The Kaspari Lab
Category: Doing Science
The Ten Principles of Ecology
I have been teaching a course called “Principles of Ecology” at OU since 1996. It was a traditional two one-hour lecture, one three-hour lab for most of those years. In 2013, I decided to flip the course, converting the lectures…
Read MoreA short essay on Koechner’s Criterion and its relationship to success in Grad School
Where I coin Koechner’s Criterion and run with it
Read MoreWhat journal gets the first peek at your manuscript? Results from a year of ruminating.
The manuscript’s done. Now what?
Read MoreOn the salutary effect of the Kudos Email
If you like someone’s work, don’t just cite them, write them!
Read MoreOn writing a strong NSF pre-proposal
Its been 4 years since NSF DEB began to require pre-proposals. What makes a strong one?
Read MoreCanopy and understory microclimates – how are the ants handling them?
The author, Jelena Bujan, in the canopy of Pseudobombax septenatum, a deciduous tree with smooth green bark. Jelena is completing her third field season on Barro Colorado Island, in Panama. In tropical forests, is frequently assumed that canopies are “deserts”…
Read MorePolitics 101 for Academics
Politics is the art of the possible. Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. I’ve known both quotes for a while, but as I just now looked them up, I discovered they have the…
Read MoreThe joy of click
Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an…
Read MoreOh, snap!, molecular biology
I know, I know. Molecular biologists are an easy target for us field types. Just the other day Dr. Corrie Moreau, ant systematist extraordinaire, repeated an old joke with gusto over a Friday Skype: So a stranger comes up to a sheepherder and…
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