Entries for October 2006
Timing problems
The trip to Bloomington was very fruitful in terms of getting to meet a few people I'd previously only heard from over email, going to interesting talks, and getting feedback from my advisor. Unfortunately, the most important single thing I found out represented a substantial setback, and this is why it's taken me a while to get around to blogging about where I'm at with research.
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UW Biology - Faculty mini-symposium
The University of Washington Biology Department kicked off the new academic year's seminar series with a Faculty mini-symposium
. This consisted of 4 departmental faculty taking 15 minutes each to present their current research; four talks for the price of one, in a sense, and I even got bonus free hand cramps because I think I took about as many notes for each as I do in a lot of hour-long presentations.
I'll write a separate post about each presentation, and then edit this post to link to all of them (and probably change the timestamp so it appears on top).
Update: writing all that up took me longer than intended because there was a trip to Bloomington in the middle and I had things I wanted to finish before going. It's now done, and these were the talks:
- Jennifer Nemhauser - Quite contrary models of how gardens grow
- Christian Sidor - New fossils from the center of Pangea
- Janneke Hille Ris Landers - The response of plant communities to climate change
- Benjamin Kerr - A Migratory Solution to a Tragedy of the Commons in a host-pathogen metapopulation
Benjamin Kerr - A Migratory Solution to a Tragedy of the Commons in a host-pathogen metapopulation
The last of the mini-symposium talks was by Benjamin Kerr, who presented a study that combined modelling and 'wet-lab' experiments to understand how a pathogen's population is regulated.
Janneke Hille Ris Landers - The response of plant communities to climate change
Talk #3 of the faculty mini-symposium was Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, on The response of plant communities to climate change
. She talked about the prevailing theory of how climate change will affect the range of a given species, and work she has done using a highly detailed corpus of data from the Kansas prairie to test the theory.
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Christian Sidor - New fossils from the center of Pangea
The second talk in the Faculty mini-symposium was by Christian Sidor of the UW and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. He talked about paleontology at a particular site in Niger, focussing mainly on what makes this site interesting and how it has changed the accepted understanding of how the world's ecosystem looked at the time of Pangea.
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Jennifer Nemhauser - Quite contrary models of how gardens grow
Jennifer Nemhauser gave the first talk, about the work in her lab on the small molecule hormones that influence plant growth.
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Environmental optimism
I've been reading Collapse by Jared Diamond lately. It's compelling, and also one of the most utterly depressing books I have ever read. It examines a series of historical collapses of societies, along with examples of societies facing similar challenges to those that collapsed but managing to overcome them. I should probably come back to this once I've finished the book, but so far I'm finding myself much more convinced by the doom-and-gloom side of the argument—in short that one society after another has made the same mistakes and we're in danger of doing the same as a globalised society in the 21st Century—than the hopeful side Diamond tries to portray along with it. There are various stories of societies' survival, but I just can't help feeling as I read them that they owe more to luck than judgement.