It came up again the other day in my social media, as it does regularly: the argument over whether or not we (academics) get paid to peer review. Folks were, as always, in high dudgeon. This argument comes up frequently (sometimes, I feed it myself), with a large fraction of academics insisting it’s a scandal...

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I always find it interesting when I catch someone believing, even espousing, two contradictory things. It’s even more interesting when that person is me. In my defence, I’m not alone on this one. It’s strange, when you think about it, that we simultaneously complain about how science is “siloed” and also about scientists who commit...

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Warning: navel gazing. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! –                – William Shakespeare – Henry V, Act III, Scene I* As most who read this will know, I’m retiring at the end of this semester. Not from science – I still have lots I want to do – but from professoring....

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You know how when you have a pet interest, it crops up for you everywhere, where other folks wouldn’t even notice it? Well, I was reading Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces the other day – an enjoyable presentation of basic physics (as we understood it in the 1960s, at least) by a master communicator.* And...

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I spend a lot of time reading manuscript drafts – my students’, of course, but also my colleagues’ in the course of either informal or formal peer review. Sometimes, by chance, the same issue will crop up a few times in a short interval, and that issue will vault to the top of my current...

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I’ve just read Tim Blackburn’s new book, The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules, and it’s a book it would never have occurred to me to write. I’m glad it occurred to Blackburn. The Jewel Box is Blackburn’s attempt to explain all of ecology and evolution to a general reader, through the lens...

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Like everyone else, I’ve written the paragraph about how the research I’d like to have funded is “innovative”. I’ve had to: over and over again, we see agencies listing “innovative” as a criterion for funding. Heck, it’s even in the name of two funding agencies from which I’ve had money in the past: the Canada...

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I suspect you’re all sick of me writing about ChatGPT (here, here, here, here, and here). So it’s time to return to one of my other, and much more longstanding, obsessions: the wonderful fun to be had in the origins of Latin names for species. No, really! Sometimes Latin names are cumbersome and tedious, it’s...

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This is a guest post from Greg Crowther. While he’s writing in particular about science-education events, I’ve had the same experience elsewhere. But beyond our mutual grumpiness: there’s a lesson here for writing. Who do we write for, and what does that have to do with what words “mean”? Read on. Over the last 25...

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Last week I wrote about a recent experiment (not mine!) in guiding ChatGPT to write an entire scientific paper. I pointed out some of the ways the result illustrated things ChatGPT can’t do: the paper it generated took considerable iteration and oversight, included incorrect information such as fake citations and errors of fact, and was...

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