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A big thanks to everyone who filled out the readers’ survey. We’ll pick and inform the winners tonight and have a full write-up of the survey results later this week.
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After reading some of the reviews from our Readers’ Survey, many people list these among their favorite posts, while many others consider them their least favorite. So, we’ve decided to change the posting schedule for Finding Melville’s Whale. From now on, one or two new entries will appear every Sunday, instead of Tuesdays and Thursdays. We … Read More “Finding Melville’s Whale – Moby Dick (Chapter 41)” »
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Tuna are rather magnificent fish. Do you still eat tuna? Why or why not? Do you draw a line at different species?
Science
As search algorithms are getting better and better, some scientific papers are getting more difficult to access. Journal subscriptions are expensive and many institutions are foregoing all but the highest impact journals. For those working outside of academia, only open access journals are a viable option. I’m fortunate that my university subscribes to most scientific journals, which means that many of my colleagues will drop me an e-mail, tweet, or phone call along the lines of “Hey, I don’t have access to this article. Can you send me a copy?”
The answer is, without hesitation, always yes. Science can only progress when we have access to the literature. At this point, I’m fielding 4 or 5 paper requests per week, and I imagine many other scientists are doing the same. Most of the time the requests are simple and straight forward. Sometimes they’re so cryptic that it takes another round of e-mails before I even know it’s a paper request. I thought it would be helpful to compile a short list of advice for how to make it all just a little easier.
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The Great Smoky Mountains are one of those places of wonder right in our own backyard. Not only have the coal and timber communities cultivated the banjo, bluegrass, and moonshine, but they are one of the most unique habitats in the world due to their forest canopy chemistry. As one of the oldest mountains chains on earth, their caps are often rounded and covered in trees, providing sheltered habitat at a variety of altitudes for critters great and small. In fact, it’s the small ones that actually deserve the most notoriety – the mountain chain boasts the highest diversity of amphibians in the world and herpetologists travel long distances to find the many salamanders hiding under the Smokies’ logs and leaf litter. This kind of refuge is increasingly important in the struggle to keep amphibians alive.
Read More “Biodiversity Wednesday: Great Smoky Salamanders” »
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Continuing this series’ recent theme of ways to make policy work, let’s consider a broader view of what policy is and therefore who gets to create policy. It’s not just the elected officials with legislation in their job description. For one, those people are accountable to the people who elected them. Second, formal written policy is not the only kind that is effective – informal rules, community traditions, and other forms of policy are often best. Plus, these types of policy offer the general public a change to be involved in creation and implementation.
There is a large literature on the value of participation in policymaking, especially in fisheries (Silver and Campbell 2005). Here I will focus on three particularly important aspects of participation to management at the scale of an estuary, where I work: a) additional knowledge creation, b) community buy-in, and c) tighter feedback loops. These are important for relatively large-scale systems with several communities and many variables that could affect management.
Read More “State of the Field: Policy is not just for policymakers anymore” »
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I’ve been critical of President Obama’s policies concerning science, technology and education in the past. I think he uses a lot of great-sounding rhetoric, but I have yet to see very much in the way of actual results. Despite lofty promises about climate change, we remain without a cap-and-trade system or any sort of meaningful response plan. To make things worse, the administration recently fired their primary adviser for climate change policy. Is all hope lost? Perhaps not.
Read More “Ethical Debate: Clean Energy and the State of the Union” »
Conservation
In this week’s edition of Shark Science Monday, Aurelie Godin discusses Canada’s shark management policies. If you have a question for Aurelie, please leave it as a comment below and I’ll make sure that she gets it.
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The latest edition of my Great Diagrams of Science series comes from a field near and dear to my heart- using stable isotope analysis to map a food web. Japanese scientists Wada, Mizutani, and Minagawa got the opportunity to study the feeding ecology of penguins in Antarctica, and were some of the first researchers to use stable isotopes for food web analysis. To travel so far and use what was at the time (1991) state-of-the-art technology, they must have received an impressively large grant. Their results played a part in revolutionizing how scientists study food web interactions, so the grant money was well spent in that regard.
However, it seems that none of it was spent on graphic design:
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Thank you to everyone who has responded to our survey. There’s still a chance to win some free books or great big piles of swag! To sweeten the deal, we’re going to add one more prize to the list. One lucky winner, randomly drawn from or pile of surveys, will win an autographed copy of … Read More “One more week to take the Reader Survey!” »