Some years ago I attended a lecture at the University of Queensland by
Charles Krebs, a Canadian ecologist and author of the well known text book
Ecology.
His lecture included many statements that I enjoyed immensely, generally
because he denigrated statistics to some degree.
He stated that no meaningful ecological question could be answered during a
PhD (or words to that effect). I'm sure that this did not go down well with
many in the audience, which was comprised almost entirely of post-graduate
students and academics. For those of you conversant with statistics he also
said that you couldn't answer an ecological question with a p value. That
caused me great mirth.
The comment that stuck most firmly in my mind, however, was that ecology is
a narrative.
Certainly it is one that needs to be long in the telling.
Regards
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From:
On Behalf Of Alan Gillanders
Sent: Thursday, 21 June 2007 9:01 AM
To: ; birding-aus
Subject: Cyclonic Winds 9 June & Storm in
Newcastle/LakeMacquarie
Scot and Craig,
Once again a possible answer raises another question or two or ....
Perhaps it is not the hierarchies which have changed so much as the dynamics
within the group. Is this a factor of group size, group stablility, age
classes in the group, direction of group growth or some imperative like
getting enough to eat.
It all goes to show the value of long time spans in observations and
observers. A PhD student has little hope of sorting such a problem out.
Alan
===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
===============================
===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
===============================
|
