I’m a Chordata! Urochordata!

Exploring RTMB with Palmer Penguins: Linear Regression

R

statistics

I was deeply intrigued to see Kristensen et al. (2026) in Ecology and Evolution the other day. With a title like RTMB: An R Package for Fitting Latent Variable Models With Template Model Builder how could I not be intrigued? Latent variables and possibility of SEM? Check! TMB? Well, I’m a regular…

Modelbased for Quick and Beautiful Model Visualization

R

statistics

A year ago, I found the modelbased package while looking for tools to visualize some mixed models. It was a minor revelation. Just like many of the packages from the easystats family.

Reflections on Two Weeks Using Mastodon

internet

Welp. I have been on Mastodon for two week now, and am rather liking it. But here are some things I have learned…

Tidyeval/Dynamic Evaluation for Writing Functions in the Tidyverse

R

I always forget how to write function that dynamically evaluate variables in a tidyverse context. This post is a reminder mostly for myself. But maybe you will find it useful, too?

R Tensorflow on an M1 Mac Without Crashing

deep learning

R

How can I run Tensorflow in R on my new M1 Mac without it being a crash-fest? I ran into this problem, and, after a few months of people mucking about, I think there is an answer!

GF Pizza that Rocks

food

gluten free

Have you only had mediocre or downright bad gluten free pizza? Try this - it comes out perfect with a nice, thin, crispy crust every time.

Simulating “Posterior” Predictions from Non-Bayesian Fits

R

statistics

Today, let us talk simulating the outcomes of a fit model - one fit without Bayesian methods.

Roaring Back into Mobility in the US Post-Covid-Lockdown

covid19R

R

As part of the Covid19R Project, I’ve been working on a new package, covid19mobility. It started as an effort to pull in the Apple Mobility Trends, and has since morphed as more mobility data comes out. Right now, I’m working through the Google Mobility Data, & I’m interested in the Descartes…

Best GF Pancakes Yet

food

I love pancakes. My wife loves pancakes. My daughter LOVES chocolate pancakes (and takes a picture with her face smeared in chocolate every time she she finishes eating chocolate chip pancakes). But… my daughter has celiac.

The Covid19R Project

R

covid19R

We want our coronavirus data! We want it now! We want it TIDY!

Dusting off the old blahg

science online

Welp. It’s been a spell. Time to bring ye olde blahg back.

Bayesian SEM with BRMS

R

sem

statistics

Note: for the most up to date version of this, see this post on rpubs

Introducing the Open Derby (guest post)

Ensuring openness and reproducibility in ecology is an ongoing challenge, although open tools (e.g., R Studio, Github) are free to use, and user support is everywhere. To illustrate how ecology collaborations can fit within an open science framework, we had the idea of running an ‘Open Derby’.…

Which library to use to teach linear models & likelihood

R

statistics

I’ve been teaching likelihood to grad students for the past few years using the wonderful bbmle package from Ben Bolker. I really love it’s flexibility and the way you can get students into fitting anything their imagination can countenance. But there’s a small cost to that. First, their…

Linear Model Power Analysis with Dplyr

R

statistics

I really liked the power analysis example I gave in class today. I feel like I’m finally firing on all cylinders with the tidyverse. So I thought I would post it here, in case it was of use to anyone!

You Complete Me

R

There’s a feature that is either new or I haven’t noticed before in the new release of tidyr that is making me giddy with giddiness. The complete function.

Other Writings about Parenting & Climate Change by Scientists

climate change

science parent

OK, so, I spoke too soon. There are at least a few stabs by scientists writing about being a parent who studies climate/environmental change. As folk send me more, I’ll try and keep this list updated. While there’s some great stuff here, I feel like this is an empty niche for some great writing.…

Parenting as a Scientist in the Age of Climate Change

climate change

rantish

science parent

An old friend with a new child asked me if I know any climate change scientists or global change biologists who are parents and have written cogently about being parents in the era of climate change. Off of the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any (prove me wrong, internet), but, heck, I’m one…

Rafe Sagarin and Passion in The Life Scientific

professional musings

How to process something like Rafe Sagarin’s senseless passing? For those who never encountered him, Rafe was a wonderful marine ecologist whose body of work was as varied and eclectic as can be, from classic papers on long-term effects of climate change in Science and Ecological Monograph to books…

Spicier Analyses with Interactive R Leaflet Maps

R

Who wants to make a kickass, public-friendly, dynamic, online appendix with a map for their papers? ME! (and you, right?) Let’s talk about a cool way to make your data sing to a much broader audience than a static image.

MEOW! It’s Marine Ecoregions in R!

R

So, I’m on paternity leave (yay! more on that another day - but HOMG, you guys, my daughter is amazing!) and while my daughter is amazing, there are many hours in the day and wee morning where I find myself rocking slowly back and forth, knowing that if I stop even for a second, this little bundle…

Space and SEMs

R

sem

statistics

WARNING: AS OF 10/1/2016 LAVAAN DOES NOT PRODUCE CORRECT CASEWISE RESIDUALS. PLEASE CALCULATE YOUR RESIDUALS BY HAND. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE FIXED SHORTLY, AND I WILL REMOVE THIS WARNING WHEN IT IS.

Talking Kelps and Climate Change at the New England Aquarium

talks

It’s always a bit painful to watch yourself talk, but I think this came off pretty well. A public lecture at the New England Aquarium. It was an interesting one to put together, and I’m still working on my style for public non-academic lectures, but all in all, not too shabby… I hope.

Positive Multifunctionality ≠ All Functions Are Positive

paper review

rantish

research

Positive Multifunctionality ≠ All Functions Are Positive

Getting it Right - after Publication: A Multifunctional Journey?

research

Sometimes, you have to publish a paper to have the hit-yourself-in-the-head revelation of the real right answer.

Kelp & German Death Metal

Science Music Videos

I have no words for how amazing this is. New lab theme song?

A Kelpy Time Machine

research

This is x-posted from my guest post at Deep Sea News about the new Floating Forests citizen science project I’m part of. If you’re excited about it, go check out http://www.floatingforests.org/!

The Beatles and Kelp

Science Music Videos

For a blog post somewhere else, I’m trying to re-work the Beatle’s classic Kelp!, er, I mean, Help!. But my first draft got all urchin-y. I love it, though, so I thought I’d post it here.

Damn, That’s Some Big Kelp!

Field Notes

I’m not sure what it is this year, but the kelp we’re seeing in the Southern Gulf of Maine is just fracking huge. Last year, yeah, there were kelpy areas, and there were kelps that were ~1-1.5 meters long, which, you know, impressive. But this year…

The Launch of the R/V Botryllid

Field Notes

Woohoo! It’s another amazing research season out here at the Shoals Marine Lab. We’re in the midst of our push to sample SML, Salem Sound, and the Boston Harbor Islands. The weather is glorious, and the water is…ok, not warm. 47F this year. Last summer at this time it was a good 5 degrees F…

Two Urchins, Similar but Not

neat!

science online

Great stuff from Sofia Castello y Tickell and Robert Lamb based on research from my alma mater, the Witman lab!

Best Kelp Barplot Ever

neat!

science!

If you’re looking at growth in Laminaria (or Saccharina) kelps, and need to make a barplot…why bother with the bar, really? Why not make it a kelp plot!

Ain’t Nuthin’ but a Green Crab Thang

Science Music Videos

Who knew Carcinus maenas could be so funky fresh? More awesomeness from Eric Axelman and folk from the Bertness lab.

Searching for Opportunities in Ecology & Environmental Science for Recent Grads

howto

So, you’re graduating with a biology or environmental science or marine bio degree! Hurray! You’ve finished your stint at college, and you’ve gained a lot of new skills. Maybe you’ve done some time in research, maybe not (!!!), but now that you’ve wrapped up, you want to find a job in the…

Fourth Annual Chemical Ecology Film Fest!!!

Science Music Videos

It’s my most favorite time of year! Time for the science music video extravaganza known as the Annual Chemical Ecology Filmfest! It’s the fourth one! Congrats to Jeremy Long and all of his students for keeping this source of awesomeness going. Sit back, and take a look at a few here, or go over…

Here a Tau, there a Tau… Plotting Quantile Regressions

R

statistics

I’ve ended up digging into quantile regression a bit lately (see this excellent gentle introduction to quantile regression for ecologists [pdf] for what it is and some great reasons why to use it -see also here and here). In R this is done via the quantreg package, which is pretty nice, and has…

Statistics Made Marvellous Through Dance

Science Music Videos

You all know I’m one for silly science videos. And silly statistics videos? Well, that’s like catnip to me.

Wanna Join My Department? Tenure Track Job Posting in Disease Ecology/Evolution!

announcements

shout out

So, rolling into year two here in the Biology Department at UMass Boston, I have to say I’m having a delightful time. Fabulous colleagues (who I’m already co-authoring papers with - that’s just how we roll), a easy access to multiple field sites and stations, a deliciously nerdy intellectual scene…

Sponge Meme Square Memes

silly

With the news that someone has found a sponge that looks like cookie monster and prodded by certain people, I really just couldn’t resist the following…

Cocktail Week: Dark n’ Stormy Effects on Kelps

science!

It is cocktail week over at Deep Sea News. And it has been glorious, with marine biology themed cocktails galore. As a cocktilian myself, I felt that I had to kick in, well, a real classic. I classic that, I daresay, may lay at the root of kelp forest ecology itself. And yet may be under threat.

An Open Letter to ISI Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar, and SciVerse Scopus

publishing

_A bit of context first. This letter arose as a result of discussions regarding citations practices in meta-analyses on Twitter several weeks ago. We all agreed citations of work within meta-analyses should be counted, but noted that many modern citation counting services disregard any citations…

Chris Lortie’s ESA IGNITE! Talk on Preprints & the Future of Publishing

This is a talk about work from the NCEAS OpenPub group that is still ongoing. Chris summarises what we’re up to quite nicely. Check it out. Crossposted here

Saving the White Abalone

neat!

science!

shout out

I’m so stoked that the white abalone breeding project at BML, my phdalmamater (as it were), is rocketing forward. And I’m even more excited to see Dr. Kris Aquilino, one of my former labmates, talking about the work and communicating science LIKE A BOSS!

Dramatic Predator Tunicate is Dramatic

ascidians

Another fun video via Chris Mah!

Proxy Server Bookmarklet

neat!

Like so many of us, when I’m off campus, in order to read journal pdfs and the like is a chore. I have to go to my university’s library website, login to their proxy server, go back to the article in question - either by surfing there from the library webpage, or adding the relevant text to the…

How I Use Different Social Media Platforms for Science

professional musings

science online

OK, so, you’re a scientist interested in jumping into the world of online social networking for interacting with colleagues, fun and ~~profit~~ bringing science to the world at large. Fantastic!

Marshall the generalists! Generalize the marshallists!

research

While working more on the bacterial network stuff, Jen and I realized I was wrong. Yep, I was wrong on the internet. Namely, in my post on bacterial networks, I got the answer wrong on the abundance of OTUs with different degrees of specialization. I had a rowSum after inverting a matrix instead…

Giving Honest Resources to Prospective Students

professional musings

A question for the peanut gallery -

Beautiful Bacterial Networks in the Marsh

research

“So,” I’m sure you aren’t wondering, how did that creating ‘ecospecies’ from bacterial sequences based on sequence similarity, co-occurrence, and network theory work out for you?”

Les Miserables Larides

neat!

Science Music Videos

One of the great things about field stations is the silliness they engender. I mean, there you are, in the middle of nowhere, with no one but other scientists thinking about the wonder of the natural world. Awe and wonder can only take you so far. And then, at some point, you cross over, and start…

PeerJ Turns One!

publishing

x-posted from openpub

Walkin’ in an Invasive Wonderland

Field Notes

research

Last day of dives before heading back. We hit two sites on either side of the northern head of Appledore. It’s a remarkable break, as on one side you have fairly decent expsore to waves from the West. On the other, things are fairly protected. So, there’s a strong physical gradient. And, though…

Kelp on a Ledge!

Field Notes

Day 2 of dives with Sarah out at SML. Today we hit two sites that were quite different - both from each other and from Norwegian Cove the other day. The Ledges are in the channel between Appledore and Smuttynose, so, they get good flow running through. This was key, as it blew sediments from the…

Undersea Carpets?

Field Notes

research

The second site of the day was a surprise. 10 years ago, Smith’s Cove was a mixed mussel bed and urchin barren. Previous, it has been a Codium meadow. Now… It’s just a giant red algal carpet. Wall to wall. Thick, easily fragmenting, ubiquitous, invasive red Heterosiphonia japonica. Also, big tufts…

The Morning Algal IDs

Field Notes

research

When it’s wavy out…

The View After the Storm

Day 1: Back in the field!

Field Notes

research

Well, today was it. After a 2 year hiatus behind my computer screen, my skin now softer and more delicate from its soothing rays, I hopped back in the water FOR SCIENCE! Not only that, but it was my return to dry suit diving. Oh, dry suit diving. I really didn’t miss you and your weird buoyancy…

True Facts About Marine Life

silly

Because there hasn’t been enough ocean silliness lately…

Living a Dream: Back to SML

Field Notes

research

So, today, I’m going to catch a ferry out to the Shoals Marine Lab. I’m just going to be out for a day to meet with the undergrad intern I’m mentoring. I’ll be back later this summer to work with her and setup some permanent monitoring transects.

Best Peer Review Experience Ever

publishing

research

So, I recently submitted a piece regarding the future of scholarly publishing in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Simultaneous to posting, I put up a preprint in PeerJ Preprints and also put it on Google Docs for line by line commentary (which you are welcome to give!). I asked in both places that…

A Preprint Experiment: Four Pillars and a Foundation for the Future of Scholarly Publishing

publishing

research

x-post from the OpenPub Project blog

Favorite Wave Sensor?

research

So, Internet, I’m setting up a number of monitoring sites this summer. I’m hoping to get good wave height measurements from them to look at disturbance. I have yet to find something like the CDIP swell height model for the Gulf of Maine (although, I’d love to hear that this is due to a failure of…

A Gif Guide to Acceptance and Rejection in Academic Publishing

linkage

silly

It’s been a mixed week, which has caused me to reflect on two beautiful posts - and put them here so that I don’t lose them.

More on Bacteria and Groups

R

research

Continuing with bacterial group-a-palooza…

Groupapalooza: Adapting Food Web Trophic Group Methods for Defining Bacterial “Species”

networks

research

_The following is some notes on a technique I’m developing for a cool collaboration between me, Jen Bowen, and David Weisman. I think it has some generality to it, and I’d love any feedback from the more mathematical crowd…I also wrote it to make sure I knew what I was doing - translating…

I’m a Grazer, Baby!

Science Music Videos

shout out

silly

You all know me. I’m a sucker for an awesome marine ecology music video. So it gives me great pleasure to present this product from the always amazing and ambitious ZEN (Zostera Experimental Network).

Parasite Ecology Explained

silly

Another excellent piece describing the intricacies of a complex field of scientific inquiry from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as always.

Transect Tape Love

Field Notes

research

science!

Field supplies for the summer starting to come in…

Seeking a Postdoc for the Byrnes Lab!

All right, folks! The time has come - I’m looking for a Postdoc for the Byrnes lab! The text of the advert is below, but, to be brief - I’m looking for someone who is interested in asking questions relating to marine subtidal community ecology. These next two years I’m getting a program up and…

The Real World: Scallop Science

science!

silly

I….I…I… Oh yes. Oh….Yes.

I want to know what YOU think about review, preprints, and publication

SciFund

OpenPub

publishing

As part of the OpenPub project, we’re soliciting folk to send us videos about their experience with the scholarly publication process. We want to use these to try and crowdfund the development of OpenPub - our preprint server with robust tools for discussion and interaction. Interested? Check out…

Extracting p-values from different fit R objects

R

sem

Let’s say you want to extract a p-value and save it as a variable for future use from a linear or generalized linear model - mixed or non! This is something you might want to do if, say, you were calculating Fisher’s C from an equation-level Structural Equation Model. Here’s how to extract the…

Filtering Out Exogenous Pairs of Variables from a Basis Set

R

sem

statistics

Sometimes in an SEM for which you’re calculating a test of D-Separation, you want all exogenous variables to covary. If you have a large model with a number of exogenous variables, coding that into your basis set can be a pain, and hence, you can spend a lot of time filtering out elements that…

AAAS Webinar on Science Crowdfunding

SciFund

(x-posted from the #SciFund Blog)

Scio13 and Beyond

SciFund

science online

While I’ve been active in using online spaces for scientific activities - blogging, tweeting, crowdfunding, and much much more - for a looong time. I’ve found it’s benefitted me greatly as a scientist. I’ve also formed a deep love for the community I’ve found in the online science world (to name…

Crowdfunding in the Peer Reviewed Literature

SciFund

(x-posted at the #SciFund Blog)

Linkage: A field guide to privilege in marine science

linkage

As someone who, admittedly, benefitted a great deal from Privilege growing up (it definitely lowered the barriers to my becoming a succesful marine scientist), know that this is true of MANY Ecology and Evolutionary Biology folk, and now think a good deal about how I can lower those barriers for…

A Quick Note in Weighting with nlme

R

I’ve been doing a lot of meta-analytic things lately. More on that anon. But one quick thing that came up was variance weighting with mixed models in R, and after a few web searches, I wanted to post this, more as a note-to-self and others than anything. Now, in a simple linear model, weighting by…

Scallopocalypse

Field Notes

research

Everyone has been pretty shocked by the devastation wreaked by Sandy. Here in New England, we also got a Nor’easter following a few days later. That’s a lot of intense storm action in a short period of time.

Discussion of Sea Level Rise on the US West Coast

climate change

X-posted from SeaMonster, this video is so clear, and so compelling that I thought it needed to put it up as well - 12” increase by 2050 in SoCal?! Wow. And 36” by 2100 in SoCal…lots to think about.

Why I’m Teaching Computational Data Analysis for Biology

professional musings

statistics

_This is a x-post from the blog I’ve setup for my course blog. As my first class at UMB, I’m teaching An Introduction to Computational Data Analysis for Biology - basically mixing teaching statistics and basic programming. It’s something I’ve thought a long time about teaching - although the…

Bertness Lab Anthem

Science Music Videos

silly

It’s always good to see some rockin’ Science Music videos coming from my alma mater. The use of crabs here? Genius. Also great to see the Big Man Himself making a special guest appearance.

Taking the Ecological Conversation Online

meetings

At ESA this year, I gave a talk in a symposium about changing the culture of ecology. The talk was entitled Taking the Ecological Conversation Online and summarized what I thought were the benefits of engaging in online activities. As this was a scientific audience interested in how we might…

Final Friday at #ESA2012

meetings

Here’s what I’m thinking of catching on Friday. Last day, and still lots of fantastic talks! What a wonderful meeting that this has been. (Eating at The Farm didn’t hurt either…)

Thursday #ESA2012 Schedule

meetings

ALl right - here’s my Thursday schedule (mostly for myself so I can keep track of it on my phone). I think in the morning, I just might park myself in the session on climate change & communities as one of my main interests for this meeting is…climate change and communities. Also, I’m guessing I’ll…

Day 3 at #ESA 2012 - Decisions, Decisions

meetings

Man, this afternoon is going to be interesting. There are two sessions that I want to sit all the way through! I’ll be speaking in the Growing Pains in Ecology session, so I’ll be there all afternoon, but, the NutNet session looks pretty amazing as well.

Tentative #ESA2012 Tuesday

meetings

Tuesday looks to be pretty exciting. The number of overlapping talks all of which I want to see has jumped up, and, heck, there are overlapping symposia that I could sit through. That said, I THINK this is going to be my schedule…again, just posting it for myself, but feel free to browse (loading…

My #ESA2012 Monday

meetings

For the next few days, I’ll be trying to focus on two areas - 1) climate change & community responses and 2) biodiversity-ecosystem function - with probably a little network ecology thrown in for good measure. I’ll be posting my schedule here not because I want you to stalk me, but rather because…

When Mild Mannered, Who is @DATACURATORHULK?

shout out

silly

OK, folk on the Twitters - if you’re not following @DATACURATORHULK, I take no responsibility for what may happen to you. And if you’re not curating your data properly, or making sure that it is open?…hide.

SciFund Round 1 - Results & Ravings

SciFund

talks

So, you want to hear my vision for what #SciFund tells us about the future of science funding & engagement, and back it up with data? Bam! Here you go.

Post-Publication Commentary - a Google Hangout Discussion

publishing

After the fantastic NCEAS working group on the future of scholarly publishing in EEB (big success - stay tuned for more news on that front!), I participated in a really interesting online discussion about Post-Publication peer review with Carl Boettiger, Jamie Ashlander, and Scott Chamberlain. The…

PeerJ launches open access into a new realm

A service that is travelling along similar lines of what I’m interested in for open publishing has launched today. PeerJ is being pitched as a cross between PLoS ONE and arXiv and indeed the company was founded by former PLoS ONE and Mendeley folk. It’s an interesting model where authors signup…

SciFund Round 2 FTW!

SciFund

SciFund Round 2 is now complete, and it pulled in $100,345 for science! 43% of the projects achieved 100% or more of their goal - almost double of round 1 - and 60% of all funds asked for were secured. Numerous projects that didn’t fully reach their goal were above 80%. A TON of great research is…

Moving on Up the Academic Food Chain!

announcements

Allright, folk! The final documents have been signed, sealed, and delivered. Looks like I’ll be starting a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at UMass Boston in the fall. That’s right, soon the Byrnes Lab is going to become a reality. Get ready, Science, because this…

Beware of the teeny tiny crabs. They will cut you!

SciFund

Happy Friday, everyone. To celebrate the end of the week, I leave you with what is hands down my favorite #SciFund video from round 2. And I don’t just say this because it was made by a collaborator of mine of the #SciFund paper that we happen to be editing right this very moment (or, in half an…

Spring is sproinging earlier than we thought

paper review

Climate change is speeding up the timing of plants growing & flowering. It’s an old trope we’re all used to hearing by now. Spring warms up earlier, and plants shift their timing - their phenology. This shift in phenology is going to have big consequences for things like agricultural production…

Diversity Loss v. Environmental Change: The Story of the Paper

paper review

Just over a year and a half ago, I was lucky enough to be in a room with some of the world’s top authorities on the consequences of species loss at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. We were worried. When Brad Cardinale asked, “So, where does diversity loss rank? As…

SciFund 2 has launched!

SciFund

Woohoo! #SciFund 2 is off to the races! I am in awe of the nearly 70 scientists who have put their work up for your enjoyment. I’ll be featuring a few marine projects in the next few days, but, for now, get on over there, check it out, and help us crowdfund some amazing science!

Tuba Pteropod? The Deep by PES

neat!

I’m not sure why, but something really caught me about this piece…

A Watermelon for the Aquanauts

neat!

I just saw this video from the Pawlik lab doing work done in the Aquarius habitat in the Caribbean. I just adore it. There’s something about the lighthearted sense of fund and enjoyment behind the soundtrack that syncs up with the work that’s being done that captures some of the essence of what…

Does Synthesis Ecology Exist as a Scientific Discipline?

professional musings

research

Does Synthesis Ecology exist? Is it a discipline? If so, what is it? If not, why not?

How to prepare for #SciFund - by crowdfunding science!

SciFund

Are you excited about seeing the 125 hot science projects that got submitted to #SciFund2? Can’t wait the additional month for those projects to post themselves online? Want to fund some awesome science right now? Maybe you signed up and want to earn some pre-#SciFund karma?

Marine Biology James Bond?

silly

I’ve been pretty stoked about the This is What a Scientist Looks Like project on tumblr. So much so that I felt compelled to submit an (old) photo of me doing field work. I mean, when one things science, they often think labcoats and microscopes. When one thinks ecology, they often think hiking in…

Running OpenBUGS on a Mac Running OSX

R

statistics

After writing up my tutorial regarding getting WinBUGS running on a Mac in R, a friend sent me this fantastic simple tutorial on the same thing for OpenBUGS on a mac in R. So, for those that want it, install away! Looks a good bit simpler, actually!

Predatory Tunicate Art

ascidians

To bring the blog back to its tunicate-y roots, here’s an AWESOME piece of predatory tunicate art from Noctorunal Sea. They say they’ll have it up as at this webstore soon. I know what I’m gettin’ for my office wall next!

Missing my Statsy Goodness? Check out #SciFund!

SciFund

R

statistics

I know, I know, I have been kinda lame about posting here lately. But that’s because my posting muscle has been focused on the new analyses for what makes a succesful #SciFund proposal. I’ve been posting them at the #SciFund blog under the Analysis tag - so check it out. There’s some fun stats…

SciFund 2 Launches!

SciFund

That’s right, folk, last time we had 49 scientists bring in ~1400 people to check out their hot science and fund it to the tune of $76,000. And that was when we had no idea what we were doing. And now it’s time for round 2! We’re going to have a little more community review, some training, and we…

Open Haus Conclusion: Peer Review or Bust!

publishing

Friday’s NCEAS discussion about changing the future of scientific publishing was fascinating. We had a wide variety of views about the current system, what it’s adding to our papers, if the problems really are problems, and why we got here. But there was one thing that came up again and again…

Open Haus: The Future of Scholarly Publishing

publishing

rantish

Today at The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis we’re having an open discussion about the future of scholarly publishing. I may post some notes from it later, but, Stephanie Pau and I have compiled a list of thought questions and helpful links to help folk prep. And, as it was…

A Need to Understand Climate Change’s Indirect Effects

rantish

research

We know that warming, storms, drought, acidification, and the myriad of other effects of climate change will impact natural ecosystems. Most of our studies have concentrated on direct effects, though. For example, if you change temperature, you alter herbivore grazing rates. But what about…

A Vision for the Future of Scholarly Publishing

publishing

rantish

In many ways, the Research Works Act has been a blessing (see excellent link round up here). It has taken the moderately complacent but always grousing scientific community and whipped our feelings about the current state and cost of scientific publishing into a white hot fury. Ideas are bandied…

Running R2WinBUGS on a Mac Running OSX

howto

R

I have long used JAGS to do all of my Bayesian work on my mac. Early on, I tried to figure out how to install WinBUGS and OpenBUGS and their accompanying R libraries on my mac, but, to no avail. I just had too hard of a time getting them running and gave up.

Food Web Structure and Changing Diversity at Two Levels

food web networks and extinctions

research

This is part of a larger series of open notebook posts about how food web structure modifies the effects of predator extinctions. For an introduction and list of other posts, see here.

Prey Loss in Different Food Web Structures: We’ve Been Here Before

food web networks and extinctions

research

This is part of a larger series of open notebook posts about how food web structure modifies the effects of predator extinctions. For an introduction and list of other posts, see here.

A Probabilistic Approach to Predator-Prey Relationships: Worth All of the Hoo-Ha?

food web networks and extinctions

research

This is part of a larger series of open notebook posts about how food web structure modifies the effects of predator extinctions. For an introduction and list of other posts, see here.

A Probabilistic Look at Predators, Prey, and Extinctions

food web networks and extinctions

research

This is part of a larger series of open notebook posts about how food web structure modifies the effects of predator extinctions. For an introduction and list of other posts, see here.

Food Web Network Structure and Extinction: The Start of an Open Notebook

food web networks and extinctions

research

So, we know that species are going extinct at a pretty stunning rate. Mostly by human activities. The natural question is, will this affect the function of the natural world? You may well say ‘Duh! Of course!’ as a first instinctive pass, but, the issue isn’t so clear cut - will species that…

SciFund is OVER!

SciFund

After 45 days, with $76,230 raised from 1440 people, I am a pretty proud papa.

Won’t You #SciFund?

SciFund

With 4 days left, Tim Bonebreak asks, won’t you #SciFund? We’ve got 6 projects fully funded, and a number that are on the verge! I am at 65% myself! So achingly close!

Awww Yeah! Chemical Ecology Music Video Extravaganza!

neat!

Science Music Videos

I’m so excited. It’s one of my favorite times of year. That’s right, it’s time for the Annual Chemical Ecology Music Video Festival! Oh, J. Long, what have your students cooked up this time?

How to Make a Dancing Yeti Crab Video with Music

howto

neat!

So, I’ve been getting some questions about how one can make their own Yeti-crabs-dance-to-music video. So here’s a quick guide for the interested folk who haven’t played around with audio or video before but want to try it out. So, here’s what I did, step-by-step, in 9 easy steps. All told, this…

Dancing Yeti Crabs! Now with a Soundtrack!

neat!

paper review

Several years ago, when the Yeti crab, Kiwa hirsuta was first described, the world looked at a crustacean for the first time and went, “AWWWWW!!!”

Can We Reduce the Carbon Cost of Scientific Mega-Meetings?

paper review

professional musings

I admit it. I love big scientific meetings. There’s something about the intense intellectual hubbub of thousands of my fields greatest minds gathered in one place for a few days of showing off the latest, greatest, flashiest work that just fills me with joy. Also a need to sleep for a week…

Seeing Through the Measurement Error

research

silly

statistics

I am part of an incredibly exciting project - the #SciFund Challenge. #SciFund is an attempt to have scientists link their work to the general public through crowdfunding. As I’m one of the organizers, I thought I should have some skin in the game. But what skin?

Morning Kelp Forest Jam

neat!

A fun undersea video with a fun soundtrack from Gary Hawkins who is generously providing me with some footage for my #SciFund video.

SciFund Preview….

SciFund

silly

statistics

Whew, it’s been a bit since I posted here. Rest assured, little sea squirts, there are some interesting new things in the works. Some things that are science-y (in which I try and use this blog as a sounding board/ lab notebook) and some things not so much.

Thanks, Steve, for helping SCIENCE!

shout out

Yesterday, we lost a great innovator and someone who, even if unwittingly, has really helped science. I am a passionate Mac advocate. It’s blend of good user interface with a UNIX underpinning lets many of us just concentrate on our work rather than constantly dithering with niggling details. So…

Astrophysicists = Parasitized Killifish

neat!

I can only assume that the authors of the every silly Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal have taken invertebrate zoology and were fascinated by the bizarre life history cycles of trematodes and/or spent some time hanging around with Armand Kuris and Kevin Lafferty at UC Santa Barbara. Why? Because…

A Grand Experiment: Can Crowdfunding Work for Science?

neat!

professional musings

There have been a steady stream of articles over the years stating that now is the time for Science to embrace Crowdfunding. It is the wave of the future, they state. It will link people to science directly. Abandon the shackles of the NSF and NIH, ye meek and mild mannered scientists. The…

Cufflinks for the Well Dressed Marine Scientist

neat!

silly

So, I’m-a-gettin’ hitched in, what, just less that 6 weeks to a singularly lovely lady. As I determine the proper haute couture for the nuptials, I’ve begun to have fun with one piece in particular. Cuffilnks.

The Story Behind the Paper: Climate Change and Kelp Forest Food Webs

paper review

publishing

research

Yay! First paper of my postdoc is out in the August 2011 issue of Global Change Biology!

Oikos in the Online Hizzy

blog

I’ve long been pretty stoked that Methods in Ecology and Evolution has a blog. And now the upstart crew over at Oikos is getting into the online game with their delightful offering. Go check it out!

Should We Eat Fish? The Online Discussion

paper review

rantish

One of the main reasons science blogs excite me is the possibility of communication between scientists. It allows for a medium that scientists can use to hash out ideas and do so publicly. This has the added advantage that those who are not big names in a field or somesuch can listen in, as it…

Yo! We’re Climate Scientists!

neat!

rantish

Science Music Videos

I realize, I have been remiss as of late posting awesome science related videos. So….

Ecological SEMs and Composite Variables: What, Why, and How

R

sem

statistics

I’m a HUGE fan of Structural Equation Modeling. For those of you unfamiliar with the technique, it’s awesome for three main reasons.

Easy Upgrading of R

R

For those who are excited about the new 2.13.0 release of R (particularly the compiler package) but are grumbling about having to remember what packages they have and re-install them, see this great advice or this piece on upgrading in osx for how to automate the process.

Extra! Extra! Get Your gridExtra!

R

The more I use it, the deeper I fall in love with ggplot2. I know, some of you have heard me kvel about it ad nauseum (oh, yiddish and latin in one sentence - extra points!). But the graphs really look great, and once you wrap your head around a few concepts, it’s surprisingly easy to make it do…

Why Michaelis-Menten Rules in a (simple) Lotka-Volterra World

neat!

science!

WARNING: This blog entry contains me awkwardly groping with math. It’s not pretty. It’s not done elegantly - indeed, for problems of even moderate complexity I fired up maxima (which is totally awesome!) rather than screw up the algebra on paper. And there are a few leaps that I make that I’m sure…

Diversity: It Matters! (for plants & algae)

paper review

Geological time has witnessed 5 extinction crises. Now we’re in the middle of the 6th - this time driven by man. What’s unprecedented, however, is the rate we are driving species extinct. For many taxa, it’s faster than we’ve seen in geological time (see here for discussion).

Ecological Nerd Musique

neat!

shout out

I woke up this morning to a wonderful email in my inbox (thanks, Fergus!) letting me know about a little musical delight. A song about diurnal zooplankton migration entitled, well, Diurnal Migration. With lyrics like Much of the ocean is not yet explored/ Though submarines pootle about the sea floor…

More, Please!

R

Thanks to Jim, I’ve been using R in the shell more and more - in concert with vi. It’s been fun, and nice to integrate my workflows all on the server (although I haven’t had to do much graphing yet - I’m sure I’ll start kvetching then and return to a nice gui).

Happy τ/2 Day!

silly

Happy Half Tau Day to everyone! What’s that, you say? It’s Pi Day? Whatever. π is wrong. Need convincing? See the brilliant video by Vi Hart below and visit The Tau Manifesto.

RStudio - An IDE for the Masses!

R

statistics

I’ll admit it. There’s one thing that always makes me sad working on a mac. R. How does R make me sad on a mac? I look over at my compatriots in Windows using fun Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Tinn-R, and I sigh. On the other hand, I just had the sad little text editor and shell.…

Promoting Ecology on the Web!

neat!

publishing

For the past three years, the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America has hosted a wonderful entitled “Ecology on the Web”. Under the curation of Jeff Hollister, EoW started out and grew to provide a number of links to fantastic ecological projects on the web.

A Brief Residency at Deep Sea News

neat!

science!

shout out

Hey, all! For the rest of the month, I’m the Scientist in Residence over at The Deep Sea News! Muchas gracias to Rick, Miriam, Kevin, and the rest of the crew for bringing me on board. My first post is up where I discuss some of my work on How are extinctions and invasions shaping food webs?

Word to Your Tree Ring

Science Music Videos

Sometimes, this blog is about pure science. But lately, it appears I’ll be cataloging the increasing boom in Science related music videos. Because they’re awesome.

Diversity-Function Brought to Life

neat!

shout out

Last October, Colin Bates and Jeff Morales conducted a workshop on Scientific Filmmaking at my old stomping grounds, the Bodega Marine Lab. The two run an awesome organization whose sole mission is to train people in ways to tell compelling science stories via video. As someone who has worked on a…

Merge Me Baby One More Time!

R

OK - has this ever happened to you? You are working with a team of collaborators all using a common dataset - maybe from an Agency, and LTER, or someone else’s data altogether. Each of you has some task - incorporating new data, running fancy models and putting the results back into the data for…

Get Your Reef On!

neat!

Science Music Videos

And here I thought that B-b-b-b-blue Whale would be stuck in my head all day. But now comes a second awesome marine science music video!

I need some scat… prey base where you at?

neat!

Science Music Videos

I wish I could say something intelligible here, but, I love this so much and cannot stop rewatching it over and over…the collision of marine bio nerdiness and pure awesome is a little overwhelming. Now if only there were tunicates involved…

Kids + Marine Biology = Awesome

neat!

Hey! I’m in a book! For kids! Best of all, its’ a chapter to help kids get excited about marine science. I got hooked into the world of marine biology young, and have never looked back. I mean - The ocean! Sea life! It’s awesome!

The Fingerprint of Fishing

paper review

How is fishing changing the ocean? This simple question has motivated a slew of fantastic research. One of the most pervasive ideas has been that of Fishing Down Marine Food Webs. Popularized by Daniel Pauly and colleagues in their 1998 paper, the idea simply states that when humans began fishing…

WSN 2010 Online

For anyone interested in the latest and greatest in marine ecology right now, but who aren’t able to get to San Diego for the Western Society of Naturalists 2010 meeting, follow along as a bunch of of liveblog and livetweet talks from the meeting. Very cool new stuff on the state of the oceans and…

Deeper and Curiouser

blog

I’ve been totally stoked that Jai Ranganathan’s science podcast Voyage of the Beagle has been rebooted as Curiouser and Curiouser and that its first episode was on the science of overfishing. I contacted the folk over at DSN about it, and they kindly let me add a guest post. Yay! Check it out, and…

Vicious Predator of the Deep!

ascidians

Thanks to Chris Mah for sending me over to this great video of a fearsome predatory tunicate (likely Megalodicopia hians)! Happy Friday, all!

Choose to Support Marine Education

blog

It’s that time of year where we ocean bloggers band together for the cause of Marine Environmental Education in US Schools. Between now and Nov 9th, we’re running a drive through Donor’s Choose in order to indoctrinate educate schoolkids in the wonders of the sea. Last year was a huge success…

Finding Truth in a Messy World

paper review

professional musings

*-note, this was derived from a combination of emails between myself and my former phd advisor. See if you can pick out who is arguing what and where. It’s fun - well, for some of you, anyway.

Privatizing the Reviewer Commons

paper review

professional musings

publishing

rantish

Let’s face it. The current journal system is slowly breaking down - in Ecology if not in other disciplines as well. The number of submissions is going up exponentially. At the same time, journals are finding it harder and harder to find reviewers. Statistics such as editors contacting 10 reviewers…

In the Grass, On the Reef - Vlogging Research

neat!

shout out

So, you’re an ecology power-couple starting a new life. You’ve got some elegant and incredibly ambitious experiments designed, funded, and ready to go. You’re about to revolutionize the study of coastal ecosystems…but where?

How a Scientist Sees the World?

I wish I could say this is wrong, but…From an excellent series on science over at Abstruse Goose.

Tunicate Whiskey

ascidians

tunicate culinary adventures

From this issue of the Ascidian News comes word of something….well….awesome.

Do Not Log-Transform Count Data, Bitches!

paper review

R

rantish

statistics

OK, so, the title of this article is actually Do not log-transform count data, but, as @ascidacea mentioned, you just can’t resist adding the “bitches” to the end.

My Dissertation in Under 7 Minutes

paper review

research

I recently attended the DISCCRS symposium for recent PhDs of a wide variety of disciplines whose work (past or present) deals with climate change. The week-long meeting was phenomenal, seeding me with thoughts, ideas, and basically making me feel quite good about the work I’m doing (if also very…

Our Future: Hot n’ Tasty?

paper review

Climate change. It’s going to wreak no small amount of havoc on mother nature (and if you’re reading this but think all of this climate change stuff is poppycock, please visit Skeptical Science and then come back). How good of a guide is our intuition for what will happen?

The Map of Science

neat!

science!

Why does it take so long for awesome cutting-edge statistical to make their way over to ecology? There are a myriad of techniques out there that have been around for 20, 30, 40, or more years that could help so many ecologists from banging their head into a wall over and over and over and…well…

Viva la Neo-Fisherian Liberation Front!

statistics

Low Down Poor Abused Data Blues

silly

I’m having one of those days. One of those “I have a meeting that will finalize the analyses for a paper, let’s just check that ONE thing that didn’t matter in early versions of this model, so, it shouldn’t matter now, and OMGWTFBBQ everything changed!” kinds of days. Well, OK, not everything -…

The Conservation Horizon

paper review

Every so often, a conservation problem rears its head that, upon reflection, we realize we had some inkling of even decades ago. Global warming, biofuels, overfishing, etc. The information was there, but scarce, buried in obscurity, or seemingly counterintuitive. Why not try and recognize the…

Research Blogging Awards!

blog

neat!

Well, everyone’s had a great year blogging away about the peer reviewed literature, yes? It’s time to reward those efforts! Announcing the first annual Research Blogging Awards! There are a multitude of categories, each with a $50 cash prize attached. And, here’s the kicker, the best research…

Ecology in 2020?

Today’s issue of Nature rings in the New Decade with an interesting article on where Science needs to be in 2020. With respect to Ecology, Robert Holt makes the following observation:

Tunicates on Bizarre Foods!

ascidians

tunicate culinary adventures

At last, Halocynthia roretzi has made it to the Food Network! Scroll to 3:40 for the good stuff.

CSAs for the Sea

neat!

Here at the Santa Barbara Farmer’s market, I’ve been delighted that we have local fish, ridgeback shrimp, mussels, and oysters. They’re amongst the tastiest seafood I’ve eaten (last week’s pumpkin shrimp risotto that I whipped up was one of the all time most amazing things I’ve ever cooked).

Help Kids Learn Sea Chanties!

blog

As a young tyke growing up around the decaying maritime glories of Baltimore, I was lucky to sail aboard The Lady Maryland. The feel and scent of her wooden decks, polished brass, and wet wool still haunt me, actually. Those voyages were coupled with a feisty choir teacher, John “Doc” Merrill, who…

Who’s your (academic) (great-grand) Daddy?!

neat!

silly

Science is a giant family. Each Professor gives “birth” to a litter of PhD students over time, many of whom go on to have their own students, who have their own students, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Lawrence Slobodkin: Trophic Pioneer

science!

I just learned that Lawrence Slobodkin passed away last week. Slobodkin was one of the authors of the infamous HSS paper in 1960 that has shaped how we think of the role of predators in ecosystems for decades. Indeed, it is one of the very origins of the modern concept of trophic cascades. More…

Web-Based Multilevel Modeling

neat!

R

statistics

This is tremendously cool. A nice intuitive web-based interface for the lme4 package in R (and you neither need to know R or understand the intricacies of the lme4 package) that gives you pdf output and plots. If you just want to play around and not worry about coding things up, it’s a great…

Sea Stars on Acid

paper review

As an ecologist working in temperate climes, I’ve been following the ocean acidification field with some interest. It’s always been obvious to me how acidification has enormous ramifications for coral reefs and other tropical marine ecosystems. They exist in warm waters already, often close to…

The New York Times Recognizes that What I Do is Hard

neat!

For anyone who wants a great simple explanation for why Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function research (my field) is rather daunting, check out Olivia Judson’s New York Times blog post.

Let’s All Go Down to the Barplot!

R

I’m back for another pean to ANOVA-loving experimental ecology. Barplots (or point-range plots - but which is better is a discussion for a different time) are the thing! And a friend of mine was recently asking me how to do a decent barplot with ggplot2 for data of moderate complexity (e.g., a…

The LTERs Get Hip!

neat!

science!

It seems that blogs, twitter, etc, are beginning to really leak into the consciousness of ecologists! In two weeks, I’m attending the LTER All Scientists Meeting (ASM). As I browsed through the working grounp lists, I came across the following: Blogs, Posts, and Tweets: Potential Uses of Web-Based…

First you get the urchins, then you get the power, then you get the data!

statistics

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I put the revised version of my diversity-disturbance experiment out in the field. I completed sampling on Monday, and, whew, my power analysis paid off! Although not entirely how I expected…

I’m an Editor?

blog

neat!

paper review

So, someone over at researchblogging.org was decidedly foolish, and asked me to be one of their new editors-at-large for Biology. That means, every Thursday, I’ll be posting the three biology (typically ecology and evolution) research paper reviews linked through researchblogging.org that I…

Tweeting A Trashy Voyage

neat!

science!

For those who aren’t following it, the SEAPLEX cruise blog is pretty amazing. SEAPLEX is a cruise being led by none other than Miriam Goldstein of The Oyster’s Garter to explore the Great North Pacific Trash Gyre.

I’ve Got the Power!

research

statistics

There is nothing like that pain of taking a first look at fresh precious new data from a carefully designed experiment which took months of planning and construction, 8 divers working full days, and a lot of back-and-forth with colleagues, and then you find absolutely no patterns of interest.

Simple Data Visualization

R

OK, so, I know I already raved about one Hadley Wickham project and how it has changed my life last week. But what can I say, the man is a genius. And if you are using R (and let’s face it, you should be) and you want simple sexy graphs made quick, the man has you covered once again.

Lytechinus: Pack Wolf of the Sea

So, you know, I’m cruising along, trying to determine the diet of the white urchin, Lytechinus anamesus, from the literature. There’s your usual “It eats kelp” papers, a few red algae papers, and nothing else special and then - A PAPER ON LYTICHINUS EATING OTHER SPECIES OF URCHINS.

Sometimes, you just need to use a plyr

R

I haven’t posted anything about R-nerdery in quite some time. But I have to pause for a moment, and sing the praises of a relatively new package that has made my life exponentially easier. The plyr package.

Mapping the Sasquatch

research

silly

I love modeling! I love modeling! Modeling will solve everything!

Ascidians in Vanity Fair!

ascidians

Yes, it’s time for squirts to take the limelight in America’s most fashionable magazine! I know this is a little old, but in the 2007 article, If You Knew Sushi by Nick Tosches, the author encounters a delicacy, Halocynthia roretzi aka the Sea Pineapple. (That’s right, they’re even on wikipedia…

Ocean Day and COB #25!

Happy World Oceans Day to all! And to all a good…night?

Sir Sea Squirt

neat!

For the fashionable marine biologist: Some months back, I fell upon a website called Sir Critter selling t-shirts of organisms bedecked by a monocle, top-hats, and cane. I asked the designer if he would create a Sir Sea Squirt. He was delighted, and just posted the resulting shirt, Sir Sea Squirt.

Going Topless with Urchins

feedback

research

There’s nothing so satisfying as pulling back and seeing your brand new experiment out there in the water.

Penis Fencing: Dangerous or Decadent?

neat!

I’ve gotta, say, Roughgarden’s The Genial Gene is so far pretty awesome. It is fulfilling its promise of being meaty, laying out the real some real testable predictions for her theory of Social Selection, and also pointing out some of the logical, historical, and cultural fallacies of sexual…

Crocheted tunicate

neat!

Amazing! Made by gooseflesh:

New Ideas in Ecology and Reviewing

paper review

publishing

Recently on ecolog-l, there has been a thread going around about journal publishing - open access v. pay-for access, impact factor, elitism, reviewing, etc. The central question seems to be, is the publication system somehow broken? Do we need to fix it? Is the model of journals such as PLoS Biology…

Can you see the matrix?

research

Lately, I’ve been dreaming of webs.

Carnival of the Blue #24

Carnival of the Blue #24 is up over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Notes There are some great articles about clams, corals, and more! I’ve been a slacker on these, so it was great to participate and see how the carnival has grown into such a wide and varied range of posts!

Shiny happy loci holding hands!

neat!

A few years back, I read Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden, and was a huge fan. In it, she builds a compelling argument that sex and gender are two different independently assorting quantitative genetic trains. I.e., Your sex (anatomy) and gender (behavior and sexuality)? Not actually the…

snails going nom nom nom = productive diverse tidepools?

paper review

The “gold standard” experimental design for asking how do changes in biodiversity change ecosystem function has been to randomly assemble communities of varying species richness, but equal abundance, and examining differences in function from one level of richness to the next.

tweet your data

Well, my mind has been blown. Fisheries analysis based on tweets?! How cool! In the age of LTER (n.b. I work for the sbc lter), the comingn of NEON, etc., it’s nice to see an innovative of getting large quantities of data from outside of the academic box.

Bringing the grey to light

Want to know what happens when a fish is sucked into a powerplant intake from both the technical and fish’s point of view? Curious about what some of the legends in the field of taxonomy were writing when they were undergraduates? Want to track down every single fish gut contents record in the…

When Italian Film Stars Go Prawn

Ah, Isabella Rosellini. After enlightening us last year to the strange proclivities of all manner of garden invertebrates, she’s back, filling us in on how animals, like Crepidula fornicata get down in the ocean.

when NOT to MANOVA

paper review

statistics

And now its time for a multivariate stats geek out.

What do squids want?

shout out

Ah, February 14th. Couples stroll arm in arm, leaning on one another, exchanging roses and kisses, eating sumptuous dinners, and losing themselves in the moment. What moment is that, you ask? Well, it’s Squid Orgy Day!

Darwin Day!

blog

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARWIN! On the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Lord, Master, and all around Deity of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (right?), I can only offer up my humble prayers. What better place than a strange shrine to Darwin in Puerto Ayora in the Galapagos.

If the internet says it, it must be true

research

Oh! Excitement! My dissertation has been posted online by Proquest. Clearly, according to the internet, I must actually be a Doctor. Thanks, Internet!

Baby Got Stats!

R

statistics

I was completely tickled last year with the oh so amusing Statz Rappers. It kept me and my nerdy stats friends laughing for days. Rapping. Stats. The Internet.

Rum, Sea Squirts, and the Lash!

paper review

“But assuming that the would-be scientist managed to avoid, or survive, the potentially dire consequences of scurvy, dysentery and malaria, that his ship was not sunk in bad weather or driven onto an uncharted rock or reef, and that his journals and specimens were not destroyed by shipboard…

A pean to the blue world - #21

blog

Le Carnivale de bleu #21 is up over at The Oyster’s Garter. And oh my! Miriam gives us an account of all entries in verse! Now how could we turn it into a sea chanty….

invasive sea-squirt-a-palooza

paper review

Attention tunicate nerds! The Proceedings of the 2nd International Invasive Sea Squirt Symposium (I love that name) (and, OK, it’s Conference, not Symposium, but how could I resist renaming it to something more fun!) are now online! And there’s a lot there to check out.

the light! the heat! the feedback!

feedback

paper review

Sometimes, the devil IS in the details. I’ve been thinking about feedbacks between community community structure and function lately, and run into a few curious roadblocks, as well as one very very interesting story.

Happy Holidays from Haeckel!

For those who need just the right holiday card for that certain someone, The Rhinobird has an excellent collection of holiday cards using the images of Ernst Haeckel for purchase at cafepress! Who knew a jellyfish could be so festive!

My brain is a ska band with a mutant algal walrus as a mascot

So, what am I up to? Where’s my research program going? What occupied my mind these days? I think cephalopodcast may have answered some of this with a recent post in which they linked the following movie.

5 things meme

Auch! I have been tagged! Memes away!

I shall return!

blog

Just a quick note - after leaving Davis, the server for this blog went down. This is the new home (like the domain name?)

Who Am I? Job Hunting Edition

professional musings

As I am in the thick of job hunting season, I’m writing a few applications. One of the most interesting parts of the whole process is the research statement. It’s interesting as it forces one to really be self-reflective, and ask “Who am I and why am I doing this?” The first paragraph in…