"How we practice our field now influences where we go next. How can we deliberately steer the field in better directions, rather than waking up each day and shortsightedly chasing another grant or publication?"

Welcome to Blue Sky, @marvimatos.bsky.social, and thank you for the reminder that federal funding for science is like rocket fuel for the economy:

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Arguably the 2nd-most valuable player on that 1984 Tigers team (second to Trammell in Wins Above Replacement, that is):

www.baseball-reference.com/teams/DET/19...

academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

Here's another useful overview for modelers:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

In many respects, every chapter in the textbook, which summarizes current perspectives in human behavioral ecology, is an outgrowth of the challenging questions that emerged at the Man The Hunter conference, which highlighted the need for more empirical data and refined hypotheses to examine.

To illustrate the thoughtful ways that human behavioral ecologists engage with debates and diverse cross-cultural data about the sexual division of labor, the textbook chapter by Codding and Bliege Bird is a great place to start. The data defuse stereotypes.

www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Mike Gurven’s chapter on life history theory would be another one to read:

www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

The first thing I did was to check the bibliography to see if this chapter was cited (it wasn’t):

www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

These are fantastic data. Maybe try to make some of the video footage available as supplemental files.

“Eggs-ogenous Shocks”

🥺🤞

The National Science Foundation has recently supported research to help curtail future pandemics:

www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Folks in the GEO community should know that I have seen Manda Adams dedicate extensive overtime hours to Coastlines and People during crunch panel season. She'll go the extra mile in the months ahead, but she and others will benefit from all the help that PIs and reviewers can muster. Hence the 🧵 ⬆️.

Also for early-career researchers, although program officers cannot share examples of funded proposals with you (except through FOIA), principal investigators *can* and often will share their proposals. See the award database and then reach out to funded researchers. (22)
www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Every June, NSF tends to get a slew of inquiries from principal investigators who had already started drafting a proposal without considering what program would review it. Program officers are normally happy to help find a good fit, but they'll be multitasking and slower to respond this summer. (21)

Meanwhile, for early-career scholars contemplating a CAREER proposal, please note that those proposals are reviewed by core programs (Behavioral Systems, Sociology, Chemical Synthesis, etc.), which you must designate upon submission. The proposal should align with the programmatic objectives. (20)

The FAQ on the COA form is a little vague on the criteria to use, but it is generally accepted that, if there was no communication among a subset of co-authors on a particular paper, then it doesn't rise to the level of a collaboration to list. (Streamlined COA forms help program officers.) (19)

Also, NSF takes conflicts of interest seriously. That said, when you're filling out your COA form, listing every single co-author might not be necessary. When papers have many co-authors (e.g., genetics papers), not everyone rises to the level of a collaborator. (18)

www.nsf.gov/funding/seni...