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.
What is ecology? What is evolution? Seems like a really simple question from an ecology or evolution perspective, until you bring a different field into the mix, e.g., transposon/genome biology. When we started the TE (formerly known as genome) ecology group, sometimes in March 2010, I had no idea we would end here, with a publication in a journal with a higher impact factor than Ecology.
Our starting point for this publication was the appeal of using ecological theory to explore the dynamics of transposable elements in the genome.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/back-from-yet-another-globetrotting-adventure-indiana-jones-checks-his-mail-and-discovers-that-his-bid-for-tenure-has-been-denied
“The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.”
… successfully, of course. Now we just have to turn it into a publication. I always give a short speech during the celebrations afterwards, and the theme was what Brittany, her personality, brought to the research project (Ryan Gregory’s great standard question). She was much too modest when she answered this during her defence, so I answered it for her:
her organizational talents (keeping track of the extensive experiments and field observations, all at the same time)her efficient and hard work (she counted more than 600 samples one summer, compared to my 90+ samples for my entire PhD)her intellectual contributions to her thesis, which looks very straightforward afterward, but it took us many iterations to understand and explain it this clearlyknowing how to handle me (important one!
It is so easy to make fun of professors, we even have our own comic strip. If you believe the stereotype, we have so many laughable traits that there is a never ending list of possible punch lines. The sad part, some (most?) of them can hit really close to home.
Recently McSweeney’s published a more elaborate punch line on philosophy to answer:
“UNIVERSE’S FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION” This is a golden oldie, and apparently it made the internet rounds already, but I became aware of it through Geekdad (what’s in a name, right?
I am about to submit the grades for the two courses this semester, and this often leads to self reflection. I am not going to do that now, but I will do something better: link to the self reflection of a teacher that is well-written, funny, insightful, sometimes reflects my own experiences, sometimes not at all. So I highly recommend William Bowers’ “All we read is freaks” for all educators.
I could extract so many passages out of this long piece, but this is the one I emailed to myself:
I sometimes think of myself as a science nerd, but then I read Benjamin Mako Hill’s computing set-up, and suddenly it’s like reading the uber science nerd manifesto. Amazingly consistent and hard-core, every single step of his work flow. And where our work flows overlap is probably in R:
“R is slow and using it with big datasets gives one plenty of time to reflect on this fact. But R is also expressive, elegant, and concise for numerical and statistical work so I happily suffer through it.
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 ?
There is a time of arriving, and a time of leaving, and the time of leaving has arrived. Thiago and his family is going back to Brazil, after a very successful, productive, and fun 6 month visit. Now I have to find a way to visit Brazil, somehow, sometime. The lab will be a little bit quieter, again.