Posted by Jeremy Fox
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2025/12/05/people-believe-in-friday-linkfests-and-are-willing-to-pay-for-them/
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/?p=74978
This week: a high-profile retraction on the economic costs of climate change, fun ways of deciding authorship order, I Can Locate Reviewer, defining economists (and ecologists?), the future of Canadian science funding, who are you we, and more.
From Jeremy (scroll down to find out why I needed to say that 
):
A recent high-profile Nature paper that estimated massive costs of climate change to global GDP growth has been retracted. The retraction follows the wake of two commentaries that identified problems with the underlying data and failure of the statistical analyses to account for non-independence of different countries. The retraction came at the request of the paper’s authors, who broadly agree with the criticisms and say they plan to revise and resubmit.
This is a few months old, but I only recently became aware of it. A pseudonymous commenter on PubPeer has flagged somewhat extensive data duplications in three recent plant ecology papers published in leading journals (two in JEcol, one in Ecosystem Health and Sustainability). The papers came from three different research groups. I had a quick look at the data files myself, and the duplications identified by the PubPeer commenter do indeed seem to be duplications. The reasons for the duplications aren’t immediately clear to me.
The US is funding fewer grants in every area of science and medicine, even as its funding agencies spend more or less all the money allocated by Congress. They’re doing it by shifting to making large lump-sum payments that cover many years’ worth of work on the grants that do get funded. So, am I understanding this right? They canceled a bunch of grants based on crude, badly applied political purity tests, then decided they didn’t want to deal with possible blowback from not spending money allocated by Congress, and so went with the only option available: give a bunch of the remaining grantees up-front payments equal to all they money they’re owed in future? Is that right?
On believing in algebra.
Commenter Andrew Krause passes on news of a major cock-up in computer science that broke the blinding on peer review for a bunch of top conferences. Anyone could see who’d reviewed any submission, and what the review said. If you didn’t know, getting selected to present at prestigious conferences is the computer science equivalent of publishing in top journals in ecology. Imagine if a software bug allowed anyone to see who’d written any review of any ecology paper submitted to Nature, Science, PNAS, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Ecology Letters, and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Is there any statement that no economist would disagree with, even though some non-economists might disagree? That is, is there any non-trivial statement that you have to agree with if you’re going to call yourself an economist, and that you have to agree with in order for your research to count as economics research, as opposed to (say) history or anthropology or philosophy or whatever? Dan Davies thinks there is one (and only one). Interestingly, it’s not a factual statement, nor is it a statement of the form “economics is the study off…”. Now I’m wondering if there’s any such statement for ecologists. Offhand, I don’t think there is.
Interview with Genome Canada CEO Rob Annan on the future of Canadian science funding. Focuses on strategic issues such as “Is Canada free-riding on the US, and could it ever do otherwise?”, “What does it mean for science policy if scientific breakthroughs are getting harder to find?”, and “Should Canada keep spending an unusually high proportion of scientific research dollars on grants to individual PIs, compared to other wealthy countries?”
Who is this “we” everyone keeps referring to? Good piece, though the last two subsections take it in an odd direction (well, it seemed odd to me, anyway). Eagerly awaiting comments on this one from our readers who teach writing.
Using natural experiments to show that professional soccer players slack off on defense when the team has nothing to play for. tl;dr: here’s the key graph.
From Meghan (!):
There’s been LinkedIn discussion of fun ways of deciding authorship recently, including here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401540610899267586/ which has led to a resurgence in views of this old blog post of mine: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/fun-ways-of-deciding-authorship-order/
And, while I’m here, I want to link to The Growth Equation, which is written by Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg. I love their posts, including this one on the success trap, this one on how even the greats face self-doubt, and this one that became a bit of a lab motto this semester. They also have a podcast called excellence, actually that is on my list of things to listen to, but I find that I basically only listen to mysteries and historical fiction these days. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2025/12/05/people-believe-in-friday-linkfests-and-are-willing-to-pay-for-them/
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/?p=74978
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