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Vol. 12 - Grading for progress and prioritization
April 15, 2024
I do not enjoy grading. Or grades. I think they often stand in between students and learning, by introducing performance anxiety where there should be...
Vol. 11 - My group's research interests are not (only) my own
April 8, 2024
Research topics that are interesting, and research topics that I find interesting, do not overlap entirely. Every once in a while, we do a little lab-wide...
Vol. 10 - Between the seconds on the chronograph
April 1, 2024
Ecologists spend a lot of time thinking about scales. If you search for “problem of scale” in Google Scholar, you get in response the entire corpus of...
Vol. 9 - Against Outreach
March 18, 2024
Academia's misguided obsession with outreach as a measure of performance excludes excellent researchers and hinders diversity in scientific evaluation.
Vol. 8 - Writing, uh, finds a way
March 11, 2024
Stomach bugs derail my plans for a productive week, but reminds me that there is value in putting things into perspective.
Vol. 7 - What happens to food webs after environmental catastrophes?
March 4, 2024
Over the past few years, with the help of truly fantastic grad students, I got more invested in the idea of using food web structure to get clues about the...
Vol. 6 - Inbox 10 is great!
February 26, 2024
Efficiently manage email by treating it as a task, not a constant distraction. And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of writing this in an email-based newsletter. Thanks for asking.
Vol. 5 - We should cite pop culture more.
February 19, 2024
We should cite more than the scientific literature, because we understand the world around us through more than the scientific literature.
Vol. 4 - A big thing is just 10000 little things
February 12, 2024
Manage big deadlines by breaking them down into smaller, manageable tasks.
Vol. 3 - can parasites change food web dynamics?
February 5, 2024
Parasite-mediated changes in host traits impact food web dynamics.
Vol. 2 - I left my methods section in El Segundo
January 29, 2024
I love A Tribe Called Quest. But there isn't a lot of hip hop like that anymore. Whenever you hear these old school beats now, it is likely as part of a...
Vol. 1 - "Will we do the drawing again this year?"
January 22, 2024
I teach an introduction to data science for biology majors. The greatest challenge of this class is to help students build up an intuition about the many...
Vol. 0 - What is this all about?
January 15, 2024
After many years on social media and microblogging platforms, I am ready to reclaim a little more space for writing; starting a newsletter felt like less...