Also this week: the Anthropocene is not a thing (yet, anyway), Canada vs. LLMs, amazing advice compilations, and more.
From Jeremy:
Ecology blogosphere revival continues: Southern Fried Science is back!
A subcomission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted 12-4 with 2 abstentions against a proposal that we’ve been living in the Anthropocene since 1950. So we’re still in the Holocene, officially.
In case anyone wasn’t aware, Spencer Hall and Marissa Baskett both have wonderful compilations of advice for grad students, postdocs, and junior faculty. Especially but not exclusively those in ecology and evolution. Spencer Hall’s compilation is now maintained by Jessica Hite. Marissa’s site also includes many links to funding sources. Wonderful as they are, neither compilation is (or claims to be) comprehensive. So if there’s a piece you’d like to see added, you can recommend it. And of course, you probably won’t agree with every piece of advice in either compilation, but that’s fine–it’s advice, not commandments. Also, neither compilation has any links to Dynamic Ecology, so if you feel like you need to diversify your sources of advice away from this blog–as you should!–there you go. 🙂 If anyone knows of any similar compilations, especially compilations that complement the two I linked to (e.g., by focusing on countries outside the US), please share them in the comments. I may compile them into a future post.
What happens if the provincial or state government, and many of the voters to whom the government is accountable, views public universities primarily as means to achieve short-term policy goals like “more health care workers” and “lower housing costs”? Nova Scotia might be about to find out.
On the other hand, could be worse, Nova Scotia. You could be Ontario.
New Anthropic LLM just dropped: Claude 3.0. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, you can’t use it in Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, or, uh,…(wait for it)…Canada. Looking forward to comments on what, if anything, one should infer from this about LLMs. Or about Canada. 🙂 UPDATE: Commenter Pavel Dodonov reports that you can’t use Claude in Brazil either. To which: ???
Mapping college and university closures and mergers in the US since 2016. Also includes info on the reasons for some of the closures and mergers. Closures and mergers seems to be concentrated among small institutions facing declining enrollments. Not clear to me if religious affiliation is also a predictive factor, after controlling for institution size?
And finally, here’s what Nirvana would’ve sounded like if they’d lived in medieval Europe. 🙂
Coming up:
Mar. 11: Spread sunshine (Meghan)
Mar. 12: Poll results: Should the Introduction section of a scientific paper end with a statement of the main results? (Jeremy)
Mar. 13: Poll: as a faculty job applicant, should you send thank you notes after a campus interview? (Jeremy)
Mar. 18: Scientists who were also great novelists (Jeremy, who plans to keep bumping this one back until whenever he runs out of good post ideas. Maybe the repeated teasers will whet readers’ collective appetite for it? Maybe eventually rumors will start swirling online about how it’s the most brilliant unreleased blog post in history. People will start demanding its release, like people demanding that Warner Brothers #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. 🙂 That’s actually a good analogy for this post, given that it’s about as good as the Snyder Cut of Justice League. #ReleaseTheScientistNovelistPost) 🙂
Mar. 20: Poll: have sample sizes increased over time in ecology?
Dynamic Ecology 
Claude doesn’t work in Brazil either. Interesting!
That makes me feel a bit better about it not working in Canada.
Another topic possibility: novels about ecologists! In the fall, I read (well, listened to) A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett. Part of the issue for the protagonist is that ecologists do some pretty weird things that are hard to explain to others.
Ooh, I’ll have to put that one on my reading list.
Time to revisit this old post, perhaps?
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