Friday links: female ESA award winners, #overlyhonestcitations, academic karma, and more (UPDATED)

Also this week: George Scialabba vs. depression, Andrew Gelman’s thoughts are worth the wait, baseball player vs. evolution, and more…

From Meg:

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment had a piece by Chris Beck et al. on women and underrepresented minorities in the Ecological Society of America. Having posted about a lack of women award winners before, I found WebTable 2.0 particularly interesting:

The Eminent Ecologist, MacArthur, and Mercer awards have skewed male, while the Buell, Braun, and Distinguished Service awards have skewed female in recent years. Their analysis doesn’t look at the newer ESA Fellows, but last year only one of the 12 fellows was a woman. I’ve been working with others (including Gina Baucom and Pleuni Pennings) to make sure that more women and underrepresented minorities are nominated for awards this year. (ht: Cat Searle)

I enjoyed Terry McGlynn’s response to the shirt worn by the scientific head of operations for the European Space Agency (the other ESA!)’s Rosetta Project. I also thought this tweet was worth thinking about more:

When #Rosetta dude walked into work today, did any @esa colleagues say anything? I wonder if I would've. Something worth thinking about

— John Asher Johnson (@astrojohnjohn) November 12, 2014

and

@FulweilerLab I'd *like to think* I would have. But when those moments happen (tasteless joke, racist coment) it's often followed by silence

— John Asher Johnson (@astrojohnjohn) November 12, 2014

Like him, I would like to think I’d have said something. But it’s a good reminder that we need to speak up in these situations, even if it might make us uncomfortable. (UPDATE: Jeremy Yoder passes on the news that the guy in question, Matt Taylor, has issued a heartfelt apology.)

From Jeremy:

Essayist George Scialabba tells the story of his four-plus decade battle with depression through the notes of his doctors and psychiatrists. A sobering read for someone like me, who’s been fortunate not to have had to deal with depression. Crooked Timber comments on the piece.

A few years ago Owen Petchey and I suggested that authors should have to “pay” for reviews of their papers by performing reviews themselves, using a notional “currency” called PubCreds. Subsequently, others have hit on the same basic idea and are starting to turn it into a reality. I just stumbled across another such effort: Academic Karma. From a glance, it looks to be more or less exactly like PubCreds, except that any authors, reviewers, and editors who want to participate do so voluntarily. Very early days, but worth watching. Relatedly: here’s some data on whether ecologists currently review in appropriate proportion to how much they submit.

The research productivity of newly-minted economics PhDs is highly skewed, with a small fraction of people producing a large fraction of the high-profile papers. This seems like one more bit of evidence for William Shockley’s “hurdle model” of scientific productivity. (ht Economist’s View).

Andrew Gelman’s belated comments on that experiment manipulating the emotional content of people’s Facebook feeds are better than any comments I saw at the time.

#overlyhonestcitations: Ethology just published a paper containing the following phrase where a citation should have been:

should we cite that crappy Gabor paper here?

Well, this is awkward. Especially since Caitlin Gabor knows and has published with some of the authors. And in a sign of the times, this story has now gone viral and has been splashed on popular general news sites like Vox. Which seems like kind of a big penalty for an embarrassing but minor mistake. Because let’s be honest–everyone has negative opinions about some papers, and that’s perfectly fine (indeed, it’d be very worrisome if it were otherwise). So there’s a part of me that’s happy to have a chuckle by linking to this–and a part of me that’s a little scared because “there but for the grace of God go I.” (ht Jeff Ollerton)

I’m only linking to this for the benefit of longtime reader and commenter Jim Bouldin: Curt Schilling vs. evolution. On Twitter. Apparently, you don’t need to click through because it was exactly like what you’d imagine.

@ResearchMark (as in Mark Wahlberg) is only one joke. And more or less the same joke as the now-defunct biostatistics pickup lines Tumblr. But it’s still funny. In a similar vein: @AcademicBatgirl. 🙂 (ht Simply Statistics)