None of the above

28 March 2020  Have been thinking about page charges of late. This (I believe) is something of a hidden crisis in fields that require publication of research. Most journals, whether private or society-based charge the author by the page. The longer the articles or the more articles one publishes, the greater the cost to the researcher who has to come up with the money. Some researchers actually pay out of pocket! Others pass the charge on to a grant, which eats valuable funds that ideally should be used for funding the research itself.  Last month I had page charges in non-profit/society journals for 2 papers. $2180 for one (including $600 extra for 6 "online only color figures"), $1385 for the other (w/ several figures not reduced in size to save space). Today I just looked at page proofs for a 3rd paper. An alternative reference format probably could have saved 2 pages of space.  We will see what that costs us...

None of this makes sense.  Disruptive change in this field is inevitable and cant come soon enough. 

14 February 2020  Sometimes grad students get depressed over bad reviews. But it helps to laugh them off and realize that the longer you play the game, the greater the number of preposterous reviews you receive. Here is one from an NSF post-doc proposal I wrote with Bob Wayne in the mid 1990s. Such an insulting review as to be laughable! If you are a student and get a review like this, laugh it off. It says more about the reviewer than about your work.

20 August 2018  The Yamaha Big Bear heads off to surplus property to be auctioned off. Originally purchased in about 2000 (+/-) , this ATV has been involved in numerous projects. It has seen at least 5 MS and 2 PhD students, plus a dozen or more undergrads. Earliest users included Amber Wright (now Asst Prof at the University of Hawaii) and Rachel Goodman (now Associate Prof at Hampden-Sydney College), seen here dealing with the harsh realities of raccoon field work. Note the no-longer-up-to-today's-safety-standards bike helmets. Via con dios Big Bear.

1 October 2107  At a recent meeting I came across this result being presented. Hmmm... 

31 July 2017  To be on the committee of a student at another institution, sometimes you need to send a transcript (proving that you really do have a degree, I guess). Recently I attempted to do so. But it turns out that 22 years after leaving Knoxville I am still in arrears and can't send a transcript until I pay up! I like that it says it is too late to appeal (implied: too late to waive?)  I am sure there is a moral to this, but ...

15 June 2017 On the demise of the NSF DDIG program.

When I was a graduate student, my career received an amazing boost from receipt of an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. For nearly 50 years these small research awards were designed to allow doctoral students to extend the reach of their dissertation research. Receipt of a DDIG award has long been seen as a measure of the broader research community’s support for the importance of a student’s work. Unfortunately, in a society that continues to under-appreciate the importance of science and continues to starve the agencies that support research, it has been harder and harder for established researchers to obtain NSF support (success rates for NSF's Division of Environmental Biology are 7-8%). This lack of funding has now undone the NSF DDIG program. After decades of supporting excellent research proposed by graduate students, the last vestiges of NSF's DEB DDIG program have been ended. This is a cost-saving move – it takes a lot to run these NSF programs. But I do wonder whether the fiscal savings provided by the end of the program are trivial relative to the costs of no longer fully nurturing the next generation of researchers. I feel like we are eating our seed corn.

5 March 2017. Had the humbling honor of being appointed the William James Rucker Professor of Wildlife Conservation earlier this year. Who was William James Rucker? In 1944 the estate of William James Rucker of St. James, MO provided funds to endow a chair in zoology to MU.  Rudolf Bennitt was the first chair, followed by Bill Elder who held the chair for 34 years. Mr. Rucker lived in Charlottesville, VA (a wonderful town and home of the University of Virginia where I did my undergraduate work) but regularly traveled to Missouri.  He was a descendant of the James family that founded the Meramec Iron Works at Meramec Springs. Here is a photo of Rucker (from the University of Virginia library collections).

1 January 2017. I have been privileged to know Joel Berger for (as he recently pointed out) nearly a quarter of a century. Joel is one of the world's foremost conservation scientists. Joel has a wonderful track record of looking at the biology of animals from a behavioral perspective and placing the resulting insights into a conservation framework. On occasion he has been known to use animal suits to get close to his study species. These days Joel is working with Musk Ox, and looking at how they respond to predators such as polar bears. What happens when a musk ox is annoyed by an approaching polar bear? They charge. Check out the great article and amazing video clips about Joel's work, as well as this neat interview. So what to do when a musk ox gets too close (I'll leave it to the reader to define "too close"). Throw the head into the air. As Joel recently told me "The airborne head is my anti-death mechanism.. i can't shoot them and its too cold to pepper spray when they charge... so, when I detonate myself from on the ground and all fours to a biped with no head, they stop the charge." What a great quote! Perhaps my favorite from 2016.

1 December 2016. I was reminded recently of a classic Far Side cartoon by Gary Larsen. As I recently learned, this cartoon is now canonized in the lexicon of Stegasaurus paleontology. Now THAT is an honor.

and also 1 December 2016

As opposed to a more dubious honor....

If you publish enough and use Google Scholar, you can identify who is citing your work. One finds one's work cited in interesting contexts. But what about bizarre contexts? Years ago we completed a study of the evolution of the carnivore family Procyonidae and the work has received a fair bit of attention in its respective field. But this paper has also (to my knowledge) been the only of my works to be cited in a creationist context! What in the world is baraminology? Its like a parallel universe!

2 October 2016. Never search your own name - the outcome may cause you to revisit ancient history. I now realize I didn't start my publishing career at in grad school, but rather at the age of 10. From the March 1974 pages of Boys Life:

26 September 2016.  Received a great email today from a predatory journal:

Dear Dr. Gompper,

I hope this email finds you well. My colleague asked if I could get in touch with you about a paper you authored entitled "Carnivore coexistence: America's recovery". Firstly, thank you for taking the time to publish this, it was an interesting read. I am hoping to discuss with you having a short follow-up article or perhaps a review article published in one of the next issues of the Internal Medicine Review. 

Internal Medicine Review? Why not - it seems like a good outlet for a carnivore paper