Holiday Party Tomorrow (Friday)

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The party will begin at 3:00 PM.
Santa’s sleigh touches down at 4:30, so please have your kids ready.
Do you have an amusing gift for someone in the department?  Drop it off in the front office before the party!
Finger foods are appreciated! Please remember to sign up in the main office.
We are collecting items for The Open Door Mission and Golisano Children’s Hospital. Please bring a canned good or other item listed at the website below.  We will have boxes set up in the Main Office this week or you may drop them off at the party.

Study Break Breakfast Tomorrow (Tuesday)

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This event is being conducted in conjunction with a food drive for Foodlink.  All food items to be donated must be: (1) in their original, unopened packages, (2) within the expiration date on the package, (3) in plastic jars or containers, not glass, (4) no homemade food items can be accepted, (5) non-food items that are new or in gently used condition only.

Items can be dropped off to the donation barrel which will be available in Hutchison 341 between Wednesday 12/8/10 to 11am on Wednesday 12/15/10.

Words of Wisdom from Nelson Hairston Sr.

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Quinn has been entertaining us with insightful quotes by the famous ecologist, Nelson Hairston Sr.  Some of the best can be found in an obituary published a few years ago in Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, including:

“If p is less than 0.01, you worked too hard.”

“If it’s not worth doing; it’s not worth doing well.”

“Some ecologists find mathematics easier than useful scientific work.”

Speciation Reading Group, Dec 13

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Next Monday at 2PM we will be discussing a review of speciation in Ficedula flycatchers from a special issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B on the “genomics of speciation” [doi link].  Decades of intense work on Ficedula provides much fodder for discussion.  Given that the paper is a review, I was going to suggest we read a companion paper with original research; however, I think it might be more interesting if everyone makes a point to check out one or two cited papers that they find particularly intriguing.  (Given our recent discussions of reinforcement, I’m personally keen to check out Servedio et al.’s 2009 paper on reinforcement and learning from a special issue of Evolutionary Ecology on “speciation: from diversification to reproductive isolation.”)

Fry Lab Welcomes New Addition

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Fry Lab welcomes newest member, Jason Zhang, son of Jie Zhang and Fry lab graduate student Jing Zhu.  Also shown are (L to R) undergrad Joe Bucukovski, technician Justin Budnik, and graduate student Mahul Chakraborty.

Kona Coffee Break

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Regular (left) and Peaberry (right) beans

Regular (left) and Peaberry (right) beans

While on our honeymoon this past summer we toured the Kona Joe coffee company and brought back some of their award winning trellis-grown coffee.  One of the more interesting things we learned was the story behind oddly shaped peaberry coffee beans. It turns out that inside each fruit of the coffee plant (the cherry) there are two embryos.   Normally, both are fertilized and grow inside that confined space resulting in the typical hemispherical shape of coffee beans.  Peaberries occur when only a single embryo is fertilized inside the coffee cherry. Historically, the 5% of the crop that developed as peaberries was discarded but recently coffee-heads have realized that, when roasted, these beans produce a unique, somewhat sweeter coffee.  Tomorrow (Monday) at 3:30 in the Grad Student Lounge well brew a pot of both Peaberry and regular Kona coffees accompanied by mango-macadamia-coconut cookies.

Mahalo

EEB Readings Dec 6-11

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UPDATED DEC.6:

Monday: Speciation Reading Group. 2PM in Hutch 341. Ideas meeting – come with suggestions on what you’d like to read in the coming weeks and months.

Tuesday: Journal Club. 12:30PM in the Bryant Room. Lynch, M. 2009. Estimation of allele frequencies from high-coverage genome-sequencing projects. Genetics. 182(1):295-301 [doi]

Wednesday: Glor Lab meeting on research related to the dog genome. Noon in Hutch 341. Details here.

Friday: Charlesworth Group. 10AM in Hutch 341. Chapter 4.3 through 4.5