The end of the semester is always hectic. Especially this year, since our lab had three year-long undergrad thesis students working away on various projects.
Brittany Ferguson worked this semester on whether duck dispersal influenced macroinvertebrate metacommunity patterns. She found one of those very zen-like conclusions, where the absence of a predicted pattern is actually evidence for the importance of the process, and we will expose her zen-conclusions hopefully sometime this summer to the very critical research community.
Brittany’s first publication stemming from her undergraduate research project during the Algonquin field course has just been published. She was part of team IDH (for obvious reasons), and they worked their butts of to collect the data: finding an interesting question based on her previous community ecology course, interviewing park people to find stands with known time-to-logging, collecting the data, tiring out the TAs who helped them (or maybe slowed them down), breaking down her field vehicle, of course exactly on the one day I came out with them.
All good things come to an end. And now it is Amanda's time to leave. She successfully defended her thesis "Zooplankton metacommunity responses to environmental change in the sub-arctic". At this point, there are 3 manifestations of her work:Amanda's electronic thesis link: the UoG library now provides an electronic reference for all theses, which will increase the exposure and accessibility of the research.Her presentation, that is the perfect example of how we should present results to a larger audience
Amanda is currently trying to publish the first chapter of her thesis (whohoo), and this can do funny things to your brain. See the post on her personal blog on how research findings are translated through the different media outlets, or the scientific version of telephone.
The prairie pothole region, characterized by millions of unique ponds scattered across its surface extends from Alberta Canada, down into the central United States. This “patchy” ecosystem provides feeding habitat for an estimated 50-75% of North Americas breeding ducks, which feed primarily on the numerable invertebrate species found within the area. The region is an ideal site for the study of metacommunity dynamics, as it’s many local ecosystems (ponds) are joined by the dispersal of highly interactive species (ducks and invertebrates).
Very occasionally, I will brave North American culture and go see a movie on a ridiculously big screen with a ridiculously big bag of popcorn. Last December, a friend convinced me to not only go see Avatar on the big screen, but to watch it in 3-D with her. I was blown away. Though I find the current 3-D craze to be, well, crazy, I have to admit that it brought a certain enchantment to the fantasy planet Pandora.
That is the finishing sentence from this article. The author tries to argue that theory and the scientific method is getting obsolete in this day and age, using Google as a role model:
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. […] There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show.
In March 2009, the Women’s Studies undergraduate program (among others) was cut at Guelph. I wasn’t involved in the issue myself, but knew a few people who rallied against this decision. They cited it as ironic evidence that feminism is far from being a finished movement. At the time, I only saw a superficial link between the Women’s Studies program cut and feminism; I didn’t know what feminism really was.