Recommended reads #38

Ecologist Timothée Poisot has what I think is a remarkable insight about the myth/cult/phenomenon of busy in academia. This is one of those topics that causes people to people spill lots of neurons and ink, often recycling a lot of the same notions. But this one is different and worth your time.

Anthropologist Holly Dunsworth recently had a new addition to her family, and uses the opportunity to explain a lot about human evolution, the various reasons that c-sections happen, and more.

The latest addition to our National Park system is the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument. Here is an attractive photographic history of the San Gabriels so you can appreciate why they’re special.

Alok Bang just published a great commentary in Current Science:

Increasing importance placed on quantity of publications and its adherence to career rewards is changing the way science is done where quality has taken a backseat. While quantity with quality is welcome, current practices are promoting the former at the cost of the latter. This piece comments on misplaced importance given to quantity, resulting into lack of scientific creativity and advancement, as well as increased scope for scientific malpractices.

Epidemiologist Tara Smith explains The Hot Zone is part of what drove her to become an expert in infectious diseases. And now, the same book is the bane of her existence. Definitely a great read to contextualize attitudes towards Ebola in the United States at this moment.

A great interactive infographic from the Washington Post: 100 students start college. Who graduates?

Matt Jones, a colleague of mine down the hallway at CSU Dominguez Hills, has a blog about inquiry-based learning in math. It looks like great stuff.

Are inquiry-based approaches unfair or harmful to shy students? This piece from Times Higher Education explores ideas provided by commenters on previous posts over the last couple months.

If you teach conservation biology, here is a rallying cry for the importance of your work, from Dezene Huber.

The US Congress has always been partisan. But it’s only in recent years that this partisanship has actually prevented people from working together, and this piece in Esquire explains from the inside exactly how messed up things are.

You may have heard of Axios Review, which gets a set of reviews for your manuscript and then shops it around to a variety of journals on your behalf. (I’m planning to give it a try soon.) In a fresh comment on an older post about Axios in Dynamic Ecology, Nancy Moran expressed reservations about the for-profit nature of the organization, which elicited some interesting replies. (Note that when I use the word ‘interesting’ I am using the word literally, not as a euphemism. I mean it’s interesting, that’s all. Now that the word literally has lost its meaning, I guess we need another word to replace it, other than just saying actually literally.)

A big-time educational expert (Grant Wiggins, co-author of Understanding by Design, a rare gem in the ‘how to teach’ genre) wrote a really great blog post about what it’s like to be a high school student. It has many things that are simultaneously obvious and overlooked.

Here’s an inspiring short interview with Robin Wright, who just received the Genetics Society of America’s Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education.

There were a few great stories from NPR I wish to mention: First, is from the son of the remarkable Geoffrey Holder, who shared his story about his last moments with his father. It’s a combination of , touching, maudlin, and celebratory. This is as good as radio gets. Second is about the history of the slide rule. I remember when you could find slide rules in thrift shops, but in recent years, you now find them in antique galleries. The third one is about the history of women in computer science, and has a very convincing just-so story to explain how the proportion of women has declined in computer science since the 1980s. (It has a lot to do with machines like the Commodore 64, which I remember getting for Christmas when I was probably about twelve years old.)

Ian Street is enthusiastic about a new BBC botanical podcast, and has such a great pitch for it, I’m looking forward to hearing it.

From Piotr Naskrecki comes a tremendous explanation for the importance of scientific collections, and the requisite collecting work. As long as you can overlook a condescending remark about vegetarians.

Meghan Daum has thoughts about privilege-shaming: “In making privilege an accusation rather than an observation, we’re essentially buying into the idea that everyone, regardless of the circumstances they’re born into, can make it on their own if they try hard enough.”

A post in Dynamic Ecology from Margaret Kosmala about How to get a Postdoc is great advice that should be helpful near the start of grad school.

A long blog post by Kathy Sierra was reprinted in its entirety in Wired. It’s entitled: Why the Trolls Will Always Win. I found it to be a revelation. It tells a horrific story about how trolling escalated to downright terror, and how the only thing that really can fix the problem is the intervention of police. But that still doesn’t even fix the problem. The narrative of the story is unfortunately not unique, but the author is in a unique position to understand and explain the origin and perpetuation of trolling and harassment, and how non-facts introduced by trolls can bizarrely become part of conventional wisdom. This isn’t a cautionary tale, because it can’t caution you against doing anything to fix the situation, other than shutting up and letting the trolls win. It’s enraging, and packaged in a powerful and depressing explanation about why things happen the way they do.

Harvard is getting sick of paying for-profit publishers for journal access and is asking its faculty to publish in open-access journals, and avoid outfits like Nature and Science. If anybody in Boston is reading this, could you remark on how that’s workin’ out for you?

For links, thanks to Sam Diaz-Munoz, Rachel Gallery, and Hope Jahren.