The Biology Department’s annual Howard Bryant Memorial Golf Tournament is happening tomorrow at the Brockport Country Club. I’m not golfing, but I will be there for dinner. Dave Lambert and I are likely going to be carpooling at around 5, so drop us a line if you need a lift too!
Apologies for the fact that three posts from Monday have mysteriously disappeared. I have yet to get an explanation for why this happened, but it seems to have been the result of recent upgrades to the University’s web server. I’m going to try to recreate these posts as time permits.
From Dalboz17's Flickr Photostream.
With the 9th Annual Rochester International Jazz Festival getting underway tomorrow night, the streets of Rochester are about to be flooded with jazz musicians and enthusiasts. The Jazz Festival eems to get bigger and better every year; this year, club passes sold out weeks ago. Nevertheless, individual tickets remain for many shows and there are tons of free performances, including outdoor shows on East Ave headlined by Los Lonely Boy, Booker T and the MGs, Marc Broussard, and Smashmouth. A complete schedule can be found at the Jazzfest’s web page. This year I’m hoping to catch some of the late evening jam sessions that bring together eclectic mixes of local and visiting performers.
The Biology Department’s summer donut seminars kick off next Monday with a lecture by our own Henri Jasper on “Inflammation and Aging.” Subsequent talks will be held weekly on Mondays at noon in HH473. Check the Department’s calendar for a complete list of upcoming seminars.
“Zimbra migration” might evoke images of unusual African ungulates moving across the Savannah, but it’s really just the University of Rochester IT department’s way of describing our move to a new e-mail client. It seems like most people have managed to make it through this migration with minimal headaches. In most ways the new client appears superior to the old ‘mail.rochester.edu’ system. One major problem with the old system was its inability to play nice with the iPhone, causing some folks to switch over to using third party services like Gmail as their primary accounts and others to move to the University’s Microsoft Exchange server (ur.rochester.edu). With Zimbra, working with the iPhone is pretty simple (see image to the right for the appropriate settings [go to “Settings:Mail,Contacts,Calendars:Add Account…” to access this screen]). If you’re like me and switched over to the Exchange server, there is at least one good reason to move over to Zimbra: the maximum mailbox size on the Exchange server is a mere 200 MB, whereas you get 7 GB on Zimbra.
With an ever-growing number of journals, the growing trend of early on-line publication, and the appearance of new research and commentaries in blogs and other informal sources, keeping up on all the latest research is one of the biggest challenges to ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Fortunately, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a new tool that makes this task easier than ever. By subscribing to RSS feeds from your favorite journals and blogs, you will have the latest research delivered directly to you, the moment it is released. The first step to using RSS is to get an aggregator. There are lots of aggregator options, but I use the on-line application Google Reader (requires sign-up) and the Apple OSX application NetNewsWire (which will import subscriptions through a Google Reader account). Once you have an aggregator, you simply sign up for the RSS feeds of your choosing. Feeds that I subscribe to include: Evolution (see “Sign up for RSS feed” link to left of screen), American Naturalist (see RSS link at right of screen), Systematic Biology (scroll down for options), Molecular Ecology (see “Sign up for RSS feed” link to left of screen), and Molecular Phylognetics and Evolution (see “New Article Feed”). And, of course, don’t forget about the feeds for your favorite blogs like dechronization, Tree of Life, EEB and Flow, and iPhylo. How you subscribe will depend on the aggregator you’re using, but in most cases you just need to copy the link provided on the pages linked above and paste it into the dialogue box after reguesting to add a subscription in your aggregator. Make Google Reader (or iGoogle) your homepage and you’ll soon be seeing the newest stuff everytime you hop onto the web!
The University of Rocheter’s Center for Research Computing has just announced a summer workshop on the R Statistical Computing Environment. The workshop takes place in early June and will be led by the CRC’s director (Greg Warnes). It’s open to anyone interested in learning to use and extend R, you just need to register with Greg. See the PDF announcement for additional details.
The most recent issue of Current Biology includes a dispatch from Presgraves and Glor on island speciation. In this commentary, we discuss the implications of an impressive new study by Kisel and Barraclough in The American Naturalist on in situ speciation.
I just learned of an exciting symposium taking place this summer in Ithaca to honor speciation research pioneer Rick Harrison. The symposium will be held July 22-23 and will feature an all-star cast of speakers, most of whom will be discussing their research on speciation.
