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Category Archives: Scientific meetings
Xenophobia – can we get rid of it? Can we understand it in Arizona?
What kind of meeting do you like best, the kind where everyone has the same background you do, or the kind where there are people of different backgrounds? If the meeting is too large, there will be a natural tendency … Continue reading
Posted in Scientific meetings
Tagged Arizona State University, Bert Hölldobler, Brad Armendt, Carlos Navarrete, Charles Blow, David Queller, Douglas Kenrick, Frans DeWall, Freeman Dyson, Herbert Gintis, Jeffrey Sachs, Jim Sidanius, Joan Silk, Kim Hill, Laurie Santos, Lawrence Kraus, Manfred Laubichler, Mark Schaller, Michael Hchter, New York Times, Phobia, Psychology, Rebecca Saxe, Richard Wrangham, Robert Boyd, Robert Kurzban, Social Sciences, Steven Neuberg, Washington University in St. Louis, Xenophobia
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The language of sociomicrobiology: report from a meeting for the Forum on Microbial Threats
Last night I got back from an excellent small meeting at the Institute of Medicine‘s Forum on Microbial Threats. You may wonder what on earth I was doing there, but the actual topic of this workshop was The Social Biology … Continue reading
Posted in Microbes, Scientific meetings, Social interactions
Tagged altruism, bacteriocin, colicin, community, forum on microbial threats, inclusive fitness, institute of medicine, kin selection, Microorganism, mutualism, national academy of sciences, population, social biology, sociobiology
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Scientific meetings are important, so plan your summer now
Some meeting deadlines have already passed. Others are hard on us. Choose a meeting now and figure out how to get to it. If you are a student, or postdoc, find all the competitions you can enter and do it. … Continue reading
Can smart people get anything done in an international week of talk?
We are now on the fourth day of this experimental workshop. We know more people than at the beginning. We can find the coffee, our offices, the meeting rooms, and the lunchroom. We know the fifteen-minute walk from our hotel … Continue reading
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Find a small meeting and go to it!
Right now I am at an even smaller meeting, called Cooperation in multi-partner settings: biological markets & social dilemmas , organized by Ronald Noë and Mark van Vught at the Lorentz Center at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, just 20 minutes by train from Schiphol airport. … They are worth it. 
At lunch with the famous Peter Hammerstein. 
Grad student, Gijsbert Werner gets to chat with Rufous Johnstone from Cambridge. 
Toby Kiers notices that even at coffee we can collaborate, filling two cups at once. 
We learned a lot about arbuscular mycorrhizae from Nancy Collins Johnson. 
Our fearless leader, Ronald Noë, puts marketplaces to work in the workshop. 
We pay attention, but most of the workshop involved discussion. 
We had offices, keys, and officemates, additional new friends and colleagues. 
Our small group gets to work, with Toby Kiers, Chris Hauert, Peter Hammerstein, and Yoh Iwasa. 
Aniek Ivert explains her cool ants to our small group. Continue reading
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How do I get nominated for an award?
Prizes are a social endeavor, chosen by busy people, so do great science, and make it easy for those nominators to find you and write about you. At some point you will be as happy that someone you nominated got a prize as when you get one yourself. 
Boahemaa Adu-Oppong right after she received the Julian Huxley award for best undergraduate thesis in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, at Rice University. 
Stan Braude right before he receives the top teaching award from the Animal Behavior Society. Continue reading
Lose the laser pointer! Let your slides speak for themselves!
So many speakers use fiddling with the little red or green light as a kind of scribbling on the slide, distracting the audience from the very thing he, or she, wants us to look at. … It would be great if you could have a first figure that just shows the predicted pattern, so we can get used to the way you present the data before we see the actual data. Continue reading
Why is only one of fifteen speakers a woman when the environmental biologists of St. Louis meet?
For example, it took a meeting in Scotland for us to meet our wonderful Dictyostelium collaborators, Adam Kuspa and Gadi Shaulsky , who are a ten minute walk away (or were before we left Houston ). … 
The lovely Tyson Research Center forest. 
The carbon neutral Living Learning Center. 
Our wonderful directors, Barbara Schaal, and Kevin Smith. 
Talking over lunch. 
Doug Berg, who has been wonderful at making microbial connections for us. 
Sitting or standing, the students meet each other. 
Our Keynote speaker, Jonathan Losos, home from Harvard, and Bruce Carlson who gave a great talk on weakly electric fish. Continue reading
Something Squidgy This Way Comes…
The annual Dictyostelium conference is just around the corner and it is being held in Baltimore, Maryland this year and I am giving a talk on one of the projects I have been working on over the last few months. The … Continue reading
Why is it so hard to write a perfect scientific abstract?
I think a better title would be: Male house wrens increase provisioning of babies from eggs that indicate more female investment, as indicated by egg color. … This study supports the generality of the hypothesis of egg color as a sexually selected signal by demonstrating for the first time that males of a species with brown eggs also respond to egg color. Continue reading
Posted in Scientific meetings, Writing
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