Walkabout wednesday: the reason I'm inefficient.

Yes. This is why I'm so inefficient. ht: Evan Cooch. Really. It has nothing to do with procrastibooking.

My Health

This is a nice little peer-reviewed review of where the story is on saturated fat in the diet. The upshot is that replacing saturated fat in the diet with carbohydrate is probably a bad idea; replacing it with poly- or mono-unsaturated fats might help a little bit. Or you could just stop worrying about fat altogether. 

I reviewed Kaayla Daniels' "The Whole Soy Story" a few weeks ago. Coach Mike liked it, and had a couple more studies on soy that I need to follow up on. I'll be honest; any study that shows brain shrinkage scares me much, much more than a 20% increase or decrease in my risk of heart disease. Also an interesting link on how much soy is eaten in Japan (hint: not very much).

Truvia is fine, but definitely not natural. That's reassuring, because I've been using it as a sweetener for the past year or so. Finding out the backstory of Truvia as a highly refined product from industrial food giants Cargill and Coca-cola was less reassuring.

Your Education

What you study as an undergraduate affects what you earn, quite a lot. I find some aspects of this list depressing. We pay people in marketing research much more than secondary school teachers, and elementary school teachers earn less than someone with any associates degree. That's like an active penalty for choosing to follow the career that ultimately drives economic growth for the whole country. Also the conclusion is that a college degree is a worthwhile investment has an important caveat: that you didn't pay too much for it. I bet there comes a point where the cost of the degree outweighs the benefit. 

Americans, and indeed, most people in the world, badly overestimate the unemployment rate. One way to interpret this is to think everyone is an ignoramus. However, it is well known that people have trouble understanding probabilities and percentages. The unemployment rate is usually reported as a percentage, but the survey asked for estimates on a frequency scale. Maybe we should report the jobless rate on a frequency scale too? 1 in every 20 working age people are unemployed and looking for work. Sounds much better than 6% to me!

And here's a response to that article citing studies where people get it right when asked for a percentage. Called it!

Our Environment

Chris Helzer reminds us that "Land managers make assumptions all the time. If we didn’t, we’d never get anything done." I agree, but would go one step farther: those assumptions represent implicit models. 

I love a good visulization, and this video of global CO2 distribution across a single year is amazing. I'd never thought about heterogeneity in CO2 levels before, but it makes sense that it's not constant as the sources and sinks vary in space as well. I'd always assumed that diffusion would even things out more. The concentrations in the Arctic are way, way higher than in the Antarctic for example. I wonder if that contributes to the differences in how the Arctic and Antarctic ice packs are changing with time. 

Does our military know something we don't about global warming? Um. Yes! And they've known it for a while, apparently. I liked this quote from Adrian Sokoloff in 1990:

The central problem is that outside the security sector, policy processes confronting issues with substantial uncertainty do not normally yield policy that has high economic or political costs.

So in 1990 they recognized a threat to U.S. security and infrastructure, and expected that the government would be unable to react in time.

Waaaay, waaay back, when I was a PhD student at the University of Adelaide, I noticed that the size of protected areas in South Australia was negatively correlated with rainfall. Makes sense, higher rainfall means more ag productivity. This tradeoff became the basis for the game Buy-O-diversity. And it turns out that this sort of inequality in representation holds globally too.

Reflecting on learning: Biology of Wildlife Populations

NRES 450/850 Biology of Wildlife Populations is a required course for some options in the Fisheries and Wildlife major; very few graduate students take the course. 

Reflecting on learning: Ecological Statistics

I have taught this 4 credit graduate course annually since 2008; my sabbatical leave this year is the first year I have not taught the course. I envision the course as a “terminal statistics course” for a typical MSc. or PhD student, recognizing that most students will take at most 2 statistics courses. 

Walkabout wednesday: Jetlagged mice, Calculus and population models.

Mice with jet lag, the effect of adding Calculus to a F&W curriculum, and population models in adaptive management. Also, I think I've been bloggin in my PJs, oops

Walkabout Wednesday: doublethink, and starving cancer cells.

My Health

Dr. Malcolm McKendrick always writes great posts, and this one is no exception. He uses some great Orwell quotes to highlight some shenanigans about public data from the European Heart Study. Between 2008 and 2012 they dropped a table showing the relationship between saturated fat intake and per capita deaths due to coronary heart disease. Guess what? The data don't support the orthodoxy.

Understanding the deep evolutionary origins of cancer might help us treat it. The idea is that prior to being multi-cellular, immortality and vigorous cell proliferation were survival traits. Environmental stresses then put cells back into "survival mode", forgetting their evolved functions.

So the team predicts that treating patients with high levels of oxygen and reducing sugar in their diet, to lower acidity, will strain the cancer and cause tumors to shrink.

The fact that they implicate sugar there is interesting, as I also came across another study that found starving breast cancer cells of sugar reverses the phenotype of cancerous cells back to non-cancerous cells. And remember that all carbohydrates in your diet ultimately end up as sugar in your bloodstream.

And as long as I'm thinking about cancer cells, soy protein changes gene expression in breast cells in vivo, and those changes relate to cancer growth rates. This study isn't completely conclusive though, because they did the experiment 7 - 30 days before removing the tumors surgically. As a result we don't know if gene expression changes would in fact have changed tumor growth.

And more on cancer! A large, randomized diet intervention in post-menopausal women found no effect of a low fat diet (< 20% kcal from fat) on risk of breast or colon cancer. 

I'm a fan of breastfeeding babies, and if you need more evidence it is a good thing, here you go. Breastfed babies have lower levels of chronic inflammation as adults.

Your Education

Over the last 2 years or so enrollments in the Fisheries and Wildlife major at UNL have fallen after more than a decade of strong growth. Turns out that reflects a broader trend, and it's at least a symptom of a good thing. For someone. Not us. (ht: Dynamic Ecology)

It's pretty common for professors to share course content around with colleagues. I benefited from course notes and lectures from Helen Regan when I started at UNL. But this article raises a different spectre; taking someone else's hard work on course development and using it without asking them. Made even easier by the widespread use of online course management software. (ht: John Janovy)

A long time ago, in a country far, far away, a University President wrote an op-ed piece bemoaning the surfeit of post-graduate students his faculty were writing into grant proposals. My response, which was actually published, was that it's obvious dude, they are cheap (below the poverty line), highly motivated (willing to work 60 hours a week motivated) and well trained workers. In an environment where funding for public  R&D gets tight, permanent research tech jobs get replaced with postgraduate stipends. Never mind that there's no work for them once they get their shiny PhDs. Now it appears the same perverse incentives are starting to bite here in the USA, with this piece in the Boston Globe highlighting a "glut of postdoc researchers". This quote says it all:

The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs — teaching, industry, government or nonprofit jobs, or consulting.

Yup. Unfortunately throwing money at this isn't the solution either; a fundamental rethink of how we train researchers and finance public R & D is needed. I guess they could always work as adjuncts, 'cuz that's such a satisfying career. (ht: Natalie West)

Our Environment

Emily Nicholson and Ben Collen have a piece in Science on measuring progress on Biodiversity conservation. I like their point that metrics need to be projected forwards under different policies if they are going to be useful. They also use the excellent approach of virtual ecology (see excellent introduction here) to test how well a biodiversity metric can track reality.

Regular visitors might have noticed that I don't believe improved knowledge leads to changes in behavior. This is a nice little piece summarizing some social science that demonstrates just how bad it really is. One of my FB colleagues wondered what it would mean if applied to scientists. Hint: see the link at the top of this post on disappearing data tables. Scientists are human, unfortunately for science, and the incentives to parrot the paradigm are rampant. (ht: Tala Awada)

Not really about environment, but MotherJones is running a series of charts on income inequality. This one caught my eye because of the increasing variance over time in the income of the top 1%. Rising variance is a signal of an impending tipping point between dynamic regimes in complex systems, as Trevor Hefley's paper in theoretical ecology demonstrates for simple population growth models (which is about our environment!). 

The nature of interdisciplinary work in Nature

Editorial in this week's Nature commenting on the divide between the sciences and humanities as portrayed by C.P. Snow in his "Two Cultures" lecture had this quote:

...those who bring disciplines together in the pursuit of scientific and technical answers find that the best people to have on board are those with deep specialized knowledge, and that such individuals can usually find a place in well-led collaborations.

This resonates with my own experience - in pursuit of "multidisciplinarity" we cannot forget the value of people with deep knowledge. Martin Kemp, in an essay later in the same issue, put the need this way:

What is needed is an education that inculcates a broad mutual understanding of the nature of the various fields of research, so that we might recognize where there special competence and limitations lie.

Such an education is not the same as having students take introductory courses in all disciplines, which is a common outcome when groups get together to train students across disciplines. I believe that a "broad mutual understanding" can only arise by working together with people from other disciplines on common problems - this needs a different course, one that is distinctly interdisciplinary. We still need people to do multiple things - biologists that take some math, and policy analysts that take some biology, but there are few people able to do math, ecology AND policy science. And yet to solve real world problems in river restoration we need to be able to bring Policy analysis, math, hydrogeology, biogeochemistry, and ecology to bear at a minimum.

Shifting Baselines and why we train grad students

GuiltyPlanet posted some great fish pictures from an article "in press" at Conservation Biology by Loren McClenachan. The upshot - the Florida Keys are stuffed - sport fish are smaller and species composition has shifted since the 1950's. Surprise, suprise. I wonder why no one has tried something similar with game birds - plenty of historical pix from the 19th century and early 20th centuries of people with dozens of birds from a morning's hunting. I suppose the main quantifiable thing about the fish pictures is the size, and that doesn't shift with game birds (AFAIK). So ... relevance to AM ... hmmm. Well - just makes it clear that you can't rely on the experience of the local expert pool to set the objectives!

For a long time - since I started writing grants to fund myself as a PhD student and later as a postdoc - I've believed that the primary reason Universities push graduate education so hard is economic. Graduate students are cheap, highly motivated labor, both for teaching and research. Mark Taylor wrote a nice Op-Ed piece in the New York Times last week where he made exactly that point - from the perspective of a professor of religious studies. He also made some pretty radical suggestions for how to reform the University system. Now I don't necessarily agree with every point he made there, but the one about graduate training emphasizing "cloning" is highly relevant. One of the big struggles facing the implementation of AM is a lack of people that have the right kind of background. Training as a research ecologist does not prepare you to help managers do Adaptive Management. Training as a wildlife biologist does not prepare you to use AM in making decisions - in fact, we avoid teaching ecologists about decision making altogether. We (the denizens of the 4th floor of Hardin Hall) have put together a graduate specialization in AM, but this only solves half the problem.

The other half of the problem - well, maybe the other 90% of the problem - is that graduate education for wildlife biologists in North America is largely funded by RESEARCH grants. So - how do you write a grant to fund someone who is going to learn how to do AM? Sure, they can work on a project to develop an AM plan, but it is going to take alot longer to develop than say, counting birds on a bunch of conservation easements before and after woody veg removal. The latter is relatively easy for a state agency to fund ("relatively" is an important word here!), whereas the AM plan is much harder, because it looks expensive and there is a long lag time before a student can start to really get the work done. And where's the research component? If you want to do research on developing the tools of AM - quantitative methods, stakeholder interactions, etc - great, but then you really have alot of learning to do before you can be effective. Who pays for you to develop the skills needed to even begin doing that research?

Sorry, no answers on that front. I'm open to suggestions for how to pay for graduate education that is relevant to professionals in the field.