Recently in Personal Category

A couple of months ago one of my students, Kathryn Theiss, received word that she'd been awarded a fellowship from the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation.

The goal of the Switzer Environmental Fellowship Program is to support highly talented graduate students in New England and California whose studies are directed toward improving environmental quality and who demonstrate the potential for leadership in their field. (source)

The fellowships are highly competitive, and I am proud to be associated with Kathryn.¹ I'm also pleased to point out that President Hogan mentioned Kathryn's award on his blog a couple of days ago. If you want to read more about what Kathryn's up to, check out this article on the web page of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

But I guess I have. I just discovered that E-Books Directory lists me as the author of Population Genetics (published by the University of Connecticut in 2008). The "book" in question is a set of course notes for my graduate course in population genetics. I released the notes under a Creative Commons license precisely to allow others to re-use them, and I'm delighted to find a link to them from an e-book directory. That may help more people to find them.

I've been back since Wednesday afternoon, but blogging will remain light for awhile. I have my mind on other things.

We (Jane, Bronwen, Chris, and I) left Capetown on Sunday, May 17 for Robinson's Pass (between Mossel Bay and Oudtshoorn). We spent three nights at Cranes Crest Guest Farm while working there. If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend it. The accommodations were very comfortable, the setting is beautiful, and the proprietors are very friendly. On Wednesday, May 20 we moved to Prince Albert, where we stayed at Acacia Cottage. Again, if you're in the area, I highly recommend it. Prince Albert is a charming town, and Acacia Cottage is a very comfortable, convenient place.¹

On Wednesday we (Jane, Chris, and I) drove to Jonaskop to check out plants in our experimental garden there, and to see the effects of a fire that burned on the mountain in mid-April. I may post a few fire photos later, but for now, I thought I'd share a map showing our route (hit the plus arrow several times to zoom in enough to see the blue track in the southwestern corner of the cape) and a photo of one of our plants, Protea punctata. Click on the image to see a larger version in a popup window.

I've been lucky with the weather so far. Normally it's rainy this time of year, but since I arrived last Wednesday, it's been bright and sunny. Today we have clouds, and tomorrow we may have a little rain, but so far the weather has been very cooperative.

Survivorship in the Jonaskop garden has been pretty good. Plants are smaller than at Kirstenbosch, but we haven't lost any at Jonaskop since mid-April. We'll count survivors at Kirstenbosch this afternoon. Since I wasn't here earlier, I can't even guess what survivorship has been since then, but about twice as many plants died at Kirstenbosch as at Jonaskop. That's not at all what I would have expected, since the environment at Jonaskop seems much harsher and there's actual soil here at Kirstenbosch. But I guess it just goes to show that growing plants in an environment that matches where they occur naturally is easier than growing them somewhere else, even if it seems benign to us humans.


View Jonaskop --13 May 2009 in a larger map

Posting will be even lighter than usual for the next month. I'm in South Africa for fieldwork on my project investigating the evolutionary radiation of white proteas (Protea sect. Exsertae).

For the next week or so, I'm based at the South African National Biodiversity Institute at Kirstenbosch National Botanic Garden. Although I'll have Internet access while I'm here, I also have a lot of work to do. After that, I'll be out in various parts of the western Cape and won't have Internet access at all.¹

Why, you might ask, am I writing about political unrest in Madagascar? Have you even heard that there is political unrest in Madagascar?¹

Well, I'm not going to try to explain what's going on, because I don't understand.² I don't know which side, if either, would be good for the people of Madagascar. I just know that unrest seems to be spreading and that because of the unrest one of my graduate students may have to delay or cancel field work she had planned for the next couple of months.³ Her dissertation isn't in danger. She'll have plenty of data on genetics and reproduction in populations of the orchid she's studying even without this year's observations. But unless her field assistants can do some of the field work for her, she'll be missing a critical year of data that we were planning to use to build a demographic model of the populations.

Field work in ecology is hard. It's often filled with hours of backbreaking work and tedious monotony. But in the end, the results are worth it. We expect unbearable heat and long, difficult hikes, just as molecular biologists expect long, boring nights mixing chemicals and culturing cells. What we don't expect is for political events to make those long, difficult hikes impossible or unsafe.

I know my student will be very disappointed if she isn't able to go to Madagascar this year, but she won't be half as disappointed as I am that I'm unable to help her.

No, I'm not talking baseball. And no, I'm not talking about being right half the time.¹ I'm talking about this entry, which is #500 for this blog.

Just another inch-pebble, but I thought I'd point it out.

Or so say the editors of Nature. They write:

More researchers should engage with the blogosphere, including authors of papers in press.

Well, if you're reading this you know they were preaching to one of the choir when I read it. But in their penultimate sentence they also explain why this is at best a mediocre web site.

A good blogging website consumes much of the spare time of the one or several fully committed scientists that write and moderate it.

It's obvious from the small number of posts I make that this blog doesn't take that much of my time. It also explains why my Technorati rank is only 6, and I'm barely at 180 in the Nature Blog Network. Still, I hope that I'm "mak[ing] a difference to the quality and integrity of public discussion."