Recommended reads #180
A detailed account of how Eunice Foote conceived the role of atmospheric gases in climate warming in 1856, and how she designed and conducted her experiments. It’s pretty cool.
What is the effect of Article Processing Charges on the geographic diversity of authors? Are paywalled journals more accessible to publish in for people in the Global South? This preprint manuscript is about a study takes advantage of a “natural experiment” in publishing space, and if you have thoughts about equity and access in scientific publishing, I bet you’ll find this fascinating. Last author Emilio Bruna explains this paper in a concise twitter thread.
This is a story is about what happened when Instagram personalities enrolled as students at Baylor contracted COVID on campus. The part of the story that I found most fascinating is Baylor actually had these students on the payroll (and presumably recruited them with this in mind) to market the university with their Instagram account.
The strange saga of Kowloon Walled City
The EIC of AmNat, Dan Bolnick, has some thoughts about what what PubPeer is good for and what it’s no good for.
The flagrant hypocrisy of bungled college reopenings.
Two books that I just started digging into are super-informative for for those interested in DEI in higher education: Equity in Science: Representation, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change in Graduate Education, by Julie Posselt, and The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits. If you’re trying to fix your graduate program to make admissions and training more equitable and just, then this looks like a very useful read. Perhaps I’ll have more to say after I read it, I had preordered it and just showed up in the mail today!
This preprint about safe fieldwork strategies for at-risk individuals is supremely useful and hopefully will get you to change practices in your lab, in your department, and/or your university. I’ll try to post about this again when I notice the paper comes out. Thanks to Amelia-Juliette Demery and Monique Pipkin for putting their work and wisdom into this.
There’s a special issue on cross-disciplinary research in biology education in CBE-Life Sciences Education that has a bunch of interesting articles.
Cientifico Latino posted a video of a workshop with an overview of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. (It’s a good by-the-numbers about what it is, how to apply, things to consider, timelines, all that. If you think you need to learn more before applying, this should help.)
Let me remind you that EEB Mentor Match has plenty of slots available to connect students up with people to help them while preparing their GRFPs! If you’re in a field that’s EEB-adjacent, that’s fine too. We’ve made over 70 pairings so far.