Amy Hurford, an ecology graduate student working a recent ecology PhD who worked with the brilliant Troy Day and Peter Taylor at Queen’s University, has a new blog called Just Simple Enough: The Art of Mathematical Modelling. It’s great stuff, you totally need to check it out. She’s thinking out loud, and very articulately, about what makes a great model, why build a model at all, and how coming up with a simple model is often a matter of seeing the problem from the right angle (a topic on which I’ve commented myself).
Seriously, what are you doing still reading this blog? Click the links already!
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Thank you! This is fantastic. But let’s get to the good news: I got my Ph.D. in 2011 and am now a postdoctoral fellow with the MPrime Centre for Disease Modelling at York University (also a brilliant place to work). The Oikos blog, I only came across last week, it hits on a lot of very interesting and related issues. I’m still trying to take it all in: there’s so much good stuff on here! Thanks again for spreading the word, it’s always nice to have visitors!
By: Amy Hurford on February 17, 2012
at 1:34 am
Whoops! Belated congrats on your degree, post now corrected.
But you only found the Oikos blog last week? I know some folks at Queen’s, especially Bill Nelson. I’ll have to give him a hard time for not plugging the blog. 😉
We clearly share a lot of interests. It’s going to take you a while to work through the Oikos blog archive if you decide to read everything that catches your eye. 😉 But here are a few that should be up your alley:
https://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/must-reads-theoreticians-explain-themselves-to-empiricists/
https://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/why-do-theoreticians-and-empiricists-often-talk-past-one-another/
https://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/zombie-ideas-in-ecology/
https://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/zombie-ideas-in-ecology-r-and-k-selection/
By: Jeremy Fox on February 17, 2012
at 1:50 am