Friday recommended reads #18
Have you always wanted to trash (or praise) a paper publicly? Check out PubPeer, “the online journal club.” All of the comments also show up in PubMed, too.
Just like nearly every other fad in education, “flipping” a classroom is not really an innovation and not a big frickin’ deal. This is explained really well by Rebecca Schuman in her column in Slate. (Yes, Slate is click-baiting pablum, but everything Schuman has written there rocks. If you want a reality check on issues in higher education, and you are a twittery person, follow her at @pankisseskafka.)
I learned a number of things in this essay by Tricia Matthew, about Teaching While Black.
It’s conventional knowledge that the increasingly competitive job market has increased the time it takes for a postdoc to land a tenure-track position. Surprise: that’s flat-out wrong. At least in my field. For more than a couple decades, the mean PhD-to-tenure-track duration hasn’t changed at all, and is just under 4 years, among ecologists those who start tenure-track positions. Here are the data (it’s a paywalled pdf.)
Don’t forget that Taxonomist Appreciation Day is coming in less than a month, on March 19th! To warm us up, here’s a heartwarming and science-laden post by David Maddison called The Legacy of a Taxonomist.
If you’re thinking about taking someone else’s poop and shoving it up your butt, be careful, because there’s a growing call for government regulation.
What does the largest bat in the Neotropics eat? Other bats! Here’s a video of this
discovery, and be sure to turn the volume up for crunching sounds. [update: old fact, just a new video. thanks to Dan Janzen for setting this straight.]New York City has some great wildlife, especially ants. Now there’s a great new, and free, book about them written for the general public. Great for a variety of ages. Get it here. You can get a pdf or an interactive iBook.
Anything you want to share? Please add them in the comments.
For links, thanks to Morgan Jackson (via @BioInFocus) and Sharlene Santana (via TheBatcave_SS) and Meghan Duffy (via @duffy_ma).