Academic Mixtape 5
links here, got your red hot links
“Overcoming Citation Bias is Necessary for True Inclusivity” … in plant science, but it’s broadly applicable.
This is a useful and not inaccurate framing: equity gaps in grades reflect not problems with students, but problems with curriculum and instruction.
NSF-IOS had a virtual colloquium about the shift from postdoc to PI, and the take-home ideas from this event on their blog are really good. Also, if you’re a biologist doing stuff that might possibly be supported by NSF and you don’t regularly look at the NSF-BIO blogs, you’re missing out. Some extremely useful information in there. So here’s the blog for the Divisions of Environmental Biology, Biological Infrastructure, Integrative Organismal Systems, and Molecular and Cellular Biosciences. And here’s the one from the director’s office of The Directorate for Biological Sciences.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has what I think is a new policy framework to promote “positive culture” in their community, which emphasizes things such as wellbeing, accessibility, ethics, safety, and such. Imagine if these things were part of accreditation?
Stephen Heard’s argues that the vagueness of the job description of a professor is mostly a good thing. I think I agree, though not necessarily for the same reasons. Hmm.
Remember what I said in the last linky post (Mixtape 4) about our need to unwind the values-laden terminology of “invasive species?” Well, I am thankful to Dr. Joe Drake (of Virgina Tech) who caught me up on some recent literature. There was a paper in TREE from a year ago with a framework for considering the range of positive effects of non-native species. And also a response that came out earlier this year that calls for a transdisciplinary approach to work on non-native species. It’s nice to see this conversation happening! Also a friend of mine wrote to me and suggested the phraseology “problematic species” for non-natives (and also natives), that cause problems. I think this is elegant in its simplicity because really our issue with these “invasives” is that they cause problems. But it also doesn’t imply that all they do is cause problems, and there’s no real metaphor tied to this language.
“Nonlinear careers through academia are increasingly common, but funding agencies and search committees penalize these paths. Why do scientists stray from the beaten path, how do they contribute to science, and how do we level the playing field?” Wondering how to level up your broader impacts? This paper can give you some good ideas. (It has yet to take off but I still think the best replacement for the problematic “pipeline” metaphor is a “subway.”)
Do I remember seeing this paper when it came out last year? Did I link to it? Well, it’s crossed my path again. It’s a helluva study showing that kids notice how much domestic labor their dads perform and it has a very strong influence on gender roles. The take-home lesson for guys here is very simple: if you want your kids to develop into adults who expect that men should be doing as much housework as women, you’ve got to be doing this as the kids are growing up. It’s a pretty simple concept but it’s useful when data from a longitudinal study back it up.
Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic grabbed some irreplaceable, unique, and highly valuable original hominid fossils and launched them into space? What? For sh*ts and giggles? The American Association of Biological Anthropologists did not appreciate this stunt. And here’s the story in the pages of Nature.
An absolutely lovely story about the restorative power of bugs, museums, and friendship.
So there’s a guy out there running a predatory consulting agency targeting early career scientists looking to move from academia to other sectors. Science has the news story on this, featuring some genuinely troubling stuff that you might want to be aware of.
Also in Science: this field season in Antarctica is turning out to be a disaster for a lot of people because… logistics? Really?