Facts have recently been all over the place. With the Trump thing and the political arguments about climate change, evolution, inauguration crowd sizes, and funding of science, perhaps it is the time to have a closer look at what facts are (see also this post). My take: Science rarely works with facts. Surprisingly, the term… Read More »
I’ve returned from IBS meeting in Tucson. Here are my thoughts on experimental and dynamic macroecology, the two big issues discussed this year: Experimental macroecology needs better justification One entire morning was dedicated to experimental macroecology. Presented were results from small-grain manipulative experiments, sometimes replicated over large extents, sometimes not. However, it all felt like a… Read More »
In the attic of my grandmother's house there is a box with my old personal stuff. Inside there is a smaller box with a bunch of 3.5 floppy disks. One of them has a fading handwritten label "Bachelor thesis - data". To get to the data I could use the 3.5 drive in a 90's… Read More »
A couple of weeks ago at iDiv I had an exchange with Jonathan Chase about the importance of natural history, and whether it is more fundamental than statistics. Jon was arguing for fundamental importance of natural history, I disagreed. To quote Jon quoting Evelyn Hutchinson: A quote Hutchinson wrote in 1975 about the importance of… Read More »
I have always found it difficult to explain my profession to people. For my bachelor degree I studied larvae of inconspicuous flies (Insecta: Diptera: Therevidae) in soils of remote forests of central Europe. About five people around the world have ever heard of these flies, but I did not care as I was passionately in… Read More »
Elisabeth Kolbert: The Sixth Extinction. Published on Feb 2014 by Henry Holt & Co., New York. The 2015 Pulitzer prize in the General Nonfiction category (awarded on May 28) went to Elisabeth Kolbert for her book on science of extinction, which also happens to be an intro to conservation biogeography. The book has a wide… Read More »
Last week I started to draft a manuscript that is heavy on the computation side and it uses large data. This requires everything to be well documented and organized, otherwise I get lost in my own code. The real challenge is then to confront my analyses with the co-authors and, ultimately, journal referees -- a… Read More »
Nature has an article about the daunting prospects for current postdocs in some countries (Nature 520, 144-147). The article is stimulating but reports only a few relatively ad-hoc ways to fix the situation. In the discussion below the article Peter Jurica mentions postdocs as middle class (of academia). I think that this simple analogy can… Read More »
Simple things are good. Here is a list of 12 things that I find simple and useful, yet not many of my colleagues use them. The list is R-biased. Knitr. Intuitive tool to integrate R and text to make reports with fancy fonts, figures, syntax-highlighted R code and equations. If you use R studio, then… Read More »
I've recently been exploring foundational ideas of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) culture, and I've found them relevant not only for software development, but also for academia. Here is something that I picked up for inspiration: If you have no idea who Richard Stallman is, I recommend his TEDx talk on Free software, free society.… Read More »
Marquet et al. have essay in Bioscience entitled “On theory in ecology”, with the main message being we need more good theory; I agree 100%. The paper also presents an overview of important ecological theories and some good points about why theory is important. Notable one: “Theory, etymologically, comes from the ancient Greek theoria, which… Read More »
Lately I went through a couple of ordinary academic failures. I had one manuscript rejected in three statistical journals in a row. I had another one rejected in Science, PNAS and PLoS Biology in a prompt sequence. Interestingly, among all of the six submissions only Science actually sent it out for review (and then rejected).… Read More »
I have recently been lucky to relocate from Yale to Center for Theoretical Study in Prague, Czech Republic. The institute brings together philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, sociologists, economists, biologists and others; it is similar to Santa Fe Institute or Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and its aim is to stimulate interdisciplinary approaches to science, encouraging new… Read More »
Species Distribution Models (SDM) a.k.a. Niche Models have always been a busy pile of confusion, ideology and misguided practices, with the real mess being the “presence only” SDMs. Interestingly, when you go to conservation or biogeography symposiums, you can hear the established SDM gurus starting their talks with: “During the last ten years SDMs have… Read More »
As a scientist, what should I do when I encounter a seemingly fundamental problem that also seems strangely unfamiliar? Is it unfamiliar because I am up to something really new, or am I re-discovering something that has been around for centuries, and I have just missed it? This is a short story about an exploration… Read More »
This post advertises our new Ecological Applications paper which is in press. Imagine that there would be a tool that could make hi-res images out of low-res ones, just like this: Such tool would be really useful for creating maps of things for which we only have a very crude (low-res or coarse-grain) spatial information,… Read More »
Some of my fellow scientists have it easy. They use predefined methods like linear regression and ANOVA to test simple hypotheses; they live in the innocent world of bivariate plots and lm(). Sometimes they notice that the data have odd histograms and they use glm(). The more educated ones use generalized linear mixed effect models.… Read More »
Time has an article on what happens when creative thinkers get the opportunity to set their minds free. The article begins at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and ends up as an essay on the old "rivalry" between basic and applied science. Opinions of two of the Institute's researchers are contrasted. Norwegian mathematician… Read More »
The Economist has an article on new approaches to scientific peer review. The concern is that, with increasing number of submissions in science, editorial resources and referee time are being wasted with every new resubmission of the same manuscript to a new journal. To quote the article: "The number of submissions to journals is outpacing… Read More »
Yesterday, professor Ronald Smith gave a talk at Yale about how to predict future climate. One of his central subjects was ensemble forecasting. Here I give it a bit of a dissection. Climatologists and ecologists do "predictive models". Once they have the model, they use it to predict the future, e.g.: How will global temperature… Read More »