Monthly Archive: January 2016

Postdoc Land: the Wild West

What is a postdoc anyway? Grad students are fairly well-defined: If you are enrolled at an accredited university, working towards a Masters or Doctorate degree, you are a grad student. If you are told someone is faculty somewhere, or a lecturer, then you might have some questions about exactly what type of position the person …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/27/postdoc-land-the-wild-west/

Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to “read more”

You hear the self-indictment again and again: “I really should be better about keeping up with the literature,” “I need to read more,” “my goal for the year is #365papers”. Do you know anyone that says “I read too much”? How about, “I’ve got it all down pat and read just the right amount to …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/20/maybe-we-shouldnt-be-trying-to-read-more/

Analysis preregistration gets a big boost in the form of a million dollars

The Center for Open Science has recently issued The $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge. What is preregistration? Briefly, the idea is to reduce “researcher degrees of freedom.” Researchers often explore their data and then make data-processing and analytical choices based on the data that will be analyzed. But this can lead to biased results and incorrect scientific …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/18/analysis-preregistration-gets-a-big-boost-in-the-form-of-a-million-dollars/

Is citizen science ethical?

I was really surprised the first time someone asked — I think it was in a review of a proposal — about whether it was ethical to do citizen science. “Isn’t this exploitation?” was how the concern was phrased. Getting unpaid people to do what was previously paid work might seem problematic. As citizen science …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/13/is-citizen-science-ethical/

Finding funding through NSF

I was having lunch with a grad student friend the other day, and I casually mentioned ‘DEB’ while we were chatting. “What’s that?” Asked my friend. I was sort of surprised, because my companion was a top-notch fifth year grad student. But then I remembered that for most of the time I was a grad …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/06/finding-funding-through-nsf/