Friday recommended reads #20

• There’s a paradox or a conundrum or dilemma in reckoning with rapid climate change that we are causing by dumping so much CO₂ back into the atmosphere. How do we personally approach the magnitude of the crisis, and what do we say to others about it? Hope Jahren nails it. Bravo.
• Jeremia Ory wrote a couple posts with some really interesting stats about the NIH R15 grants, traditionally the mechanism by which faculty at small teaching institutions have been funded. This is the first one and this is the second one. I thought both were really interesting and I’m not even in an NIH field.
• I just learned about this pretty cool blog with very specific and workable ideas for teaching non-majors biology.
• Here’s a provocative interview with Philip Roth, the great American novelist, in the New York Times. He decided to stop writing novels last year, and since that time, has re-read all of his 31 novels. He has some really good insights into his own life, our country, and what it means to be a member of our species.
•  When your course deals with sensitive topics, do you put a trigger warning in your syllabus to prepare students? This week, there were two insightful pieces on this topic, first by Tressie Cottom and the other was by Good Enough Professor. They might not say what you expect them to.
• This essay about why faculty members work more than they need to made the rounds this week. It doesn’t have any new brilliant insights, but it puts the ideas all together in a way that makes a lot of sense.
• There is an informative and depressing interactive feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education that demonstrates exactly how much our nation has pulled its investments into higher education over the past 25 years.
• Here’s a nice short article, accompanied with great images, about When trilobites ruled the world, also from the New York Times.
• There has been continued discussion this week about the asymmetries in credit for the use of previously published data. The comments on Monday’s post were interesting. To date, the best thing I’ve read was this post on Simply Statistics, including the following paragraph:

I’m completely sympathetic to data generators who spend a huge amount of time creating a data set and are worried they may be scooped on later papers. This is a place where the culture of credit hasn’t caught up with the culture of science. If you write a grant and generate an amazing data set that 50 different people use – you should absolutely get major credit for that in your next grant. However, you probably shouldn’t get authorship unless you intellectually contributed to the next phase of the analysis.

For links, thanks to Stelio Chatzimanolis, Dorit Eliyahu, and Barrett Klein.