I recently had a run-in (OK, a minor disagreement) with a reviewer who wanted me to scrub all contractions from my manuscript – and who specifically objected, not to some fancy or newly-coined acronym but standard, common English contractions like didn’t, it’s, and we’ll. Reviewer: “Do not use contractions. Change didn’t for did not.” Me: […]

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At the 2018 conference of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, 5 friends and I put on a workshop on the use of Twitter in science.  Today: slides and commentary from Alex Smith‘s piece of the #CSEETweetShop.  How can you use Twitter to share the word about your own scientific publications?  And how does […]

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Image: Balloon release at the Yarmouth Old Gaffers Festival, by Editor5807 CC BY 3.0, via wikimedia.org Someone’s cat just wandered across my back yard, and that got me thinking about butterfly releases.  No, really – stick with me for a moment.  There’s a connection, and, eventually, a bigger point. By now, everyone ought to be […]

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I was awfully pleased to learn, late last week, that Scientist Sees Squirrel has won the 2018 People’s Choice Award for Canada’s Favourite Science Blog*.  What an honour!  The award competition is run yearly by the blogging network ScienceBorealis in collaboration with the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada.  There were 9 nominees this year, […]

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This semester, I’m coteaching a graduate/advanced-undergraduate level course in biostatistics and experimental design.  This is my lecture on how to present statistical results, when writing up a study.  It’s a topic I’ve written about before, and what I presented in class draws on several older blog posts here at Scientist Sees Squirrel.  However, I thought […]

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Image: “Beautiful vineyard” by Sasmit68 via wikimedia.org, CC BY-SA 4.0 Last week I raised the apparently-dumb but actually rather interesting question of why humans consider flowers to be beautiful.  Today, another question about beauty, this time with (I’m afraid) really unfortunate consequences.  Have you ever heard someone talk about how beautiful a vineyard is?  Have […]

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Some time ago, I went on a little rant here, in a post I called “University administrators should understand universities”.  In it I complained a bit about university administrators who don’t seem to understand what a university’s mission is or how we go about accomplishing it.  I stand by that criticism (while noting that it […]

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Image: Flowers, by Alvegaspar CC BY-SA 3.0 via wikimedia.org If you watch science documentaries like Nova or The Nature of Things, you might get the feeling that what’s most exciting about science is all the questions scientists have answers to – all the things we’ve learned about how our universe ticks.  (It’s built right into […]

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Image: Squirrel (of course), Sorbyphoto CC0. I’m happy to be able to tell you that Scientist Sees Squirrel is a 2018 nominee for “Canada’s Favourite Science Blog” – a People’s Choice Award.  This is an annual award, jointly sponsored by the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada and the blogging network Science Borealis.  It’s lovely […]

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Image: Me, collecting foliage from balsam fir trees in Quebec.  Photo courtesy Cameron Rugo. Last month I spent a week in the field, as part of a team collecting soils and foliage for a project assessing carbon sequestration in spruce budworm-defoliated forests*. The soil was always easy to reach, conveniently located right at ground level […]

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