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Academic Mixtape Twelve

good stuff to you might appreciate

Feb 2

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It got a lot of press, so you might have seen this: Bigfoot is simply a bear. There’s a strong positive association between black bear densities and Bigfoot sightings. There are about 5000 bears per Bigfoot sighting. Huh.

In which females feign death to be rid of the males attempting to mate with them.

I thought this is a cool story from the Long-Term Evolution Experiment: Two lab groups ended up working on parallel projects asking extremely similar questions using strains from the experiment. They sorted this out, had conversations, and jointly submitted two manuscript to the same journal. It’s heartening to see collaboration happen in circumstances where too often I’ve seen niche overlap result in competitive exclusion.

This is a few years old, but new to me: “We Eat at the Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever.”

The US Consumer product Safety Commission released its annual list of foreign objects removed from orifices in emergency rooms across the country.

Insights from four [women] scientists caught at the early-career crossroads.

It appears that Israel is intentionally destroying the universities in Gaza. The list of university presidents, deans, and professors who have been killed since the start of this campaign is stunning. More information here, in this letter representing the Middle East Studies Association. Please give this a read because I do think it’s important that fellow academics are aware of the magnitude of what’s happening right now.

A professor from the University of Chicago reflects on what happened at West Virginia is happening broadly: The Fight for the Modern University. Likewise, while the New York Times has been downright complicit with the current fascist campaign against the value of higher education in the United States, this feature detailing the playbook of the “anti-wokeism campaign” is enlightening.

Witnessing the recovery from wildfire.

Yet another hit-the-nail-on-the-head editorial from Holden Thorp in Science, about a culture among scientists that devalues our colleagues who share the research enterprise, including social media specialists, publications staff, etc.

Manu Saunders over at Ecology Is Not a Dirty Word reflects on the losses and gains to academic blogs tied to the fracturing of social media.

In Dynamic Ecology, Brian McGill makes the very good point that if postdocs should be longer than two years, because moving all the time sucks and isn’t good for anybody or for science. One way suggested to address this problem is by having folks work remotely. One thing that was only briefly mentioned in the comments is that having a possible more equitable approach is to have a local/regional focus on recruitment of lab members can make a huge difference in a lot of ways.

Also via Dynamic Ecology, here’s the page on Pubpeer that lists all of the errata, retractions, and expressions of concern of papers involving Denon Start.

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