…are back! This week: collaboration vs. your career prospects, big data vs. little data, tigers vs. sloth bears, seats vs. students, Olympic-academia caption contest, and more.
From Jeremy:
Jabberwocky Ecology has a new feature: semi-regular posts sharing things they like.
Exit, voice, and loyalty, ESA edition. I was going to comment on this, as it sparked a number of thoughts. But my comment turned into multiple paragraphs. So I’m going to try to turn it into a standalone post. For now, if you’re not familiar with the phrase “exit, voice, and loyalty,” see here.
Big data is made of little data. From macroeconomic policy, but it generalizes.
Writing in Science, Sarah Boon reviews journalist Sophie Yeo’s new book on ecological restoration, Nature’s Ghosts.
People respond to incentives–but scientific researchers (mostly) don’t.
Two big changes in many scientific fields over the course of my professional career are the rise of large collaborations, and the worsening of faculty career prospects for junior academic researchers. This new working paper (=unreviewed preprint) argues that the former caused the latter. I’ve only read the abstract and so can’t vouch for it. Just passing it along in case it’s of interest to you.
Incompetence is a form of bias.
Teaching philosophy with problem sets. Interesting pedagogical musings, which I enjoyed even though I don’t teach philosophy.
Inviting public input is a lousy way for democratic governments to figure out what their citizens want or need. Illustrative quote: “Notice and comment procedures are table stakes. They’re a necessary input into decision-making in a liberal democracy, but they are also both hugely insufficient and enormously prone to capture by special interests.”
Why aren’t modern buildings ornamented? I had thought it’s mostly because ornamentation has become comparatively costly over time. Wrong.
Political scientist and poker player Nate Glassman reviews poker player and political analyst Nate Silver’s new book, On the Edge. I liked Silver’s last book and reviewed it for the blog, so this one’s on my reading list as well. And here’s Andrew Gelman’s review.
Everything is seating charts, large lecture edition.
Tigers vs. sloth bears. I had no idea! These have to be young inexperienced tigers, right?
Olympic-academic caption contest! 1000 Internet Points are on offer for the best caption to the linked pair of pictures. 🙂 Opening bids:
postdoc/full professor
gnlmm()/lm()
Bayesian/frequentist
ecologist/paleontologist
genomics/Darwin
main text/supplementary material
results/discussion
me writing my book at 10 am/me writing my book at 10 pm
🙂
(note: when coming up with your captions, keep in mind that the guy in the right-hand picture won a medal! I think the best jokes here will play on the fact that the guy on the right is actually very good at his sport, even though he doesn’t look like it. That’s why my last three jokes are the weakest ones. They’re based on the mistaken assumption that the guy on the right is as bad at his sport as he appears to be.)