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!
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