Chris Brimacombe

National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle

Superset big words with simple ones

I agree. One thing I’ve been wondering about is how European PhD students compare to North American students, where guaranteed funding is typically longer (in my experience). I wonder whether shorter PhD durations leave students somewhat disadvantaged when it comes to publishing?

I suspect the sunk cost fallacy explains a lot of the junk science we see

Deciphering Probabilistic Species Interaction Networks We review how probabilistic species interactions are defined at different spatial scales. These definitions are based on the distinction between the realisation of an interaction at a specific time a....

New paper from the lab: how do we make probabilistic species interaction networks more useful and robust? @francisbanville.bsky.social has some thoughts, and went through the literature to map mathematical definitions to ecological concepts.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
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MORE STUDY NEEDED

Celebrating an NSERC Grant to Support Food Web Research — Centre for Ecosystem Management We’re pleased to share that Dr. Chris Brimacombe, a newly-arrived Postdoctoral Fellow here at the Centre for Ecosystem Management (CEM), has been awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Co...

🎉 We have reason to celebrate! Our own Dr. @chrisbrimacombe.bsky.social, Postdoctoral Fellow here at the CEM, has received an NSERC grant to further support his research on ecological networks like food webs 🕸️ Read alllllll about it in our latest blog post: www.ecosystemscience.ca/news/celebra...

Which publication a food web was sourced from was a better predictor of its structure than the ecosystem type (eg, aquatic 🐟 vs terrestrial 🪲) 🫠

Researchers’ decisions (and our forgetfulness about their importance) can have long-lasting downstream effects 😬
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Thanks for the kind words!

Publication‐driven consistency in food web structures: Implications for comparative ecology Large collections of freely available food webs are commonly reused by researchers to infer how biological or environmental factors influence the structure of ecological communities. Although reusing...

this blew my mind: food webs constructed from open-source datasets are driven, in part, by their original publication—in other words, published food webs reflect not just the ecological community but also hidden researcher decisions.

doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

Congratulations Francis!

Yikes!

Thank you!

Chris Brimacombe ‪University of Toronto‬ - ‪‪Cited by 181‬‬ - ‪Ecology‬ - ‪Applied Mathematics‬

scholar.google.ca/citations?us...

Publication‐driven consistency in food web structures: Implications for comparative ecology Large collections of freely available food webs are commonly reused by researchers to infer how biological or environmental factors influence the structure of ecological communities. Although reusing...

New open-access paper out: Food web structures are shaped more by the researchers who build them than by biological or environmental forces we could detect. Read it here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

It's always the ones you most suspect

Adversarial collaboration

🧪 Very cool results on food webs by lab members:

[1] Banville et al.: what does it mean to use probabilities to represent interactions?

[2] @gabdans.bsky.social et al.: local reconstruction of regional food webs

[1] ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
[2] royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.

“We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper.”

Excellent reporting from the New Yorker! 🧪

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The strain on scientific publishing 📄:

We've got issues. Scientists overwhelmed, editors overworked, constant special issue invites, mass article retractions, journal delistings… JUST WHAT IS GOING ON!?

See: arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884

A 🧵1/n
#AcademicChatter #PublishOrPerish #PhDAdvice #PhDChat