This week: the social roots of trust (in data visualizations, and everything else), beautiful experiments, the end of university education (?), against scientific position papers, the decline of deviance (?), trying to stop a scientific bandwagon, and more.

An email correspondent just asked me this question. I don’t know the answer, but here are some back of the envelope estimates. Let’s do some Fermi estimation!

I know I said I was done collecting data on the North American ecology faculty job market. But, well…

I won’t get into why I changed my mind*, all you need to know is that I changed it. This year, I once again tried to identify every ecologist hired into a tenure-track (TT) faculty position in North America during the 2024-25 job season, and compiled various bits of data about those new hires.

I might do other posts on the results, but if you’re a current or future ecology faculty job seeker, or a mentor to current and future job seekers, this is the one post you’ll want to read. It’ll give you a statistical profile of (some measurable features of) ecologists getting hired into TT positions in N. America. Obviously, that’s not nearly enough data for any job seeker to estimate their own personal odds of getting hired (for a specific job, or for at least one job out of all the ones they applied for). A lot of the data you’d want either isn’t in this dataset (e.g., data about applicant pools; data about the teaching experience of new hires, etc.), or isn’t “data” at all (e.g., how well you personally fit a specific position; how well you personally come off in interviews, etc.). But these data can do two useful things. First, they can give job seekers and their mentors a broad ‘search image’ of what successful ecology faculty job seekers look like on some measurable dimensions. That’s useful context. As a job seeker, you might be wondering if you have “enough” publications to be competitive, or if you’ve been a postdoc for “too long” to be competitive, or whatever. This post answers those sorts of questions. Second, these data can debunk some of the baseless, anxiety-inducing rumors that job seekers sometimes hear on ecoevojobs.net and I presume in other places.**

It’s a long post, so I divided it up into a Q&A format so you can easily skim for whatever bits of info you’re looking for. But if you’re really pressed for time, and if you’re familiar with the data I compiled in the past, here’s the tl;dr in meme form. Tell us, David Byrne: what is the N. American ecology faculty job market like?

This week: The Canadian federal budget vs. Canadian higher ed, fade outs fade out, James O’Dwyer and Sally Otto vs. Jim Brown, a transparent academic job market, squirrel!, and more.

Quick post about something that came up on ecoevojobs.net recently. I suspect that everything I’m about to say will be familiar to most readers of this blog, but in case not, I figured a quick post couldn’t hurt.

Imagine you’re interviewing for a faculty position in North America (on Zoom or in person). You get a question from the search committee that you struggle to answer, or answer badly. Whether because you were nervous and blanked, or you were caught unprepared, or for some other reason. Sometime after the interview, you think of a better answer. Should you follow up with the search committee to provide the better answer?

Sometimes when you’re writing a scientific paper, you have to make a choice about how to frame it. For instance, imagine you’re studying the population biology of some insect species. You might choose to frame it as a study of that insect species, and so send it to a specialized entomology journal. Or, you might choose to frame it as a study of some general population ecology phenomenon that the insect species exhibits, and send it to a general ecology journal. The choice of framing will depend in part on features of your study, and in part on your preferences and goals. For instance, if you want to maximize the paper’s readership and thus its impact on the field, you’ll probably want to choose the framing of broadest interest to the largest number of potential readers. Though of course you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; you don’t want to oversell, or pretend your paper is about something it’s not.

I don’t usually have to make choices about how to frame my own papers. Usually, I’m running experiments in model systems to address some fundamental ecological question. So even before I conduct the experiment, I usually know how I’m going to frame the resulting paper and what sort of journal I’m going to submit it to.

Which perhaps makes me prone to overlooking opportunities to frame my papers in ways I didn’t originally plan. I wonder if I recently overlooked an opportunity to frame a paper as addressing a question of broader interest and importance than the one I framed it as addressing. Here’s the story; you tell me if I missed my chance!

This week: the absurdity of the data:ink ratio, the industrialization of decision-making, Manhattan plot vs. Manhattan, incentivizing replication studies, Neanderthal fraud, and more.

The Crafoord Prize is a Nobel-like award intended to complement the Nobels by going to researchers in fields the Nobels don’t cover. Once every four years, it goes to biologists working in ecology or evolutionary biology. It goes to people in other disciplines in other years. The Crafoord Prize is one of the most prestigious and lucrative awards in biology; it’s worth over 850,000ドル USD at current exchange rates.

The 2027 Crafoord Prize will go to a biologist; nominations are due Jan. 15, 2026. I got a letter inviting me to submit a nomination (not sure why), but anyone is allowed to do so. Who would you nominate? (UPDATE: a correspondent informs me I got this wrong, that you have to be invited to submit a nomination. My apologies for the error. I am still interested in comments from anyone. Even if you haven’t been invited to submit a nomination, I still think it’s interesting to mull over who you would nominate if you were invited. /end update)

I’ve thought about it a bit and have a few candidates in mind. But I think it’ll be a more interesting conversation to talk about my thought process, rather than just listing names. Here’s how I’m thinking about this; please share your thoughts.

This week: the origin of research universities, why governments can’t count, scholarly self-audit, bear vs. zoo, and more.

Interviews with ecologists have become one of my favorite kinds of posts. They’re super-interesting, and they’re not much work for me to write. 🙂 I just made a tab at the top of our homepage with links to all our interviews. I’ll keep it updated as we publish new interviews. Meanwhile, I encourage you to go back and read old ones you might’ve missed.