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Panton Fellowship updates: June (month 3)

It’s that time again… time to write my monthly Panton Fellowship update.

The trouble is, as I start writing this it’s 6am (London, UK). I arrived back from the Hennig XXXI meeting (University of California Riverside) after a long flight yesterday and am supremely jetlagged. I still can’t decide whether this is awesome (I can get more work done, by waking up earlier), or terrible as I can’t keep my eyes open past 9pm at night!

At this conference I shoe-horned some of my Panton Fellowship project work into the latter half of my talk (slides below), as it fitted in with the theme of the submitted abstract on supertrees.

Supertrees are just one of many many different possible (re)uses of the phylogenetic tree data I am trying to liberate from the literature for this project. I tried to stress this during my talk, as a lot of people at Hennig aren’t too keen on supertrees as a method for inferring large phylogenies. In fact, there was a compelling talk with solid data from Dan Janies given later on in conference, critiquing supertree methods such as SuperFine and SuperTriplets, which were outperformed in most tests in terms of both speed and optimality (tree length) by supermatrix methods using TNT. That’s fine though – there are so many other interesting hypotheses one can investigate with large samples of real phylogenetic estimates (trees).

e.g.

  • Do model-based phylogenetic analyses perform better than parsimony? [Probably not, judging by the conclusions in this paper]  –  I’d like to see this hypothesis re-tested more rigorously using tree-to-tree distance comparisons between the different method trees. Except we can’t currently do this very easily because there’s a paucity of machine-readable tree data from published papers
  • Meta-analysis of phylogenetic tree balance and factors that influence balance e.g. (this thesis, and this PLoS ONE article).  Are large trees more imbalanced than small trees? Are vertebrate trees more balanced than invertebrate trees?
  • Fossil taxa in phylogenetic trees – are they more often than not found at the base of the tree? Is this ‘real’ or perhaps apparent ‘stem-ward slippage‘ caused by preservational biases?
  • Similarity and dissimilarity between phylogeny and measures of morphological disparity as studied  by my lab mate Martin Hughes

So, I hope you’ll appreciate this data isn’t just needed for producing large supertrees.

I could go on about the conference – it was excellent as ever, but I’ll save that for a dedicated later post.

Other activities this month included:

  • submitting my quarterly Panton report to the Fellowship Board
  • attending the OKFN Bibliohack session at QMUL’s Mile End campus (13th & 14th June) helping out with the creation of the OKFN Open Access Index, and learning how to use & debug a few issues with PubCrawler (a web crawler for scraping academic publication information, not a beer finder app!), with Peter Murray-Rust
  • discussing Open Access, Open Data and full text XML publishing with the Geological Society of London. The GSL have a working group currently investigating if/how they can transition to greater openness. Kudos to them for looking into this. Many a UK academic society may currently be hiding their heads in the sand at moment ignoring that the UK policy-wise is now committed to Open Access as the future of research publishing. It probably won’t be easy for GSL to make this transition as their accounts[PDF] show they are rather reliant on subscription-based journals and books for income. It’s hard to see how Open Access article processing charges could immediately replace the £millions subscription income per year from relatively few books & journals. Careful and perhaps difficult decisions will have to be made at some point to balance the goals of this charitable society, the acceptable level of income and the choice and amount of expenditure on non-publication related activites (e.g. ‘outreach events’).Interestingly, I note The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has recently decided to outsource their publications to an external company. Does anyone know ‘who’ yet? I just hope it’s not Elsevier.

Finally, the audio for the talk on the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Panton Fellowships, I gave in Cambridge recently, has now been uploaded, so I can now present the slides and the actual talk I gave together (below) for the first time! Many thanks for the organisers of the conference for doing all this work to make audio from all the talks available – it’s really cool that a relatively modest, small PhD student conference can produce such an excellent digital archive of what happened – I only wish the ‘bigger’ conferences has the resources & willpower to do this too!

…and if that’s not enough Panton updates for you, you can read Sophie Kershaw’s updates for June too, over on her blog


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One response to “Panton Fellowship updates: June (month 3)”

  1. […] A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously). […]