You ever heard of Every Noise at Once? You can search for an artist, see the genres they belong to, and then look for artists nearby in 2D musical space (oversimplified a bit to be fair) within that genre. I've found it's generally pretty accurate, and I've found plenty of new artists this way.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
I wear these walking the dog down to -20F or so. They're warm enough with the tops flipped up, and you can quickly flip them down for a little dexterity to tie a poop bag. Not gonna say your fingers won't get cold while you're doing it, but it's the best approach I've found short of multiple pairs of gloves, which is just a pain for a quick dog walk.
A big thing I would add is to strongly consider how much you'll be moving, especially when it comes to footwear.
Boots that are rated to -40 during light activity can leave you with cold toes if you're standing still in -10 for an hour.
Activity levels also dictate how you layer and how easily you need to dump heat. If you're hiking, snowshoeing, XC skiing, you want some layers with zips so you can quickly let heat out.
Ecology PhD turned data scientist, I was looking to respond and you summed up my thoughts really well!
I will add that funding can complicate things a bit, funding sources often get wowed by more "advanced" methods, while the underlying science might be less than stellar. There are important questions that can be answered by small, elegant field studies, and there are questions that require larger datasets and more computation. When we start putting the methodological cart before the scientific horse, that's where we run into problems.
I'd also add that the best scientists I know have, for the duration of their careers, put the question first and pursued methods to fit. I know folks who have the wildest set of skills, from next-gen sequencing to fish tattooing and all sorts of random engineering skills. Willingness to learn new skills in the pursuit of worthwhile questions is one of the hallmarks of a good scientist, in my experience.
100 percent. I'm guilty of doing this wrong in the beginning of my PhD, and it was the biggest hurdle I needed to learn how to overcome. It's easy to try to force problems onto methodologies; it's much harder (and more interesting!) to try to solve real problems with the best available tool for the job.
I'd even argue that the declining rate of scientific advancement is due to the academic track moving towards the same short-term thinking that plagues parts of the private sector. When the incentive structure is towards pumping out publications, there is way less breathing room for the patient development of good science and novel research. Plus, null results coming from excellent research are treated as useless, so the incentive is towards finding obvious, positive results, especially for early-career scientists.
The total result of the current academic incentive structure is towards the frequent publication of safe, boring positive results, especially pre-tenure. Academic research needs to become LESS like the quarterly return driven private sphere, not MORE like it.
1. The incentive is to get grants. Papers, sure...but grants really. The problem is that grants are effectively smaller than they used to be due to inflation, and so you have to have multiple R01 level grants to fund the lab. Grants must be understandable and seem feasible to get funded...the competition is incredibly high....so this limits attempted scope. So to survive, you write grants that are simple and easy to achieve.
2. In general, the problems are harder today than they were 40 years ago. We are constantly delving into problems plagued by noise and heterogeneity. This makes progress much tougher.
I feel like there's some fundamental fallacy in the idea that "a declining rate of scientific advancement" is a sign that the field is somehow being corrupted or rotting out from the inside.
Science isn't like other commodities. In most of recorded history it is only ever produced, never destroyed [1], and the product is basically free to replicate [2]. The result is massive inflation: it might be hard to make a profit growing corn the same way we did 200 years ago, but doing a 200 year old science experiment is utterly pointless outside a classroom demonstration.
So making science that is worth paying for is just always going to get harder. And yet we equate science with other industries when we expect anything less than billion dollar experiments to yield fundamentally interesting results. This doesn't mean science is somehow getting worse, or that the practitioners are to blame, it just means it's evolving to attack much more difficult problems.
All this being said, there are plenty of ways to reform to keep the progress going: reproducibility is theoretically easier than ever, and yet many journals aren't requiring open datasets or public code. We need to keep the pressure on to evolve in a positive way, not just throw up our hands because things are harder than they were when we knew less.
[1]: Ok, there are some examples were lots of information was destroyed, and a bias from what is recorded.
[2]: I don't mean repeating the same experiment, just that the results from one experiment are trivially disseminated to millions of people.
Could we blame the "industrialisation" of PhDs on that we should expect less impact from each researcher and thus the obvious policy the keep interesting research happen is more researchers?
Pretty influential one: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338 "The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find."
That one, though, is because we are running into physical limits: if we want to build things out of atoms, we can't make features that are half an atom thick. Even above that scale, physical effects that used to be ignorable, like quantum tunneling, no longer are.
From the late 70s through about 2005, scaling semiconductor generations was easy. MOSFET scaling followed rules formulated by Dennard, which provided a fairly easy method of scaling semiconductor designs from one generation to the next, keeping power density roughly constant and continually improving performance. The problem is that by around 2005, if you did it that way, your gates were no longer switches, they were dimmers, and leakage power started to dominate, and that meant that chip architectures had to change radically to keep on scaling.
So, we can no longer just scale designs from one generation to the next, we have to come up with completely new approaches. That's much harder.
You could argue that those current researchers are doing a lot more than those in the 70s. It is difficult to quantify how much harder the doubling problem becomes every time, and how much more effort it takes to solve. But the fact that, after decades of yearly exponential improvement, costs have consistently grown only linearly. More specifically, only x18 cost for doubling after roughly 40 iterations (2^40 is massive). I mean that’s phenomenal by any standards.
All of this is the result of scaling issues. For most of the history of science, it was a endeavor pursued by very few people. Then we started sending everyone to university, eviscerated our economies, and expanded the research workforce a thousandfold. More maybe.
There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful reform is possible.
There's tons of very interesting and rewarding research to pursue. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because so much of the research pursued currently is neither interesting nor rewarding. You have to be brave, creative, and independently minded in order to realize that this research is just around the corner. The current academic system doesn't select for people with these traits (rather, it selects for people who are good at taking tests and following rules).
Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those high-quality papers that get cited.
Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is incremental and slow.
The term for parasitoids that attack other parasitoids is a "hyperparasitoid". I did my PhD on parasitoids that attack aphids, but I've never heard of a hyper-hyperparasitoid, do you have any reference to that example?
I was under the impression that it’s fairly common?
The caterpillar: Often a pest species like the tomato leafminer
Primary parasitoid: Cotesia glomerata
Secondary parasitoid: Lysibia nana and some species from the genus Gelis like agilis
Tertiary parasitoid: Certain species within the Trichogramma or Eulophidae families.
I recently discovered the existence of hyperparasitoid wasps much to the delight of my entomologist friend. That these things fly and have working nervous system (apparently ditching the neuronal nuclei during metamorphosis?), the ability to navigate etc. continues to blow my mind. They are so tiny!
It's a pretty widely known thing that studying charismatic megafauna gets you lots of money. However, they're also generally WAY more of a pain to study. Fewer individuals, larger home ranges, expensive permits, etc. A good friend studies basking sharks and the shark research world is insanely competitive, full of crazy type A folks. Compared to the insect ecology world (where I come from), which is full of pretty chill stoners and weirdos.
That's interesting. I first read your comment, and I thought you were referring to the personalities of those studying an animal gradually changing as they unconsciously model their own behavior after that animal. This seems highly plausible to me.
But then I re-read it, and the second time it seemed to mean that the members of a group studying a certain animal would self select to favour those who are fascinated by and admire that animal. This also seems highly plausible to me.
Either way, it seems fitting that the world of shark study is full of "apex predator" researchers.
I think some of it is self-selection, but I also think some of it is a filtering effect based on the much more competitive and stressful atmosphere. Getting funding and permits and equipment to study sharks is a way more stressful process than walking around in a field collecting bugs. Not that collecting bugs is always easy, but the barrier to entry is way lower.
> They smell like the animal. Presumably this results in some correlation in their gut flora
Frankly, this claims are starting to be a little offensive.
Biologists take baths also when needed. Exactly the same as any other people. This would be not different than claiming that people that breed pigs, ends looking and smelling like pigs. Is not a productive way to drive this kind of conversations.
I started watching harp videos and they're all so calm and composed, like harp music lol. I really wonder if they're attracted to the harp because they're harp-like or if they became harp-like because of playing the harp.
The idea that you can change your personality just by choosing a field of study is for some reason very appealing to me.
> studying charismatic megafauna gets you lots of money
May I ask how so? Is it from producing popular documentaries or something? Or is there the research grant money from conservationist institutions or societies? (I can see how that wouldn't be there for parasites).
Donors. They want something that makes them feel good. Something to talk about at a cocktail party. LCM: large charismatic mammal; I'm saving pandas is better than the parasitic anderson wasp* that lives out its lifecycle in some gross fungus thing
Your point is well taken that pandas are probably a quick pitch for the right crowd, but “lots of money” seems optimistic for wildlife/conservation biology funding. That said, raising money for diseases of __human__ inhabitants of the developing world is typically quite a challenge. Counter to the focus of this thread, obesity is where it’s at right now for abundant funding.
It comes down to a lot of factors, but a big one is the diversity of funding sources. If you study a species that doesn't have broad appeal, you're probably looking at NSF funding, maybe USDA. If you study a game animal you can tap into all sorts of funding sources, like Ducks Unlimited, etc. You might be able to get state or federal wildlife agency funding. You might get a weird, wealthy donor who like sharks.
NSF grants are still the most important and impressive for most subfields within ecology, but the competition is fierce.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
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