Consumed

Spring semester always begins with this great promise of being super-productive, especially when I am on a research assistantship and not teaching.

Then I come back to reality and remember that much of my spring semester is always consumed by:

1. applying for grants or helping undergraduates apply for grants to fund their independent projects,
2. preparing summer research conference abstracts and presentations, and
3. planning summer fieldwork. 

Don't get me wrong, these things are still productive, but it's never what I dream of RE: writing 5 manuscripts and skiing every weekend.  Guess I should be a little more realistic when I make my "to do this semester" lists!

And, in the end, the above list (+ writing articles and teaching) certainly reflects the reality of the rest of my life if I choose to stay in academia.  I am still figuring out the best way to juggle writing, lab work, teaching, mentoring and planning.  I think I am getting better, but there is still LOTS of room for improvement.

For now (based on how I feel this morning) I will leave you with this:

Check out the rest of the PhD comics series!
(It's amazing how well they mirror my life as a graduate student.)

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READING: Smith (2010). Is There an Ecological Unconscious? The New York Times.

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Recovering from break & hosting a speaker

Well, it's been a while since my last post.

I went "home" over winter break to spend some time with family and friends in Tennessee.  I always promise myself I will get loads of work done over break.  And I usually end up being very disappointed with myself at the end of break.  I did get lots of reading done...just not as much writing as I had hoped.  But it was nice to catch up with everyone and enjoy views like this:

View from my Grandmother's house in eastern TN

I love the open spaces and breathtaking mountains of the western US, but I think the rolling hills of the southeastern US will always feel like "home."

So...it's back to school, back to the lab, back to work.  I'm only taking one course this semester: the final required class for the Program in Ecology ("ecology as a profession").  I'm hoping this means I will conquer most of the lab work, data analyses and writing on my "to do" list as well as the dreaded preliminary exams.

This past week I've been busy planning the schedule for our first visiting ecology speaker of 2010: Dr. Peter Groffman from the Institute of Ecosystem Studies.  I met Peter while taking the Fundamentals of Ecosystem Ecology course at IES several years ago (an amazing course that I would recommend to any graduate student studying ecology), and I'm thrilled to be hosting his visit to Wyoming.

One of my favorite privileges of being a PiE student is that we get to nominate, vote, invite and host several visiting speakers each year for the Ecology Speaker Series.  This series is run entirely by grad students, and I think we've done an excellent job of selecting and hosting speakers.

Hopefully the weather cooperates - sometimes that's the trickiest part of hosting a visiting speaker in Laramie!

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READING: Groffman et al. (2004). Exotic earthworm invasion and microbial biomass in temperate forest soils. Ecosystems.
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Up and running

The semester is beginning with a flurry of speakers and seminars. I enjoyed listening to Dov Sax speak about patterns of plant invasions on oceanic islands. Since part of my research involves thinking about freshwater fish invasions, this was an interesting perspective - the patterns are quite different between fish and plants.

Alexandra Rose gave a seminar on latitudinal gradients in clutch size. Again, I found myself thinking about the potential role of latitudinal gradients in my research and the comparisons among taxa.

This week, Peter Groffman is giving a seminar that I believe focuses on smaller organisms and ecosystem processes. One of the reasons I came to Wyoming was the diversity here - plants, birds, worms - which helps keep me from focusing too narrowly within my own work. The seminars are also a nice way to meet some of the dozens of PiE students who aren't in my department.

Modern history of polar bear conservation

Dag Vongraven, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, recently published a guest editorial in the journal Polar Research (2009, 28:323-326). It provides a concise rundown of events that led to today's administrative bodies responsible for managing and conserving the world's 19 populations of polar bears. It's a neat read if you are curious how data is gathered and shared, and how management decisions are coordinated, for this circumpolar, international species.

Doubt and ignorance in science

I have heard several people characterize graduate school as: the farther along one progresses in education, the more apparent one’s ignorance becomes. And, generally, I agree – as I learn about the mechanisms behind a particular natural phenomenon, I end up thinking about all the other phenomena and mechanisms of which I am totally unfamiliar.

But it is not just a matter of how much of the world you have been exposed to; I think also that as a scientist progresses, he or she absorbs the notion that it is best to doubt something unless faced with strong evidence to the contrary, preferably experimental. This doesn’t sound radical, but I think it is – the list of assumptions I make about how the natural world works is actually quite long, and the list of phenomena for which I have encountered mechanistic explanations supported by clear, experimental evidence, is really short.

Claude Bernard uses pages and pages to discuss this notion and although he was focused on human medicine, I think the implied principle in his phrase “True science teaches us to doubt, and, in ignorance, to refrain” applies to all science.

The phrase is from An introduction to the study of experimental medicine. Like I said, in this book he is taking a long time (at least according to my 21st-century attention span) to discuss the role of doubt in science, the importance of experimentation, and the critical need to humble oneself in front of nature. In short, he seems to be saying “Get over yourself – nature is complicated so don’t pretend to know it all.”

It seems kind of strange to emphasize that point. It is a point well-taken, as I described above, but today it does not seem necessary to tell scientists that they can’t make up data or tweak it to fit their hypotheses (sure, that does happen, but it is widely understood to be wholly unethical and condemnable). Perhaps it is that in Bernard’s day – the book was published in 1865 – the risk was not an unethical bending of data to fit a preconception, but a mindset that frequently put human wisdom as the pinnacle of truth, rather than clear reasoning supported by strong evidence.