Dave Parry over at academHacK (and more frequently at @academicdave) is generally pretty far out on the intellectual edge, but that means he often has some pretty interesting things to say. His most recent installment, Burn the Boats/Books, includes a bunch of interesting ideas about moving beyond the traditional limits of book and journal publishing in order to embrace the benefits (and realities) of the modern web.

As a graduate student, explaining what your day to day life is like to your non-academic friends can sometimes be a little difficult. In this enjoyable piece from The Science Creative Quarterly Daven Tai takes a unique approach to this challenge: If you’re looking for five minutes of academically oriented fun go check out the whole article.

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as “simple” as a handful of proven patterns—work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed […]

Steve Easterbrook over at Serendipity has three recent posts that do a pretty solid job of capturing what I think when I see the ongoing coverage of the fallout from the CRU email hack (if you’ve been living under the proverbial rock for the last 6 months you can start here). Here’s one quick highlight from the most recent post but you really should head over to Serendipity and check out the following three posts: Academics always fight over

A group of 5th and 6th graders where asked to define either “science” or “writing” and when the answers were combined this definition of creativity was the result. In scientific education, and as we conduct scientific research, we often lose track of the fact that creativity is critical to the scientific process. This is a great reminder of its importance.

Introduction I have been very encouraged of late to see more and more ecologists embracing the potential of the web for communication and interaction. I’ve recently blogrolled some graduate student blogs and in the last few weeks I’ve come across American Naturalist’s trial run of a forum system, Ecological Monographs’ blog, and a blog soliciting feedback on a new initiative to digitize existing biological collections.

It’s probably not really to our benefit to be advertising competing positions when we’re currently looking for a post-doc ourselves, but this is a great opportunity so I thought I’d pass it along. The Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State has a post-doctoral fellowship available to work with one (or more) of it’s faculty.

Transient Theorist is planning on doing something with his Spring Break that most of us don’t do often enough – take a week to think. In the rush to do all of the things that have to be done, we often lose track of doing the things that are really important to our core mission – advancing scientific knowledge as quickly as possible.

I’m happy to announce that we’ll be hiring a postdoc starting this summer to work on research in the areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics. The complete description follows below. Please forward a link to this post to anyone you know who might be interested or post a link to it on your blogs. Thanks!

Cell Press has recently announced what I considered to be the most interesting advance in journal publishing since articles started being posted online. Basically they have started to harness the power of the web to aggregate the information present in in articles in more useful and efficient ways.