Special Focus: Research during a Pandemic
Research during a Pandemic: ECR perspectives
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it a host of challenges for everyone. At Cultured Scene, we were particularly interested in how the pandemic and resulting quarantines and lockdowns have affected early-career researchers. We asked academics from different fields and at different stages of their careers the same six questions about how the pandemic has impacted them.
A tribe of poets answered me
An unfortunate side effect of undertaking a PhD is that hobbies are often left by the wayside. We have every intention of carrying them with us on our long and winding academic roads, but somehow they fall from our pockets. By the time we have noticed, the hike back to them can appear too arduous to be worth the effort.
The ‘art’ of keeping sane: a PhD caught in a pandemic
To think that a month ago, I lived happily amidst a few people, starting my days early in the sticky warmth of tropical sunshine, enjoying cups of chai, watching for birds, picking up and playing with wind-dispersed seeds. All of this in a small village in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on the far east […]
Fieldwork in times of Corona
Like everything about this global crisis, this winter’s field trip was two parts surreal, one part seemingly arbitrary decisions. The surreal yolk was, and is, the tension between reality and my lived experience, between daily news and my own comforts, posters advocating hand washing in areas with no running water, between stress and the dissolution […]
Pitch to Publication
Personality composition may determine the spread of social information in shoaling fish
Matthew Hasenjager talked to Cultured Scene about his recent findings that how individuals learn is conditional on group personality composition in guppies. The whole study by Matthew and colleagues has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Dolphins mind the shell: About an innovative foraging strategy that spreads beyond the mother-calf bond
Being part of the ‘Dolphin Innovation Project’, Sonja Wild was privileged to study the fascinating behaviour of the Shark Bay dolphins in Western Australia. To Cultured Scene, Sonja provided some insight into her study on ‘shelling’, a novel foraging strategy that is transmitted via social learning. The whole study by Sonja and her colleagues has recently been published in Current Biology.
Common cuttlefish learn to master the “prawn-in-the-tube” test by observing conspecifics
Eduardo Sampaio shared his newest findings on social learning in the mostly solitary common cuttlefish with Cultured Scene. The whole study has recently been published in Animal Cognition.
Of sharks and their ability to learn from others
Catarina Vila Pouca spoke to Cultured Scene about her findings on social learning in juvenile Port Jackson sharks that have been published in Animal Behaviour earlier this year.
Digging for Victory
Alba Motes Rodrigo discusses her recent publication with Cultured Scene.
Interviews
Prestige: Simple, maybe, but not easy.
The concept of prestige in social learning can be difficult to address, and even more-so in the context of scientific practice. But a rumination of The Prestige as presented in Christopher Nolan’s film brings some resolution to conceptual tensions and inspires some real magic worthy of the term.
Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age
Cultured Scene interviews Alberto Acerbi about his new book, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age.
A tribe of poets answered me
An unfortunate side effect of undertaking a PhD is that hobbies are often left by the wayside. We have every intention of carrying them with us on our long and winding academic roads, but somehow they fall from our pockets. By the time we have noticed, the hike back to them can appear too arduous to be worth the effort.
The ‘art’ of keeping sane: a PhD caught in a pandemic
To think that a month ago, I lived happily amidst a few people, starting my days early in the sticky warmth of tropical sunshine, enjoying cups of chai, watching for birds, picking up and playing with wind-dispersed seeds. All of this in a small village in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on the far east […]
Fieldwork in times of Corona
Like everything about this global crisis, this winter’s field trip was two parts surreal, one part seemingly arbitrary decisions. The surreal yolk was, and is, the tension between reality and my lived experience, between daily news and my own comforts, posters advocating hand washing in areas with no running water, between stress and the dissolution […]
How Research Works
Surviving the Viva: PhD defences remembered
The PhD viva (or defence) is likely one of the most stressful moments of many academics’ professional lives. What’s worse is that this rite of passage doesn’t even follow the same format across institutions or countries, making preparing for your viva even more difficult. Will it be a public or private defence? Will you make corrections before or after defending? Will you be faced with internal or external examiners, and how many? To shed at least a little light on the experience, Cultured Scene asked early-career researchers who studied in a variety of countries to explain how their defence worked, and to offer advice to students preparing for their own defence.
Why experiments are stupid but we need more of them
Most of us are excited about social learning in the real world. How do the dolphins of Shark Bay learn to fish with sponges, do chimpanzee mothers teach their young how to crack open nuts, can starting moves in the board game Go or formations in football really be said to “evolve” – and what […]
The Publishing Black Box: What happens after you click Submit?
Every one of us researchers has, as some point in their career, to go through the process of submitting a paper and all those who have submitted – and even those who as yet have not – know some detail of what happens behind the curtains. But who really knows the whole process? Here we try to get into the details of what happens from submission to the final response.
Work-Life Balance
Our resident Agony Aunt offers guidance on the key questions bothering early-career researchers, with additional advice crowd-sourced from Twitter. In this edition: Work-life (or, life-work) balance!
How to Master Publishing
Our resident Agony Aunt offers guidance on the key questions bothering early-career researchers, with additional advice crowd-sourced from Twitter. In this edition: Publishing!
Events, Places and People
Faces of ESLR: Ahana Fernandez
Language, more than anything else, defines human nature. Language appears to be unique in the animal kingdom and, thus, the question of how and why language evolved is one of the most fascinating research questions for me. However, it is not just human language that fascinates me but also vocal (social) communication in various social […]
Faces of ELSR: Samin Gokcekus
I actually find it difficult to write pieces like this one because my interests are very broad. I believe that any topic can be interesting if you take the time to understand it, and I hope to spend the rest of my research career bringing together my knowledge and experiences from different fields to find […]
Faces of ESLR: Jonathan St-Onge
I just started a PhD in computational social science at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. My research focuses on so-called echo chambers, but I am also interested in fragmentation of online public spaces more generally. The idea of echo chambers is kind of intuitive, at first. They are metaphorical chambers on the internet that […]
