Posted 12 Oct 2015 / 4
If you look at who I am as an academic, you would think that I should be among the most ardent supporters of Open Access publishing. After all, the proliferation of open access would solve a lot of problems for me. As a scientist who teaches at a school of art, design, and architecture, access Read More
A Major Post, Economic sustainability, Economics, Ethics, Grants & Funding, Higher Education, Periodicals, Public Policy, Publication, Science as a career, Social Media
Posted 08 Oct 2015 / 0
I am excited to announce that I am scheduled to speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. The title of my talk is “Highly-creative baby-breeding idea propagators: what human (re)productive choices mean for the future of our species“, and it will provide a partial overview of Read More
A Major Post, Anthropogenic Change, Behavior, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Carrying Capacity, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Parenting, Population Growth, Population Pressure, Psychology, Public Outreach, Reproductive Fitness, Resource Consumption, Sex and Reproduction, Sustainability
Posted 07 Oct 2015 / 0
NPR Morning Edition “New Dietary Guidelines Will Not Include Sustainability Goal” Man, this is a bummer. If our dietary guidelines are simply aimed at maximizing our bodily health but not the long-term health of our civilization and the planet upon which we depend, what’s the point of these guidelines? I love how the meat industry Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Food, Freshwater Ecosystems, Habitat Destruction, Habitat Fragmentation, Marine Ecosystems, Pollution, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, Sustainable Agriculture, Terrestrial, Vegetarianism
Posted 07 Oct 2015 / 0
NPR Morning Edition “Are Big Cities Still A Primary Engine For Scientific Innovation?” The geography that is explored in this short piece is interesting to me: proximity used to be a pre-requisite for exchanging ideas, which led to creative centers for particular industries. Now that access to information is largely decoupled from geographical location, the need Read More
A Minor Post, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Radio & Podcasts, Sociology
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
Here’s the last of four ECOmotion Studios animated shorts celebrating the Ecological Society of America’s centennial. This one’s a bit thin in my humble opinion. It captures the essentials of Huffaker’s really odd experiments (I am always struck by what extents Huffaker had to go to stabilize predator and prey populations), but mostly uses the narrative Read More
A Minor Post, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Film & Video, Film, Television, & Video, Predation, Science in Art & Design, System Stability
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
Here’s another classic ecological experiment depicted by the ECOmotion Studios crew, again for the Ecological Society of America‘s centennial. This one uses some of the same narrative approaches as the other shorts in this series, although this one is set to more of a “song” than the others. Narrating an experiment and its rationale is Read More
A Minor Post, Community Ecology, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Ecology, Ecology Education, Film & Video, Film, Television, & Video, Science in Art & Design
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
Here’s another fun and informative video from ECOmotion Studios. I thought that it was interesting how this short discussed the connection between decomposers and the eventual supply of oil, although I wonder if many viewers will gain enough information from this short video to fully understand this idea. The basic ideas behind Hairston-Smith-Slobodkin (HSS) are Read More
A Minor Post, Carrying Capacity, Community Ecology, Ecological Society of America, Film & Video, Film, Television, & Video, Predation, Science in Art & Design, Terrestrial
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
Back at the Evolution 2014 meeting I encountered the great “Drift” animated short, which I still use in my evolution course. Well the producers of that short have formed ECOmotion Studios, and they have made a bunch more videos in honor of the Ecological Society of America‘s centennial. This one is a fun “spoken word” jam Read More
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Community Ecology, Competition, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Film & Video, Film, Television, & Video, Intertidal Zones, Keystone Species, Methods, Predation, Science in Art & Design
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Episode 3: Timbers on a Boston Island” I love this episode because it captures the two major human impacts of urban ecology: the creation of commensal niches for some species while other species are isolated to islands of small remaining habitat. We learn about a variety of organisms from birds to bugs Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Birds, Commensalism, Habitat Destruction, Habitat Fragmentation, Mutualism, Parthenogenesis, Radio & Podcasts, Reptiles, Sustainable Urban Design, Urban Ecology
Posted 06 Oct 2015 / 0
arXiv “Assortment and the evolution of cooperation in a Moran process with exponential fitness” I am still struggling to understand when it would be appropriate to assume an exponential (rather than linear) fitness function. It is wonderful that these modelers are mapping out all these different conditions under which cooperation evolves, but how to select Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory
