What happens when you collaborate with non-ecology scientists?
- You create a Transposable Element (TE) simulation model called TEWorld, with this logo:
- One of your collaborators initials in this project are TE (and you only realize this after collaborating for 4 years)
- You need to run said simulations on sharcnet, and one of the clusters is you will use is called kraken (or orca, or requin, or saw; obviously computer scientists are not biologists, or they are and the inclusion of orca is reverse reverse psychology).
Fletcher Halliday,blogging at BioDiverse Perspectives, wrote:
“My original intent in writing this post was to compare the 5 most-cited papers on biodiversity to the 5 most blogged-about papers on biodiversity to address the differences between what we value as researchers versus what we value as general science communicators.”
What struck me throughout this post was this, maybe implicit, need to distinguish between blogging and publications. I always approach a publication as a communication of ideas.
As you probably noticed, we do lots of interdisciplinary research in this lab. A group of undergraduate students approached this question for a 4th year class, and made a website that approaches interdisciplinary research from, you guessed it, several different perspectives. One of the activities they did was interviewing a wide range of people with this question in mind. Two of those persons where Ingrid and myself. And I will leave it up to you to find those, embarrassing ?
… rests on actually reading and understanding each other’s words.
This is a difficult exercise, and not only for students. Tom Nudds and I just covered in community ecology the rationale for protected areas planning based not only on representativeness (making sure that all species are protected), but more importantly also on persistence (see his article in Biodiversity and Conservation for a summary of their ideas). If the target areas have all the species you want to conserve, but lack essential components that would ensure their actual persistence through time, representativeness means nothing.
Collaboration is on my mind these days. Ingrid pointed out this article to me, about, among other things, the potential pitfalls of group work. The author, Susan Cain frames this in the presence or importance of introverts, and how negating introverts has a negative effect on the performance of group work. Choice quote from the interview:
“Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas.
Since I started reading a lot of long-form articles on the internet, I have been exposed to a lot of great ideas, and great writing. The latest is an article by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, The Darwin Show. He synthesized 14 (fourteen!) books that appeared around the celebration of his 200th birthday in 2009. In it, he explores a lot of interesting themes, and one of the main ones revolves around why this is such a big deal.
Recently, I found myself eavesdropping on two elderly fellows debating an age-old question: does size matter? Yes! declared one. Small ones have never satisfied anyone. It needs to be big!You’ve got it all wrong,countered the other. Proper use of a small one can be just as good as having a big one. And what good is a big one if you don’t use it properly?/o:pIn a nearby lecture theatre the Costa-Rican Mermaid was preaching the power of long distance swimming to promote big ones.
One of the most common complaints about the world of science is it’s inaccessibility to the everyday person. Carl Zimmer has put together an “Index of Banned Words”. Words that should be vanquished from the vocabulary of scientists everywhere. The list includes the taboos “elucidate”, “predation”, “mechanism”, and (gasp!) “community ecology”.
Reading through the list has made me realize how incredibly predictable my choice of words has become when writing in my science courses.
“The federal government wants to put a price tag on polar bears,” begins this recent Globe and Mail article. It goes on to explain that Environment Canada wants to determine the socio-economic value of the iconic arctic species. This includes things like the bear’s consumptive value, cultural value, scientific value, educational value, aesthetic value, existence value, and so on. How much does each “additional unit of polar bear” or each “additional hectare of habitat” bring to the nation?