Just one paper away: looking back at first scientific proposal experience

In September last year I was starting to put together my first ever proposal to basically write my own PostDoc position that would give me an extra three years of academic research fun. Today I received the final feedback from the panel (which was negative but more on that below) and I thought that I’d …

Mind the gap: when the news article run ahead of the science

This is a quick post on a blatant example on how careful and prudent interpretation in scientific articles are over-simplified in news article. Scrolling through lemonde.fr website I found this article about a long-term study that looked at the long-term changes in insect biomass. In this article one can reads: 'Le facteur majeur permettant d’expliquer …

Cause, mechanism and prediction in ecology

This is a theme that bugged me for the past few months, through reading (Peters' critique for ecology, Shipley's path analysis book), meetings and discussions (IK computation ecology). So it is time to actually sit down, think this through and organize my thoughts. What better way to achieve this than to write a post? What …

On the price of (my) higher education

With my higher education studies behind me, I wanted to reflect a bit on the different amount of tuition fees that I experienced moving around European universities. Stage 1: France I started in 2008 with a Bachelor of science in Strasbourg, at that time you had to pay around 500€ for a year. In these …

About my PhD defense in Germany

I recently held my defense and will most certainly make a couple of posts in the ”near” future on important aspects of the PhD that might helped current or future PhDs. In this post I will talk a bit about my experience during the defense and what helped me preparing it but also holding it. …

Making a case for hierarchical generalized models

Science is also about convincing others, be it your supervisors or your collaborators, that what you intend to do is relevant to get the answers sought. This “what” can be anything from designing an experiment, to collecting samples or formatting the data. This post was inspired by a recent discussion with one of my supervisor …

Tendances des élections présidentielles francaises des 50 dernières années

[An english version for this article is available here] Cette année (2017) les Français seront appelés à élire leur prochain président au mois d'avril. Il y a quelque temps j'ai découvert le site open data du gouvernement français où sont publiés de nombreux jeux de données publiques et où tout un chacun est invité à …

Patterns across 50 years of French presidential election

[Une version francaise de cette article est disponible ici] This year (2017) we will have our presidential election between April and May in France. A while ago I discovered the open data website of the French government publishing public data with free access and promoting utilization by anyone. So in this post I will explore …

Prediction in ecology -implementing a priority.

In this post I would like to comment a bit on the recent forum paper by Houlahan et al on the importance of prediction to demonstrate ecological understanding. Before going through what I took from the paper I will outline a bit where I stood on prediction and understanding before reading the article. Explanation vs …

What roles should ecologist have in the society?

This post is a reflection on the roles that ecologist should have in the society, it was sparked by some discussion I had at the BES/SFE meeting in december. This is one of my first try at blogging essay-like away from my nice beloved R-code. First of I'd like to start with a definition of …