Really enjoying #BES2025. Things I appreciate: - Morning plenaries (gets people in on time, doesn’t leave morning speakers w/ empty rooms) - Good length coffee breaks (30 min!) - Vegan lunch served on site - Posters across all career stages & spread across rooms - Strong presence of journals/editors

What's on your #BES2025 schedule today? We will be at the How to get published-workshop together with the @britishecologicalsociety.org and the @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social to talk about just that! And if you can't make it today, the same workshop is taking place tomorrow.

"It may be uncomfortable to conclude that a widely used study design has been producing spurious results. But the evidence is in, and telling uncomfortable truths is a part of doing science." Problems with twin studies. theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missin...

Okay I want to say more about this, specifically I want to say: lampshading is a technique to use carefully. What's lampshading? it's when the author says, yeah, I know this is a problem, I acknowledge it but I'm not going to solve it. Throw a lampshade on it, it's a lamp.

I wasn't going to repost this until he mentioned his melancholy

📣Tomorrow our next series of online seminars restarts: Chris Klausmeier (MSU) will present: ⭐Microbial cross-feeding: coexistence and collapse, spatial patterns and population cycles⭐ Free and open to all: Zoom link: iite.info/seminar/ Global Times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f...

And the Michaelis-Menten model is the same one we use in ecology to model type-II predator functional responses! Enzymes function a lot like predators, "feeding" on reactants

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

What scientific paper do you find yourself re-reading because you love how it's written? One of mine is Mallet 2012: "The struggle for existence: How the notion of carrying capacity, K, obscures the links between demography, Darwinian evolution, and speciation" dash.harvard.edu/entities/pub...

17. If I had the option to press a button and LLMs would not have been, and never would be, invented, I would push it without hesitation. In fact, I'd have a considerable, positive willingness to pay to push that button.

5. Most frequentist methods are just *fine* and there's no need to always go full luxury bayesian in every application.

Every applied math book about dynamics or regression in short:

I’m also thrilled to announce that I will be starting a faculty position with @centreecomgmt.bsky.social @ U of Guelph this fall! I will be recruiting students & postdocs for 2026 - please reach out or come find me at #CSEE2025 if you’re interested in theory, global change & fisheries ecology 🐟

✨ The Bernhardt Lab at the University of Guelph is recruiting graduate students for 2026! Join us! We have several fully funded grad positions available ✨ Please spread the word! www.bernhardtlab.org/join-us #CSEE2025

It's great to see a packed house at the #CSEE2025 "Forefront of Statistical Ecology in Canada" symposium! It's a great sign of strength of the statistical ecology community here If you want to join the community and conversation, sign up to the Google Group!

Between Sinners and Kpop Demonhunters, this is turning out to be a surprisingly good year for musicals.

Grace Wahba, "the mother of smoothing splines," won the International Prize (aka the Nobel) in Statistics #stats for her representer theorem. youtu.be/8Ae_QzwwR_U?... So well deserved! I guess, one could also give her the price again in two years for her work on Generalized Cross-Validation.

it seems pretty clear to me that the country was founded on both inspiring ideals of universal human rights *and* on slavery and genocide. the tension between these two tendencies - sometimes within the very same individuals! - is a main theme of American history a real Land Of Contrasts situation

I hope anyone cancelling this FT subscription tells them it's because they're trying to reduce their trade deficit with the magazine

This post is pure art. Next time I teach shrinkage estimation I'm pointing students to this

In 1912, she moved to Berlin to begin working with Leonor Michaelis in enzyme kinetics. With him, she developed the Michaelis-Menten Equation. The equation shows that the rate of reaction rate in enzymes increases to saturation as the substrate concentration increases. 🧵4/10

Creating a lecture on mollusc biology for next week, and this comes up in my feed. 🎉 Sometimes the teaching gods smile on us

Never use a dual Y axis line chart! I made a little playground: You can tweak the axis limits and see how different the graph looks like: www.react-graph-gallery.com/example/dual...

Teaching #MathematicalMethodsInPopulationBiology again. This course covers basic methods for deterministic & stochastic dynamical models in population biology. In this thread*, I'll highlight topics from all twenty 90-min lectures. *Redoing this thread as I didn't complete it in 2024

Yes…ha ha ha…YES. Marginal effects are an absolute game changer if you work with even just slightly complicated models. If you haven’t looked into them yet, you may be missing out and making your life harder than it already is!

Everyone is running away with this one, but I took the time to trace the source, and these are 80% confidence intervals, the true meta-science story (and there is one!), was written up as one about selective reporting and calibrating standard errors..

By strict standards of replication, the estimated speed of light wasn't replicable based on highly inconsistent CIs, even though the initial estimates were within 1% of the modern value (figure from www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscop...)

Started out the new year by rereading Ian M. Banks' "Player of Games"; still takes my breath away with how exciting, nuanced, and timeless it is; feels like it could have been written yesterday

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

There are few better feelings than when former students go off and do great things, and then write to you and let you know about them. Students: never wonder if you should get in touch with a former teacher or supervisor to share this kind of thing. It is one of the purest rewards there is. /1

Je me souviens. #NationalDayRemembranceActionViolenceAgainstWomen

I was interviewed by @theconversation.bsky.social podcast about the reopening of the Newfoundland 🇨🇦 Northern cod fishery after the 32 year fishing moratorium theconversation.com/why-canadas-... @marineinstitute.bsky.social

IT IS OUT! 🎉 Here is a Starter Pack for New PIs in Ecology (with a 🇨🇦 focus). Know someone <10 years into a new position? Let me know so I can add them. go.bsky.app/UchpBTt

Call for appplicants in UQAM, great place with a lot of nice people like Beatrix.

god the way i will lose my mind if ANDOR season 2 has even more scenes of imperial bureaucratic squabbling

Oh, to be a jolly pink shack perched atop abandoned and crumbling industrial architecture

Do you work with large #acoustictelemetry networks? Ed Lavender just put out a new model for tracking the paths of aquatic animals through these networks. You can: - Try the new R package here: https://buff.ly/4dDzcPW - Check out the preprint here: https://buff.ly/3AA0ibR #fishsci #fishsky

Excited to bring Joint Species Distribution Models to {mvgam}: nicholasjclark.github.io/mvgam/refere.... Throw any of {mgcv}'s or {brms}'s flexible predictor effects into the factor or observation models and give it a whirl #rstats #communityecology

There's definitely good days in academia: my first PhD student submitted her thesis today, sabbatical application was approved, and got a message from a journal editor in chief that a review I did was "truly among the most helpful reviews I've ever received" 🥳

Howdy! I’m an MSc student at the Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada. I am in the lab of Dr. Isabelle Laforest-Lapointe, where I’m exploring the impact of dominant forest mycorrhizal types on soil biogeochemical processes and microbial communities Looking forward to talking fungi avec vous!

For my prokaryote lecture today, I was reading up on the history of Ester Lederberg and how she got snubbed for a Nobel and a faculty position ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Lederberg). I feel like there must be a German word that means "infuriating but unsurprising". Anyone have suggestions?

We know the drivers of research waste in academia are ⚠️Pressure to maximize papers and PhD students ⚠️Endless demands on time due to poor management ⚠️Stakeholders don't insist on robust quality systems to underpin mission critical work Solutions that don't address these are pointless.

Vaccines are incredible

A near ironclad rule of race science is the dumbest motherfuckers you will ever meet are obsessed with IQ.

A question for any #stats historians out there: the earliest mention I found of the General lin. model was Fennessey 1968, and the *Generalized* lin. model is Nelder and Wedderburn 1972. Is this the earliest these terms occur? And is it plausible that N&W just hadn't read or recalled Fennessey?

I love that Google has decided to emphasize how easily its search can be used to cheat on assignments 🤦

This rather fantastic recent piece is a great illustration of the value of code review, as well as sensitivity analyses. doi.org/10.1038/s414... But I think it is particularly instructive as commentary on our scientific process today. 🧵