This is straight from the ALGAE-L listserv, but I thought it might be of interest:
PhD studentship: The ecology and evolution of multicellularity
A fully funded PhD position is available to work on evolutionary transitions to multicellularity. The student will work within the molecular ecology and evolution lab as well as the aquatic ecology group at the Department of Biology, Lund University.
I have used most of the major reference management platforms at one time or another: EndNote, RefMan, Zotero, and Mendeley. Most of my time in grad school, I used what my advisor used to make collaborating easier: EndNote at UCF and RefMan at Arizona. During my Ph.D. I played around with Zotero but found it clunky. Back in those days, Zotero only worked with Firefox, and it didn’t sync files, so I had to have a separate way of organizing my PDFs.
I was an early adopter of Mendeley, and I loved it from the start. It integrated citation management with PDF organization, synced across platforms, and had an interface that was about as intuitive as you could ask for. Importing PDF metadata didn’t always work, but that was fine with me. It was also free, for a limited (but pretty generous) amount of storage. It became such a vital part of my workflow that, when I had filled up the free storage, I was happy to pay for more. I’ve been paying Mendeley $54.99/year since 2011.
Authorship on peer-reviewed papers is a big deal in academia. If you’re a grad student looking for a postdoc, the very first thing your prospective advisor is going to want to know is what you’ve published (this is arguably true at every level, though funded grants become important, too). Customs vary among fields, but in mine (ecology and evolutionary biology), the first author is typically the person who carried out the experiment and wrote at least a first draft of the paper, and the last author is typically the head of the lab group, who is presumed to have played a role in planning the research, advising the first author along the way, and writing and revising the resulting paper. In between (if there are more than two authors) are people who have made some other contributions, which can cover a wide range of activities.
Sometimes, though, people who haven’t made any significant contribution at all are listed as authors. This happens for a variety of reasons, but the one I want to talk about today is so-called ‘honorary’ or ‘gift’ authorship. This is something I have long had a strong opinion about: in my mind, honorary authorship is unethical. It is an abuse of the system. It is academic misconduct. [Read more…]
…but they dug it back up!
The backstory here is that I wrote a post a couple of years ago that expressed some not very flattering opinions about a publication called Research Features. A while later, their Editorial Director emailed me that she was “interested and concerned” about what I had written and asked if we might talk on the phone. When I replied that I’d rather discuss it by email, she left the conversation and never came back. I later found out that their writers were only paid £50 for each article, and I wrote about that. This year, I learned that the same people had started a new publication, Research Outreach, that seemed to have cleaned up its act relative to Research Features, and I wrote about that. Their Operations Director responded with a couple of very nice comments, which I posted in their entirety.
It turns out that while I was making nice with Research Outreach, they were bolting the doors and tuning up to play “The Rains of Castamere.” [Read more…]
I’m sure it’s fascinating, but I would love to know what algorithm told them it was related…
Go to Sweden. Learn about multicellularity. Taste dank saké.
I am hiring a PhD student to study the evolutionary origins of multicellularity. Apply here https://t.co/Ef77E4WbQX
— Eric Libby (@SFI_elibby) December 11, 2018
Eric Libby is looking for a Ph.D. student to model the evolution of multicellularity at Umeå University in Sweden. Here’s the project description:
In response to Tom Sheldon’s dire warnings of the dangers of preprints, “Preprints could promote confusion and distortion,” I’ve suggested that what really promotes confusion and distortion is credulous reporters failing to apply basic journalistic standards:
Peer review isn’t a magic wand that guarantees that only solid work gets published, and it isn’t a substitute for skepticism. Reporters have a responsibility to evaluate the evidence in a paper whether it is peer reviewed or not.
A couple of recent examples are relevant. First, the claim by mathematician Michael Atiyah to have proven the Riemann Hypothesis, an immensely important number theory problem related to the distribution of prime numbers. Remember, along with promoting “confusion and distortion,” Sheldon had warned that preprints could rob journalists of “time and breathing space,” pressuring them to rush to sensationalize bad science. Reporting on Atiyah’s claim shows what utter nonsense this is.
At the end of July, I criticized an opinion piece that Tom Sheldon published in Nature, “Preprints could promote confusion and distortion“:
While the article casts preprints, preprint servers, and scientists who post their work to preprint servers as potential sources of misinformation, its arguments better support the case that science reporters should act more responsibly…What irks me is that I can’t find any hint in the article that Sheldon thinks journalists share the blame when they sensationalize bad science.
The latest issue of Nature includes three more critical responses to Sheldon’s nonsense.
If I were a graduate student nearing graduation, I would apply for this: an NSF-funded postdoc opportunity in the Umen lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis.
Taking applications for NSF-funded postdoc position to study multicellularity and germ-soma evolution in Volvox. Exciting opportunity to apply molecular biology and computational approaches to gene network evolution. https://t.co/vTZVSM9Q6Dpic.twitter.com/f90rSw0F1d
— Jim Umen (@Volvox01) July 26, 2018
I recently argued that asking for letters of reference to be submitted with applications for tenure-track positions devalues the time of highly productive scientists:
Letters of recommendation should be requested by the committee, and they should be requested after the first cut.
A senior researcher who’s a friend and colleague recently told me that for the last few years, she has simply not applied for any position that asked for letters of reference up front. It’s not hard to understand why. After a while, you start to feel that you’re imposing on your references (in reality, it’s the search committees who are imposing). In my case, I’ve submitted well over a hundred such applications, which means that each of my three references has supplied over a hundred letters (and thank you for that).