Dynamic Ecology

> as a weekly assignment or final project, for each student to choose a Wiki page and actively edit it http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/using-wikipedia-in-the-… and http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/follow-up-to-my-caution…

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/william-shockley-on-wh… This is specifically about academia and publishing, but I don't think that's all that different from a lot of development practice. It presents a useful way to think about engineer productivity that doesn't get caught up in meaningless slogans.

This has been discussed before: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/two-stage-peer-review-… http://neurochambers.blogspot.com/2013/04/scientific-publishing-as-it-… Personally as a researcher, I think the idea is definitely a good one.

Discussion: http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/william-shockley-on-wha… "William Shockley on what makes a person who publishes a lot of papers (and the superstar researcher system)"

The term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive. If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too. [1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-…

"Dogmas" are pretty much never disproven. (Technically, outside of mathematics, they can't be.) Science is a long process of lots of people looking at lots of data and coming up with different explanations to make sense of it all. Some of these explanations make more sense than others, but it's pretty much guaranteed that even the experts won't be able to agree on which ones. As new data and new generations of researchers emerge, the explanations evolve, consolidate, and sometimes are discarded again. In short: science is a mess of opinions, gradually moving along. If you want to get a feel for what that looks like in practice, have a look at this blog post about diverging opinions in ecology: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/poll-results-heres-wha… (Most of the hypotheses he explores are current "textbook knowledge"!)

If you want data: As of 2016, academic institutions hired 21,511 full-time, tenure-track professors [1]. Your odds of getting tenure given that you're in a tenure-track position vary by institution, but seem to range from about 75% at elite private institutions to 90% at state schools [2]. Figure about 18,000 professors were hired into positions that will eventually grant them tenure. AngelList lists about 30,827 companies at the Seed or Series A/B/C stage [3]. Crunchbase has 33,577 funding rounds that occurred within 2016 [4]. The former stat has issues in that it includes funding rounds over a broad time period, and the latter potentially has issues with multiple funding rounds for the same company happening; however, given their general consistency and the existence of funded companies that do not appear in AngelList nor Crunchbase, 30,000 companies funded per year seems about right. The average tenured professor salary varies heavily by field, but the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports it at $104820 [5], Glassdoor at $70385 [6], PayScale at $71993 [7], Indeed at $66921 [8]. There were 12,688 mergers & acquisitions in 2018 [9], the vast majority of which were for undisclosed amounts (companies do not have to disclose the transaction if it's for < $75M). Given the distribution of the ones that are disclosed, it's a good bet that most of those are for between $1M-20M (I've heard $1M/engineer as the going rate for aquihires, where the team succeeds in delivering a…