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.
Have you ever felt insecure, inferior, stupid, when talking to a theoretical ecologist? Here is your fall back position:
Physicists: ““
Just replace “physicist” with “theoretical ecologist”, and “liberal-arts majors” with yourself, and you regain the upper hand again in any discussion ;-)
In our lab, we focus mainly on metacommunity dynamics, or how the interactions between dispersal and local environmental processes influence communities in the landscape. Since we are interested in communities in the landscape, we automatically deal with the issue of “scale”. This is one of those very diffuse concepts in ecology, with as many definitions as scientists (temporal, spatial, conceptual, grain, …).
This recent article by Spivak et al. in Freshwater Biology tackles a problem experimentally that is not often studied in ecology: how applicable are the results of small-scale experiments for empirical (and by default large-scale) systems?
Intelligent persons have written wonderful books about creating good graphs. Today, I received two graphs in my Google Reader, and they make such powerful/funny statements that I had to show them, especially since they are visually so comparable.
In the funny category:
In the powerful category (click here for the original article with more powerful visuals):
It’s very unlikely that anything in my research career will produce anything that funny, or could influence the voting behaviour of a whole nation, but we can only try.
Are you intrigued by these snippets?I like statsI dislike learning R results may be meaninglessTedious? Yes. Accurate? Yes Then go over to Amanda's latest blog post.
When we were preparing the grading rubric to assess critical thinking (which is more complicated than you might think), Marianne Staempfli found this very useful resource: The Critical Thinking Community. While the website itself is quaintly old-fashioned, it has a lot of useful information. For instance, a definition:
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
It is always interesting to read how scientists read, understand, and interpret articles in very different way. You can encounter this most often for your own results when you present at a conference or seminar, and you get questions that throw you in a hoop, and track the articles that refer to one of your publications (admit it, you do it too): often the first response is "how could they interpret my text/data/interpretation in that context?
This is an article in the Globe and Mail that struck a cord with me, "Ten years that shook, rattled, rolled and helped repair the world" by Doug Saunders. If you do not have the time to read the full article, you can click on this shortened version with most of the salient points summarized in a concept map structure (make sure to click on it to see the bigger version so that you can actually read the text ;-):This article provides a very nice example of the 10th Cottenie Commandment: Thou Shalt Listen to thy Intuition, but Follow the Data.
Learning (be it as a scientist, a teacher, a student, or any combination of the above, this will be the topic of another blog) is a difficult process, as any scientist, teacher, or student will tell you. However, sometimes you get struck by lightening, by an experience that makes you wonder, “How did I ever function without this?”. 3 years ago, I was introduced to concept mapping by Steve Crawford, but I am not exactly sure how we got on this subject.