Via Lost in Transcription. Happy holidays! ◼
How would you measure scientists’ performance?. Photo by MarcelGermain.◼
Following DrugMonkey’s lead, here’s the first sentence posted to this site every month in 2011. (I’ve cheated a bit by skipping over boring introductory material in one or two cases.)
Hey, I really kept on top of the Carnival of Evolution, eh? I did this last year, too. More quantitative navel-gazing coming in the new year. ◼
Surveying. Photo by danakin.Inspired by previous efforts at other blogs, and spurred by Kevin Zenio’s recent post on the importance of reader feedback, I’ve decided it’s well past time to find out more about who’s reading Denim and Tweed. I get some sense of the size and diversity of my readership from Google Analytics, and from who decides comment on or tweet about or “like” individual posts. However, it’s pretty clear that some number of you read without responding in any medium I can see, and those are the folks about whom I’m most curious.
So if you would please take a minute or two to fill in this handy online form, I would be exceedingly grateful. None of the questions are required, but answers to all of them would be informative. This is your chance to let me know who’s out there, and what you think of what I’m doing here at D&T. ◼
Hummingbird in flight. Photo by Jason Paluk.Video this week: tool use by an orange-dotted tuskfish. Specifically, the fish breaks open a clam by hitting it against a rock. Who needs opposable thumbs?
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Brick-and-mortar. Photo by ImaginaryGirl.Bouncing off the same NY Times op-ed that I did yesterday, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo says, screw indy booksellers. They’re not cheap or efficient enough. Here’s the core of his price argument:
A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.
And here’s efficiency:
Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?
Manjoo also makes the point that indie bookstores aren’t really selling local products—their bread and butter is sales of the same nationally distributed books that fill up Amazon’s top sellers list. And since Amazon offers those books at a better price point, they’re available to more people who want them, and that’s all you need to sustain a literary culture, right?
Well, maybe. If you don’t mind that some portion of that discount comes at a cost to actual human beings. Cue Vanessa Veselka’s account of trying to unionize an Amazon “distribution center” over at The Atlantic.
He was the one who told me Bezos was going to close the Seattle warehouse. It was too expensive to run. Huge fulfillment centers were springing up around the country. In Nevada, they were getting $5.15 an hour and people had to work 12-hour shifts, five days a week. Mandated overtime pay didn’t start until after 40 hours of a workweek. So when production lulled people were sent home or told not to come in the following day to shave costs. These were the new models. This was the future.
Shaving overtime by sending people home mid-shift, or giving them “the next few days off,” was the practice in Seattle too, but in Nevada there was no velvet glove, no nod to personal identity. Workers there were herded through long security lines and body searched on their way in and out before they could clock in. The ventilation was terrible and they got fired for the slightest complaint-at least these were the reports.
That was years ago. Much more recently, Amazon management made the news for working its warehouse staff to heat exhaustion rather than open some doors to let in a breeze.
During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.
An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an “unsafe environment” after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor’s report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.
Cheap books are great, but someone has to pay for the difference. Manjoo’s taking the side of the robots on this one: sure, you could pay a couple extra bucks so a bookstore clerk with interesting suggestions for your next purchase can feed her family, or you could let an algorithm find you more like what you’ve already read, and let that clerk break her back in a warehouse for a barely-living wage. ◼
Uncle Hugo’s, where it is entirely possible to trip over a stack of Asimov novels and break a model of the ship from Lost in Space if you’re not careful. Photo by Olivander.You may have heard that Amazon.com took its competition with brick-and-mortar booksellers to a new level this holiday season, offering a discount to people who go into a store and scan a product with Amazon’s smartphone app to find out what price Amazon was offering for the same wares (presumably cheaper, and free of local sales tax). If you’re not sure why this is an asshole move on the part of the gargantuan online retailer, you’ve got a good one in this op-ed by Richard Russo, who talks to a number of other authors, all of whom have done pretty well thanks to sales via Amazon, about the whole business. Money quote from Ann Patchett:
“… If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”
I bought a lot of books as gifts this holiday season, and I’m glad to say I bought none of them from Amazon. Instead, I went to the collegiate used bookstore the Book House, the “indie behemoth” Magers & Quinn, and the astounding nerdcave that is Uncle Hugo’s. I probably paid a bit more, and I’ll have to figure out how to fit all the books in my carry-on instead of shipping them ahead of me, but I had a lot more fun doing the shopping, too. ◼
Song sparrow chicks. Photo by Tobyotter.
Predators have an obvious impact on their prey: eating them. But if the threat of predators prompts prey species to change their behavior, those behavioral changes can also affect prey population dynamics [$a]—and thereby, potentially, the prey’s evolution—even if the predators never actually catch any prey.
This is the effect documented in a short, sharp study just published in Science, in which Liana Y. Zanette and her coauthors show that song sparrows raise fewer chicks if they simply think that there are predators nearby [$a].
The team’s experimental design was simple but probably pretty work-intensive. Over the course of one summer on several small islands off the coast of British Columbia, they watched song sparrows choose mates and build nests. Once nests were established, the team surrounded them with anti-predator defenses: netting and electrified fences. They confirmed that these measures kept predators out with regular video surveillance. And then they turned on the loudspeakers.
At some nests, the team broadcast looped recordings of calls made by song sparrow predators—raccoons, crows and ravens, hawks, owls, and cowbirds. At control nests, the broadcast was instead a playlist of similar-sounding calls made by non-predators, including seals, geese, hummingbirds, and loons. The team then monitored the nests, recording the behavior of the mated pair at each nest, and the ultimate success of the eggs they laid.
An adult song sparrow, looking watchful. Photo by kenschneiderusa.The results are pretty unambiguous. Pairs of song sparrows that heard predator calls laid fewer eggs than pairs that heard non-predators. Of the eggs laid by pairs who heard predator calls, fewer hatched, and of those hatched chicks, fewer survived fledge. Just the continuous, threat of predators—predators that were never visible—reduced the number of chicks the sparrows fledged.
The reasons for the reduced offspring are apparent from other behavioral observations. Birds in the predator-call treatment were perpetually on high alert, as measured by “flight initiation distance,” the distance up to which a researcher could approach the nest before the birds took flight. Sparrows in the non-predator treatment let researchers get about 120 meters from the nest before taking off; sparrows in the predator treatment wouldn’t tolerate humans within twice that distance. In the predator treatment, sparrows spent less time sitting on their eggs, and visited to feed their chicks less frequently. Not surprisingly, chicks in the predator treatment also gained less weight than chicks in the non-predator treatment.
And, in what may be the most poignant data set I’ve ever seen in print, the team also measured the skin temperature of chicks in each nest 10 minutes after the parents had left. Chicks in the predator-call treatment were measurably, and significantly, colder.
So the simple fear of predators is enough to prompt free-living song sparrows to lay fewer eggs, and raise fewer of the eggs they do lay to fledging. However, the absolute difference in offspring between sparrow pairs in the predator and non-predator treatments—40%—probably reflects the maximum effect we might expect to see in natural populations.
That’s because left to themselves, sparrows probably seek nesting spots with less predator activity. Here, all the sparrows had established nests in what, presumably, were the best spots they could find—but for half of them, the new neighborhood suddenly seemed to become a lot less safe shortly after they settled in. What Zanette et al. document is very much a behavioral, short-term response, and it’s one that many prey animals may be able to mitigate, or avoid altogether, with other behavioral responses. It’s hard to say how exactly it reflects the impact that fear of predators might have in sparrow populations unmolested by ornithologists.
Nevertheless, this result does suggest that for many prey animals, the fear of predators can, itself, be something to fear. ◼
References
Creel, S., & Christianson, D. (2008). Relationships between direct predation and risk effects. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23 (4), 194-201 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2007.12.004
Martin, T. (2011). The cost of fear. Science, 334 (6061), 1353-4 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216109
Zanette, L., White, A., Allen, M., & Clinchy, M. (2011). Perceived predation risk reduces the number of offspring songbirds produce per year. Science, 334 (6061), 1398-1401 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210908
Grandma’s date pudding. Photo by jby.I could frankly do without a lot of holiday-time rituals, but I’m perfectly happy to have the excuse for baking. This year I made cranberry orange bread for the folks in my lab, following a great recipe in Mark Bittman’s magisterial How to Cook Everything. I’ve also taken a crack at Ma Savage’s Christmas Snowballs for one party, and for the departmental party, I dug up a family tradition: Grandma Bender’s date pudding.
My mom’s mom has a pretty serious sweet tooth, and so I learned to love this recipe—cubes of rich, sweet, date cake layered in sweetened whipped cream—as part of the main course for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Nowadays, I cut the sugar from the whipped cream, and it still goes over quite well as a dessert. It’s also possible to substitute in whole wheat or spelt flour, which only makes the cake denser and richer. Recipe follows:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat one cup of water to boiling, and soak one cup of chopped dried dates in the hot water for 20 minutes. Cream together one tablespoon of butter and one cup of sugar, and then blend in one egg, one cup of flour, one cup of chopped pecans (or other nuts), half a teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of baking soda, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract. Finally, fold in the soaked dates and any liquid remaining with them; blend it all well. Spread this batter in a greased 9 inch by 13 inch cake pan and bake it for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
When the cake is done, let it cool to room temperature, or stick it in the fridge or freezer if you’ve baked it in advance, which is often convenient. When you’re ready to assemble the pudding, whip two cups of heavy cream together with a teaspoon or two of vanilla extract until it’s stiff, then cut the cake into one-inch cubes and layer cubes of cake with the whipped cream in a midsize serving bowl. ◼
You want to dissect my what?! Photo by GAC’63.Video of the week, via Open Culture: Robert Krulwich describes behavioral experiments that dissected how ants navigate. (You may remember this as the subject of one of Jason Goldman’s earliest posts.)
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