I just came across this great Robert MacArthur quote on Allen Hurlbert’s website: Ecological patterns, about which we construct theories, are only interesting if they are repeated. They may be repeated in space or in time, and they may be repeated from species to species.

I just read the excellently forward thinking year end editorial of the new journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution. The editorial was written by Lonnie Aarssen and Christopher Lortie and is filled with Aarssen’s trademark,creative, outside the proverbial box, thinking.

There are a couple of upcoming meetings (or sessions of meetings) related to metabolic scaling and it’s relationship with/to ecology that I thought might be of some interest.

I have nothing against journals charging for content. While I like the open access model I think that there are upsides to both systems. But seriously, there really are some things that should not be hidden behind a pay wall. Corrections of any kind: Errata, Corrigenda, etc.

I’m going to be participating in a Royal Society Discussion Meeting and they’ve asked us to advertise this to interested parties so I figured I’d just post about it here. The meeting is on Biological Diversity in a Changing World and (other than your humble narrator) has a pretty impressive list of speakers.

I’ve recently started reading two scientific programming blogs that I think are well worth paying attention to, so I’m blogrolling them and offering a brief introduction here. Serendipity is Steve Easterbrook’s blog about the interface between software engineering and climate science. Steve has a realistic and balanced viewpoint regarding the reality of programming in scientific disciplines.

This is just one of many brilliantly reasoned (and worded) arguments from Saving Alma Mater . If you are an academic, or an administrator at an academic institution, you really should read this book.

I went to graduate school with Ford and would strongly recommend that those looking for PhD opportunities on the quantitative side of ecosystem ecology consider the opportunity below.

The current model of writing up collaborative research in science is that a single individual “takes the lead” and writes a complete draft of the manuscript, which is then sent on to coauthors for comments, corrections, etc.

The White Lab at Utah State University has an opening for a graduate student with interests in Macroecology, Community Ecology, or Ecological Theory/Modeling.  Active areas of research in the White lab include broad scale patterns of biodiversity and body size, dynamics of ecological communities, and the use of sensor networks for studying ecological systems.

You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back.