It’s been a while since I’ve been this proud of a paper

I don’t usually blog about my own papers, except in some rather meta ways, but last week saw the publication of a paper I’m really, really proud of.  And it has some interesting backstory, including its conception right here on Scientist Sees Squirrel.

The paper is called “Site-selection bias and apparent population declines in long-term studies”, and it’s just come out in Conservation Biology.  It started, back in August of 2016, with a post called Why Most Studied Populations Should Decline.  That post made a very simple point about population monitoring, long-term studies, and inferences about population decline.  That point: if ecologists tend to begin long-term studies in places where their study organisms are common (and there are lots of very good reasons why they might), then we should expect long-term studies to frequently show population declines simply as a statistical artifact.  That shouldn’t be controversial – it’s just a manifestation of regression to the mean – but it’s been almost entirely unaddressed in the literature.

A bunch of folks read that blog post.  Some were mortally offended.

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The dangerous temptation of acronyms

(My Writing Pet Peeves, Part 6)

Over the last two weeks, I’ve written peer reviews* for three different manuscripts (MSs).  All three included newly coined acronyms (NCAs) to substitute for repeated short technical phrases (RSTPs).  I’ve gotten in the habit, whenever I run across an NCA, to use my word processor’s search function (WPSF) to find and count occurrences of the NCA in the MS.  Frequently (including for two of the recent three MSs), my WPSF reveals that the NCA is used only once or twice more in the MS.  That makes it an RUA – a rarely used acronym – and RUAs are one of my writing pet peeves (WPPs).

By now that you probably suspect that I’m deliberately using a lot of acronyms to annoy you. 

Charles Darwin’s other mistake

Images: Charles Darwin, age 33 (with his son William Erasmus Darwin), public domain; Leucospermum bolusii, photo by Andrew Massyn, released to public domain.

When I was a grad student, it was de rigeur to proclaim that every good idea was already in The Origin of Species, and to express amazement that Charles Darwin could have been so right about so many things.  It’s probably the astonishingly rightness of the Origin – along with the rest of Darwin’s writing – that makes his huge error stand out so conspicuously.  That huge error, of course, was the idea of blending inheritance.  It didn’t work in theory, it wasn’t (even then) consistent with available data, and Darwin should have known both of those things.  (His correspondence suggests that he probably did.)

I recently ran across* another Darwinian mistake.

A tale of two jokes (one published, one not)

Image: Sun Records compilation; photo © Chris Light CC BY-SA 4.0

Most scientific papers (and definitely most of mine) are pretty dull.  That is, the results may be important and interesting, but the papers themselves – the text – tend to be dry, colourless, even tedious.  That’s partly because we work so hard to remove authorial voice; it’s partly because we favour complex passive-voice constructions laden with jargon and acronyms; and it’s partly because we avoid humour like the plague.  At least, most of the time.

I say “most of the time” because everyone can point to an example or two of a paper that includes a joke.