Note: Jeremy’s email isn’t working, so I’m posting my Friday Links separately this week. (Normally I email mine to him in a word file.)
Ruth Patrick, who was a pioneering limnologist and freshwater ecologist, died this week at the age of 105. Her work on freshwater diatoms was revolutionary, and her successes in science are all the more remarkable because she worked at a time when science was not friendly to women. Just how unfriendly? According to this obituary (which I encourage you to read, both to learn more about her impressive work and what life was like for women in science then), she was not paid for 7 years (!!!) after starting her position at the Academy of Natural Sciences because she was a woman. 7 years! Wow. I am glad to see that the obituaries of her have done a good job of primarily focusing on her impressive contributions to science, while also touching upon the challenges she faced as a woman in science.
And, on the subject of women in science, Acclimatrix has a post at Tenure, She Wrote with tips for male academics on how to help make science friendlier for women. Lots of good tips!
More from Scicurious this week on the usefulness of LinkedIn for keeping in touch with people who’ve left academia. Sci has now convinced me to join LinkedIn. We’ll see how it works for me. The first email I got from the LinkedIn ESA group was spam, and someone on twitter indicated they’ve been getting lots of emails. I’m hoping to deal with this by setting things up to filter to a folder that I only check periodically.
Here’s a post on how to get a job in conservation that might be of interest to some of our readers. (ht: David Shiffman)
Popular Science announced that it’s shutting off commenting on (almost all of) its posts. It talks about studies showing that negative comments threads can impact readers’ perception of the story itself, which is interesting (and disturbing). (ht: Sadie Jane Ryan)
And, following up on Margaret’s Citizen Science post, here’s a link to Plankton Portal, where you can help identify and measure marine plankton. (ht: Margaret Kosmala)
And, just for fun, animals with misleading names. It includes “Eastern Kingbird. Found in the West. Many birds do not recognize its authority.” 🙂
We’ll see if I got all the links correct this week!
Dynamic Ecology 
I heard the editor of Popular Science interviewed on NPR and thought the argument was pretty reasonable. The comments section for any online article can be equally entertaining and frustrating. But why should knowledgeable science writers have their work criticized (even critiqued) by people with little to no expertise on the subject? I think up-voting helps weed out the useless comments but it is far from perfect and often provides disappointing insight into uninformed popular opinion.
ESPN recently linked its comments section to Facebook to reduce offensive comments by anonymous posters. And for certain writers, they simply don’t allow comments. I imagine its reduced the load for the unlucky interns tasked with moderating the material.
I agree that it seems like a reasonable thing to do, given the state of comments sections (and the evidence they cited). But it’s certainly sad that it needs to be done!
I hadn’t heard that about ESPN. That’s interesting. I wonder if this is going to become a more and more common strategy?