Eco-Defense against Invasions

Characterizing patterns of invasion across space, time, and taxonomic group will help reveal how invasive species affect ecosystem function and individual native specie

Troubled Waters: The Future of Global Fisheries

Scientists debating how to assess global fisheries are now including studies of long-term ecosystem effects and options for recovery efforts. But is it possible to both conserve and farm the sea

A Golden Age of Brain Exploration

The Allen Brain Atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain is poised to serve as an outstanding resource to neuroscienc

A new method for ecoacoustics? Toward the extraction and evaluation of ecologically-meaningful soundscape components using sparse coding methods

Passive acoustic monitoring is emerging as a promising non-invasive proxy for ecological complexity with potential as a tool for remote assessment and monitoring (Sueur and Farina, 2015). Rather than attempting to recognise species-specific calls, either manually or automatically, there is a growing interest in evaluating the global acoustic environment. Positioned within the conceptual framework of ecoacoustics, a growing number of indices have been proposed which aim to capture community-level dynamics by (e.g. Pieretti et al., 2011; Farina, 2014; Sueur et al., 2008b) by providing statistical summaries of the frequency or time domain signal. Although promising, the ecological relevance and efficacy as a monitoring tool of these indices is still unclear. In this paper we suggest that by virtue of operating in the time or frequency domain, existing indices are limited in their ability to access key structural information in the spectro-temporal domain. Alternative methods in which time-frequency dynamics are preserved are considered. Sparse-coding and source separation algorithms (specifically, shift-invariant probabilistic latent component analysis in 2D) are proposed as a means to access and summarise time- frequency dynamics which may be more ecologically-meaningful

ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?

This paper is supported by ACUMEN (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) project, grant agreement number 266632, under the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union.This paper is supported by ACUMEN (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) project, grant agreement number 266632, under the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union

Reckoning up: sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university

This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a ‘composite ethnography’ representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are ‘reckoned up’ in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the ‘outrage economy’ of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde’s work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of ‘speaking in’ to the neoliberal institution

Academia.edu: Social network or Academic Network?

Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike, give scholars the ability to publicize their research outputs and connect with each other. With millions of users, these are a significant addition to the scholarly communication and academic information‐seeking eco‐structure. There is thus a need to understand the role that they play and the changes, if any, that they can make to the dynamics of academic careers. This article investigates attributes of philosophy scholars on Academia.edu, introducing a median‐based, time‐normalizing method to adjust for time delays in joining the site. In comparison to students, faculty tend to attract more profile views but female philosophers did not attract more profile views than did males, suggesting that academic capital drives philosophy uses of the site more than does friendship and networking. Secondary analyses of law, history, and computer science confirmed the faculty advantage (in terms of higher profile views) except for females in law and females in computer science. There was also a female advantage for both faculty and students in law and computer science as well as for history students. Hence, Academia.edu overall seems to reflect a hybrid of scholarly norms (the faculty advantage) and a female advantage that is suggestive of general social networking norms. Finally, traditional bibliometric measures did not correlate with any Academia.edu metrics for philosophers, perhaps because more senior academics use the site less extensively or because of the range informal scholarly activities that cannot be measured by bibliometric methods.This paper is supported by ACUMEN (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) project, grant agreement number 266632, under the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union

Functional Genomics Thickens the Biological Plot

New functional genomic tools are enabling researchers to draw on a large cast of 'non-model' organisms to help set the stage for ecological and evolutionary discovery