Intro to modelling in R

http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/bolker/emdbook/index.html

Chad Brassil: "Evolution in ecological models: parasitoid behavior to the tropical diversity gradient" (Department talk)

Our visitor Chad Brassil from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln will give a seminar in BEES today:

"Evolution in ecological models: parasitoid behavior to the tropical diversity gradient"

1-2pm, Room 456
16/11/2006

Quantitative genetics links

Hi,
I came across this comprehensive set of lectures on quantitative genetics:

http://www.aps.uoguelph.ca/~lrs/Animalz/

Enjoy! Felix

Journal club 17/10/06

Felix will talk about:

N.G. PRASAD and MALLIKARJUN N. SHAKARAD

Genetic correlations: transient truths of adaptive evolution

Journal of Genetics 2004 83(1): 4-6.

Congratulations on Grant Success

Congratulations to Sarah Pryke, Alexei Maklakov and Simon Lailvaux on their 2007 APD Fellowships and Discovery Grants, and to Erik Postma and Andy Russell on their Discovery Grant success.

Journal club at 2pm, on TUESDAY, 19/9

Alexei will talk about:

Carel ten Cate, Machteld N. Verzijden, and Eric Etman.

Sexual Imprinting Can Induce Sexual Preferences for Exaggerated Parental Traits

Current Biology 2006 16: 1128-1132.

Current Biology: Special Issue on SEX

Hi,

for everybody who haven't come across it yet:
http://www.current-biology.com/misc/?page=misc5
(Volume 16, Issue 17 , 5 September 2006)

Felix

Ageing mailing list

Hi,

I just came across this mailing list about ageing, it may be worth checking out:

http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/ageing

Have fun with it,
Felix

Journal club 19/7/2006

Kate will talk about:
Female fitness declines with increasing female density but not male harassment in the western mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis.
Chad C. Smith and R. Craig Sargent. Animal Behaviour, 71(2), 2006, pp. 401-407.

Top five science blogs

Unfortunately we didn't make it into the top 5...

"Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."

See news @ nature.com for the winners

Labmeeting 10/7/2006

In this weeks' labmeeting Mark Kirkpatrick will talk about:

"Genetical principal components and fun traits"

Journal club

For this weeks journal club, Nori picked:
Nancy Tyler Burley, 2006. AN EYE FOR DETAIL: SELECTIVE SEXUAL IMPRINTING IN ZEBRA FINCHES. Evolution 60: 1076–1085

Some bedtime reading

Check out this link to a set of lecture notes written by Bruce Walsh for a post graduate course on evolutionary genetics:
http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/workshops/Aarhus2006/notes.html

Journal Club

After last weeks experiment, we will again have a 'normal' journal club tomorrow (Wednesday at 4:00 in room 608). I realise it is a bit late, I hope you still find the time to read this one:

Phillips and Shine, 2006. An invasive species induces rapid adaptive change in a native predator: cane toads and black snakes in Australia. Proc. Roy. Soc. B. 273: 1545-1550

And some more...

Impressive new Impact Factors for BioMed Central's open-access journals

Eleven journals published by BioMed Central received their first Impact Factor this month. With nine journals in the top 10 of their 2005 Journal Citation Report category, and ten journals with a 2005 Impact Factor exceeding 3.00, BioMed Central's open access journals are confirmed as publishing high-quality, highly cited research.

Many journals in the BMC series also received their first Impact Factors this year. BMC Developmental Biology, with an Impact Factor of 5.41, is ranked at number six in the developmental biology field. BMC Structural Biology enters the Biophysics category at number eight, with an Impact Factor of 5.00. BMC Evolutionary Biology, with an Impact Factor of 4.45, is the 6th most highly cited journal in the Evolutionary Biology category. BMC Biotechnology (3.05), BMC Neuroscience (2.73), BMC Microbiology (2.18) and BMC Gastroenterology (1.46) also received their first Impact Factor.

Read more on the BioMed Central website

Additional info about open access journals

Here's one more, hot off the press, about the pros of the open access system:

Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles.
Gunther Eysenbach.
PLOS, 4(5), 2006, pp. 692-698.

Open-access journal hits rocky times

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship publisher for the open-access publishing movement, faces a looming financial crisis. An analysis of the company's accounts, obtained by Nature, shows that the company falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even. In an attempt to redress its finances, PLoS will next month hike the charge for publishing in its journals from US$1,500 per article to as much as $2,500.

Read more on the Nature website

The 3rd International Conference of Quantitative Genetics

Preliminary Announcement
The 3rd International Conference of Quantitative Genetics

Zheijiang University, Hangzhou, China August 18-24, 2007

The 3rd International Conference on Quantitative Genetics (ICQG)
will be held during August 18-24, 2007 at Zhejiang University in
Hangzhou, China. As with the 1st ICQG in Ames, Iowa in 1976 and
the 2nd ICQG in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1987, the 3rd
Conference will be a comprehensive survey of the current status
of quantitative genetics. New technologies in areas ranging from
genomics and molecular genetics to statistics are providing both
opportunities and challenges for our understanding of the genetic
basis of quantitative traits in natural populations, the
evolution of characters, and use for plant and animal
breeding. Program suggestions will be welcomed by the Conference
Organizers listed below.

Zhejiang University is one of the few top-rank research
institutions in China. It is a comprehensive institute with a
full range of disciplines. With a faculty capable of top-level
and large-scale research and a high proportion of graduate
students, the university has been undertaking projects, both
basic and applied, to address pressing issues and challenges of
today and of the future.

The City of Hangzhou is one of the seven ancient capital cities
of China. It has a population of 3.72 million and has a recorded
history spanning 2100 years. Marco Polo described Hangzhou as the
"Most beautiful, magnificent, and heavenly city in the world."
Located in China's most developed southeast coastal area,
Hangzhou is renowned for its thriving economy, colorful culture
and beautiful landscape, especially its famed West Lake and Tea
House.

Academic Chairs: Bruce Weir (bsweir@u.washington.edu) and Bill Hill
(w.g.hill@ed.ac.uk)

Academic Co-chairs: Junyi Gai (sri@njau.edu.cn) and Changquin Wu
(chxwu@public.bta.net.cn)

Conference Organizers: Jun Zhu (jzhu@zju.edu.cn) and Zhao-Bang Zeng
(zeng@stat.ncsu.edu)

Journal Club 21 June - Different Model (requires preparation)

On June 21, we will celebrate the Winter solstice with an experimental form of journal club that I wish to try out. Instead of reading and deconstructing one paper in detail, the proposed alternative model involves folks going out and finding a paper each that is of potential interest to the group, and breifly introducing that paper to the group. It is a way of using our collective numbers to cover and diversify our interests within what is a very broad literature, and if it works, we can try to use this approach to complement the single-paper discussions which I understand are very productive.

For the 21st, I want each of us to find one paper and spend 2-3 minutes speaking about that paper and it's merits. To keep things a bit focussed, I suggest we limit ourselves to papers from open-access journals (PLoS Biology, BMC titles, etc). This will give us a chance to find out about some of these interesting journals and their publishing model at the same time as learning about the science. Please send me your paper's title ahead of time so I can be sure there won't be duplication.

Rob

PS. Think and let Simon, Erik and I know (or post on this blog) what you think about this model. We can use it in future to target particular journals, fields, taxa or time periods in the history of Evolutionary Biology.

Journal club 7/6/6

Matt and:

Evolution: Do Bad Husbands Make Good Fathers?
David H. Hosken and Tom Tregenza.
Current Biology, 15(20), 2005, pp. 836-838.
(Short review)

Assessing putative interlocus sexual conflict in Drosophila melanogaster using
experimental evolution.
Andrew D. Stewart, Edward H. Morrow and William R. Rice.
Proc. R. Soc. B., 272, 2005, pp. 2029-2035.

Journal club 31/5/6

Barbara will talk about:

Adaptive genetic complementarity in mate choice coexists with selection
for elaborate sexual traits.
Kevin P. Oh and Alexander V. Badyaev.
Proc. R. Soc. B., FirstCite early online publishing, 2006, pp. 1127-1130.

Anybody up for this one next Wed??

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/502806

::Felix Zajitschek

Journal club 24/5/06

Up for discussion (don't forget the cookies, Dean :-)

Learned kin recognition cues in a social bird.
Stuart P. Sharp, Andrew McGowan, Matthew J. Wood & Ben J. Hatchwell.
Nature, 434, 2005, pp. 1127-1130.

SCIENCE - Aging

For those of you interested in aging, SCIENCE magazine has created the
Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - and because everything has an
acronym this is called SAGE KE. Check out this rather useful website on the
science of aging at http://sageke.sciencemag.org/.

Rob

Journal club 17/5/06

Papers for discussion:

Sex, death and tragedy.
Daniel J. Rankin and Hanna Kokko.
TREE, 21(5), 2006, pp. 225-226.
(commentary on the following paper)

Sex ratio bias, male aggression, and population
collapse in lizards.
Jean-Francois Le Galliard, Patrick S. Fitze, Regis Ferriere and Jean Clobert.
PNAS, 102(50), 2005, pp. 18231-18236.

Notice bored

Thanks, Felix, for starting this. I just walked down the passage to the lab, as I do about 10 times a day, and looked at the same articles and crappy posters. I thought we could make those big poster boards into something that showcases evolutionary biology in some way. It could involve news articles or recent papers. I'm not talking about an extension to our Hall of Fame noticeboard. Rather something that raises the profile of the field in general.
Any ideas? Anyone who wants to spend some time and energy making it work?

*http://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/school/staff/brooks/brookspubs.html
...............................................................................................
School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences
The University of New South Wales
Kensington, Sydney 2052
NSW, Australia
PH: +61-2-9385-2587 FAX: +61-2-9385-1558
http://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/school/staff/brooks/brooksrob.html

Australasian Evolution Society: http://www.evolutionau.org

Today's journal club is about:

INTERSPECIFIC AGGRESSION CAUSES NEGATIVE SELECTION ON SEXUAL CHARACTERS.
KATJA TYNKKYNEN, JANNE S. KOTIAHO, MARI LUOJUMÄKI, AND JUKKA SUHONEN Evolution, 59(8), 2005, pp. 1838–1843

Meta-Analysis (lab meeting/Simon)

Mentioned Articles on meta-analyses:

• West & Sheldon 2002
• Palmer 2000
• Palmer 1999
• Griffith, Parker & Olson 2006
  

Mentioned program:

• MetaWin

___________________________________________________________
::Felix Zajitschek
::BEES / 2052 UNSW / NSW / AUSTRALIA

Group Setup & Info

Hi everybody!

Posts under the name of EvoEcoSex come from members of the Brooks and the Griffith lab at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, in short BEES, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney.

Both lab groups work on similar questions, relating to behavioural and evolutionary ecology of sexual reproduction and life histories. We use quantitative genetic analyses, behavioural observations and manipulative experiments to test hypotheses generated from sexual selection and life history theory. We are also interested in the biology of ageing, the evolution of sexual dimorphism, sex determination, genomic imprinting and of the Y chromosome, and the evolutionary consequences of inbreeding.

You can find us here:

• Brooks lab: http://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/school/staff/brooks/brookslab.html

• Griffith lab: links under 'Avian Behavioural Ecology' on http://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/research/researchgroups.html

Brooks Lab United (June 2006)
(click on picture to enlarge)














Back row, from left:
Rob Brooks, Russell Bonduriansky, Tessa Crozier, Felix Zajitschek, Erik Postma, Matt Hall.
Front row, from left:
Nicolle Spyrou, Susi Zajitschek, Kate Carroll, Nori Kawasaki.