Monthly Archives: August 2012

How to sign up for a Roundtable presentation

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image by rowie k via flickr CC-BY-NC-SA

NOTE: This post also appears in the ‘Host a Roundtable’ tab above ↑ to make it easier to find. 🙂

If you would like to lead a Roundtable presentation or discussion, please visit the relevant Google Doc.

First, navigate to https://docs.google.com

If #home has been automatically appended to the URL, erase it, and then append the following:

/document/d/1eRWpgoo8S17E06sCRnMxJO6c8OALrOH7AT_x2JsGiBE/edit

Edit the document to sign yourself (or a guest you’ve invited) up for a slot.

Big Data and the Future for Ecology

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Great to see such a nice turnout for the Roundtable discussion on big data and ecology! I’m posting a slide set from the talk (ESA_Hampton_2012_public), but as you probably noticed, I don’t put much text on my slides, so it probably won’t make much sense to you if you didn’t see the talk! Feel free to email me if you want any details not included here. We are revising a paper on this topic for resubmission to Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Frontiers has a  liberal policy on copyright so – if accepted – please rest assured that I and the other authors will make it available on our websites.

I took out the cute xkcd images, but you can enjoy as many as you like by checking out xkcd.com yourself!

What?! You’re still reading this post after checking out xkcd.com? I doubt it, but if you are, then…

Here’s some papers I mentioned:

Some Simple Guidelines for Effective Data Management
Elizabeth T. Borer et al.
Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 90(2) 205-214

Heidorn, P. B. 2008. Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science. Library Trends 57:280–299.

Aronova, E., K. S. Baker, and N. Oreskes. 2010. Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, 1957–Present. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40:183–224.

Shaun shared a blog post that describes the 3 V’s of ‘big data’ – volume, velocity, and variety.

 

Professional development at NCEAS: community interests and expertise

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The Roundtable discussion on 8/17 included a presentation of the results of a survey on professional development interests and expertise that was sent out to the NCEAS community. (Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey!) During the discussion, we spent quite a bit of time delving into ideas about presentations or discussions related to areas of professional development that elicited high interest from the survey respondents.

In the figures below, numbers of respondents who reported each level of interest and expertise are shown in the vertical, and different areas of professional development are listed from left to right. Purple segments represent level of interest, and green segments represent areas of expertise. Please let me know if you have any questions about how to interpret the figures.

Several people suggested topics for discussion in addition to the ones included in the survey:

  • dealing with sexism and other forms of discrimination in a professional setting
  • data visualization
  • how to resolve tensions between competition (me first) vs. collaboration/cooperation (us together) modes of advancing science
  • enhancing cross-disciplinary communication
  • framing research results

Some interesting readings were also mentioned during the discussion:

Please add a comment below if you’d like to suggest additional topics or readings. I hope that these survey results will be helpful for those planning to host the Roundtable in the coming months.

Just for fun, I also mapped out the survey participants based on shared interests and expertise using a self-organizing map (SOM) approach. The two images below show the results of this analysis. Colors represent cluster membership (k-means), and members of the same cluster can be expected to be more similar that members of different clusters.

See you at the next Roundtable!

WordPress site to accompany NCEAS Roundtable!

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image by tony newell via flickr CC-BY-NC

Hello NCEAS community,

In order to make it easier to share ideas and resources related to the NCEAS Roundtable presentations and discussions, we’ve set up a WordPress site! Please use this forum to share information with other members of the NCEAS community. When you give a Roundtable presentation or discussion and have links, figures, comments, etc. that you would like to share, please post them here (being careful not to violate copyright, of course)! Please be aware that anything you post here is accessible on the web, so do not post anything you do not want to be publicly available.

In an effort to reduce spam, this site is closed to comments from unregistered users. To register, click on the link in the lower right of the main Roundtable page. Once you register, I will also give you author permission so that you can create a post related to your own Roundtable presentation or discussion. You can also subscribe to updates via RSS to receive notification when new entries or comments are posted.

Do you have an image that would make a good header for this page? Please send it along!

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.