends, my spouse– know the answer, or at least some vague approximation. From everyone else, it’s […]
Before we get too much further into 2012, I’d better share my year-end review post. Last year was a bit crazy, between major life events and state and university shake-ups, but both I and my academic career survived! In 2011, I: Attended the 4th International Biogeography Society Meeting in Iraklion, […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 